The gaps in Marvell’s correspondence have sometimes been attributed to nervousness on the part of recipients about their contents, though there is little evidence of even an approach to politically compromising frankness in those official letters that do survive. The loss of letters also resulted from more mundane treatment by posterity. William Skinner of Hull, who held a number of Marvell letters at the beginning of the eighteenth century, is said to have had so little interest in this trove that he ‘gave them to the pastry-maid to put under pie-bottoms’.2 In the autumn of 1672 Marvell would publish his prose broadside against Samuel Parker, The Rehearsal Transpros’d, a defence of the King’s policy of indulgence towards dissenters and Catholics, but there is no independent insight, through correspondence, into this important controversy. In the early part of 1672, however, before the King had issued the Declaration, Marvell’s letters show that he was staying at a house at Winchendon, near Aylesbury, owned by Lord Wharton, the Opposition peer who shared Marvell’s distaste for the Conventicle Act.
