Andrew Marvell’s ambivalence about justice Art Naoise Kavanagh Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Royal Holloway, University of London 2012 1 2 1 2 Declaration of Authorship I, Art Naoise Kavanagh, declare that the work presented in this thesis is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ________________________ Date: __________________________ 3 2 3 Abstract !is thesis examines the treatment of the theme of justice in the works, both poetry and prose, of Andrew Marvell and, in a "nal chapter, the justice of certain aspects of his behaviour. In order to do this, it seeks to locate particular works in the context of contemporary debates or discussions as to ancient rights, the ancient constitution (and competing theories as to the king’s power) and the disagreement between Hugo Grotius and John Selden on the subject of the legal status of the sea and, more generally, the laws of nature and nations. !e discussion of the justice of his be‐ haviour o$ers a reinterpretation of the Chancery pleadings and other records in a cluster of cases arising a%er Marvell’s death out of the collapse of a bank in which his friend, Edward Nelthorpe, was a partner. It is argued that these records have, up to now, been misunderstood. !e thesis concludes that Marvell’s work evinces an ambiguity about justice, with the poetry tending to give voice to his scepticism, while the sense that justice might be at least partly achievable is more likely to appear in the prose works. !e conclusion as to his actions is also a matter of some ambivalence: while the evidence does not show that he colluded in a fraud on the bank’s creditors, the suspicion that he behaved badly towards his wife is complicated by a lingering uncertainty that he had, in fact, married. 4 3 4 Table of contents Introduction 6 1. ‘Ancient rights’: Cromwell’s return from Ireland and the death of !omas May 24 Ancient constitution, common law 24 Invoking ancient rights 32 ‘Fit for highest Trust’: Cromwell, the Commonwealth and legitimacy 39 ‘Irrevocable Sentence’: Justice and the poet’s role 61 Judgment and balance 70 2. Grotian concepts of justice in ‘!e Character of Holland’ and !e last Instructions to a Painter 72 Natural law, ius gentium and the ownership of the sea 72 ‘Just Propriety’ 85 ‘!ey feign a parly’ 105 ‘Monk looks on’ 113 Similarity in di$erence 123 3. !e problem of justice in Marvell’s pastoral and lyric poetry 125 ‘Translated, and by whom’ 125 ‘Ev’n Beasts must be with justice slain’ 128 ‘Fame and interest’ 140 ‘Lawful Form’ 144 ‘Without Redress or Law’ 158 4. !e law and the king’s prerogative 172 Contignation thwarted 172 Absolute and ordinary prerogatives 186 !e growth of arbitrary government: Marvell in 1677 189 ‘!e rigor of that Power’: Marvell in 1673 198 !e place of the Account in the context of Marvell’s other prose 214 5. Marvell and Equity: ‘In rescue of the Banquiers Banquerout’? 224 Edward Nelthorpe and his creditors 224 5 4 5 John Farrington and Mary Marvell in Chancery 229 Farrington’s persistence 245 Marvell’s debt to the partnership 253 Marvell ‘pleased to have the marriage kept private’ 255 Biographical conclusions 267 Conclusion 269 Appendix: Prerogative Court of Canterbury entries recording the grants of Administration in the estates of Andrew Marvell and Edward Nelthorpe 271 Bibliography 273 Note Except where otherwise stated, Marvell’s poetry is quoted from Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd edn. by Pierre Legouis with E. E. Duncan-Jones, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), vol. I (referred to as Poems and Letters). In quotations, any emphasis which is not described as added is original. Introduction ‘A good Cause …’ ‘!ere is some consensus,’ Nicholas von Maltzahn tells us in the introduction to An Andrew Marvell Chronology, ‘that Marvell is an enigma’.! Nigel Smith subtitles his biography ‘!e Chameleon’," with the implication that our di"culty in discerning the poet’s outline and features results from disguise rather than indeterminacy; a further implication may be that, though Marvell is probably glad of the concealment a#orded by the disguise, its adoption is more instinctive than deliberate. An early and clear expression of the current consensus came with the publication of the lectures delivered at York on the tercentenary of Marvell’s death. !ere, Balachandra Rajan talked about ‘the aesthetics of inconclusiveness’, while Robert Ellrodt, noting that ‘Marvell’s poetic elusiveness is widely acknowledged’, added that he found the poet ‘elusive in a very personal sense’.# Reviewing this volume, William Empson, a critic who could be both surprisingly right and distressingly wrong about Marvell,$ recoiled from the idea ‘that Marvell himself might be “not displeased” at $nding that his poems caused exasperation’% because of the di"culty of pinning them down. For Empson, the two outstanding lectures in the series were those given by Christopher Ricks and John Carey: ‘both these authors evidently $nd Marvell transparent — they are not puzzled by him, let alone betrayed’ (p. 39). ! Nicholas von Maltzahn, An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 1. " Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: !e Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). # Balachandra Rajan, ‘Andrew Marvell: 'e Aesthetics of Inconclusiveness’, in Approaches to Marvell: !e York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 155– 73; Robert Ellrodt, ‘Marvell’s Mind and Mystery’ in Approaches to Marvell, ed. Patrides, pp. 216–33. $ In chapter 5 below, it will be argued that he understood, as if by instinct, that Fred S. Tupper had misread the evidence as to whether Marvell had been married, yet he botched most of the details of the task of refuting Tupper. % William Empson, Using Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), p. 34. 6 7 6 7 !e lectures by Ricks and Carey6 originally suggested the present enquiry, though it has now moved some distance from that starting point. Ricks concentrates on the use of re&exive imagery in Marvell’s poetry, whereby something is compared to itself or to an aspect of itself. Carey, dealing with Marvell’s ‘situations in which an agent $nds its actions shooting back upon itself’ (Approaches to Marvell, p. 144), demonstrates that the re&exivity is not just a matter of imagery, but is characteristic of the way Marvell’s mind works. Subject and object are sometimes identi$ed, some‐ times transposed or confused. Empson acknowledged that, while Ricks and Carey were able to overcome the sense of bewilderment or worse with which critics like Ellrodt met the poetry, they presumably would not be able to elucidate every puzzling point (Using Biography, p. 39). !ey indicated, in other words, the possibility of admitting the elusiveness while guarding against the danger of taking it for inconclu‐ siveness. One critic who made an attempt at achieving just this kind of balance is John Klause in !e Unfortunate Fall.7 Klause takes the view that Marvell is the opposite of a paradoxical thinker (he uses the term ‘categorical’, which he borrows from Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity8). Clearly, to claim that the author of the following lines from !e First Anniversary dislikes and mistrusts paradox is itself to &irt with the surprising and unexpected: For all delight of Life thou then didst lose, When to Command, thou didst thy self Depose; … For to be Cromwell was a greater thing, !en ought below, or yet above a King: !erefore thou rather didst thy Self depress, Yielding to Rule, because it made thee Less. (ll. 221–2, 225–8) ( Christopher Ricks, ‘Its Own Resemblance’ in Approaches to Marvell, ed. Patrides, pp. 108–35; John Carey, ‘Reversals Transposed: An Aspect of Marvell’s Imagination’ in Approaches to Marvell, ed. Patrides, pp. 136–54. ) John Klause, !e Unfortunate Fall: !eodicy and the Moral Imagination of Andrew Marvell (Hamden: Archon Books, 1983). * Klause, !e Unfortunate Fall, p. 162, n. 87. 8 7 8 However, while the language is paradoxical, the force of the lines lies in surprise rather than in self-contradiction: to say that Cromwell was greater than a king but in assuming command he has diminished himself may confound our expectations but it does not present us with an apparent impossibility.9 !ere are, in short, two quite distinct kinds of paradox: one which alerts us to the possibility that things are unexpectedly not as they seem (in order to rule one must yield, and give up much) and another which claims that reality itself my be self-contradictory: that a social institution or a relationship (for example) is at once itself and its antithesis. Accord‐ ing to Klause, however attractive Marvell may have found the $rst kind of paradox, he was disturbed by the second. !e context in which Klause explores the categorist’s imagination is Marvell’s approach to the question of divine justice. In fact, however, Marvell has relatively little to say directly on the subject of theodicy.10 On the other hand, the broader category of justice — not con$ned to that of the deity — provides many opportunities to look at both types of paradox, and it is a subject that recurs throughout Marvell’s work, the prose as well as the poetry. Justice seems to be important to human beings. Alan Ryan begins his intro‐ duction to a collection of writings on the subject, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Rawls and Nozick, by saying that the issue they discuss is ‘what justice is and why it matters’.