ted in high quarters of the
State a deep, dangerous, and well-considered plot to subvert the
Protestant faith and to destroy by armed force Parliamentary Government
in England. Marvell was not the victim of a delusion. Such a plot, plan,
or purpose undoubtedly existed, though, as it failed, it is now easy to
consider the alarm it created to have been exaggerated.

Marvell was, of all public men then living, the one most deeply imbued
with the spirit of our free constitution. Its checks and balances jumped
with his humour. His nature was without any taint of fanaticism, nor was
he anything of the doctrinaire. He was neither a Richard Baxter nor a
John Locke. He had none of the pure Erastianism of Selden, who tells us
in his inimitable, cold-blooded way that "a King is a King men have made
for their own sakes, for quietness' sake." "Just as in a family one man
is appointed to buy the meat," and that "there is no such thing as
spiritual jurisdiction; all is civil, the Church's is the same with the
Lord Mayor's. The Pope he challenges jurisdiction over all; the Bishops
they pretend to it as well as he; the Presbyterians they would have it
to themselves, but over whom is all this, the poor layman" (see Selden's
_Table Talk_).

This may be excellent good sense but it does not represent Marvell's
way of looking at things. He thought more nobly of both church and king.

In Marvell's last book, his famous pamphlet "_An Account of the Growth
of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England," printed at Amsterdam and
recommended to the reading of all English Protestants_, 1678, which made
a prodigious stir and (it is sad to think) paved the way for the "Popish
Plot," Marvell sets forth his view of our constitution in language as
lofty as it is precise. I know no passage in any of our institutional
writers of equal merit.

"For if first we consider the State, the kings of England rule not
upon the same terms with those of our neighbour nations, who, having
by force or by address usurped that due share which their people had
in the government, are now for some ages in the possession of an
arbitrary power (which yet no prescription can make legal) and
exercise it over their persons and estates in a most tyrannical
manner. But here the subjects retain their proportion in the
Legislature; the very meanest commoner of England is represented in
Parliament, and is a party to those laws by which the Prince is swo