Besides the honour of England, that of Hull had to be defended by its member. A young Lieutenant Wise, one of the Hull garrison, had in some boisterous fashion affronted the corporation and the mayor. On this correspondence ensues; and Marvell waits upon the Duke of Albemarle, the head of the army, to obtain reparation.
“I waited yesterday upon my Lord General—and first presented your usual fee which the General accepted, but saying that it was unnecessary and that you might have bin pleased to spare it, and he should be so much more at liberty to show how voluntary and affectionate he was toward your corporation. I returned the civilest words I could coin on for the present, and rendered him your humble thanks for his continued patronage of you ... and told him that you had further sent him up a small tribute of your Hull liquor. He thanked you again for all these things which you might—he said—have spared, and added that if the greatest of your military officers should demean himself ill towards you, he would take a course with him.”
A mealy-mouthed Lord-General drawing near his end.[1]
Wise was removed from the Hull garrison. The affronted corporation was not satisfied, and Marvell had to argue the point.
“And I hope, Sir, you will incline the Bench to consider whether I am able or whether it be fit for me to urge it beyond that point. Yet it is not all his (Wise’s) Parliament men and relations that have wrought me in the least, but what I simply conceive as the state of things now to be possible and satisfactory. What would you have more of a soldier than to run away and have him cashiered as to any command in your garrison? The first he hath done and the second he must submit to. And I assure you whatsoever he was among you, he is here a kind of decrepit young gentleman and terribly crest-fallen.”
The letter concludes thus:—
“For I assure you they use all the civility imaginable to you, and as we sat there drinking a cup of sack with the General, Colonel Legge[1] chancing to be present, there were twenty good things said on all hands tending to the good fame, reputation, and advantage of the Town, an occasion that I was heartily glad of.”
Corporations may not have souls to save and bodies to kill, but evidently they have vanities to tickle.
In November 1669 the House is still busy over the accounts. Sir George Carteret was Treasurer of the Navy. Marvell refers to him in The Last Instructions to a Painter as:—