On the 3rd of December Marvell writes that the House, having heard that Lord Clarendon had “withdrawn,” forthwith ordered an address to his Majesty “that care might be taken for securing all the sea ports lest he should pass there.”  Marvell adds grimly, “I suppose he will not trouble you at Hull.”  The king took good care that his late Lord-Chancellor should escape.  An act of perpetual banishment was at once passed, receiving the royal assent on the 19th of December.

Marvell was kept very busy during the early months of 1668, inquiring, as our English fashion is, into the “miscarriages of the late war.”  The House more than once sat from nine in the morning till eight at night, finding out all it could.  “What money, arising by the poll money, had been applied to the use of the war?” This was an awkward inquiry.  The House voted that the not prosecuting the first victory of June 1665 was a miscarriage, and one of the greatest:  a snub to the Duke of York.  The not furnishing the Medway with a sufficient guard of ships, though the king had then 18,000 men in his pay, was another great miscarriage.  The paying of the fleet with tickets, without money, was a third great miscarriage.  All this time Oliver Cromwell’s skull was grinning on its perch in Westminster Hall.

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.[140:1]

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:—­