The Forced marriage full novel download

The name of Andrew Marvell ever sounds sweet, and always has, to use words of Charles Lamb's, a fine relish to the ear. As the author of poetry of exquisite quality, where for the last time may be heard the priceless note of the Elizabethan lyricist, whilst at the same moment utterance is being given to thoughts and feelings which reach far forward to Wordsworth and Shelley, Marvell can never be forgotten in his native England.

Lines of Marvell's poetry have secured the final honours, and incurred the peril, of becoming "familiar quotations" ready for use on a great variety of occasion. We may, perhaps, have been bidden once or twice too often to remember how the Royal actor

"Nothing common did, or mean,

Upon that memorable scene,"

or have been assured to our surprise by some self-satisfied worldling how he always hears at his back,

"Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near."

A true poet can, however, never be defiled by the rough usage of the populace.

As a politician Marvell lives in the old-fashioned vivacious history-books (which if they die out, as they show some signs of doing, will carry with them half the historic sense of the nation) as the hero of an anecdote of an unsuccessful attempt made upon his political virtue by a minister of the Crown, as a rare type of an inflexible patriot, and as the last member of the House of Commons who was content to take wages from, instead of contributing to the support of, his constituents. As the intimate friend and colleague of Milton, Marvell shares some of the indescribable majesty of that throne. A poet, a scholar, a traveller, a diplomat, a famous wit, an active member of Parliament from the Restoration to his death in 1678, the life of Andrew Marvell might a priori be supposed to be one easy to write, at all events after the fashion in which men's lives get written. But it is nothing of the kind, as many can testify. A more elusive, non-recorded character is hardly to be found. We know all about him, but very little of him. His parentage, his places of education, many of his friends and acquaintances, are all known. He wrote nearly four hundred letters to his Hull constituents, carefully preserved by the Corporation, in which he narrates with much particularity the course of public business at Westminster. Notwithstanding these materials, the man Andrew Marvell remains undiscovered. He rarely comes to the surface. Though both an author and a member of Parliament, not a trace of personal vanity is noticeable, and vanity is a quality of great assistance to the biographer. That Marvell was a strong, shrewd, capable man of affairs, with enormous powers of self-repression, his Hull correspondence clearly proves, but what more he was it is hard to say. He rarely spoke during his eighteen years in the House of Commons. It is impossible to doubt that such a man in such a place was, in Mr. Disraeli's phrase, a "personage." Yet when we look for recognition of what we feel sure was the fact, we fail to find it. Bishop Burnet, in his delightful history, supplies us with sketches of the leading Parliamentarians of Marvell's day, yet to Marvell himself he refers but once, and then not by name but as "the liveliest droll of the age," words which mean much but tell little. In Clarendon's Autobiography, another book which lets the reader into the very clash and crowd of life, there is no mention of one of the author's most bitter and cruel enemies. With Prince Rupert, Marvell was credited by his contemporaries with a great intimacy; he was a friend of Harrington's; it may be he was a member of the once famous "Rota" Club; it is impossible to resist the conviction that wherever he went he made a great impression, that he was a central figure in the lobbies of the House of Commons and a man of much account; yet no record survives either to convince posterity of his social charm or even to convey any exact notion of his personal character.

A somewhat solitary man he would appear to have been, though fond of occasional jollity. He lived alone in lodgings, and was much immersed in business, about a good deal of which we know nothing except that it took him abroad. His death was sudden, and when three years afterwards the first edition of his poems made its appearance, it was prefaced by a certificate signed "Mary Marvell," to the effect that everything in the book was printed "according to the copies of my late dear husband." Until after Marvell's death we never hear of Mrs. Marvell, and with this signed certificate she disappears. In a series of Lives of Poets' Wives it would be hard to make much of Mrs. Andrew Marvell. For different but still cogent reasons it is hard to write a life of her famous husband.

Andrew Marvell was born at Winestead in Holdernesse, on Easter Eve, the 31st of March 1621, in the Rectory House, the elder Marvell, also Andrew, being then the parson of the parish. No fitter birthplace for a garden-poet can be imagined. Roses still riot in Winestead; the fruit-tree roots are as mossy as in the seventeenth century. At the right season you may still

"Through the hazels thick espy

The hatching throstle's shining eye."

Birds, fruits and flowers, woods, gardens, meads, and rivers still make the poet's birthplace lovely.

"Loveliness, magic, and grace,

They are here-they are set in the world!

They abide! and the finest of souls

Has not been thrilled by them all,

Nor the dullest been dead to them quite.

The poet who sings them may die,

But they are immortal and live,

For they are the life of the world."

Holdernesse was not the original home of the Marvells, who would seem to have been mostly Cambridgeshire folk, though the name crops up in other counties. Whether Cambridge "men" of a studious turn still take long walks I do not know, but "some vast amount of years ago" it was considered a pleasant excursion, either on foot or on a hired steed, from Cambridge to Meldreth, where the Elizabethan manor-house, long known as "the Marvells'," agreeably embodied the tradition that here it was that the poet's father was born in 1586. The Church Registers have disappeared. Proof is impossible. That there were Marvells in the neighbourhood is certain. The famous Cambridge antiquary, William Cole, perhaps the greatest of all our collectors, has included among his copies of early wills those of several Marvells and Mervells of Meldreth and Shepreth, belonging to pre-Reformation times, as their pious gifts to the "High Altar" and to "Our Lady's Light" pleasingly testify. But our Andrew was a determined Protestant.

The poet's father is an interesting figure in our Church history. Educated at Emmanuel College, from whence he proceeded a Master of Arts in 1608, he took Orders; and after serving as curate at Flamborough, was inducted to the living of Winestead in 1614, where he remained till 1624, in which year he went to Hull as master of the Grammar School and lecturer, that is preacher, of Trinity Church. The elder Marvell belonged, from the beginning to the end of his useful and even heroic life, to the Reformed Church of England, or, as his son puts it, "a conformist to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of England, though I confess none of the most over-running and eager in them." The younger Marvell, with one boyish interval, belonged all through his life to the paternal school of religious thought.

Fuller's account of the elder Marvell is too good to be passed over:-

"He afterwards became Minister at Hull, where for his lifetime he was well beloved. Most facetious in discourse, yet grave in his carriage, a most excellent preacher who, like a good husband, never broached what he had new brewed, but preached what he had pre-studied some competent time before. Insomuch that he was wont to say that he would cross the common proverb which called Saturday the working-day and Monday the holyday of preachers. It happened that Anno Dom. 1640, Jan. 23, crossing Humber in a Barrow boat, the same was sandwarpt, and he was drowned therein (with Mrs. Skinner, daughter to Sir Edward Coke, a very religious gentlewoman) by the carelessness, not to say drunkenness of the boatmen, to the great grief of all good men. His excellent comment upon St. Peter is daily desired and expected, if the envy and covetousness of private persons for their own use deprive not the public of the benefit thereof."1

This good man, to whom perhaps, remembering the date of his death, the words may apply, Tu vero felix non vit? tantum claritate sed etiam opportunitate mortis, was married at Cherry Burton, on the 22nd of October 1612, to Anne Pease, a member of a family destined to become widely known throughout the north of England. Of this marriage there were five children, all born at Winestead, viz. three daughters, Anne, Mary, and Elizabeth, and two sons, Andrew and John, the latter of whom died a year after his birth, and was buried at Winestead on the 20th September 1624.

The three daughters married respectively James Blaydes of Sutton, Yorkshire, on the 29th of December 1633; Edmund Popple, afterwards Sheriff of Hull, on the 18th of August 1636; and Robert More. Anne's eldest son, Joseph Blaydes, was Mayor of Hull in 1702, having married the daughter of a preceding Mayor in 1698. The descendants of this branch still flourish. The Popples also had children, one of whom, William Popple, was a correspondent of his uncle the poet's, and a merchant of repute, who became in 1696 Secretary to the Board of Trade, and the friend of the most famous man who ever sat at the table of that Board, John Locke. A son of this William Popple led a very comfortable eighteenth-century life, which is in strong contrast with that of his grand-uncle, for, having entered the Cofferers' Office about 1730, he was made seven years later Solicitor and Clerk of the Reports to the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, and in 1745 became in succession to a relative, one Alured Popple, Governor of the Bermudas, a post he retained until his death, which occurred not

"Where the remote Bermudas ride

In the ocean's bosom unespied,"

but at his house in Hampstead. So well placed and idle a gentleman was almost bound to be a bad poet and worse dramatist, and this William Popple was both.

Marvell's third sister, Elizabeth, does not seem to have had issue, a certain Thomas More, or Moore, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Cambridge, whose name occurs in family records, being her stepson.

In the latter part of 1624 the elder Marvell resigned the living of Winestead, and took up the duties of schoolmaster and lecturer, or preacher, at Hull. Important duties they were, for the old Grammar School of Hull dates back to 1486, and may boast of a long career of usefulness, never having fallen into that condition of decay and disrepute from which so many similar endowments have been of late years rescued by the beneficent and, of course, abused action of the Charity Commissioners. Andrew Marvell the elder succeeded to and was succeeded by eminent headmasters. Trinity Church, where the poet's father preached on Sundays to crowded and interested congregations, was then what it still is, though restored by Scott, one of the great churches in the north of England.

The Rev. Andrew Marvell made his mark upon Hull. Mr. Grosart, who lacked nothing but the curb upon a too exuberant vocabulary, a little less enthusiasm and a great deal more discretion, to be a model editor, tells us in his invaluable edition of The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Andrew Marvell, M.P.,1 that he had read a number of the elder Marvell's manuscripts, consisting of sermons and miscellaneous papers, from which Mr. Grosart proceeds:-

"I gather three things.

"(1) That he was a man of a very brave, fearlessly outspoken character. Some of his practical applications in his sermons before the Magistrates are daring in their directness of reproof, and melting in their wistfulness of entreaty.

"(2) That he was a well-read man. His Sermons are as full of classical and patristic allusions and pat sayings from the most occult literatures as even Bishop Andrewes.

"(3) That he was a man of tireless activity. Besides the two offices named, he became head of one of the Great Hospitals of the Town (Charter House), and in an address to the Governors placed before them a prescient and statesmanlike plan for the better management of its revenues, and for the foundation of a Free Public Library to be accessible to all."

When at a later day, and in the midst of a fierce controversy, Andrew Marvell wrote of the clergy as "the reserve of our Christianity," he doubtless had such men as his father in his mind and memory.

It was at the old Grammar School of Hull, and with his father as his Orbilius, that Marvell was initiated into the mysteries of the Latin grammar, and was, as he tells us, put to his

"Montibus, inquit, erunt; et erant submontibus illis;

Risit Atlantiades; et me mihi, perfide, prodis?