As they turn to leave, for the room is so small that the man who comes in last must be the first to go out, they meet a friend of the poet on the stairs, who makes a third at dinner. After dinner Flecknoe produces ten quires of paper, from which the friend proceeds to read, but so infamously as to excite their author’s rage:—
“But all his praises could not now appease
The provok’t Author, whom it did displease
To hear his verses by so just a curse
That were ill made, condemned to be read worse:
And how (impossible!) he made yet more
Absurdities in them than were before:
For his untun’d voice did fall or raise
As a deaf man upon the Viol plays,
Making the half-points and the periods run
Confus’der than the atoms in the sun:
Thereat the poet swell’d with anger full,”
and after violent exclamations retires in dudgeon back to his room. The faithful friend is in despair. What is he to do to make peace? “Who would commend his mistress now?” Marvell
“counselled him to go in time
Ere the fierce poet’s anger turned to rhyme.”
The advice was taken, and Marvell, finding himself at last free from boredom, went off to St. Peter’s to return thanks.
This poem is but an unsatisfactory souvenir de voyage, but it is all there is.
What Marvell was doing during the stirring years 1646–1650 is not known. Even in the most troubled times men go about their business, and our poet was always a man of affairs. As for his opinions during these years, we can only guess at them from those to which he afterwards gave expression. Marvell was neither a Republican nor a Puritan. Like his father before him, he was a Protestant and a member of the Reformed Church of England. He stood for both King and Parliament. Archbishop Laud he distrusted, and it may well be detested, but good churchmen have often distrusted and even detested their archbishops. Mr. Gladstone had no great regard for Archbishop Tait. Before the Act of Uniformity and the repressive legislation that followed upon its heels had driven English dissent into its final moulds, it was not doctrine but ceremonies that disturbed men’s minds; and Marvell belonged to that school of English churchmen, by no means the least distinguished school, which was not disposed to quarrel with their fellow-Christians over white surplices, the ring in matrimony, or the attitude during Holy Communion. He shared the belief of a contemporary that no system is bad enough to destroy a good man, or good enough to save a bad one.
The Civil War was to Marvell what it was to most wise men not devoured by faction—a deplorable event. Twenty years after he wrote in the Rehearsal Transprosed:—
“Whether it be a war of religion or of liberty it is not worth the labour to inquire. Whichsoever was at the top, the other was at the bottom; but upon considering all, I think the cause was too good to have been fought for. Men ought to have trusted God—they ought to have trusted the King with that whole matter. The arms of the Church are prayers and tears, the arms of the subject are patience and petitions. The King himself being of so accurate and piercing a judgment would soon have felt it where it stuck. For men may spare their pains when Nature is at work, and the world will not go the faster for our driving. Even as his present Majesty’s happy Restoration did itself, so all things else happen in their best and proper time, without any heed of our officiousness.”1
In the face of this passage and many another of the like spirit, it is puzzling to find such a man, for example, as Thomas Baker, the ejected non-juring Fellow and historian of St. John’s College, Cambridge (1656–1740), writing of Marvell as “that bitter republican”; and Dryden, who probably knew Marvell, comparing his controversial pamphlets with those of Martin Marprelate, or at all events speaking of Martin Marprelate as “the Marvell of those times.”2 A somewhat anti-prelatical note runs through Marvell’s writings, but it is a familiar enough note in the works of the English laity, and by no means dissevers its possessor from the Anglican Church. But there are some heated expressions in the satires which probably gave rise to the belief that Marvell was a Republican.3
During the Commonwealth Marvell was content to be a civil servant. He entertained for the Lord-Protector the same kind of admiration that such a loyalist as Chateaubriand could not help feeling for Napoleon. Even Clarendon’s pedantic soul occasionally vibrates as he writes of Oliver, and compares his reputation in foreign courts with that of his own royal master. When the Restoration came Marvell rejoiced. Two old-established things had been destroyed by Cromwell—Kings and Parliaments, and Marvell was glad to see them both back again in England.
Some verses of Marvell’s attributable to this period (1646–1650) show him keeping what may be called Royalist company. With a dozen other friends of Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier poet and the author of two of the most famous stanzas in English verse, Marvell contributed some commendatory lines addressed to his “noble friend, Mr. Richard Lovelace, upon his Poems,” which appeared with the poems themselves in that year of fate, 1649. “After the murder of the King,” says Anthony Wood, “Lovelace was set at liberty, and having by that time consumed all his estate, grew very melancholy, became very poor in body and purse, was the object of charity, went in ragged clothes (whereas when he was in glory he wore cloth of gold and silver), and mostly lodged in obscure and dirty places, more befitting the worst of beggars and poorest of servants.”
Then it was that Lucasta made its first appearance. When the fortunes of the gallant poet were at their lowest and never to revive, Marvell seizes the occasion to deplore the degeneracy of the times, a familiar theme with poets:—
“Our civil wars have lost the civic crown,
He highest builds who with most art destroys,
And against others’ fame his own employs.”
He then glances scornfully at the new Presbyterian censorship of the press:—
“The barbèd censurers begin to look
Like the grim consistory on thy book,
And on each line cast a reforming eye,”
and suggests that Lucasta is in danger because in 1642 its author had been imprisoned by order of the House of Commons for presenting a petition from Kent which prayed for the restoration of the Book of Common Prayer. This danger is, however, overcome by the ladies, who rise in arms to defend their favourite poet.
“But when the beauteous Ladies came to know
That their dear Lovelace was endangered so,
Lovelace that thaw’d the most congealèd breast,
He who lov’d best and them defended best,
They all in mutiny, though yet undrest,
Sally’d.”
One of them challenged Marvell as to whether he had not been of the poet’s traducers, but he answered No!
“O No, mistake not, I reply’d, for I
In your defence or in his cause would die.
But he, secure of glory and of time,
Above their envy or my aid doth climb.
Him, bravest men and fairest nymphs approve,
His book in them finds Judgment, with you, Love.”
Lovelace did not live to see the Restoration, but died in a mean lodging near Shoe Lane in April 1658, and was buried in St. Bridget’s Church. Let us indulge the hope that the friends who occupied so many of the introductory pages of Lovelace’s Lucasta occasionally enlivened the solitude and relieved the distress of the poet whose praises they had once sung with so much vigour. As