World Enough and Time by Nicholas Murray

Author:Nicholas Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466875890
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

17

The Faults and the Person

The Raising and Destroying of Favourits and Creatures is the sport of Kings not to be medled with by us.1

Marvell’s involvement in the impeachment of Clarendon was not confined to the composition of nearly 1,000 lines in rhyming couplets. He entered fully into the Commons debate on the matter, and his interventions were marked by a characteristic independence of judgement. He was never wholly predictable as a politician, although he generally came down on the side of the Opposition forming around the figure of Clarendon’s opponent, the Duke of Buckingham, who had married his former pupil Mary Fairfax.

Some time before Parliament met to consider these matters on 10 October 1667, Marvell wrote to Sir John Trott, MP for Andover.2 Trott’s son Edmund had died of smallpox on 11 August, not long after his older brother John, also a young Oxford graduate, had died from the same disease. Since Marvell’s correspondence is mostly about political and business affairs, this letter of condolence is of interest in showing a more human side of the poet. Although placing his sympathy in a stern Christian context of acceptance of ‘your Sons happiness’ (in going to meet his Maker) the letter is one of feeling. ‘I know the contagion of grief,’ Marvell wrote, ‘and infection of Tears, and especially when it runs in a blood. And I my self could sooner imitate then blame those innocent relentings of Nature, so that they spring from tenderness only and humanity, not from an implacable sorrow.’3 In Marvell’s grief, however, there is leisure for fiction, and the letter is a very rhetorical one. It also contains an allusion, masked in a Biblical analogy, to the political situation, and expresses the fear that, in the wake of the Dutch raid, greater calamities were in store for English Protestants from a court that may have done secret deals with the papists. Marvell concludes by enumerating the things that should console a Christian father grieving for his son: ‘The word of God: The society of good men: and the books of the Ancients. There is one way more, which is by diversion, business, and activity; which are also necessary to be used in their season.’ Marvell is aware that in writing to a father about the loss of his son he is writing of a condition he has not experienced and never will experience. With that nuance, but ostensibly writing about their respective public roles, he writes: ‘But I my self, who live to so little purpose, can have little authority or ability to advise you.’ Marvell composed two Latin epitaphs – one for each son, the one to Edmund described in this letter as ‘this sorry Elogie of your Son’ – that are set in tablets in the north wall of the chancel of the old church at Laverstocke in Hampshire, now a mortuary chapel of the Portal family.

On 10 October 1667 Parliament resumed with a determination to seek redress for the miscarriages of the war and to punish the culprits.

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