Andrew Marvell's ambivalence about justice

292 Pages·2012·5.77 MB·English

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
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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: __________________________
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Abstract
This thesis examines the treatment of the theme of justice in the works, both poetry
and prose, of Andrew Marvell and, in a final 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. The discussion of the justice of his be‐
haviour offers a reinterpretation of the Chancery pleadings and other records in a
cluster of cases arising after 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.
The 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. The
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.
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Table of contents
Introduction 6
1. ‘Ancient rights’: Cromwell’s return from Ireland and the death of Thomas 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 ‘The Character of Holland’
and The last Instructions to a Painter 72
Natural law, ius gentium and the ownership of the sea 72
‘Just Propriety’ 85
‘They feign a parly’ 105
‘Monk looks on’ 113
Similarity in difference 123
3. The 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. The law and the king’s prerogative 172
Contignation thwarted 172
Absolute and ordinary prerogatives 186
The growth of arbitrary government: Marvell in 1677 189
‘The rigor of that Power’: Marvell in 1673 198
The 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
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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 …’
‘There is some consensus,’ Nicholas von Maltzahn tells us in the introduction to An
Andrew Marvell Chronology, ‘that Marvell is an enigma’.1 Nigel Smith subtitles his
biography ‘The Chameleon’,2 with the implication that our difficulty 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 afforded
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. There, 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’.3 Reviewing this volume, William Empson, a critic
who could be both surprisingly right and distressingly wrong about Marvell,4
recoiled from the idea ‘that Marvell himself might be “not displeased” at finding that
his poems caused exasperation’5 because of the difficulty 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 find Marvell transparent — they
are not puzzled by him, let alone betrayed’ (p. 39).
1 Nicholas von Maltzahn, An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),
p. 1.
2 Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
3 Balachandra Rajan, ‘Andrew Marvell: The Aesthetics of Inconclusiveness’, in Approaches to Marvell:
The 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.
4 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.
5 William Empson, Using Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), p. 34.
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The 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 reflexive 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 finds its actions shooting back upon itself’ (Approaches to Marvell, p. 144),
demonstrates that the reflexivity is not just a matter of imagery, but is characteristic of
the way Marvell’s mind works. Subject and object are sometimes identified, 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). They 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 The 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 The First Anniversary dislikes and mistrusts paradox is itself to flirt with
the surprising and unexpected:
 For all delight of Life thou then didst lose,
When to Command, thou didst thy self Depose;
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For to be Cromwell was a greater thing,
Then ought below, or yet above a King:
Therefore thou rather didst thy Self depress,
Yielding to Rule, because it made thee Less. (ll. 221–2, 225–8)
6 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.
7 John Klause, The Unfortunate Fall: Theodicy and the Moral Imagination of Andrew Marvell (Hamden:
Archon Books, 1983).
8 Klause, The Unfortunate Fall, p. 162, n. 87.
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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 There 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 first kind of paradox,
he was disturbed by the second.
The 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 confined 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’.11 There seems little room for doubt that it does matter, though it may be
difficult to reach firm conclusions as to how and why this is so. Ryan quickly goes on
to say that ‘[t]he legitimacy of a state rests upon its claim to do justice’ (p. 1). This is
to say that people expect it to do justice and are liable to express outrage if it does not.
9 Another instance where Marvell’s language is paradoxical but the situation which it describes is not
can be found in ‘The unfortunate Lover’, where, as the cormorants ‘famish him, and feast, / He both
consumed, and increast: / And languished with doubtful Breath, / Th’ Amphibium of Life and
Death’ (ll. 37–40).
10 See below, page 20.
11 Alan Ryan, Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 1 (emphasis added).
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In large part, then, justice is a matter of expectation: people expect and demand that
certain institutions and individuals exercising some degree of power should behave in
a certain way: even-handed, impartial, taking account of legitimate claims and rights,
and in accordance with law (where the law is not itself thought to be unjust).
The concept of justice gives rise to a number of difficulties or problems, three
of which will be discussed in this introduction. In the first place, it is not easy to say
what justice is, and when we try we may quickly find ourselves contemplating
something of a paradox. It clearly has some relation to law. The machinery by which
the courts apply the law and adjudicate on questions arising out of it is often called
‘the administration of justice’. J. S. Mill tells us that the term itself is related to the
terms for ‘law’ and ‘right’.12 When he lists the activities and actions which may
typically be labelled ‘just’ or, conversely, ‘unjust’, it appears that, while law and rights
make up perhaps more than half of the story, important aspects of justice may come
into conflict with them:
1. It is generally unjust to deprive somebody of his or her rights, which typically
include the rights to liberty and property. Rights for the most part are legal rights.
Bentham, whose utilitarian principles Mill defended, ridiculed the idea that there
could be rights antecedent to, or more fundamental than, positive law.
2. However, it may also be unjust for a person to hold rights which ought (according
to some higher standard of justice, the law being imperfect) not to belong to him or
her.
3. Each person should get what he or she deserves.
4. It is unjust to break faith, i.e. to fail to keep a promise or undertaking, or to induce
someone to act to his or her detriment by raising false expectations by one’s conduct.
12 J. S. Mill, ‘On the Connection between Justice and Utility’ (chapter 5 of Utilitarianism), reprinted in
Justice, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 56.
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5. Impartiality or even-handedness is just,but it is not required in all circumstances. It
is most stringently required where somebody is exercising a judicial or quasi-judicial
capacity, so again, the connection between law and justice is a strong one.13
That is not to say, of course, that everything that the law demands is also a
requirement of justice. Justice may insist that there should be some rule prescribing
how a will is to be validly executed or governing the formation of a contract, yet it
may be indifferent as to which of various possible sets of rules on these topics is
actually enacted. If the law invalidates a purported will signed by only one witness, or
one with the signatures of two witnesses who did not sign in the presence of the
testator, it is not because irregular attestation is inherently unjust but because it
would be unjust not to apply the rules that have been promulgated (and which will
presumably be enforced in comparable cases).
It may help us to deal with the conceptual problem posed by the idea of
justice as being (a) analogous to law and in large part coinciding with it, and (b)
potentially in conflict with the law, and being called upon to overrule it, if we
consider justice as an ideal principle to which positive law attempts to approximate.
Branding a particular law unjust would then be an attempt to correct and improve
law by making it conform more closely with the ideal. The difficulty with this
approach is that, for it to make sense, we must conceive of justice as a preexisting
ideal, which might be said to manifest itself (with a greater or lesser degree of
perfection) in particular laws, institutions and actions. If this were in fact the case, we
might well ask what purpose is served by law, as distinct from justice? Why not
appeal directly to the ideal, instead of to its fallible approximation? The obvious
answer would be that we do not have direct access to the ideal, but can grasp its
requirements only by means of its manifestation in the form of law. If we can
13 Mill, ‘On the Connection between Justice and Utility’, pp. 53–54.
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