28

No Popery

And as we are thus happy in the constitution of our State, so are we yet more blessed in that of our Church; being free from that Romish yoak, which so great a part of Christendom do yet draw and labour under.1

Early in 1678, Shaftesbury was released from the Tower, where he had languished for a year after his ill-judged attempt to challenge the legitimacy of the resumed Parliament the previous February. This was not an easy time for the opposition. The King and his minister, Danby, while not always pursuing the same policies, had nonetheless gradually fortified the position of the government by a combination of secret dealings with the French King and bribery of potential opponents. The notorious Titus Oates conspiracy, alleging a popish plot, would not be announced until the autumn. The opposition, whatever intimations it might have of the King’s secret deals with Louis XIV, lacked clear evidence. Public opinion, however, was anti-French and vigorously anti-Catholic. The marriage of the Duke of York’s daughter Mary to William of Orange was a popular move seen as strengthening Protestantism. By the end of the year a treaty with the Dutch would be signed, ostensibly placing England against France, but Charles continued his covert links with Louis, trying to secure more money from him in exchange for maintaining English neutrality. Opposition members like Marvell, who feared an international Catholic conspiracy, looked on in alarm at these machinations.

His new-year letter to Hull, referring to ‘the probability of a warre with France’, reflected the general mood of the opposition MPs. Not that the high-minded like Marvell were, in their personal dealings, averse to proposing a little inducement. In a letter written from his Covent Garden lodgings to the Trinity House Brethren on 8 January 1678, Marvell suggested to them, in regard to a Mr Fisher who had been of service to Trinity House in the matter of the timber importer Clipsham who was trying to avoid his dues: ‘I thinke if you incouraged him sometime or other with a little vessell of your Ale it would be very well placed.’2 The accounts of Trinity House for the year show that money was spent on ‘two barrells of ale sent to Coll Gilby & Mr Marvell’, a further ‘tenne gynneys’ that was ‘Given to Mr Marvell for a gratuity for all his labour & paines & writeing letters in the business’ and a further £2 11s 4d ‘Spent now at Mr Marvell’s comeing downe with Coll Gilby & him upon a treate’.3 The Trinity House Warden, Thomas Coates, wrote from London to his fellows on 5 February to report on Marvell’s shyness in accepting these gifts:

Accordinge to your order I waited on Mr Marvell att Westminster yesterday to whome I presented your reall respects with the testimony thereof your kinde token, which att the first he very modestly refused untill I did assure him if he did not accept itt the House would demonstrate their gratitude some way equivolent to itt. Then hee received itt desireinge me returne you his hearty thankes protestinge (and I doe beleive him) hee never expected such recompence for any service or kindnes hee had donne or could doe the House and would be ready to serve and assist them.4

So grateful was Marvell for this significant addition to his Parliamentary income that he wrote soon afterwards, with just a hint of sanctimoniousness, to the Wardens saying: ‘I find my self very much surprised lately by a Token which you were pleased to send me by Mr Coates. And truly I was very unwilling to have accepted having always desired rather to doe those offices of friendship where I could have no prospect of other gratification then the goodness of the Action.’5 When this eloquent asseveration was over, Marvell pocketed the money.

Having just been elected a younger Warden of the Trinity House in London at Deptford, Marvell found himself, in the spring of 1678, caught in a conflict of interest. He was obliged to tell the Hull House: ‘I am under some constraint, not hauing liberty being a member of this Trinity House to impart their resolutions to you upon this affaire and yet being desirous to doe you all reasonable service.’6 This new appointment is testimony to Marvell’s lifelong interest in mercantile and maritime business.

On the wider international stage, Marvell was apprehensive about the behaviour of the French, whose army was in Flanders. Reporting to the Hull Corporation on a range of trade sanctions against the French, and describing the French troop movements, he again predicted: ‘So that all things compared it lookes like warre.’7 If that were to be the case, he was confident that any extra expenses demanded by the King for the conduct of the war would be ‘chearfully supplyed by all his good Subjects’.8 Three days later, however, the House voted to confine such supply ‘to the use of the French war in the strictest termes’9 – knowing the propensities of the King in the matter of supply. One consequence of these war preparations was that more urgent business was laid aside, in particular measures to tackle ‘the danger from the Growth of Popery’.10 Nonetheless, a committee was established ‘to consider of the dangers by the Growth of Popery and the Remedyes for the same’.11 The House also received ‘seuerall particulars in Monmouth and Herefordshire about Masses Priests &c: and other things too open and visible in those Countyes’.12 Nothwithstanding the strength of Marvell’s animus towards the Catholics he could still manage to maintain an equilibrium of sorts. In a letter to Hull on 30 April, after recounting some lurid details of the activities of the ‘Popishly affected’ in the Welsh Marches, he nonetheless entered the caveat that they could just be rumour: ‘I write these things unwillingly as being of ill Report & whch therefore although fit to be communicated to persons of your prudence yet it may be prudent to keep within a narrow compasse.’13 Throughout the early spring war seemed imminent but then the possibility of a peace between Holland and France began to emerge. In one of his last letters to his constituents, Marvell reported on the apparent moves towards peace and its likely acceptance by the Spanish Emperor ‘so that all the late Alarum vanishes’.14

If the prospect of war had receded, the forward march of popery was certainly not, in Marvell’s estimation, being halted. On 10 June he wrote to Will Popple a cleverly ironic letter that made it pretty clear that he was the author of an anonymous pamphlet that had been circulating for at least six months:

There came out, about Christmass last, here a large Book concerning the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government. There have been great Rewards offered in private, and considerable in the Gazette, to any who could inform of the Author or Printer, but not yet discovered. Three or four printed Books since have described, as near as it was proper to go, the Man being a Member of Parliament, Mr Marvell to have been the Author; but if he had, surely he should not have escaped being questioned in Parliament, or some other Place.15

Marvell’s early biographers were in little doubt that this work was the triumph of their English patriot. ‘He sets, in a true light, the miseries of a nation under a papal, and the blessings of a protestant administration,’16 wrote Cooke. In the view of Thompson it was ‘the means of discovering the Popish Plot, and other diabolical intrigues of the Jesuits’.17 Marvell’s conspiracy theory may now strike us as excessive but the historical evidence, much of which would have been unavailable to him, bears out at least some of his contention that Parliament was being hoodwinked by the King, who was engaged in covert dialogue with a foreign power of a kind that was profoundly undemocratic and unconstitutional. The full title of the work indicates its scope and its historical specificity: An Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government in England: More Particularly from the Long Prorogation of November, 1675, Ending the 15 February 1676 [1677 n.s.], till the Last Meeting of Parliament the 16th of July 1677. The 1678 edition, published after his death and naming him as the author, adds that it was ‘Recommended to the Reading of all English Protestants’.

The perceived threat from the Catholic European powers rather than the nature of the Catholic religion itself was the primary motor of Marvell’s animosity. He was capable of admitting the sincerity of individual Catholics and even of acknowledging their disabilities in the state, but this anonymous work begins badly with a highly prejudicial attack on Catholicism that does Marvell little credit. It is in fact one of the canonical texts in the long history of English anti-Catholicism. With the overemphatic rhetoric of a fundamentalist preacher thumping the lectern in a corrugated iron mission hut, he inveighs against Catholicism in the usual terms. Catholicism, he argues, combines the worst abominations of Judaism, Islam (‘Plain Turkery’) and paganism, with some ‘peculiar absurdities of its own in which those were deficient’.18 The whole package, which has no claim to be considered a religion at all, is ‘carried on, by the bold imposture of priests under the name of Christianity’ and constitutes a ‘last and insolent attempt upon the credulity of mankind’. In particular, by confining its use of scripture to the language of Latin it deprives ‘the poor people’ of direct access to the word of God. It practises ‘idolatry’ in its worship of saints and angels, and it builds its foundation on ‘incredible Miracles and palpable fables’. Its central enormity is the Mass, conducted:

in an unknown tongue, and intangled with such Vestments, Consecrations, Exorcisms, Whisperings, Sprinklings, Censing and phantasticall Rites, Gesticulations, and Removals, so unbecoming a Christian Office, that it represents rather the pranks and ceremonies of Juglers and Conjurers.19

But the ultimate provocation to the good sense of an English Protestant is the doctrine of transubstantiation: ‘that Transubstantial solacism … a new and antiscriptural Belief, compiled of Terrours to the Phancy, Contradictions to Sense, and Impositions on the Understanding’. In exchange for blind loyalty to this ceremonial nonsense, the Catholic powers have ‘discharged the people from all other services and dependence’, in sharp contrast to the English constitutional position where the citizen is not dictated to by a theocracy. The scandal of indulgences makes the Pope ‘clerk of the spiritual market’ in which ‘the worse Christians men are, the better customers’. Absolute power and infallibility is granted to the Pope, who ‘does persecute those to death who dare worship the Author of their Religion instead of his pretended Viceregent’. Finally, the celibate Catholic priests – and this is an interesting observation from the unmarried Marvell – ‘by remaining unmarried, either frustrate human nature if they live chastly, or, if otherwise adulterate it’.

Marvell contrasts this ‘gross superstition’. with the English way. In contrast to the states of Catholic Europe, skewed towards absolutism and insensitive to individual civil liberties, he argues, ‘here the subjects retain their proportion in the Legislature; the very meanest commoner of England is represented in Parliament, and is a party to those laws by which the Prince is sworn to govern himself and his people’. Marvell then claims in regard to the King (he must have been aware of the ironic cast of these words as he framed them, for the whole tenor of the pamphlet is to contradict this comforting assertion in reality): ‘His very Prerogative is no more than what the Law has determined.’ The English King is ‘the onely intelligent ruler over a rational People’. These fine words on the constitutional position of the King as dutiful and answerable servant of his people bear little relation to the reality Marvell’s pamphlet sets out to describe. He adds that there is absolutely no question of England going back to the unfortunate ‘Romish perswasion’ of its past, because for Anglicans their doctrine is ‘true to the principles of the first institution’ of Christianity. One look at the state of things in Europe will teach England how fortunate she is in avoiding the enslavements of the Continent and will bolster her Euroscepticism.

Although Marvell was a member of the Parliamentary committee that examined the evidence of the causes of the Great Fire, and which reached a sceptical conclusion, he now asserts baldly that it was a deliberate act of foreign papists ‘acted by Hubert, hired by Pieddelou, two Frenchmen’. With an interesting dash of pragmatism, Marvell concludes that there is little prospect of the English returning to their original religion, ‘the Protestant Religion being so interwoven as it is with their secular interest’. Reclaiming the Church lands confiscated after the Reformation now would ‘make a general earthquake over the nation’. In spite of all these points, there are still those in England, Marvell contends in terms that would make his old friend, Milton, turn in his grave, who would wish to ‘introduce a French slavery’ by converting England back to Catholicism:

For, as to matter of government, if to murther the King be, as certainly it is, a fact so horrid, how much more hainous is it to assassinate the Kingdom? and as none will deny, that to alter our Monarchy into a Commonwealth were treason, so by the same fundamental rule, the crime is no less to make that Monarchy absolute.20

After these preliminaries, Marvell proceeds to the real matter of his pamphlet, which is not just to inveigh against Catholicism but to offer ‘a naked narrative’ of recent events, quoting documents, many of which would not be in the public domain, in order to expose the conspiracy working against the government of the land. Vitiated like all conspiracy theories by its lack of specific evidence and its shadowy gesturing at possible culprits, the remainder of the pamphlet is nonetheless characterised by a more level and coherent tone than his earlier ribaldries and satires such as Mr Smirke. The urgency of his self-appointed task seems to have sobered and controlled his prose. The thesis had already been stated plainly in the opening pages:

There has now for divers years a design been carried on to change the lawful Government of England into an absolute Tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into downright Popery: than both which, nothing can be more destructive or contrary to the interest and happiness, to the constitution and being of the king and kingdom.21

In fact Marvell goes a little further back in history to the beginning of the decade in search of evidence of the conspiracy. The proroguings of Parliament in the 1670s (which did actually tend to happen when the King was being supplied with covert funds from France) are seen as opportunities for the conspirators ‘to give demonstrations of their fidelity to the French King’. He attacks, surprisingly in view of the effort he put into defending it in The Rehearsal, the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672 as a bid by the ‘hellish conspiracy’ to ‘defraud the nation of all that religion which they has so dearly purchased … it was the masterpiece therefore of boldness and contrivance in those conspirators to issue the declaration’. Not for the first time in his political career, Marvell thus radically revised his stance. In spite of a backhanded tribute to the crypto-Catholics like Clifford who ‘honourably forsook their places rather than their consciences’ in 1673, when the Test Act was introduced in the wake of the repeal of the Declaration, Marvell is contemptuous of the Duke of York, who married a Catholic, Mary of Modena. ‘Such marriages,’ he declared, ‘have always increased Popery, and incouraged priests and jesuits to pervert His Majesty’s subjects.’ Claiming that the conspirators made overtures to ‘the old Cavalier party’ to boost their strength, Marvell accused them of an intent ‘to have raised a Civil War’.

Coming closer to the present – the long prorogation of 22 November 1675 to 15 February 1677 which he called ‘this vast space’ in which the conspirators flourished – Marvell, in default of harder evidence, notes that it is ‘very remarkable’ that five judges were replaced during this period: ‘What French counsel, what standing forces, what parliamentary bribes, what national oaths, and all the other machinations of wicked men have not yet been able to effect, may be more compendiously acted by twelve judges in scarlet.’ He then turned his attention to his fellow MPs, observing that it was ‘too notorious to be concealed, that near a third part of the House have beneficial offices under his Majesty’. A further third were ‘hungry and out of office’ and therefore angling for the same sort of favour. In spite of having been elected to oppose the court party, these country MPs ‘when they come up, if they can speak in the House, they make a faint attack or two upon some great minister of State’. Fortunately, there remain among the final third some who are ‘constant, invariable, indeed Englishmen’ who can be counted upon to behave decently. But, in truth, Parliament presents a sorry picture: ‘It is less difficult to conceive how fire was first brought to light in the world than how any good thing could ever be produced out of an House of Commons so constituted.’ There is a fatally complacent conviviality among these Parliamentary time-servers, in Marvell’s picture: ‘They live together not like Parliament men, but like so many goodfellows met together in a publick house to make merry. And which is yet worse, by being so thoroughly acquainted, they understand their number and party, so that the use of so publick a counsel is frustrated, there is no place for deliberation, no perswading by reason, but they can see one another’s votes through both throats and cravats before they hear them.’ Only the four lords, including Shaftesbury, who challenged the prorogation and were sent to the Tower for doing so earn Marvell’s unqualified praise in this Parliament. As he reviews in detail the events of 1677, Marvell sees the hand of the conspirators in everything: ‘For all things betwixt France and England moved with that punctual regularity, that it was like the harmony of the spheres, so consonant with themselves, although we cannot hear the musick.’

Marvell ends by claiming to have ‘laid open’ the conspiracy if the country will care to examine the evidence: ‘yet men sit by, like idle spectators, and still give money towards their own tragedy’. The pamphlet, he claims, was written ‘with no other intent than of meer fidelity and service to his Majesty’, when he knew full well that if there was any conspiracy the King was at the heart of it. Far from welcoming its publication, however, the government set on foot immediately a hunt for the author. The London Gazette for 21–25 March 1678 carried an advertisement offering a reward of £50 for anyone who could find ‘the Printer, Publisher, Author, or Hander to the Press’ of this and other ‘Seditious, and Scandalous Libels against the Proceedings of Both Houses of Parliament’.22 The person who found the actual ‘Hander of it to the Press’ could expect a reward of £100.

It was not until after Marvell’s death in the summer of 1678 that Sir Roger L’Estrange confidently identified the poet as the author in a letter to Secretary of State Williamson.