ANDREW MARVELL (Notes)

 

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

MARVELL, Andrew (1621-1678), son of the Revd Andrew Marvell, born at Winstead in Holderness, Yorkshire. in 1624 the family moved to Hull on his father's appointment as lecturer at Holy Trinity Church. Marvell attended Hull Grammar School. He matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a sizar in De. 1633, and graduated in 1639. In 1637 he had contributed Greek and Latin verses to a Cambridge volume congratulating Charles I on the birth of a daughter. His mother died in Apr. 1638, his father remarrying in November. Around 1639 Marvell may have come under the influence of Roman Catholic proselytizers: according to one story he went to London with them and was fetched back by his father. In January 1641 his father was drowned while crossing the Humber, and soon after Marvell left Cambridge for London. Between 1643 and 1647 he travelled for four years in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, learning languages and fencing, and perhaps deliberately avoiding the Civil War (he said later that 'the Cause was too good to have been fought for'). On his return from the Continent he apparently moved in London literary circles and had friends among Royalists. His poems to Lovelace ('his Noble Friend') and on the death of Lord Hastings were published in 1649. In the early summer of 1650 he wrote 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland', perhaps the greatest political poem in English.

From 1650 to 1652 Marvell tutored young Mary Fairfax, daughter of the Parliamentarian general, at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire. In this period, it is usually assumed, he wrote 'Upon Appleton House' and lyrics such as 'The Garden' and the Mower Poems. In 1653 he was appointed tutor to Cromwell's ward William Dutton, and moved to John Oxenbridge's house at Eton, where he probably wrote 'Bermudas'. In 1654 with 'The First Anniversary' (published 1655) he began his career as unofficial laureate to Cromwell, and was appointed in 1657 Latin secretary to the council of state (a post previouly occupied by his friend and sponsor John Milton, now blind). For eight months during 1656 Marvell was in Saumur with Dutton, where he was described as 'a notable English Italo-Machiavellian'. He mourned Cromwell in 'Upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector' (1658) and took part in the funeral procession. The following year (January) he was elected MP for Hull, and remained one of the Hull members until his death. At the Restoration his influence secured Milton's release from prison.

From June 1662 to April 1663 Marvell was in Holland on unknown political business, and in July 1663 he travelled with the earl of Carlisle as private secretary on his embassy to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, returning in January 1665. His satires against Clarendon were written and published in 1667. Later that year he composed his finest satire 'Last Instructions to a Painter', attacking financial and sexual corruption at court and in Parliament, and took part in the impeachment of Clarendon. The Rehearsal Transpros'd, a controversial mock-biblical prose work advocating toleration for Dissenters, which set new standards of irony and urbanity, appeared in 1672 (Pt II, 1673). Gilbert Burnet called these 'the wittiest books that have appeared in this age', and Charles II apparently read them 'over and over again'. According to the report of government spies, Marvell (under the codename 'Mr Thomas')  was during 1674 a member of a fifth column promoting Dutch interests in England, and in touch with Dutch secret agents. The second edition of Paradise Lost contained a commendatory poem by Marvell, and in his prose works he continued to wage war against arbitrary royal power. Mr Smirk, or The Divine in Mode and A Short Historical Essay Concerning General Councils (1676), and An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677), were all Marvell's though prudently published anonymously. The London Gazette offered a reward, in Mar. 1678, for information about the author or printer of An Account. That August, however, Marvell died in his house in Great Russell Street from medical treatment prescribed for a tertian ague. His Miscellaneous Poems appeared in 1681. His Miscellaneous Poems appeared in 1681, printed from papers found in his rooms by his housekeeper Mary Palmer, who gave herself out to be his widow and signed the preface 'Mary Marvell' in order to get her hands on £500 which Marvell had been keeping for two bankrupt friends. This volume did not contain the satires (the authorship of some of which is still disputed): these appeared in Poems on Affairs of State (1689-97).

Famed in his day as patriot, satirist, and foe to tyranny, Marvell was virtually unknown as a lyric poet. C. Lamb started a gradual revival, but Marvell's poems were more appreciated in 19th-cent. America than in England. It was not until after the First World War, with Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and T. S. Eliot's 'Andrew Marvell', that the modern high estimation of his poetry began to prevail. In the second half of the 20th century his small body of lyrics was subjected to more exegetical effort than the work of any other metaphysical poet. His oblique and finally enigmatic way of treating what are often quite conventional materials (as in 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun' or 'To His Coy Mistress') has especially intrigued the modern mind.

Poems and Letters, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd edn rev. P. Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones (2 vols, 1971); Latin Poems, ed. and trans. W. A. McQueen and K. A. Rockwell (1964), The Rehearsal Transpros'd, ed. D. E. B. Smith (1971); P. Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (2nd edn, 1968); H. Kelliher, Andrew Marvell: Poet and Politician (1978); J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell's Poetry (1966).

—oOo—

From A History of English Literature, by Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian (1926-1937)

The End of the Renascence, 1625-1660 — 6. Puritan poetry. Marvell.


The Puritans also had their songsters, who, while they were less numerous than those of the other party, included one of the most endearing and another, much the greatest of the poets of the century—Marvell and Milton.

It is impossible not to place among the Puritans Andrew Marvell (1621-78) (1), who, under the Commonwealth was tutor to the daughter of Lord Fairfax, the great Parliamentary general, and who subsequently was Milton's friend and with him secretary to the Privy Council. He was the most inspired and affectionate of Cromwell's panegyrists, and after the Restoration he carried on in verse and prose the struggle for religious and political liberty. Yet it must be recognized that no one could be less like than Marvell to the conventional harsh and gloomy Puritan, the enemy of all worldly and artistic amusement, for ever mouthing verses of the Old Testament in order to denounce the sins of the world.

This figure is dispelled as we look at Hanneman's portrait of Marvell, a man thirty-seven years old, with brilliant, living eyes, a laughing, mocking mouth and a calm brow, or as we read the verses which the poet wrote in his thirtieth year, alight, as they are, with human love and feeling for nature. Even in the poems of his maturity and in his pamphleteer's prose the gaiety is apparent of a jovial and mirth-loving  spirit. On the whole, religion has far less place in Marvell's verses than in those of the Anglicans we have just considered. While he wrote many verses which witness to the sincerity of his faith, he made both more numerous and finer poems filled with the joyous humanism and the cordial, vital quality which prove him a son of the Renascence. Undoubtedly he revered the Bible; but he also loved wine, women, and song.

He wrote his essentially poetic works at Nunappleton, Lord Fairfax's country-seat, where he lived from 1650 to 1652. He is inspired by the country, but not, like earlier poets, by the country seen in accordance with the pastoral convention. The desire for a more precise, for a local poetry, was already making itself felt, and one of the first poems which fulfilled it was John Denham's Cooper's Hill. But while a landscape was to Denham no more than the starting-point for historical and moral reflections, Marvell indulged far more fully in the happy contemplation of natural scenery. Before him only Wither had expressed, amid much rubbish, the intimate enjoyment he drew from fields and woods. Marvell spontaneously returned to this theme which was to be so dear to the Lake poets. He is very Wordsworthian in Upon the Hill and Grove at Billborough, in which he describes a sort of natural terrace whither Fairfax, after his retirement, was wont to resort in search o quiet and of a meditative mood.

Marvell relates his own feelings in the longest of his poems, Upon Appleton House, in which he shows that he is familiar with the aspects of the country and its trees and birds, and that he had studied and compared the songs of birds. He anticipates Wordsworth in preferring the song of the dove to that of the nightingale. As he walks, he can

... through the hazels thick espy
The hatching throstle's shining eye,

and watch the woodpecker at work. He almost identifies himself with the birds and growing things:

Thus I, easy philosopher,
Among the birds and trees confer;
And little now to make me wants
Or of the fowls, or of the plants.

He has dialogues with the singing birds. The leaves trembling in the wind are to him Sibyl's leaves:

What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said,
I in this light mosaic read.
Thrice happy he who, not mistook,
Hath read in Nature's mystic book.

To be covered with leaves is a delight to him:

Under this antic cope I move,
Like some great prelate of the grove.

He calls upon the leafy shoots to cling to him:

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines,
Curl me about, ye gadding vines.

This is the exalted love for nature of a romantic, but a hint of strangeness and of Elizabethan pedantry are mingled with it.

Marvell's feeling for animals, his suffering when they suffer, is voiced with infinite gracefulness in his semi-mythological poem, The Nymph complaining for the Death of her Fawn.

He was the first to sing the beauty and glory of gardens and orchards. In them he tastes his dearest delights: it seems to him that all creation is

Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Marvell's Garden foreshadows Keats by its sensuousness, and Wordsworth by its optimistic and serenely meditative mood.

Yet he preferred wild to cultivated nature. It is in the spirit of charming Perdita in The Winter's Tale that, in The Mower against Gardens, he protests against artificial gardening processes—grafting, budding, and selection.

The feeling for nature which, in the poems we have mentioned, is expressed in its pure state, is readily introduced into poems which are otherwise inspired, by Christianity or by love, nowhere better than in the famous song of the emigrants in Bermuda. Here Marvell imagines that he hears a Puritan refugee from the Stuart tyranny singing praises to God as he rows along the coast of an island in the Bermudas, 'safe from the storms' and prelates' rage':

He hangs in shades the orange bright
Like golden lamps in a green night,
And does in the pomegranates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows.

Sometimes Marvell returns to the pastoral, but he gives it a new emphasis of truth, even of realism. The short idyll Ametas and Thestylis making Hay-ropes is very original and gracerul, and there is also the touching complaint of Damon the Mower, who, working beneath a burning sun, laments his Juliana's hardness of heart.

Love poems are not numerous in Marvell's work, but among several which are graceful (The Gallery) or slightly ironical—denouncing women's tricks, artifices, and coquetry (Mourning, Daphnis and Chloe)—a few hold us by their passion. His lines To his Coy Mistress have Donne's strength and passion without his obscurity or bad taste, and run easily and harmoniously. They are the masterpiece of metaphysical poetry in this genre, and they also show a return to the anacreontic theme, 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.' But it is repeated with a new intensity. It issues from a heart truly deep and passionate, and the love which is demanded is silent and forceful:

Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapt pow'r.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

These lines are the very essence of the poetry of Marvell, that strange, sensuous, passionate Puritan. He had, however, another vein. He was an ardent patriot and patriotism rather than piety may be said to have dictated his verses on Cromwell's protectorate and death. It is the dominant note of his Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland [1650], First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector (1655), and Poem upon the Death of His late Highness the Lord Protector. A sort of competition of poets, in which such as Waller and Dryden took part, was provoked by the great man's death, and Marvell carried off its prize because in his verses the man speaks through the poet. They are penetrated with emotion. Better than the others, Marvell gives the impression of the greatness of him he sang and the immensity of the loss his death occasioned.

After the Restoration Marvell pursued only the art of satire, in prose and verse, and this phrase of his accomplishment is better studied elsewhere. We have said enough to show how far he was original as a pure poet. Nature endowed him richly: his sincerity and straightness of vision sufficed to raise the metaphysical school, to which he belonged, from its state of decline, and to bring it back from extravagance to reason without alienating fancy. In the history of the feeling for nature his place is considerable. He expressed himself with liveliness and happy audacity. But he paid too little regard to versification. His lyrical work is written almost entirely in rhymed eight-syllabled couplets, a pleasant metre, but one so easy that it tempts to carelessness. In the formation of his stanzas, Marvell shows himself one of the least varied and inventive poets of his time. To rank among the greatest, he should have had a more exacting standard of art, and perhaps a more whole-hearted devotion to poetry, as well as those supreme qualities of mastery of the word and the line which are the glory of the other Puritan poet, John Milton.



 

Satire and the Satiric Spirit — 3. Political Satire: Marvell, Oldham.—

Under the Restoration the domain of political satire is vast and crowded, and only the scholar can explore all its corners. Great names, brilliant or powerful works stand out above a multitude of pamphlets and invectives, which in the most varied forms express one and the same fund of virulent enmity; where intense words fail to give any artistic relief to the monotony of these outporings of hatred.

It is the art of the satirist which alone counts here. The contemporaries, struck by the wealth of this production, have gathered from it the collections entitled Poems on Affairs of State, in which satires are intermixed with pieces of different characters, and of unequal interest. Among their very diverse themes, there are heard the outburst of a vigorous impassioned inspiration, that of a seething anger against the absolutist and Catholic tendencies of the Stuarts. All the genius of a Dryden, thrown on the side of the monarchy, cannot prevent the confused instinct of an irritated people from voicing itself in even louder tones; and another writer—Andrew Marvell—from lending a poetical expression to this instinct.

Marvell belongs to the preceding age of English literature. (1 bis [see above]). A belated survivor like Milton, he preserves in the midst of the children of Belial the forceful energy of a character that has been tempered by Puritanism. His satires, by virtue of the definite occasion which called them into existence, are part and parcel of the Restoration and must be connected with it.

This occasion brings together three poets of the transition in which the new literature develops from the old. Waller (2), a courtier poet at heart, had celebrated an English naval victory, and attributed its triumph to the reigning dynasty (Instructions to a Painter, 1665); Sir John Denham (3) had inveighed against this adulation in lines of greater manliness (Directions to a Painter, 1667, 1671, 1674). Sparing at first the king's person—for he knows how to bend the stiffness of his principles, and is not above tactics of caution—then abandoning all reserve, he [Marvell] launches until his death (1678) a series of attacks against the foreign policy of the king, and the scandals of public life of the court. Unable to disclose his identity, he has to circulate these pamphlets anonymously, either in manuscript form or in loose sheets, and to hide his main purpose under the veil of allegories. But the personality of the author reveals itself in most cases, and the pulsating ardour of his feeling shines out through all disguises ([The Last Instructions to a Painter], Britannia and Raleigh, Dialogue between Two Horses, etc.). In a language of extraordinary raciness, and a popular tone, with a raw realistic touch, the rage and shame of an England that has been humiliated, enslaved, and contaminated by foreign vices and fashions are here expressed. Such feelings were still exceptional, but their contagious influence was spreading obscurely. As if the new spirit in poetry supplied him with his instrument of expression, Marvell writes most often in heroic couplets; but his unpolished verse, capable of surprising vigour, has not the necessary suppleness or regularity and rather reminds one at times of the simple ballad rhythms. The irresistible virtue of a lofty soul, of a heart embittered but obsessed by noble regrets and high thoughts, nevertheless imbues these strange poems with an energy of movement and phrase, with an eloquence, that make them one of the most eminent examples of English political satire.


________


(1). Complete Works in Prose and Verse, ed. Grosart, 4 vols. (1872-5); Poems and Satires, ed. Aitken in 2 vols. (1892) and in 1 vol. for the Muses' Library (1898). See A. Birrell, Andrew Marvell (English Men of Letters Series, 1905).

(1 bis). (...) Poems and Letters, ed. by H. M. Margoliouth, 1927; P. Legouis, André Marvell, etc., 1928. There would seem to be serious doubt as to the authenticity of several among the satires attributed to Marvell.

(2). Edmund Waller (1606-87): Poems, ed. by Drury, 1893. See Part I.

(3). Sir John Denham (1615-69): Poems, Chalmers, vol. vii. See Part I.

Reflections (On a Drop of Dew)

The English Civil Wars - NIVEL AVANZADO

Episode 1: A People Divided

 

Episode 2: A Nation at War

Episode 3: To Kill a King  (Not the feature film of the same title)

___________________

Jorge Luis Borges, "A la efigie de un capitán de los ejércitos de Cromwell."

 

 

—oOo—

Early Stuarts

From A Short History of England, by Simon Jenkins (Profile Books, 2011)

 

On 24 March 1603 Elizabeth died in her grandfather's palace at Richmond, saying that 'none but' the Protestant James, thirty-six-year-old son of Mary Queen of Scots, should succeed her. Tired though her reign had become, she passed away loved and mourned. Her private prayer was an apt epitaph: 'When wars and seditions with grievous persecutions have vexed almost all kings and countries about me, my reign hath been peaceable, and my realm a receptacle to Thy afflicted Church.' She had established the supremacy of the crown in her father's image and bonded the English nation under it. She had brought her nation glory and peace. Elizabeth was surely the greatest of England's rulers.

 

Early Stuarts 

(1603-1642)

 

Most people who met James I (1603-25) as he rode south in the summer of 1603 had known only Elizabeth as monarch. Loyalty to her person had soothed the conflicts of Henry's Reformation. Beyond the familiar confines of village and town, the queen had come to embody a united England, a nation at peace, at least with itself. She enjoyed what Macaulay called 'English king-worship', a consent which she deftly identified as a bond of love between herself and her country. 

How would James compare? He was short, garrulous, self-consciously a scholar and lacking in self-discipline. His upbringing was dreadful. His father had been killed, probably by his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, who in turn had been killed by the English over whom he now ruled. As boy king of Scotland he had survived four regents dying violent deaths round him, not to mention an attempt on his life, a sadist for a tutor and a witches' conspiracy against him. To the English, he was an outsider from an enemy state. Cecil, fearful of Spanish plots, urged him to hasten south. 

As he travelled, James billeted his retinue of 'coarse and beggarly Scotsmen' on English grandees, dispensing his new prerogative at will. He hanged a man without trial in Newark and knighted any host who cared to ask. In London the new king indicated a break with the past. After the dowdy last years of Elizabeth's reign, he put London en fête. Shakespeare's now celebrated troupe was taken under royal patronage and became the King's Players. James patronised John Donne, Ben Jonson and the composer Orlando Gibbons. Masques on classical themes were ordered from Inigo Jones, as was the exquisite Italianate Queen's House at Greenwich, a gift to James's Danish wife Anne. What came to be called Jacobean architecture spread to every mansion and manor in the land, with long glazed galleries overlooking formal parterres. 

James I was a talented intellectual who patronised the arts and the new Bible, but his extravagance and advocacy of kingly divinity sowed the seeds of eventual civil war.

 

The new reign began with the best of intentions. At a Somerset House conference a year after his coronation James achieved what had eluded Elizabeth, peace with Spain. It silenced Spanish demands for a Catholic restoration in England in return for an end to English attacks on Spanish interests in Europe and the Americas. That same year, James declared a united monarchy of England and Scotland to be known as 'Great Britain', with a distinctive flag namesd after an abbreviation of his Latin name, the Union Jack, though he was unable to merge the two nations in one parliament, any more than he was able to bring Ireland to heel. 

Finally in 1604 the king summoned representatives of the bishops and the Puritans to Hampton Court in the hope of ending conflict between them. He was not a wholly impartial chairman. Despite a Calvinist upbringing he was an 'episcopalian', acknowledging the authority of bishops. He garrulously warned to all who cared to listen that, if bishops were replaced by assemblies, 'Jack, Tom, Will and Dick shall meet and, at their pleasure, censure me and my council.' It would be tantamount to a parliamentary republic. Yet the Hampton Court conference reconstituted a Church of England that has survived ever since. Bishops were entrenched. Matters such as baptism, ordination and the civil role of the church were agreed. James also ordered a new translation of the Bible, published in 1611, involving no fewer than fifty-four scholars, overseen by a commission of twelve. Though based on its precursors, the bibles of Tyndale and Coverdale, it remains one of the masterpieces of English literature and a tribute to the art of the committee. 'It lives on the ear,' said the Victorian theologian, Frederick Faber, 'like music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forgo'.

As ecclesiastical diplomacy Hampton Court was less successful. Where Elizabeth convinced both sides she favoured them, James left both dissatisfied. His hectoring manner extended beyond theology to all aspects of the nation's welfare, with a treatise opposing tobacco smoking, a habit 'loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain'. Nor did James's tolerance extend to the Catholics, excluded from Hampton Court. In 1605 a group of them reacted to his failure to hear their pleas by taking the drastic step of plotting to blow up parliament. Only when a conspirator warned a friend to stay away on the night of 5 November was parliament thoroughly searched and Guy Fawkes, with forty barrels of gunpowder, found in the basement. There is little question that, had they exploded, the king and ruling class of England would have been wiped out. An appalling atrocity was averted.

 

 [Guy Fawkes mask. "Remember, remember, the fifth of November"]

The retribution was ferocious. The plotters' trial concluded that 'from the admirable Clemency and Moderation of the King ... he is graciously pleased to afford them, as well as an ordinary Course of Trial, an ordinary Punishment much inferior to their Offence.' This ordinariness meant each being drawn from prison backwards by a horse-tail, then hanged, cut down when still alive, 'have his Privy Parts cut off and burnt before his face, as being unworthily begotten and unfit to leave any generation after him. His Bowels and inlaid Parts taken out and burnt ... after to have his Head cut off.' Then his body was to be quartered. If this was ordinary, we could only wonder what 'extra-ordinary' punishment might involve.

Fawkes's bomb did not explode, but a different fuse was lit, that of anti-Catholic frenzy. To show even-handedness, James persecuted Catholics and radical Puritans alike. The Church of England identified 'uniformity' with state security and treated dissent as treason. One consequence was a wave of emigration to the New World. It began in 1607 with John Smith's doomed colony of Jamestown, Virginia, named after the king, and culminating thirteen years later in the Pilgrim Fathers and the Mayflower. By the end of James's reign 80,000 Britons had crossed the Atlantic in one of history's most significant migrations.

James regarded parliament as a compulsive spender might a tiresome bank manager, to be ignored except in time of need, and then resented. Yet times were always of need. The king suffered from the curse of the House of Stuart, extravagance, coupled with antagonism towards parliament when it refused him money. He told parliament that its privileges were at his disposal as a 'matter of grace'. His divine right to rule was not a matter of negotiation. Had he not written a book on the subject in which he stated explicitly, 'Kings are called gods, and are appointed by God and answerable only to God'? Those who obstructed him were 'spitting in the face of God'. Parliament begged to differ, with an 'apology' that the aforementioned privileges 'are at an everlasting stand ... being lost are not recovered but with much disquiet'.

After 1614 an exasperated James did not even summon parliament for seven years, turning to sources of revenue not dependent on the Commons. He sold honours much as Henry VIII had sold monasteries. He invented minor hereditary titles called baronetcies for  £1,095, cloaked as subsidies for troops in Ireland. By the end of his reign he was selling knighthoods for as little as £220. But he could not escape his judges. The lord chief justice, Sir Edward Coke, one of the first great exponents of common law against royal absolutism, ruled that even the king was subject to the law; 'The King cannot take any cause out of any of his Courts and give Judgement upon it himself ... the King ought not to be under any man, but under God and the law.' In 1616 James sacked him, but he could not sack his argument.

Robert Cecil, royal counselor since 1590, had died in 1612, as had the much-acclaimed heir to the throne Henry Stuart, who fell to typhoid at the age of eighteen. Henry was succeeded by his diminutive younger brother Charles. The court was dominated instead by the dashing George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who mesmerised the king and was called by him 'my dear, sweet Steenie'. Courtly behaviour took on a bizarre glamour, depicted by the artist William Larkin, in costumes of unprecedented brilliance. Never had the English male been so ravishingly adorned, with lace collars like wings, voluminous pantaloons, embroidered stockings and shoes with giant pompoms. Forced to recall parliament for funds in 1621, the king found it still intransigent, urging him to join a European Protestant alliance against Spain. James recklessly sought help from the latter, cavorgin openly with the Spanish ambassador. He had already, at Spain's bidding, executed Walter Raleigh, held in the Tower of London since Elizabeth's reign, putatively for treason.

Glamorous, devious, adventurous, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, held both James and Charles in thrall.

In 1623 James approved a wild venture by his son and Buckingham to visit Madrid with a view to Charles marrying the Spanish infanta. The two young men offered to convert England to Catholicism, or at least to raise future English kings as Catholics, an extraordinary suggestion within living memory of the Armada. The infanta took an instant dislike to Charles, who was told by her father he would have to receive mass and stay a year on probation in Madrid if he wanted her hand. The two Englishmen fled.

The king was now ailing and Buckingham, with Charles firmly under his influence, played with fire. He switched to supporting war with Spain, turned his attention to France and found Charles a wife in hte daughter of the French king, the fifteen-year-old Henrietta Maria, a pert girl no more than 5ft tall tall whose front teeth were said to be 'coming out of her mouth like tusks.' Before any marriage could be arranged, in 1625 James died, carrying with him the comment of a French courtier that he was 'the wisest fool in Christendom'. He was at first scholarly and sincere in seeking to resolve the conflicts inherent in the state bequeathed him by Elizabeth, but a nation rife with religious pluralism required a more subtle statecraft than James possessed. Nor could it tolerate his creed of divine kingship, which would soon bring the monarchy into collision with parliament and people.

Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France. Their marriage was close but politically disastrous and ended on the scaffold.

James's son Charles I (1625-49) was an indecisive but cultured man, compensating for his small stature and stammer with a zealous love of art and an adherence to his father's belief in his divine appointment. He patronised Rubens and Van Dyck, and amassed one of Europe's great art collections. Rubens called him 'the greatest amateur of painting among the princes of the world'. He married Henrietta Maria by proxy and it was not until shortly before his coronation in 1626 that Londoners witnessed with dismay their new queen's arrival with a 200-strong retinue of French priests and papists. She infuriated the public by stopping to pray for the souls of Catholic martyrs at Tyburn. As a practising Catholic she and her party could not join the coronation ceremony, and Charles ordered his guards to limit her retainers to seven at state functions.

When the new king addressed parliament, it found his brevity a relief after his father, but was shocked by his demand for a larger subsidy. The Commons were strongly Protestant and dominated by independents such as John Pym and John Eliot. They now denied the king revenue from trade duties for more than a year at a time, and debated the impeachment of Buckingham, who retained his hold over the king. The confrontation led to the most explicit charter of political liberty since the Magna Carta, the 1628 Petition of Right. It was sponsored by the indomitable Coke, who declared that 'Magna Carta is such a fellow he will have no sovereign'. It told the king he could not imprison without trial, or tax without the will of the Commons. Nor could he impose his prerogative on parliament or support a standing army. The petition served as the foundation stone of all later declarations of civil rights, including that of American independence. Charles dismissed it on the grounds that 'kings are not bound to give account of their actions but to God alone'.

That same year Buckingham was stabbed to tdeath in Portsmouth, an event that apparently jolted the king, after four years of marriage, to attend to his queen. She bore him an heir, also Charles. In 1629 he dissolved parliament, not calling another for eleven years of what some called personal rule and others 'the tyranny'. Charles relied instead for advice on his convervative archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, and a former parliamentarian, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. The latter was sent to pacify Ireland and returned, that many put to that task, with a reputation for ruthlessness (and a nickname: 'Black Tom').

The tyranny was the last sustained test of English monarchical sovereignty. Charles could dispense with parliament but not with his need for money. In 1635 he used his prerogative to extend one of the few duties outside parliamentary control, 'ship money' levied on coastal towns for their defence. The king now declared it a national tax. A former MP for Buckinhamshire, John Hampden, refused to pay. 'Grant [the king] this,' wrote the radical John Milton at the time, 'and the parliament hath no more freedom than if it sat in his noose.' When at a subsequent trial the court fround for the king, Henrietta Maira reacted with such delight, creating an elaborate ballet in which she danced as Luminalia, or light defeating darkness. The gesture did little to increase her popularity or that of the tax. Ship money proved near uncollectable, only 20 percent being gathered by 1639.

When, in 1637, Charles had sought to impose Laud's new high-church prayer book on his Scottish subjects it led to riots in Edinburgh and a Presbyterian 'covenant' against bishops. Despite the pleadings of Strafford, Charles declared a 'bishops' war' on Scotland. He saw his under-resourced army beaten back to the gates of Newcastle, which had to be ceded to the Scots. Charles was desperate for funds and finally summoned the so-called Short Parliament to give him money. This it refused to do. A new parliament was elected, at which 399 out of 493 MPs, led by Pym and Hampden, declared themselves firmly opposed to 'the king's advisers'. This so-called Long Parliament of 1640 became one of the great institutions of English history. It lasted in one form or another through the English Civil War, displaying radical, republican and conservative phases until it oversaw the Restoration twenty years later. Its composition reflected the crucial shift in wealth that had taken place in provincial England and Wales under the Tudors, from the medieval church and territorial magnates to an emerging middle class of smaller landowners, city burgesses, merchants and the professions. As it argued with itself and grew in confidence, the Long Parliament was the key that unlocked the door to modern England.

This institution moved swiftly to assert its control over the king, impeach Laud and execute Strafford. When the king was forced to sign the latter's death warrant, Strafford remarked, 'Put not your trust in princes,' a pathetic echo of Wolesy's cry a century before. In 1641 the House of Commons recast the Petition of Right as a Grand Remonstrance with 200 clauses. It demanded that the prerogative court of Star Chamber be abolished, ship money ended and taxes regularised. A freely elected parliament should meet every three years and be dissolved only by its own decision. It should control the church, the appointment of ministers and judges, and the conduct of the army and navy. There should be no bishops in the House of Lords and the king should rule in name only. Such an assertion of parliamentary sovereignty was the most radical in any European state at the time, and was only narrrowly voted through. Even in the twenty-first century its programme has not been fully realised.

Charles now had to fight to save his crown. He responded hesitantly to the Grand Remonstrance, but was goaded by Henrietta Maria 'to pull these rogues out by the ears or never see my face again.' He did what no monarch had done before. On 4 January 1642 he tried personally to arrest the five most extreme MPs, including Pym, for treason, entering the Commons with armed men in attendance. Members stood amazed as the Speaker, William Lenthall, vacated the chair for the king, but refused to hand over the five, remarking famously, 'May it please your Majesty, I have either eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here,.' Realising the MPs had by now escaped, Charles abjectly declared 'all my birds have flown', and beat an ignominious retreat. No monarch was ever to set foot in the chamber again.

Within weeks, armed bands from the City invaded Westminster, rumoured to be seeking the queen's arrest. The royal family fled to Hampton Court and then to Greenwich, where Charles and Henrietta Maria spent a poignant night together at the Queen's House. Even today it seems a place of sadness, its curved steps like teardrops running down its facade. The queen gathered her children, seized the crown jewels and headed for Dover and the pawnshops of France. The king wnt north to Nottingham where, that August, he summoned his subjects to defend his rights on the field of battle. Consent had called the bluff of divine kingship and, after a century and a half, the horror of civil war returned to England.

The execution of Charles I, 1649

 

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