World Enough and Time (18 page)

Although Marvell flattered the Corporation excessively (‘I account all things I can do for your service to be meere trifles & not worth taking notice of in respect of what I ow you … I haue in the things concerning your town no other sense or affection but what is yours as farr as I can understand it'
15
) he could handle the burgesses firmly when it was needed. ‘Be pleased to let me distinctly & fully know your minds in these points so materiall that I may not for want of resolution from you to be exposed when it comes to the pinch,'
16
he demanded on one occasion. On another he reprimanded them: ‘It would behoue you to be speedy and punctuall in your correspondence.'
17
There is a note of impatience here with his provincial masters. But the prevailing note was unctuous courtesy and high sentiment. Reporting a bill being brought in by King Charles which would allow him to appoint and dismiss magistrates in the Corporations and one that would give him the sole right to command the militia and armed forces, Marvell intones as a loyal subject and a mere weak member of the House: ‘I hope his Majesty will as he has done hitherto help us out of these straits of our own minds; otherwise we may stick in the Briars.'
18

On 16 June Marvell supported the first reading of a bill to make Holy Trinity Church, Hull a separate parish from its mother church of Hessle, reserving the advowson (right of patronage) for the Corporation. At first that right was not granted, so Marvell said he could not support the second reading, ticking off the Corporation for not giving him clearer instructions about how he should vote. The bill was eventually passed on 29 June.

Marvell's secure position with his constituency base was important for his political survival. During the early summer of 1661, in a House where the court party was becoming increasingly confident that the tide was running in its direction, the underlying mistrust that existed towards people with Marvell's political history increased. On 20 June he wrote to Hull: ‘I must beseech you also to listen to no little storyes concerning my selfe. For I belieue you know by this time that you haue lately heard some very false concerning me.'
19
It is not clear what these rumours were but they were plainly more than grumbles from Gilby and were widespread enough that Marvell could take it for granted they had independently reached the ears of the Corporation.

Nothing more is heard of these rumours for the remainder of the year (although there is an eight-month gap in Marvell's surviving correspondence between June 1661 and February 1662, the month in which he acted as a teller for a proviso to the poor bill on behalf of garrison towns, which was lost). But early in 1662, a more serious incident occurred in the House of Commons, reported in the
Journals of the House
for 18 March 1662:

Ordered,
That the Difference between Mr
Marvell
and Mr
Clifford,
Two Members of this House, be referred to Mr Speaker, to examine; and, to that End, to hear Mr
Scott,
another Member of this House, who was present when this Difference did happen; and to mediate and reconcile the same between them if he can; or else to report it to the House, with his Opinion therein.
20

Thomas Clifford was the MP for Totnes in Devon, a closet Catholic, and later stalwart of the court party granted estates by Charles II as a reward for supporting his plans to establish Catholicism in England in 1669. He became Lord Clifford of Chudleigh in 1672, his initial ‘C' contributing to the famous ‘Cabal' administration of Clifford, Ashley, Buckingham, Arlington and Lauderdale between 1670 and 1673. He eventually resigned as Lord Treasurer in 1673 rather than sign the Test Act. Two obvious reasons for a clash with Marvell were his crypto-Catholicism and his aggression; Pepys refers to ‘his rudeness of tongue and passions when angry'.
21
But Marvell also, in spite of his quietness and reserve, seems to have had a quick temper. During the nineteen years of Marvell's Parliamentary career from 1659 to 1678 only six such quarrels are noted in the Parliamentary records so the incident was a serious one. After the Speaker's investigation the matter was resolved, with Marvell having been found guilty of the first provocation and being instructed, in spite of his reluctance, to apologise:

Mr Speaker reports, That he had examined the matter of difference between Mr
Marvell
and Mr
Clifford;
and found that Mr
Marvell
had given the first provocation that begot the difference: and that his opinion was that Mr
Marvell
should declare his sorrow for being the first occasion of the difference; and then Mr
Clifford
to declare, that he was sorry for the consequences of it: And that Mr
Clifford
was willing to yield to this determination, but that Mr
Marvell
refused.

And the House thereupon directing the said Mr
Marvell
and Mr
Clifford
to withdraw; and taking the matter into debate;

Resolved,
That the said Mr
Marvell
and Mr
Clifford
be called into their places: and that each of them shall have a reprehension from Mr Speaker, for breach of the peace and privilege of the House; and according to Mr Speaker's report, be enjoined to declare their sorrow for it; and to crave the pardon of the House.

And the said Mr
Marvell
and Mr
Clifford
being accordingly called in to their places; and having received a grave reprehension from Mr Speaker, and Mr
Marvell
declaring that he was sorry, that he should give the first provocation of the difference; and Mr
Clifford
acknowledging that he was sorry for what ensued; and both of them engaged to keep the peace and privilege of the House for the future; and not to renew this difference, but to have the same correspondence they had before it did happen: with which the House was well satisfied; and did remit the breach of privilege.
22

This was not, however, to be Marvell's last physical encounter with another Member in the House, nor was Clifford to be allowed to get away with a formal rebuff from the Speaker. In his satire written five years later, ‘The last Instructions to a Painter', Marvell has a portrait of Clifford, by then the Comptroller of the Household: ‘With
Hook
then, through the
microscope,
take aim/Where, like the new
Controller,
all men laugh/To see a tall Lowse brandish the white Staff.' In another poem of 1673 attributed to Marvell, ‘An Historicall Poem', there is an allusion to his tragic end: ‘Clifford and Hide before has lost the day,/One hang'd himself, the other fled away.'

The Speaker, Sir Edward Turner, was not forgiven either for this humiliation. He appears in ‘The last Instructions', mercilessly cast:

Paint him in Golden Gown, with Mace's Brain:

Bright Hair, fair Face, obscure and dull of Head;

Like Knife with Iv'ry haft and edge of Lead.

At Pray'rs, his Eyes turn up the Pious white,

But all the while his
Private-Bill's
in sight.

In Chair, he smoaking sits like Master-Cook,

And a
Poll-Bill
does like his Apron look.

Well was he skill'd to season any question,

And make a sawce fit for
Whitehall's
digestion:

Whence ev'ry day, the Palat more to tickle;

Court-mushrumps
ready are sent in in pickle.

When
Grievance
urg'd he swells like squatted Toad,

Frisks like a Frog to croak a
Taxes
load.

His patient Piss, he could hold longer then

An Urinal, and sit like any Hen.

At Table, jolly as a Country-Host,

And soaks his Sack with
Norfolk
like a Toast.

At night, than
Canticleer
more brisk and hot,

And Serjeants Wife serves him for
Partelott.

ll 866–84

Marvell's love of ‘reverend Chaucer'
23
is once again attested in this passage. The poem would appear anonymously and for now he had no choice but to defer to the power of the Speaker and reflect on the extent of the animosity towards him in parts of the House.

13

Beyond Sea

If one were to choose a date for the beginning of the modern world, probably July 15, 1662, would be the best to fix upon. For on that day the Royal Society was founded, and the place of Science in civilization became a definite and recognized thing.

Lytton Strachey
1

Marvell's education had been in the classics and, just as in politics he seems to have been happiest occupying the middle ground, his intellect seems to have been poised between the old and the new, between the traditional values of a classicist and a student of the Bible and the scientific values of the new age of inquiry. There is evidence in his writing of familiarity with Hobbes ‘whose half-mediaeval, half-modern mind was the dominating influence over intellects which came to maturity in the middle years of the century', according to Strachey. Hobbes's materialist philosophy – ‘The universe, that is, the whole mass of things that are, is corporeal', as he put it in his famous work,
Leviathan
(1651) – did not naturally consort with the idealist tendency of Marvell's thought. The poet who wrote of a dialogue between the soul and the body would have few points of contact with a philosopher who rejected the notion of the soul as mediaeval ‘vain philosophy'. ‘The accepted tradition of centuries past, blended out of Platonic, Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, Stoic and Christian elements, spoke with seemingly overwhelming authority for the soul as a spiritual and even divine essence, informing the body, but existing in its own right, separable, and consequently immortal,' wrote Basil Willey, a modern historian of seventeenth-century thought.
2

At the dawning of the great age of modern science and reason, Marvell – though he lived at the centre of the turbulent political events of his epoch – was not wholly emancipated from the old philosophy nor eager to seize the role of
buccinator novi temporis.
He was, however, according to Aubrey, a friend of the mathematician John Pell, who invented the division sign in mathematics. Pell was a precocious scholar favoured by Cromwell, who sent him on a political mission to Switzerland in 1654. He later took orders and, like John Aubrey, was not greatly competent in managing his affairs and never quite lived up to his initial promise. The new science, as well as the contemporary confusion of astrology and astronomy, entered into Marvell's poems where mathematical and geometrical metaphors abound, such as the ‘perfect Hemisphere' of Bilborough Hill or the
‘holy Mathematicks'
of ‘Upon Appleton House'.

Whatever his appetite for intellectual exploration, Marvell was always a keen physical traveller. By the spring of 1662, he had been at home for at least five years and would have been getting restless. Malicious gossip in the House, made worse by his recent public dressing-down from the Speaker, may well have persuaded him to look for a change of scene and the opportunity now appeared to present itself. The mission that he undertook was a mysterious one. Marvell's references to it at this time are brief and enigmatic. Writing to the Brethren of Trinity House on 22 March, he apologised for managing only a brief letter, citing in excuse ‘some avocations lately in mine own particular'
3
that had preoccupied him. A week later he asked for ‘a dormant credit for an hundred pound'
4
to oil the wheels of their business – the beginnings of the long-running Spurn Head lighthouse project.

One of the navigational duties of Trinity House was the provision of aids to navigation. In the sixteenth century a beacon was set up, later followed by a buoy that enabled the House to collect buoyage charges. There had been a light on Spurn Head as early as 1427, when it was maintained by a hermit, but it was not until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that speculators began to be attracted to the idea of seeking patents to erect a lighthouse and charge tolls on passing ships. Such schemes were consistently opposed by Trinity House, although their colleagues in Newcastle supported the idea to help their coal trade. In 1618, 1637 and 1657 the House opposed schemes, until in 1660 Philip Frowde was given leave to promote a bill in Parliament, then in 1662 Trinity House introduced its own bill to erect a lighthouse on Spurn Head. Its principal argument was that the revenues would benefit the poor. The House was joined by various other speculators including Justinian Angell, who later actually managed to erect lights with voluntary support. Both Trinity House Hull and Deptford objected to this on the grounds that the lights were badly sited, trying in 1675 to get them extinguished. Hull Corporation, however, opposed this move. Later, in 1675, Angell obtained a patent giving him the right to charge a farthing a ton on all passing ships. This rose to a halfpenny in 1678, the year of Marvell's death.
5

Marvell made this apparently very ordinary scheme take on an air of delicate intrigue, warning the Brethren on 8 May that it was not ‘safe … to speake too cleare by the Post'.
6
He was hopeful of completing his work on their behalf soon but had an announcement to make:

But that whch troubles me is that by the interest of some persons too potent for me to refuse & who haue a great direction & influence upon my counsells & fortune I am obliged to go beyond sea before I haue perfected it [i.e. their business].