a large competence to defray the ordinary expense of the Crown, and maintain its lustre.  And if any extraordinary occasion happen, or be but with any probable decency pretended, the whole Land at whatsoever season of the year does yield him a plentiful harvest.  So forward are his people’s affections to give even to superfluity, that a forainer (or Englishman that hath been long abroad) would think they could neither will nor chuse, but that the asking of a supply were a meer formality, it is so readily granted.  He is the fountain of all honours, and has moreover the distribution of so many profitable offices of the Household, of the Revenue, of State, of Law, of Religion, of the Navy and (since his present Majestie’s time) of the Army, that it seems as if the Nation could scarce furnish honest men enow to supply all those imployments.  So that the Kings of England are in nothing inferiour to other Princes, save in being more abridged from injuring their own subjects:  but have as large a field as any of external felicity, wherein to exercise their own virtue, and so reward and incourage it in others.  In short, there is nothing that comes nearer in Government to the Divine Perfection, than where the Monarch, as with us, injoys a capacity of doing all the good imaginable to mankind, under a disability to all that is evil."[181:1]

This was the constitution which Marvell, whose means of information were great and whose curiosity was insatiable, believed to be in danger.  No wonder he was agitated.

The politics in which Marvell was immersed during his last years are difficult to unravel and still more difficult to illuminate, for they had their dim origin in the secret thoughts and wavering purposes of the king.

Charles the Second, like many another Englishman guiltless of Stuart blood in his veins, was mainly governed by his dislikes, his pleasures, and his financial necessities.  To suppose, as some hasty moralisers have done, that Charles cared for nothing but his women is to misread his character.  He had many qualifications to be the chief magistrate of a nation of shopkeepers.  He was ever alive to the supreme importance of English trade upon the high seas.  His thoughts were often turned in the direction of the Indies, east and west.  He took a constant, though not always an honest, interest in the navy.  He hated Holland for more reasons than one, but among these reasons was his hatred of England’s most formidable and malicious trade competitor.  He also disliked her arid and ugly Protestantism, and blood being thicker than water, he hated Holland for what he considered her shabby treatment of his youthful nephew, whose ultimate destiny was happily hidden from Whitehall.  Among Charles’s many dislikes must be included the Anglican bishops, who had prevented him from keeping his word, and foiled his purpose of a wide toleration.  He envied his brother of France the wide culture, the literature and art of