21

Animadversions

For it is not impossible that a man by evil arts may have crept into the Church, thorow the Belfry or at the Windows. ’Tis not improbable that having so got in he should foul the Pulpit, and afterwards the Press with opinions destructive to Humane Society and the Christian Religion. That he should illustrate so corrupt Doctrines with as ill a conversation, and adorn the lasciviousness of his life with an equal petulancy of stile and language. In such a concurrence of misdemeanours what is to be done?1

In 1671, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, wrote a play called The Rehearsal. Buckingham, leader of the country party’s opposition to Charles at a time when Marvell’s sympathies were running in that direction, saw his play receive its first performance in London on 7 December 1671. The aim of this burlesque was to ridicule the current fashion for ‘heroic’ plays, a genre founded by the former Poet Laureate, William Davenant, nicknamed ‘Bayes’ because he wore the laureate’s crown of bay leaves. When Davenant died in 1668 the mock title passed to his successor as Poet Laureate, John Dryden. As the Victorian critic, Henry Morley, introducing a selection of these plays which included The Rehearsal, put it: ‘Bold rhodomontade was, on the stage, preferred to “good sense” upon poets, as a reaction against the strained ingenuities that had come in under Italian influence.’2 When Marvell came to write his pamphlet, the recent success on the stage of Buckingham’s play, which was printed in 1672, would still be reverberating; although popular in the eighteenth century, The Rehearsal is neither in print nor performed today. It is made up of a string of parodic passages mocking the heroic style, featuring a central character called Mr Bayes who takes two friends to see a rehearsal of his absurd new play. At one point Bayes, a self-confessed plagiarist, explains to his friends, Mr Smith and Mr Johnson, his method of composition:

Bayes:… I take a book in my hand, either at home or elsewhere, for that’s all one, if there be any Wit in’t, as there is no Book but has some, I Transverse it; that is, if it be Prose put it into Verse, (but that takes up some time), if it be Verse, put it into Prose.

Johns: Methinks, Mr. Bayes, that putting Verse into Prose should be call’d Transprosing.3

By equating Samuel Parker with the bombastic fool Bayes, whose embodiment on the stage would be fresh in many of his readers’ minds, Marvell was being both witty and highly topical, and enjoying a further tilt at Dryden into the bargain. The implication is that Parker’s attempts at wit, like those of Mr Bayes, are derivative and farcical. Marvell’s earthy humour made what purported to be a contribution to theological controversy into an instant best-seller.

But he had a serious purpose in writing it. He wanted to defend the King’s policy of indulgence towards nonconformists, which was coming under fire from many leading figures in the Church of England and even from some dissenters who saw it as a step towards popery. Samuel Parker was only the noisiest and most aggressive of the defenders of the Establishment. The MP Sir John Reresby later wrote in his Memoirs that the Declaration of Indulgence was ‘the greatest blowe that ever was given, since the Kings restoration, to the Church of England’.4 Leading figures in the Church of England, alarmed at the threat to their hegemony, began to campaign against the King’s policy. The Bishop of London instructed his clergy to preach against popery such that, according to Burnet: ‘The king complained to Sheldon [Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury] of this preaching on controversy, as done on purpose to inflame the people, and to alienate them from him and his government.’5 With opposition to his policy of toleration coming both from the Church and from Parliament, Charles took steps to make sure that the nonconformists, whose hatred of Catholicism was as potent as either, were on his side, and offered some of the leading nonconformists a yearly pension of £50 in order to secure their support, though the famous nonconformist minister Richard Baxter refused to take the King’s money. A friend of Marvell, Baxter shared his retrospective scepticism about the value of the Civil War, writing in his autobiography, Reliquiae Baxterianae: ‘I make no doubt that both parties were to blame, as it commonly falleth out in most wars and contentions, and I will not be he that will justify either of them.’6 According to Wood, the physician and author Henry Stubbe, who wrote a response to Marvell’s pamphlet, was well rewarded by the King for two pamphlets he wrote in 1672 and 1673 defending that other unpopular plank of royal policy, the Dutch War. Wood alleged that Stubbe received £200 from the royal purse. Although there is no suggestion that Marvell was rewarded financially for his polemic it would have been no less welcome to the King for the way in which it defended his policy, silenced its leading opponent, and presented Charles himself in a highly favourable light. Charles was not a lover of serious discourse but, if Burnet is to be believed, he took The Rehearsal to his bosom: ‘the last King, that was not a great reader of books, read them [the two parts of The Rehearsal] over and over again’.7

As a theological treatise, however, The Rehearsal Transpros’d is of little value. It is almost entirely taken up with mockery and abuse of Parker – Wood’s ‘sportive and jeering buffoonry’ – and says nothing of very much value on the substantive questions supposedly at issue. Marvell’s technique, which was shared by his less talented and witty contemporaries, and which makes so much of their pamphleteering merely tedious to modern taste, was to answer relentlessly, and seemingly page by page, every point made by the opponent, quoting his words back at him at length and holding up passages to ridicule. The method is doggedly ad hominem. Reading the many responses to Marvell’s pamphlet can be a gruelling exercise, in spite of their effort to be sportive and satirical. After prolonged exposure to all this ‘wit’, one begins to long for dullness.

Marvell opens his attack by calling Parker ‘a lewd, wanton, and incontinent Scribler’8 and swings directly into personal abuse. He mocks attempts in the recent past to suppress nonconformist meetings and conventicles, when effort would have been better directed instead to silencing the authors of windy, offensive pamphlets such as Parker: ‘Two or three brawny Fellows in a Corner, with meer Ink and Elbow-grease, do more harm than an hundred Systematical Divines with their sweaty Preaching.’ He continues with a dig at Sir Roger L’Estrange, since 1662 the Surveyor of the Press, or chief government censor, and Sir John Birkenhead, the man authorised to search out unlicensed printers. Both men are referred to by their initials only in a passage satirising scribblers like Parker: ‘Their ugly Printing-Letters, that look but like so many rotten-Teeth, How oft have they been pull’d out by B. and L. the Publick-Tooth-Drawers! and yet these rascally Operators of the Press have got a trick to fasten them again in a few minutes, that they grow as firm a Set, and as biting and talkative as ever.’ Although, after several more pages in this vein, Marvell announces: ‘Now, having had our Dance, let us advance to our more serious Counsels’, the expectation is disappointed, for he continues to attack Parker’s style rather than his substance. That style is ‘luscious and effeminate’ and the whole enterprise of Parker’s preface, ‘bedawb’d with Rhetorick’, lacks proper decorum (‘part Play-book and part Romance’) when it is considered that he is writing a preface to the work of a bishop of the Church of England. Moreover, Parker exaggerates the greatness of Bishop Bramhall ‘like a St Christopher in the Popish Churches, as big as ten Porters, and yet only imploy’d to sweat under the burden of an Infant’. Although appearing to concede the merits of Bramhall’s advocacy of an ecumenical reconciliation between the churches (‘though some that meddle in it do it chiefly in order to fetter men straiter under the formal bondage of fictitious Discipline’), Marvell believes that Bramhall would have been better employed in trying to unify Protestantism at home and abroad rather than in pursuing this idealistic goal. Disingenuously, it may be thought, Marvell now moves on to Parker and to allege that ‘his only talent was railing’. The defence of Bramhall was mere camouflage, with Parker using him ‘but for a Stalking-horse till he might come within shot of Forreign Divines and the Nonconformists’. Marvell calls him ‘Buffoon-General to the Church of England’ and singles out as an example of his lack of theological understanding or tact his attack on Calvin: ‘I had always heard that Calvin was a good Scholar, and an honest Divine.’ Marvell had perhaps heard this from his friend Richard Baxter. Parker, in fact, is ‘a mad Priest, which of all sorts is the most incurable’.

Marvell’s anticlericalism was always vigorous. Although he would later claim that, as far as the clergy were concerned, ‘the memory of mine own extraction, and much more my sense of the Sanctity of their function ingage me particularly to esteem and honour them’,9 it was precisely from his ‘own extraction’ – his father’s lack of eagerness to follow the rituals and rules of the Church of England – that he had learnt this coolness towards bishops and ‘the brabbles and quarrels that have been unnecessarily sow’d by some of the clergy’.10 Too many of the clergy, in Marvell’s view, were bent on ‘Preferment and Grandeur’ and were, in an allusion to Ben Jonson’s Volpone, ‘the Politick Would-be’s of the Clergy’. Ignoring Christian humility and meekness they became obsessed instead with ‘Ceremony and Severity’ and exhibit a strange ferocity:

That which astonishes me, and only raises my indignation is, that of all sorts of Men, this kind of Clergy should always be, and have been for the most precipitate, brutish, and sanguinary Counsels. The former Civil War cannot make them wise, nor his Majesties Happy Return, good natured; but they are still for running things up unto the same extreams. The softeness of the Universities where they have been bred, the gentleness of Christianity in which they have been nurtured, hath but exasperated their nature; and they seem to have contracted no Idea of wisdom, but what they learnt at School, the Pedantry of Whipping.11

Certainly, Parker’s clerical garb guarantees him no respect from Marvell who embarks on a mocking summary of Parker’s curriculum vitae. In a sly hint that Parker may have been impotent, he writes: ‘I do not hear for all this that he had ever practised upon the Honour of the Ladies, but that he preserved alwayes the Civility of a Platonic Knight-Errant.’ Brushing aside Parker’s intellectual credentials, Marvell concludes that very early on in his career: ‘He lost all the little remains of his understanding, and his Cerebellum was so dryed up that there was no more brains in a walnut and both their Shells were alike thin and brittle.’ In short: ‘All that rationally can be gathered from what he saith, is, that the Man is mad.’ In matters of Church discipline, Parker was more obsessed with rooting out dissent and enforcing authority than with saving souls. He ‘made the process of Loyalty more difficult than that of Salvation’. Marvell demonstrates his own contrasting commitment to toleration by stating: ‘I think it ought to be highly penal for any man to impose other conditions upon his Majesties good Subjects than the King expects or the Law requires.’ Parker’s own life, Marvell contends, is characterised by oppressive authoritarianism towards people with whom he disagrees, having ‘fed all his life with Vipers instead of Lampreys’. He implies that some of his savagery towards dissenters may be the product of the unnatural reaction of an apostate towards his former associates. By contrast to Parker, Marvell praises the generosity and toleration of the King in bringing in the Act of Oblivion, which, like a truth and reconciliation commission, drew a line under the antagonisms of ‘the late Combustions’. Unfortunately, the Church of England could not learn from this example: ‘For, though I am sorry to speak it, yet it is a sad truth, that the Animosities and Obstinacy of some of the Clergy have in all Ages been the greatest Obstacle to the Clemency, Prudence and good Intentions of Princes, and the Establishment of their Affairs.’ But perhaps the most damning indictment of Parker is provided by his own words, in the preface and in the Discourse, which Marvell (somewhat loosely) quotes back at him, showing that Parker believed in the absolute right of the monarch to lay down the law in matters of religion: ‘The Government of Religion was vested in princes by an antecedent right to Christ.’ One sentence in particular goes to the heart of the fundamental illiberalism of Parker’s position: ‘’tis better to err with Authority than to be in the right against it: not only because the danger of a little error (and so it is if it be disputable) is outweighed by the importance of the great duty of Obedience’. Not merely free thought but morality must be sacrificed to the imperious demands of obedience, in Parker’s eyes, when he writes: ‘Princes may with less hazard give liberty to men’s Vices and Debaucheries than their Consciences.’ Marvell confessed to a concern at the low moral tone of much Restoration living, ‘at such a time, when there is so general a depravation of Manners’. In spite of this reverence for absolutism, however, Parker does not, in Marvell’s view, show sufficient respect for royal authorities because he ‘thinks himself fit to be their Governour’.

When Marvell finally reaches a consideration of the preface itself he finds there ‘scarce anything but slender trifling unworthy of a Logician, and beastly railing unbecoming any man, much more a Divine’. He accuses Parker of wild inconsistencies and impossible logic: ‘In all his Writings he doth so confound terms, he leaps cross, he hath more doubles (nay triples and quadruples) than any Hare, so that he thinks himself secure of the Hunters.’ Coming at last to the point of the preface, Marvell defends the King’s policy of toleration against the oppressive conformity Parker would prefer him to practise, in a passage already quoted above, that salutes the King’s Declaration as the augury of a period of ‘mutual Felicity’ between ruler and believer. In a brief intermission from raillery, Marvell also praises John Hales, his old friend from Eton days, as an exemplar of a more generous spirit in the Church of England, who suffered in the Civil War and exhibited ‘the native simplicity of a Christian spirit’. But there is no escaping the essential formlessness of Marvell’s polemical plan. He admits as much when he describes, about three-quarters of the way through the book, his random method of picking up on Parker’s shortcomings: ‘After this I walked a great way through bushes and brambles before I could find another Flower: but then I met with two upon one stalk.’ This is, too often, how it strikes the reader: as a lazy way of proceeding, leafing through Parker’s words in order to happen on some passage that can be held up to ridicule, before moving on to pluck off another dead-head. At the same time, however, the quotation demonstrates Marvell’s habitually concrete and effective imagery, which is what, in the end, sustains the reader’s interest.

In charging Parker with raising false fears about the threat posed by the return of popery, Marvell is on stronger ground, although this was a cause he would take up himself later in the decade. He regarded this argument against toleration as irresponsible: ‘he is an Enemy to the State, whoever shall foment such discourses without any likelyhood or danger’. He reminds Parker of the role of the clergy in whipping up anti-Catholic feeling in the wake of the Declaration: ‘For I suppose you cannot be ignorant that some of your superiors of your Robe did, upon the publishing that Declaration, give the Word, and deliver Orders through their Ecclesiastical Camp, to beat up the Pulpit-drums against Popery.’

In one of those rare autobiographical passages in his writing, Marvell reveals at one point that he used to play picquet with a clergyman whom he describes as ‘a Dignitary of Lincoln’ (possibly Francis Drope, prebendary of Lincoln, or William Reresby, prebendary of Brampton).12 This clergyman was ‘very well known and remembred in the Ordinaries’ and seems to have cheated at the game by making some form of hand signal, an experience that did nothing to diminish Marvell’s suspicion of the clergy. As a result of this, ‘of all the money that ever I was cheated of in my life, none ever vexed me so, as what I lost by his occasion. And ever since, I have born a great grudge against their fingring of anything that belongs to me.’ In order to press home this notion of clerical cupidity and crookedness, he then recounts the story of the notorious highwayman of the reign of Charles I who practised his profession near Hampton Court dressed up as a bishop. Marvell implies strongly that the principal motive for the hostility shown towards the Puritans by the Church of England was that they had deprived the clergy of their pre-Reformation luxury by obstructing ‘that laziness and splendor which they injoyed under the Popes Supremacy, and the Gentry had (sacrilegiously) divided the Abbey-Lands [as at Nun Appleton], and other fat morsels of the Church at the Dissolution, and now was the time to be revenged on them’.

After accusing Parker in sum of ‘making all Religion ridiculous’, Marvell concludes by saying he wrote the pamphlet because he was ‘offended at the presumption and arrogance’ of Parker’s style. He adds, however, one more interesting detail, confessing that Parker’s habit of inveighing ‘against the Trading-part of the Nation’ was an added goad. Throughout his life, Marvell remained loyal to the commercial culture of Hull, with which he was connected by family ties, childhood memories, and professional responsibility. The fierce anticlericalism of The Rehearsal was intrinsic to his notion of English patriotism, to the defence of hard-working, anti-Establishment, provincial society to whom pompous and self-advancing prelates like Parker were an unwanted burden. The immediate battle, however, was not yet over. Parker would be unlikely to let this witty onslaught go unanswered. Lacking the self-knowledge to realise that it would do his reputation no good, he began to prepare an immediate riposte, but not before others had jumped into the fray. Marvell’s goal of silencing Parker would not be attained for at least another year.