World Enough and Time by Nicholas Murray Page A

head would have forced him along with him. But immediately his pistol was wrested from him, and as they were putting themselves into a posture to abuse him, we interposed so effectually that he was rescued out of their hands.
    The circumstances in Miège’s account are not clear enough to be certain who the aggressor was on this occasion, but once again Marvell seems to have been prone to getting himself into a violent incident. Perhaps tempers were frayed after the strain of this long, fruitless mission. After Marvell was rescued ‘out of the hands of a barbarous rout of Peasants and Mechanicks’ he set off to protest to the governor of the town about the disorder. While he was gone his companions found themselves ‘beset by above a hundred of them endeavouring to rob us of our goods, and others to do violence to our persons’. In the fracas ‘a Page lost his Periwig’ and ‘the rabble took particular delight to toss him up and down with his Furs in the snow’. At this point Carlisle returned and order was quickly restored.
    The embassy arrived back in England on 30 January 1665 – the anniversary of the King’s execution – having returned via Munster, Cologne, Malines, Brussels, Calais, and Gravesend. Charles II asked Carlisle to record in full what had happened in order to enable him to challenge the accounts arriving from the Russian ambassadors, who were complaining of the insolence of the English mission. Miège was commissioned to perform the task. That he did so with such competence has provided Marvell’s biographers with an account of a period of nearly eighteen months that would otherwise have remained teasingly blank, for Marvell himself left no record of the trip.

18
    Arbitrary Malice
    The terrible Bill against Conventicles is sent up to the Lords. 1
    Marvell’s commitment to the notion of religious freedom and toleration – provided that this generosity was not extended to include Catholics – never wavered. It was this that made him, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when his poems were relatively neglected, a byword – and not just among nonconformists – for the defence of liberty. Marvell’s notion of liberty was a very English one: passionate yet inseparable from a certain xenophobia. His hostility to Catholicism, it has already been argued, was only partly the result of religious prejudice, and was also connected to a fear of Catholicism as a conduit for subversive ideas and treasonable activity. England’s enemies – whatever temporary alliances might have been formed at this time – were, according to this reading of events, found typically among the European Catholic monarchies. At the end of the twentieth century, fundamentalist Islam has often had the same effect on Western European polities, provoking mingled fear and prejudice, part racial, part political. If Marvell’s phobia now seems unnatural there can be no doubt that his defence of nonconformity was deeply held and sincere. The epithet ‘incorruptible patriot’, attached to Marvell in the eighteenth century, underlines the rooted Englishness of his position. Against the court, with its corruption, dissolute behaviour and suspected crypto-Catholicism, Marvell opposed a sturdy Protestant patriotism, drawing strength from the country and founded in a love of his native soil. If this was an ideological construction, it was certainly a powerful one that continued to resonate long after his death. His father, the Reverend Andrew Marvell, had taught his son to be an independent-minded member of the Church of England. Marvell’s anti-clericalism was his own development of this paternal temper.
    On 14 February 1670 Parliament sat for the first time since its prorogation on 1 December with plenty of business to conduct. ‘We haue kept to our selves these three dayes to so hard duty that you will excuse me if I be shorter then