[152:2] See the dedication to A Free and Impartial Censure of the Plutonick Philosophy, by Sam Parker, A.M., Oxford 1666.  Parker was a man of some taste, and I have in my small collection a beautifully bound copy of this treatise presented by the author to Seth Ward, then Bishop of Exeter, and afterwards of Salisbury.

[165:1] Grosart, vol. iii. pp. 145-8.

[166:1] Grosart, vol. iii. pp. 155-9.

[167:1] Grosart, vol. iii. pp. 170, 210-1.

[167:2] Grosart, vol. iii. p. 211.

[168:1] Grosart, vol. iii. p. 171.

[168:2] Grosart, vol. iii. p. 63.

[169:1] Grosart, vol. iii. p. 198.

[170:1] For a still more unfriendly sketch of Andrew Marvell by the same spiteful hand, see Parker’s History of his Own Time, a posthumous work, first published in Latin in 1726, and in an English Translation by Thomas Newlin in 1727.  This book contains an interesting enumeration of the numerous conspiracies against the life and throne of Charles the Second during the earlier part of his reign, a panegyric upon Archbishop Sheldon and plentiful abuse of Andrew Marvell.  Parker died in unhappy circumstances (see Macaulay’s History, vol. ii. p. 205), but he left behind him a pious nonjuring son, and his grandson founded the famous publishing firm at Oxford.

[176:1] Grosart, vol. iii. p. 284.

[178:1] Grosart, vol. iii. p. 370.

[178:2] Ibid., p. 382.

CHAPTER VI

LAST YEARS IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

Marvell’s last ten years in the House of Commons were made miserable by the passionate conviction that there existed in high quarters of the State a deep, dangerous, and well-considered plot to subvert the Protestant faith and to destroy by armed force Parliamentary Government in England.  Marvell was not the victim of a delusion.  Such a plot, plan, or purpose undoubtedly existed, though, as it failed, it is now easy to consider the alarm it created to have been exaggerated.

Marvell was, of all public men then living, the one most deeply imbued with the spirit of our free constitution.  Its checks and balances jumped with his humour.  His nature was without any taint of fanaticism, nor was he anything of the doctrinaire.  He was neither a Richard Baxter nor a John Locke.  He had none of the pure Erastianism of Selden, who tells us in his inimitable, cold-blooded way that “a King is a King men have made for their own sakes, for quietness’ sake.”  “Just as in a family one man is appointed to buy the meat,” and that “there is no such thing as spiritual jurisdiction; all is civil, the Church’s is the same with the Lord Mayor’s.  The Pope he challenges jurisdiction over all; the Bishops they pretend to it as well as he; the Presbyterians they would have it to themselves, but over whom is all this, the poor layman” (see Selden’s Table Talk).