World Enough and Time by Nicholas Murray Page B

ordinary,’ 2 wrote Marvell in one of his first letters of the new session to Hull. Since he entered the House a decade earlier the life of an MP had become more and more filled with activity. His letters increasingly reflect this fact, while at the same time suggesting, tantalisingly, that his workload might have had other undisclosed elements: discreet government activity, personal business affairs, intrigue, or, simply, the natural private preoccupations of a scholar-poet.
    The Parliamentary session of 1670 was busy with the issue of suppressing the perceived threat of illicit nonconformist meetings, the conventicles; not only the Catholics posed a threat to the supremacy of Anglicanism. Suspicion of the King’s foreign policy coloured the response of the House to many other issues. In May 1668 the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle had resulted in a ‘Triple Alliance’ between England, Holland and Sweden against France, but the following year the King’s younger brother, James, Duke of York, acknowledged his conversion to Catholicism. Secretly, the King began negotiations with Louis XIV of France for an alliance based on a promise by Charles to declare himself a Catholic at an agreed time (which, in the end, he never did). The deal was secretly agreed in May 1670 by the Treaty of Dover, offering money and military aid to Charles in return for his declaration, which could be the opening for the establishment of Catholicism in England. Had this been publicly known, the anti-Catholics would have felt fully vindicated in their prejudice. The result of all these manoeuvrings was a continuing tension between the public and private policies of the King.
    On 21 March, Marvell wrote to his nephew, William Popple, who was at his business address in Bordeaux. One of the longer surviving letters of Marvell, it is unusual in the extent and candour of its personal political opinion. The letters to Hull generally contained almost no personal judgements on politics, though the gaps in the archive could mean that some letters were destroyed precisely because of their possibly incriminating political content. Addressing his fond nephew as ‘Dear Cousin’, 3 Marvell began by explaining that he had ‘writ twice to you at Bourdeaux ’, where Popple had another arm of his international trading business. The unfolding political chronicle began with a report of the mission to Scotland of Lord Lauderdale, the King’s Commissioner for the Scottish Parliament. Lauderdale had done good work there for Charles, but Marvell clearly disapproved of his successes in not only ‘giving the King absolute Power to dispose of all Things in religious Matters’ in Scotland, but also in settling a militia in the country of 20,000 foot and horse ‘to march into England, Ireland, or any Part of the King’s Dominions, whenever his Person, Power, Authority, or Greatness was concerned’. These were precisely the sorts of powers that Marvell and the country opposition were determined the King should not be able to exercise in England. Lauderdale’s third triumph was to empower Charles to start the machinery to bring about the union of England and Scotland, ‘for which Service he was received, with extraordinary favour, by the King’. The opposition, Marvell reports, muttered that Lauderdale ‘deserved an Halter rather than a Garter’ for this work and asked itself if he could be impeached.
    The habitual deference towards the King that marks Marvell’s constituency correspondence (and that may, for all its formal eloquence, have been no more than politic) is noticeably absent from his letter to Will Popple. On the contrary, he was clearly annoyed by the attitude of the King who, before Christmas, had been voted £400,000 but now demanded even more. From the end of the session on 1 December to 14 February, when the House resumed, there had been ‘great and numerous Caballing among the