navy.  General Monk, who was the handy man of the period, and whose authority was always invoked when the king he had restored was in greater trouble than usual, had hastily collected what troops he could muster, and marched to protect Chatham; but what were wanted were ships, not troops.  The Dutch had no mind to land, and after firing three warships (the Royal James, the Royal Oak, and the London), and capturing the Royal Charles, “they thought they had done enough, and made use of the ebb to carry them back again."[129:1] These events occupied the tenth to the fifteenth of June, and for the impression they produced on Marvell’s mind we are not dependent upon his restrained letters to his constituents, but can turn to his longest rhymed satire, which is believed to have been first printed, anonymously of course, as a broadsheet in August 1667.

This poem is called The Last Instructions to a Painter about the Dutch Wars, 1667.  The title was derived from Waller’s panegyric poem on the occasion of the Duke of York’s victory over the Dutch on the 3rd of June 1665, when Opdam, the Dutch admiral, was blown up with his ship.[129:2] Sir John Denham, a brother satirist of Marvell’s, and with as good an excuse for hating the Duke of York as this world affords, had seized upon the same idea and published four satirical poems on these same Dutch Wars, entitled Directions to a Painter (see Poems on Affairs of State, 1703, vol. i.).

Marvell’s satire, which runs to 900 lines, is essentially a House of Commons poem, and could only have been written by a member.  It is intensely “lobbyish” and “occasional.”  To understand its allusions, to appreciate its “pain-giving” capacity to the full, is now impossible.  Still, the reader of Clarendon’s Life, Pepys’s Diary, and Burnet’s History, to name only popular books, will have no difficulty in entering into the spirit of the performance.  As a poem it is rough in execution, careless, breathless.  A rugged style was then in vogue.  Even Milton could write his lines to the Cambridge Carrier somewhat in this manner.  Marvell has nothing of the magnificence of Dryden, or of the finished malice of Pope.  He plays the part, and it is sincerely played, of the old, honest member of Parliament who loves his country and hates rogues and speaks right out, calling spades spades and the king’s women what they ought to be called.  He is conversational, and therefore coarse.  The whole history of the events that resulted in the national disgrace is told.

“The close cabal marked how the Navy eats And thought all lost that goes not to the cheats; So therefore secretly for peace decrees, Yet for a War the Parliament would squeeze, And fix to the revenue such a sum Should Goodricke silence and make Paston dumb. ...  Meantime through all the yards their orders were To lay the ships up, cease the keels begun.  The timber rots, the useless axe does rust, The unpractised saw lies buried in the dust, The busy hammer sleeps, the ropes untwine.”

Parliament is got rid of to the joy of Clarendon.