The satire concludes with the picture of the king in the dead shades of night, alone in his room, startled by loud noises of cannons, trumpets, and drums, and then visited by the ghost of his father.
“And ghastly Charles, turning his collar low,
The purple thread about his neck does show.”
The pensive king resolves on Clarendon’s disgrace, and on rising next morning seeks out Lady Castlemaine, Bennet, and Coventry, who give him the same advice. He knows them all three to be false to one another and to him, but is for the moment content to do what they wish.
I have omitted, in this review of a long poem, the earlier lines which deal with the composition of the House of Commons. All its parties are described, one after another—the old courtiers, the pension-hunters, the king’s procurers, then almost a department of State.
“Then the Procurers under Prodgers filed
Gentlest of men, and his lieutenant mild
Bronkard, love’s squire; through all the field arrayed,
No troop was better clad, nor so well paid.”
Clarendon had his friends, soon sorely to be needed, and after them,
“Next to the lawyers, sordid band, appear,
Finch in the front and Thurland in the rear.”
Some thirty-three members are mentioned by their names and habits. The Speaker, Sir Edward Turner, is somewhat unkindly described. Honest men are usually to be found everywhere, and they existed even in Charles the Second’s pensionary Parliament:—
“Nor could all these the field have long maintained
But for the unknown reserve that still remained;
A gross of English gentry, nobly born,
Of clear estates, and to no faction sworn,
Dear lovers of their king, and death to meet
For country’s cause, that glorious thing and sweet;
To speak not forward, but in action brave,
In giving generous, but in council grave;
Candidly credulous for once, nay twice;
But sure the devil cannot cheat them thrice.”
No member of Parliament’s library is complete without Marvell, who did not forget the House of Commons smoking-room:—