World Enough and Time (27 page)

Marvell's discreet mission to Ireland, had it taken place, might well have brought him into contact with the larger-than-life character Thomas Blood. An adventurer who in March 1663 had attempted to capture the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, James Butler, the Duke of Ormonde by seizing him in his own residence, Dublin Castle, Colonel Blood pulled off an even more daring stunt on 9 May 1671, when he tried to steal the Crown Jewels. A master of disguise and role-playing, Blood appeared on this occasion as a priest, but was caught in the Tower when the son of the Keeper, Edwards, whom he had befriended in order to gain access, returned to surprise him. When caught, he boasted: ‘It was a bold attempt but it was for a crown.' His chutzpah seems to have endeared him to his captors and Evelyn reported in his diary that Blood refused to confess except to the King who, bemused by the Blood legend like everyone else, agreed ‘being desirous of seeing so bold a ruffian'.
16
Far from being cast into a dungeon, Blood – who in the past, as a member of the Fifth Monarchy Men, had been suspected of being a double agent – somehow escaped punishment, got back the estates in Ireland that had been taken from him at the Restoration, and was seen at court. Marvell composed a short Latin poem, ‘Bludius et Corona', which was similarly reluctant to see Blood as a dastardly criminal. It was translated into English in lines 178–85 of ‘The Loyall Scot' and reveals a sympathy for the pretext of Blood's action (regaining wrongly confiscated lands), acknowledges his lack of real wickedness (evidenced by his failure to murder Edwards when surprised which would probably have guaranteed success) and takes the opportunity for a cruel anticlerical satire (his ‘Lay pitty' conquered the ‘Bishops Cruelty' that he might have been expected to have put on with the clerical disguise):

When daring Blood to have his rents regain'd

Upon the English Diadem distrain'd,

Hee chose the Cassock Circingle and Gown,

The fittest Mask for one that Robs a Crown.

But his Lay pitty underneath prevailed

And while hee spared the keepers life hee fail'd.

With the preists vestments had hee but put on

A Bishops Cruelty, the Crown had gone.
17

In September 1671 an informer's report to Joseph Williamson, secretary to Secretary of State Arlington and an old acquaintance of Marvell's from Saumur in 1656, mentions, rather cryptically, ‘Marvell with Bl from Bucks'.
18
Buckingham had been in France in the summer of 1670 trying – unsuccessfully as it turned out – to calm expatriate English fears about the sudden rapprochement between the King and Louis XIV. If ‘Bl' is ‘Blood' in the condensed informer's report then Marvell and he may have been obscurely mixed up with Buckingham's intelligence activities. In a letter to Thomas Rolt of the East India Company,
19
in August, Marvell returned to the Blood story. He calls him ‘a most bold, and yet sober, Fellow'
20
and reveals that he shares the general attitude to Blood's escapade: ‘He, being taken, astonished the King and Court, with the Generosity, and Wisdom of his Answers. He, and all his Accomplices, for his Sake, are discharged by the King, to the Wonder of all.'

Marvell may well have known Rolt during his period in Thurloe's office, Rolt having found favour with Cromwell. His letter appears to be advising Rolt about his personal affairs. The advice is of a kind that Marvell may well have had to learn for himself: ‘stand upon your Guard; for in this World a good Cause signifys little, unless it be as well defended. A Man may starve at the Feast of good Conscience.' He offers Rolt a piece of his personal experience dating back to the European travels of his freer youth: ‘My Fencing-master in
Spain,
after he had instructed me all he could, told me, I remember, there was yet one Secret, against which there was no Defence, and that was, to give the first Blow.' Marvell was almost exactly a year away from his encounter with Samuel Parker, whose ‘Bishops Cruelty' he would be fencing with – verbally at any rate – under this rubric of the pre-emptive strike.

That encounter would be a distraction from the immediate political scene which, as he describes it to Rolt, consists of fawning courtiers acceding far too readily to the King's demands for money: ‘that it is a Mercy they gave not away the whole Land, and Liberty, of
England
'. The King prorogued the Parliament until 16 April 1672, not a moment too soon, in Marvell's view: ‘The House of Commons has run almost to the end of their Line, and are grown extreme chargeable to the King and odious to the People.' More than this: ‘We truckle to
France
in all Things, to the Prejudice of our Alliance and Honour.'

During this year Marvell managed, however, to overcome his Franco-phobia sufficiently to enter a competition, with a putative prize of a thousand pistoles, to compose an inscription to be placed over the pediment of the newly completed Louvre in Paris. Half a dozen Latin distiches – none, unfortunately, prizewinners – appear under the title
‘Inscribenda Luparae'
in the 1681 Folio of poems. Marvell appears to have been not the only poet who tried his luck, but all the entries from England were unsuccessful.

20

A Gracious Declaration

And accordingly he issued, on
March
the 15th 1672, His Gracious
Declaration of Indulgence,
of which I wish His Majesty and the Kingdom much joy, and, as far as my slender judgement can divine, dare augurate and presage mutual Felicity …
1

After the proroguing of Parliament in April 1671, Marvell, who had now reached the age of fifty, wrote no more letters to his constituents (at any rate none that have survived) until nearly three years later, at the start of 1674. The gaps in Marvell's correspondence have sometimes been attributed to nervousness on the part of recipients about their contents, though there is little evidence of even an approach to politically compromising frankness in those official letters that do survive. The loss of letters also resulted from more mundane treatment by posterity. William Skinner of Hull, who held a number of Marvell letters at the beginning of the eighteenth century, is said to have had so little interest in this trove that he ‘gave them to the pastry-maid to put under pie-bottoms'.
2

In the autumn of 1672 Marvell would publish his prose broadside against Samuel Parker,
The Rehearsal Transpros'd,
a defence of the King's policy of indulgence towards dissenters and Catholics, but there is no independent insight, through correspondence, into this important controversy. In the early part of 1672, however, before the King had issued the Declaration, Marvell's letters show that he was staying at a house at Winchendon, near Aylesbury, owned by Lord Wharton, the Opposition peer who shared Marvell's distaste for the Conventicle Act. It was to this address that several letters were sent by a Dr Benjamin Worsley to Marvell, who forwarded them to Lord Wharton, adding notes and sealing them with his personal seal, representing a stag. Marvell and Worsley were acting as matchmakers for Wharton's eldest son, who planned to marry a Mrs Cable from Honiton in Devon. Marvell had requested Worsley, who had friends in Devonshire, to conduct a few discreet inquiries about Mrs Cable, which he then passed on to the anxious father. In the end it was Mrs Cable who was unimpressed by young Wharton when he paid her a visit in Honiton and the match went no further. Marvell's presence in the house, and his role in this intimate matter, shows his close involvement with the leading Opposition figures.

It was possibly early in 1672 that Marvell – if he was the author, and the evidence both external and internal is slight – wrote the satirical poem, ‘Nostradamus's Prophecy'. A manuscript version of the poem bearing the date 6 January 1672 has survived and, even if Marvell was not the author, it is interesting, if not poetically then politically, as a commentary on the immediate situation. It pretends to be a prophecy by the sixteenth-century Frenchman Michel de Notredame, better known as Nostradamus, some of whose prophecies were thought to have predicted the execution of Charles I and the Great Fire. The poem alludes not only to this but also to more immediate events and personalities, adverting to the sexual licence and corruption of the court and the alleged homosexuality of the King's first minister George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham:

When Sodomy is the Premier Ministers sport

And whoreing shall be the least sin att Court,

A Boy shall take his Sister for his Mate

And practise Incest between Seven and Eight.

It goes on to refer disparagingly to Lauderdale as ‘an old Scotch Covenanter' now become ‘The Champion of the English Hierarchye' and contains a very Marvellian tilt at the Bishops: ‘When Bishops shall lay all Religion by/And strive by Law to 'stablish Tyrany'. Its closing couplet, which casts ‘envious Eyes' on the Venetian republic as a better alternative to this corrupt English monarchy, may point to a shift taking place in Marvell's thinking – again, if the poem is his – away from constitutional monarchism towards republicanism.

The decision of Charles to issue the Declaration of Indulgence heightened public fears about his covert motives. The Declaration claimed that he was entitled by his ecclesiastical prerogatives to suspend the laws against dissenters and to grant licences to them to open meetinghouses. Catholics would also be allowed freedom of worship in their own homes. These concessions worried those who disliked religious freedom and others also feared that the King might extend his claim to be able to suspend religious statutes to the suspension of other laws. And there was the question of the Duke of York. The King's brother was no longer seeking to conceal his Catholicism, his failure to take communion at Easter having been noticed. In spite of his numerous bastard offspring, the King had no legitimate heir. As John Dryden put it some years later in his satire
Absalom and Achitophel
(1681), referring to this period, Charles had ‘Scatter'd his Maker's Image through the Land' by copulating prodigiously with various women, ‘But since like slaves his bed they did ascend,/No True Succession could their seed attend'. The Duke of York was therefore the King's heir presumptive. The prospect of a Catholic king, bent on destroying Protestantism and establishing Romish power on English soil, alarmed many, who asked whether there was something more to the Declaration of Indulgence than met the eye. The alliance with Louis XIV had just resulted in an attack on Holland, a solid Protestant state. What was the King now planning with the Catholic ruler across the water? These fears and anxieties ensured that the twelfth session of the Cavalier Parliament that met in March 1673 would be a noisy and disputatious one, but for now Marvell would welcome the easing of the pressure on the dissenters, however little he relished the same spirit being shown towards the Catholics. The emergence in these years of the country and the court parties can suggest a neat modern division of party interest but the King was essentially a law unto himself. He was fond of intrigue and parleying with people of all sorts of political backgrounds. The flavour of this is caught by the memoirs of the Marquess of Halifax:

He lived with his ministers as he did with his mistresses; he used them, but he was not in love with them. He showed his judgement in this, that he cannot properly be said ever to have had a favourite, though some might look so at a distance … He had back stairs to convey informations to him, as well as for other uses; and though such informations are sometimes dangerous … yet in the main that humour of hearing everybody against anybody kept those about him more in awe than they would have been without it. I do not believe that ever he trusted any man or set of men so entirely as not to have some secrets in which they had no share; as this might make him less well served, so in some degree it might make him the less imposed upon.
3

Such a secretive, crafty sensibility might well have been intrigued by – and made use of ‘back stairs' for intrigue – the discreet and private figure of Andrew Marvell, who was about to emerge in print as the King's defender, at least in the matter of indulgence towards nonconformists.

Three months after the Declaration, in June, Marvell wrote to Will Popple offering an analysis of recent political events. To his customary circumspectness was added some consciousness of real risk, as he explained to Will: ‘There was the other Day … a severe Proclamation issued out against all who shall vent false News, or discourse ill concerning Affairs of State. So that in writing to you I run the Risque of making a Breach in the Commandment.'
4
The political situation was deteriorating and suspicion was rife. ‘Affairs begin to alter, and Men talk of a Peace with
Holland,
' Marvell wrote. He thought that this shift away from the alliance with France would happen ‘before
Michaelmass'
(29 September), an opinion whose grounds could not be disclosed even to Will: ‘for some Reasons not fit to write'. Marvell's sympathies were clearly with the Protestant Dutch: ‘No Man can conceive the Condition of the State of
Holland,
in this Juncture, unless he can at the same Time conceive an Earthquake, an Hurricane, and the Deluge.' By contrast: ‘
France
is potent and subtle.' As if to underline the sense of impending crisis, a number of fires had broken out, at St Catherine's Dock, Bishopsgate and Southwark, recalling the Great Fire and the Catholic plotters whom many blamed for it. ‘You may be sure all the old Talk is hereupon revived,' Marvell told Will.