World Enough and Time (21 page)

Holland,
that scarce deserves the name of
Land,

As but th'Off-scouring of the
British Sand.

During Marvell's absence in Russia the threat of naval war with the Dutch had become an imminent reality. The Commons had voted £2.5 million for the war and shortly after Marvell returned to England the Second Dutch War began in March 1665. He had also missed the first attempts to impeach the Lord Chancellor, Clarendon. Both events would loom large in the satires Marvell began to write in the mid-1660s, prompted by disillusion with the government of Charles II and its growing intolerance of dissent. The dislocations and turbulence of war and an unsettled national politics would be accompanied in 1665 by a major outbreak of bubonic plague, followed in turn by the Great Fire that ravaged London in 1666. For a poet who had always displayed a satiric vein and who was at the heart of the political world and keenly attentive to its every nuance, Marvell's shift to satire at this time is wholly unsurprising.

Marvell plunged straight back into political business in February 1665. His signature appears on the 4th, together with that of Colonel Gilby, John Ramsden and John Cresset, witnessing a Trinity House document.
1
A month later the Hull Bench Books record that an order was made on 16 March for the payment to him of £10 6s 8d for thirty-one days' attendance at the last session of Parliament.
2
Marvell would have been kept at the government's expense throughout the latter half of 1663 and 1664 (he was officially noted as a court dependant)
3
but the Parliamentary wages would now be needed to enable him to survive back in London. He was in the habit of occasionally handing over his wages to his brother-in-law Edmund Popple, who acted as banker, investment adviser and general man of business for him. The Bench Books record such payments being made on 2 March 1661, 3 December 1663 (when Marvell was riding out the Russian winter at Vologda), 14 December 1665 and 21 April 1670.
4

The outbreak of plague in London forced the Cavalier Parliament to meet for a short fifth session at Oxford in the autumn of 1665. It was from there that Marvell wrote the first letter to the Hull Corporation and its latest mayor, Robert Bloome, since his return from Russia, though he had been back in London for seven or eight months now. During the spring someone had arranged for the publication of part of the poem he had written during an earlier engagement with the Dutch in 1653, ‘The Character of Holland'. The first 100 lines, with a further eight-line conclusion bolted on to make the poem relate to the moment, were entered on the Stationers' Register on 13 June, ten days after the English victory under the Duke of York at Solebay. This original pamphlet, printed for Robert Horn, at the sign of the Angel in Pope's Head Alley, has disappeared, but it was issued again by Horn in 1672, once more for topical reasons, and is in the collection of manuscripts and pamphlets assembled by Robert Harley and printed in the eighteenth century as
The Harleian Miscellany.
According to an early editor of Marvell's work, G.A. Aitken, ‘a printer, on the side of the Court, impudently adapted Marvell's poem to the occasion'.
5
The deeds of the early commanders of 1653, Deane, Blake, and Monck, were edited out and replaced with what Aitken rightly calls eight lines of ‘doggerel' in praise of the Duke of York and the heroes of 1665:

Vainly did this slap-dragon fury hope

With sober English valour e'er to cope;

Not though they prim'd their barb'rous morning's draught

With powder, and with pipes of brandy fraught;

Yet Rupert, Sandwich, and, of all, the Duke,

The Duke has made their sea-sick courage puke;

Like the three comets sent from heaven down

With fiery flails, to swinge th'ungrateful clown.

It is safe to assume that Marvell was not the author of this conclusion, nor is it likely that he gave his assent to the publication, but the reference to Prince Rupert recalls the anecdote of an early Marvell editor, Thomas Cooke, who in 1726 referred to ‘the great regard Prince Rupert always had to his counsels'.
6
Prince Rupert, son of Elizabeth Queen of Bohemia and Frederick V, elector palatine, had been a general of Charles I, gaining the first victory of the Civil War at Worcester, on the opposite side from the Earl of Carlisle. Exiled after the wars he returned at the Restoration to be made a Privy Counsellor and commissioner for the government of Tangier. He had a distinguished naval career and was a vice admiral at the outbreak of the Dutch War of 1672. According to Cooke, who claimed the privilege of having spoken with members of Marvell's family before writing his account of the poet's life:

It is reported of that Prince, whenever he voted according to the sentiments of Marvell, which he often did, it was a saying of the adverse party,
He has been with his tutor.
The intimacy betwixt him and Mr Marvell was so great, that when it was unsafe for the latter to have it known where he lived, for fear of losing his life by treachery, which was often the case, his royal friend would frequently renew his visits in the habit of a private person. For he was often in such danger, that he was forced to have his letters directed to him in another name, to prevent any discovery that way.

It is worth remembering that Cooke made errors about very basic details of Marvell's career, such as suggesting that his embassy was not to Russia but Constantinople – a search of the relevant papers at the Public Record Office has produced no trace of the latter – but if Cooke's anecdote is reliable it suggests two things. The first is that Marvell's easy crossing of political barriers was never trammelled by past associations or inconveniences in the record: he was not abhorred by every member of the court party. The second is that his life as a politician, as has already been suggested, was a dangerous one. Cooke referred to ‘the insuperable hatred of his foes to him, and their designs of murdering him'.
7
He claimed to have seen ‘a private letter … written to a friend from Highgate' (which has not survived) in which Marvell confesses his fear of these enemies, quoting the Latin:
‘Praeterea magis occidere metuo quam occidi; non quod vitam tanti aestimem, sed ne imparatus moriar'
(a difficult and possibly incorrectly transcribed piece of Latin which means something like: ‘I shrink from killing more than from being killed; not so much because of the value I put on life as from being unprepared to die'). Cooke argued that this made Marvell ‘very cautious with whom he contracted a friendship'. Aubrey confirms this when he says that Marvell, though fond of wine, would be cautious about how much he drank in company and ‘was wont to say that, he would not play the gooodfellow in any man's company in whose hands he would not trust his life'.
8
This permanent caution, added to a natural reserve and taciturnity, contributed to the air of mystery and apartness that clung to this solitary man. ‘He had not a generall acquaintance,' Aubrey noted. Later, at the time of his clashes with Samuel Parker in the early 1670s, he was the recipient of another lost letter, dated 3 November 1673, said to have been left for him at a friend's house and to have been signed with the mysterious initials ‘JG'. It concluded: ‘If thou darest to print any lie or libel against Dr Parker, by the eternal God, I will cut thy throat.'
9
Marvell's gift for making friends in unexpected places was matched by an equal talent for making cordial enemies in whatever business he was engaged.

In his first letter to Mayor Bloome, Marvell complained that the burgesses had not replied to his letter written before the Oxford session began (their response, written two days previously, was in fact in the post). He provided a short political briefing explaining that the House had voted the King more money to prosecute the Dutch War. He also reported on the Five Mile Bill which, when enacted, would restrain ‘nonconformists ejected ministers from liuing neare towns corporate'.
10
He predicted a brief sitting: ‘We shall haue a short session I belieue not aboue a moneth.' The Oxford term began on 18 November, by which time the MPs would expect to be gone. In fact the Courts of Justice were held in Oxford in November. Marvell observed that there was in fact ‘litle to be done', but added in the same breath: ‘I am in some hast.' Once again, he seems to have had several irons in the fire, the immediate Parliamentary business eclipsed by private matters. The presence of the Bodleian Library was one such call on his attention in Oxford. His signature appears in the Library's admission register of 30 September as a visitor, or one of the
extranei nobiles et generosi,
the only other name recorded in this category being, on 4 October, that of Sir Winston Churchill, the politician and father of the 1st Duke of Marlborough.
11
The Library at that time kept no record of books issued but it is safe to assume that the scholarly poet, deprived of access to library resources during his eighteen months abroad, was making good use of the opportunity.

A week after his first letter, Marvell gave the Mayor the latest news: ‘Our nauy is speeding to chase the Dutch again of our Seas.'
12
On 2 November he reported that a bill aimed at checking the spread of the plague had fallen ‘because the Lords would not agree with us that their houses if infected should be shut up'.
13
The national emergency had evidently contributed to some degree of abatement of the tension between King and Commons, for the former ‘was pleased at our departure [from Oxford] to witness his great satisfaction in all our proceedings'. The King prorogued the Parliament until 20 February 1666.

Marvell was thus back in London by the end of 1665 but there is a gap in his public and private correspondence until the beginning of October 1666. It can be assumed that he witnessed, a month earlier, a calamity even more extraordinary than the plague, for on 2 September, in the small hours between about 1 and 2 a.m., a fire broke out at the house of Thomas Farrinor, the King's baker, in Pudding Lane, between Eastcheap and Lower Thames Street. The diarist, Samuel Pepys, was woken at about 3 a.m. by his servants, who had seen the signs of a great fire raging in the city. At first he dismissed it and went back to bed. The Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, protesting at having been dragged out of bed to see the fire, observed grumpily: ‘A woman might piss it out.' But when Pepys woke again at 7 a.m. the extent of the fire was brought home to him. He walked to the Tower to get a full view of the devastation, then went down to the Thames to catch a boat from where he could see the real dimensions of this ‘lamentable fire':

Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river, or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs, by the waterside to another. And, among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loath to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies, till they burned their wings and fell down.
14

Aided by a preceding long dry spell and an easterly wind, the fire swept through the city. In four days more than 13,000 houses were destroyed, together with the adjacent churches and public buildings. Millions of pounds of damage was done to property in an era before fire insurance. One hundred thousand people were homeless. The stress on a nation already involved in a costly war and still waiting for the predicted Dutch booty was telling. As the fire abated, the search for scapegoats began. Plague, fire, war were seen by the religious zealots as God's punishment on a sinful nation. The politicians – against a background of hysteria and xenophobia during which several foreigners were randomly lynched – seemed to incline towards the traditional explanation for such things: a popish plot. Clarendon would later conclude that there was no evidence ‘of any other cause of that woeful fire, except by the displeasure of Almighty God', but the Privy Council held long sessions examining suspect after suspect.

Parliament met on 18 September. One of its first tasks was to appoint a committee ‘to inquire into the causes of the late fire'. According to the Journals of the House it was ordered on 2 October ‘that Sir Maurice Berkley, Mr Pepis, Sir Thom. Allen, Mr Morice, Sir Richard Everard, Mr Crouch, Mr Marvell, Sir Wm Hickman, Sir Adam Browne, Serjeant Mainard be added to the Committee'.
15
(The prompt action of Samuel Pepys in reporting directly to the King had resulted in a royal order to start pulling down buildings in the path of the fire.) Appointed on 25 September, and meeting in the Speaker's chamber under the chairmanship of Sir Robert Brook, the committee had evidently felt the need very shortly to acquire extra members. On 20 December Marvell and another MP called Jolliff were given the task of examining a Mrs Eves of Enfield to hear what she had to say about the suspicious case of Mrs St George, a palpable papist.

Shortly before the fire broke out Mrs Rebecca Eves claimed to have been told by Mrs St George about a plot for ‘firing the city'. A little later, Mrs St George's daughter paid Mrs Eves a visit to ask what her mother had said, clearly anxious about her garrulous parent. After the fire the daughter again told Mrs Eves that ‘she had much ado to keep her mother in at the time of the fire, lest she should speak some things she should be questioned for'.
16
Mrs Eves's summing up on the St George family was that: ‘They are all great Papists, and there are many more in the neighbourhood.' Even an ardent Catholic conspiracy theorist like Marvell must have concluded that such tittle-tattle was a waste of the committee's time. The full committee report was published on 22 January 1667 but Parliament was prorogued two weeks later before it could properly discuss the matter. No single culprit was ever found and the most likely suspect was a spark from a baker's oven, dry hay in a neighbouring inn and close-packed streets of timber houses on a dry late summer evening with a good wind to fan the flames.