World Enough and Time Page 4

  Posterity has dealt harshly with Richard Flecknoe, the protagonist of Marvell’s poem ‘Fleckno, an English Priest at Rome’. John Dryden – prompted in part by Flecknoe’s fierce attacks on the obscenity of the London stage – would in 1682 make him the eponymous subject of his poem ‘Macflecknoe or a Satyr upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, TS.’, an attack on the poet Thomas Shadwell. In Dryden’s poem, Flecknoe is presented as the epitome of dullness and one who ‘In Prose and Verse was own’d, without dispute/Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute’. Although Marvell’s poem is scarcely more respectful, there is evidence in Flecknoe’s writing that he may have enjoyed occasional remissions from tediousness. His statement that ‘I write chiefly to avoid idleness, and print to avoid the imputation (of idleness), and as others do it to live after they are dead, I do it only not to be thought dead whilst I am alive’16 is not wholly devoid of wit.

  Richard Flecknoe, described in Gillow’s Dictionary of the English Catholics as ‘priest, poet and dramatist’, was born in Oxford (date unknown) and was the nephew of the Jesuit, Father William Flecknoe SJ. He was sent abroad to be educated at one of the Jesuit colleges where he was said to have entered the Society of Jesus and been ordained priest. According to Gillow: ‘Naturally of an easy-going disposition, with a strong objection to the trammels of discipline, it was no wonder that he soon left the Society. His weakness was vanity and conceit, and fondness for society in which he was ambitious to shine as a polite English scholar.’17 It is not difficult to see why satirists were attracted to the pompous, social-climbing author of A Treatise of the Sports of Wit (1675) as an easy target, though his poems would earn passing praise from Robert Southey and Charles Lamb in the nineteenth century.

  In 1640 Flecknoe left an England drifting towards a civil war in which Catholics might not prosper (though he would later write a worthless eulogy of Oliver Cromwell in 1659 which praised the Lord Protector, opining that ‘a Greater and more Excellent personage has no where been produc’d by this latter Age’).18 His travels began in the Low Countries and would later take him to Constantinople, Portugal and Brazil, as described in his A Relation of Ten Years Travells in Europe, Asia, Affrique, and America (1656). In the opening pages of this work he announces breezily his reasons for leaving a conflict-ridden country: ‘I’m too weak and slight-built a Vessel for Tempestuous Seas … England is no place for me and for Poets … I, like one who flies an Incendium, wholly indifferent whither I went, so I sav’d myself.’ We laugh, and Marvell laughed, but might his own motives have been similar?

  Flecknoe enjoyed his exile amongst English titled expatriates, until, that is, their complaints about their losses at home began to bother him, at which point he moved on: ‘I, by relating all to the narrow compass of one Portmanteau, travel lightly up and down, injoying that Liberty, Fortune has bestow’d on me,’ he declares. In Brussels, he flattered various titled ladies: ‘amongst Men (such is the corruption of the Times) one learns nothing but Libertinage, Vice and Deboisherie’. He passed through France, then to Monaco, where he was lodged in the Palace of the Prince, and then into Italy, always on the run from political conflict. No sooner had he arrived in Genoa than the Marquis Philippo Palavicino despatched a carriage to fetch him from his inn to the Palace. By 1645 he had arrived in Rome where something clearly went wrong. ‘I swear I like it not,’ he writes. ‘Give me good Company, good Natures, & good Mirth, & the Devil of any such thing they have here.’ He was impressed by the ruins and the antiquities, but did not care for the living inhabitants of the city. He wrote to his noble friends in Flanders: ‘I converse more with the dead than the living here (their antient Statua’s and Pictures, I mean) … how melancolly a Creature I am.’ This was the condition in which Marvell found him, explaining in the poem’s opening lines that he called at the poet-priest’s lodgings because he was ‘Oblig’d by frequent visits’ from Flecknoe to do so, which suggests that Marvell had for some time been well-integrated into English expatriate life in Rome.

  ‘Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome’, which is formally reminiscent of the satires of Donne and Horace, is hardly a charitable poem, making fun of Flecknoe’s poverty and pinched surroundings, from which, on this occasion, no aristocratic patron had been able to rescue him. The poet mockingly recounts a visit to Flecknoe’s lodgings ‘at the Sign/Of the sad Pelican’. Once there, he is required to climb three flights of stairs, at the top of which he finds a garret which was so small, three feet by seven, it ‘seem’d a Coffin set on the Stairs head’. The act of opening the door blocked half the room, making it a ‘Wainscot’. In contrast to its tight dimensions, however, the room contains poetic stanzas in abundance and no sooner does Marvell squeeze himself in than the awful poet begins in ‘a dismal tone’ to read his ‘hideous verse’. He resigns himself to this ‘Martyrdom’, which is rapidly followed by a performance on the lute, over whose frets the poetaster’s ‘gouty Fingers’ move, the rumblings of his empty stomach making a sympathetic music with the strings. Marvell’s language in the poem is wittily blasphemous about the Catholicism of Flecknoe, who is pitiably thin from starvation ‘as if he only fed had been/With consecrated Wafers’, and who is fattened only by wads of his terrible rhymes. He watches the scarecrow dress and, after a farcical encounter with another caller while trying to get down the narrow stairs, all three go out for a meal where, replenished, the poems start again, read this time by the third party, probably an Italian because he is said to appreciate the poems ‘because he understood/Not one Word’. This local youth may also be hiring the poet to write hack verses addressed to his inamorata. Hearing his poems inadequately rendered, the ‘disdainful Poet’ stamps off in high dudgeon. Marvell, finding himself free at last, pretends mockingly that he will go off to St Peter’s to hang a votive offering there in gratitude for his release.

  Such a bald summary, of course, does scant justice to the allusive wit and word play of the poem, which cleverly satirises such theological concepts as transubstantiation as well as Catholic practices such as the Lenten fast. Moreover, like every poem of Marvell’s, it is instinct with classical allusion and lightly worn learning. Such a wit implies an appreciative audience so perhaps the author, who on internal evidence had a long acquaintance with the city prior to the visit, had some learned friends among the English in Rome who would enjoy both the manuscript verse – it was not published until after his death in the 1681 edition of his poems – and the mockery of Flecknoe, who might have been a standing joke among them. Pauline Burdon speculates that the readership could have included the second Duke of Buckingham, who had been in Rome since late 1645 and would stay until May 1646. Flecknoe later addressed some verses to him and one reason for cultivating Marvell might have been the hope that the latter’s contacts might bring him together with a much needed potential patron.19

  It is probable that the encounter between the two poets took place in March 1646 during Lent. Flecknoe seems to have arrived in Rome at least as early as January 1645, according to the English College records, to perform a mission for one of his patronesses, the Duchess of Lorraine. Once that mission was completed he seems to have slid gently, during late 1645 and 1646, into the poverty in which Marvell found him, having no other means of support.20 His visits to the English College may have occurred during this period of hardship when he would appreciate the opportunity to dine.

  Another of Marvell’s poems can possibly be dated to this time. ‘A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda’ was set to music by the English composer William Lawes, the setting having survived in Lawes’s own hand in a manuscript now in the British Library. Since Lawes was killed fighting for the Royalist side at the siege of Chester in September 1645 the poem must have been written in the first years of the decade, though the version that appears in the 1681 edition of Marvell’s poems appears to have been revised later. It shows that the delicate pastoral verses, such as those that appear in the early pages of the Miscellaneous Poems, began early.

  The final stage
of Marvell’s tour was Spain. He would have set off from Italy no sooner than the spring of 1646, it being the habit of travellers to winter in cities. The next certain sighting we have of him is in Cambridgeshire, in the autumn of 1647. He would travel again, on official missions, some more clandestine than others, but this period of four to five years was the most extended and probably most relaxed of his periods abroad. His mockery of Flecknoe’s poverty suggests that this was not his own condition. To have sustained himself for such a long period implies some form of financial support, either from a patron at home or from the income derived from working as a tutor to a young man of wealthy family.

  He would, however, return – with skills newly acquired from a Spanish fencing-master – to an England engaged in an altogether less frivolous and foppish presentation of arms.

  4

  The World’s Disjointed Axle

  Then is the Poets time, ’tis then he drawes,

  And single fights forsaken Vertues cause.1

  Arriving back in England, perhaps in the summer or early autumn of 1647 at the port of Hull, after four or five years of relaxed foreign travel, the twenty-six-year-old poet, who would not find a permanent job until at least the middle of 1650 or the beginning of 1651, found himself in the middle of a still raging conflict. In November 1647, the King, who had been taken into Army custody earlier in the year, escaped from Hampton Court and fled to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. The Second Civil War was just about to start.

  Marvell’s mind would naturally turn to how he could earn his living. He was unmarried, apparently without a settled profession, and with no obvious means of support. He was probably starting to write the lyric poetry that is the basis of his current reputation, but it would have been invisible to most of his contemporaries, with the exception of those lucky enough to be given it to read in manuscript. The notion of a career as a professional writer would not even have occurred to a poet of his epoch.

  Marvell had, however, identified a possible source of funds. In November he set off for Meldreth in Cambridgeshire, the village where his father was born, to arrange the sale of some family property he had inherited several years earlier. His signature appears on a deed of 12 November 1647 where he is described as ‘Andrew Marvell of Kingston super Hull Gentleman’.2 An accompanying document is also signed by Marvell, who promises, in Latin, that he will keep the bargain at a penalty of £80. The fact that two local men, Mathew East and Henry Gosling, were present as witnesses proves that Marvell was in Meldreth in person for the signing. A further note on the back of the main deed, dated 23 December, shows that Marvell was also present on that date.

  Marvell may have inherited the property at Meldreth when his father was drowned on 23 January 1641. Had there been any doubt, or intestacy in his father’s will, he would in any case have come of age in March 1642, shortly before he departed for Europe. The deeds also show that this was not the first such transaction for Marvell, for the Meldreth property in this instance is described as being situated ‘betweene the lands late of the sayde Andrewe Marvell now John Staceys on both sides’, suggesting that Marvell had sold part of the property in 1642 just before going on his travels, which raises the possibility that his trip could have been financed by this means. In 1647 he was selling the remainder of his inheritance – his grandfather’s house and three and a half acres of land – to John Stacey. The fact that his bond was for £80 suggests that the income from the sale was £40 (a bond generally being set at twice the value of the transaction), a considerable sum in 1647 and easily enough to have supported Marvell for the next couple of years in London. In 1624 his father had supported a wife and five children on an annual income of £12.

  Although he was described as a gentleman of Hull, Marvell is more likely to have been establishing himself in London at this time, a city to which he was clearly attracted and where his career was most satisfactorily to be forged. Until his employment, in late 1649 or 1650, as tutor to the daughter of the famous Parliamentary general, Lord Fairfax, Marvell seems to have been not just his usual moderate self in politics but apparently to have leant towards the Royalist tendency. The historian Christopher Hill suggests that, taking the period of the European tour and the pre-Fairfax period together: ‘Most of Marvell’s friends at this time seem to have been aristocratic young cavaliers of the type he was likely to meet in continental salons; and when he returned to England his own sympathies were apparently Royalist.’3

  Marvell’s witty and graceful manner in poetry would have endeared him to the Cavaliers, such as the poet Richard Lovelace (though Marvell’s wit was of a more robust and intellectual kind). Lovelace was a wealthy and stylish courtier who was thrown into prison in 1642 for presenting a ‘Kentish Petition’ on behalf of the King (a previous such petition having been ordered to be burnt by the public hangman). He and Marvell may have met at Cambridge in the 1630s, when the youthful Lovelace as described by Anthony Wood was ‘then accounted the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld … much admired and adored by the female sex’.4 After his release from the Gatehouse Prison in June, Lovelace set off, like Marvell, for Europe, where the two could have met again. The Parliamentarians had imposed censorship under a Printing Ordinance of June 1643 which was still in force in spite of such high-toned defences of freedom of speech as Milton’s Areopagitica in November 1644. Lovelace was imprisoned for a second time in 1648, where he prepared for the press his volume Lucasta. The censors gave it a licence on 4 February 1648 and a series of ‘commendatory verses’ was attached to the volume when it appeared in May 1649. Among the Royalist poets who offered their tributes were John Harmar and John Hall, Cambridge contemporaries of Marvell, who himself contributed a short verse commendation to this unimpeachably Royalist exercise.

  Marvell’s poem ‘To his Noble Friend Mr Richard Lovelace, upon his Poems’ was probaby written at some time after the second Petition of Lovelace on 2 May 1648 (because he refers to the ‘first Petition by the Author sent’). It shows little patience for the contemporary political climate and its vengeful temper: ‘Our Civill Wars have lost the Civicke crowne, [a bitter reference to the oak leaves bestowed on someone who saved the life of a fellow citizen in war in ancient times]/He highest builds, who with most Art destroys.’ Marvell paints a portrait of petty literary rivalry and politically inspired abuse cast by self-righteous Puritans at the imprisoned writer:

  The Ayre’s already tainted with the swarms

  Of Insects which against you rise in arms.

  Word-peckers, Paper-rats, Book-scorpions,

  Of wit corrupted, the unfashion’d Sons.

  The barbed Censurers begin to looke

  Like the grim consistory on thy Booke;

  And on each line cast a reforming eye,

  Severer then the yong Presbytery.

  Another poem sometimes attributed to Marvell and written at about the same time is ‘An Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers’. Francis Villiers, another Grand Tourist at the time Marvell was in France and Italy and whom Flecknoe, as suggested above, may have tried to solicit as a patron, was killed on 7 July 1648 in a skirmish with Parliamentary forces in Surrey. The only surviving copy of the poem is in the library of Worcester College, Oxford, but it cannot be proved to be from Marvell’s hand. The strongest argument against its being a product of the future servant of the English Republic is its too stridently Royalist tone and the declaration in the closing lines of determination to renew the civil slaughter. Such passion (‘Not write so many, but so many kill’) is uncharacteristic of Marvell’s political temper.

  A further, this time undisputed, poem from this period is Marvell’s contribution to some verses published in 1649 to mourn the death on 24 June from smallpox of the twenty-year-old Henry, Lord Hastings, son of the Earl of Huntingdon. Among the contributors to this Lachrymae Musarum were Robert Herrick, Sir John Denham and John Dryden, a demonstration as much that Marvell was now naturally consorting with his poetic peers, his talen
t and stature fully acknowledged, as that he was in Royalist company.

  The contrast between the composition of these elegant verses and the brutal reality of the times could not be more pointed. For at the start of the same year that Lucasta and Lachrymae Musarum were published, King Charles I was beheaded in Whitehall, while Oliver Cromwell moved to suppress both the Levellers at home and the rebellious Catholics in Ireland. There is also a powerful aesthetic contrast between the achieved but not greatly distinguished occasional verses written by Marvell after his return to England and the triumphant artistic maturity of his ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ written probably in June or July 1650 when Marvell was twenty-nine years old, though caution must be expressed about the pastoral lyrics, which cannot be dated exactly. They were probably written during his period with Fairfax in Yorkshire.