Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane 0199655375, 9780199655373

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Brief Chronology
Introduction: Towards an Interpretable Whole
1. Work of Service
2. Toils of Patriarchy
3. Wounds of Desire
4. Secrecies and Disclosures
5. Into the World
Conclusion
Appendix: Chronology and the Lyric Career of Andrew Marvell
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

A N D R E W M A RV E L L , O R P H A N O F THE HURRICANE

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Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane DEREK HIRST AND STEVEN N. ZWICKER

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker 2012 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2012 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–965537–3 Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

To Washington University, St. Louis in appreciation

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Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Brief Chronology

ix x xi

Introduction: Towards an Interpretable Whole

1

1. Work of Service

9

2. Toils of Patriarchy

41

3. Wounds of Desire

74

4. Secrecies and Disclosures

103

5. Into the World

128

Conclusion

161

Appendix: Chronology and the Lyric Career of Andrew Marvell Bibliography Index

164 178 191

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Acknowledgements This study has been some time in the making and we have accumulated debts over the years—to quite a few generations of students who have listened patiently to our musings on Andrew Marvell and have contributed, often provocatively, to them, and especially to Anne Cotterill and Matt Augustine, superb Marvellians both; to colleagues who have listened sometimes less patiently to those musings, but no less productively, and among those especially Gerry Izenberg and Joe Loewenstein. In the wider world of Marvell scholarship we are particularly indebted to Nicholas von Maltzahn, whose Chronology has been invaluable and who generously shared his photographs of the manuscripts of the Reverend Andrew Marvell. To Nigel Smith we are very grateful for many conversations over the years and for his careful reading of drafts of the manuscript of this book. And in an older world of Marvell scholarship, we want to acknowledge our debt to the work of H.M. Margoliouth and Pierre Legouis. We must thank as well the editors of English Literary History and The Historical Journal for permission to adapt parts of our earlier articles for what were to become Chapters 1–3. And to our families—our thanks for their indulgence and forbearance and even interest in this long-aborning project. The dedication of this volume to Washington University is an expression of our appreciation for an institution which as early as the 1970s was generously supporting interdisciplinary teaching and writing. August 2011, St. Louis

Abbreviations Chronology Nicholas von Maltzahn’s An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Basingstoke, 2005), is throughout referred to as Chronology. P&L Marvell’s poems and letters are quoted from The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H.M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis with E.E. Duncan-Jones, 2 vols (Oxford, 1971). Poems are cited parenthetically in the text by line number from P&L. Letters are cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number from P&L. PW Marvell’s prose is quoted from The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Annabel Patterson, with Martin Dzelzainis, N.H. Keeble, Nicholas von Maltzahn, (2 vols., New Haven, 2003). The prose is cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number from PW.

Brief Chronology 1621

1624

1629–1633 1633 1637

1638

1639 1641

1642

1642/3–1647 1645–1646

1647

31 March

Andrew Marvell (AM) born at Winestead, near Hull, Yorkshire, son to Reverend Andrew Marvell, vicar of Winestead, and his wife Anne (née Pease). Reverend Andrew Marvell became Master of the Hull Charter House, a charitable foundation, and lecturer at Holy Trinity Church, Hull. AM probably attended Hull Grammar School. AM entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a subsizar, or quasi-servant. 17 March Date of the birth of Princess Anne, occasion of AM’s first published verses in Latin and Greek, which appeared in a Cambridge University celebratory volume, Musarum Cantabrigiensium. February AM may have appeared in Abraham Cowley’s Latin comedy Naufragium Ioculare, performed at Trinity College, Cambridge. April AM elected scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge; AM’s mother died that month. November Reverend Andrew Marvell remarried. AM graduated BA; may, briefly, have converted to Roman Catholicism. 23 January Reverend Andrew Marvell drowned crossing the River Humber. September Trinity College, Cambridge, moved to eject AM for non-performance of his college duties. Spring AM living in London. 22 August Charles I raised his standard for civil war at Nottingham. AM travelled the continent. In Rome, likely with the young Duke of Buckingham and his brother, Lord Francis Villiers, AM visited Richard Flecknoe. 12 November By this date AM was back in England, and sold inherited property outside Cambridge.

Brief Chronology

xii November

1648

1648–1650 1648–1652

1649

1650

May to October 7 July

Charles I attempted to escape from Parliamentary captivity at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. Second Civil War at its height.

Death of Lord Francis Villiers; the publication of AM’s Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers as a separate presumably followed shortly thereafter. (Autumn) Probable composition of To his Noble Friend Mr. Richard Lovelace, upon his Poems. 5 December Pride’s Purge. AM associating with London writers and journalists. Probable period of composition of the majority of AM’s pastoral lyrics, after he had returned from the continent and before the autumn of 1652 when he is likely to have left Nun Appleton. 30 January Execution of Charles I. 24 June Death of Henry Lord Hastings; publication of Lachrymae Musarum, including AM’s Upon the Death of Lord Hastings, followed, presumably shortly thereafter. AM joined a number of contemporaries in this volume, including Denham, Nedham, Dryden, Herrick, and John Hall. August Cromwell led army to Ireland. October Parliament’s Resolves touching the Subscription to an Engagement published, triggering the socalled ‘Engagement Controversy’. 1 June Cromwell returned from Ireland. 20 June The Commonwealth decided to invade Scotland. 25 June Lord Fairfax resigned his command and soon headed north to retirement at Nun Appleton. June–July AM joined Fairfax household. Summer/ Probable period of composition for An HoraAutumn tian Ode. Late Autumn Composition of To His Worthy Friend Doctor Witty. November AM likely to have written most of Tom May’s Death. May himself died 13 November; AM may have written against him in 1647.

Brief Chronology 1651

1652 1653

1654

1655

1656

1657 1658

February

xiii

AM composed Latin epigram on the embassy of Oliver St. John to the Dutch. July–August AM wrote Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax. Early August English army mustered within a few miles of Fairfax’s estate to counter the threat of invasion from Scotland. 3 September Battle of Worcester, Cromwell’s final defeat of the Scottish and Royalist challenge. July First Anglo-Dutch war began. Autumn AM likely left Nun Appleton. 21 February Milton wrote on AM’s behalf to John Bradshaw, President of the Council of State, recommending AM for government service. Late February Probable date of composition of first version of The Character of Holland (a poem revised in 1665 during the Second Dutch War). July AM began his three-and-a-half year tutorship of William Dutton, Cromwell’s ward, within the household of John Oxenbridge at Eton College. AM probably wrote his poem Bermudas in the following months; Oxenbridge was a Commissioner for the government of the Bermudas. 16 December Cromwell became Lord Protector under the Instrument of Government. February AM sent the Latin verse Letter to Doctor Ingelo to Dr Ingelo, then chaplain to the English embassy to Queen Christina of Sweden. 17 January Anonymous publication of The First Anniversary. Late Autumn AM travelled to the continent with William Dutton. Spring AM and Dutton at the Protestant Academy in Saumur, France. September AM returned to England with the ailing Dutton. 2 September AM took government office as assistant to John Milton in the Office of Foreign Tongues. 3 September Death of Oliver Cromwell; sometime in the following months AM wrote A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector. 23 November Walked in Oliver Cromwell’s funeral procession together with John Milton and John Dryden.

Brief Chronology

xiv 1659

1660

1661

1662

1663

1665

January

AM elected MP for Hull, Yorkshire, to Richard Cromwell’s short-lived Parliament. 20 January Memorial volume for the late Lord Protector entered in the Stationer’s Company Register; AM’s Poem upon the Death was there listed among the contents but had been removed by the time of publication of Three Poems Upon the Death of his late Highnesse Oliver Lord Protector (1659). The elegy was published in 1681 but removed from all but two known copies of the printed folio. May AM lost parliamentary seat on the return of the Rump; kept his Secretaryship and gained lodgings in Whitehall. 2 April AM elected MP for Hull in the Convention Parliament. 1 May Publication of Charles II’s Declaration from Breda promising a ‘liberty to tender conscience’. 29 May Restoration of Charles II. December AM intervened in Parliament on behalf of an imprisoned John Milton. 29 December Dissolution of Convention Parliament. 1 April AM re-elected as Member for Hull to Charles II’s Long or ‘Cavalier’ Parliament. September AM likely to have revised Tom May’s Death. 18 March The House of Commons ordered examination of ‘the Difference’ between AM and Sir Thomas Clifford. 20 March The Commons Speaker ordered AM to apologize for the quarrel with Clifford; AM refused, but was forced to acknowledge that ‘he had given the first Provocation’. June AM left for Holland in the service of Earl of Carlisle and perhaps too of the state, perhaps as a spy. April AM returned to the House of Commons after his absence in Holland. July AM went as Secretary to the Earl of Carlisle on an embassy to Muscovy. Sweden, and Denmark. 5 January AM assaulted a recalcitrant waggoner on route near Hamburg and was rescued from a mob. 30 January Carlisle’s embassy returned to London.

Brief Chronology 22 February 3 June

13 June 1666

April

1666

Late

1667

May

10–13 June June/July 28 July

August

October– November 1668

15 February 1670

February March

xv

Second Anglo-Dutch War was declared. Battle of Lowestoft; Edmund Waller subsequently published Instructions to a Painter in celebration, a work that prompted AM and others to participate in an extended controversial exchange of ‘instruction poems’. Revised version of The Character of Holland entered for publication in the Stationers’ Register. The Second Advice to a Painter, likely by AM, in manuscript circulation. AM likely wrote The Third Advice to a Painter, which was circulating in manuscript by early 1667. AM may have married the widow Mary Palmer whose name later appears in litigation over AM’s estate and whose name testifies to the authenticity of AM’s poems in the 1681 folio. Dutch fleet attacked the Royal Navy at anchor in the River Medway. AM wrote Clarendon’s Housewarming. Death of Abraham Cowley. AM probably wrote ‘The Second Chorus from Seneca’s Tragedy Thyestes’ soon afterwards. AM wrote a letter of condolence and epitaphs on the deaths of the two sons of his friend Sir John Trott. Milton’s Paradise Lost registered with the Stationers’ Company. AM wrote The Last Instructions to a Painter. AM spoke against exemplary punishment in the Parliamentary attacks on the now disgraced Earl of Clarendon. Some scholars seek to date The Garden and perhaps other of AM’s lyrics to this date and beyond. AM denounced Lord Arlington in debate on misgovernment. AM probably completed the first version of The Loyall Scot. Parliament at work on a new act against religious dissenters that was to become the Second Conventicle Act; AM called this ‘the Quintessence of arbitrary Malice’.

Brief Chronology

xvi 1671

Summer

1671–1672 1672

15 March November

1673–1674 1673

May December

1674

April–June

1676

June

1677

29 March June

December 1678

April

1681

August January

AM wrote the Latin and English versions of the epigram on Colonel Blood’s attempt to steal the crown. AM wrote Latin verses, Inscribenda Luparae, for a Louvre Palace competition. King’s Declaration of Indulgence. Publication of The Rehearsal Transpros’d, which AM had been writing through the autumn. Various pamphlet attacks on AM in response to The Rehearsal Transpros’d. Samuel Parker’s massive counterblast, A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed, in press. The Rehearsal Transpros’d: The Second Part published. AM wrote On Mr. Milton’s Paradise lost for the second edition of Milton’s poem. Publication of Mr. Smirke: Or, The Divine in Mode . . . Together with a Short Historical Essay, concerning General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions, in matters of Religion, a work attacking clericalist claims and excesses. AM’s confrontation with the Commons’ Speaker. AM concealed two bankrupt relatives in a house he now rented in Great Russell St., London. An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government published. Remarks upon a late disingenuous Discourse written by one T. D. licensed: a defence of clerical moderation and non-doctrinaire Protestantism and AM’s last publication. AM died of a tertian ague. Publication of Miscellaneous Poems, attested by ‘Mary Marvell’.

Like all others who work on the life and times and writings of Andrew Marvell, we are indebted to Nicholas von Maltzahn’s Chronology of Andrew Marvell.

Introduction Towards an Interpretable Whole Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane is an interpretation of Marvell’s work; it is speculative and polemical and may not satisfy all readers, but we hope that it provides new ways of thinking about Marvell’s relations to his writings and new readings of his texts. We approach the poems and polemics as narratives fashioned by the play of the imagination within and against the spaces, boundaries, and structures that defined and contained it. Marvell’s movements within time and across such confines are the conventional matter of biography, and while this study is not biography, such materialities bear on our understanding and our exposition of Marvell’s poetry and prose. We see in those writings the script of an imagined life, the story that Marvell told of himself—wittingly and unwittingly—in idealizations and in projections, in verse, polemics, and letters. The imagined life as a script of encounters with the world and as a narrative of suffering and endeavour is hardly peculiar to Andrew Marvell— John Milton’s writings constitute perhaps the most spectacular example of an early modern writer living out on the page the anxieties and heroisms of a writing life. With Marvell it is the very elusiveness and the strangeness of his story that compel attention. The concept of an imagined life seemed to us a way of accounting for the powerful narrative coherence of the fragments of a life that Marvell intermittently disclosed in and through his writings, a life whose particulars he may or may not have lived physically but which he revealed, perhaps not always consciously or deliberately, as the story of a self. To that story he repeatedly turned, as shall we, for it is repetitions and recursions—often lost to view in the linearity of biography—that give unusual access to the imagined life.1 We did not realize that this was our subject when together we began to write about Marvell in the early 1990s, although for a number of years we 1 Leonard Barkan’s Michaelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, 2010) provides a model of the ways in which the analysis of recursive habits of expression can reveal the preoccupations of a psychology and an aesthetic sensibility.

2

Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane

had been teaching Marvell’s poetry, thinking about his politics, and writing individually about these. Our method had been deeply to contextualize, often with the aim of uncovering the reach of partisanship in seventeenth-century England, and also and more generally with the aim of exploring the kinds of exchange that took place among writers, forms, and occasions in a time of political turmoil and cultural challenge. But as we worked more extensively with Marvell’s writings and purposes our approach—under pressure of those writings and almost inexorably— turned towards a very different understanding of the relationship between a writer and his circumstance. That turn first made itself felt as we explored Marvell’s masterpiece of occasion, Upon Appleton House, his tribute to Lord Fairfax and meditation on the Lord General’s retirement to his country estate. This was the beginning of our deeper encounter with Marvell’s work. We came to recognize that only by examining in detail Marvell’s modes and gestures in this his most sustained poem could we discern his ways of working and their meaning for an understanding of the integrity of his disparate body of writings and of the logic of his career. Occasion was our starting point, and the more we looked into occasion, the clearer it became that much of the poem was fitted to very particular dates and circumstances, and thus to very particular needs. Chronology was to prove crucial to our unfolding of this poem and indeed to the development of our thinking about Marvell. But in allowing us to appreciate the intimacy of the poet’s address to place, to patron, and to circumstance—the way in which through so much of this long poem he seems almost to breathe the purposes of Lord Fairfax—a deep reconstruction of those purposes took us of necessity and as it were by default to those parts of the poem that are turned at quite another angle. One element of the geometry is of course that of compliment, of service and obeisance, but there are other moods in this poem with its deflections and diffusions, its adaptations and allusions, its inversions and mockeries. Service, we came to realize, had dimensions that faced simultaneously outwards and inwards: outwards to the patron’s occasions, inwards to what we were coming to understand as the poet’s imagining and exploration and use of himself. Opening such problems to view in Upon Appleton House and in proximity to Lord Fairfax raised new questions. A whole series of Marvell’s poems seemed to suggest a condition of unease, an unease particularly in face of patriarchy. That term identifies not only family relations but, as Laura Gowing has put it, an ‘overarching social structure’: and here we might think of the hierarchies of patronage, the authority of magistracy in all its iterations from prince or protector to rule in the domestic household, and also the patriarchal economy with its undergirding idealization

Introduction

3

of early modern masculinity, male authority, and patrilineal descent.2 Why was it that in Marvell’s panegyrics, tribute should so often have been paid and played out in proximity to subversion and endangerment? In the starkest instance, we wondered why The First Anniversary, filled as it is with gestures of elevation, should spend so much of its time in the neighbourhood of disaster. There was logic enough in acknowledging the contingency of Cromwellian rule, but Marvell’s verse positively embraces vulnerability and discomfiture. How like Marvell, we began to appreciate, to be fully attentive to occasion, to the discourses and particulars of contemporary political life, and at the same time to be deeply responsive to other desires and purposes. When we found that he played desires and discomforts simultaneously across a broad range of his writings, coupling elevation with subversion, admiration with endangerment—even as he held to view patrons, patriarchs, and fathers—we realized that discomfiture might be something more than a literary strategy, more than a poetics. Such counterpointing is not quite the same as the thinking in binaries that has been identified as characteristic of the early modern mind.3 Whatever the origins of Marvell’s expressions of unease—origins that, we came to surmise, lay near his fascination with the figure of the endangered child—and however much that unease may have been sharpened by his own continuing status as a kind of servant, a seamless continuity, even a complicity, of literary structure, political opportunity, and what appears to be a kind of psychological opportunism characterizes a whole field of his texts. Surely complicity helps to explain their extraordinary fluency and power. Perhaps the most remarkable of such sites is that mysterious lyric on the birth and death of the Marvellian hero, The unfortunate Lover. Almost everything about this poem has perplexed critics: its teasing occasionality, the identity of the lover, and not least the spectacle that the lover makes of his own suffering towards the poem’s close. More deeply baffling than this self-display is the incident at the centre of the poem, the violation of the orphan hero by birds of prey. As in To his Coy Mistress, predation and violence denominate the mysteries of erotic encounter—in that carpe diem poem perhaps sexual seduction; in The unfortunate Lover surely the violation of innocence. The violation was primal for the Unfortunate Lover and indeed for so many of the Marvellian figures he seems to shadow. It was primal as well for what constituted Marvell’s political programme in later life, and in particular his repeated attacks on the cruelties 2 Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, 2003), 9. 3 Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford, 1997), passim.

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Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane

of the bishops. Our claim signals the distinctive approach that this book takes to the matter of ideology. At its first coining as a term in the late eighteenth century, ideology was, as the Oxford English Dictionary notes, firmly implicated in the psyche. Although much commentary today casts ideology as political creed, some Marxist theorists over the last twenty years or so have offered powerful insights into the parallels between the contradictions that ideology masks and the disturbances that the psyche polices. While we acknowledge particularly the sophistication of Terry Eagleton’s reconciliation of Marx and Freud, we shall suggest ways in which what have come down to us as Marvell’s texts allow us to move beyond theory and to recover in practice the intimate and unceasing traffic between the psyche and ideology.4 And there lies both interpretive challenge and opportunity. As a number of scholars have suggested, The unfortunate Lover most likely emerged under the sign of the execution of the King; and we might infer that it was only national catastrophe which could have unleashed the personal drama of this text. A similar perturbation is to be found surrounding and dwelling within the excoriation, fears, and longings of The last Instructions to a Painter, Marvell’s most famous satire. To have moved from a recognition of the political occasions of Lord Fairfax and the sense that Marvell made of those occasions to a recovery of the territory of inversion and violation is to have travelled from knowable terrain—the field of incidents, archives, and conventional rhetorics—into an uncharted landscape. And we would suggest that Marvell himself followed such a path. This is not to argue that the career turned systematically and predictably from selfcontemplation to public crisis, but that those preoccupations were in some way contrapuntal. The act of writing in the shadow of occasion drew him to places of incompleteness and turmoil, and his texts were shaped by the impulse to shelter and indulge interior matter, indeed interiorities, under external occasions. The unfortunate Lover is Marvell’s paradigmatic exploration of primal drama; could anyone but understand it, we would surely find that The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun is his most brilliant seizure of the contingent or the circumstantial as a way to bring almost to view the logic of the body. It was as we were exploring the mysteries of The unfortunate Lover that we realized that we needed to write a book. We had not been alone in adventuring new approaches to Andrew Marvell, and one of the most impressive features of Marvell scholarship over the past decade has been the enormous advance in our understanding of Marvell’s late career. 4 See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, second edition (New York, 2007), especially chapters 4 and 5.

Introduction

5

Thanks to the researches of a cluster of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic—in particular, Martin Dzelzainis, N.H. Keeble, Nicholas von Maltzahn, Annabel Patterson, Nigel Smith, John Spurr, and Phil Withington—we now know a great deal about Marvell’s political and religious positions in the 1660s and the 1670s.5 His work in parliament and in the press has been superbly opened to view; and his situation in the networks of aristocratic patronage and in the turmoil of unlicensed printing shops has been elaborated in ways far beyond the expectations of previous generations of scholars. Nigel Smith has given us a new and richly annotated edition of the poems and a no less rich biography;6 David Norbrook, and, more recently a number of other scholars—Paul Davis, Edward Holberton, James Loxley, Nicholas McDowell, Joad Raymond, and Blair Worden—together have opened the politics and the social and literary circumstances of Marvell’s writings of the later 1640s and 1650s.7 But a consequence of the outpouring of new work has been, paradoxically, a reinforcing of what has long been recognized as the central problem of Marvell scholarship: the integrity of the imagination and of a career distinguished by exquisite lyrics and muscular polemics. As the Andrew Marvell of political and religious controversy has emerged more fully into the world, it has come to seem more difficult to imagine that figure as lyric poet. The appearance of Nicholas von Maltzahn’s detailed chronology of Marvell’s life has in a sense magnified our collective dilemma by bringing the raw materials of that life more clearly—and certainly more helpfully—to view.8 One approach to the problem of coherence in this career has been to re-date some of the pastoral lyrics to the Restoration, positioning verse of meditation in the midst of calumny and controversy and thus asserting contiguity of composition as its own evidence of integrity of imagination. For reasons that we advance in the Appendix, we do not find the re-dating and all the implications that follow persuasive. 5 See the introductory essays and notes to The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Annabel Patterson, Martin Dzelzainis, Nicholas von Maltzahn, and N.H. Keeble, 2 vols (New Haven, 2003); Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven, 2010); and the essays by Phil Withington, ‘Andrew Marvell’s Citizenship’, 102–21, and John Spurr, ‘The Poet’s Religion’, 158–73, in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, ed. Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge, 2011). 6 The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Harlow, 2003, revised edition, 2007). 7 David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge, 1990); Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, 2007); Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate (Oxford, 2008); Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2008); and the essays by Paul Davis, ‘Marvell and the Literary Past’, 26–45, James Loxley, ‘The Social Modes of Marvell’s Poetry’, 8–25, and Joad Raymond, ‘A Cromwellian Centre?’, 140–57, all in Hirst and Zwicker, The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell. 8 Chronology.

6

Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane

Yet we do not discount the quest for the integrity of Marvell’s imagination. Our dissatisfaction with the efforts to re-date certain of his lyrics did not stem merely from a conviction of the insufficiency of the evidentiary base some scholars constructed. It reflected as well our growing sense that historicizing, as conventionally practised and however fine-grained, might be inadequate to the task of accounting for the paradoxical continuities across Marvell’s so discordant texts. As we came to recognize how powerfully the body and with it the affective life determined gesture and argument through all Marvell’s genres, we began to wonder whether the final goal of the attempt to historicize ought not to be the psyche. It was to something like that, though by another name, that Marvell’s polemical opponents turned when they fixed on his body and its deficiencies. And they had reason. In the order of the body politic, bodies and politics were mutually implicated. Modern scholars of Andrew Marvell have been strangely reluctant to follow such implication, though the evidence is there in his texts. Marvell’s lyrics play upon the harmonies and dissonances of the body, and occasionally (though only occasionally) register the paroxysms or projecting the order of the state. The satires and the polemics, on the other hand, which dwell within the public regime, just as surely and just as intermittently disclose glimmers of an affective life. In The last Instructions to a Painter (1667), Marvell fashioned a text that repeatedly makes public the privileged matter of parliament and the secret deformities of the King’s court; at the same time the poem trails evidence of the yearnings and incompleteness that Marvell had constituted as lyric poetry. Shortly afterwards, in The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672), he mounted a spirited defence of religious toleration that perches atop acts of selfexposure. The paradox is that such an impulse to expose, to bring secrets into public view, should have been twinned not simply with inclinations but with compulsions to secrecy. The rhythm of Marvell’s career then seems dialectical: acts of secrecy and exposure, of privacy and publicity, which culminate in the texts that form his written life. The career was also governed by another impulse, one hardly hidden from public view in a world of patronage and hierarchy. And at this point in our argument, having turned within, we follow Marvell out into that world. His professional life as secretary and as parliament man centred on practices of sociability and on acts of service. Marvell gained notice during the Republic for his skill and assiduity in brokering, complimenting, servicing a variety of clients, and such service was extended in 1663–1664 in diplomatic embassy to Muscovy, Denmark, and Sweden. He was clearly prized both for his language skills and for the promise of diplomatic poise. That promise seems to have been lost in the fiasco of the Russian embassy, and likely enough Marvell’s irascibility impeded the further development

Introduction

7

of his career in government office; nevertheless, he made considerable success out of his intuitive appreciation of the modes of address to his betters and out of a sense of service, of obligation, and of hierarchy.9 And on this success he built his professional life, though hardly without cost to himself as the reports of Marvell’s combativeness remind us. He fashioned and articulated a proficient selfhood as he copiously negotiated his position with, his obligations to, and his writings for his constituents in Hull and his patrons in London and at Westminster; but something of violence appears too as he spoke and wrote to and for public causes. Indeed, Marvell’s various acts of idealization are often and intriguingly shadowed by violence. Idealization practised in the pursuit of public causes points to the broader terrain of ideology—not only political and religious opinions and values but also attachments, affections, and anxieties. The ideology we discover as we read Marvell’s texts is not republicanism, or royalism, or liberalism avant la lettre.10 Everywhere and always, in lyric retreat as in the turmoil of print publicity, Marvell’s ideology is formed and shaped by attachment and service and dependency and vulnerability, the position he understood and occupied as his own—in the household, in constituency work, and in state affairs. Our argument and the structure of this book follow him from service in the household to dramas of selfhood before turning outwards again to his work in the world. It may seem as if a project that began with Marvell in the fields of Lord Fairfax’s Yorkshire estate turned into a form of biography—Andrew Marvell: poet, servant of the Lord Protector, parliament man, and pamphleteer. We have learned in the course of writing these chapters how crucial is a comprehension of the material life to an understanding of the writings, how intimate with the forms of the imagination are the body and the spaces it occupies. Yet our exercise is scarcely biography—either in biography’s structure or in biography’s addiction to developmental narrative. Rather, as we suggested at the outset, this book explores what we call the imagined life, the life that Marvell imagined in and through his writings. We use this term not as a theoretical construct but as a representation, and in its own way a narrative, of the emergence of texts from experience, and more certainly as a model of how Marvell’s writings work. And we 9 Reflections on failure and disappointment in Marvell’s life and career are woven through Nigel Smith’s biography, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon. 10 Notable readings of Marvell’s politics and political ideals in addition to those cited in note 5 above include Caroline Robbins, ‘A Critical Study of the Political Activities of Andrew Marvell’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of London, 1926); John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Chicago, 1968); Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, 1978); and Warren Chernaik, The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1983).

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offer it as the conclusion of an undertaking that began in an attempt to unravel a particular crux in Upon Appleton House, and then, under the repeated pressures not simply of the mysteries of Marvell’s lyric verse but of the strange and strangely staged autobiographies that are scattered through his polemics, turned into a project that sought more largely to situate his verse and prose within an interpretable whole. We have learned that only by way of the imagined life can these writings be grasped in their integrity, and not more simply as generic or occasional exercises, brilliant though Marvell was in the fields of genre and occasion. This is, we repeat, not to make a case for literary biography as it has been conventionally understood; but it is an attempt to honour the triangulation of the life, the work, and the imagination. We make such an attempt with the conviction that it is in the work that the imagined life and the material life discover forms of cohabitation, and with the conviction too that the life of the body living in time is determined by the imagination, even as the imagination is tethered and constrained and impelled by the body. Who understood those sinuous ties better than the poet of dialogues between eyes and tears, and bodies and souls? We intend to return elsewhere to the constraints and anxieties that bound together soul and body. Of course an artist might urge, ‘It is as well that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not its origins’—and Marvell, like Thomas Mann, had his own impulses of concealment and exposure; and Marvell, like Mann’s Aschenbach, must have taken an artist’s pleasure in the perfection of his writings. But to seek understanding in addition to pleasure, we must ask after origins and outcomes; we must ask, where did Marvell’s writings come from and where were they going?

1 Work of Service One of the most notable features of Marvell scholarship in the past decade or so has been the recovery of his social and sociable worlds: coterie relations in the literary circle of Thomas Stanley,1 household intimacy with the godly Oxenbridge family at Eton and then the cavalier Duttons of Gloucestershire, delicate negotiations with his neighbours and kin among the worthies of Hull, and service to some of the nobles who stood at a distance from Charles II’s purposes. Sociability for Marvell was also constituted of textual relations: of course emulation and adaptation of the ancients, but as importantly competition with and admiration for contemporary writers English and European.2 Marvell’s literary conversations with ancients and moderns is hardly a recent discovery, but what is new is the linking of textual and human sociabilities, and the conjecture that alluding, imitating, borrowing—or rather taking—and adapting were second nature to this writer; indeed, for Marvell’s most recent biographer and editor, such habits were the defining condition of Andrew Marvell ‘the chameleon’.3 This scholarship has surely achieved a new appreciation 1 For Marvell and the Stanley circle, see Hilton Kelliher’s observations in Andrew Marvell, Poet and Politician, 1621–78: An Exhibition to Commemorate the Tercentenary of His Death (London, 1978), 34; Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford 2008), especially the Introduction, ‘Marvell and Friends’, and chapter 1, ‘Social Contexts of Marvell’s Lyric Verse, 1646–1648’; and Susan A. Clarke, ‘Marvell in Royalist Gardens’, Marvell Society Newsletter 2:2 (2010), . 2 The appreciation of Marvell’s wide-ranging adaptations of other poets began with the edition of Marvell by H.M. Margoliouth, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 2 vols (Oxford, 1927) and Pierre Legouis’s nearly contemporary study, André Marvell, poète, puritain, patriote (Paris and London, 1928); and was deepened by J.B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell’s Poetry (London, 1966). Among more recent studies of borrowing and adaptation, see especially James Loxley, ‘The Social Modes of Marvell’s Poetry’, The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, ed. Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge, 2011), 8–25; Paul Davis, ‘Marvell and the Literary Past’, The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, 26–45; and, throughout his edition, Nigel Smith’s commentary on Marvell’s sources and allusions, The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlow, revised edition, 2007). 3 Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven, 2010); and see Smith’s commentary on Marvell’s literary sociabilities in ‘“Mirrored doubles”: Andrew Marvell, the Remaking of Poetry and the Poet’s Career’, Classical Literary Careers and their Reception, ed. Philip Hardie and Helen Moore (Cambridge, 2010), 226–40.

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of how fundamental were sociable relations to Marvell; but there lies a challenge to one of our most treasured convictions: Marvell the solitary singer. How are we to reconcile lyric aloneness with sociability and social proficiency, and the undeniable evidence in the public record of a worldly career? It might seem easy enough to hypothesize a divided self—on the one hand the officious parliament-man and on the other the poet withdrawn from the busy companies of men. But in fact nothing seems to have been easy for Andrew Marvell, neither the postures of officialdom nor the pastoral solicitudes: both extracted costs, and not from two individuals but from a unitary self. This is not to deny the very different accomplishments of either phase of the career. It is however to emphasize the estrangements that mark both—the extravagancies of selfhood, the woundedness, the dissolutions and aggressions, the impossible yearnings— and that together constituted a life which Marvell may not have lived in the world but that he surely imagined and inhabited in his texts. The most ambitious text of this imagined life—a life fashioned by the play of the imagination within the spaces, boundaries, and structures that defined and contained it—is Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax. The poem provides the entry point to an understanding of the full reach of Marvell’s writings because it is the work most closely associated with a patron, and in such association lies the defining circumstance of Marvell’s career; because it embraces polemics and topicalities; and because it was not published, perhaps not even circulated in manuscript: it existed in some liminal state between privacy and publicity. It offers in other words the most varied interpretive challenges and opportunities. We scarcely need to be reminded how brilliant and extravagant is the play of this imagination within the quite material conditions of the Nun Appleton estate and among its ‘fragrant Gardens, shaddy Woods, | Deep Meadows, and transparent Floods’ (ll. 79–80). But we would emphasize Marvell’s salute ‘to my Lord Fairfax’—his employer, patron, and fellow poet, and as well the patriarch of the Nun Appleton household. It is within the structures and expectations of service to men like Lord Fairfax that Marvell spent much of his adult life, and it is within such constraints and occasions, with their own gratifications and costs, that he wrote. Lord Fairfax’s concerns in the summer of 1650—when we must presume that the new tutor entered his service—were clear: the house, its monastic origins, the daughter, her marriage and thereby the descent of the estate, and most of all his own position in time and in a public life from which he had just and very visibly retired. The richness and complexity of the picture that emerges from Upon Appleton House of an aristocratic patron and of his career, and of that career in relation to the

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history of the English Republic, has long been appreciated. Scholars have also attended to the ingenious ways in which Marvell’s self-presentation in this poem participates in the conventions of panegyric service, at once admiring heroic venture and deflecting critical scrutiny. What has not been altogether appreciated is another kind of work that the poem performs: an exploration of vulnerabilities, not only of the patron and household but also of the client and poet. The most remarkable feature of this ambitious and sustained work is the way Marvell articulates together a calendar of the seasons and the perplexities of an estate and of its descent in time and as well the topography of a writing life—stories of externalities and interiorities. We mean to tell those stories together since Marvell insistently and ineluctably twinned them, throughout this poem and throughout his career, and we mean to tell those stories together because that is an argument, we believe, that had not been previously achieved. In the epic dimensions of Upon Appleton House, in the poem’s digressions and dilations, in its histories and geographies, in its oddly presentist gestures and prophetic musings, in its reflexivity, and above all in its imaginings of relations between and among its principals and principles, Marvell opens a remarkable space for his patron, but also one to which he was himself insistently to return. The poem was once deemed philosophical enquiry, attached loosely, perhaps indifferently, to its moment and historical characters, and in all of its allusiveness assimilated readily to the timeless world that has so often been claimed for Marvell’s lyrics. And Upon Appleton House is deeply embedded in the green world of pastoral, while meditation is a hand that Marvell plays with a particular brilliance. Yet once the poem’s historical moment is ascertained, its abundant topical matter can be seen to bear on its principals and themes with a surprising and sometimes unnerving exactness. The reconciliation of politics—of nation, of religion, of family, of gender—with aesthetics is certainly difficult at this distance from the intimacies of Lord Fairfax’s country house and from the obscurities of the early years of the English Republic. And yet, we would suggest, to register the relationship of the poem’s politics and aesthetics with the continuities of motive beneath its surface is to appreciate the challenge and the potential of circumstance and occasion for its writer. Circumstance and occasion in fact constituted his imaginative palette in ways that we must grasp if we are to comprehend how he worked as a poet.4 Of all of Fairfax’s occasions and concerns, the most urgent were those of the public figure; they were also the centre of Marvell’s panegyric 4 In the first part of the present chapter we revisit, and revise in places, some of the argument about the dating of the poem that we ventured in ‘High Summer at Nun Appleton: Andrew Marvell and Lord Fairfax’s Occasions’, Historical Journal 36 (1993), 247–69.

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program—the writing of Lord Fairfax as hero. Pierre Legouis long ago conjectured that Marvell entered Fairfax’s service even before the latter left London for his Yorkshire estate, perhaps quite soon after Fairfax resigned his command as Lord General on 25 June 1650; and it seems likely that Marvell relinquished his employment as tutor to Fairfax’s daughter in the autumn of 1652.5 Of what happened in between we are much less certain. Many of Marvell’s pastorals, including The Garden, surely date from that remarkable period at Nun Appleton, with its own local literary coterie of the poet-general and his kinsmen, Charles and Henry Fairfax. While the poems in the ‘Mower’ sequence seem to contain few datable materials, Upon Appleton House is more forthcoming. Critics observed seasonal indicators within the poem; they noted its episodic character, its reference to the passing hours of the day, and its conjuring of civil war and social and political radicalism in the mowing sequence. But when and how was the poem conceived, in what order was it imagined, and in what ways did the poem accommodate Fairfax’s temperament and dilemmas? Of course, Marvell ponders the Lord General’s retirement; but quite different issues are raised, and a very different angle of address to the General taken, if that meditation occurred within months of the retreat rather than, say, at the end of Marvell’s stay. Upon Appleton House is very much a summer’s poem; the question must be, if timing matters, which summer? The summer of 1650 can be quickly ruled out. Fairfax himself was still in London in the second half of July 1650,6 and Marvell seems only to have begun his tutorial duties in the late autumn of that year, or so at least the poet’s complimentary verses of late 1650 to the Hull physician Dr Robert Witty seem to suggest.7 5 Pierre Legouis, André Marvell: poète, puritain, patriote (Paris and London, 1928), 40–1; for Marvell’s likely exit from Appleton House we rely upon his apparent presence in fashionable London in the latter part of 1652: see Chronology, 37. 6 Fairfax was still in London on 17 July 1650 (Mercurius Politicus 11–18 July 1650, 102), and would have taken some days, even if travelling light, to return to Yorkshire. Surely An Horatian Ode is the product of the late summer of 1650, written after Fairfax’s resignation and also, we propose, after Cromwell’s invasion of Scotland ( pace Elizabeth Story Donno’s dating prior to 22 July: Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth, UK, 1972), 238; the poem’s reference to the Pict taking shelter in the heather likely reflects the Scottish general Leslie’s evasive tactics in August before Cromwell managed to bring the ‘Caledonian Deer’ to bay at Dunbar on 3 September 1650. 7 Witty himself variously dated parts of the volume to which Marvell contributed commendatory verse 30 November and 2 December 1650; see the commentary on Dignissimo suo Amico Doctori Wittie and To his worthy Friend Doctor Witty upon his Translation of the Popular Errors, in P&L 1:307–8. Blair Worden has recently hypothesized that the Caelia of the poem might be any of Andrew Marvell’s female tutees rather than Mary Fairfax, though Marvell’s text is explicit in the present tense that Caelia ‘Now learns the tongues of France and Italy’ (l. 20): see Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford,

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In that poem Marvell pays homage to his tutee’s current progress in foreign languages, while in Upon Appleton House Maria has made the languages quite her own (ll. 707–8). Marvell could have been resident at the estate and written the poem in the summer of 1652, but at that point the pressures of destiny on Lord Fairfax—the subject matter of the poem— were few and far between; anyway, Lord and Lady Fairfax, and therefore presumably their daughter Mary, spent much of 1652 in Surrey.8 That summer in Yorkshire proved a time of drought, when the crops shrivelled and the rivers ran dry9—conditions sharply at odds with the lushness of Marvell’s text; Damon the Mower is surely the poem of the summer of 1652. Further, it is hard to imagine that a poet so responsive to the emblematic meaning of nature would have passed silently over the eclipses of March–April 1652, which preoccupied contemporary comment.10 It seems inconceivable therefore that the poem was not written in the summer of 1651. Until 3 September 1651, when Cromwell destroyed the last external challenge at the battle of Worcester, the life of the Rump Parliament, and of the English Republic as a whole, was dominated by the problem of survival.11 The immediate danger after the execution of the King centred on Ireland; but, as An Horatian Ode reminds us, Cromwell had crushed this by mid-1650. Thereafter, the greatest threat to security came from the 2007), 216. There is no evidence of Marvell’s tutelary relationships with any young girls beyond Mary Fairfax. Furthermore, a return to eastern Yorkshire would certainly make more likely the renewal of acquaintance with Witty, the good Doctor of Hull. We should also note that evidence has come to light of possible contact between Witty and the Fairfax household in the 1650s: Timothy Raylor, ‘Dr Witty and a Nun Appleton Poisoning’, Notes and Queries 51:1 (2004), 27. 8 For the Fairfaxes’ residence in Kingston, Surrey, see B. Cozens-Hardy, ‘Dr Thomas Thorowgood’, Norfolk Archaeology 22 (1924–1926), 333. Worden has conjectured that Marvell was in fact on a diplomatic embassy to the Netherlands in the spring of 1651 rather than at Nun Appleton, and that this seems to push the composition of the poem towards 1652. Such an argument is unpersuasive, and on various grounds. As Worden himself notes, when John Milton recommended Marvell for diplomatic office in 1654, he made no mention of any previous diplomatic experience. Further, Secretary Thurloe passed over Marvell’s name and appointed instead Philip Meadowes; since (as Worden notes) Thurloe had himself headed the secretarial contingent in the 1651 embassy, we might imagine that Meadowes was the hypothetical junior who accompanied the legation to the Netherlands; Worden, Literature and Politics, 399–404. 9 Six North Country Diaries (Surtees Soc., CXVIII, 1910), 37. 10 We might note that Marvell did not ignore those eclipses when he later came to write Damon the Mower; for some contemporary comment, see, for example, Mercurius Politicus, 18–25 March 1652, p. 1476, and 1–8 April 1652, p. 1520; contemporary almanacs also abound in comment. In a letter of April 1677 to his friend Sir Henry Thompson (Chronology, 188), Marvell noted with comment a contemporary eclipse. 11 See Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge, 1974), passim; also Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Stanford, 1997).

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north. On 23 June 1650 the second Charles Stuart at last landed in Scotland in search of Presbyterian support, bringing with him the prospect of renewed invasion of England. In expectation of such an eventuality, the Rump in the late spring of 1650 determined on a pre-emptive strike, and prepared to send its forces north across the Scottish border. Throughout the years of civil war, Parliament had stressed its defensive posture, and the command now to go on the offensive plunged its godly Lord General into despair.12 Fairfax resolved his moral dilemma—a dilemma intensified by the manifest godliness of the new enemy—by resigning his command. His action brought the promotion of Oliver Cromwell to supreme command, but it put no end to the crisis. Despite the remarkable victory at Dunbar on 3 September 1650, Cromwell’s forces were tied down in a war of attrition through the spring of 1651. English pamphlets, newsbooks, and diaries remained full of war and the rumour of war. Summer held little promise of peace—indeed, the leading almanac writers, William Lilly and Nicholas Culpepper, in their predictions for July and August 1651 had foretold war and civil war in the bowels of England.13 These prophecies seemed borne out as Scottish forces moved towards the border in late July. Should they take the eastern road into England they would pass within a few miles of Fairfax’s estate. It is to these anxious months that the composition of Upon Appleton House belongs; the poem had surely been written, likely presented, and in some way done its work for its audience by the end of the third week of August of that year. Such precise dating is made possible by textual echoes in Marvell’s poem of a major literary compilation, William Cartwright’s Comedies Tragi-comedies, with other Poems, which—thanks to the annotating habits of the London bookseller, George Thomason— we know appeared in print on or very shortly before 23 June 1651.14 Marvell’s eye was likely enough drawn to one prefatory contribution to 12 Worden, Rump Parliament, 224. A convenient introduction to the defensiveness of Parliament’s war aims is to be found in Andrew Sharp, Political Ideas of the English Civil Wars (London, 1983), 15–18, 61–76. Fairfax made his views clear at his resignation: ‘Human probabilities are not sufficient grounds to make war upon a neighbour nation, especially our brethren in Scotland, to whom we are engaged in a solemn league and covenant’; see ODNB, under the heading ‘Fairfax, Thomas’. 13 Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (1732), 493, 494; Nicholas Culpepper, An Ephemeris for the Yeer 1651 (1651), under the heading, ‘July’; William Lilly, Merlin Anglici Ephemeris (1651, recte 1650), under the heading, ‘June’. 14 Catalogue of the Pamphlets. . . Collected by George Thomason 1640–1661, ed. G.K. Fortescue, 2 vols (London, 1908), 2: 837. For an account of Thomason’s purchasing and collecting methods, see Michael Mendle, ‘The Thomason Collection: A Reply to Stephen J. Greenberg’, Albion 22 (1990), 85–93. In the case of such a prominent item as the Cartwright collection, we may assume that Thomason was prompt in his purchase, all the more so given his political sympathies at that point.

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the volume by its dismissive reference to ‘dumb Tutors, that descry | Ethicks and Arts’;15 but he profited from the encounter by borrowing from that text a very distinctive image—the figure of bellowing cattle filling a levelled plain.16 This borrowing enables us to say with confidence that Marvell could not have completed his poem before the print publication of the Cartwright collection.17 He had surely finished it, so declare the themes and imagery of Upon Appleton House no less than the family’s occasions and the changing resonance of the national crisis, by late August. In many and remarkable ways Marvell’s Upon Appleton House is an address to occasion. The poem is variously located within time; indeed, so insistent is its temporal reference that an historical poem emerges inexorably from what begins as country-house celebration and topographical progress piece. And we have recently been reminded just how topical are the architectural motifs in that country-house celebration at Nun Appleton.18 The poet searches into a number of histories—familial, local, national, and prophetic. But driving its expansive central scenes is an unmistakable narrative present tense. ‘And now to the Abbyss I pass’ (l. 369) signals the narrator’s and the poem’s entry into that present: it is a moment of high summer, of mowing and ripeness. It would also prove a season that put intense political as well as moral pressure on Marvell’s patron. The central sections of the poem consist of three panels: garden, meadows, and wood. A generalized summer season links all three—flowers are in bloom, the meadows are ripe, the forest is lush. Beyond this generalized summer, the central panel offers more pointed detail. The precision with which Marvell takes us through the season’s agricultural calendar in the Vale of York is striking: the grass, first seen at its height (stanzas xlvii– xlix), is mowed (l–liii), and stacked (liv–lvi); the fields are gleaned (lvi– lvii) and finally flooded (lix–lx).19 The narrative is exact in detail and 15

Comedies Tragi-comedies (1651), sig. f.*6v. Comedies Tragi-comedies, sig.*7; Upon Appleton House, ll. 449–52. 17 The folio’s remarkable assemblage of prefatory elegies and commendations signalled its prominence as both a political and literary event. We do not have evidence that this book was in the library at Nun Appleton, but certainly Marvell read in it and borrowed from it. For further discussion of this borrowing, see Hirst and Zwicker, ‘High Summer at Nun Appleton 1651: Andrew Marvell and Lord Fairfax’s Occasions’, Historical Journal 36:2 (1993), 250–1. 18 See Jane Partner, ‘ “That Swelling Hall”: Andrew Marvell and the Politics of Architecture at Nun Appleton House’, Seventeenth Century 23:2 (2008), 225–43. 19 William Empson, usually quite acute about local matters, mistakenly suggests that the meadows were flooded in autumn, ‘Natural Magic and Populism in Marvell’s Poetry’, in Andrew Marvell, Essays on the Tercentenary of his Death, ed. R.L. Brett (Oxford, 1979), 46. 16

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sequence, arrestingly so for a poem in which sequence elsewhere is purposefully cast in doubt. The seasonal dating is further fixed by Marvell’s playful allusion to Fairfax’s July absence from the estate once the water meadows have been flooded (ll. 465–72).20 We are in a present tense both immediate and vivid in the exactness of its sense of nature observed. And it is on just this seasonal note that the poem concludes. Walton’s Compleat Angler informs us that salmon enter the rivers in August.21 Marvell’s salmon-fishers are not only a brilliant allegorical marker, rising out of the waters as amphibious man within and outside the stream of history; they are also seasonal figures, tying the poem’s mysterious close unmistakably to high summer. That summer prompted reflections as well on domestic matter, estates, and descents. The month of July surely provided the occasion of Marvell’s panegyric salute to Mary Fairfax for 30 July was her birthday.22 Appropriately enough in a poem filled with family history, private allusions, and domestic particulars, Fairfax’s poet and Mary’s tutor celebrated her entry into woman’s estate. Born in 1638, Mary was now turning thirteen, an age when aristocratic girls often left the tutelage of their parents;23 the ripeness of nature in the poem, which throughout juxtaposes fertility and death, renders especially poignant this tribute to menarche and marriageability. The poem’s emblems of fertility reinforce the agricultural calendar and remind us of the passage of time; they also provide an unexpected domestic topicality. The topicality of Marvell’s imagery of war is obvious: the meditation on Fairfax’s resignation, the allusions to Levelling, to soldier mowers, and to camp followers, have clear historical reference. But the pervasiveness of such materials, the depth of their reach into Fairfaxian history, and their significance to the summer months of 1651, need properly to be appreciated. Every narrative turned away from the narrator is laced with belligerence. The virgins of the nunnery wage garrulous war (stanza xxxii); the Fairfax genealogy prizes heroes and conquest (stanzas xxix, xxx, xxxvi); the bittersweet refiguring of the garden as fort has long been noted, as has the mobilization of the senses; and of course the meadows are the most celebrated scenes where the engines of war turn. Further, the flood on this estate conjures an armed ark and the woods a besieged encampment; even 20

For that absence, see C.R. Markham, A Life of the Great Lord Fairfax (London, 1870),

366. 21

Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653), 133. G.E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 12 vols (London, 1910–1959), 5: 231n. 23 Thus, Mary’s second cousin on the Vere side, Brilliana Harley, was sent to stay with Lord Fairfax’s mother-in-law at the age of thirteen: Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), 24–5. 22

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in ‘Paradice’s only Map’ (l. 768), the virgin Maria must be wary of siege and ambush by amorous youth, and—in a wonderful pun on Lady Fairfax’s soldierly ancestry among the Veres—even domesticity is ‘Discipline severe’ (l. 723). The poem reflects war at every turn and in the most unexpected locales. That meditation has often been read as retrospection, and its commemorative force is certainly clear; but the complex schemes of time in garden and meadow, while admitting nostalgia and regret, insist on the present tense. Indeed, a more ominous present disturbs Marvell’s Levelling scene, so long read merely as memory of the 1640s. In fact, the vexing of the meadows, the denomination of the Israelites, the carving of the rail, the death trumpets and funerals, the careless victory and triumph in hay all face more than one way. Neither radicalism nor war could be confined to the past. In the summer of 1651 the Leveller leaders, John Lilburne and William Walwyn, were organizing enclosure protestors in Hatfield Chase just to the east of Fairfax’s estate;24 and the soldiers had not disbanded when Fairfax resigned his commission. Indeed, the high point of army millennialism had come not in the 1640s but in the aftermath of Fairfax’s withdrawal when, in the Musselburgh Declaration of August 1650, the soldiers as they entered Scotland categorically took ‘King Jesus to be [their] king by profession’.25 Although the narrator’s discovery of Israelites in the field of soldier-mowers might seem, by this late date in England’s history as elect nation, almost wholly and safely contained by rhetorical and political convention, those conventions are challenged and the application both exploded and made anew by the cry of bloody Thestylis, mocking the narrator, speaking out of turn and out of the body of the poem: ‘he call’d us Israelites; | But now, to make his saying true, | Rails rain for Quails, for Manna Dew’ (ll. 406–8). The difficulty of this strange figure is resolved when we recognize that the bitter scripturalism of the passage is driven by topicality. The summer crisis of 1651 bred renewed millennialism amongst supporters of the Republic;26 to be 24 It may be merely coincidence that the rioters were attacking drainage works, but it is suggestive that Marvell chose to vent the canard about the levelling aims of the Levellers in one of the very contexts in which Levellers actually were levelling. See Keith Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London, 1982), 200–4; for the problem of Leveller interest in agrarian issues, see Roger Howell and David E. Brewster, ‘Reconsidering the Levellers: The Evidence of The Moderate’, Past and Present 46 (1970), 69–86. 25 A Declaration of the English Army Now in Scotland, 1st August 1650 (1650). 26 See for example the thanksgiving sermon for the battle of Worcester preached to Parliament by Peter Sterry, chaplain to the council of state and soon to Oliver Protector: Peter Sterry, England’s Deliverance from the Northerrn Presbytery Compared with Its Deliverance from the Roman Papacy (1651), 44–5, also 26–7, 32–3, 41–2; for an example of resurgent millennialism in the parishes, see The Diary of Ralph Josselin, ed. Alan Macfarlane (London, 1976), 220, 267.

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situated at Nun Appleton in these weeks, between Levellers to the east of the estate and the massing English army at Ripon just to the west, was to live the contradictions as well as the physical dangers of scriptural politics.27 Marvell’s text certainly allows those contradictions, and while ambiguity has been identified as Marvell’s habitual intellectual mode, we would argue that it was as well his strategic mode as he surveyed his patron’s predicament. He may have intended the bizarre and ironic tone in these passages to indulge, even to excite, Fairfax’s distaste for social radicalism as the former Lord General contemplated those he had so recently led. But Marvell also offered a more familiar reading of the moment, and to Fairfax another, and politically very different, response; for the various scriptural materials here—quails, manna, the flight through the Red Sea—all have hovering over them the image of a captain chosen back to Egypt.28 That image was insistently applied, angrily, fearfully, by the regime and its supporters to the younger Charles Stuart throughout the 1650s.29 In July 1651 that captain was preparing to invade. The danger which threatened to engulf the estate and the whole of England can even be felt in that most nostalgic of the poem’s landscapes, Lord Fairfax’s garden. However regretful the meditation in Fairfax’s flowerbeds, nostalgia is challenged by a present whose sharp intrusiveness needs to be emphasized: ‘But War all this doth overgrow: | We Ord’nance Plant and Powder sow’ (ll. 343–4). What Fairfax and Marvell have planted as metaphor now grows alarmingly real. Those muskets and cannon playfully recapitulate Fairfax’s military career; but by the summer of 1651 they also threaten to explode. Over the border not far to the north, and at Ripon even nearer to home, soldiers with real guns are once again gathering. If it is to the present that the historical markers within Marvell’s text so insistently turn, why then does his poem dwell on universals, upon timeless philosophical issues? The themes of conduct and virtue, engagement and retreat, were scarcely irrelevant to the long history of the Fairfax family, with its domestic calendars and pedigrees, and its generations of military accomplishment; nor would the topoi prove irrelevant to the personal dilemma of this poet, a man soon enough to struggle with the 27 The bulk of the English field army was gathered around Ripon, less than a dozen miles west of Nun Appleton, from 13–16 August 1651; British Library, Additional MS 21420, fos. 172–3. 28 Cf. D.C. Allen, Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry (Baltimore, 1968), 108. 29 Mercurius Politicus, 11–18 July 1650, 88; The Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. Ivan Roots (London, 1989), 84; The Complete Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols (New Haven, 1953–1980), 6: 463.

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function of poetry in a godly republic.30 Through the various episodes of the poem, Marvell plays with immense skill the counterpoint of retreat and engagement. The application of that theme to Fairfax’s past is selfevident, as is its wistful application to Mary’s future. But the dilemma of present choice bore down on Lord Fairfax no less momentously in the summer of 1651 than it had a year earlier. The war against the Scots that had presented such a moral dilemma for Lord Fairfax in 1650 returned in new guise in the summer of 1651. Fairfax like others now had to decide whether to defend the Republic and the nation against a Scottish king. The fragility of the Republic’s hold on public allegiance is manifest, but the one point at which scholars have found it both worthwhile and feasible to examine the nature of that allegiance is the Engagement controversy of 1650.31 Upon Appleton House opens another such moment. The requirement that all adult males take an Engagement of acquiescence to the Commonwealth had sparked a profound moral crisis among conscientious Presbyterians who had earlier solemnly sworn in the Solemn League and Covenant to protect the person and office of the king; their diaries and sermons eventually allowed modern historians some access to private sentiments in a remarkably obscure period.32 Beyond that brief episode, the evidence is generally of a public nature, in the form of petitions, or the silence which greeted the fall of the Rump. Precisely dating Upon Appleton House affords us an insight into the circumstance, and a reflection perhaps on the state of mind, of a major figure at a moment whose meaning has been glossed over. Lord Fairfax’s great strength as commander had been his military, scarcely his political, genius. Throughout the anxious years of politicking that followed the end of the first civil war in 1646, his every move had been watched as allies, subordinates, wife too, sought to direct his steps.33 30 On this theme, see Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge, 1999), chapters 6–7. 31 See especially John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice (Chicago, 1968), 9–68; Quentin Skinner, ‘Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy’, in Gerald E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum (London, 1972), 79–98; Glenn Burgess, ‘Usurpation, Obligation and Obedience in the Thought of the Engagement Controversy’, Historical Journal 29 (1986), 515–36; David M. Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth-Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Rochester, 1999); and Edward Vallance, ‘Protestation, Vow, Covenant, and Engagement: Swearing Allegiance in the English Civil War’, Historical Research 75: 190 (2002), 408–24. 32 Oliver Heywood’s Life of John Angier of Denton, ed. E. Axon (Chetham Soc., 1937), 67; The Life of Adam Martindale, ed. Richard Parkinson (Chetham Soc., 1845), 92–9; Records of the Borough of Leicester 1603–1688, ed. Mary Bateson, Helen Stocks, and W.H. Stevenson, 4 vols (Leicester and Cambridge, 1899–1923), 4: 396; Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant (Woodbridge, 2005). 33 See, in general, the ODNB entry; see as well Andrew Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007). Perhaps the clearest instance of

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In the crisis of the King’s trial he could neither set his hand to the destruction of Charles nor raise his hand to prevent it. And it was by resignation that he finally resolved the long political agony that had by the spring of 1650 driven him ‘melancholy mad’.34 Marvell puzzles over the degree to which the removal to Nun Appleton was a retirement from the world; but the world certainly had not let go its hold on him.35 As Cromwell’s invasion of Scotland flagged, there were early reports that the Council of State was pressing Fairfax for a declaration of support.36 But as the Scots in their turn prepared to invade in the summer of 1651 England’s war turned defensive; Fairfax accordingly faced the exact condition which the previous year he had indicated his readiness to accept. The changed circumstances had persuaded many, and historians have noted—as supporters of the Republic did before them—the readiness of country people to join the militia regiments raised that summer.37 Fairfax was slower to commit himself, doubtless to the dismay of the government, which had been informed of links between his Presbyterian household and the plotting of English Presbyterians that made the summer’s crisis so much more unnerving.38 On 12 August the council sent him a remarkable letter, begging him to defend the major stronghold of Hull, his refuge in the early days of the civil war and of which he had served as governor.39 By the nineteenth of the month Cromwell was ostentatiously and no doubt with relief stressing his old commander’s collaboration.40 The Rump Parliament’s Fairfax’s political weakness is provided by Gerrard Winstanley, who observed the whisking of a petition out of the Lord General’s hand by a busy-body (Hugh Peter?) and two colonels: The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. George H. Sabine (New York, 1940), 389. 34 Worden, Rump Parliament, 224. 35 Nun Appleton evidently became something of a tourist attraction in the early 1650s, doubtless as a result of its new architecture as well as its owner. The house’s novel architectural motif of civic porch in a rural setting might be taken as emblematic of Fairfax’s own ambivalence. Robert Loveday, Loveday’s Letters (1659), 80; A.A. Tait, ‘Post-Modernism in the 1650s’, in Inigo Jones and the Spread of Classicism: Papers Given at the Georgian Group Symposium, 1986 (London, 1987), 33–4. 36 Mercurius Politicus, 11–18 July 1650, 102. 37 David Underdown, Pride’s Purge (Oxford, 1971), 314; Andrew M. Coleby, Central Government and the Localities: Hampshire 1649–1689 (Cambridge, 1987), 37; Ronald Hutton, The British Republic 1649–1660 (New York, 1990), 35. 38 Historical Manuscripts Commission 13th Report, Appendix Part I. Duke of Portland’s Mss. (London, 1891), 579–80, 582, 585, 586–8. The council obviously did not in the end credit the information, yet passions in Parliament seem to have run high: Worcester College, Oxford, Clarke MSS, vol. xix, fos. 13v, 14, 17v, 18. It should be noted that Fairfax’s former secretary John Rushworth was more clearly implicated, but by 11 August 1651 Rushworth had evidently made his peace with the regime: Lois Spencer, ‘The Politics of George Thomason’, The Library, fifth series, 14 (1959), 11–27; ODNB, ‘Rushworth, John’. 39 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1651, 323–4. 40 Mercurius Politicus, 21–28 August 1651, p. 1016; see also Whitelocke, Memorials, 504, for another comment on the importance of the announcement.

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ensuing grant to Fairfax of the Isle of Man argues the importance of that decision;41 but the delay suggests how difficult it had been for him, and under how much pressure the decision had been made—pressure applied not only from Whitehall. This was a testing time for the regime as well as for Fairfax. The lavish publicity the government gave in the summer to the trial and execution of the Reverend Christopher Love, made to bear the blame for the Presbyterians’ political dealings with the Scots,42 speaks not only of the edginess and apprehension of republicans, but also of the likelihood that the heart-searchings to which Upon Appleton House pays such ample, if diffusive, tribute were widely shared. In the following months, the decisions of despairing royalists—Thomas Hobbes, John Evelyn, Edmund Waller— to end their self-imposed exiles suggest how fateful that time had been.43 But to have lived through the summer, without the hindsight given by 3 September and the victory at Worcester, must have been to have experienced some of the vertigo and discontinuities of Marvell’s poem. In this summer Marvell produced his most ruminative verse: a poem responsive to every moral contour which his patron may have occupied and to the existential crisis that he faced. At the epicentre of the poem is a man facing a very specific decision, whether or not to take up arms for an uncertain cause; and we can identify the days in August at which he faced this decision at its height. Ringed around that centre are episodes involving other characters, most of them members of his household, immediate and extended. The protagonists in those episodes are made to play out analogous decisions in the distant past and in a prophetic future. William Fairfax’s assault on the nunnery, with all its tonal ambiguity, is made to type Fairfax’s present predicament: ‘What should he do? He would respect | Religion, but not Right neglect’ (ll. 225–6). Isabel Thwaites’ circumstance, Lord Fairfax’s retreat to the garden, the narrator’s encampment in the forest, Maria’s entry into the world, all are variations on this theme. The effect of such analogies is to offer a panoply of extenuations for Fairfax’s moral crises. For the one from which the Lord General had so recently emerged, Marvell makes a gesture 41

Markham, Fairfax, 364. The reverberations of the Love trial can be felt in every newsbook from late June to mid-August; fuller accounts are to be found in The tryall of Mr. Love (1651) and The whole triall of Mr Love (1651), the latter being reprinted in State Trials, vol. 5, cols. 43–135. For the impact of the trial on the Presbyterian clergy, see P.J. Anderson, ‘Sion College and the London Provincial Assembly’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37 (1986), 83–4; for a vivid example of Presbyterian bitterness, see A Brief Narration of the Mysteries of State Carried on by the Spanish Faction in England (1651). Fairfax’s continuing hold on the imagination of such groups is suggested by Thomas Jacombe, Enoch’s Walke and Chang [sic] (1656), 50. 43 See ODNB for entries under these names. 42

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towards the inscrutability of providence—‘had it pleased him and God’ (l. 346)—a gesture whose caution and scrupulousness may have echoed Fairfax’s own doubts about the relations between providence and human agency at this juncture in English history.44 For the crisis that now loomed, this poem—with its philosophic dilations, its recapturing of past crises, and its casting of the future—spread the colours of destiny broadly in front of the Lord General. By so dispersing the present, the poet located this summer in a long context. His poem offered Fairfax a looking glass with which to enjoy the advantages of perspective, the comfort of distance. Set within the frame of a hundred and fifty years of Fairfaxian history and inheritance, the summer of 1651 is manifestly an anxious moment but not a climacteric. That appeal to the continuum of history provides one method of both comprehending and attenuating the crisis; the tonal extremes of nunnery and forest provide attenuation of different kinds. The narrator’s forest retreat certainly plays upon the poem’s central themes and languages, but its extravagant tone, its inversions and dissonances, intersect those themes at an odd angle. Excess and idleness and distended self-presentation in a poem dedicated to and centring on a patron’s house and history suggest something other than an address to occasion; and surely something more than the interests of thematic coherence drove Marvell’s exploration of retirement. To present retreat as abandonment, as hallucination, play, and inversion, is indeed to raise the vexing moral and political issues entailed in Lord Fairfax’s retreat, but it is to do so in a way which implies that the excesses and misuses of retreat belong to others. To locate the moral dangers of retirement in the psyche of the troubled youth, and moreover to shape this crisis so exactly to the personal circumstances of the poet and tutor who had followed his patron and employer to Nun Appleton, is both to acknowledge the allurement of retreat and, it may be, to alert Lord Fairfax delicately even by excluding him from its dangers. Marvell allows his patron to have it both ways: watchful and wary in the garden—‘For he did, with his utmost Skill, Ambition weed, but Conscience till’ (ll. 353–4)—Fairfax enjoys the conventions of retirement as escape from the stains and toils of public life and yet remains clear of the vices of ease. The forest episode dissipates and disarms self-accusation; it acknowledges criticisms—the moral and spiritual dangers so vividly signalled in the luxuriance of the forest—but demurs. The idle poet thus serves as surrogate, scapegoat for charges that might have been laid to the patron’s account, and laid by himself as well as others. 44

See above, note 13.

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There may, however, have been more than one narrative folded into the mazes of this retreat. Critics have seen in the woods the narrator’s embrace of ecstatic knowledge, and they have noted the continuities of this metaphysical material with the neo-Platonism of the pastorals and dialogues. Some have even taken this as evidence of the poet’s own habitation of the world of the spirit;45 but the narrator’s willingness to embrace ecstatic knowledge is repeatedly and surely strategically broken by a striking self-awareness. Although it may be difficult to hear amongst the sybil’s leaves Marvell addressing his patron, the poet’s engagement with neo-Platonism and the conjuring of hermetic knowledge was not merely temperamental. Critics have often observed that the force and proximity of his patron’s pursuit of the intellectual pleasures of solitariness—even to the point of translating and adapting fashionable French libertin texts— determined Marvell’s topics in this poem.46 Like others who retreated from public turmoil to the consolations of the private life, Lord Fairfax indulged in the hothouse of metaphysics as well as in the pleasures of pastoralism.47 Marvell was both willing and able to play with such ideas; indeed, he quickly outran Fairfax in both the pastoral and the metaphysical mode. Their exercises may have allowed Marvell to exult in speculation; they also allowed him to play out and to play among its inherent dangers. Fairfax was himself alert to the spiritual dangers of hermeticism and injected a Calvinist corrective into his commentary on the neo-Platonist classic, Mercurius trismegistus.48 The narrator’s enactment of an ecstasy of the spirit might therefore have been intended to echo and compliment Fairfax’s own intellectual fascination with such material, and to pay spectacular tribute to his theological probity. But the erotic sensualism of this narrative, its emphasis on temptation of the flesh, on corruption, languishing, and panting, on licking, binding, and clasping, surely reached beyond Fairfax’s imagination:

45 Rosalie Colie, ‘My Ecchoing Song’: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton, 1970), 165–6. 46 Cf. Maren-Sofie Rostvig, ‘Images of Perfection’, in Earl Miner, ed., SeventeenthCentury Imagery (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), 14; and Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth (Chicago and London, 1986), 257–61. See also, Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, 51–2, 97, and Hopper, ‘Black Tom’, 204, for Fairfax’s translation of some of the Hermes Trismegistus texts. 47 Sir Henry Vane’s Retired Man’s Meditations (1655) charts the speculations of one politician in defeat. Clarendon, who meditated on David’s Psalms in exile, provides another such example; see B.H.G. Wormald, Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion 1640–1660 (Chicago, revised edition, 1976), 165–6. 48 See R.I.V. Hodge, Foreshortened Time (Cambridge, 1978), 135–7, for commentary on Fairfax’s attraction to and careful engagement with hermeticism.

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Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane And see how Chance’s better Wit Could with a Mask my studies hit! The Oak-Leaves me embroyder all, Between which Caterpillars crawl: And Ivy, with familiar trails, Me licks, and clasps, and curles, and hales. Under this antick Cope I move Like some great Prelate of the Grove, Then, languishing with ease, I toss On Pallets swoln of Velvet Moss; While the Wind, cooling through the Boughs, Flatters with Air my panting Brows. Thanks for my Rest ye Mossy Banks, And unto you cool Zephyr’s Thanks, Who, as my Hair, my Thoughts too shed, And winnow from the Chaff my Head. (ll. 585–600)

Earlier in the poem Marvell constructs a strict regimen of the senses for his patron’s garden, and throughout he observes the discipline of the Fairfax household. Of all the charges laid to Lord Fairfax’s name, erotic temptation was perhaps the least likely. To fold such temptation into the subject matter of his patron’s intellectual speculation was therefore to raise a flag of a most brilliant and yet inappropriate hue. We have no wish to discount the personal work that Marvell may have been performing through this material, and to it we shall return; but as an address to his patron, could these scenes have been intended to alert Fairfax to the shocking implications of his fascination with the spirit? The coupling of spiritual questing with erotic ecstasy was the focus of many anxieties in 1650–1651, the time of the Ranters, and such coupling is the argument of Marvell’s own narrative.49 Neo-Platonism, which scholars long assumed to be almost wholly intellectualized and restricted to texts of the most arcane character, in fact constituted a shaping force in the radical underground: transmitted through the works of Jacob Boehme, hermeticism reached far beyond the intellectual’s study.50 Whatever the tenseness of Lord Fairfax’s contacts with that underground as it had permeated the ranks of the army he then commanded, his undoctrinaire spiritual enthusiasm had inclined him to sympathize with many of its concerns: he had appointed the antinomian William Dell 49 The phobia clearly existed, whether or not an organized group called the Ranters did: see J.C. Davis, Fear, Myth, and History: The Ranters and Historians (Cambridge, 1986). 50 Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989), passim.

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and the Seeker William Erbery chaplains when general,51 and his conduct towards the Diggers in 1649 famously earned him the regard of their leader, Gerrard Winstanley.52 We must presume Marvell knew of his patron’s sympathies and of his deep interest in the libertine poetry of Saint-Amant.53 The poet’s preoccupation throughout the forest retreat with illumination in and through the material world suggestively and strategically parallels Ranter themes of these years.54 His decision to present the narrator’s spiritual autobiography as something more than the mere lapse from protestant virtue which might have been expected in this narrative counterpoint to Fairfax the protestant hero cannot help but conjure the great bugbear of the early Republic. Whatever Fairfax’s alertness to the theological dangers of neo-Platonism, it is sexual digression that most catches the eye in Marvell’s wayward narrative.55 And it was a piece of the most delicate pedagogy for Marvell to teach a lesson on the seductiveness of spiritual wandering to a patron of the utmost personal rectitude but one who had in the late 1640s been notoriously seduced by his radical co-religionists; to do so under the eaves of the patron’s own house demanded daring as well. It is one thing to extenuate; 51 A.G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), 161; R.L. Greaves and R. Zaller, Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols (Brighton, 1982–1984), 1: 253. 52 The connections between Fairfax and Winstanley have been widely noted; it is possible that Fairfax had local interests in north Surrey, so the sympathy he showed to Winstanley is all the more remarkable. See Cozeus-Hardy, ‘Dr Thomas Thorowgood’, 333. 53 See Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, 97. 54 In Heights in Depths and Depths in Heights (1651), a text almost as vertiginous as Marvell’s own, Joseph Salmon paused as ‘the dark Canopies of Earth and Flesh… bespread with obscurity… the Hemispheare’ of his spirit; can we see in both author and image a reflection of the last stanza of Marvell’s poem? The reach of one of Marvell’s central images is suggested, variously, by Salmon’s likening of the spirit to a bird which soars only to fall, with ‘the golden plumes of our soring fancies’ singed; by the confidence of the Seeker Captain Francis Freeman that ‘Now there is nothing but mirth in [external forms], there is a continual singing of birds in them, chirping sweetly’; by the Boehmenist excursions of the leading Welsh Fifth Monarchist, Morgan Llwyd, in his Book of the three birds (A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century, ed. Nigel Smith (London, 1983), 204, 208; Francis Freeman, Light Vanquishing Darkness (1650), 2; Greaves and Zaller, Biographical Dictionary, 2: 194). Jacob Bauthumley, in The Light and Dark Sides of God (1651), a text with a title almost as suggestive as Salmon’s, could ‘see that God is in all Creatures, . . . and every green thing, from the highest Cedar to the Ivey on the wall’, just as Marvell could invest the ivy with spiritual significance in the narrator’s wandering (Ranter Writings, 232). 55 We should stress that sexual digression is not the focus of the forest passage in what may have been Marvell’s main source for the episode; this theme was Marvell’s own. This source, Nathaniel Whiting’s Pleasant History of Albino and Bellama (1637) was first noticed by Pierre Legouis, André Marvell (Paris, 1928), 141, note 226, and has now been thoroughly explored by Ian C. Parker, ‘Marvell, Nathaniel Whiting, and Cowley’, Notes and Queries 57:1 (2010), 59–66; the relevant forest passage in Whiting’s work is to be found at p. 50.

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it is something else to play spiritual guide—and surely something else again to play the provocateur. A no less complex negotiation among extenuation, pedagogy, and indulgence governs the narrative in the nunnery, and in ways that are strikingly similar to the poet’s work in the forest retreat. Clearly enough, the episodes are thematically linked; but the extravagance of Marvell’s history of the nunnery—as striking as the unfolding retirement in the forest— forces the argument of thematic counterpoint to carry a difficult explanatory burden. This much the poem’s critics have certainly recognized, and they have sought in the nunnery scene’s conventional anti-popery an explanation for Marvell’s dwelling upon spiritual corruption.56 But there is more to this episode than the heralding of protestant virtue for which Lord Fairfax and his immediate progenitors were celebrated.57 Not least, Marvell’s history of the nunnery speaks in an odd manner to one of the most important aspects of his patron’s career, for the episode offers diminution, even mockery, as commentary on warfare. Ian Parker’s recent exploration of Marvell’s source for this passage, Nathaniel Whiting’s bawdy and anti-popish romance, The Pleasant History of Albino and Bellama, reinforces our sense that the breaching of the nunnery deeply compromises an epic Fairfax with a mock-heroic setting.58 Throughout the episode Marvell mixes epic and mock-heroic materials, sometimes of course at the expense of popish foes, but also, and more strategically, to balance the credit of action and retirement. While the rescue of the virgin Thwaites introduces important themes, the comic aspect of William Fairfax’s assault deflates heroic enterprise. Marvell justifies that enterprise as genealogy and prophecy (‘From that blest Bed the Heroe came, | Whom France and Poland yet does fame’) (ll. 281–2); but comedy is a strange language for epic endeavour. Reflections on the vanity of human action, and of warfare in particular, must have offered a certain consolation to a hero so busily weeding ambition and tilling conscience. Could they have also offered extenuation to a poet who had himself spent the years of war in peaceful, perhaps playful, exile? The provision of attenuating narratives for the Lord General must also have contributed to Marvell’s virtual exclusion of Lady Fairfax from the body of this poem—an absence surprising in a poem devoted to family as 56 See, for example, Donald Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970), 221–2; and Michael Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth (Oxford, 1987), 149–50. 57 The presentation of protestant virtue as a political theme is the main point of A.D. Cousins’ ‘Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax” and the Regaining of Paradise’, in Conal Condren and A.D. Cousins, eds, The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell (Aldershot, UK, 1990), 53–84. 58 Ian Parker, ‘Marvell, Nathaniel Whiting and Cowley’, 59–66.

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well as estate and sharply contrasting with her prominence as ‘the great Nymph’ in Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borow (ll. 42–3). Lady Fairfax does appear in Upon Appleton House, but only in a dependent and conventional female role: she is governess to Lord Fairfax’s governor (l. 299), a figure in the Vere pedigree (l. 492), daughter of ‘starry Vere’ (l. 724), and one of the two ‘glad Parents’ who are to make destiny their choice in the disposition of their daughter (l. 7434). But if the moral and masculine integrity of Lord Fairfax were the key to Marvell’s representation of the estate in this poem, then Lady Fairfax’s role had to be carefully circumscribed, for Marvell’s stress on the scrupulousness of Lord Fairfax’s conscience and on the inwardness of retirement could hardly have accommodated such an outspoken helpmeet. In years when the intrusion of women into politics drew so much male ire, few women were more notorious than Anne Lady Fairfax.59 She had twice interrupted the King’s trial in January 1649 with loud denunciations from the gallery in Westminster Hall; in the spring of 1650 she had successfully pressed her husband not to command against the Scots; and now in the spring and summer of 1651 she was known to be in contact with that Presbyterian-royalist cause which came to crisis in August.60 To have admitted such a figure into the text of Lord Fairfax’s poem would surely have been to compromise the Lord General’s autonomy, to raise loud and vexing questions not only about his moral stance but even about his patriarchal authority.61 That the poet may have had some interest of his own in admitting such questions into the vicinity of his text is also true; but to have raised them in the figure of Lady Fairfax herself would have been to risk losing control over them. These delicate domesticities nevertheless pressed on Marvell’s history of the nunnery, although not by name. They did so in a manner which may prove key to the relationship of poet and patron. 59 For a survey of female militancy in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, see Stevie Davis, Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution (London, 1998). Perhaps the most insightful commentary remains K. Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present 13 (1958), 42–62; cf. Annabel Patterson on the role of Lady Fairfax, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, 1978), 96. 60 For Lady Fairfax at the King’s trial, see C.V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (London, 1964), 100, 117–18, 126, 143–4. Lord Lisle, on the council of state, noted Lady Fairfax’s pressure on her husband in 1650 to decline the Scottish venture, while the equally well-placed Bulstrode Whitelocke noted that Fairfax ‘att first seemed to like well’ of the Scottish campaign, ‘butt afterwards being hourly perswaded to the contrary by the presbiterians & by his own Lady, who was a great Patronesse of them, . . . declared himselfe unsatisfyed’ (Historical Manuscripts Commission Report, De L’Isle and Dudley Mss., (London, 1966), 6: 477; The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675, ed. Ruth Spalding (British Academy, Records of Social and Economic History, new series, XIII, 1990), 260); for Lady Fairfax’s alleged associations in 1651, see the sources cited at note 38 above. 61 See on this score the contemporary scurrilities noted by Hopper, ‘Black Tom’, 194–5, 202.

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Lord Fairfax’s anxiety over the fate of what had once been Church lands, and not simply conventional anti-Catholicism, determined Marvell’s decision to include ancient estate history. Not for nothing was Fairfax’s household antiquary, Roger Dodsworth, engaged from the 1630s until his death in 1654 in the cooperative enquiry into the fate of Church lands that was to yield both Sir Henry Spelman’s ‘History of Sacrilege’ and the Monasticon Anglicanum (1655) of Dodsworth and William Dugdale.62 As important, the imminent and deliberate transmission of the estate through the female line—and by consigning the estate to his daughter Fairfax was directly challenging the masculine descent of an entail— turned Marvell’s gaze back towards the last instance in this family when a female had shaped inheritance and destiny.63 The poet seized on this for his own purposes, for once he had decided on the inclusion of this history it developed an additional and more pointed design. Marvell’s ridicule of gender inversion in the case of the noisy and belligerent nuns allowed what was, for this household, dangerous matter to surface. In the late 1640s nothing had been more prominent in Lord Fairfax’s public reputation than his political passivity, and it was that reputation which had given such a frisson to the performance at the King’s trial of Anne Lady Fairfax.64 We must wonder whether her conduct is echoed, even ridiculed, in the stentoriousness of Anne, Prioress Langton. Whiting’s Albino and Bellama had given Marvell the figure of a belligerent abbess;65 he now applied it for his own purposes, surely to Lady Fairfax rather than to Prioress Langton, for it hardly needs remarking that Lady Fairfax’s material presence and her reputation were a good deal more obvious to the tutor at Nun Appleton than anything he might have heard about Prioress Langton, resident a century and a half earlier.66 To imagine verbal warfare as 62 For Monasticon, see Jennifer Andersen, ‘Structuring Images: Readers and Institutions in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature’ (PhD thesis, Yale University, 1996), 180–8; for Dodsworth, Dugdale, and Spelman see the ODNB. 63 See, for the entail, Lee Erickson, ‘Marvell’s Upon Appleton House and the Fairfax Family’, English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979), 158–68; also Brian Patton, ‘Preserving Property: History, Genealogy, and Inheritance in “Upon Appleton House”’, Renaissance Quarterly 49:4 (1996), 833–4, 836. 64 Hopper, ‘Black Tom’, 191–3; Marvell glances at this reputation when he introduces Lady Fairfax as ‘starry Vere’, a reference to her father’s crest and his greatest exploit. 65 William A. McClung points out that Prioress Langton had long been dead by the time of William Fairfax’s assault on the nunnery and argues that Marvell wholly imagined the scene: The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry (Berkeley, 1977), 166, note 23, and cf. Erickson, ‘Marvell’s Upon Appleton House’, 160–1. Recently, Ian Parker has pointed out that Marvell lifted the figure of the belligerent abbess from a contemporary printed source, Nathaniel Whiting’s Pleasant History of Albino and Bellona; the implication of that adaptation for the dating of Marvell’s lyrics is a striking matter to which we shall turn in the Appendix. 66 Lady Fairfax was obviously and in her own right a complex figure; in 1657 William Dugdale reported the attempts of those arriviste ‘Proud tits’, Lady Fairfax and her daughter,

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the crux of William Fairfax’s conquest of the nunnery, and thus to allegorize Lady Fairfax as Prioress Langton, was to raise, and surely subversively, the politics of gender in this household. Marvell may not have known that Lord Fairfax’s grandfather had foreseen family troubles in the present Lord Fairfax’s willingness to be ‘much led by his wife’; Marvell certainly did not know of Lucy Hutchinson’s sadness that Fairfax’s Independent chaplains ‘could not endure to come into the Generall’s presence while she was there’, and that ‘the Generall had an unquiet, unpleasant life with her, who drove away from him many of those friends in whose conversation he found much sweetenesse’.67 But he surely felt emboldened to highlight female aggression by the political drama then unfolding. In the bitter struggles of the Interregnum, the parallel between the ecclesiastical disciplines of Presbyterianism and Roman Catholicism was often drawn: each church hankered, their enemies claimed, to become the visible church triumphant.68 And in the Scottish crises of 1650 and 1651 prominent English Presbyterians were tempted to give their support to the king and kirk to the north. For that cause Christopher Love, the London Presbyterian divine, was to die on the scaffold in August of 1651, and with that cause Lady Fairfax was—and was known to be—dangerously associated. Satire of the temptations of a visible church—with all the appeal that these temptations allegedly held for assertive women—was Marvell’s entry to the last case of female inheritance on this estate; it may also have been a discreet and carefully veiled way of seeking to distance his patron from the pro-Scottish and pro-Stuart advice his wife had offered in 1650 and which she was suspected to be offering again. But the degree to which Marvell intended these materials to be open to Lord Fairfax is difficult to calculate. Indeed, once we identify such sharp to intercede with the Protector for the royalist Duke of Buckingham. Such animosity for Lady Fairfax was surely personal rather than partisan, for Dugdale had had close contacts with the Fairfax household in 1650–1652 through his friend, collaborator, and fellow antiquarian Roger Dodsworth, a retainer of Fairfax and cousin of Fairfax’s secretary Rushworth. Dodsworth had himself been confident enough that Fairfax would command against the Scots: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 5th Report (1876), 177; The Life, Diary and Correspondence of Sir William Dugdale, ed. William Hamper (London, 1827), especially 235, 245. We might note that repeatedly in 1650 the royalist news-sheet The Man in the Moon alleged Lord Fairfax’s cuckoldry, and while the poem offers no hint of sexual misdoings within the Fairfax family, the canard certainly gave point to rumours of Fairfax’s subordination:David Underdown, A Freeborn People (Oxford, 1996), 102–3. 67 See ODNB for ‘Anne Lady Fairfax’, and Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of Colonel John Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland (Oxford, 1973), 168; see also Erickson, ‘Marvell’s Upon Appleton House’, 161, for a discussion of the first Lord Fairfax’s fears. 68 See for example Sterry’s sermon on the 1651 victory at Worcester, whose argument is summed up in its title, England’s Deliverance from the Northern Presbytery Compared with Its Deliverance from the Roman Papacy. More famous testimonials to this association are Milton’s ‘New presbyter is but old priest writ large’, and chapter 47 of Hobbes’s Leviathan.

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implications in the nunnery episode the perennial issue of the audience of a manuscript poem that may or may not have been presented to the Lord General poses itself with a new force. Whom might Marvell have imagined as his possible and potential readers, and to what degree did obscurity and veiling select and control the reception of the poem and its arguments? The strident anti-Catholicism provided of course its own bait. Had Marvell’s text passed before the eyes of Lady Fairfax, likely enough she would have been more dazzled by the treatment of popery than outraged by the caricature of the Amazon prioress. We can only wonder what degree of comprehension the poet may have intended Lord Fairfax to achieve in the mazes—sexual as well as moral, religious, and familial—of this narration. Issues of readership and application may also have determined the perplexing tone of the last stanza of this poem. The oddness of its details, at once flat and particular, contrast sharply with the extravagant panegyric that precedes it; those details would have delivered Lord Fairfax, Marvell’s dedicatee and surely his imagined reader, into an abrupt and ambiguous present. At day’s close the characters in the scene, poet and protégée, idler and innocent, watch the salmon-fishers emerging from the river. And the present moment is not theirs alone. The ‘rational Amphibii’ (l. 774) signal, as many critics have noted, universal dimensions of the reflective moment;69 but the danger of this particular moment is also palpable. Men have the capacity to act in time and to retreat from history: so much have poet and protégée learned. But if the sense of cosmic menace in the final couplet seems overwrought when applied to these characters, it is not difficult to guess whom the narrator thought it might envelop. The stanza is a waiting place for Maria, perhaps for her tutor; but how long in the summer of 1651 could options remain open for Lord Fairfax? In a poem whose every transition has its rationale, the care and intent with which the final episodes move away from Lord Fairfax need to be remarked. His brooding presence is felt throughout the poem; he is the figure through whom so much of the history recorded in the verse is transmitted to the future. Yet he is left curiously suspended, and almost evacuated from the poem’s climax. Recognizing the etiquette of clientage, the poet is throughout remarkably sensitive to the person of the patron, to his moral dilemma, to his scrupulous conscience. Concluding with Lord Fairfax would have been intrusive, a solecism on the scale of admitting Lady Fairfax into the drama. Since the poem is in an important sense 69 Margoliouth long ago noted Marvell’s echo of Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, I. 34, ‘man that great and true amphibium’, P&L 1:293; and cf. Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art, 245–6.

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about the future and since Lord Fairfax’s bearing on any future—whether political, dynastic, or tenurial—was uncertain, Marvell’s solution was to turn his gaze and the gaze of his poem directly onto Maria. This had the added advantage of eliding the tenurial and dynastic discord threatened by Fairfax’s decision to break the entail, normalizing that breach by framing it in a grander historical perspective. The poem’s stress on a descent of heroism and on prophecy was solace for the imminent extinction of the direct male line. Just as surely, the poem’s close covers with providentialist moralizing Fairfax’s assertion of human will over legal convention: ‘While her glad Parents most rejoice, | And make their Destiny their Choice’ (ll. 743–44)—a union of biology and tenure that would mark a triumph of the will in both senses of that term. It is on characters whose capacity to make decisions is necessarily limited, the child and the servant, that Marvell lavishes his attention at the poem’s close. Granted, the disposition of figures across the ninety-seven stanzas may have been determined in part by the way in which Marvell decided to sew together the pieces of a composition that he likely enough did not write through from its beginning to its end. But there can be no question that the exclusion of Lord Fairfax from the last third of the poem was a matter of tact and of tactics. To move instead from that ‘trifling Youth’ (l. 652), the figure through whom the poet at once diminishes and elaborates his own significance on the estate—though he had so little part to play in ordering either Nun Appleton’s or England’s destiny—to a celebration of Maria, the vessel and emblem of the Fairfaxian future, and then to the cryptic images of the poem’s last stanza, enables moral spectacle, family history, and perhaps above all philosophical generality to override the anxious present. Might it have been a consolation to Lord Fairfax as well as a diversion to the poet to ponder the problem of choice in proximity to figures whose very presence served to question agency? Surely Marvell’s fluency with metaphysics, spiritualities, and philosophical meditation—perhaps consolation and justification and extenuation for those who like himself had in the 1640s wavered and trimmed and turned aside from commitment—had found its ideal occasion in a patron famously ambivalent and famous too for scrupulous ethics. And how beautifully Marvell plays his metaphysical hand in this poem. But Upon Appleton House was not the only work of this moment to allow Marvell’s philosophizing a home in his patron’s taste. The Garden, Marvell’s most famous rendering of ecstatic absorption in a green world, was we argue also written on Fairfax’s estate.70 Indeed, appreciating how fashionable was such spirituality in the early 1650s, scholars have long 70

See Appendix.

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understood such spirituality as a probable context not just for Upon Appleton House but for The Garden too.71 And if The Garden was conceived in the vicinity of Upon Appleton House, we might go beyond spiritual markers to note how Marvell situates both poems not only in a specific place and time but also within a family’s history. The final stanza of The Garden famously interrogates human time: How well the skilful Gardner drew Of flow’rs and herbes this Dial new; Where from above the milder Sun Does through a fragrant Zodiack run; And, as it works, th’ industrious Bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholsome Hours Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs! (ll. 65–72)

Such attentiveness might well remind us of Marvell’s gestures in the closing stanza of Upon Appleton House: But now the Salmon-Fishers moist Their Leathern Boats begin to hoist; And, like Antipodes in Shoes, Have shod their Heads in their Canoos. How Tortoise like, but not so slow, These rational Amphibii go? Let’s in: for the dark Hemisphere Does now like one of them appear. (ll. 769–76)

And, more broadly, a new attentiveness to time is characteristic of this historical moment.72 Could it be that ‘an Accurate Dyall for York meridian . . . being a new Invention’ attracted the attention of the Fairfax household and its poet just as in 1651 it attracted the attention of some Yorkshire 71 For reflection on the 1650s context of its spiritual themes, see Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 152. Conventional assumptions that The Garden was composed during Marvell’s sojourn at Nun Appleton and in proximity to his other pastorals were challenged by Allan Pritchard in 1983 (‘Marvell’s “The Garden”: A Restoration Poem?’, Studies in English Literature 23:3 (1983), 371–88); subsequently, a number of scholars endorsed and even extended Pritchard’s claims by re-dating to the late 1660s not just The Garden but also The Mower Against Gardens. As we argue in the Appendix, these arguments rest on a number of questionable assumptions and are not in sum persuasive; they also raise methodological issues about the relations between print and manuscript to which we shall there return. 72 See the observation on contemporary fascination with timepieces: in Takashi Yoshinaka, Marvell’s Ambivalence: Religion and Politics of Imagination in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2011), 178–9.

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gentlemen who moved within Fairfax circles?73 And might we not then read in the ‘dial new’ (l. 66), that wonderful and enigmatic figure which closes The Garden, a tribute both to current fashions in the neighbourhood and to a long-standing Fairfaxian preoccupation with the orders of time, even—in the case of Lord Fairfax’s grandfather, the first Thomas Lord Fairfax who had built the house and garden at Nun Appleton—an obsession with timekeeping?74 The Garden’s final stanzas have often seemed to generalize, to universalize, this lyric: in fact, and in typically Marvellian fashion and as with Upon Appleton House, the computation of time brings the poem back into the traditions, occasions, and tastes of this family. With its larger argument too, The Garden performs work of service: not only with the time-bound and timeless gestures of pastoral—et in Arcadia ego—but also within the more urgent calendar of the early 1650s. The Garden recognizes, and in the most diplomatic fashion, how contingent and how fragile is the world constructed within the borders and boundaries of an estate. But while the oak, the laurel, and the bays of the first stanza gesture in conventional ways towards a public order from which Lord Fairfax had detached himself and from which he had perforce distanced his poet, the scenes of vegetal embrace, no less than the parallel scenes in Upon Appleton House, suggest the complexity of work whether complementary or consolatory that both poems were doing for the patron as well as the poet. Such broad philosophizing underscores the patronal focus of much of Marvell’s poetry. The chronology needs to be remarked. The more formal panegyric Marvell wrote for Oliver Cromwell, The First Anniversary, was

73 See Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b. 333 (4). The ‘Lady Fairfax’ of the Goodricke brothers’ correspondence was from the other branch of the family; nevertheless, the Goodrickes were at the time of the correspondence about the clock in communication with Thomas Lord Fairfax’s old friend and deputy Major-General Lambert. Ironically, a ‘Nun Appleton Dial’, a device for a transom window and currently in the York Art Gallery, was fashioned in 1670 for Fairfax’s successor at Nun Appleton, Sir William Milner, replete with motifs that grace Milner’s coat of arms and flourishing conventional Ovidian tags about the seasons. The turning of the seasons is scarcely Marvell’s concern in The Garden, but the ‘Nun Appleton Dial’ underscores the materiality of sundials in this time and place. See Christopher Daniel, ‘Shedding a Glorious Light’, Country Life, 181 (26 February 1987), 72–5; . Nicholas von Maltzahn has recently challenged arguments for a Yorkshire locale of The Garden with the claim that melons do not grow in the county, now or then (‘Marvell’s Restoration Garden’, Andrew Marvell Society Newsletter 1:1 (2009), ). Current Yorkshire seed catalogues cast doubt on the modern part of that claim; and of course Marvell’s vegetal imagination while often luxuriantly particular was hardly bounded by the tide of Humber. 74 ODNB, ‘Fairfax, Thomas, first Lord Fairfax of Cameron’.

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to be just as knowing in its appraisal of the person, even the sensibility, of its subject, and just as preoccupied with orders and rhetorics of time as the earlier poem; but now Marvell’s praise is utterly devoid of metaphysics, and suitably so. The very different tone of The First Anniversary has been attributed to Marvell’s decision at last to engage: a man doing politics, as politics is conventionally understood, writes quite differently from a man secluded in a country estate. But Marvell’s circumstance as writer of the two poems was strikingly similar: with each, client and servant addresses patron. What has changed above all is the identity of the patron. If we are to explain the absence of philosophy and meditation from the later poem we must consider the consequences of addressing a patron who was the model of an active life, who was to confess his own unreflective nature,75 and who scarcely needed in the winter of 1654–1655 the extenuations of philosophy. This point seems reinforced by the other work that emerged from this moment, Marvell’s poem Bermudas, written in the household of John Oxenbridge, clergyman and Fellow of Eton College. The poem, with its providentialist spirituality and geographic specificity, is obviously a tribute to the conscience and career of his godly host;76 its engagement with time is neither domestic nor apocalyptic but hymnal: Thus sung they, in the English boat, An holy and a chearful Note, And all the way, to guide their Chime, With falling Oars they kept the time. (ll. 37–40)

Marvell’s verse is surely a poetry of affinity and occasion, and the company he kept determined his tonalities; but affinity and occasion also struck deeper notes and more complex harmonies. Marvell’s articulation in such rapid order of the political dilemmas facing two successive patrons, in their day the most important men in England, cannot but raise broader questions about service and ideology. Service and patronage were critical in the structure and mood of Marvell’s verse; and of course service and patronage were central to the unfolding of Marvell’s whole career. Local connections must have obtained for the young man from Hull that fruitful post in the household of the former Lord General, neighbour to and once defender of Hull and still in 1650 its Governor; and the ties so strengthened must in turn have leveraged the 75 Derek Hirst, ‘The Lord Protector’, in J.S. Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London, 1990), 133. 76 The poem is as well a literary engagement with Edmund Waller’s The Battle of the Summer Islands (1645); see Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 55.

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poet into the service of the Lord Protector. For such were the realities and exigencies of patronage politics that the backing of the government’s other poet, John Milton, could scarcely have provided sufficient entrée into Cromwell’s entourage; but Lord Fairfax remained active as a patron and protector, with access to the new powers, even after his withdrawal from the central stage.77 When the world turned at Oliver’s death, we might even wonder whether Lord Fairfax played some part in bringing Marvell onto the parliamentary stage.78 And when Fairfax removed himself from politics, Marvell seems to have transferred his loyalties to Fairfax’s son-in-law, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham—or rather, to have transferred them back again, since Marvell had been close to the Villiers brothers in the 1640s.79 Perhaps Marvell provided a connection, perhaps a service, which facilitated the tenurial and marital association of Buckingham and Fairfax in the 1650s. To dwell repeatedly upon the great man in history—for whatever reason, whether instrumental clientage, Machiavellian ideology, or psychology—was of course a way for a young man from middling circumstances in provincial England to shape a political as well as a literary career. We should remind ourselves that Marvell made the most remarkable political poem in the language out of just such an exercise, dwelling on himself as he dwelt on great men in time. The real continuity among the Horatian Ode, Upon Appleton House, and The First Anniversary, and the continuity over two very puzzling decades of Marvell’s career, from 1649 through the Restoration, lies then not only in the sensibility of the poet but also in the presence—or the absence—of such figures. In An Horatian Ode he announces his preoccupation with the themes of ambition and greatness. He was to play out those themes variously, at first in panegyric and later, of necessity, in satire on the persons of a series of great men:

77 British Library, Additional MSS 21421, fo. 70; Historical Manuscript Commission, 5th Report (1876), 177. See also Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Council,’ in Patrick Little, ed., The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007), 92. 78 After absenting himself from politics throughout Oliver’s Protectorate, Lord Fairfax returned triumphantly to the head of Yorkshire’s list of representatives in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament. It may not be a coincidence that his daughter’s former tutor made his first entry to Westminster at the same time, as member for Hull, while his kinsman and former secretary, the historian John Rushworth, consolidated his claims on a seat at Berwick, to which he had been elected in a 1657 by-election. Marvell clearly received governmental support in the election (see Chronology, 55–6); but it is equally clear that local and family alignments also played a part, and in 1659 Fairfax was unquestionably a significant factor in local alliance. 79 For Marvell’s connection in the 1640s and beyond to the house of Villiers, see McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 25–8; see as well Plays, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings Associated with George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, ed. Robert Hume and Harold Love, 2 vols (Oxford, 2007), 2: 55, note 16.

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Lord Fairfax, the Lord Protector, Captain General Albemarle, and Lord Chancellor Clarendon.80 At all points he showed a most exact sense of the particularities of his subjects: of Clarendon’s affectations of grandeur, of Albemarle’s bearing, of Cromwell’s dynamism, of Thomas Lord Fairfax’s moral scrupulousness and philosophizing hesitancy. The acquisition of a patron was crucial to Marvell’s literary production, yet the meaning of that relationship for its principals has not been sufficiently pondered. Marvell and Fairfax provided refuge for one another in the summer of 1651; the patron proffered sustenance and a circumstance of sociability, the poet a vision of estate and history within which Fairfax might find his own form of extenuation and shelter. For Marvell that vision allowed aesthetic shelter, perhaps moral elevation, as he contemplated the antiquity of patronage: the incident of Jonson at the Sidneys’ looms at the opening of the poem, and the examples of Horace and Maecenas, Virgil and Augustus, were of course also ready to hand. But as he went beyond the praise of virtue to offer his patron the pleasures and impulses of pastoralism, whether in its conventional modes or in the sometimes stylized, often single-minded, gardening of defeated politicians in these years,81 the poet could find in the very argument of aesthetics a way to counterpoise clientage with the image of imaginative freedom. And if the sublimity of Marvell’s verse lay just beyond the comprehension of even this most literary of patrons, its pleasures would not have been compromised for the poet; they may even have been augmented. For Marvell’s negotiation of dependency and shelter was always complex. In formal terms, his tie to Fairfax was straightforward enough. But a client’s shelter is inescapably predicated on subordination; and however ancient the convention, however deeply written it was into early modern bodies and lives, and whatever satisfactions and protections it brought, clientage brought as well discomfiture, even resistance.82 James C. Scott 80 The role of Archibald Douglas, the sole object of panegyric in The last Instructions (ll.649–96), in such a sequence raises interesting questions about the organizing force and masculine identity of these figures; see Steven N. Zwicker, ‘Virgins and Whores: The Politics of Sexual Misconduct in the 1660s’, in Condren and Cousins, eds, The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, 100–1. 81 The ranks of republican politician-gardeners include John Lambert, the greatest parliamentarian commander after Cromwell and Fairfax (ODNB, under the heading, ‘Lambert’), and the regicide colonel John Hutchinson (Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson with a Fragment of Autobiography, ed. James Sutherland (Oxford, 1973), 206n, 207). Cromwell’s own horticultural tastes may be hinted at in An Horatian Ode, ll. 31–2. Fairfax’s own vegetal aesthetic appears in the ODNB entry for ‘Thomas 3rd Lord Fairfax’. 82 Marvell was certainly not alone in suffering the ambiguities of his position as a member of the household and yet not of the family he so celebrated. The newsletter-writer Captain Rossingham apparently felt able to satirize the Countess of Northumberland repeatedly in the 1650s from within the Percy household, but he earned repeated beatings in

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has made us familiar with the uneasy dynamic of hierarchy and subordination, the costs of the so-often unspoken mechanisms that drove those relations. May not Andrew Marvell and his writings exemplify, and inimitably express, Scott’s subtitle, ‘Hidden Transcripts’?83 The domesticity of Upon Appleton House, its intimacy with the personal concerns of members of that household, animates many of the poem’s details; such familiarity surely accounts for elided expressions and allusive references. But the poet was prepared as well to make much of the illusion of discomfiture, most obviously in the narrator’s extravagance and shamefaced infantilism in the forest and on the riverbank; indeed the last scenes of the poem are as much celebrations of the narrator’s embarrassment as they are of Maria’s virtue. Off-setting the portrait of his pupil are materials that display, even highlight, his own fatuity:84 Oh what a Pleasure ‘tis to hedge My Temples here with heavy sedge; Abandoning my lazy Side, Stretcht as a Bank unto the Tide; Or to suspend my sliding Foot On the Osiers undermined Root, And in its Branches tough to hang, While at my Lines the Fishes twang! But now away my Hooks, my Quills, And Angles, idle Utensils. The young Maria walks to night: Hide trifling Youth thy Pleasures slight. ’Twere shame that such judicious Eyes Should with such Toyes a Man surprize; She that already is the Law Of all her Sex, her Ages Aw. (ll. 641–56)

It could not but have been apparent to Lord Fairfax as Marvell’s actual or imagined reader that autobiography was folded here, as at other points, into the fiction of the narrator, underscoring the poet’s barrenness at an age—nearly thirty—when Fairfax had both won glory and become a the process; the delicacy and the extraordinary detail of the instructions given, at the Restoration, by one minister to another contemplating employment in a household including females is suggestive as well. Wiltshire Record Office, Ailesbury MS 1300/452; Somerset Record Office, MS DD/PH/205, 142–7. 83 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990). 84 Cf. Elsie Duncan-Jones, ‘Marvell: A Great Master of Words’, The Proceedings of the British Academy 61 (1975), 280.

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father. The narrator’s foolish embarrassment deliberately confesses a failure not only of moral purpose but also of personal capacity. Some of that failure is at first suggested in the forest retreat, where Fairfax’s interest in neo-Platonism allows—perhaps invites—the poet to explore what were clearly his own fantasies of the green world. The inversions and delusions of that withdrawal—its extremes challenging conventional ideals of masculine capacity and performance in the world—suggest the gendered as well as moral stakes that were implicated for Marvell in dependency and isolation. He raises those stakes, psychologically and even eschatologically, at Maria’s entry; and it is not only idleness that shames this angler: ’Twere shame that such judicious Eyes | Should with such Toyes a Man surprize’ (ll. 653–4). The language, inescapably sexual, or rather autoerotic, suggests wastefulness, a trifling of a different kind.85 These scenes perform, we suggest, distinct but not wholly discrete functions on behalf of the patron and of the poet. On the one hand, the self-exposure and the textualized embarrassment in the forest and on the riverbank provide topical leverage: the narrator sacrifices sexual selfesteem on behalf of the patriarchal destiny of Lord Fairfax. The images of fruitless and careless sexuality offer a striking contrast to the heterosexual discipline that defines the presentation of Maria and her parents (ll. 721–4), and they focus the theme of probity on the destiny of family and nation. The closing solace that Marvell chose to offer a patron whose military and political destiny no longer lay clear was thus a celebration of the progenitive, a role by which Fairfax, lacking a son as well as a career, could at least and at last claim his destiny. But there is an oddity in trailing not just selfhood but sexual waste at a moment when the poem is busy projecting the patron’s command over destiny, and this cannot be wholly subsumed under conventional topics or themes. The pleasures of this scene are surely more opaque, for the revelation of intimacies in a text dedicated to the patron suggests an unusual approach to power. Self-abasement may have been a costly testimonial to the authority of the patriarch, but it also hints at a rather different interest in the disclosure of secrets. Compensation for dependency, for the loss of autonomy, is part of our reading of these gestures, but there is something more. Lord Fairfax’s occasions invited his poet to indulge non-reproductive dreams of his own. Sensual indulgence seems played out at too great a length in the forest and on the riverbank to function merely on behalf of an overt thematic 85 For a seventeenth-century reader, those lines must have connoted the ‘amorous sport’ which the Oxford English Dictionary gives as the primary meaning of ‘toy’ as a substantive.

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and moral project in the poem. Could it also have been a deeper project of the poet? The lesbianism at the nunnery—an emphasis that Marvell did not absorb from his source in Whiting’s Pleasant History—surely functioned in a similar way. It has a perfectly conventional force in demonstrating the deviancy of popery. Marvell also turns the scene to instrumental use on his patron’s behalf: Lord Fairfax was suffering pangs of conscience over an estate once despoiled from the Church, and the poet directly assuages that conscience with his reassurance that Nun Appleton was ‘no Religious House till now’ (l. 280).86 Lord Fairfax was also, we must suppose, feeling a certain anxiety at breaking the entail on the estate, and the reassurance the poet offers does double duty for the patron since it also allows the birthday tribute to Mary to emerge from a pointed emphasis on heterosexual rectitude and progenitive fulfilment, or at least progenitive consolation. And yet the patron’s plight as well as his needs offered an opening to the poet that was still more gratifying. For Lord Fairfax was wedged between an outspoken and politically damaging wife and a daughter whose place in destiny’s designs Marvell was strategically elevating even as his patron adjusted to political and dynastic effacement. Fairfax’s dilemmas thus allowed space to those conventionally marginalized; and marginality was, as we shall argue throughout this work, a space and an identity that Andrew Marvell made his own. We are therefore close to understanding how the nunnery allowed Marvell the opportunity to explore sexual deviancy together with religious sociality—it allowed him, that is, to explore the social compensation for and in non-heterosexuality. We suggest that there was in this gesture an element of normalization for one whose own desires were not comfortably housed under a patriarchal roof.87 Literary patronage is often imagined as an economic construct, an exchange of benefits, but when we acknowledge its inevitable psychological implications as well as its formal institutions, when we recognize that it could not be exclusively a matter of market or power, we may apprehend the presence, or at least the ghost, of patronage in all the themes, arguments, and aesthetic decisions of Upon Appleton House. It is a poem that 86 The ODNB entries on Fairfax’s antiquarian client Roger Dodsworth and on Dodsworth’s friend Sir Henry Spelman, author of the as-yet-unpublished History and Fate of Sacrilege, make clear some of the context of Fairfax’s concerns. 87 In the years of his pamphlet career, Marvell’s sexual identity was to become a matter of repeated gossip and innuendo. For an introduction to such matters, see Legouis, Andrew Marvell, (Oxford, 1968), 199, and William Empson, Using Biography (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 14–16; both discuss the erotic displacements in the lyric poetry as well as the later pamphlet attacks on Marvell’s sexual reputation. More recently, Paul Hammond has conjectured Marvell’s sexual identity in ‘Marvell’s Sexuality’, The Seventeenth Century 11:1 (1996), 87–123. We return in detail to such matters in Chapter 3.

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imagines the patron as well as his poet in their historical and psychological circumstance, and which makes sublime—for strategic as well as aesthetic reasons—the imperfection, the incompleteness, and the contingency of this world. To recognize the complexity of its programme is to register the brilliance of Marvell’s achievement as he so gracefully and knowingly addressed Lord Fairfax’s occasions that momentous summer and in so doing created the space to explore purposes of his own. What those may have been is the subject of this book.

2 Toils of Patriarchy Progenitiveness and descent, issues that so concerned Marvell in Upon Appleton House, reverberate through his career. He made one of his most striking addresses to the regime of paternity in August 1667 when he wrote to console Sir John Trott on the death of a son and the imminent erasure of a line. Within this letter’s scriptural narratives counselling Christian fortitude, Marvell urged the conventional wisdom of proportionality in the management of grief: the public catastrophes of the mid1660s—plague, fire, the Dutch fleet in the Medway—lend perspective to private loss. Yet here is a plangent tone, and a directness of confession, most unusual among Marvell’s texts.1 The grief of a father and the extinction of patrilineal descent occasioned a powerful turbulence: fatherhood and the loss of sons prompted Marvell to an anatomy of his own condition and drew from him the striking confession of a vacant and useless life—‘But I my self, who live to so little purpose, can have little authority or ability to advise you’ (P&L 2:313). The strength and the danger of familial attachment form the text and subtext of the letter to Trott and of its sources. The letter abounds in biblical figures modelling conformity to God’s purpose, even to the hazarding of sons—Eli, Moses, Abraham, God himself. But at the centre Marvell narrates a very different exemplum: Zipporah, though the delay had almost cost her husband his life, yet when he did but circumcise her Son, in a womanish pevishness reproacht Moses as a bloody husband. (P&L 2:312)

Zipporah is a curious figure of instruction, though her reproachfulness warns Trott against complaint. Her pride and anger, even the attempt to shield her son from the pain of circumcision, lend themselves to other purposes. The biblical story, with its mutilation of the son and its quite 1 It is the judgement of Annabel Patterson that the Trott letter was ‘a textbook consolation that could have been written by and to anybody’; see her Censorship and Interpretation: The Condition of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, WI, 1984), 266, note 27. See also Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven, 2010), 201–2.

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remarkable triangulation of domestic affiliations, had an allure for this poet. Here he discovered the termagant wife, the father endangered, and the vulnerable child; indeed the child written out of history and thereby paternity denied. The measure of the story’s hold lies in its retelling in terms rather different from those of Marvell’s scriptural source: And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision. (Exodus (AV) 4:24–6)

In his application, Marvell transfers the blade and thus the seal of the covenant from Zipporah to Moses: ‘when he did but circumcize her Son’. No longer quite the biblical chronicle of the loss of a father’s authority, Marvell’s narrative now underscores the wounding contradictions of patriarchy. There is an unusual argumentative and surely psychic economy in so rearticulating a biblical model that it can at once conjure the sorrows of fatherhood, the violence implicit in masculine sexuality, filial violation in circumcision, the assertiveness of woman, and the promise of national covenant. Whatever Marvell’s aspirations and fears for the nation in the summer of 1667, and whatever his consolations for Trott, this letter’s strange acknowledgement of the binding power of patriarchy exacted from him as well a powerful act of self-reflection: ‘it is as if a man should dissect his own body and read the Anatomy Lecture’ (P&L 2:312).2 The figure of an anatomy lecture read out by its subject directs our attention to the reflexivity of this entire exercise: the painful consolation drawn from the non-progenitive male in his own doomed line for this grieving father, the rewriting of sacred history to endow fatherhood with the promise of covenant, the reordering of gender relations to reassert masculine authority.3 All these issues are simultaneously at play in Marvell’s letter and they must help explain its presence as the solitary piece of vernacular prose in the 1681 folio, Miscellaneous Poems. Our purpose in this chapter is to follow Marvell into the anatomy lesson, and to explore through his writings some of the meanings of 2 The whole of Marvell’s complex and volatile engagement with the figure of patriarchy must challenge Michael McKeon’s scheme for a fairly smooth transition from patriarchy to politeness; see his ‘Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (1995), 295–322. 3 On the meanings of dissection and anatomy, see Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York, 1995). For the ineffectuality of the childless male, see Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Childless Men in Early Modern England’, in Berry and Foyster, eds, Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), 178–9.

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affective attachment within the order of patriarchy. No less than Marvell, others could read the polemical and ideological force of the body politic and the body natural. When Marvell entered the Restoration controversies over toleration in 1672, his own body became a subject of published speculation. Scurrilous and partisan though Marvell’s anatomists may have been, they point a way to understand not only the peculiar narrative turn of the Trott letter but also the imaginative turns of Marvell’s entire career. In The Transproser Rehears’d, Samuel Butler, like Marvell an intimate of the Duke of Buckingham, claimed to figure to the life the notorious ‘instructor to the painter’.4 What he saw in Marvell’s figure as he observed him perched at the coffee house table, silent recorder of gossip and scandal, went beyond social pursuits: I should now in imitation of our Author proceed to his Personal Character, but I shall only advise the Painter if ever he draws him below the Wast, to follow the example of that Artist, who having compleated the Picture of a Woman, could at any time, with two strokes of his Pencil upon her Face, two upon her Breast, and two betwixt her Thighs: change her in an instant into Man: but after our Authors Female Figure is compleated, the change of Sex is far easier; for Nature, or Sinister Accident has rendred some of the Alteration-strokes useless and unnecessary.5

Here is asserted a form of identity that may remind us of the image and implications of circumcision in the letter to Trott; the reminder is all the stronger since it is in such terms that Marvell retaliated against his enemy Samuel Parker.6 But Butler did not use castration merely as response to the scurrility of Marvell’s Restoration polemics. In the culture of the early modern body politic, effeminacy of form always conjured a politics of behaviour. For this satirist, the politics were transparent: O marvellous Fate, O Fate full of marvel; That Nols Latin Pay two Clerks should deserve ill!

4 The Transproser Rehears’d (Oxford, 1673), 35. The authorship of this tract has been persuasively attributed to Samuel Butler: Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Samuel Butler’s Milton’, Studies in Philology 92 (1995), 482–95. 5 The Transproser Rehears’d, 134. As others have noted, the author of The Transproser Rehears’d was not alone in alleging Marvell’s sexual incapacity. See Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell (Oxford, 1968), 199; and, more recently, Paul Hammond, ‘Marvell’s Sexuality’, The Seventeenth Century 11 (1996), 87–123. 6 Neal Hackler, ‘A Subtle Circumcision in Marvell’s The rehearsal transpros’d, The Second Part’, Notes and Queries 57:1 (2010), 57–8. Marvell, of course, had his own interest in themes of castration; we know that the familiar lines—‘His green Seraglio has its Eunuchs too; | Lest any Tyrant him out-doe. | And in the Cherry he does Nature vex | To procreate without a Sex’ (Mower against Gardens, ll. 27–30)—takes images of castration into the garden. The topic was also on his mind in The Character of Holland: ‘While the fat steam of Female Sacrifice | Fills the Priests Nostrils and puts out his Eyes’ (ll. 91–2).

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Hiring a Gelding, and Milton the Stallion; His Latin was gelt, and turn’d pure Italian.7

Puns, allusions, and innuendo here compound Italianate aesthetics, practices, and politics. The lines boldly conflate castration with buggery, and private indecency with republican art and politics.8 Whatever the sexual force of the satirist’s charge, and however partisan his portrait, we too would contend that the figure uniting poet and politician was the body in its deficiencies and desires.9 Through that body, Marvell’s antagonist unwittingly suggested the unity of imagination that animated all the expressive modes Marvell deployed: lyric stillness, civic celebration, political satire, ecclesiastical controversy, parliamentary declamation. Modern scholars have attempted to argue the imaginative coherence of Marvell’s work through such constructions as the poet’s intellection,10 but such coherence must be rooted in the body and in lived circumstance. A structure of feeling, formed and driven by the position of the body within the constraints of prevailing political culture, shaped Marvell’s deepest and most abiding argument.

7

The Transproser Rehears’d, 135–6. For mid-century republicanism, see Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles (Cambridge 2004); and David Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society 1649–1776 (Stanford, 1994). The charge that sexual deviancy and republicanism were associated might have gained substance not just from Marvell and the Milton of the divorce tracts, but also from Marten, Challenor, Neville, and Thomas May, notorious loose-livers among the handful of doctrinaire republicans of mid-seventeenth-century England. Their foes would have argued that the connection between republicanism, with its obtuseness to lineal succession, and a non-monogamous sexuality was not coincidental. For the most extended riff on Marvell’s alleged castration and impotence, see ‘Love Letter to the Author of Rehersall Transprosed’, in Pierre Legouis’s transcription, Bodl. MS Eng. Poet d. 187; and for a detailed précis of the verse, see Legouis, Andrée Marvell: poète, puritain, patriote (Paris, 1928), 459–60. 9 Polemic use of the charges of sexual deviancy of course abounds in early modern satiric literature; what we should observe in this passage is the unusual conflation of buggery with castration, though we should note as well that The Transproser Rehears’d was not a singular text in conflating these charges; see Hammond, ‘Marvell’s Sexuality’, 93, 95, 97, and 101. 10 The classic proponents of this genre of Marvell criticism are surely Rosalie Colie (‘My Ecchoing Song’: Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton, 1970)), who refracts the whole of the career through the lyrics; John M. Wallace (Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1968)), who saw the loyalism of the Horatian Ode as both the emblem and unifying spirit of the literary and political careers; and David Norbrook (Writing the English Republic (Cambridge, 1999)), who sees in republicanism an ideological value that informs the whole. Some critics have, of course, denied the possibility of integrating this literary career. Thus, for example, Thomas N. Corns writes: ‘[Marvell’s] individual poems imply a system of values and a sensibility (sometimes a rather disconcerting one), but sentiment often comes with genre, model, and mode, and no single synthesizing voice may be convincingly postulated’; see his Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1992), 224. 8

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That argument encompassed the complex meanings, emotional as well as political and cultural, of masculine authority. One enduring political circumstance to which Marvell was subject was patriarchy; his enduring social circumstance—orphan and isolate, tutor and landless politician— was dependency, perhaps incompleteness. His enduring condition as writer was at once to yearn for shelter and to feel the pressures of patriarchy and dependency alike—and surely this is the drama condensed and enacted in that strange and purposeful selection and transposition of the biblical narrative of Moses and Zipporah. Throughout his work, Marvell was absorbed in a complex and fraught dialectic of idealization and subversion. The writing of that dialectic steadily turned not on political principle, nor on aesthetics, nor even on those conceptual binaries urged by Stuart Clark as the mental structures of the age, but on the body of innocent or androgyne confronting progenitor or patriarch.11 Each tormented lyric that pauses over couplings and partings, concealments and disclosures, impossibilities and desolations, little girls and dead lovers, can be seen as part of a programme that imagines the deconstruction of heterosexuality and of patriarchal authority, whose overt politics Marvell anatomizes in his poetry of public occasion and over whose internal dynamics he steadily broods. The costs and pressures of patriarchy are nowhere clearer than in Marvell’s great Yorkshire chorography, Upon Appleton House. The poem is of course apologia: Lord Fairfax’s political, dynastic, even marital, ineffectualities are softened and transmuted in a lyric tribute to masculine destiny, and brilliantly rewritten as a drama of protestant vigilance and paternal authority. But apologetics and exoneration, as we have seen, do not account for all the work of that text. The poem is an epyllion of voyeurism and a panegyric of self-display, and while it maps the Fairfax estate and its place in history, it also interrogates the body: politic, domestic, and sexual. Its architecture and occasion are service to Lord Fairfax, its meditations on history and conscience shaped exactly to his domestic and political predicaments.12 But there are materials within Upon Appleton House that escape Fairfax’s governance, and that even seem to escape the architectonics of this poem’s form. Why does it take twenty-three stanzas in the nunnery to expose the polemically familiar inversions and sensualities of Roman Catholicism? And why, in a poem devoted to Fairfaxian dynasty and destiny, should the narrator sprawl languidly across thirty-one stanzas of self-exploration and self-display?

11 12

Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford, 1997). See Chapter 1.

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Such disproportion, itself a sign of narrative disturbance, challenges the linear, progressive, indeed prophetic histories of this text.13 The digressions of nunnery, forest, and riverbank might seem to complement structures and themes of dynasty and purpose, but the poet’s long embrace of seduction and self-display tells a more unsettling story. The extent of mockery in the mock heroics with which Marvell figures the origins of the Fairfax house has become beautifully clear in the recent discovery that Marvell adapted Nathaniel Whiting’s Albino and Bellama for this scene. Marvell takes Whiting’s comic parental raid on a nunnery—‘The joyfull parents having got their daughter, | Gave a farewell unto the house with laughter’—and applies it to his own closing celebration of Fairfax’s mastery of fate, ‘While her glad Parents most rejoice, | And make their Destiny their Choice’ (ll. 743–4).14 The purposiveness of this adaptation and its application at such a crucial point in Marvell’s argument offer invaluable access to his method and approach. What we surmise is that the need to give legitimacy and cover to Fairfax’s attempt to break the entail on his estate and to his hold on former monastic property drove Marvell to turn in more than one way to other monastic heists, and not just to the story of the virgin Thwaites with which we are familiar. But we would go further when we observe the presence of Whiting’s materials in so much of the lyric verse that emerged from the Nun Appleton phase of Marvell’s career.15 We suggest that once Marvell discovered the hold of the nunnery on Lord Fairfax’s conscience, he quickly recognized what remarkable work with nuns and with this particular former nunnery Whiting’s popular text would enable him to do.16 If Lord Fairfax’s occasions prompted Marvell’s greatest poem, Lord Fairfax’s preoccupation with his nunnery occasioned and allowed Marvell’s strangest departures. The nunnery passage of Upon Appleton House recounts what may seem the obligatory Protestant commentary on the Roman Catholic challenge to heterosexual and domestic authority. The nuns overtly threaten Protestant vigilance and heterosexual proprieties, but Marvell goes far beyond Whiting’s rather crude and overtly heterosexual pastiche. In a poem whose occasions centre on genealogical dilemmas,

13 This point is developed by Anne Cotterill in Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford, 2004), chapter 2. 14 Cf. Nathaniel Whiting, The Pleasant Historie of Albino and Bellama (London, 1637), 70. 15 See Appendix for a, no doubt incomplete, list of Marvell’s borrowings from Whiting’s romance. 16 As Ian Parker has shown in ‘Marvell, Nathaniel Whiting, and Cowley’, Notes and Queries 57:1 (2010), 59–66, Marvell used Whiting as early as 1648 in his elegy on Lord Hastings.

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Marvell’s nuns offer reproductive alternatives, indeed a dazzling subversion of progenitiveness and descent, as well as of heterosexual authority, as they play within the nunnery. The seductive nun promises forms of immortality as well as the pleasures of narcissism to Isabel Thwaites: ‘But much it to our work would add ‘If here your hand, your Face we had: ‘By it we would our Lady touch; ‘Yet thus She you resembles much. ‘Some of your Features, as we sow’d, ‘Through ev’ry Shrine should be bestow’d. ‘And in one Beauty we would take ‘Enough a thousand Saints to make. (ll. 129–36)

Sewing was of course conventional woman’s work, and often enough a collective pastime or consolation, but the ‘Suttle Nuns’ (l. 94) lay claim to a veritable reproductive technology, other ways of sowing, multiplying, disseminating.17 The entire episode in the nunnery may gratify moralizing Protestants; it also indulges a series of speculations on female autonomy that question and counterpoint masculine prerogative. And we would point to compensation of another kind. What the nuns promise Isabel Thwaites within a same-sex community is the futurity, indeed the eternity, of art: portraiture that will distribute her face across a thousand altars. What the poem, with its scenes in the nunnery and on the riverbank, offers to Marvell is a way of imagining not simply the eternity of art but the cohabitation, the interdependence, of transcendence and asexual reproductivity. As we shall discover, he was repeatedly to dwell within this consoling and costly theme.18 Patriarchy not only stalks the nunnery, it hovers over all those scenes of inversion and postures of recumbency that so challenge destiny and conscience: lesbian retreat, the commingling of spiritual error with vegetal embrace, and most especially the collapse on the riverbank of masculine purposiveness into youthful and auto-erotic pleasures. The poem’s teasing fictions invite the knowing reader (perhaps even Thomas Lord Fairfax) to reflect on the narrator’s adventures on this imagined estate within the 17 For some account of the gendered economies of sewing, see L.Y. Lieb, ‘“The works of women are symbolical”: Needlework in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Life 10, 2 (1986), 28–44, and Michael Barth, Emblems for a Queen: the Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (London, 2008). 18 In the early 1670s, we should note, Marvell was to thrust ironically at Samuel Parker in exactly these terms: ‘Who could in reason expect that a man should in the same moments undertake the labour of an Author and a Father?’ (PW 1: 47).

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frame of Andrew Marvell’s sojourn at Nun Appleton. Was it a temptation then (as it surely is now) to read Andrew Marvell into the narrator ventriloquizing lesbian desire in the nunnery, or displaying himself in postures of exquisite sensuality? The narrator may have been caught unawares by the young Maria, but the poet’s calculation was more knowing. The projection of the actors in this scene, Andrew Marvell and Mary Fairfax, in transparent and daring fictions before the critical and upright intelligence of Lord Fairfax must have excited—and been intended to excite— complex emotions in reader and writer alike. Upon Appleton House is Marvell’s most extended theatre of self-exposure, but the pastoral lyrics—conventionally the site of erotic play— contain repeated traces of that script. Marvell darkens this landscape with dramas of heterosexual devastation and dreams of narcissistic shelter. Juliana of the Mower poems sunders masculine integrity; The Garden’s wistful challenge to Genesis is a seemingly asexual but scarcely unerotic masculine self-sufficiency. Literary convention could certainly account for the individual gesture, but the lover’s story that Marvell discovers seems so much a pattern, so recursive, as to constitute a lyric programme: in Clorinda and Damon consummation and the grave, in The unfortunate Lover shipwreck and mutilation, in The Match explosion and destruction, in Daphnis and Chloe cannibalism, witchcraft, and execution, in The Gallery torture and evisceration; and repeatedly the wounding blade. The cost of heterosexual desire is annihilation, the dream—in The Nymph complaining quite as much as in Upon Appleton House—is of transmigration, of refuge and shelter. But Marvell’s programme does not end in the Nymph’s alabaster shrine to loss and arrested sexuality: First my unhappy Statue shall Be cut in Marble; and withal, Let it be weeping too: but there Th’ Engraver sure his Art may spare; For I so truly thee bemoane, That I shall weep though I be Stone: Until my Tears, still dropping, wear My breast, themselves engraving there. There at my feet shalt thou be laid, Of purest Alabaster made: For I would have thine Image be White as I can, though not as Thee. (ll. 111–22)

There is here a suggestion of erotic longing for the child, and of voyeurism, feelings and practices acknowledged, indeed celebrated, in The Picture

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of little T.C.19 The anticipations and anxieties of Young Love suggest as well the powerful convergence of political argument with psychological structure: Come, little Infant, Love me now, While thine unsuspected years Clear thine aged Fathers brow From cold Jealousie and Fears. .................. Love as much the snowy Lamb Or the wanton Kid does prize, As the lusty Bull or Ram, For his morning Sacrifice. (ll. 1–4, 13–16)

For the narrator to house amatory moves under the roof of a cold, suspicious patriarch is to acknowledge dependency while declaring challenge.20 Marvell’s disclosure of amatory desire as the eroticization of the child marks sexual liminality as an integer in a private and daring engagement— a fantasy of resistance as well as attachment, one that yields to and yet would annihilate the authority of fathers. Once again, Upon Appleton House provides both the fullest exposition of this challenge to patriarchy and the key to its meaning. The image of Maria, poised at the edge of sexual maturity, is embedded in a tangle of issues and feelings binding together father, daughter, dependent tutor, and observing poet. To contemplate the prospect of Mary Fairfax’s embarkation on the flood of history was incumbent on the client and inescapable for the father and patron; but celebration of the dynastic future is eclipsed in a present brilliantly fixed by poet and protégée alike, ‘by her Flames, in Heaven try’d, | Nature is wholly vitrifi’d ’ (ll. 687–8). The conventions of panegyric explicate some of Marvell’s figures, and the turmoil of 1651 might rationalize the poet’s decision so determinedly to frame Maria and the estate in the present tense.21 But the poem’s and the poet’s fascination 19 Michael Long in Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia (Oxford, 1984), 6–7, presents the paedophilic materials as forms of imaginative innocence and nostalgia; see also Michael John Disanto, ‘Marvell’s Ambivalence Towards Adult Sexuality’, Studies in English Literature 48:1 (2008), 170–2. For a discussion of voyeurism in Little T.C., see Chapter 4. 20 Margoliouth noted long ago, even while dismissing the possibility, that the snowy lamb here was perhaps Mary Fairfax; see P&L 1:222 (1927 edition; 1:252 in the third edition). Ian Parker has recently demonstrated the unquestionably erotic force of Marvell’s language and his borrowings in this poem; see his ‘Marvell, Nathaniel Whiting, and Cowley’. For a different point of view, see Diane Purkiss, ‘Thinking of Gender’, Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, ed. Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge, 2011), 77–8. 21 See Chapter 1.

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with a child arresting time and arrested in time can be glossed neither conventionally nor contextually. Maria may be the vessel of descent, but when Marvell frames her incandescence he surely challenges the destiny and denies the autonomy the poem seems to proffer Fairfax. Similar concerns with the position of the child in history must also govern the extended portrait of the youthful Archibald Douglas in The last Instructions: . . . brave Douglas; on whose lovely chin The early Down but newly did begin; And modest Beauty yet his Sex did Veil, While envious Virgins hope he is a Male. .......................... His shape exact, which the bright flames infold, Like the Sun’s Statue stands of burnish’d Gold. Round the transparent Fire about him glows, As the clear Amber on the Bee does close. (ll. 649–52, 679–82)

The eroticized gaze catches our attention, but more is at stake for Marvell than Eros and aesthetics. The child frozen in time, withheld from futurity, may be part of a conventional lament over the inexorability of time; more surely it is a denial of name, lineage, and inheritance: the promise the child bears in a progenitive order. The subversion of patriarchy could not but entail various and troubled designs. These are written out in Marvell’s encounters with orphan parents and with those child-figures barred from patrilineal descent: little T.C. stalked by the vengeful Flora, Archibald Douglas as virginal androgyne, the ‘infant’ of Young Love, Sir John Trott and his lost heirs, the unfledged rail of Upon Appleton House (ll. 395–6, 413–14), and perhaps above all the Nymph Complaining—a succession of dead or pre-pubescent idealizations. The meaning of such a preoccupation is located in the household construct and declared in the household romances of Marvell’s great poem: the lesbianism of the nunnery, the near-erasure of marital relations, the ecstatic narcissism in the woods, and the tutor’s exposure before and fascination with the young Maria. The force of Marvell’s repeated coupling of desire and vitrification is clear, but what should also be noted is its depth and complexity, its rootedness in a strangely reflexive engagement with the world. Upon Appleton House is not Marvell’s only work in which such profound discomfort in the face of patriarchal rectitude resonates with occasion; nor is it alone in an argumentative dialectic that turns both within and without. We find traces of such discomfort in that elusive pastoral, The Picture of little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers, and traces too of the figure of Andrew Marvell at the poem’s centre—of Marvell’s recurrent anxiety in proximity to female sexuality. How else are we to apprehend the punning

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gesture towards menstruation (‘flowers’ was the euphemism of the day) in the poem’s title or the coy topicality of that title with its ties to affinity and place, and its strange resonances for Marvell’s career in the patronage that little T.C.’s grandmother and her great-aunt had extended to Andrew Marvell father and perhaps son?22 The drama of the poem curiously parallels that of Upon Appleton House, with the destiny of the child covering that of a former monastic estate at Thornton Curtis whose initials belong not only to this child but also to her dead sister and to her mother. The vulnerability of the child poignantly shadows the descent of this estate away from T.C.’s family—a contingency that Marvell rather more hopefully reinterprets at the end of Upon Appleton House. But the work of service does not stop there. With Mary Fairfax, Marvell uses the language of law and justice to celebrate the innocence of the female. In the Picture of little T.C., the reference to the virgin’s ‘chaster Laws’ (l. 11) plays again upon that convention; it also conjures up the legal genealogy to which she was heir through her grandmother, one of the many offspring of that towering figure Sir Edward Coke. And in so calling up Coke’s Institutes, does he also shadow this delicate lyric with the lurid history into which Coke had thrust another daughter? Frances Villiers née Coke, Theophila’s kinswoman, had been forced at age fourteen into a miserable and notoriously unchaste marriage to the first Duke of Buckingham’s lunatic brother.23 The elements we uncover within this poem may seem distant from its pastoral surface, but they are in fact part of Marvell’s familiar 22 While Andrew Marvell’s great twentieth-century editor, H.M. Margoliouth, was prepared to concede that a kinswoman may have died with Marvell senior in the 1641 wreck, he disposed of the tradition that the grandmother of Little T.C. was that victim, and he denied too that the poet had been the recipient of a significant benefaction from her. However, Margoliouth’s brilliant collaborator and successor, Pierre Legouis, urged the possibility of such patronage in some form. Whatever the case, it is certain that the whole Marvell family had enjoyed the financial support of T.C.’s great-aunt, Anne Sadleir, for in his dedication to a manuscript sermon of 1627, Marvell senior referred to her as ‘Constant benefactresse to me & to my family’. See H.M. Margoliouth, ‘Andrew Marvell, Senior’, Review of English Studies 2:5 (1926), 97; see also Margoliouth, ‘Andrew Marvell: Some Biographical Points,’ Modern Language Review 17:4 (1922), 351–61, and Pierre Legouis, ‘Andrew Marvell: Further Biographical Points,’ Modern Language Review 18:4 (1923), 417. 23 For an introduction to the Coke family’s history at this point, see the entry on Sir Edward Coke in the ODNB. It is interesting to note that the tribulations of Frances Coke began at the age of fourteen. The Marvell family’s involvement with Coke’s daughters by his first marriage is a matter of some controversy. The monastic history of the Thornton Curtis, or Thornton College, estate—which lay just three miles from Hull, across the Humber—is outlined in Sir William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum… Now epitomized in English (1693), 152. Little T.C.’s parents’ temporary occupancy of a property owned by her uncle is made clear in Terence R. Leach, Lincolnshire Country Houses and their Families, vol. 1 (Dunholme, Lincs., 1990); see also A.R. Maddison, ‘Lincolnshire Pedigrees’, vol. 3 (Harleian Soc., 1904), 888–9. We are indebted to Mr James Stevenson, of Lincolnshire Archives, for help in this matter.

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repertoire of service and idealization: lineage and estate; marriage, reproduction, and the vulnerable child withheld from time, all compounded with gestures of subversion where the lineaments are gathered. And they are gathered, we might note, within a few miles both of Marvell’s home at Hull and of Nun Appleton, and as well in the not altogether flattering shadow of that Villiers family with whom Marvell had already been associated on his Italian sojourn and in his elegy for Lord Francis Villiers, and with which he was of course to be so long associated. But the poet’s challenge to the progenitive extends beyond Humberside. Seldom—perhaps only at the furthest reaches of harmonics in Musicks Empire where ‘Virgin Trebles wed the manly Base’ (l. 10)—can he celebrate heterosexual coupling. Elsewhere, he affects the green worlds of desire, those all-but-neutered reproductive dreams enacted in The Garden, in The Mower against Gardens, and so entertainingly in the forest embraces of Upon Appleton House. There is no question of the wit and mercurial tonality of these scenes; but we ought not to miss their ideological force. To embrace ‘delicious Solitude’ (The Garden, l. 16), to conjure ‘vegetable Love. . . Vaster than Empires’ (To his Coy Mistress, ll. 11–12), to figure the ‘green Seraglio’, to deal ‘between the Bark and Tree’, to ‘procreate without a Sex’ (The Mower against Gardens, ll. 27, 21, 30), to turn into ‘Lillies without, Roses within’ (The Nymph complaining, l. 92) is to confront, to challenge, the entire frame of heterosexuality. It is no accident that when Marvell contemplates Mary Fairfax’s entry into that frame, he does so not in terms of marital and sexual union but in a language of grafting—‘The Priest shall cut the sacred Bud’ (Upon Appleton House, l. 742)—neutered, violent, and certainly suggestive of a wider programme. The psychological force of such grafting, with its implications of dismemberment and displacement, is glossed by the striking and in this context surprising misogyny of Marvell’s verse.24 The memento mori hovering near the close of Upon Appleton House shocks as well as instructs: Go now fond Sex that on your Face Do all your useless Study place, Nor once at Vice your Brows dare knit Lest the smooth Forehead wrinkled sit: Yet your own Face shall at you grin, Thorough the Black-bag of your Skin. (ll. 729–34)

24 For the biological meaning of displacement in grafting, see the judgement of Mary E. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2004), 206, that grafting was ‘not a simple or straightforward process but rather one in which patterns of inheritance might be altered in surprising ways’.

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The grinning skull is unmistakably that of womankind, whose cosmetic preoccupations are figured with a peculiar and relentless harshness, quite overwhelming the familiar moralizing trope. Every moment this celebration of virginal innocence spends in proximity to woman is marked by unease. The ‘disjointed Abbess’ (l. 253) provides a shocking gloss on the otherwise almost wholly elided Lady Fairfax.25 The narration of seduction in the nunnery boldly and wittily ties sexual and spiritual danger to female sensualities. And the poet takes this argument in a coarser and more violent direction with ‘bloody Thestylis’ (l. 401): here, in the mowing scene, masculine enterprise is mockingly transfigured into female appetite, exultation, and brutality. At one extreme, then, the female (Thestylis speaking out of the body of this text) breaks the frame; at the other, the poem’s virgins (Thwaites and Fairfax) are romanticized beyond the flesh. Scholars have long noted the conventions of apotheosis in Marvell’s depiction of the young Maria.26 What they have not fully explicated are the dangers excited by the onset of female sexuality. Could the poet have been unaware of the shocking pun in the narrator’s apostrophe, ‘The young Maria walks to night’ (l. 651)? The figure of night-walking, a seventeenth-century synonym for prostitution, concentrates the sexual tensions of the entire scene.27 And in his poem To his worthy Friend Doctor Witty, verse that takes as its lightly-coded subject the language tuition of Mary Fairfax, might Marvell have intended similar subversions through the conflation of sexual with linguistic idioms? Caelia whose English doth more richly flow Than Tagus, purer then dissolved snow, And sweet as are her lips that speak it, she Now learns the tongues of France and Italy; But she is Caelia still: no other grace But her own smiles commend that lovely face; Her native beauty’s not Italianated, Nor her chast mind into the French translated. (ll. 17–24)28 25

See Chapter 1, 26–9. See D.C. Allen, Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry (Baltimore, 1968), 220–5; Barbara K. Lewalski, Donne’s ‘Anniversaries’ and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton, 1973), 367–70; and A.D. Cousins, ‘Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax”’, in Conal Condren and A.D. Cousins, eds, The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell (Aldershot, UK, 1990), 77. 27 By the 1690s there was even a periodical guide to London prostitutes, The Night Walker. See F. Dabhoiwala, ‘The Construction of Honour, Reputation, and Status in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 6 (1996), 204. 28 Margoliouth proposed the identification of Caelia as Mary Fairfax in his 1927 edition, P&L 1:308, and subsequent editors have generally followed the suggestion. 26

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Virginity and corruption are once again allowed a startling proximity at the verge of menarche. Nor is it difficult to find in other of Marvell’s poems the figure of dangerous female sexuality, and in a variety of contexts and tonalities: Mourning discovers an engulfing female sexual hypocrisy; more disturbing is the imputation of a crime (crimen) to the nymph Callisto, guilty of suffering rape by Jupiter (Letter to Doctor Ingelo, l. 32); in The Gallery, Marvell displays a shocking series of predatory images; and in The last Instructions, he provides a lurid catalogue of female appetite, violence, and vice—the Queen Mother, the Duchess of York, Lady Castlemaine, the bitch Excise, that ‘new Whore of State’ (l. 150). Of course, to register the savagery and range of the satirist’s misogyny in The last Instructions is not to suggest a failure of his grasp of the strategies of Ovidian erotics, and we might think here of the safely mythologized Medway nymphs of that poem (ll. 525–60, 658–60). Nor is it to suggest that masculine sexuality is spared the edge of Marvell’s corrosive wit in this text. But masculine corruption in The last Instructions is underwritten by female vice. And we might suspect that it is distance alone—here nationality—which admits the Dutch admiral, Michael De Ruyter, as a pattern of masculine propriety; we might suspect indeed that Marvell could acknowledge the possibility of courtly love only in the figure of the pillaging, and republican, foreigner. Amidst corruption and appetite Marvell locates valour and honour only in the wholly self-contained virginity of Archibald Douglas. The conventions of biography scarcely determined the representation of the hero, and knowing contemporary readers would likely have registered the erasure of Douglas’s marital status. In the displacement of Douglas the husband and father by Douglas the virginal androgyne Marvell may have sought civic vindication of the single life; he seems to have sought as well deeper solaces, identifications, and pleasures: His yellow Locks curl back themselves to seek, Nor other Courtship knew but to his Cheek. Oft has he in chill Eske or Seine, by night, Harden’d and cool’d his Limbs, so soft, so white. (ll. 653–6)

The verse lingers sensually over the curling locks and soft limbs, and the erotic excitement is not borne wholly on literary convention. For Marvell, Ovidian fable, pastoral convention, amatory embrace all ineluctably narrate displacement. Indeed, displacement seems the very rubric under which he maps the broad terrain of erotic desire. Narcissism and transmigration are of course the story of the highly-wrought and high-spirited vegetal entertainments of Marvell’s forests, meadows, and

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gardens. The Nymph complaining abounds in moments of erotic irony, and Empson long ago noted the striking inversion that Damon the Mower enacts—Damon singing of Juliana, the poet relishing Damon.29 And in An Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers (1648), the early salute to the hero’s passion for ‘the matchless Chlora’ is lost in the closing meditation on his body, fallen ‘in the chearfull heat | Of youth: his locks intangled all with sweat’ (ll. 69,105–6). Such elision of gender seems as characteristically Marvellian as does the transfiguration of Villiers in the garden at the end of the poem. A similar dynamic is displayed in Marvell’s commendation of Lovelace’s Lucasta. The close of this poem, whose narrator is conflated with the poet through the fully historicized and materialized signature, ‘Andr. Marvell’, suggests a striking triangulation of feeling: Lovelace the apex, the focal point, pursued by an anxious male and aggressive female beauty.30 Renaissance scholars have reminded us of social structures that might accommodate such triangulation.31 But in Marvell’s work, the conflation of masculine competition, denial, and desire cannot wholly be accommodated to social convention. Fleckno, an English Priest at Rome, unfolds erotic tangles into a brilliant and extended play on feasting, penetration, and postures whose implications must surely challenge any effort to contain the homoerotic in the homosocial. Marvell was certainly exploiting ribald conventions of anti-popery, and surely literary mockery and competition in some fashion occasioned the 29 See William Empson, Using Biography (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 14–15. On erotic irony and displacement, see Mathew Augustine, ‘“Lillies Without, Roses Within”: Marvell’s Poetics of Indeterminacy and “The Nymph Complaining”’, Criticism 50:2 (2008), 255–78. 30 An Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers, ll. 69, 105–6, 110–14; To his Noble Friend Mr. Richard Lovelace, upon his Poems, ll. 33–46; on Marvell’s commendation of Lovelace, see Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2008), 179–201; and David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 172–3. 31 The matter of homoeroticism and its relationship to the homosocial in Renaissance England are subjects of considerable current, and sophisticated, debate. Nearly thirty years ago Alan Bray posited an early modern world of widespread homoeroticism in Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982). More recently, Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, 1992); Lisa Jardine, ‘Companionate Marriage vs. Male Friendship’, in Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky, eds, Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early-Modern England (Manchester, 1996), 238–9, 250, 252 note 19, 254 note 61; and Thomas King, The Gendering of Men 1600–1750 (Madison, WI, 2004)), have debated the extent of the homoerotic within the homosocial and the patriarchal. Recently too, Paul Hammond, ‘Marvell’s Sexuality’, 87–123, has used the construct of masculine relations of service and dependence to contain the homoerotic in Marvell’s poetry, and Bray himself has spiritualized relations of masculine friendship in The Friend (Chicago, 2003). For an insightful discussion of this complex set of relations and allegiances, see Valerie Traub, ‘Friendship’s Loss: Alan Bray’s Making of History’, in Laura Gowing, Michael Hunter, and Miri Rubin, eds, Love, Friendship and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800 (Basingstoke, 2005), 15–42.

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verse.32 But the fact that Richard Flecknoe, poetaster, was in a not altogether different situation of dependency from Marvell’s own makes all the more telling Marvell’s willingness to locate, even to flourish, his own body at the poem’s punning and somatic centre:33 I meet one on the Stairs who made me stand, Stopping the passage, and did him demand: I answer’d he is here Sir ; but you see You cannot pass to him but thorow me. He thought himself affronted; and reply’d, I whom the Pallace never has deny’d Will make the way here; I said Sir you’l do Me a great favour, for I seek to go. He gathering fury still made sign to draw; But himself there clos’d in a Scabbard saw As narrow as his Sword’s; and I, that was Delightful, said there can no Body pass Except by penetration hither, where Two make a crowd, nor can three Persons here Consist but in one substance. Then, to fit Our peace, the Priest said I too had some wit: To prov’t, I said, the place doth us invite By its own narrowness, Sir, to unite. (ll. 87–104)

Marvell may here be mocking but he is also conjuring and bringing close to home those associations of religious deviance and buggery argued in the defining Henrician and Elizabethan statutes (25 H.8, c.6 and 5 Eliz.1, c.17). What then might have drawn Marvell to that most striking of heterosexual idioms, the seductive carpe diem lyric? The challenge of outrunning literary convention surely drove the opening of To his Coy Mistress: Marvell begins with obvious intentions of mockery, and he outflanks Petrarchanism in a series of droll and brilliant exaggerations. Though irony inflects this liebestod, mockery hardly describes the darker strains of the second verse paragraph, its graveyard allure; nor does literary competition map the unexpected places to which Marvell had gotten by the 32 Joan Hartwig noted the erotic punning in this work and its anti-Catholic function; see her ‘Marvell’s Metamorphic “Fleckno”’, Studies in English Literature 36:1 (1995), 171–212. 33 For a discussion of Marvell’s reflexiveness in Fleckno, the way ‘the poet Richard Flecknoe stands as a frightening and even repellent mirror of what Marvell the emergent poet might become’, see Nigel Smith, ‘“Mirrored doubles”: Andrew Marvell, the Remaking of Poetry and the Poet’s Career’, in Philip Hardie and Helen Moore, eds, Classical Literary Careers and their Reception (Cambridge, 2010), 230–1.

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close. The formal structure of the lyric stages a show of logical precision, yet the organization of feeling in the poem follows anything but logic.34 Some of the paradoxes of To his Coy Mistress are obviously conventional, but others are the more particular domain of a poet drawn to precipices and exposure, to dramas of mystery, and to the incoherence of the body. Here, towards the close of the poem, as he comes to a point of instability, perhaps incompleteness, in his own feelings, Marvell forces the conventions of heterosexual desire against his abiding template of incapacity, violence, and resentment.35 We would then read Marvell’s brief tribute, Upon an Eunuch; a Poet, as the very emblem of a career that sought in lyric dramas vindication of loss and vacancy.36 Such an argument might seem to reinforce conventional readings of Marvell’s disparate careers, with lyric compensation standing clear of political engagement. What possible relation can the poetics of endangered desire have to Marvell’s texts of political argument? The architectonics of The First Anniversary promise nothing of inversion and incapacity, nor does the equipoise of An Horatian Ode suggest unmastered feelings. The dominant figures in the political poetry seem a world away, untroubled in their masculine authority. Yet anxieties of attachment no less define the political texts than they do the lyric poems; indeed, they bind together the entire project of this writer. The balancing act of An Horatian Ode has been read exclusively as intellection, as calculation and not feeling, its ambiguities repeatedly glossed as the supreme response to civic perplexity.37 And yet not only does the Horatian Ode seem remarkably serene for its historical moment; 34 On the syllogistic or rather pseudo-syllogistic logic of the poem, see Barry Targan, ‘Marvell’s Formal Fallacy’, Sewanee Review 116:3 (2008), 464–6; see also Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago, 1968), 289–90. 35 Hammond has suggested that the climactic moment of To his Coy Mistress layers heterosexual images onto homosocial texts and yearnings; Hammond, ‘Marvell’s Sexuality’, 113–14. We would insist not only that the literary conventions are heterosexual but that the confusions, desires, and aversions of the closing stanza are heterosexually determined. For further reflection on this crux and this mood, see Chapter 3. 36 See Chapter 3; cf. Lynne Enterline’s interesting Lacanian reading of Upon an Eunuch; a Poet, and also her remarks on The Garden and on the Mower poems; Enterline, Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford, 1995), 153–5, 158–68. 37 The critical literature debating the political sentiments of the Horatian Ode is vast; see, for example, Michael Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1987), 114–37; David Norbrook, ‘Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” and the Politics of Genre’, in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday, eds, Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), 147–69; Thomas M. Greene, ‘The Balance of Power in Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”’, ELH 60:2 (1993), 379–96; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994), 277–8; Warren Chernaik, ‘Was Marvell a Republican?’, Seventeenth Century 20:1 (2005), 77–96; and Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, 2007), 82–115.

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it is also singular among this poet’s works. To one side, chronologically speaking, is the oddly feminized close to the Lovelace tribute; to the other, the awkwardness and embarrassment confessed in Upon Appleton House. At the centre is the king’s bleeding head. How could this febrile sensibility manage such poise in such a climacteric? Circumstance and ideology have been used to provide one sort of answer: the deliberative intelligence fully grasped this civic drama of competing rights. But circumstance and ideology can provide another, and very different, answer. The poem’s familiar dynamic of elevation and subversion, of exaltation qualified by irony and of irony framed by admiration, was not only intellection for Marvell: it was as well a contradiction recurrent and irresolvable. In 1649–1650 the critical circumstance for this poet—though of course not for him alone— was the displacement of the royal patriarch by a structurally ambiguous figure. What is remarkable about An Horatian Ode is not just its craft but its freedom from anxiety. Could it have been the irruption of a hero, Oliver Cromwell, who simultaneously created and destroyed, that allowed the poet momentarily to occupy that position of equipoise we think supremely Marvellian?38 The dynamic of creation and destruction had a striking proximity to the dramas of idealization and endangerment that Marvell played out and was to play elsewhere in his verse. The poem in which Marvell most fully explores contrarieties is of course Upon Appleton House. And though in Upon Appleton House Marvell remained fixed on the patriarch, on the mastering of fate and the projection of destiny, those themes, as we have seen, are steadily challenged. Perhaps the most unnerving challenge of all is the intrusion of Oliver Cromwell into the prophecy of the ‘Offspring fierce’ of William Fairfax at the crux of the poem and the family’s history. That offspring ‘Shall fight through all the Universe; | And with successive Valour try | France, Poland, either Germany; | Till one, as long since prophecy’d, | His horse through conquer’d Britain ride’ (ll. 241–6). The first conquering hero imagined in these lines may have been either the first Sir Thomas Fairfax or the first Thomas Lord Fairfax; and the prophetic gesture ‘Till one’ (l. 245) seems to announce the poet’s patron. But it cannot do so— surely no one would have known this better than Thomas third Lord Fairfax, for in 1651 there was only one hero who had ridden through all of conquered Britain.39 Oliver Cromwell had in 1648 put down Welsh revolt at St Fagans, in 1649 quelled the Irish, and in 1650 smashed the 38 For further reflection on Marvell’s Cromwellian desires and identifications, see Chapter 3. 39 By the summer of 1651 Oliver Cromwell had ridden in, campaigned through, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland; Thomas Lord Fairfax had campaigned in none of those. His campaigning had been limited to England and of course the continent. It is possible that

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Scottish army at Dunbar, a trajectory that An Horatian Ode contemplates admiringly. The role that Lord Fairfax played in such British conquests was and is hard to fix, and the lines in this poem that celebrate Fairfax’s military achievements are no less difficult to parse. What the verse announces is the lineage of heroism across the Fairfax generations; but what it also, and startlingly, allows is the passage of heroism from Thomas 3rd Lord Fairfax to Oliver Cromwell, and the marking of that passage is surely central to the programme of An Horatian Ode. The private dramas of Upon Appleton House similarly question Lord Fairfax’s place in history as the poet uses the materials of domestic authority, progenitiveness, and moral rectitude to challenge and even subvert the whole issue of mastery, poetic and patriarchal alike. The trauma that Marvell so nearly elided in Upon Appleton House and so superbly wrote in An Horatian Ode was that of the nation. The equipoise he affected in An Horatian Ode is, we would argue, belied by the way he secreted the figure of Cromwell within the life history of Fairfax that he wrote in Upon Appleton House. More certainly, equipoise is denied by the poem that intervened, Tom May’s Death, the second of the three quasipublic poems of 1650–1651. In the months immediately after An Horatian Ode Marvell seized on the figure of Thomas May, who died shortly after the composition of the Ode, to express the complicities and contradictions he felt. Like Marvell himself, May was a classicist and poet, celebrator of aristocratic heroes, though more recently an active parliamentarian. The discomfort Marvell experienced as he sought to make his own way in a world of patronage that was also a world wracked by revolution is reflected in Tom May’s Death, the text he made out of May’s life, and in the malicious pleasure with which he enjoyed May’s demise. Literary competition played a part in the articulation of these feelings as the poet of Roman similitudes in An Horatian Ode cast aspersions on May’s own Roman similitudes, and perhaps a certain local jealousy too, since May’s only signed piece of journalism from the 1640s cast him as purveyor of news from Hull, Marvell’s home-town.40 And yet the anger and contempt and sheer Marvell, like so many of his countrymen then and since, was writing ‘Britain’ and meaning ‘England’. But in 1651 more than at most times in England’s history the meaning of Britain was a matter of some discussion and dispute. Further, had Marvell intended an equation of Britain and England, it would have been difficult for him to celebrate his patron as the conqueror, surely an extremely and unreconstructedly royalist reading of the 1640s. Though such a reading would certainly have questioned Fairfax’s political and military career, it would also render Marvell’s loyalties in 1650–1651 truly circuitous. For the terms ‘Britain’ and ‘England’ at this juncture, see Derek Hirst, ‘The English Republic and the Meaning of Britain’, in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds, The British Problem, 1534–1707 (Basingstoke, 1996), 192–219. 40 A True Relation from Hull of the Present State and Condition it is in (1643).

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viciousness in this poem reach more deeply, and present us with a political and surely psychological conundrum. How could the poet of An Horatian Ode, who himself celebrated ‘the Republick’s hand’ (l. 82) and ‘the Commons Feet’ (l. 85), so soon deride as mercenary May’s deployment of his pen on Parliament’s behalf? We must suspect that displacement is part of the explanation: onto May’s hapless bulk Marvell projects his own anguish at the betrayal of royalist exemplars and ghosts—Villiers, Lovelace, and Charles himself, whose bearing on the scaffold An Horatian Ode famously admires. May, historian of the Long Parliament and of common triumphs, had violated the personal attachments on which for Marvell, as for so many, political identity depended, ‘Apostatizing from our Arts and us, | To turn the Chronicler to Spartacus’ (ll. 73–4). But while Marvell only turned away from those attachments when death had emptied their forms of immediate meaning, there can be no question that he had violated their spirit in doing so. Scholars have diligently parsed and eloquently expounded the print record of late 1650 in order to rationalize the poet’s transition from the calm of An Horatian Ode to the anger of Tom May’s Death: that is, to situate Marvell’s poems of this year along a coherent political trajectory. But no amount of diligence and eloquence can comprehend within an order of intellection the ability of one who could in the former poem accept as a force of nature what was for him so clearly the work of Oliver Cromwell and then, within months, write the brilliant rodomontade proclaiming, albeit through the mouth of Ben Jonson, the absolute duty of the poet to ‘arraign successful crimes’—a category that presumably includes the deeds of Oliver Cromwell:41 When the Sword glitters ore the Judges head, And fear has Coward Churchmen silenced, Then is the Poets time, ’tis then he drawes, And single fights forsaken Vertues cause. He, when the wheel of Empire, whirleth back, And though the World’s disjointed Axel crack, Sings still of ancient Rights and better Times, Seeks wretched good, arraigns successful Crimes. (ll. 63–70) 41 The most signal effort at rationalizing the disjuncture of the two poems of 1650 is Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England, 82–115, but as Nicholas McDowell has forcefully argued, these poems have their roots not only in politics but within a network of literary and social relations; McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 259–72. See also Paul Davis, ‘Marvell and the Literary Past’, in Hirst and Zwicker, eds, Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, 28–9, for a challenge to such attempts as ours to read Marvell’s politics in 1650 out of Jonsonian ventriloquism. But however much the Jonsonian ventriloquism might seem to diminish the force of his denunciation of May, Marvell chose to deploy that voice at a signal moment—as so often, working at various levels and in disguised ways.

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A sign of Marvell’s unsteady feelings at this juncture lies in the way this most sensitive user of words applied to May, the parliamentarian, parliament’s own standard term—‘malignant’—for the royalist enemy (including, recently, Andrew Marvell?), scorning May as ‘Malignant Poet and Historian both’ (1.42). The malignancy of the historian appears in the association with Polydore Vergil, a figure of widespread English execration and perhaps especially in the anti-Scottish mood of 1650, for his debunking of the ancient English claims to supremacy over Scotland; the malignancy of the poet lay in the association with those opponents of Rome’s empire, Lucan and the Vandals and the Goths. This moment of acute slippage saw Marvell himself use Lucan first as a text for meditation on civil war in the Horatian Ode and then as a way to traduce Lucan’s translator, Thomas May. Such slippage was paralleled in the way Marvell subversively folded Cromwell into Fairfax in Upon Appleton House. Amid these turnings, Marvell’s reversal of the political bearing of ‘malignancy’ suggests the toll of complicity, the anxieties as well as the power of attachment. A no less personal dynamic disturbs the structure of The First Anniversary when Marvell returns to the meaning of Cromwell himself. Against this poem’s conjectures of authority, its myths of origin and metaphors of destiny, another story unfolds. The poem’s overt design is apparent, its formal occasion driving the poem’s dialectic between celebratory return and singular projection. Circles, eddies, spheres, and anniversaries herald continuity and the possibility of history, but in the poem’s apocalyptic rush we hear a different order; and both are elements of manifest design. The poem’s line of persuasion seems clear enough, whatever the rhetorical complexity of this dynamic and however copious its topical development. Yet an almost tactile insistence on mortality darkens nearly every celebratory gesture, even as the poem distinguishes the person and rule of Oliver Cromwell and simultaneously acknowledges the political dilemma of singularity; and biographical incident is repeatedly deployed to that end. But reportage, realism, and political strategy scarcely exhaust the poem’s fascination with the Protector’s demise, its dwelling in the details of catastrophe. Marvell’s decision to imagine the desire, the yearning for that event, of Fifth Monarchists and foreign ambassadors alike seems of a piece with his insistence on first-person narration of the coaching accident: ‘Our Sins. . . Our brutish fury. . . our yearly Song’: Thee proof beyond all other Force or Skill, Our Sins endanger, and shall one day kill. How near they fail’d, and in thy sudden Fall At once assay’d to overturn us all. Our brutish fury strugling to be Free, Hurry’d thy Horses while they hurry’d thee.

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The complexity, even confusion, of tenses in this scene almost conceals the narrator’s confession of having half-imagined Cromwell’s death. His pleasures in such imagining dissolve into an exultation of guilty tears and joy: Like skilful Looms which through the costly thred Of purling Ore, a shining wave do shed: So shall the Tears we on past Grief employ, Still as they trickle, glitter in our Joy. (ll. 183–6)

The political programme of the poem absorbs some of these guilty tears.42 But some were surely the poet’s own. That admixture of grief and covert pleasure is best explicated by the poem’s handling of Noachite patriarchy in its review of the forms of rule: Him as their Father must the State obey. Thou, and thine House, like Noah’s Eight did rest, Left by the Wars Flood on the Mountains crest: And the large Vale lay subject to thy Will, Which thou but as an Husbandman wouldst Till: And only didst for others plant the Vine Of Liberty, not drunken with its Wine. That sober Liberty which men may have, That they enjoy, but more they vainly crave: And such as to their Parents Tents do press, May shew their own, not see his Nakedness. Yet such a Chammish issue still does rage, The Shame and Plague both of the Land and Age. (ll. 282–94)

42 On the coaching accident as an articulation of the political fragility of the Protectorate settlement, see Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate (Oxford, 2008), 110–11. Blair Worden argues that Marvell’s projection of Cromwell in The First Anniversary is a show of ‘the protector in supreme control’ (Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England, 141), though this notion seems at odds with the poem’s references to the ‘ponyarding Conspiracies’ and ‘lying Prophecies’ that endanger ‘and shall one day kill’ the Lord Protector (ll. 171–4), or the lengthy depiction of the coaching accident (ll. 175–214), or the rage of the ‘Chammish issue’ whom Marvell depicts as watching Cromwell’s ‘halting’, deriding his fall, and rejoicing ‘when thy Foot had slipt aside’ (ll. 293–6).

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It took a particular imagination to derive from the foundational text of paternal authority the generation of rage and shame. The overt argument is clear: those who would pry into the mysteries of paternal rule disclose private shame.43 But Marvell’s decision to add to the biblical story of transgressive voyeurism a distinctive motif of self-display gives to shame a peculiar psychological force—the exposure of secrets and as well the implication of the narrator in a scene of risk and embarrassment. As we shall see in Chapter 4, such themes and scenes Marvell writes into a variety of his texts. The First Anniversary is a poem about politics, and to fold shame and self-display into that address is an unusual and surely significant strategy. We suggest that to observe the perturbation in this text when political authority is given paternal and domestic face—so much more paternal and domestic than that of the younger, less progenitive, and more diffident Fairfax—may be to recover for Marvell the point of contact between the psychological and the political. Patriarchalism, with its implications of progenitiveness and thus lineal descent, was the political foundation of this society; for this poet it seems to have been the arcanum imperii, the very mystery of rule, and to have brought his feelings to a point of crisis and contradiction. Residence and dependency within the patron’s household occasioned the transgressive display of Upon Appleton House, but the relationships held up to view in The First Anniversary are very different. And while celebration and idealization remain a part of the continuing story, as of this poem, unmistakable designs of mortality now articulate the rest. It is no surprise that those designs frame Marvell’s final meditation on Cromwell, A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector, with its powerful mood of yearning and loss.44 But whatever the formal conventions and national frame, Marvell’s drama is domestic, familial, and deeply personal. He has much to say of heroic endeavour; and genealogy too plays its part in this epideictic verse. But what surprises is the theatre of pathos and sensibility that Marvell wrests from the conventions of genealogy. A third of the poem is devoted to the harmonics of domestic affection and the hidden sympathies of suffering as the poet 43 That overt message seems to echo the royalist response to the parliamentarian disclosure of the king’s correspondence with his wife, captured at Naseby. But if Marvell’s choice of this episode is striking enough, he went beyond the royalist argument in his introduction of the theme of self-display. On the 1645 episode, see Derek Hirst, ‘Reading the Royal Romance: Intimacy in the King’s Cabinet’, The Seventeenth Century 18:2 (2003), 219–23. 44 On Marvell’s elegy and the rites of mourning, see Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate, chapter 7. See also Ashley Marshall’s defence of the aesthetic achievement of Marvell’s elegy in ‘ “I saw him dead”: Marvell’s Elegy for Cromwell’, Studies in Philology 103:4 (2006), 499–521.

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imagines himself within the seclusions and intimacies of nursery and deathbed, and at the side of a father who above all else protected and nurtured.45 It is here alone in the whole of his works that Marvell places the patriarch at the centre of his vision; and this overwrought poem, trembling between attentiveness and bathos, displays the costs. The recognition that fatherhood—in the most domestic and sheltering senses of that word—undergirds all the structures of patriarchy exacts from Marvell this cry of anguish. What energies, we might wonder, drive and are absorbed in this poem’s romance of doom and devotion? Pierre Legouis, perhaps the greatest of all Marvell scholars, wondered whether this was Marvell’s love poem to Oliver Cromwell.46 How tangled are the emotions released in the scenes and tropes of grief as Marvell turned his gaze towards an affective family, towards a father fully harmonized with the child and her fate—that is, towards a scene of mutual vulnerability. We cannot help but suspect here not just idealization but a deeper longing that drives towards suffering and loss. Yet we should also register the subversive impulse. As in The First Anniversary, to identify the human frailty at the heart of the frame of power is to expose the ghost in the machine. Might the loss of poetic control, the bathos, of A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector, bear some relation to Marvell’s imagined and staged intimacy with the Lord Protector? And perhaps we catch a note of this exaltation, this adoration, in a surviving account of Hull Corporation’s exquisitely crafted salutation—surely by the assistant secretary in the Office of Foreign Tongues—to the new Protector Richard on his father’s death, the most complemental addresse, that could be in which he was magnify’d for his wisdome, nobleness of mind and Lovely Composition of Body, and his father Oliver was compared to Moses, Joshua, Elijah, the Charriotts and Horsemen of Israel, likewise to Constantine the great and to whome soever that was famous either in sacred or Prophane History, for valor, Piety and Goodness, was call’d that Jewel which the world was not worthy of, the Glorious Sunn of the Universe, the great Protector of Peace and Joy, the breath of their Nostrells, The Called of the Lord, the Delight of the Mortalls, The Terror of the Gods of the Earth.47 45 Edward Holberton sees the domestic setting and affect as evidence of Marvell’s appeal to the social sensibilities and the sobriety and domesticity of the godly; Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate, 178–9. 46 Legouis, Andrew Marvell, 114–15. 47 British Library, Lansdowne MS 890, f. 145.This is from the notes towards a history of Hull taken by the local antiquary Abraham de la Pryme at some point in the later seventeenth century; the original manuscripts seem to have disappeared from Hull’s records, but what caught de la Pryme’s eye amidst the usual aridities of borough business was this all too brief but unmistakable heightening of rhetorical intensity at the moment when

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The resonance between this language and the idioms that Marvell chose for The First Anniversary and A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector is unmistakable. The disclosure of the private within the patriarchal—the reach of the personal to the very core of the political—was not just the work of the Cromwellian years. As we have seen, it was a crux Marvell explored in his letter of August 1667 to Sir John Trott. Even as he wrote The last Instructions, Marvell was composing his epitaph on Edmund Trott: the epitaph is dated 11 August, the Last Instructions inscribed 4 September. In the satire Marvell insists on the sexual sterility of this body politic; in the letter to Trott he discloses the civic meaning of paternal loss. Marvell’s impulse in handling the letter’s scriptural narratives is to spin national apocalypse out of private occasion. The Prophet Eli’s loss of sons paralleled the loss of Trott’s: Eli’s grief was followed by the demise of government and the loss of the Ark of the Covenant, and so Marvell reflected, ‘I pray God that we may never have the same paralel perfected in our publick concernments’ (P&L 2:312). This apocalyptic imagination is surely glossed, perhaps even explained, by the proximity of occasion with The last Instructions, the position of one text within another, of one crisis within the other.48 We have urged the poignancy of Marvell’s letter to Trott, its unusually intimate confessions, but The last Instructions offers a no less feeling, and a no less hopeless, anatomy of patriarchy and nationhood. Although the envoi closes with an idealization of Charles II, the poem itself systematically explodes the symbols of national fecundity. Marvell tracks the sordid progress of the body natural across the body politic to a brilliant figure in the transgression of Britannia. That episode is succeeded by the boldest gesture of this angry poem, the grisly theatre of regicide, a scene most certainly imagining, if not compassing, the death of this king: While, the pale Ghosts, his Eye does fixt admire Of Grandsire Harry, and of Charles his Sire. Harry sits down, and in his open side The grizly Wound reveals, of which he dy’d. And ghastly Charles, turning his Collar low,

Andrew Marvell was remaking his connection to the port. For another instance of a favourite son drafting a town’s address to Protector Richard, see the case of Leicester in Derek Hirst, ‘Making Contact: Petitions and the English Republic’ Journal of British Studies 45:1 (2006), 47–8. 48 As E. E. Duncan-Jones noted long ago (Notes and Queries (1966), 26–7), recorded in P&L 2:383. See also Joshua Scodel on the relations between Marvell’s letter to Trott and The last Instructions, in The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, 1991), 234–6.

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Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane The purple thread about his Neck does show: Then, whisp’ring to his Son in Words unheard, Through the lock’d door both of them disappear’d. (ll. 917–24)

The harshness with which Marvell exposes and the dexterity with which he handles all the poem’s scenes of sexual vice and sterility declare the satirist’s claims to public interest. They suggest, too, a private world of feeling, something of the despair and dissolution glimpsed in the letter to Trott. Here in The last Instructions Marvell conclusively subverts, perhaps even denies, the royal emblem of patriarchy and fecundity. Yet the ideals had scarcely lost their hold. Hovering towards the close of the poem is a faint and abstracted embodiment of virtue and magnanimity, those country magnates—a group that surely included in Marvell’s estimation Buckingham as well as the virtuous backbench MPs—who transmute the desires of the body natural into passion for the body politic: . . . they whom born to Virtue and to Wealth, Nor Guilt to flatt’ry binds, nor want to stealth; Whose gen’rous Conscience and whose Courage high Does with clear Counsels their large Souls supply; That serve the King with their Estates and Care, And, as in Love, on Parliaments can stare. (ll. 983–8)

There is a touch of Eros as well as an odd voyeurism in this scene—a pointed reminder of the affective nature of all true political association— though it is far removed from the vulgarity and rapacity of this king and court. But haunting the centre of this verse is a more hopelessly disembodied political ideal and a more helplessly imagined model of political affection: the figure of Archibald Douglas. The anger of all the poem’s denunciations of the political sins of the body is inescapable; its source is surely that poignant, almost painful, longing. Marvell sustained neither the apocalyptic vision nor the performance of its rhetorics in the writing career that lay ahead—a decade that was to be, in some ways, his most productive, and, politically, his most influential. The path that career took towards prose polemic, and towards an insistent engagement with the themes of tyranny and conscience that defined the emerging Restoration crisis, has led literary scholars not only to regret its disjunction from the pastoral lyrics, but even to debate its ideological congruence with the varied public verse of the 1650s and 1660s. There is no denying the distance in mood and tone of the lyric Marvell from the argumentative thrust and parry of the 1670s; yet behind

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the partisan stances and gestures lie the modes of feeling, the rhythms of idealization and subversion, so evident in the earlier poetry. The career turned, suggestively enough, on the body of Archibald Douglas. At the end of the 1660s Marvell opened The Loyall Scot, a poem occasioned by public debate over the union of England and Scotland, with a portrait of Douglas recycled wholesale from The last Instructions. There is an argumentative strategy to that opening, but strategy hardly accounts for the position of the portrait in the true dynamic of the poem. In the furious diatribe against the English bishops that the portrait unleashes we encounter once again idealization counterpointed by brutal assault. As in The last Instructions, androgynous virtue stands against sexual corruptions; here, it provides the foil for a broad polemic against abuse centred not at the court of Charles II but now in the ranks of the episcopate. We might surmise that as the bishops increased their reach and their stridency at the end of the 1660s, this son of a clergyman would have been particularly responsive to pretensions to patriarchal authority. But the emergence of a new target in The Loyall Scot signalled not only a new political analysis; it also allowed a freer play to Marvell’s habitual moves of idealization. Off-setting savagery against the bishops—a theme that was to sound through, indeed denominate, Marvell’s work of the next decade—is this poem’s striking apostrophe to Charles II who, the poet hoped, might yet afford some protection to religious dissent. At its climax, and with a surprising openness and ease, Marvell embraces national community: Just soe the prudent Husbandman who sees The Idle tumult of his factious bees, The morning dews and flowers Neglected grown, The hive a comb case, every bee a drone, Powders them ore till none discern their foes And all themselves in meal and friendship close. The Insect Kingdome streight begins to thrive And Each works hony for the Common Hive. (ll. 266–73)

How different the invocation of ‘the Common Hive’ from the cool civic conventions at the close of The last Instructions. We do not seek to obscure the topicality and partisan engagement in Marvell’s manifestly, indeed brilliantly partisan decade. Rather, we would insist on the importance of the affective and metaphoric structure—so strangely figured in Archibald Douglas—that housed and gave shape to the partisan gestures and arguments of this writer. Tyranny and conscience were of course the operative themes, pursued in The Loyall Scot (1670?), The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672), Mr. Smirke (1676), and The Growth of

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Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677); and the polemical mechanics were, as we might expect, dazzling and various. Yet across all these texts Marvell plays attachment, elevation, and subversion, themes so powerfully underwritten by the lyrics and panegyrics. Early modern conventions of exposure and slander might explain the uncovering of sexual misconduct beneath Anglican intolerance in The Loyall Scot, The Rehearsal Transpros’d, and in Mr. Smirke. But convention does not explain the determination of Marvell’s pursuit nor his relish in the discovery of corruption in the very midst of discipline severe, in every genre, and at every point of the career. The dynamic was deeply embedded in Marvell’s understanding—and surely at some level his experience—of patriarchalism, and that dynamic is apparent even in his expository treatise of church governance, A Short Historical Essay, Concerning General Councils (1676). In that narrative’s earnest tribute to the godly emperor, Marvell chooses to locate the beginnings of ecclesiastical partisanship and persecution in the biography of Athanasius, chief protagonist in the tumultuous Council of Nicaea, who so fatefully put aside his youthful games on the beach (PW 2:134–5). The origins of episcopal rigour and self-promotion are here located in the processes, in the very biology, of maturation. Always for Marvell, childhood is that wistful and troubled terrain of innocence overshadowed by authority. The intimacy of innocence with discipline and danger in Marvell’s lyrics of childhood will come as no surprise. What is astonishing is to discover their pressure not just on the ecclesiastical polemicist but on the public career of the parliamentarian. The gathering crisis at the prospect of a popish successor occasioned an attempt in parliament in 1677 to consign the education of royal children to the bishops. Andrew Marvell, MP, exploded in the House not just at the introduction of such a bill, but at the levity with which it was treated: He could have wished it had perished at the first reading rather than have been revived a second. He is sorry the matter has occasioned so much mirth. He thinks there was never so solemn and sad an occasion, as this Bill before you.49

As strikingly, he disrupted the polemical rhythms of The Growth of Popery by printing the bill verbatim in twelve pages of his own text.50 What occasioned such disproportion was the coming together of those old themes 49 Anchitell Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 10 vols (London, 1769), 4: 322. In this and all subsequent Grey citations, Grey purports to be quoting Marvell’s words. 50 Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 4: 324. Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, PW 2:313–23.

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of childhood, paternal authority, and clerisy. Popery and arbitrary government may have been the general cry in the late 1670s; for this particular member of parliament they had a primal resonance, triggering an outburst, on the very floor of the House, whose ‘abruptness’ of expression surprised even him.51 The Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 had allowed Marvell to see Charles II as fulfilling his promise at the Restoration and acting as patron of tolerance and the individual conscience; it gave good reason to pay the king tribute in The Rehearsal Transpros’d.52 Yet neither strategy nor partisanship could have driven this polemicist so repeatedly to idealize Charles in the late prose. In the speech on the bishops’ education bill Marvell gave passionate vent to a concern for the body of this king, and a revulsion at imaginings of his death: God be thanked for the King’s age and constitution of body! The King is not in a declining age; and if we intermeddle in things of this consequence, we are not to look into it so early, as if it was the King’s last Will and Testament. The Law makes it Treason ‘to imagine the death of the King that is—’.53

How distant this must at first seem from the posture and the voice of the Cromwellian poet or of the satirist of the 1660s; and yet of course how familiar that twinning of idealization and endangerment. The impulse to idealize and to endanger extended, unsurprisingly, to literary relations, even to relations with that hero of the literary republic, John Milton, friend and no less mentor to Andrew Marvell. We cannot be wholly surprised that relations between poets might include envy as well as admiration: Jonson on Shakespeare is the pre-eminent model of the mixed modes of praise and subversion. And Marvell fulfils such expectations, not least when he admires blank verse only to render its praise through complacent rhyme.54 But competition does not do justice to the poem’s deeper currents of ambivalence. The very premise of On Mr. Milton’s Paradise lost is misdoubting: . . . the Argument Held me a while misdoubting his Intent,

51

Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 4: 322. Mark Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner, eds, Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 228–9. 53 Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 4: 322. 54 For a different reading of Marvell’s programme in this tribute, see Diana Trevino Benet, ‘The Genius of the Wood and the Prelate of the Grove: Milton and Marvell’, in Margo Swiss and David A. Kent, eds, Heirs of Fame: Milton and Writers of the English Renaissance (Lewisburg and London, 1995), 240–5. 52

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Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane That he would ruine (for I saw him strong) The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song, (So Sampson groap’d the Temples Posts in spight) The World o’rewhelming to revenge his Sight. Yet as I read, soon growing less severe, I lik’d his Project, the success did fear. (ll. 5–12)

Milton’s ambition is at every point put in jeopardy, his wilfulness neatly underscored. Central to the drama of Marvell’s ambivalence is his open avowal of ‘delight and horrour’ (l. 35) as he surveys the Miltonic sublime. Those above all were the emotions excited by proximity to authority in extremis. The old and easy divisions of this poet’s career do not hold; nor can we think of any of his genres and modes as self-contained. Every gesture is of course illuminated by traditions of Renaissance poetics and early modern polemics, and by positioning within local and national history. Yet the Marvellian text must be understood whole as the ineluctable expression of a single mind, a single psychology. Yearning fashioned Marvell’s art; but we would go beyond contemporary libels to recognize how programmatic and how intimate in this poet is the need to attach and idealize with the impulse to challenge, to slander, to subvert. We would recognize above all how Marvell’s acts of attachment and idealization are figured through and in resistance to the authority of the father: the engagement with patriarchy was for him manifestly a story of selfhood as well as a work of ideology. We may appreciate this more readily from a series of textual encounters that tell as striking a tale as Marvell’s rewriting of the story of Zipporah in his letter to Sir John Trott. In The Rehearsal Transpros’d Marvell castigated Samuel Parker, his foe and it may be his alter ego, for filial impiety; and here he launched into his longest, and his oddest, borrowing from the Duke of Buckingham’s play, The Rehearsal: Bring in my Father, why d’ye keep him from me? Although a Fisherman, he is my Father. Was ever Son yet brought to this distress, To be for being a Son made fatherless? Oh you just Heavens! Rob me not of a Father: The being of a Son take from me rather. (PW 1:259)

The urge to lampoon and humiliate drove Marvell’s selection of this passage, and irony abounds in the original; but we must wonder at the resonance of such a lament for one whose own father had died in the wreck of a small boat. Ten years after that death by drowning Marvell insisted, on the rare occasion of print publication to the world in his own name,

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on twice identifying himself as his father’s son: ‘Andrew Marvell A[ndreae] F[ilius]’.55 Even though the gesture appeared in a tribute to a Hull worthy, the signature with its initials was a strikingly personal act. The stormy engagement with Parker drew Marvell more than once to leave traces of the tangled meanings that childhood and paternity held for him. At one point in The Rehearsal Transpros’d—in a textual move even more strange than that borrowing from The Rehearsal—he appears to fold himself into the indulgent figure of Charles II, and then—and wholly unprompted by the text he cites or by the history of his own times— imports an absent son into the succeeding encounter.56 We can only assume that it was the willingness of the King to act at last the nurturing patriarch as he promulgated his Declaration of Indulgence that elicited from Marvell this remarkable piece of idealization. Marvell’s yearning prompted what might seem one of his more striking ideological reversals in the fantasy he spun in his 1676 Short Historical Essay, Concerning General Councils, of the young Athanasius on the beach. That Church Father’s Christological fervour, which had given rise to the Athansian Creed and so had shaped a long history of ecclesiastical divisiveness and rancour, seems far distant from the theological interests of Andrew Marvell father and perhaps son. Yet when he turned to his own purposes the embattled Bishop Croft’s lament that the newly-fledged partisans of the Restoration Church had lost touch with the Athanasian verities of old, Marvell located those ancient truths themselves in youth, in the boy bishop; and as he did so, he touched his portrait with a surprising sympathy. We may wonder whether the Athanasian insistence that God the Father and God the Son were two though of one substance had its own appeal to the author of such remarkable reflections on fatherhood and loss as those written for the Trott family.57 Sheltering authority was a figure after which Marvell yearned, though patriarchalism constituted an order in which he could not fully participate and would endanger, even to the point of undoing. It is that contrapuntal music which floods the close of Upon Appleton House—the patriarch subverted, yet tutor and child seeking shelter in his home. Such a complex of attachments and contradictions has, not surprisingly, rendered the national meaning of Marvell’s politics—royalist, 55 The texts are Marvell’s commendatory poems to Robert Witty at the end of 1650; P&L 1: 97n, 99n. 56 Marvell’s strange figuration of himself and the king extends through several allusive pages; see The Rehearsal Transpros’d, in PW 1: 373–6. 57 See below, p. 151. In her editorial introduction, Annabel Patterson notes Marvell’s departure from his source and gives it a polemical significance though she does not speculate on its psychological force or its fit with Marvell’s other returns, PW 2: 19–21.

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loyalist, or republican—deeply problematic. The controversy is perhaps misdirected, for yearning and subversion speak to a more elemental—and more determining—politics, of fathers and sons, of parents and children.58 In the following chapters we shall go on to speculate further about the relations of the Reverend Andrew Marvell and his son, but we cannot here escape the son’s insistent return to the dynamic of endangered children and orphaned parents: most obviously the Trott family, but also Moses and his son, Cromwell and his Eliza, Theodore Mayerne and his blood, the Cornewall family and their daughters the little T.C.s, Anne Hyde with her vitrified sons; surely too the Douglas family whose progenitive future Marvell so oddly erased, and that most touching emblem of orphaned parents, the rails whose nest is destroyed by the mowers at Nun Appleton (ll. 409–14). Patriarchalism was the defining structure of early modern politics, but paternity with all its affectivities and contingency was its soft centre. While in Marvell’s generation, the civil war generation, around a third of the population was still unmarried at the age of forty-five, we must note that even in normal times 40 per cent of families never had sons to survive to maturity through whom they might imagine the permanence and perpetuity of the overarching construct.59 It is of course in the nature of ideology not to be wholly coincident with social reality, and the greater the distance between them, the greater the violence ideology performs on social reality. In the middle of the seventeenth century political patriarchy was exploded, and paternity itself came under stress. We are familiar with the invitation, the imperative, that the crisis of patriarchy issued to contemporaries down to the end of the century to probe its political and constitutional meanings and implications. Surely, for those who wished to see and to write it, the personal, the affective, and the paternal body of patriarchy was no less exposed by that crisis. Marvell’s condition was to stand within the body and without, and he was surely not alone in such a circumstance—not least, his friend the philosopher James Harrington is a suggestive parallel.60 Marvell’s position as adult male within the body 58 It is striking that, amidst all the highly suggestive recent work on family dynamics, we have heard little or nothing of the uneasy relations of James VI and I and his sons, of Charles I and his sons, of Oliver Protector and his sons—or, for that matter, of James II and his daughters. 59 Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, 2000), 223; Eric A. Wrigley and Roger S. Schofield, Population History of England and Wales: A Reconstruction (London, 1989), 260–2. We are grateful to Roger Schofield for alerting us to these proportions. 60 Marvell’s friend, Harrington, although himself unmarried at the time of writing Oceana, there insisted that marriage was the precondition for full political participation in his republic since ‘the Common-wealth Demandeth as well the Fruits of a mans body as of his mind’. When in 1677, just two years before his death, he finally married, ‘It happening

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politic gave him the freedom to act the anatomist of progenitiveness and power, but the conditions which compromised that position dictated an accounting of the costs: the yearning after masculine authority, and always a resentment over dependency and its incapacities. Here the timehonoured conventions, indeed clichés, of Renaissance social and intellectual history, of the dynamic of body natural and body politic, are brilliantly written out. so, for some private reasons, that he could not enjoy his deare [his childhood sweetheart] in the flower and heate of his youth, he would never lye with her’ (The Common-wealth of Oceana (1656)), 79; John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. (A. Clark /2 vols; 1898 London), I, 292; see also below, Chapter 5, p. 135.

3 Wounds of Desire Marvell’s discomfiture within the structures of patriarchy was a story of the body politic and of the body natural; it was also and more certainly a story of the life lived or imagined, a story of selfhood and its vulnerabilities. He seems to have staged scenes of that life, even to have proffered glimpses of a self bound to and interpreted by the writing—that strangely dissonant repertoire of platonic ideals, garden idylls, republican solemnities, brilliant satire, ecclesiastical polemic, and suppressed longing. At one turn the figure of the poet is to be found idling in the shadows of pastorals like Upon Appleton House or The Picture of little T.C., and then, in later life, Marvell emerges as public man—parliamentarian, controversialist, fierce and witty champion of civic liberties and religious toleration. Lines of continuity have of course been discerned in this career, but scholarly diffidence over biography, and over the questions of meaning and purpose that biography can be legitimately supposed to answer, have contrived to sever material sites and landscapes from the life which was imagined in them and, still more, to discourage speculation about their relation to the life Marvell may have lived. Given the complexity of the writings and the obscurity of the life, this hardly surprises—there are all too few fixed points to which the lyric career can be tied. Nevertheless, Marvell’s work invites us to make such connections. The fleeting disclosures from a life that his writings seem to offer, in particular those studied images of authorial identity, declare the significance of that life as his subject and suggest his prescient grasp of the idea of the self. Scattered through the lyric poetry, the formal panegyrics, the satires, and the polemical pamphlets, are lineaments of a story that properly constituted reveals an astonishing integrity of selfhood and imagination and, as well, the coherence of an entire body of writing. Once, and only once, Marvell fashioned a full and legible script of selfhood and identity. What we propose in this chapter is to take seriously that script of the self, to give due weight to its account of origins, to its developmental force, and to the ways in which it informs and disrupts an entire career. Marvell’s narrative is a veritable aetiology of the self: a dramatic and determining story of eros and abuse, and of wounding and

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incapacity, for which the transcendence of poetry was his counter and his solace. This is the story held within that baffling lyric, The unfortunate Lover.1 To understand The unfortunate Lover as the supreme text of Marvell’s imagined life is to take the poem that has most eluded interpretation and proclaim it the key to the whole. We do this not only out of the pleasure of solving puzzles, though solving those puzzles allows a recognition of the coherence of this poem’s narrative and of its high-wire daring, its taut and resonant language, and finally its argumentative brilliance; we claim the centrality of this text because The unfortunate Lover is the story of origins. It is here and here alone that Marvell faced directly into the darkness and hypothesized beginnings and projected their ineluctable consequence. There are elements of this story, we shall show, to which he was drawn, feelingly and argumentatively, over the entirety of his writing life. Indeed, we will argue, that it is only by means of the story that Marvell told in this poem that such discordant elements of his material life that have been left to us can be made coherent, can become an interpretable whole. Some have rationalized The unfortunate Lover as an exercise in the arrangement of images and emblems.2 Others have sought meaning in political and spiritual allegory, and still others have pursued its argument through icons of love and virtue, or of captivity and divinity.3 But the particulars of all these constructions steadfastly refuse narrative coherence, and the poem itself has defeated interpretation, driving critics to perplexity and irresolution.4 Appreciation of the poem has certainly gotten beyond the opinion 1 That the story we are about to unfold may already have been intuited is suggested by the exact sequencing of titles, at whoever’s hand, in Andrew Marvell’s Miscellaneous Poems (1681): The Nymph complaining, Young Love, To his Coy Mistress, The unfortunate Lover, The Gallery, The Fair Singer, Mourning, Daphnis and Chloe, The Definition of Love, and The Picture of little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers. 2 On The unfortunate Lover and the emblem tradition, see Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (London, 1939); and, following Praz, M.C. Bradbrook and M.G. Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1940), 29; Maren-Sofie Rostvig, ‘In ordine di ruota: Circular Structure in “The Unfortunate Lover” and “Upon Appleton House” ’, in Kenneth Friedenreich, ed., Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell (Hamden, CT, 1977), 245–67; and, most fully, Rosalie Colie, ‘My Ecchoing Song’: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton, 1970), 109–13. 3 The first suggestion that The unfortunate Lover is a political allegory was made by R. Syfret as noted by Bradbrook and Thomas, Andrew Marvell, 29 note 2. For fuller political readings, see Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, 1978), 20–5; and Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Brighton, 1986), 267–305. See also Patsy Griffin, The Modest Ambition of Andrew Marvell (Newark, NJ, 1995), 27. For readings of the poem as spiritual allegory, see Anne Berthoff, The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell’s Major Poems (Princeton, 1970), 75–6; and Bruce King, Marvell’s Allegorical Poetry (New York, 1977), 77–88. 4 See Joseph Summers: ‘I have no idea what “The unfortunate Lover” means’ (Marvell: Laurel Poetry Series (New York, 1961), 4); or Louis Martz: ‘In The unfortunate Lover lies an

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that this is ‘probably the worst love-poem ever written by a man of genius’, but the imaginative centre of The unfortunate Lover and its very fabric still seem to resist comprehension.5 The arcane matter of sources and borrowings, of analogues, emblems, and allusions, has been used as a refuge from reading the text as a whole, and most especially from an acknowledgement and an interpretation of the poem’s most unavoidable, irreducible feature— its tone.6 Melodramatic, lurid, even garish, The unfortunate Lover dwells in affective regions distant from what we think of as the familiar registers of Marvell’s poetry; the poem’s narrator, by turns declamatory and self-pitying, seems a world apart from Marvellian equipoise. The poem begins amidst binaries and green shades, but it plunges quickly into an abyss of desolation and trauma.7 Not only is the movement abrupt and unmediated; the violence is contained neither by Marvell’s habitual irony and dialectic nor by the conventions of political or amatory suffering. The verse spins from shipwreck to Caesarean section, from orphans and abuse to spectacles of blood—the sole fixity an insistent sense of endangerment and destruction. And yet for all its drama, the poem achieves the serenity of verse and perfume, only to tilt, once again but now reflexively, into a heraldics of blood. We rightly associate Marvell’s lyrics with tightness of syllogism and sequencing; The unfortunate Lover displays a very different structural logic, but its turbulent feelings animate a narrative no less perfect, no less implacable. enigma no one has unraveled, nor ever will’ (‘Marvell and Herrick: The Masks of Mannerism’, in C.A. Patrides, ed., Approaches to Marvell (London, 1978), 208). Even the brilliant Colie seems defeated by the poem: ‘The ridiculousness of this poem does not lie wholly in the sad but inevitable foolishness of the lover; it lies as well in making a lover like this the inhabitant of a lyric poem’ (‘My Ecchoing Song’, 109). See also Elsie Duncan-Jones, ‘A Reading of Marvell’s The unfortunate Lover’, in Reuben Brower and Helen Vendler, eds, I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honour (Oxford, 1973), 211–26, especially 211, 223. The most recent retreat from interpretation into a series of qualifications and denials is symptomatic of the general critical perplexity; see Nigel Smith, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell, revised edition (Harlow, UK, 2007), 88. 5 H.C. Beeching, ‘The Lyrical Poems of Andrew Marvell’, The National Review 37 (July 1901), 747–59, quoted in Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 88. Of all those who have read The unfortunate Lover, Lynn Enterline in The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford, 1995) comes closest to identifying the deep psychic stresses of Marvell’s poem; but, through Julia Kristeva and Sigmund Freud, she constructs an argument that discovers the subject of this poem as metapoesis. While we recognize the descriptive power of Enterline’s reading, we contend that Marvell himself discloses a very different subject. 6 A wonderful exception is Robert Polito; see his commentary on tone in The unfortunate Lover in ‘A Pair of Andies’, Poetry Foundation, . 7 Donald Friedman is not alone in his perplexity over the poem’s abrupt reversals: ‘In this poem the first stanza illustrates qualities of diction and theme that associate it with Marvell’s major poetry; and yet it is related to the body of the poem in only an indistinct manner’ (Marvell’s Pastoral Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970), 41).

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If in nothing else, those who have spun argument out of allusions and allegories have concurred in dating The unfortunate Lover to the great crisis of the middle of the seventeenth century, and surely the events of 1649 cannot lie far beneath the turbulence of this poem.8 But the precise relation of topicality to that turbulence has proven difficult to calculate; indeed, it will be our contention that it is the topical matter of this poem that has most led its readers astray. Granted, the topical often provided Marvell with a way to meditate on national crisis, and, as Upon Appleton House demonstrates, the topical could also be a site for exploring identity, for unleashing dramas of selfhood.9 But at the centre of The unfortunate Lover a deeper drama is played out, one that impinges on the topical at the most oblique of angles and one rendered irruptive by the danger of its subject matter. Framing that elemental discourse is a different and a fully conscious argument about the relations between eros and imagination, an argument drawn out of a poignant understanding of writing and human reproduction as an economy of scarcity, a zero-sum game. The unfortunate Lover opens in the artless symmetry of the garden state—the world as it once was or might have been: Alas, how pleasant are their dayes With whom the Infant Love yet playes! Sorted by pairs, they still are seen By Fountains cool, and Shadows green. But soon these Flames do lose their light, Like Meteors of a Summers night: Nor can they to that Region climb, To make impression upon Time. (ll. 1–8)

The idealizations of ‘Fountains cool, and Shadows green’ (l. 4) are anticipated and shaded from the very first by a touch of regret, by distance from the scene of coupling and consummation, by a melancholy recognition of pleasures withheld, of the otherness of those ‘Sorted by pairs’, and by a recognition too of earthly transience, the ‘Meteors of a Summers night’ (ll. 3, 6). The last motif might well remind us of The Mower to the GloWorms, but the stanza closes in a very different mood and rhetorical mode—determinative and not descriptive—with the speaker defiantly juxtaposing pleasures and couplings against the work of transcendent 8 J.B. Leishman (The Art of Marvell’s Poetry (London, 1966), 32–3) and Elizabeth Story Donno (Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, UK, 1972), 229) date the poem on the basis of verbal echoes and borrowings to the late 1640s. See also P&L 1: 255–6; Griffin, The Modest Ambition of Andrew Marvell, 38; Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown, 20; and Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 85. 9 See Chapter 1.

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creation: ‘Nor can they to that Region climb, | To make impression upon Time’ (ll. 7–8). How Marvellian is that counterpointing of the quotidian and the transcendent, that conceit of singularity, of elevation above the conditions and compulsions of mortality. Narrative time is the medium into which the poem next, offhandedly yet self-consciously and irremediably, descends: ’Twas in a Shipwrack, when the Seas Rul’d, and the Winds did what they please, That my poor Lover floting lay, And, e’re brought forth, was cast away. (ll. 9–12)

Here is situated the disastrous biography of the Unfortunate Lover: his violent beginnings, his particularity, his abandonment in and to his human condition. The lover’s story turns on the conflation of birth and death, of origin and ruin. In that devastation lover and mother are folded together but so too, surely, is the narrator who tells this story from within the events themselves, eyewitness and perhaps something more, plangently recounting the abortiveness of a love, the fatal condition of a birth that thrusts the lover through the gaping wound of Caesarean section into the shipwreck that is his life. The violence of birth and death and the elemental suffering may seem hyperbolic, but they are part of what is clearly a narrative of trauma, not mere emblem work. Elsewhere couples play idly among fountains and shades, but the Unfortunate Lover is adrift in turbulent seas, a storm of physical and psychic disasters that in the next stanza resounds ‘As at the Fun’ral of the World’ (l. 24). The conjoining of natural and psychic distress is conventional enough, and surely at the opening of stanza three Marvell plays with and within a tradition of Petrarchan conceits that had long codified the physiology and climatology of love:10 The Sea him lent these bitter Tears Which at his Eyes he alwaies bears. And from the Winds the Sighs he bore, Which through his surging Breast do roar. No Day he saw but that which breaks, Through frighted Clouds in forked streaks. While round the ratling Thunder hurl’d, As at the Fun’ral of the World. (ll. 17–24)

10 On the poem’s Petrarchanism, see Robert Wilcher, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1985), 32–4.

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But Marvell uses these conceits to probe the identity of the self with nature and to propose that melodrama and metaphor be experienced with utmost seriousness. Conceits that might be mere occasions for wit here possess the singularity of a wounding psychic truth, even as the studied shifts of verb tense in the stanza insist that this wound is an enduring condition. Nature is no neutral backdrop to the self, no mere stage-set for idyllic play; it is the foreground onto which is projected trauma and out of which meaning is made and to be made. What has transformed the garden into ragged and perilous nature? And what has wrought the self to such a condition? The poem begins to answer these questions in stanza four where nature is given an active hand in determining and interpreting psychic meaning and where birth itself is identified as the site of originary trauma: ‘While Nature to his Birth presents|This masque of quarrelling Elements’ (ll. 25–6). Because it is for us such a commonplace, the idea of birth as traumatic separation, as descent into a world of dissonance and differentiation, is difficult to experience as revelation, and yet it seems the exact discovery of the poem at this point with its punning conflation of shipwreck and Caesarean section. Were this simply birth as trauma, transience, and mortality, why would the Unfortunate Lover be any different from those equally transient mortals ‘[w]ith whom the Infant Love yet playes’ (l. 2)? Stanza four begins to unfold the story of differentiation. We might note in passing the strange resonance of the Unfortunate Lover’s identity as ‘Orphan of the Hurricane’ (l. 32) with the poet’s own story: the river Humber, perhaps a storm, certainly the death of the father by drowning.11 But before we too readily assimilate poetry to biography, we should note that this death by drowning left Marvell an orphan at age nineteen—not the most likely candidate for guardianship. If an act of self-imagining is buried within the emerging arguments and imagery of the poem, the ‘Orphan of the Hurricane’ is a notation, a piece of shorthand. In the poem’s developmental narrative it is not the overlaying of birth with death, nor even the orphaning, but the ‘fleet of Corm’rants black’ that represents the story’s boldest turn: A num’rous fleet of Corm’rants black, That sail’d insulting o’re the Wrack, Receiv’d into their cruel Care, 11 For assessment of the near-contemporary accounts of the Reverend Marvell’s death, see H.M. Margoliouth, ‘Andrew Marvell, Senior’, Review of English Studies 2:5 (1926), 97; Margoliouth, ‘Andrew Marvell: Some Biographical Points,’ Modern Language Review 17:4 (1922), 351–61; and Pierre Legouis, ‘Andrew Marvell: Further Biographical Points,’ Modern Language Review 18:4 (1923), 417. See also Anne Cotterill, Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford, 2004), 124–5.

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With ‘Nature’ (l. 25) begin the conditions of disaster and dependence, but it is the cormorants that have used vulnerability to their own malevolent ends. That the cormorants represent a circumstance within and beyond the order of nature all students of the poem have, in one way or another, recognized. Some have sought to explain the mysterious shading of the poem’s symbolic world by locating the meaning of these figures within the poem’s historical moment, within, that is, the play of the symbolic against the topical; but they have struggled to identify both the victim and the trauma to which this topicality might be attached.12 What is clear is that the cormorant as figure of rapacity had long been a commonplace and, equally, that in the struggles for religious liberty in the 1640s a polemical association of black coats and clergy—tyrannical and voracious, abusive and wounding—gathered powerful force.13 Likely enough encouraged by the royalist poet and polemicist John Cleveland, whom we know he read in print, Marvell brilliantly transformed the commonplace.14 In a work of 1648, Cleveland cast the (clerical) Master of St John’s College, Oxford, as a cormorant who ate undergraduates: ‘And yet that Cormorant can bee dainty too: Doctors and Seniors are too tough for continuall cramming, he must have Bat|chellers of art and Rabets, undergraduats and Chickens; master com|moners and Phesants. Domitian 12 See Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell, 285–8; and Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660 (Cambridge, 2001), 306–7. 13 The rhetoric of William Walwyn in particular reads almost as a source book for Marvell: the clergy in their ‘neate and black formalities’ were ‘birds of prey . . . Ravens, Vultures, and Harpies’, cruel ‘School-masters’, who ‘wound a man halfe dead by wounds’ (The Writings of William Walwyn, ed. Jack R. McMichael and Barbara Taft (Athens, GA, 1989), 233, 328, 372, 373). For Richard Overton, the ‘bloody minded men . . . of the black Presbytrie . . . bloody black executioners’ were ‘inhumane Caniballs’, ‘Trayterous blood-thirsty Man-eater[s]’, and themselves ungrateful children of their ‘bloody Fathers’, the bishops who had spawned them (Martin’s Eccho (1645), 2–3, and An Arrow against all Tyrants (1646), 14–15). An early insistence on the colour-typing of the clergy is to be found in Sir Edward Dering, A Collection of Speeches (1642), 2; contrast later the knowing reference to ‘those Things in black, the Ministers’ in the anonymous The Petition of the Six Counties of South-Wales and the County of Monmouth (1652), 12. For Marvell’s interest in the literature of religious radicalism in these years, see chapter 1, p. 25 and especially note 54; more generally see Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, chapters 4 and 5. 14 John Cleveland, Mid-Summer Moone: or Lunacy Rampant (1648), 2–3. We might note that Cleveland also writes in the same text (2–4) of Ajax, that crucial figure in The unfortunate Lover, and the sybil’s books, a phrase that resonates within the forest episode of Upon Appleton House. Marvell answered Cleveland’s Rebel Scot in his own Loyall Scot, though Marvell’s poem seems only to have circulated in manuscript copy.

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gorg’d with men, wantons with flies afterwards.’ Marvell heightened the stakes. The blackness of the cormorants now provides an odd and powerful redundancy, and the figure’s charge surely fixes on the overweening clergy, so much the concern of the poem’s moment. But the topical in Marvell’s poem does not lead outwards to civic struggle; it leads inwards to the history of the self. The poem unleashes a bitter and ironic complaint that was to resonate throughout the career of this clergyman’s son. If we understand the black cormorants as the clergy within a history of the self, what, we must wonder, are we to do next?15 What is the action depicted in stanza five that culminates with the ‘unfortunate and abject Heir’, who is also in this poem’s inwardly turned narrative the Unfortunate Lover, hovering between life and death? Whatever action lies buried at the heart of this stanza, it is central to the poem and to the uncovering or acknowledgement of trauma. The rhetorical mode here is paradox: hope digested to despair, feeding as starving, feasting as famishing, increasing as diminishing, living as dying. But these desperate paradoxes are no playthings of Petrarchan desire; they are altogether darker, incapable of easy interpretation or quick imagining: And as one Corm’rant fed him, still Another on his Heart did bill. Thus while they famish him, and feast, He both consumed, and increast. (ll. 35–8)

The Unfortunate Lover—child, orphan, victim—is the site of wounding attention. The language is suggestively erotic—one cormorant feeding him, another billing at his heart; the action is consuming, desirous, and at the same time rapacious, devastating even unto death. The paradoxical effects of love are the most familiar, most clichéd devices of Petrarchan desire and should at the very least open the amatory, indeed erotic, subject of the stanza. But the principals of affection are not some distant and disdainful mistress and her pleading lover but the orphan and whatever or whoever is figured in and by the cormorants. Eros in Marvell’s texts has been read as same-sex desire, but what is narrated in this stanza is surely no conventional story of the hidden flames of homoerotic attachment.16 Something altogether different is here imagined. What we must acknowledge in the stanza and more largely in the poem is a narrative of abusive, sustained, and yet pleasurable and deeply guilty violation. Shameful and 15 Marvell’s later figuration of his enemy and alter ego Samuel Parker as a crow, and his insistence on the bird’s blackness surely indicate a certain self-identification; see PW 1: xx; and Nigel Smith’s comment on the passage, ‘Boomerang Theology’, 149. 16 See Paul Hammond, ‘Marvell’s Sexuality’, The Seventeenth Century 11:1 (1996), 87–123.

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elemental in its force, the action depicted is reciprocating: the cormorants feed the ‘abject’ and ‘unfortunate’ lover, but also bill at his heart. Under such regimen the orphan is at once ‘consumed, and increast’. The vulnerability of the child is a familiar topic within a body of poetry that includes the figures of Mary Fairfax, the Nymph Complaining, and Little T.C. But what is declared in this stanza is yet more shocking—the availability of the child to erotic attachment. Marvell glances at this possibility in Young Love, but it is only in The unfortunate Lover that he plays out its costs. In this story of abuse, something devastating and anarchic is surely figured, for such attachment is annihilating and leaves the orphan lover an ‘Amphibium of Life and Death’ (l. 40). ‘And now’ (l. 41)—that emphatic and Marvellian turn into the present counterpoints the retrospective of the previous stanzas and reinterprets the meaning of victimhood:17 And now, when angry Heaven wou’d Behold a spectacle of Blood, Fortune and He are call’d to play At sharp before it all the day: And Tyrant Love his brest does ply With all his wing’d Artillery. Whilst he, betwixt the Flames and Waves, Like Ajax, the mad Tempest braves. (ll. 41–8)

The amphibium of life and death is still suspended, caught between the flames of love and the drowning waves, but the passivity and complicity of the previous stanzas have been transformed into heroic defiance. In the sharp contest with fortune, Marvell’s protagonist plays out a powerful act of self-fashioning: the orphan of the hurricane has become Ajax braving the tempest. This is the classic encounter of masculine virtu with fortune in the face of destiny—the very moment that Marvell contemplates for Lord Fairfax in Upon Appleton House, that Cromwell is shown to face in An Horatian Ode, and that Archibald Douglas elects on the burning deck of The last Instructions. It is a conjuncture and a paradigm to which the poet was repeatedly drawn. There may have been a form of consolation in thus elevating, and appearing to normalize, the Lover’s story. But singularity remains; the gods are sure of blood whenever they see him in the field. Cupid deploys all his 17 For discussion of this copulative, see Shankar Raman, ‘Marvell’s Now’, Early Modern Culture, 6 (2007), . See also the discussion of ‘now’ in Gary Kuchar, ‘Andrew Marvell’s Anamorphic Tears’, Studies in Philology 103:3 (2006), 369–71.

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winged armoury, the full range of love’s affect, only to have the Lover face into the storm. There seems to be some narrative slippage here; stories that cannot track together, though together they surely register noncoition. In the life-and-death struggle of this self, there is a revealing disjuncture between two narrative vectors: the power of love and the hero’s singularity. It is not that the arrows of Cupid fail to pierce his heart: he is, as stanza seven insists, deeply susceptible to desire, but he turns aside, incapable of love’s performance.18 The true misfortune of the Unfortunate Lover is that on one side burn the flames of love while on the other surge the waves that are his element. The stanza amply demonstrates the will to mastery in face of the gods, but the tempest that this Ajax braves registers the utter impossibility of joining flames and waves, of grafting this present onto that past, as surely as his suffering marks his epic endeavour. The mythic figure of Ajax must have appealed to Marvell for the futility of his pursuit of Cassandra, for his defiance of and punishment by the gods, and still more, and of course, because his story ends in shipwreck and drowning. But we may also wonder if Marvell was drawn to Ajax because that figure—two classical heroes of the same name—allowed him to express the two stories this poem has to tell, that of the doomed defiance of the gods, and another of the warrior in the world whose dead body nourished flowers. This oddly doubled Ajax accounts for and animates the extravagant heroics of stanza seven. Vulnerable to the elements yet still defiant, cuffing the thunder, rebounding from the waves, the Lover seizes his destiny, locking himself to the rock on which the gods have left him: See how he nak’d and fierce does stand, Cuffing the Thunder with one hand; While with the other he does lock, And grapple with the stubborn Rock: From which he with each Wave rebounds, Torn into Flames, and ragg’d with Wounds. And all he saies, a Lover drest In his own Blood does relish best. (ll. 49–56)

Victimhood is transmuted into a story of triumph, but the imagery of this stanza also narrates a story of suffering as spectacle, a spectacle available only to the initiate, perhaps even only to the observing narrator.19 The last 18 There is a tantalizing resonance between the language of stanza seven of this poem and Act 4, scene 1 of Cosmo Manuche’s The loyal lovers (1652), 224–5. 19 There is a suggestive parallel in Marvell’s idealization of the Scottish episcopocide James Mitchell’s self-display under torture in Scaevola Scoto-Brittannicus (1676).

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couplet makes the daring claim that only ‘a Lover drest | In his own Blood’ (ll. 55–6) can absorb and appreciate these acts and idioms. The language of that arresting couplet invites the conflation of sensuality and cannibalism with a touch of auto-eroticism as well as self-display. Such a melodrama of the wounded self surely transcends Petrarchanism as it writes out of the originary claims of orphanhood and isolation an argument of difference and imaginative distinction. And yet Petrarchanism provides the language and imaginative means by which this lover is returned to the world: This is the only Banneret That ever Love created yet: Who though, by the Malignant Starrs, Forced to live in Storms and Warrs; Yet dying leaves a Perfume here, And Musick within every Ear: And he in Story only rules, In a Field Sable a Lover Gules. (ll. 57–64)

Torment and transcendence are after all Petrarchan stock-in-trade, and Marvell seems at this point in the poem’s unfolding more than happy to embrace them. Grotesque extravagance is now safely housed within hyperbole and artificiality: ‘This is the only Banneret | That ever Love created yet’ (ll. 57–8). Outrageous and singular adversity is defanged and dispersed in the gesture towards topicality, those ‘Malignant Starrs’ (l. 59), those ‘Storms and Warrs’ (l. 60) that now situate this drama within the turbulence of the 1640s. We must also recognize that the conventional claims of Petrarchan transcendence are exactly responsive to the problem laid out at the opening of this poem: the relation of amatory pairings to the great work of time. The argument that this poem sets in motion is that poetry only emerges from singularity and suffering, that there is a physics of imaginative enterprise, and that it is driven by drama and distortion. Marvell is scarcely the first to claim either poetry’s eternity or transcendence as love’s consolation, but there is something quite unconventional and superbly expressive in the couplet that closes this poem: ‘And he in Story only rules, | In a Field Sable a Lover Gules’ (ll. 63–4). Denied the conventional forms of fruition and authority, the Unfortunate Lover—and once again we must wonder how to imagine Marvell inhabiting the lineaments and dramatics of this story—discovers and asserts selfhood as fiction and this fiction as the story of impossibilities and of abuse and suffering. How else are we to understand the shield flourished in the poem’s concluding line, ‘a Field Sable a Lover Gules’? Editors have heard here an echo of Hamlet, and some have, though un-

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wittingly, followed Marvell’s enemy Samuel Parker in accusing Marvell of heraldic error in the imposition of colour upon colour, the red upon the black; but the error lies not in the poet’s ignorance of heraldic esoterica.20 He knew perfectly well, as his controversy with Parker was repeatedly to show, the technical requirements of heraldry, and his aim in these lines, with their conjunction of colour upon colour, rather than colour upon metal, was surely to instantiate contradiction—the very definition of love and the very argument of Marvell’s poem of that name.21 What is at stake as well in the symbolism of red upon black is the poem’s recuperation of the trauma of its central stanzas; flourishing that ‘bloody black’ device, Marvell proclaims the Unfortunate Lover at once heroic agent and victim.22 That figure, the ‘Orphan of the Hurricane’, stands figuratively, and literally—line thirty-two of sixty-four—at the exact centre of the poem; his trauma the shaping event in a life history. The poem charts the sequence that has determined his meaning: birth within the maelstrom, abandonment, seduction, violation, and the creation of a heroic singularity. Singularity and heroism are contrasted with coupling, ease, and transience at the poem’s opening; they are identified as the triumph of the imagination at its close. The poem, whatever its costs, is its own evidence of such triumph. Here is a model of the writing life; here is a natural history of the imagination written out in the most spectacular and selfdramatizing terms as the biography of the Unfortunate Lover. His lyric authority derives from a knowledge of misfortune infinitely greater than any that might be imagined through the conventions of love: ‘This is’, after all, ‘the only Banneret | That ever Love created yet’. And the high degree of his drama and misfortune are directly and commensurately crowned by his triumph in ‘Story’, at once a unique history and a unique lyric gift. In whatever way we might want to understand the poet imagining his own history in these lavish, these outlandish, stanzas, was he wrong so to prize himself? From one point of view the poem might be understood as a fantastic piece of self-justification, a melodramatic effort to wring meaning and imaginative triumph out of suffering—not such an unusual psychic enterprise. But even if we cannot allow the claim that 20 See P&L 1: 256; and David Ormerod and Christopher Wortham, eds., Pastoral and Lyric Poems 1681 (Nedlands, 2000), 60: ‘Marvell’s line is bad heraldry, for a colour may only be superimposed on a metal, and vice versa. A red (gules) lover on a black (sable) field is hence impossible’. See also Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 91 note 64. 21 Marvell himself had only scorn for Parker when he noted that Parker’s conduct was akin to that of those who put ‘Metal upon Metal, which is false Heraldry’ (PW 1: 60, 289). For the heraldic solecism of imposing colour upon colour (gules on sable), see Sylvanus Morgan, Ars Chromocritica (1666), 4–5. 22 It was Overton who typed the clergy as ‘bloody black’ in Arrow against all Tyrants, 15.

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Marvell as the Unfortunate Lover is the ‘only Banneret | That ever Love created yet’, we must allow that the body of lyric longing which is Miscellaneous Poems (1681) is a triumph of music and story. Marvell’s poem reaches to the inmost core of the imagined life; but we should recognize that the text appears to construct a worldly setting for this life, a temporal and spatial context, a political circumstance. It is that setting which has invited the interventions of topicality. Indeed, and for obvious reasons, the ‘Storms and Warrs’ of stanza eight have been understood to give a most public meaning to this very personal history, and Marvellians have assumed that such topicality has a consistent politics. They have offered a range of references and interpretations: the orphan of the poem as the young duke of York, the ‘masque of quarrelling Elements’ (l. 26) as the entertainments of royalty, the cormorants as the Scots clergy who harangued the captive Charles I, the perfumes and music of the poem’s close as funerary tributes to the king, and the poem’s imagined landscape as both gloss on the frontispiece of Eikon Basilike and commentary on the sufferings of King and Church.23 But royalist sympathies are surely cast in doubt by Marvell’s use of the parliamentarian term of art ‘Malignant’ to type the times in which the Lover is forced to live.24 More importantly, all such readings stumble over the manifest disjunctures in the poem and distort the presence and programme of the topical within the singular drama of the Unfortunate Lover. The resonance of public affairs may indeed deepen the significance of private matter, but Marvell’s relation to and deployment of the topical were both more complex and more strategic than has been allowed. ‘Artists take on projects to put themselves in a place where the inner self will come through’—we would like to suggest a variant of exactly such place-

23 The fullest example of such interpretation is Margarita Stocker’s Apocalyptic Marvell. Stocker insists on the partisan significance of this emblem, but we can read little from such images as that of the rock unmoved amid the storm that Marvell’s poem shares with the frontispiece to Eikon Basilike. See also Robert Wilcher, Marvell and Royalism, 33–8. In the published version of his sermon to Parliament on the morrow after the king’s execution, the Independent divine John Owen urged this figure as an emblem for the godly; see Owen, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons in Parliament Assembled: on 31 January (1649), 30. 24 An EEBO (Early English Books Online) whole-text survey of usages of the term ‘malignant’ for the years 1648–1650 confirms that the Second Civil War had intensified its partisan identification, and that royalists were perfectly aware of this leading usage and conformed to it. Marvell’s deployment in The unfortunate Lover of the older, and still strong, astrological usage shows either his emotional distance from the conflict insofar as it involved his own person—rather than, for example, that of Francis Villiers—or his readiness to ironize: each possibility is to our point. From close to this moment came the similar partisan slippages of Tom May’s Death; see Chapter 2.

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ment, at the brink of national catastrophe.25 Marvell situated this biography amid the events of the late 1640s because these were a convenience, a symbol for and an objectification of psychic states that have nothing to do with national crisis and disaster but which find a form of rationalization, perhaps even normalization, and surely release in those dislocations. It is as if the contemplation of political crisis allows the internal to become objectified; and, as if in honour of that transaction, Marvell allows hints and shadows of such objects and events a proximity to the inner self.26 To take up Richard Avedon’s words: Marvell puts himself in a place where the inner self is allowed to come through, and we might measure the struggle to reveal that inner self by the utter strangeness of the internal drama and by its discontinuity with the objective world. What the poem performs is dissonance, a sense of estrangement, the gap between the incoherent drama of violation and displacement and the objective world of public disorder and national catastrophe—a gap also articulated by the disjuncture and distance between the framing stanzas of the poem and the disturbance within. Is it any wonder that students of this poem have had a difficult time correlating inner states with external symbols? In fact, such states and symbols are not coherent and not intended to cohere. This is not to deny either the objectification of that inner self Marvell suffered alone or the presence in the poem of the symbols of the civic world that he shared with others; but it is to ask whether Marvell was using the proximity of the self to history in order to underscore his presence—however complicated or oblique—within this fiction. The unfortunate Lover is not the only poem of Marvell’s where the contours of a particular psychology discover an unusual and obscure fit with the hinted shape of external events. The Nymph complaining—a fiction in which the civil wars seem to make so adventitious and yet so crucial an appearance—suggests itself immediately as a site of similar procedures and mysteries, as danger somehow allows the release of private volitions and violations.27 There is something analogous in the philosophical and expository method—with its deft layering of public matter and private suffering— that Marvell entertains in Mourning, as he tucks an obsessive and personal subtext within the dazzling folds of high art. This poem, devoted to 25 Richard Avedon, quoted in Michael Kimmelman, ‘August Sander: People of the 20th Century. A Photographic Portrait of Germany’, New York Times, 2 June 2004, B, 23. We should note that David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge, 1999), 168, intuited a version of this relationship between events in national history and the affective imagination. 26 Marvell’s use of the Leveller charge against the clerical black coats is exactly a case in point. 27 We are not alone in seeing a connection between the two poems, though Berthoff, Resolved Soul, 82, only noted a relation between ‘the static, timeless heraldic standard’ of The unfortunate Lover and the ‘“story” of The Nymph Complaining’.

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epistemological dilemmas that were the very rage of the 1630s and 1640s, makes one brilliant turn after another in its exploration of signs and things: art and artifice, representation and experience, the endlessness of interpretation. It is also true that this poem uses as vehicle for enquiry that familiar amatory trope, the fickle female.28 At the most obvious level, what Marvell achieves by putting into conjunction these stock materials is one more instance of his remarkable capacity to outgo the field. And yet what also appears at the very edge of these stock materials, and on the boundaries of convention, is a set of Marvell’s own, and quite odd, preoccupations. For in addition to convention there are motifs more surely after Marvell’s own heart—the transient child, doubled in this poem with his characteristic brooding; the eye as instrument of knowledge and of deceit;29 the bottomless, the drowning, seas; and most striking of all the seductive and infinite yet non-reproductive economy of self-pleasure: And, while vain Pomp does her restrain Within her solitary Bowr, She courts her self in am’rous Rain; Her self both Danae and the Showr. (ll. 17–20)

And in a manner so characteristic of Marvell, hidden within the mythology of singularity and self-pleasure is the figure of the Unfortunate Lover: if we pull on the thread that Marvell trails in that line, we come to the legend of Perseus, son of Danae, born into turbulence and danger, put to sea with his mother in a coffin. Even in the midst of the most sophisticated exploration of the dilemmas of epistemology, Marvell was at work with darker themes. And even in the midst of conventional misogyny and the denigration of the fickle female, was Marvell domesticating his own private matter: a father quickly remarried, a stepmother twice a mourning bride? Nay others, bolder, hence esteem Joy now so much her Master grown, That whatsoever does but seem Like Grief, is from her Windows thrown. Nor that she payes, while she survives, To her dead Love this Tribute due; But casts abroad these Donatives, At the installing of a new. (ll. 21–8)

28 See L.E. Semler, ‘Marvell’s Mannerist Scepticism: A Reading of “Mourning” ’, English 44 (1995), 214–28. 29 On this theme see Colie, My Ecchoing Song.

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In philosophical reflection as in amatory lyric, Marvell turned repeatedly to the condition of the Unfortunate Lover. And in that other signal phase of his career, as polemicist against coercion of conscience, the encounter of the Unfortunate Lover with history, with the world, no less animated the story Marvell told. The narrative was everywhere one of abuse. At the most documented point of his career, towards the end of his life, Marvell urgently confronted issues of ecclesiastical comprehension and religious toleration—first in The Loyall Scot and then more broadly in the prose works of the 1670s. However anti-doctrinaire his conclusion, driving the polemic of Andrew Marvell, clergyman’s son, is a fantasy of the rigour, rapacity, and brutality of Anglican churchmen. These were qualities he perhaps knew closer to home. In a sermon to the magistrates of Hull in late 1636 amidst a recurrent plague epidemic that may have killed the poet’s mother, the Reverend Andrew Marvell counselled the most remorseless rigor in the maintenance of order and brutality in the punishment of sin: they Cannot look to prevaile unles they be severe & rigide in the execution of law & inflicting of punishment . . . such is mans base & servile disposition . . . . [W]ith a slave or a foole a whip will do more than faire language . . . men that are become servants of sin are like a spaniel, an asse and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten the better they be, they are like to a headstrong restiffe jade that cannot be rid or managed without a baiting bit, sharp spurres & a good bastinado . . . there is no peace to the wicked nor to those who forbear to punish them.30

However precociously open-minded the Reverend Andrew Marvell may have been in his theological tastes and interests, and however wide-ranging and generous his scholarly impulses, he was irascible in debate and intransigent in discipline severe.31 And how striking the resonance between the spurs and bastinados of the father’s sermon and the whipping posts and rods of the son’s polemic against clerical rigour. Rounding on his enemy Samuel Parker in The Rehearsal Transpros’d, Marvell systematizes the charge of clerical brutality: ‘Bring out the Pillories, Whipping-posts, Gallies, Rods, and Axes, (which are Ratio ultima Cleri, a Clergy-mans last Argument, ay and his first too)’ (PW 1: 147). When he came to repeat 30 Hull City Library, MS ‘Sermons etc. of the Rev. Andrew Marvell’, St Luke’s Day, 1636, ‘A Sermon at the Swearing a New Mayor at Hull’, ff. 123–123v. 31 The evidence for the senior Marvell as disciplinarian is the unusually harsh sermon to the magistrates; see previous footnote. As Nicholas Murray observes, A.B. Grosart long ago and on the basis of the sermons noted Marvell’s father’s irascibility; see Murray, World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell (London, 1999), 12. For a valuable discussion of other traits of the father, see Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven, 2010), 18–25.

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that denunciation of clerical cruelty he denied that he had every clergyman in mind, though he surely undercut that qualification by insisting in the same breath on his ‘deep . . . veneration’ for the persons of the bishops—some of whose number he promptly likened to ‘Canibals’ (PW 1: 160–1).32 Such figuration suggests that Marvell was a remarkable instance of the way a moderate position in religion might emerge from a deeplyexperienced conflict of opposites.33 That figuration also invites us to see the connectedness of the more gothic moments in the lyric poetry with Marvell’s impassioned outburst as parliamentarian against the 1677 bill to entrust the education of royal children to the bishops, as well as with his recouping of those passions wholesale in The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government.34 The concern of Marvell’s prose works in the 1670s with the intolerance and tyrannical ambitions of the clergy has hardly escaped notice, but his insistence on the clergy’s cruelty, and more particularly to those received into their care, has attracted less attention. In this imagination there seems to be a fundamental tension within the dual role of the guardian as provider of care and of correction. On the one hand, as his perceptive enemy Parker recognized, that tension extended outwards with Marvell deriving ‘the Politiques of the World from the Illegal and Arbitrary Government of whipping School-masters’.35 And of course it turned inwards. Entrusted with the education of the young, the tutor operates in dangerous terrain where tutelage and abuse may go hand in hand. The ramifications of abuse are extensive: deriding the viciousness of the clergy’s politics, their preference for ‘most precipitate, brutish, and sanguinary Counsels’, Marvell traces these to ‘the Pedantry of Whipping’, which is all that ‘they learnt at School’ (PW 1: 162).36 But it is not just pedantry and narrowmindedness that drive ‘the wanton lash of every Pedant’: boys know they must ‘down with their breeches as oft as he wants the prospect of a more pleasing Nudity’ (PW 1: 82).37 Such truths Marvell knew from the inside. Perhaps he had experienced them in his youth; more surely he occupied 32 In his Epigram: Upon Blood’s Attempt to Steal the Crown, Marvell had typed the ‘bishop’s cruelty’ as proverbial (Epigram, in Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 414). 33 Though see the counter-argument of Ethan Shagan, ‘Beyond Good and Evil: Thinking with Moderates in Early Modern England’, 49:3 (2010), 512. 34 See Chapter 2. 35 Samuel Parker, Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed (1673), 516. 36 See also Marvell’s passing reference to persecution as ‘Boyes-play’ (PW 2: 42). 37 Alan Stewart subjects what he sees as conventional charges of schoolmasterly abuse to some criticism. Nevertheless, the power of the convention is clear in the 1663 disclaimer of the journalist Marchamont Nedham: he will not speak of ‘the ill use some have made of [beating] to lewdness (of which Instances are not wanting, but that they are odious) it being a kind of uncovering of nakedness’; see Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, 1997), 84–121. Nedham is quoted at p. 88.

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their form, and he wrote brilliantly about the tutor’s capacity to nurture as well as about the temptations inherent in the occupation. The erotic play on the riverbank in Upon Appleton House and the sexual knowingness of To his worthy Friend Doctor Witty demonstrate just how intimately Marvell came to imagine those temptations of pedagogy. But in the landscape of youth that Marvell draws in prose and verse, scenes of abuse and desire are shadowed by loss. The poet who in Upon Appleton House (ll. 267–8) imagined the stealing away of the child was himself in 1670 added to the Commons’ committee on a bill against child stealing. And was his performance on that committee, and beyond, glanced at in the taunt by one of his enemies, ‘but will he eat your children Trans[proser]?’38 As many have noted, the celebration of Maria’s virginal promise is haunted by the knowledge of change and mortality; the youthful beauty of Little T.C. is stalked by the vengeful Flora; the dead Hastings had been ‘hurried hence, as if already old’ to forestall his marriage to Mayerne and erotic fulfilment (Upon the Death of Lord Hastings, ll. 16, 20–2);39 and the youthful promise of Douglas is most incandescent at the moment of destruction. Such yearnings are rather more surprising encountered amidst the derision and denunciation of the prose. As we have seen in Chapter 2, Marvell discloses, in his Short Historical Essay, Concerning General Councils that accompanied Mr. Smirke (1676), the origins of ecclesiastical exclusiveness and intolerance in the story of Athanasius and the interrupted games of boys on the beach. While Marvell there compounds the elegiac with the polemical, he also looks towards issues of career and complaisance as he observes the young Athanasius’s facile absorption into household and service. That was a trajectory that the author of the Horatian Ode and Upon Appleton House well understood. It is a commonplace to discover that poets and polemicists objectify and make external the trepidations and vulnerabilities with which they themselves are intimate. It does not then surprise to find Marvell in Mr. Smirke fabricating a life shaped as much to his own interests as to the facts of the career of Francis Turner, the target of that satire: adolescent complaisance, ambition, careerism, wit, calumny, and deviance. He begins his indictment in ‘Boyes-play’, and notes that there was among the group of players a ‘close Youth’ eager for ecclesiastical promotion who, gaining office, ‘took up an unfortunate resolution that he would be Witty’. 38 Chronology, 115; Cotterill, Digressive Voices, 109–11; S’too him Bayes, or some observations upon the humour of writing Rehearsals Transpros’d (1673), 57. 39 Hastings died the day before his marriage; see the title of the elegy by Francis Standish, ‘An Elegy upon the death of Henry Lord Hastings, the only son and heir of the right honourable Ferdinando Earl of Huntingdon, deceasing immediately before the day designed for his marriage’ (Lachrymae Musarum (1649), 26).

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For Marvell, the road from aspiring youth to bitter polemic to moral obloquy is direct: Turner, whatever his wit, combines calumny with ‘the sin against Nature’ (PW 2: 42). While Marvell here trades in charges of sexual impropriety and transgression—not after all such an odd move for ecclesiastical controversialists—he builds these on Turner’s careerism and serviceability. In that bitter caricature, in the weird lament for the absent father in The Rehearsal Transpros’d, and in the affecting account of Athanasius, that instrument of intolerance and oppression, Marvell seems to turn repeatedly to the vulnerabilities of the Unfortunate Lover. It might be that such was his own discomfort with those vulnerabilities that some act of transference and displacement was needed for him to air and articulate them. It might be too that for the wayward narrator of Upon Appleton House, as for the polemicist who delighted in acts of exposure, the decision to call attention to vulnerabilities was altogether more self-conscious. In like manner and as we have seen, in The Rehearsal Transpros’d Marvell imputed narcissism, indeed auto-eroticism, to his enemy Samuel Parker, thus opening himself to the eager counterattacks of Parker’s defenders on the same ground.40 Although it is only in recent years that critics have explored relations between the somatic and the writerly, between the body and the imagination, others long ago and less bent on elevating the lyric poet or the principled ideologue had no qualms about joining Marvell’s body in its deficiencies and desires to his writings. Not least among these was Parker, Marvell’s prime adversary, who was confidently to identify not only Marvell’s facial and rhetorical mannerisms but also a characteristic argumentative pattern.41 At the very conclusion of his Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed (1673), Parker turns away from the broad nonconformist challenge and characterizes his immediate adversary, ridiculing Marvell’s preoccupation with ‘Rods . . . and Ferula’s’ and his habit of deriving national calamity, ‘the Kingdom’s ruine’, from apple carts overturned in the Strand by the unruliness of the child.42 What Parker does, perceptively if 40 Paul Hammond notices the self-endangerment and confesses his puzzlement that ‘Marvell’s imagination should have traveled this path’ (‘Marvell’s Sexuality’, 88). But as Nigel Smith notices about Marvell and a different antagonist, he seems both to flay and to identify with him: ‘becoming like Flecknoe was such a threat, and the poem is Marvell’s touch of poison that sees him off . . . Marvell’s guilty conscience or fear of becoming Flecknoe’s mirror is never truer’ (Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, 59). 41 For Parker on the performative Marvell, Chapter 4, 106–7. 42 Parker, The Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed, 517–18, 522. Parker was not alone in recognizing that boyhood lay at Marvell’s argumentative centre. Another of Marvell’s animadvertors of the early 1670s, most likely Samuel Butler, observed his inordinate political attention to ‘the Boys whipping their Giggs, and the Lacqueys playing at the Wheel of Fortune’; see The Transproser Rehears’d (1673), 34. Marvell himself paid tribute to the enduring memory of brutal schoolmasters in Rehearsal Transpros’d (PW 1: 87).

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vituperatively, is to locate in youth Marvell’s abiding political fascinations—on the one hand disciplinary abuse and on the other the origins of seismic change.43 Convictions of liberty and toleration can of course originate at a number of sites, even the most cerebral and conscientious. But the form this argument took in the polemics of an ageing Marvell found its origins in the experience, lived or imagined, of youth; that experience was played out with tremendous subtlety and bravura in the poetry of his middle years. The elevated themes of civic moderation, of liberty and toleration, can be—must be—located within discipline severe. We would thus go beyond Parker to argue that crucial features of Marvell’s creative as well as argumentative life can be traced to the history of the Unfortunate Lover. Most particularly we would observe the complex of attitudes that centres on endangered youth—a complex fashioned of melodrama and driven by desire, and little in Marvell’s poetry has so captured the attention of modern readers. Such desire is not everywhere we look in Marvell’s poetry, but it occurs often, and in a most striking way. Desire seems to feature not simply an abstracted narrator, the sheltered and ever-articulate voyeur at the edge of a landscape, but bears the features of a poet—and Marvell invites us on occasion to imagine the poet as himself. In a most extended and striking form, Marvell conjures in The last Instructions the incandescent, but thoroughly historical, Archibald Douglas as fantasy of ideal and endangered youth, situating him within unmistakably historical gossip and data that could only have been known to a member of parliament like Andrew Marvell himself. He then replays that figure in The Loyall Scot as he ties the idealization to his own anger against the intolerant bishops. And there is the odd hint of topicality, the teasing puzzle, that Marvell drops into the very title of The Picture of little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers—not to mention the extended autobiographical fantasy the poet lays out in Upon Appleton House. We might think as well of the first-person address to, and the personal connection with, Dr Robert Witty, to whom a most knowing poem presumably about Mary Fairfax was inscribed. Still more personal is the lament for the ‘beauty beyond his sex’ (Supra Sexum Venustus) of Sir John Trott’s lost son (Johannis Trottii Epitaphium, l. 16, our translation). 43 It may not be coincidence that Marvell’s first published work, his 1637 panegyric on the birth of a royal child (Ad Regem Carolum Parodia), took as its text a verse by Horace (Carmina I, 2) that coupled threats to empire with threats to youth: ‘Enough of plague, and enough of his dreadful thunderbolt has the father already sent, and smiting our citadels with right hand aglow, he has terrified the city; terrified the citizens lest should return the oppressive age of former times. . . . Youth made sparse have heard the heavens have sharpened a sword by which the oppressive Turks should better have perished; they have heard of deaths cause by their parents’ vices’ (Estelle Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry: From Text to Context (Brussels, 2003), 249); and see pp. 101, 163 below.

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The idealization of beauty and innocence is the conventional face of such desire, and Marvell deploys those conventions brilliantly—he was, needless to say, deeply responsive to beauty. But the tremulous response to youthful beauty came from a very different place in this psyche. We might suspect that powerful and dark emotions cohabited with fascination for the pre-pubescent; and at the centre of The unfortunate Lover is that scene of primal transgression against unguarded youth from which, we would argue, came a tangle of feelings: a wish to preserve unsullied innocence, an acknowledgement of the guilty pleasures of aberrant desire, anger against and yearning for what should have been the sheltering arms of patriarchy, and, finally and consequentially, an incapacity in face of the demands of sexual maturity. Repeatedly, that extraordinary story of denial and aversion breaks the surface of Marvell’s poetry. Denial shapes in an odd and striking fashion the representation of Douglas as nubile androgyne and as well the fetishization of desire in The Nymph complaining;44 and aversion seems to script nearly every encounter with adult sexuality in Marvell’s poetry. In The Definition of Love, aversion is played out as the very geometry of desire, and Marvell returns to that painful calculus in Upon Appleton House, where the image of the stock doves (ll. 523–8) gives rise, paradoxically, to perpetual mourning for nuptial union—their song the odd and unfulfilled counterpoint of the narrator’s own music. Less abstracted but no less inescapable is the repulsion articulated in the lyric encounters with the heterosexual female, with Clora (The Gallery), with Clorinda (Clorinda and Damon), and most spectacularly and weirdly with Chloe (Daphnis and Chloe): Rather I away will pine In a manly stubbornness Than be fatted up express For the Canibal to dine. Whist this grief does thee disarm, All th’ Enjoyment of our Love But the ravishment would prove Of a Body dead while warm. (ll. 69–76)

While in the satires the revulsion unleashed at a series of sexualized figures might seem simply programmatic for this genre—and no doubt generic 44 See Matthew Augustine, ‘“Lilies Without, Roses Within”: Marvell’s Poetics of Indeterminacy and “The Nymph Complaining”’, Criticism, 50:2 (2008), 255–78, and Augustine, ‘Borders and Transitions in Marvell’s Poetry’, The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, 54–8.

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demands did make a contribution—such demands do not fully explain the satirist’s disgust. It is altogether obvious that Marvell’s poetry does not express an aversion to Eros; but it is equally obvious that the erotic animates an unusual range of forms. Some have seen in Marvell’s poetry traces of homosocial, indeed homoerotic, desire, but in fact Marvell repeatedly conjures heterosexual encounter, and always to disturbing effect. In the slight pastoral devices of Ametas and Thestylis making HayRopes is hidden an intriguing and instructive dialectic of aversion. Under the guise of a light-hearted dialogue, and beginning with the stock metaphor of rope-twisting for love-making, the poem choreographs disjunctures and disappointments. He propositions; she rejects the impropriety in his taste for love where ‘both should turn one way’ (l. 6); he derides female ploys and inconstancy, but she insists love ‘Must be taken as you may’ (l. 14.). Thestylis’ rejoinder has usually been understood as proverbial and permissive; but it is unmistakably imperative—take love as it is allowed to you and not as you would have it. Ametas’ goodhumoured concession follows quickly: ‘Then let’s both lay by our Rope, | And go kiss within the Hay’ (ll. 15–16). The resolution of the dialectic may seem a conventional and unruffled withdrawal to lesser forms of union, but that resolution is premised on an unresolved drama of aversion; of Thestylis’s aversion for what Ametas would demand and of Ametas’s aversion for Thestylis’s conventional form of play. The narrative here is decidedly, disarmingly physical, but it has a darker and foundational version. That hyperbolic story of love turned aside, of the elemental incompatibility of flames and waves, is declared by stanza six of The unfortunate Lover. A no less dramatic and brilliant rendition of sexual aversion is told in—and surely haunts—To his Coy Mistress. As we noted in Chapter 2, the startling imagery of the second verse paragraph gives an altogether gothic rendering of copulation and desire. Here, human sexuality is constituted in and by imagery of annihilation—deserts and vaults, dust and ashes. Marvell’s speaker offers these as alternatives, as persuasion; what seems shocking is that a memento mori, with its worms and decay, should serve as the prompt to desire. The conjuncture reveals the proximity in this imagination of annihilation and coition—here the spectre of heterosexual fulfilment hovers over the void.45 This is after all the argument of the first stanza of The unfortunate Lover, which seems so coolly and softly 45 We should note the proximity of Marvell’s language here to that of Nathaniel Whiting’s Pleasant History, 59–60, a passage that moves from the embrace of worms in the grave to the warning that ‘In Cupid’s Temples shall no voice be heard’.

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to acknowledge the emptiness in which human reproduction ends. And is it not the fear of Damon as he rejects Clorinda’s advances in Clorinda and Damon? And is it not the case that misogyny and aversion similarly haunt the closing lines of To his Coy Mistress, despite its simulacrum of heterosexual ecstasy? An enormous amount of energy has gone into the explication of the resolute obscurity of Marvell’s striking images—the birds of prey, the iron g(r)ates, the lovers rolled together as a sphere of desire. We would suggest that this stanza, and indeed the poem as a whole, derives from a recognition of that discordant anatomy of desire—what we have earlier called Marvell’s template of incapacity—in Ametas and Thestylis. The loves ‘both . . . turn[ed] one way’, front to back instead of front to front, in what is surely a dream of sexual conjunction of another kind, more easily conform themselves into the Platonic sphere conjured at the close of To his Coy Mistress: ‘Let us roll all our Strength, and all | Our sweetness, up into one Ball: | And tear our Pleasures with rough strife, | Thorough the Iron g(r)ates of Life’ (ll. 41–4). But what are we to make of those ‘iron gates’ or ‘iron grates’ that have so long baffled readers of the poem? The language unmistakably has something to do with the vagina— Marvell fortifies that territory in both Daphnis and Chloe and The Match, so the ‘iron g(r)ates’ should not surprise.46 But just as striking as the declaration of impenetrability is the definitive and surely argumentative coupling of ‘life’ with those ‘g(r)ates’ in To His Coy Mistress. This is the conjunction and the beginning that the Unfortunate Lover escapes through Caesarean section. The poet seems here to imagine that the violence and the completeness of this union will somehow burst through the birth canal. In its non-procreative sexuality, such union may yet make the sun run, ‘make impression upon Time’ (l. 8); it may yet achieve the immortality denied to those more conventionally paired. But can we be sure that the closing lines of To his Coy Mistress are no mere variant of Petrarchan singularity or of the inexpressibility topos? In fact, driving the conclusion to the third stanza is the premise of the second, and as well the argument of The unfortunate Lover—that conventional heterosexuality cannot comprehend futurity. What is just as surely present, if unspoken, is the Unfortunate Lover’s conclusion that eternity is only to be possessed through verse. The form of intercourse that Marvell’s narrator has in mind, heterosexual but not annihilating, must therefore allow the fulfilment of verse. It is an undeniably heterosexual coupling that the poet imagines in both Coy Mistress and Ametas and Thestylis. The claim that art consorts best with pederasty is at least as old as Plato, but it 46 He fortifies it figuratively in Upon Appleton House too, of course, where ‘The Cloyster outward shuts its Gates, | And, from us, locks on them the Grates’ (ll. 103–4).

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is not Marvell’s, though his treatment of the figure of Douglas suggests that he was immune to neither homoerotic nor pederastic desire.47 More urgently, the second stanza of The unfortunate Lover declares the fear of annihilation in heterosexuality that shapes the argument of To his Coy Mistress and determines the elegiac note at the opening of The unfortunate Lover. The danger of annihilation, wounds, and incapacity together dominate Marvell’s litany of heterosexual encounters. Damon’s wound is self-inflicted; when Chloe but offers to yield herself, Daphnis plunges into a paroxysm of suffering; and the victim of The Fair Singer is wholly undone by love. This poet’s misogyny is rooted in, and excited by, the imagination of incapacity, and the invective of The Character of Holland hints at such dissolution. What seems at first conventional sexual slander, the scorn directed at the odour of Dutch women in lines 85–92, becomes more consequential with the pun on castration in the putting out of the priests eyes, or testicles (l. 92). Marvell there deploys for another the canard that distaste for female sexuality renders the male impotent. And in The unfortunate Lover he provides the originary account of incapacity and disjuncture, tracing it in this poem to whatever happened in the cormorants’ nest. Marvell’s account is causative, not simply narrative, for he was fully conscious of the logical, of the consequential, implications of the adverbial conjunction ‘now’ that in stanza six links the Unfortunate Lover’s experience of abuse with his amatory failures, his woundings at Cupid’s hands.48 That causal grammar ties together a narrative sequence that runs from the victimization of the Unfortunate Lover to the excitement of the proffered conjunction in To his Coy Mistress to the abandonment of coition in Ametas and Thestylis. The unfortunate Lover allows us to comprehend the meaning of eros for Marvell; it also crystallizes the nearly physical pleasure he takes in the wounds of love and the detail with which he conjures them. There is something provocative and challenging, as well as deeply felt, in the Unfortunate Lover’s taste for suffering, that punning conjunction of consumption and desire caught in the language: ‘a Lover drest | In his own Blood does relish best’ (ll. 55–6). Those words have puzzled Marvell scholars, but often textual cruxes and knots of unintelligibility form 47 It is more than a little suggestive of inclinations to pederasty—as opposed to the homoeroticism Hammond generally infers—that the close of To his Coy Mistress should carry so many echoes of John Hall’s ‘To his tutor, Master Pawson. An Ode’; see Hammond, ‘Marvell’s Sexuality’, 113–14. 48 In Mr. Smirke, Marvell administered a tutorial in grammar to the Animadvertor: ‘[T]he Now in that place is a word of Immediate Inference, as if it appeared necessarily, from what last preceded’ (PW 2: 75).

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interpretive opportunities.49 What the line seems willing to explore in the most literal sense is the narrator’s desire to taste and to display his own suffering, to relish his own wounds. This crux identifies the particular and peculiar interest Marvell elsewhere exhibits in the somatic—and surely also aesthetic—character of wounding love, most obviously in To his Coy Mistress where the ‘am’rous birds of prey’ (l. 38) oddly replicate the cormorants of The unfortunate Lover and the greedy vultures of The Gallery. Such interest is evident too in the cannibalism and necrophilia of Daphnis and Chloe, and in the fatal wounding of Damon the Mower. And what could be more wounding and more deeply imagined through the body than the birth of the Unfortunate Lover: ‘Upon the Rock his Mother drave; | And there she split against the Stone, | In a Cesarian Section’ (ll. 14–16). United in this strange and troubling image are a series of conditions that define the Unfortunate Lover: the body itself, its unnatural beginnings, the originary wound, and the consequent suffering, violence, and isolation. Wounding was, for Marvell, a foundational argument even shaping his vision of the pained soul; it haunts the trembling dew in On a Drop of Dew—‘In how coy a Figure wound, | Every way it turns away’ (ll. 27–8)50—and surely defines the ghoulish exchanges in A Dialogue between the Soul and Body. And as the narrative of The unfortunate Lover tracks from Caesarean section to masculine incapacity, it embraces a larger project within the Marvellian psyche and canon alike: a fascination with alternative modes of reproduction. Marvell seems almost programmatically to entertain varieties of asexual desire and reproduction. The most detailed case for this fascination has been made in the explication of the poet’s eroticized gardens, those places where the imagination seems to roam freely in the pleasures of grafting and budding, and in the exchanges between human desire and vegetal form. There is also of course the transgressive terrain of paedophilic desire, clearly erotic, just as clearly non-procreative—although as the games of Athanasius, the boy bishop in The Short Historical Essay, Concerning General Councils, show, by no means non-regenerative. Equally premised in sexual alterity are the sewing nuns of Upon Appleton House, whose material reproduction of the human form is realized through aesthetics.51 That motif is deeply implicated in the framing argument of The unfortunate Lover: the reproductivity of aesthetics. 49 Lynne Enterline in Tears of Narcissus, 188, appreciates most fully the dilemmas and opportunities presented by these words. For a summary of responses to the textual crux, see Wilcher, Andrew Marvell, 36. 50 For the suggestion of cannibalism in this delicate lycic, see P & L 1:244 n. 51 Equally instructive is the asexual regeneration of lads on the beach that Marvell interpolated into his version of the Athanasius story (PW 2: 134–5).

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The transient mortals caught in happy embrace at the opening of that poem are denied the reaches of immortality, which are reserved alone for those who triumph through story and song. Such is the necessary conclusion of Marvell’s costly argumentation in this verse, though it is hardly the only place where he drives the claim. In his Latin epitaph for Edmund Trott, Marvell was indulging the grief of his friends, but he surely voiced his own understanding of futurity’s false promise in that unusual salutation to ‘parents, the most futile rank of humans, fabricators of sons’ [Legite Parentes, vanissimus hominum ordo, | Figuli Filiorum].52 Fittingly, then, Archibald Douglas, a figure whom he deprives of sexual history, is promised immortality, even propagation, through story and song: ‘Fortunate Boy! if either Pencil’s Fame, | Or if my Verse can propagate thy Name; | When Œeta and Alcides are forgot, | Our English youth shall sing the Valiant Scot’ (ll. 693–6). No less instructively, transcendent creation and recreation are reserved for the mind alone in The Garden. The counterpointing of sexual and aesthetic reproduction could hardly be more concisely achieved than in Upon an Eunuch; a Poet. But it is in The unfortunate Lover that Marvell most fully confronts the loss and pathos of the equation of art and immortality: ‘Yet dying leaves a Perfume here, | And Musick within every Ear: | And he in Story only rules, | In a Field Sable a Lover Gules’ (ll. 61–4). How like Marvell to offer pathos, almost sentimentality, and at the same time to draw away from those tones: ‘And he in Story only rules’, where the word ‘only’ is both an overreaching claim for the significance of the aesthetic and a recognition of its limits. It is a story of concession as well as of triumph. There is more than a little irony in The unfortunate Lover’s proximity— thematic, and surely compositional—to An Horatian Ode, that great meditation on the competing claims of the pen and the sword.53 In the latter poem, all is balance, equipoise, control. We would argue that The unfortunate Lover is no less controlled, no less formally balanced. Further, we would point out that the equipoise in An Horatian Ode is partial: it is only achieved within the domain of the sword where justice is measured against fate; the condition of the poet as forward youth is held up, and then lost, to view. A similar dialectic characterizes The unfortunate Lover; there, the immortality of story and song is predicated in the poem’s opening and asserted at its close, but it is the plight of the Unfortunate Lover that claims our attention throughout. The dialectic between action and 52 Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 197. The orphaned parent birds of Upon Appleton House (ll. 395–96, 413–14) provide a similar reminder; see in particular Cotterill, Digressive Voices, especially 99–108, for discussion of the orphan in Marvell’s verse. 53 In this instance, compositional proximity must cover not only the writing sequence but also the printed sequence of these two poems in Miscellaneous Poems.

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contemplation was a haunting dilemma for the poet of The Garden and Upon Appleton House. The unfortunate Lover and An Horatian Ode exactly constitute this dialectic and surely personalize the encounter of the psyche with history. Yet in the traditions of Marvellian scholarship, that encounter has been glossed in differing and often exclusive ways. Positivism has taken shelter from the disturbing force of this dialectic through illusions of the disembodied self, of a Marvell wholly ratiocinated; that illusion is, we suggest, enhanced by a conviction of Marvell’s bifurcated career. Psychology on the other hand has assumed a mind independent of history, a body living outside time. The case of Marvell demands another and intermediating category for the dramas and dialectics of selfhood: what we have called the imagined life. That term fuses the historical person—living in the body and in the turmoil of events—with a self rooted in the psyche and performed in and felt through textual production. And such textual performance of the self is what Marvell achieved in that startling confession of incapacity coupled with the most disinterested self-anatomy that he wrote out as consolation to his grieving friend, Sir John Trott in 1667. It is that same self whose origins and meaning Marvell anatomized in The unfortunate Lover. The textual performance of the self Marvell offered in relation to the Trott family was as far-reaching as that disclosed in The unfortunate Lover. Although this poet published so little to the world, two of Marvell’s texts for the Trotts appeared in stone. That the epitaphs on the young Trott heirs, who died in the mid 1660s, should then have survived is of course no wonder, but we should also note their survival among the verses that Marvell collected and preserved and that came to compose the 1681 folio. The survival of the letter that Marvell wrote to the bereaved father may surprise: we must assume that it once found a form of publication in the mails, but what could have prompted its inclusion as Marvell’s only piece of correspondence in that miscellany of verse? It was presumably Marvell himself who determined to preserve it, and we must wonder at his reasons. We have already reflected on the ways in which Marvell wrote in this letter of the turbulence of the female and the sorrows of patriarchy; we would now emphasize that this flood of tears and texts occasioned by the failure of patrilineal descent told yet another story. As we noted in Chapter 2, Marvell conflated the domestic and the civic, the personal and national disasters of 1667, in order to console his friend by means of an argument of proportionality. But what was offered to Trott went beyond consolation, and the grief in these texts belonged not only to the occasion of others’ loss. It also belonged to Andrew Marvell. When he played before Trott a set of variations on personal and dynastic extinction—Moses,

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Eli, Trott, and, lurking in the background, Clarendon’s own losses that fateful summer—he was reminding his reader of the way things had to be, of the order that God had ordained. The pedagogy, as well as the consolation, is declared in the unyielding anatomy of loss that Marvell offered in the letter, and in the brutal rewriting of procreation’s story in the epitaph on Edmund Trott: Read, parents, the vainest rank of humans, Molders of sons, founders of names, Stuffers of moneybags, nourishers of distant hopes, And, if it is possible, be wise by our misfortune. Edmund Trott is no more. . . . And bespattered with the fatal disease of the pox, He has become (That we may lighten the envy of true praise with a feigned reproof ) A betrayer of friends, a parricide, The sponge of his family.54

The death of sons is read as the death of parents, and the abandoned child, that orphan of the hurricane, finds retribution. As both letter and epitaph remind us, this is an ineluctable story. And not surprisingly, these were not the only texts of others’ lives in which Marvell told that story. In the songs that he composed on the marriage of Mary Cromwell and Lord Fauconberg, the erotic sport seems on the surface untroubled. The occasion demands the conventional marriage tropes, but Marvell inserts into the ceremonial the figure of Anchises, from whose loins the storied Aeneas was to spring, and whose own marital history included blinding by an angry Jove, father of Anchises’ lover. This little allegory allowed Marvell to compliment Oliver Cromwell as Jove and source of empire; but it allowed as well the shadow of paternal violence to hover over the nuptials.55 How striking that in Marvell’s very first appearance in print, his complimentary adaptation of Horace for the celebratory volume on the birth of Charles I’s fifth child, Princess Anne, we should find the same conjunction of endangered children, parental violence, and empire threatened: ‘Youth . . . have heard of deaths caused by their parents’ vices. Which of the gods may the people call to the affairs of the tottering empire?’.56 Such texts, it is clear, gave the poet a space within which to figure and reconfigure the paradoxes of desire, incapacity, and futurity which he 54 William A. McQueen and Kiffin A. Rockwell, The Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell (Chapell Hill, 1964), 81. 55 Edward Holberton notes the political awkwardness of the marriages and the ways in which Marvell reflected these tensions in his verse; see Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate (Oxford, 2008), 143–62. 56 See above note 44; Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry, 249.

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staked out in The unfortunate Lover. And if we see in the epitaph for Edmund Trott and Marvell’s letter to the father characteristic acts of selfreflection—the poet perhaps drawn to his own imaginings of an end in the deserts of vast eternity—we must see them too, and still more The unfortunate Lover, as part of a heroic and surely therapeutic endeavour to project the self as whole; and by ‘therapeutic’ we mean that process by which suffering is transmuted into art. Of the success of that effort—of the masterful coherence, tonal range, and formal brilliance of The unfortunate Lover—there can be no doubt. It was the work of a writer capable of the most supreme control, capable too of imagining the self in a variety of historical positions and attachments, and capable, of course, of developing a fully formed and powerful set of religious and political programmes. It is as if Marvell exactly intuited those Enlightenment ideals, authorial wholeness and integrity of imagination. And it is as if those ideals were his counters to incompleteness and dissolution as he returned insistently to certain narratives of desire and adapted and interpolated stories of loss and attachment. To describe the life imagined in The unfortunate Lover is of course not to substitute the story unfolded in this poem for a narrative of the life Marvell lived in Yorkshire, in London, and beyond; nor is it to privilege the historical present tense of this poem and its hinted-at topicality over the reality of a lurid psychology. It is rather to see as whole the material life—only to be recovered from textual traces57— together with an implacable narrative of the self inhabiting history and torment. 57 For a catalogue of the sexual slurs, see Hammond, ‘Marvell’s Sexuality’, 89–97. It may be merely coincidence, but it is striking that one who likened controversial publishing to going to sea in a storm should have used as the title for his poem a phrase also chosen by some balladeer for a melodrama of tempest and shipwreck; see Marvell, PW 1: 247; and An Excellent New Song, Call’d, The Unkind Parents, Or, The Unfortunate Lovers (n.d.), (accessed 21 February 2007).

4 Secrecies and Disclosures Andrew Marvell fashioned lyric poetry from hidden parts of his life, but it was not only lyric verse that was written out of those spaces. The civic mind also dwelled there, and it was no less marked by a sense of contradiction—irresolvable, irruptive, and recurrent, and throughout the writing career. At the instinctual level such contradiction might seem to threaten dissolution, and the extraordinary control Marvell displays in the great poems is surely a measure of that threat. But at the programmatic level, Marvell’s dialectic turns fluently inwards and outwards: to the interior life yet also to the political world and a career of public knowledge. It is our purpose in this chapter to follow Marvell within and without through a series of his writings, and to register something of what was at stake for him in those domains. It is hard to overemphasize the degree to which Marvell’s drives to conceal and to disclose were bound together. The lyrics of interiority, largely unpublished in his lifetime, have been central to any understanding of Andrew Marvell; and so too is John Aubrey’s characterization of him as a man wary and watchful: ‘Though he loved wine he would never drink hard in company, and was wont to say that, he would not play the goodfellow in any man’s company in whose hands he would not trust his life.’1 More recently, a different Marvell has returned to view, standard-bearer of toleration and civic balance, a public servant fully entered into the lists of controversy and polemic.2 And while Marvell certainly belonged to a culture of calumny and animadversion, his programme of public engagement reached beyond polemic to an ideal of civic rationality— 1 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols (London, 1898), 2: 53. The photocopy that appears in Andrew Marvell, Poet and Politician, 1621–78: An Exhibition to Commemorate the Tercentenary of His Death, compiled by W.H. Kelliher (London, 1978), 94, suggests that the emphasis is Aubrey’s. See also Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven, 2010), 167, for the remark by Anthony Gilby that although he ‘was living very close to Marvell, nothing was to be seen of him until the first day of Parliament; he was not a man to be found easily’. 2 See especially the introductory essays to PW by Martin Dzelzainis, Annabel Patterson, Nicholas von Maltzahn, and N.H. Keeble; see also Patterson, The Long Parliament of Charles II (New Haven, 2008).

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indeed, late in his career he was wishfully and strategically to characterize the English polity as the preserve of ‘the only Intelligent Ruler over a Rational People’ (PW 2: 226). And there lies a puzzle. Since the eighteenth century the convention has been to privilege one Marvellian spirit, whether lyric or polemic, in favour of the other. Mutual implication rather than contradiction ties together what have seemed irreconcilable: the drives of interior life and public performance, lyric poetry and the commonweal. Privacy and publicity as separate spheres, scholars have often claimed, were if not invented at least articulated towards the end of the seventeenth century.3 It will be our claim that Andrew Marvell embodied and imagined, and from an unusual angle, the uncertainties and stresses of both of those emergent conditions. Marvell was deeply committed to the ideal of a participatory public order.4 What that seems to have meant for him was not the cut and thrust of parliamentary debate but rather the fashioning, distributing, and deployment of public knowledge. Information was at the conventional heart of this parliament man’s relations with the good burgesses of Hull, and there is a neat conformity between what Jürgen Habermas has argued as the mercantile origins of a culture of news and Marvell’s work on behalf of provincial commerce and capital; it may not have been coincidental that he expressed the hope for ‘a better market’ as he urged on his fellow members of the Commons to better serve their constituencies.5 But Marvell’s concern with news did not limit itself to local business and local loyalties. Pursuing honest intelligence in The last Instructions, he derided the evasions and scapegoating at the heart of the official investigation into the Medway disaster. And throughout the ‘Advice’ poems Marvell insistently delivered to public view an impressive range of very guarded matter. Granted, exposure is the task of satire, and one eagerly prosecuted in a time of national humiliation and scandal; but Marvell brought a particular vehemence as well as brilliance to his public disclosures of dangerous 3 The most influential formulation of the emergence of the public sphere is that of Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA, 1989; originally pub. 1962). Since the book’s appearance in English there have been a number of critiques of Habermas’ historical vision and the social narrowness of his formulation. More generally, the theme has been the subject of vast scholarly and critical study and debate; see especially Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, 2006). The emergence of privacy is of course the subject of the classic volumes, A History of Private Life, 5 vols, eds. Phillippe Aries and Georges Duby (Series Editors), (Cambridge, MA, 1987–1991), vol. 3, Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier. 4 See Phil Withington, ‘Andrew Marvell’s citizenship’, in Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 2011), 102–21. 5 Marvell to Edward Thompson, 5 January 1670–1671, quoted in Chronology, 123. For Habermas and the mercantile origins of news, see his Structural Transformation, 14–26.

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matter. We must acknowledge too his considerable sophistication in the arts of information. His acute awareness of all the configurations of the press is no less impressive than the bravura display in his rhetoric of exposure. Such capacity enabled him to spread a message and build a reputation even as he eluded an energetic regime of press censorship.6 A similar commitment to the quality of information drove him to a signal intervention in parliamentary debate, as he rebuked on the floor of the House of Commons the government’s ‘intelligence’ efforts under Lord Arlington in 1668.7 Surely his late act of self-characterization as ‘Gazettier’ bears the weight of a long career in the traffic of information.8 The arc of that career reached its apogee in the narrative of An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, with its systematic display of the documents of public life. The rationality and intelligence he there invoked put him squarely in the vanguard of what we have come to think of as the Habermasian project of modernity.9 But Marvell’s was scarcely a smooth and straightforward trajectory towards the information age. After all, he seems to have spent a part of his adult life as a spy, and his age was in fact one of censorship, book-burnings, and vengeful prosecutions for scandal and libel.10 It behoved all those who practised polemic to take care. Marvell managed to preserve his anonymity, and perhaps his life, as he inserted the privileged knowledge of a parliament man into the polemics and pamphlets of his Restoration career, doubtless aided by that personal caution which his contemporaries noticed.11 But in Marvell’s writing there is a deeper dynamic of concealment than the strategizing which allows self-preservation, and it is hinted at in one of the few accounts we have of Marvell in writerly action. This catches him ‘at the Tables-end’ in the coffee house, waited on by an attentive coffee boy. ‘The Gazett being examin’d, and many Political Discourses pass’d betwixt our Intelligent Sophy, and the more judicious Boy’, Marvell—we are told—then gave his ear to the encounters and conversations around him: ‘None we[re] so loud, as a Junto of Wits, that had seated themselves near our Author: while they were ingaged in a very warm dispute, the Man of 6 See Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Restoration Literary Underground: Printing the Painter Poems’, Seventeenth Century 22:2 (2007), 395–410; see also the introduction to The Rehearsal Transpros’d by Dzelzainis and Annabel Patterson in PW 1: 3–40. 7 Anchitel Grey, Debates of the House of Commons from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 10 vols (1769), 1: 70–1. 8 P&L 2:323 [‘To a Friend in Persia’] 9 August 1671. 9 See especially Mark Knights, ‘How Rational was the Later Stuart Public Sphere?’ in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007), 252–68. 10 For Marvell’s career as spy, see Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, 170–2. 11 After his death, there were rumours that Marvell had been poisoned; see Chronology, 214.

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Observations draws out his Table-book . . . making all this while as [if ] he minded nothing.’ He is situated just where Habermas might have him: in the rush of political traffic and news, and in the coffee house, one of the defining social institutions of emergent modernity. But Marvell’s position in this account is ambiguous. He remains on the margin, looking, listening, gathering, his ‘principal camerade’ the youthful servant, and all the while affecting unconcern.12 Marvell had made poetry out of liminality’s postures and conditions; now, gazetteer at work, he transcribed public matter even as his enemies conjured up traces of a life noted for secrecy, pilloried for transgression. Dialectic may have shaped Marvell’s career, but the twinning of secrecy and exposure was no simple antithesis. These were crucial constituents in Marvell’s unsteady equilibrium, but the exchanges between private and public matter, between shamefulness and shaming, between voyeurism and disclosure were scarcely dialectical stages. Rather, they circulated together, nervously and productively, throughout the career. As rumours spread of Marvell’s role as satirist and polemicist, he came to know what it was to be a public man, to go forth ‘upon the billows of applause and obloquy’ (PW 1: 247).13 Even as early as 1661—well before his polemical career—he was aware that his character had been traduced and that ‘no little storyes concerning my selfe’ were spreading.14 Such visibility was not a condition he relished. Marvell acknowledged in The Rehearsal Transpros’d: The Second Part how deeply the attacks and animadversions sparked by his venture into prose controversy had touched him.15 These animadversions yielded as well another account of Marvell drawn to the life—an account that has him at least as self-conscious as the report of him in the coffee house. His performances as a speaker in parliament, we are told, were nothing if not nervous and self-conscious: First you must rise up and take out you[r] Gold-watch . . . and though it do not go, or be down, yet look on’t in the first place however, not transiently, but stay your Eye upon it, till you cannot longer do it handsomly without too apparent Prostitution of your design, than combing your Wigg shake it with a Grace, make up your Mouth betwixt a smile and a simper, look upon the Presence with some Pity but more scorn. And then begin, Mr. Speaker, and there pause again, for it becomes you to seem modest at first; and so 12 [Samuel Butler], The Transproser Rehears’d (1673), 35–7; the authorship of this pamphlet was established by Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Samuel Butler’s Milton’, Studies in Philology 92:4 (1995), 482–95. 13 It is no coincidence that as Marvell imagined the dangers of publicity and public life he was put ‘in mind of a Shipwrack’ (PW, 1: 247)—a conventional figure of course but a most familiar one for this orphan of the hurricane. 14 P&L 2: 32–3; see also Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, 168. 15 See below, 121–2.

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after a frown or two more with your mouth, and as many smiles with your Forehead, procede in good earnest without any more faces and prefaces.16

Was this the way Marvell performed on the public stage? The account is of course just as polemical and partisan as the scandalizing assaults on Marvell’s sexuality; but since at least some of its intended readers would have been Marvell’s parliamentary colleagues—and surely they were the source for this account—Parker must have been delivering to them a version of Marvell they would have instantly and with pleasure recognized. And the metaphor of the stage alerts us to what this observer clearly sensed was the performative and effortful nature of Marvell’s speaking in the Commons’ chamber. Such performativity inflected in more than one way the partisanship of Marvell’s later career. Those who have described the republican and the reformist Marvell are surely correct in noting his deep public engagement, his civic ideals, his energetic commitment to and service on behalf of the commonweal. Yes, ideals and attachments drew him out into the world; but was this the ‘robust story of increasingly liberal views and ameliorative effort’ that has recently been claimed for Marvell?17 Other forces held him back, pulled him within. For Marvell, secrecy was not just diplomatic care but also a compulsion. Of course for any writer of newsletters in the 1660s and 1670s discretion was part of the job description; but in the little that he revealed of himself in the first person he hinted at deeper habits of concealment: ‘I am naturally and now more by my Age inclined to keep my thoughts private’ (P&L 2: 166). He wrote these words to his parliamentary constituency of Hull in 1676 two years before his death, and the self-awareness is striking on two counts: in its recognition of his own penchant for secrecy and guardedness, and in its sense of the consistency of the self over time and of the deepening of significant traits. It is in the context of this self-knowledge that we should read Marvell’s Latin verse of that same year on Joseph Maniban, graphologist. Here Marvell treats a number of interrelated issues: character and fate, the rule of providence, but also and in the most literal sense the ways in which the hand reveals the self: Who after this would commit his thoughts to babbling paper, If he thought that his fate would be exposed by his pen? And if the guilty handwriting might proclaim the fortune of the writer, What thing in life would he more wish to have hidden? 16 Samuel Parker, A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed (1673), 521. Parker was not himself a member of the House of Commons, but his writings make clear how well connected and well informed he was. 17 Patterson in PW, 1: xiv.

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Nevertheless, in the turnings of the reed-pen all things are read spontaneously. What the words do not signify, the shape makes known, And each signs for himself Bellerophontean letters; A spirit within drives the unknowing hand. My letter savored of nothing beyond the ordinary, And was a sample of my simplicity, A narrative such as delights pleasant friends, All full of the city, wit, news, poetry; Yet this interpreter, than whom no other is surer, (Neither the subject matter, the words, nor I known to him) A cunning haruspex, examines the entrails of my writing And, poring, consults the innards of my script. Then immediately the events of my life, the recesses of my mind He unfolds.18

Broadly, this text declares the conjunction of destiny and the human will, a topic that Marvell had earlier visited in An Horatian Ode, Upon Appleton House, The First Anniversary, and A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector. No less significantly, the passage sets out some troubled questions about the ways in which the self is disclosed by the hand. Was Maniban’s art a vulgar error? Marvell certainly toys with this possibility, and yet his ironies here (and always) allow a more serious and sustained inspection of alternatives. Picking up the fable of the unwitting messenger carrying his own death warrant, Marvell’s Latin (Ignaramque Manum Spiritus intus agit), translated, reads ‘A spirit within drives the unknowing hand’.19 Does Marvell intend the hand that delivers the letter, or the hand that writes it? In this ambiguity there are two arguments: the first about the hidden self; the second about its unwitting revelation in and through the act of writing—overly dramatic perhaps but scarcely a concession to vulgar error. As he surveyed the claims and techniques of the Abbé Maniban, Marvell heightened the drama, recoiling at the inspection of the entrails, the anatomy, of his own script—the unfolding not only of the events of the life but of the recesses of the mind, and the rooting of these in the body. The intellectual appeal for Marvell of the relation between fate and will is clear and it was abiding; but it is clear too that the revelation of the self was both a fascination and a fear, and throughout his career. Overtly, the poem on Maniban questions the graphologist’s art, and seems merely a throwaway, a manuscript verse letter enclosed within 18 Translation by William A. McQueen and Kiffin A. Rockwell, The Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell (Chapel Hill, 1964), 31, ll. 1–18. 19 P&L 1: 55, l. 8; translation of McQueen and Rockwell, The Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell, 31.

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intimate correspondence.20 But the act of writing a learned, allusive, punning, and formally complex piece of Latin verse—and perhaps still more, the act of communicating such a formal and self-conscious claim to privacy and appending instructions to the carrier not to read it—indicates more than a passing interest. At the end of his life, in the poem on Maniban and in his letter of 1676 to Hull acknowledging his growing penchant for secrecy, he revisits in explicit terms aspects of selfhood that he had explored throughout the lyric verse. Marvell’s anxious withholding of himself from public view is surely continuous with his lyric articulations of the self in dissolution and displacement, in flight towards the liminal and marginal. Time and again, selfhood and its agency are denied, dispersed, and devolved. From the impossibilities and deferrals figured in The Definition of Love, through the disappointments of the ‘Mower’ poems, in the depths and deceits of Mourning, within the pastoral dialogues, in the devastations of Daphnis and Chloe and The Match, the moving passion is neither the consummation nor the denial of love but the dispersal of the self and the abandonment of agency. In Clorinda and Damon, in The Fair Singer, in The Mower to the Glo-Worms, and The Mower’s Song it is the woman who initiates, and the male who dissolves. The persons with whom Marvell identifies are females, children, wounded males; the sites where he most fluently locates himself are to the side. The narratives this poet constructs take us to hiding places, to shades, caves, and margins: to the forward youth singing in the shadows, to the borders and the riverbank of Lord Fairfax’s estate, to the edge of the room where the Protector lies dying, to the point of suspension ‘Betwixt the Air and Water’ (The Gallery, l. 36), between childhood and sexual maturity in Young Love, The Picture of little T.C., The Nymph complaining, Upon Appleton House, and The last Instructions, to the interstices of verse and engagement in the Horatian Ode, to those of action and contemplation throughout. And it is the same habit, indeed habitation, of the liminal that leaves the poet between heaven and earth, between the material and the spiritual, between the soul and the body, between the sacred and the profane in a number of poems: Ros; On a Drop of Dew; A Dialogue, Between The Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure; A Dialogue between the Soul and Body; Clorinda and Damon; and The Coronet. Needless to say, occupying the margins allowed Marvell to develop certain modes of thinking and saying—his familiar ironies and ambiguities; but the margins allowed darker, half-hidden pleasures. The Picture of little

20

For the bibliographical details, see PL 1: 272–3, and PL 2: 348.

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T.C. discloses the narrator in emblematic posture, denying agency and seeking the shadows; yet this narrator has not turned wholly away: O then let me in time compound, And parly with those conquering Eyes; Ere they have try’d their force to wound, Ere, with their glancing wheels, they drive In Triumph over Hearts that strive, And them that yield but more despise. Let me be laid, Where I may see thy Glories from some shade. (ll. 17–24)

The passage makes forceful and punning play out of ‘conquering Eyes’ as ‘glancing wheels’, underscoring, as so often, the danger and allure of the gaze. But the last line of the stanza is remarkable less for its fears than for its coupling of passivity and marginality with voyeurism. It asserts the apposition of such conditions, and more importantly it suggests their interdependence and instrumental force. There is a further paradox: these postures, articulated in verse, are surely bound up in some fashion with self-display. Voyeurism and self-display are for the narrator of The Picture of little T.C. as clearly a form of erotic pleasure as they are a fearful withholding from engagement and commitment. The stakes are higher and more complex in Upon Appleton House, where voyeurism is the leitmotif and the deep impulse of verse filled with prospects and perspectives. Marvell is highly conscious of the arts of seeing and depicting; he also explores the pleasures, the dangers, and the compulsions of looking. Upon Appleton House begins with casual and innocent survey: inspecting the architecture, cataloguing the gardens, admiring the landscape—these are the natural order of things. But within such order the gaze quickly discovers inversion and disturbance. The kaleidoscopic imagery of the meadow shows how perspective can turn things upside down, challenge hierarchy, distort proportions, and all in a remarkably sustained visual regime.21 Even when the mode is narrative, as in the account of the house’s history as nunnery, action turns visual, and historical subject becomes object and spectacle. Of course, Marvell is here acknowledging and playing upon reformed understandings of popish sensualities—and how likely he would do so in a poem narrating protestant apocalyptic. But Marvell is not only the agent of conventional anti-popery; he also exploits the voyeurism of that convention as he gazes upon intimate spaces and observes and assays 21 See Rosalie Colie on Marvell’s fascination with perspective: ‘My Ecchoing Song’: Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton, 1970).

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the temptations of the senses, and all under the deeply respectable colour of confessional ideology. Here Marvell ventriloquizes a seductive nun tempting the heiress Isabel Thwaites to join the convent: ‘Within this holy leisure we ‘Live innocently as you see. ‘These Walls restrain the World without, ‘But hedge our Liberty about. ‘These Bars inclose that wider Den ‘Of those wild Creatures, called men. ‘The Cloyster outward shuts its Gates, ‘And, from us, locks on them the Grates. ‘Here we, in shining Armour white, ‘Like Virgin Amazons do fight. ‘And our chast Lamps we hourly trim, ‘Lest the great Bridegroom find them dim. ‘Our Orient Breaths perfumed are ‘With insense of incessant Pray’r. ‘And Holy-water of our Tears ‘Most strangly our Complexion clears. (ll. 97–112)

There can be no doubt of this narrator’s interest in, indeed taste for, the altogether transgressive seduction of the virgin Thwaites with its allure of adulation, its vision of transfiguration, and the delights of forbidden fruit. No matter that Marvell had borrowed elements of this story from Nathaniel Whiting’s romance, Pleasant History of Albino and Bellama; he chose to apply them and their transgressions to this family. And we should note throughout this seduction the extraordinarily visual character of the language, even at those points where the seduction is handled through the other senses. What Marvell develops in the nunnery is spectacle in the moral as well as technical meanings of that term. This is a poet all too aware of the deep pleasures of seeing, and pleasured too by the exercise and adventure of his art through the transmutation of words into images. Voyeurism is a condition perfectly attuned to his very visual imagination; it is also, in its withholdings, argumentatively and tonally responsive to what seems so often in Upon Appleton House his own, as well as his patron’s, sense of privacy. For Marvell, in all the ways unfolded by the drama of this poem, voyeurism and selfhood seem mutually constitutive. Who was the consumer of the closing scenes of this poem that set out the dissolution of the self in carefully-wrought stanzas of the poet’s art, and what was the relation between consumption and voyeurism? However few the contemporary readers of Upon Appleton House, we can at least imagine the poet as consumer of his narrator’s self-display and voyeurism.

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The scene on the riverbank indicates something of what is at stake in Marvell’s poetics of voyeurism. Eyes do possess active virtues, and those of Mary Fairfax—minor and female—judge, correct, and straighten the idling narrator and wider world alike. But such virtues are not to be found through the eyes of the narrator, adult male though he is. That figure’s playful recumbency challenges propriety as his eyes fix on himself; nevertheless, it is from his errant gaze that the energy of the final scenes derives (see especially stanzas 80–1). And though the narrator does not act in the world, he does display and disclose, and what he exposes is of course himself. The strangeness of the scene on the riverbank, its challenge not just to the ostensible tribute to the patron but to conventional standards of all kinds, suggests a charge that derives not from argument alone. In this scene’s displays and disclosures, voyeurism is the crucial and powerful instrumentality. The baroque complexity of the drama at the end of the poem suggests the force for Marvell of the coupling of voyeurism and display: the poet fashioning as well as observing, producing as well as consuming, and making available to the complicit reader—were there to have been one—all these actions. More than once Marvell conjoins self-fashioning and self-exposure with the consoling and enduring properties of artistic production and display. The invitation at the opening of The Gallery, ‘Clora come view my Soul, and tell | Whether I have contriv’d it well’ (ll. 1–2), sets in motion a cascade of Marvell’s familiar themes and postures: pastoral idylls and idealization juxtaposed with a Gothic imagining of the other, and suffering, torture, and humiliation. As well it announces the production of the self as an object for consumption—by the scripting writer as well as by the imagined reader/viewer. How like the climactic image of the Unfortunate Lover, ‘drest | In his own Blood’ (ll. 55–56), is this fashioning of the self into an image within Clora’s ‘Shop of cruel Arts’ (l. 12). And how likely for Marvell, fashioning poems that put the wounded and creating self on display, to offer that casualty of life, the Eunuch, as an emblem of the consolation of the aesthetic for the failures of sexual reproductivity: Don’t believe yourself sterile, although, an exile from women You cannot thrust a sickle at the virgin harvest, And sin in our fashion. Fame will be continually pregnant by you, And you will snatch the Nine Sisters from the mountain; Echo too, often struck, will bring forth musical offspring.22

But while the Eunuch narrator of Marvell’s poem makes what may seem a soft and predictable turn towards the Muses, we should note the 22

McQueen and Rockwell, The Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell, 43.

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bluntness of Marvell’s Latin text (Tibi Fama perennè Prægnabit; rapiesque), surely a compensation for the Eunuch’s inability to plunge his sickle into the virgin corn. Marvell here provides a striking condensation and conflation of sexual and literary work, of the agricultural and the writerly with more than a hint of the sexually violent. His Latin speaks not only seizure but also rape. Throughout these poems, some surely uncirculated during his life, and certainly not printed until after his death, Marvell fashions under his own hand out of the story of a peculiar selfhood art objects for his own viewing. At the close of Upon an Eunuch; A Poet it is Echo, and thus surely Narcissus, with whom the Eunuch is identified and whose verse lingers.23 And we should stress that it is not memory that promises futurity; the Eunuch achieves a kind of reproduction as the seal of selfhood through aesthetics—the same story that Marvell told in Upon Appleton House and, as we shall see, in The last Instructions. The story of the Eunuch, withheld from sexual reproduction and making verse that resounds only of the self, is also and more affectingly the story of Damon the Mower. Damon finds his echo in the fairy ring that closes around him and encloses his song of consolation: Nor am I so deform’d to sight, If in my Sithe I looked right; In which I see my Picture done, As in a crescent Moon the Sun. The deathless Fairyes take me oft To lead them in their Danses soft; And, when I tune my self to sing, About me they contract their Ring. (ll. 57–64)

Though the scythe is to him, as it emphatically is to the Eunuch, a sexual instrument, Damon seems no more than the Eunuch capable of sexual reproduction, and surely because of his woundedness. The layering of moon over sun underscores the poet’s fascination with fluid and ambiguous sexuality: masculine capacity is erased by the eclipsing crescent moon, and the scythe replicating that crescent shape inexorably figures incompleteness.24 But the scythe is also mirror, reflecting Damon to himself, and enabling him to understand the self there reflected as image. This is not just some chance reflection, as it had been in Marvell’s classical sources, but a ‘picture done’, an act of self-representation—and, as 23 Narcissus also haunts To his Coy Mistress; see Nigel Smith, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlow, UK, revised edition, 2007), 76–8, notes to ll. 27 and 33–6. 24 If we were to look for a marker to date this poem we might find it in the much noted eclipses of 1652; see Chapter 1, note 10.

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Nicholas von Maltzahn reminds us, the number of portraits that Marvell had painted of himself indicates no small interest in self-representation.25 From such deep and inward roots comes the voyeurism of the ‘Mower’ poems: turning his scythe outwards Damon discloses the world; turning his scythe upwards he discovers the self.26 But there is a third move here: The edged Stele by careless chance Did into his own Ankle glance; And there among the Grass fell down, By his own Sythe, the Mower mown. (ll. 77–80)

The punning force of ‘edged/stele steel’ conjures the sword even as it couples the writing instrument and mowing implement with introspection: glancing within, the mower is felled by his own scythe.27 Sexual incapacity—and, we should note, sexual desire, for the language of licking and sweating remains (ll. 45–6)—is unmistakably conjoined with exposure both of the self and of the world. Damon’s scythe, as the poet’s stele, is an instrument of wounding force, of painful self-revelation; and as the poet’s stele, it is as well the necessary device with which the world is laid bare. Twenty-six years on, in his poem to Maniban, Marvell, now the polemicist and public scourge, returned to this dangerous juncture— writing, wounding, and self-revelation. It is odd to think that in the midst of the poetry of pastoral inwardness Marvell should already have collected so many of the devices and elements of his later writing: the insistence on painting and portraiture as means of knowing as well as agents of indictment, the sense of the pen as edged steel, the hints at Gothic excess, at sexual corruption, the selfreflexivity and woundedness, and above all the moves of discovery and disclosure. Such a display was to become programmatic in the Advice to the Painter poems, above all in The last Instructions. With its rhetoric of injunction, its repeated instructions to ‘Paint’, and ‘Paint then’, and ‘Paint then again’, representation is the problematic but discovery and disclosure remain the deepest impulses. The expressive contest between poetry and painting is ancient and conventional, but within these conventions— given a topical turn by the publication of Edmund Waller’s poetry of courtly praise and as well by new fashions in the representation of court beauties and naval heroes—Marvell indulges a wonderful imaginative 25

Chronology, 47. Cf. David Kalstone, ‘Marvell and the Fictions of Pastoral’, English Literary Renaissance 4:1 (1974), 174–88. 27 We might note a certain irony here when we compare the conflation of pen and sword in Tom May’s Death, ll. 63–70. 26

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economy, a magnificent opportunism.28 He seizes on conventions and concerns that are very much of the moment to disclose matter that reaches deep within. The pressure of the personal on the occasional is surely declared in the arresting portrait of Archibald Douglas in The last Instructions. Its soft eroticism has scarcely escaped critical attention, nor has its tinge of prurience; but we should also note the way in which the entire scene (ll. 523–696) stages multiple acts of voyeurism. It opens with the Dutch admiral Michael de Ruyter spying the naked and bashful nymphs, and deriving sexual pleasure from the sight: Ruyter the while, that had our Ocean curb’d, Sail’d now among our Rivers undistrub’d: Survey’d their Crystal Streams, and banks so green, And Beauties e’re this never naked seen. Through the vain sedge the bashful Nymphs he ey’d; Bosomes, and all which from themselves they hide. The Sun much brighter, and the Skies more clear, He finds the Air, and all things sweeter here. The sudden change, and such a tempting sight, Swells his old Veins with fresh Blood, fresh Delight. Like am’rous Victors he begins to shave, And his new Face looks in the English Wave. (ll. 523–34)

Marvell stresses the visual entry to this scene by doubling the way in which de Ruyter gazes on his own image, in mirror and in waves, and doubles it again by including within the visual programme the Dutch navy’s expression and reflection of its own pleasure in self-display, its ‘streaming Silks’ and ‘inveigling Colours’ (ll. 537–8). The reader looks on all this looking-on, but the voyeurism—always replicating in this poet’s economy—has just begun. The modest nymphs now turn aggressive and seductive as they spy Archibald Douglas, himself naked among the reeds. Nor are the nymphs the only spectators, for Douglas is also caught in the admiring gaze of the narrator. Indeed, Douglas is as well an object of his own admiration, ‘His yellow Locks curl back themselves to seek, | Nor other Courtship knew but to his Cheek’ (ll. 653–4). Narcissus is not far from this river scene as the voyeurist narrator constructs a complicit artist and the poet constructs an implicated reader: the visual seduction here is

28 Edmund Waller, Instructions to a Painter (1665). On contest in these texts, see Steven N. Zwicker, ‘Sites of Instruction: Andrew Marvell and the Tropes of Restoration Portraiture’, in Julia Marciari Alexander and Catharine MacLeod, eds, Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II (New Haven, 2007), 123–38.

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vividly reminiscent of the closing drama in Marvell’s tribute to Lovelace. And yet the staging of Archibald Douglas as object of admiration is not over. The scene turns more explicitly theatrical with the admission of another audience as Douglas prepares his roles as military hero and valiant Scot. Aboard the blazing ship, the self-doomed hero performs his own death in front of an admiring General Monck—and Marvell is careful to insist both on the theatricality of the scene and on Douglas’s pleasure in self-display: ‘And secret Joy, in his calm Soul does rise, | That Monk looks on to see how Douglas dies’ (ll. 675–6). As the flames engulf him, the wholly eroticized— and in its puns sexualized—and strangely narcissistic figure is transformed into an object of art, glowing, enclosed in amber, shining like an angel. There are several features we wish to remark upon, and the first is the scene’s adventitiousness, its disproportion: the pastoral interlude that features de Ruyter and Douglas takes up nearly two hundred lines, one-fifth of the poem. Marvell adapts, rearranges, and erases biographical facts to render Douglas beauteous, nubile, androgynous, non-progenitive, and he extends the image across the canvas. The scene allows an odd lingering over the figure of the valiant Scot; not that Marvell lacks his usual economy or busyness with his own themes, but the display and finally the immolation of the figure go on at considerable length. Such dilation, that can be accounted for neither by historical nor topical pressures, opens a space in which Marvell can explore what we have come to see as his enduring preoccupations. Indeed, we might wonder whether the elements of this story, with its conjunction of flames and waves—as in The unfortunate Lover—drew Marvell towards his primal condition of contradiction and incompleteness for which the eternity of verse was his consolation. As we have noted, he offers such consolation to Douglas, though perhaps he means it for himself as well: ‘Fortunate Boy! if either Pencil’s Fame, | Or if my Verse can propagate thy Name; | When Œta and Alcides are forgot, | Our English youth shall sing the Valient Scot’ (ll. 693–6). This is a scene for which Marvell must have been the primary, and deeply attentive, audience. But unlike so many of Marvell’s other writings, The last Instructions had, we know, an attentive readership in the wider world.29 The poem participates eagerly in the rage for news and the taste for scandal, and there is much to gratify both appetites in its gossipy scenes of court intrigue and parliamentary business.30 While the opening of the poem 29

On contemporary manuscript copies, see Chronology, 98. On the relations among satire, gossip, and news in the Restoration, see Harold Love, English Clandestine Satire, 1660–1702 (Oxford, 2004), as well as Love’s ‘Gossip and Biography’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds, Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2008), 91–104. 30

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addresses problems of representation, with their attendant aesthetic and epistemological concerns, The last Instructions is neither philosophical treatise nor mere gazette. The titillating force of sexual gossip is clear enough; that gossip is as well and of course an important element in the political argument of the poem: the improprieties of this deformed body politic in all of its non-reproductive economies. Marvell’s stress on the monstrous, the abortive, the fetishistic, the murderous—the abundance of the appetitive and the violent, the simply brutal—had and have undeniable power. But the argument of the poem is not limited to public business. With its agendas of looking and being seen, of voyeurism and self-display, Marvell once again shelters private matter within wider and more public, and more momentous, occasions and forms. And the Douglas scene tells us exactly how personal, how intimate and private—and close to lyric disclosure—were the problems of knowing and representing the self. This scene tells us too of the poet’s own implication in the dilemmas, the delights as well as the disappointments and discomforts, of the non-procreative sexualities that foretold national disaster. Revealing others in this poem involved, in some fashion, a display of the self, in its desirousness and its transgressions. Not coincidentally, the parade of vice and folly in The last Instructions opens with private business as Marvell excoriates Sir Thomas Clifford, a courtier with whom he had had a major altercation in parliament in 1661 (ll. 17–18). At this juncture in the late summer of 1667 Marvell was writing himself as well as the nation, and he displayed a sharp awareness of the way self-anatomy and political jeremiad, disclosure and instruction, worked together. In his letter to Sir John Trott, written within weeks of The last Instructions, Marvell rehearsed themes of disaster and destruction, of corruption and transgression, and saw them as evidence of God’s wrath against a failed leadership and wayward people. He also touched that other note of self-disclosure in the anatomy that he offered his friend.31 A striking coincidence, a striking simultaneity, ties the anatomy of the incomplete self in the Trott letter to the anatomy that The last Instructions offered of the political body grotesque. And perhaps there is one other text with which we can triangulate such work of exposure and self-knowledge, and that is Marvell’s translation of the most familiar chorus from Seneca’s tragedy, Thyestes: Climb at Court for me that will Tottering favours Pinacle; All I seek is to lye still. Settled in some secret Nest 31

See the discussion in Chapter 2.

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Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane In calm Leisure let me rest; And far of the publick Stage Pass away my silent Age. Thus when without noise, unknown, I have liv’d out all my span, I shall dye, without a groan, An old honest Country man. Who expos’d to others Ey’s, Into his own Heart ne’r pry’s, Death to him’s a Strange surprise.32

The mood of this translation suggests Marvell’s summer of 1667 and not the early 1670s, the other moment that has been conjectured for its composition on the strength of Marvell’s acquisition of a country cottage in Highgate, just outside London.33 We suspect that the verse offers an implicit tribute to Abraham Cowley, who died that summer and who had himself translated Seneca’s Chorus. Cowley had shared much with Marvell—an undergraduate past at Trinity College Cambridge, an admiration for the Duke of Buckingham and also for Archibald Douglas, and an admiration too for mowers and their scythes.34 The mood of Marvell’s translation does not seem to fit his much more engaged and indeed robust stance of the early 1670s (the time of the Louvre distichs and of The Rehearsal Transpros’d ); it is congruent with the tone of the despairing letter to Trott and with the despair too of The Last Instructions.35 And the text of Marvell’s translation with its theme of withdrawal from the corruptions of public life must seem more than apposite to a moment when so many in politics were preparing to flee the coming deluge 32

Senec. Traged. ex Thyeste Chor. 2, P&L 1:58. For a late nineteenth-century photograph of the house, see Kelliher, Andrew Marvell, 88. 34 The closeness of Marvell’s tastes to those of Cowley is rather poignantly suggested by Cowley’s death of a cold caught ‘in the heat of the last summer’—that fatal summer of 1667—‘by staying too long amongst his Laborers in the Medows’. Thomas Sprat, ‘An Account of the Life,’ in The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (1668). For Marvell’s perhaps unusual interest in mowers, see William Empson, Using Biography (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 14–15; and for contemporary hopes that Cowley might write a tribute to Douglas, see Sir William Temple, The Works of Sir William Temple (1720), 2:40. For Cowley’s interest in mowers and scythes in 1667, see Appendix below. 35 Smith, on the strength of textual echoes of a work printed in 1667, raises the possibility that Marvell translated the Chorus in that year, though he prefers to follow the argument of Michael Craze in dating the Seneca text to 1671–1672; see Michael Craze, Life and Lyrics of Andrew Marvell (New York, 1979), 307–8; also Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 190, 191 note 2. But that late dating—which hinges on Marvell’s acquisition of a country house in Highgate and his prospects of a government job in Ireland—seems unresponsive to the mood of total abandonment imagined in the translation. Nor does the alleged echo of Milton’s Paradise Regained, printed in 1671, solve the matter, since Marvell could as easily have derived his language from Milton’s own scriptural sources or, surely as likely, from having read his friend’s poem in manuscript. 33

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signalled by the disasters of 1667.36 There is in Marvell’s Seneca not only a reflection on occasion but as well his abiding themes, the secreting of the self from view, and the uses of prying and exposure. The fact that Seneca’s text was a Renaissance commonplace—that so many of Marvell’s precursors and contemporaries tried their hands at its translation—allows us to register the peculiar inwardness of Marvell’s verse, and its fixations and returns.37 There is a shadow of topicality here; but we need to note Marvell’s departure from the way in which the language of classical selfknowledge was conventionally translated.38 Marvell’s characteristic diction is unmistakable. He renders as ‘some secret Nest’ Latin that speaks of sweet quiet and obscure places; and at the end, he chooses the word ‘pry’—no less singular, no less distorting of the Latin—to render the Stoic achievement of self-knowledge in the face of mortality. His language shows him far from the conventional classicizing address to care and retirement, to negotium and otium, and far indeed from conventional representations of the active or even the retired male. This chapter began by observing the proximity of the lyric Marvell to the herald of public knowledge and rationality and it asked how the poet of shadows and enigmas could have become public expositor and polemicist. In so doing, it necessarily challenged the familiar construction of Marvell’s divided career, since that construction assumes that the forms and genres of Marvell’s writing denominate the writer’s very impulses. Revelation and exposure, we have suggested, occupied the servant of the public good in a corrupt age, while the drive to bring into view, to reveal, to expose, underlay the lyric career. We must insist too that traces of the yearning self remained deeply embedded in Marvell’s civic endeavours. The brutality of Marvell’s satires has been fully appreciated; what has not been observed is that even as Marvell flays the enemy, even as he exposes the depths of sexual and political corruption, he displays a glimmer of empathy for its protagonists. In the writings of 1667 Marvell allows touches of poignancy to emerge in the face of national disaster as he softens political indictments with reflection and sympathy. Is it the subject position of violation and loss that allows a striking identification in his rendering of the otherwise gothic and appetitive Duchess of York (ll. 59–78) and Lady Castlemaine (ll. 79–104)—a surprising sympathy 36 For some examples, see The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (11 vols, 1970–1983), 8: 257–60, 262–4, 277, 286, 409–10, 413–14. 37 See Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 190. 38 Cowley’s translation at this point runs: ‘To him, alas, to him, I fear, | The face of Death will terrible appear, | Who in his Life flattering his senceless pride | By being known to all the world beside, | Does not himself, when he is Dying know | Nor what he is, nor wither he’s to go’ (Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 191).

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for lost children, abandonment, and worn beauty, a surprising tenderness amidst squalor? The episodes remind us that the body in all its vulnerabilities remains the point of contact between the lyric poet and the public writer. The unmistakable evidence of the conviction to which Marvell had so clearly come in 1667—that the body articulated national corruption and dissolution—is surely to be found in The Loyall Scot of 1669–1670. His decision to recycle the portrait of the dying Archibald Douglas— disproportionate enough in its original context—makes a peculiar and affecting metaphor for the unlikelihood of British union, for the impossibility of propriety in public life, and more especially for the endangerment of virtue by clerical depredation. It underscores as well his abiding themes of vulnerability and longing. Clerical depredation and abuse, indeed all the familiar tropes of anticlericalism, were in the 1670s to crowd Marvell’s prose polemics and acts of witness. The sally in The Loyall Scot announced what was to be the overriding concern of his last decade, developed in the attack on Samuel Parker in The Rehearsal Transpros’d, in the caricature of Francis Turner in Mr. Smirke, and in the relentless assault on Roman Catholic priests and their high Anglican fellow-travellers in The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government. Yet conventional anticlericalism does not account for all the moves of these remorseless polemics, for Marvell projects what are surely his own disabilities into the public fray. Warming to his attack on Samuel Parker’s serviceability, his complaisance, his oddly asexual or bisexual attractions, Marvell displayed an unmistakable interest in the narcissism of that house chaplain’s performance: among the ladies he practised a Courtship [that] had no other operation than to make him stil more in love with himself . . . to speculate his own Baby in their Eyes. But being thus, without Competitor or Rival, the Darling of both Sexes in the Family and his own Minion; he grew beyond all measure elated, and that crack of his Scull, as in broken Looking-Glasses, multiply’d him in self-conceit and imagination. (PW 1: 76)39

Amidst all the suggestive topics and traits within this dazzling portrait of Parker, perhaps the most intriguing is self-replication as the work of the imagination. Asexual reproduction and self-replication are subjects to which Marvell had repeatedly been drawn in the lyrics, not least in the Platonic fantasies of The Garden, the consolations of Upon an Eunuch, and 39 More than one controverter ridiculed Marvell as one who himself walked among the hens and left them as innocent as he found them; see anon., S’too him, Bayes (1673), 39–40, and ‘Love Letter to the Author of Rehersall Transprosed’, Bodleian ms. Eng. Poet d. 187 (transcribed by Pierre Legouis).

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the distillations of Eyes and Tears. And Marvell brings the portrait of his clerical foe even closer to his own person: the trajectory that he foists on his enemy in Mr. Smirke—which he presents as a dangerous move from sheltered service within an aristocratic household to print in public causes—is one with which he was himself altogether familiar (PW 2: 42). We are not arguing a full and exact self-awareness as the account of Parker skirted topics and territories so very close to Marvell’s own; but it is clear that there must have been more than a little self-knowledge here. The recurrence of such a biography in Marvell’s caricature of Francis Turner in Mr. Smirke suggests the hold that the figure of a self-regarding, self-absorbed, serviceable careerist exerted on him. It is as though he were discovering the self in the alter ego he constructed out of his polemical enemies.40 He had once sought the self in the art objects he fashioned of lyric verse; the polemicist again discovered that self, strangely but not incomprehensibly, within the images he fashioned of his opponents. The mechanism seems to be something like displacement, a projection of the self onto the reviled other—a projection, that is, of the censurable self, with its knight-errantry, its Platonism, its ambiguous sexuality, its selfabsorption, and its service and serviceability. Throughout the portraits of 1667, as in the polemics of the 1670s, Marvell precariously situated public transgression and public wrongs atop a knowledge of personal frailties, incapacities, and loss. From that unsteady structure of feeling, one that may at points have surprised Marvell himself, the odd proportions and dilations of the late verse and the prose alike emerge. Perhaps such instability is to be discovered too in Marvell’s unusual sensitivity to accusations of polemical impropriety. Though there is nothing unusual, nothing peculiarly Marvellian, in the detection, exposure, and rehearsal of vice, folly, and the abuse of privilege, Marvell’s contemporaries noticed something that they certainly felt to be distinctive and they responded to it in print. His clericalist adversaries argued, in a halfdozen separate responses, both that his polemic was excessive, and excessively sexualized, and that it was determined by his own depravities and deficiencies.41 And Marvell had given them a way in which to handle his vulnerabilities and to expose matter that must have caught him off-guard.

40 We should recall as well the ways in which Marvell himself seems so oddly figured in his satiric portrait of Richard Flecknoe: Nigel Smith, ‘“Mirrored doubles”: Andrew Marvell, the Remaking of Poetry and the Poet’s Career’, in Philip Hardie and Helen Moore, eds, Classical Literary Careers and their Reception (Cambridge, 2010), 230–1; see also Marvell’s excoriation of Thomas May, above, Chapter 2. 41 For a full listing of the counterblasts to The Rehearsal Transpros’d, see Legouis, André Marvell: poète, puritain, patriote (Paris, 1928), Appendix, ‘Controverse avec Parker’, 456–61.

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‘Must’, because that is exactly the tenor of his response to the litany of denunciation. In The Rehearsal Transpros’d: The Second Part (1673), written and published close on the heels of his detractors’ cries of foul play, there are several odd pieces of self-exposure. Listen, amid all his anticlerical fervour, to Marvell surprised by his enemies: declaring an addiction to ‘modest retiredness’ and a longing ‘to go no more to Sea’ for fear of shipwreck, he protested innocence and injury when the churchmen insisted on reading in his exposure of clerical vice only the disclosure of his own tastes and inclinations (PW 1: 246, 247). Folding his fate and image into the nation’s, Marvell mounted a high horse: ‘For ’tis better that evil Men should be left in an undisturbed possession of their repute . . . then that the Exchange and Credit of Mankind should be universally shaken, wherein the best too will suffer and be involved’ (PW 1: 237). Invoking universals and protesting the importance of public quiet—these are odd moves for a polemicist. They point to the paradox of a man unwilling to have himself tossed in the storm of controversy, and yet declaring in almost Miltonic terms the public benefit of turmoil and tumult: How should such persons arrive at their design’d port, but by disturbance? for if there were a dead calm always, and the Wind blew from no corner, there would be no Navigation . . . and ’tis indeed the very thing proposed in your Ecclesiastical Politie, that you might be row’d in state over the Ocean of Publick Tranquility by the publick Slavery. (PW 1: 324)

The paradox may seem simply a piece of bad faith, but it exposes something far from paradoxical: that place where fear turned into aggression. Of the aggression that emanated from these fractures there can be no doubt. The instances when Marvell comes into public view in the 1660s and 1670s include episodes of verbal abuse—spoken as well as written— and even physical violence. Granted, the filters of news and sensation may select in favour of such reporting, but these are striking events in the life of a man of learning and letters, even in the life of a polemicist. Marvell’s direct self-representation both in the letters and in the affair of The Rehearsal Transpros’d in fact includes repeated references to his readiness to strike. He likened disputation to duelling, and announced proudly that ‘My Fencing-master in Spain, after he had instructed me all he could, told me, I remember, there was yet one Secret, against which there was no Defence, and that was, to give the first Blow’ (P&L 2: 324).42 And when confronted over his polemical manners in The Rehearsal Transpros’d and, he claimed, challenged with a death threat, Marvell dropped his reflexive anonymity and put his name to his self-defence in The Second Part. Indeed, 42

See also PW 1: 149.

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he confided, with more than a touch of self-dramatization, that he was more concerned he would kill someone than be killed himself (P&L 2: 357, 396).43 Marvell was not altogether indulging in fantasy. Trying to pistol-whip a waggoner, as he had done on the Russian embassy of 1663–1664, may be acceptable in the canons of adventure and social violence, but to come to the point of confrontation in the precincts of the House of Commons—and to do this twice—was quite another matter. Remarkably, fully one-third of the formally-recorded incidents of disorderly behaviour by MPs in the Commons during Marvell’s parliamentary career involved Marvell himself.44 Nor were these the only ways in which Marvell breached, and breached egregiously, parliamentary decorum. For all his famed retiredness, Marvell could surely be provoked into selfassertion. In the first of his parliamentary skirmishes, the 1662 fracas with Thomas Clifford, Marvell doubly challenged propriety, first in the confrontation itself and then remarkably by refusing to apologize for his conduct on the floor of the House when called to do so by the Speaker; he was, as we shall see, no less unrepentant on the Commons floor in 1677.45 Some of his outbursts were clearly sparked by social friction; others were linked to themes that had deeper significance. One of these was ‘intelligence’, the mishandling of which drove him in 1668 ‘somewhat transportedly’ to an attack on the king’s chief minister.46 Marvell’s temper flared again, and more explosively, in 1677 over an issue if anything even dearer to his heart than intelligence: the care of children and the spectre of clerical aggrandizement and abuse. Nicholas von Maltzahn has argued that this intervention was a flashpoint in the way it ‘linked’ the personal and the partisan, conjoining Marvell’s long-standing concerns for religious toleration with the emerging party politics of Exclusion.47 The encounter was surely a flashpoint, but it was personal in another way as well, for as we have seen the endangerment of children was a story to which he repeatedly and dramatically returned. After the reading of a bill to grant to the bishops control over the education of royal children, Marvell delivered an extraordinarily long and, it has been observed, ‘rambling’ speech in opposition.48 This was one of the few occasions in the 1670s in 43

See P&L 2: 357 (‘45. fragment’), 396n. Guy Miege, A Relation of Three Embassies (1669), 430–1; see Legouis, ‘Andrew Marvell: Further Biographical Points’, Modern Language Review 18:4 (1923), 423–4, 424, note 1. 45 Commons Journals 8: 389–91. 46 Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 1: 70–1. 47 PW 2: 190. 48 Basil Duke Henning, ed., The History of Parliament: The Commons 1660–1690, 3 vols (London, 1983), 3: 26. 44

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which he is recorded to have spoken in parliament, and he himself referred to his inexperience as a speaker. His antagonist Samuel Parker had earlier caricatured Marvell’s mannered self-presentation as a speaker, the tics and gestures of a man absorbed in calculating effects.49 In 1677 that self-control vanished under pressure, and not simply the pressure of speaking on behalf of toleration or in the vanguard of Whiggery. Two days after Marvell delivered his long speech he came to blows in the House. He was censured by the Speaker and, remarkably, he retorted in kind: ‘he hopes that as the Speaker keeps us in order he will keep himself in order for the future’.50 Such verbal tumult and disorderliness seem mirrored in the extraordinary procedure of the Account of the Growth of Popery, in which the education bill is obtruded verbatim. Here then, at the end of his life, the old responsiveness to the vulnerability of youth emerges powerfully and at an odd angle, even as Marvell pursues a programme of disseminating on behalf of the public interest the privileged matter of parliamentary business. Under pressure he may have protested his respect for the Speaker ‘whether out, or in, the House’, but the print publication of the bill in the Account shows how ready he was to go out of the House in the public cause. An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, Marvell’s most important prose work, is free of the personal animadversions and exposures that animate the Rehearsal Transpros’d and Mr. Smirke. It delivers instead, and surely as characteristically, a fully-fledged programme of the dissemination of privileged knowledge for the public good. At its close Marvell makes a very exact and self-knowing distinction between giving information and turning informer (PW 2: 375–6). He understood such a distinction, and not only because he lived in a manuscript and print culture that constantly mixed and matched scandal and information, prying and secrecy, with printing for the public good. He now understood too—indeed, under attack he had even come to claim—the distinction between a man’s private life and the work that he might do on behalf of the nation. He had been pursuing for some time ideals and practices of information, of transparency on behalf of a rational nation, in 49 Parker’s representation of course implies that Marvell had a past as a speaker; and we have observed that he spoke repeatedly amidst the crises of the later 1660s. Thereafter, Marvell seems to have concentrated his energies on polemics. His appointment to 120 parliamentary committees presumably reflected his conscientious attendance during some notoriously ill-attended sessions rather than his fourteen recorded speeches; see Henning, The History of Parliament: The Commons 1660–1690, 3: 26. 50 Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 4: 328–31. However unfair and partisan Marvell may have thought the Speaker’s conduct, it remains the case that such verbal retaliation on the Commons’ floor was altogether improper and altogether unusual.

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the verse satires and in his letters to Hull, and he advised his constituents of the need to ‘demonstrate things authentickly’ (P&L 2: 116). But of course, concurrently, in the satires and in The Loyall Scot, personal obsessions had erupted in the rehearsal of public causes. He might seem to have arrived, with An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, at a different place. His arguments on behalf of toleration and liberty had certainly grown in sophistication and coherence with the growing reach of Church and Crown. For the most part Marvell displays in this text an altogether controlled ability to keep his sights trained on the twin offences of popery and arbitrary government, of the management by secrecy and self-interest of those nefarious designs of French Roman Catholic absolutism. The Account resounds with the language of secrecy and exposure, but in the context of polemic in the 1670s this is conventional enough. It is no longer a coded diction for the self, and there are very few vulnerabilities on display. But there remained vestiges of an older version of the self, a kind of ghost of incompleteness hovering over the procedures of information and exposition. How else can we explain either Marvell’s fascination with the drama and self-display of wounds in Scaevola Scoto-Brittannicus (1676) or the disproportion of the bishops’ education bill recycled in the pages of the Account? The Account honours its title as it hunts after the excesses of popery and tyranny; it advances a second agenda as well, and one equally responsive to public concerns: the ideal of a polity that might boast not only an ‘intelligent ruler’ but also ‘a rational people’. The programme of exposing secret designs to public view was certainly not Marvell’s alone, nor is it merely one more manifestation of Marvell’s familiar drive to disclose and to subvert. The programme is premised on ideals that Marvell shared with others among what was to become the Whig party, and these ideals are central to his argument in this work and sustain the whole. And we should note that the idealization of the nation is joined with something more, an entire self-consciousness in the setting out of a programme ‘to discover and communicate to the Publick’. Marvell places an almost Miltonic faith in the power of ‘bright Truth’ to discover ‘all things in their proper Colours and Dimensions’, and like Milton he systematically deploys print as the great public corrective (PW 2: 241, 285). It is tempting then to think that Andrew Marvell, speaking back bluntly to the Commons’ Speaker and offering matter of state to view in the marketplace of print, had emerged fully formed into—even as he helped create—an expanding public sphere, with its emphasis on rationality and debate, and its separation of the realm of publicity, from courtly domain and domestic spaces. But while the idioms of loyalty to and admiration for the king that Marvell deploys in the Account are conventional, his

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adoption of those idioms went beyond convention. And as we noted at the beginning of this chapter, Marvell’s emergence into the public sphere of the coffee house may only have gone so far as its margins. The poem on Maniban, written in 1676, merely a year before the Account, displays Marvell’s continuing anxieties about prying and exposure. His apprehension of non-rational forces within still ran deep, even though he seemed so boldly to contest them without. And though the evidence that has been presented of his marriage late in life suggests some victory over the sense of incompleteness he had expressed so often in lyric verse and satire alike, in fact that marriage—secret, unequal, perhaps involved with deception—stands as an emblem of his continuing vulnerability and loss even as he faced out onto the world.51 Biography is of course addicted to developmental narratives, to growth towards coherence and completeness. As Andrew Marvell moved out from the shelter of others’ houses to establish his own, moved out of dependency and service to the fullness of a political personality, the explanatory force of a developmental model seems undeniable. And such a model for the growth of this poet and polemicist has been attached to a much grander developmental story, that of the growth of toleration and liberty: in that telling, not only is Marvell elevated but the teleology is humanized.52 But in such stories, whatever their sophistication and their own ideological power, the one turn that has not been interrogated is development itself: as if development were one-directional, as if it were always clarifying and summative. We might ask whether the facts of Andrew Marvell’s life, and more especially of his writing, suggest a certain development by subtraction. His does not fit the model of a late style developed by Rudolph Arnheim and Edward Said for the last phases of an artist’s life.53 Yet there is something intriguing about Marvell’s turning away from the kind of work he had done in earlier years. He had as it were solved the formal challenges of lyric just as he had outlived the biological urgencies lyric interrogates. There was surely no reason for him to continue

51 On the marriage, see Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), 224–7; Art Kavanah, ‘Andrew Marvell “in want of Money”: The Evidence in John Farrington v. Mary Marvell ’, The Seventeenth Century 17:2 (2002), 206–12; see also William Empson, Using Biography, 43–95; Empson’s correspondence on the secret marriage in The Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford, 2006), 504–5, 543; and also Smith, who does allow the possibility of the marriage, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, 197–8, 336–8, and 361, note 31. 52 See especially Annabel Patterson in PW, 1: xiii–xiv. 53 See Rudolph Arnheim, ‘On the Late Style’, in New Essays on the Psychology of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), 285–96; and Edward Said, Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (London, 2006).

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writing in that mode.54 This is not to say that the self had become other than it once was. Perhaps the fading of fault lines allowed the assembly of a more coherent self, but if so this was a compaction of personality. The poem on Maniban and the obtrusion of the care of children into The Growth of Popery suggest that the contraction of the personal, so evident in the latter text, may not have been a victory over an unyielding sense of fracture and of yearning. It may have been more simply the work of age, of maturation—but only when we insist on the non-progressivist meaning of that word. In calculating these remainders, we must wonder if Marvell felt, among the acquisitions and attenuations of age, the loss of verse. His reluctance to let go of that verse, to publish it to the world, may suggest something of that kind. 54

For the dating and hence the sequencing of Marvell’s poems, see Appendix.

5 Into the World Engaging with the world is not just a matter of determining what to disclose and what to withhold; it entails the projections of a life and perhaps as well it entails an attempt to make sense of that life. For Andrew Marvell that attempt was a lyric as well as a polemical enterprise, but it was also for him, surprising as this might seem, an enterprise of sociability. What survives of Andrew Marvell’s engagement with the world is preserved in a variety of forms and in what we might think of as a series of archives: the posthumous volume of poetry published—under the hand of Mary Marvell—as Miscellaneous Poems (1681); the verse satires circulating in manuscript from the 1660s that allow us a glimpse of Marvell operating in parliament, along with occasional traces in more formal records, and particularly those of parliament and (posthumously) of the court of chancery; a series of polemics that Marvell wrote and that came into print in the 1670s; over 300 extant letters, mostly to his parliamentary constituents in Hull and to his brethren in the Hull Trinity House, but also to family and friends; a number of portraits; and finally a striking concatenation of texts that Marvell produced on the sorrows and occasions of the family of Sir John Trott—a pair of epitaphs graven in stone, versions of these in the pages of Miscellaneous Poems, and a letter of consolation to Trott himself that also found its way into the miscellany.1 The most conventional of these archives of Marvell’s sociability is constituted by the letters. These track the manoeuvrings of a parliament man and man of business, and the doings of a friend and a family member. On one occasion, and not implausibly, Marvell represented his performance as simply conventional: ‘My letter savored of nothing beyond the ordinary, | And was a sample of my simplicity, | A narrative such as delights pleasant friends, | All full of the city, wit, news, poetry.’2 The letters reveal 1 For an explication of the Trott materials, see Chapter 2. In addition to the Latin verse composed for the Trott brothers, Marvell also composed and ‘published’ verse memorializing Jane Oxenbridge, Janae Oxenbrigiae Epitaphium (1658: 1681 folio), and Frances Jones, An Epitaph upon____ (1672: 1681 folio). 2 ‘To a Gentleman that only upon the sight of the Author’s writing, had given a character of his Person and Judgment of his Fortune’, translated by Wiliam A. McQueen and Kiffin A. Rockwell, The Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell (Chapel Hill, 1964), 31, ll. 9–12.

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social and political finesse of a high order, something for sure of political identity, but as well some important and surprising threads of feeling. Alongside these letters there is also a record of his work in that very sociable, corporate institution, the House of Commons, with its committee rooms and lobbies. Together, these give an account of Marvell in the world strikingly different from his familiar configuration as solitary singer or as herald of the public good. Many of the letters have been in the public domain since the late eighteenth century—they were edited by Edward Thompson in 1776, by A.B. Grosart in 1875, by H.M. Margoliouth in 1927 and 1952, and Margoliouth’s edition was revised by Pierre Legouis in 1971. They have been read as political commentary but until recently scholars did not pause to ask much of their tenor, their affect, their character, or even perhaps their ideals, and what those ideals may tell us of the writer and his work in the world.3 The letters to Hull, spread over close to twenty years, display Marvell as a local patriot but still more as a man of affairs:4 they record his accounts of addresses to town patrons and benefactors, his committee work on the town’s behalf in parliament, his care to assuage bruised egos and interests, his talents as draughtsman of official letters and parliamentary bills.5 He is here the consummate functionary, though ‘functionary’ is a word that seems to contradict most of what we have been told about and what we value in Marvell.6 The last two generations of Marvell scholars have instructed us forcefully, eloquently, in Marvell’s ideals, whether loyalist, republican, Whig, or tolerationist; and students of his poetry have gone far beyond the New Criticism, unfolding the aesthetics and the psychology of a Platonist, a pastoralist, and a singular poet of desire. And some of the most recent scholarship—in particular Nicholas von Maltzahn’s Chronology and Nigel Smith’s Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon—has laid out and interpreted the evidentiary materials for a fuller comprehension of the life and endeavours of poet and politician. But the integration of those endeavours remains a challenge. To read across Marvell’s correspondence and the 3 For important exceptions, see Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005); N.H. Keeble’s survey, ‘“I would not tell you any tales”: Marvell’s Constituency Letters’, in Conal Condren and A.D. Cousins, eds, The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell (Aldershot, UK, 1990), 111–34; Nicholas Murray, World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell (London, 1999), and, above all, Chronology, passim. 4 See Phil Withington, ‘Andrew Marvell’s Citizenship’, in Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 2011), 102–21. 5 See Caroline Robbins, ‘A Critical Study of the Political Activities of Andrew Marvell’, PhD thesis (University of London, 1926), especially 54–67. 6 As another Hull functionary and poet observed, ‘Poets are not normally thought of as either efficient or conscientious’; Philip Larkin, ‘The Changing Face of Andrew Marvell’, English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979), 154.

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other evidences of his public career, to look beyond the details of constituency business and listen beneath the unreflexive and uninflected tonality that critics have found so un-Marvellian, is to discern a distinctive set of practices and values that reverberate with the yearnings for attachment and the idealizations that characterize so much of Marvell’s verse. The social and political form that these practices and values took, in the case of Andrew Marvell and so many of his contemporaries, was service. And while it is a commonplace that both service and civic conscience helped constitute social and political relations in early modernity, students of Marvell’s politics have focused on conscience at the expense of service. We would suggest that service, compounded of psychology and ideology as well as of labour, not only inflected this long career; it also inhabited—if in some half-light—poetry that seems to deny work in the world. In 1659 the port town of Hull elected Marvell to Richard Cromwell’s parliament, and retained his services from the last months of the Protectorate through nearly two decades of restored monarchy. However it was that Marvell gained his parliamentary seat in successive elections, there can be no question that the burgesses of Hull took satisfaction from the labours of their chosen representative, and told him so not simply when they re-elected him to the Convention and Cavalier Parliaments but also in sundry testimonials through the ensuing decades.7 Marvell’s colleagues in the Commons seem to have taken little notice of his labours on the floor of the House for most of his time there. The diarists among them rarely recorded his speech-making efforts, and he surely did not speak often—as indeed he acknowledged—nor perhaps to much effect: fourteen speeches are recorded across nineteen years of membership of the Commons.8 But he must have possessed some significant parliamentary skills if his efforts helped preserve John Milton from Cavalier vengeance in the turbulent months after the Restoration, and he gained appointment to numerous parliamentary committees, primarily for local and 7 See especially P&L 2: 17, 48–9, 169. See also the regular tributes of ‘ale, barrels of ’ listed in the index to Chronology; and W.H. Kelliher, compiler, Andrew Marvell, Poet and Politician, 1621–78: An Exhibition to Commemorate the Tercentenary of His Death (London, 1978), 93. 8 Basil Duke Henning, ed., The History of Parliament: The Commons 1660–1690, 3 vols (London, 1983), 3: 25. For Marvell’s own acknowledgement of his infrequent speech making, see Anchitel Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 10 vols (London, 1769), 3: 323–30. There was a moment, however, in the wake of Clarendon’s fall when an aristocratic clique seemed to offer the promise of a tolerationalist program; then Andrew Marvell seems to have stood up to speak more often on the Common’s floor—he certainly caught the eye of the parliamentary diarists in 1667–1668: Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 1: 14, 36, 70–1, 294; The Diary of John Milward, ed. Caroline Robbins (Cambridge, 1938), 108, 197, 225, 238, 328; see also Chronology, 98–9, 103–5.

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regional affairs, but also for matters having to do with support of the clergy and their families.9 The letters to Hull reveal his skills in action.10 Yes, Marvell provided occasional and usually veiled commentary on the great issues and affairs of the politics of his day, and scholars have of course noticed such commentary; but more insistently, and more selfregardingly, he related his endeavours with officials and officialdom on behalf of Hull and its projects, from tax assessments to the provision of coastal beacons. And where he found collaboration from other friends of the port he paid formal if not necessarily heartfelt tribute, waxing eloquent at various points on the goodwill of Lord Belasyse, the civility of the Duke of Albemarle, the solicitousness of the Duke of Monmouth, the graciousness of the Duke of Richmond.11 Indeed, civility turns out to be a rather important theme in these letters. Marvell mastered not only the verbal idiom but all the gestures and discourses of social negotiation. In the Cromwellian Protectorate he had gained special notice for his diplomatic talents, for the adroitness of his compliment and address, and in the changed circumstances of the Restoration such recognition was renewed as the Convention House of Commons, like the protectoral council before it, deputed him to draft diplomatic niceties. Edward Holberton has recently made clear the exceptional deftness of Marvell’s interweaving of Swedish and English diplomatic perspectives in the poet’s Latin verse, Letter to Doctor Ingelo, of early 1654. And though the Convention’s call on his services to congratulate the King has been seen as political payback, a rubbing of Marvell’s nose in his political pliancy, perhaps it was simply recognition of his skills in the refinements of etiquette.12 It may be that we can find the grounds for such esteem in his letter of July 1653 to Oliver Cromwell, then Lord General, which throughout breathes ‘civility’ and salutes ‘eminence’ (P&L 2: 304– 5). And he breathed civility as well in personal correspondence: Sir, it is long since I had the honour to heare from you; which, if it proceed, as you said in a former Letter but which I can scarse handsomly mention, from your tendernesse of troubling me, is the cruellest piece of your Civility: 9 A convenient introduction to Marvell’s parliamentary career is in Henning, The History of Parliament: The Commons 1660–1690, 3: 24–7; for Marvell’s work on Milton’s behalf, see Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford, 2000), 403–4. 10 We can watch these skills at work in a letter in which Marvell seeks employment for a friend; see Rhodri Lewis, ‘An Unpublished Letter from Andrew Marvell to William Petty’, Notes and Queries 53:2 (2006), 181–3; cf. Chronology, 165. 11 This is not to say that Marvell was not on other occasions and in other circumstances very much at odds with Lord Belasyse. 12 See Chronology, 52, and Legouis, ‘Andrew Marvell: Further Biographical Points’, Modern Language Review 18:4 (1923), 421; Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate (Oxford, 2008), 6–36.

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to me especially who have no imployment but idlenesse and who am so oblivious that I should forget mine own name did I not see it sometimes in a friends superscription. (P&L 2: 337)

The letter, to his friend Sir Henry Thompson in York early in 1675, gives us some sense of how the effacements and ironies that we know so well from Marvell’s other writings could colour the intimate and playful presentation of the sociable self, and how civility was in so much of his correspondence the very groundwork of his relations. Marvell’s Hull letters were altogether performances in civility, and they evidence their author’s sustained attentiveness to social grace and ease. From the very beginning he stressed his obligations of civility and courtesy to the town (P&L 2: 14–15). Who better than Marvell could express the relation of principle to performance, with his advice to Hull to get itself a privy councillor to serve as the town’s lord steward, who would then be able to ‘patronize the justice of your cause’? Accordingly, he prided himself on ‘coyn[ing the] . . . civillest words’ in his encounter with Albemarle; he recounted with justified pleasure his consummately skilled mediation of Richmond’s favour (P&L 2: 81, 109, 206–7, 269); and he repeatedly presented himself as the perfect broker of business on the town’s behalf. He recorded not only his own meticulous execution of the business of his constituents, but also noted the successes and shortcomings of others, the failure of the town’s chief counsel to appear for business, the readiness of gentlemen elsewhere to turn their backs on urban neighbours (P&L 2: 85, 295). Such attentiveness to performance begins to seem more than a little programmatic as he reports repeatedly on a detail which other parliamentary note-takers and indeed modern historians have thought at best trivial: the call of the House, the Commons’ periodic and formalized efforts to extract attendance—that is, service— from its members. Year in, year out, Marvell kept his constituents informed of the progress of the call of the House—surely, for him there was nothing formal or stylized about such recording, such attendance, such service, and he undoubtedly earned his appointment to the Commons’ 1667 committee investigating absent members.13 Misled by Marvell’s enemy Samuel Parker, scholars have sometimes alleged quaintness in Marvell’s receipt of parliamentary wages. But Marvell took seriously the dispute over wages for service that blew up in Colchester and then spread to the floor of the House.14 Of course, the issue of corruption and placemen—that is, the perversion of proper service—played a large part 13

Commons Journals (London, 1742–), 8: 679; P&L 2: 120, 125, 158, 160, 178, 184. Robert C. Latham, ‘Payment of Parliamentary Wages—The Last Phase’, EHR 66 (1951), 28 note 4, 46–7; and P&L 2: 184. 14

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in The last Instructions and in Marvell’s polemical campaign against ‘Popery and Arbitrary Government’,15 but the issue was for him no mere rhetorical or partisan convenience. ‘Woe to the absent’, he proclaimed in a 1671 letter to a friend, ‘if gentlemen would come up and attend we might have something of a better market’.16 The attack on corruption and placemen was rooted in a long and deeply held commitment to service, with all its practices and also its effacements. That commitment is evidenced in Marvell’s employment record. The story may well have begun in a tutoring encounter with the young Villiers brothers—an encounter whose origins perhaps lay in a connection formed with the young Duke through their overlapping sojourns at Trinity College, Cambridge, at the end of 1630s. It is very likely that Marvell wrote his elegy for Lord Francis Villiers (1648) out of the attachment so formed—the decision to print it, even if anonymously, as a separate surely constituted a significant declaration of attachment—and he remained attached, affectively and programmatically, that is ideologically, to the Duke of Buckingham throughout his life, and even beyond.17 More celebrated, and rightly so, is Marvell’s service in the Fairfax household: tutor to the young Mary Fairfax; poetic colleague to her father; in a manner, historian of the estate in 1651. Marvell once more assumed the role of tutor and companion, this time to Oliver Cromwell’s young ward, William Dutton, travelling with him from Eton to the Protestant academy at Saumur in France in 1656, though the more exalted service of these years surely involved relations with Cromwell himself both before and after the latter became Lord Protector: for him in the summer of 1653 he wrote the Latin verse that accompanied the portrait Cromwell sent to Queen Christina of Sweden; for him as well he wrote The First Anniversary and to him he paid tribute in formal panegyric; it was in Cromwell’s private service that he acted as William Dutton’s tutor, perhaps worked to try to arrange Dutton’s marriage to Frances Cromwell and wrote the nuptial verse for Mary Cromwell in 1657; and it was in Cromwell’s public service that he worked alongside Milton and the young Dryden. Nor did such personal attachments and service terminate with his establishment as servant of Hull and follower of a parliamentary life. It was for one of the godly 15 Thus in 1677 Marvell extolled a bill for the regulation of elections and punishment of abuses, ‘a thing then which nothing were more necessary’ (P&L 2: 178). 16 Quoted in Chronology, 123. 17 For a discussion of Marvell’s attachment to the Villiers family, see Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2008), 28–9. After Marvell’s death, his nephew, William Popple, edited the religious writings of the lately deceased Martin Clifford, Buckingham’s secretary and friend and, with Buckingham and Cowley, a contemporary of Marvell at Trinity College, Cambridge. See the ODNB entries for Clifford and for George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham.

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northern nobility of the Cromwellian years—Charles Howard, Earl of Carlisle—that he made his next ventures into state service: he went in Carlisle’s company to Holland in 1662–1663 and with Carlisle in the embassy to Muscovy and Sweden in 1663–1665. Marvell’s association with godly noblemen included enduring ties to another northerner, Philip Lord Wharton, on whose behalf he acted as political counsel and on behalf of whose son he performed as marriage broker.18 The benefits of aristocratic association were various, and while Marvell’s ties to the godly privy councillor, Arthur Annesley, Earl of Anglesey, may have brought him library privileges, they also protected him from retribution for some of his ecclesiastical polemics of the 1670s.19 But it was not only the godly with whom Marvell associated himself; nor had his old tutoring role been forgotten. His relationship with the Duke of Buckingham may have brought neither the political nor personal gains for which he must once have hoped, but he showed his continuing regard for the Duke in a series of tributes from Clarendon’s Housewarming through The Rehearsal Transpros’d up to The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government. A more intriguing feature of Marvell’s later career, in its challenge to conventional constructions of partisanship, is the near-contemporary identification of Marvell as Prince Rupert’s ‘tutor’.20 What such a relation would have included was counsel and companionship. Counsel and companionship seem to have characterized too some of Marvell’s parliamentary sociabilities—and we have only recently come to recognize that the houses of parliament did in fact function in this period as social spaces.21 We may assume that his remarkably documented friendship with Sir John Trott had its roots in parliamentary association, and to the documents of that friendship we shall shortly return. More generally, Marvell owned to a capacity for friendship: his affectionate and some-

18 On Marvell’s relations with Wharton, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Lord Wharton’, The Seventeenth Century 22:3 (2004), 252–65. Wharton was certainly living in the south after the Restoration, but his continuing ties to his Yorkshire birthplace are evident in his foundation of Philip Lord Wharton’s Charity, which was still, in the twentieth century, distributing Bibles to successful Yorkshire schoolchildren including the grandmother of one of the present authors. 19 See Patterson and Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell, Locke, and the Earl of Anglesey: A Chapter in the History of Reading’, Historical Journal 44:3 (2001), 703–26. 20 See PW 2: 245n. The observation is a solitary one, but Nicholas McDowell notes that the Villiers brothers were serving under Prince Rupert’s command in 1643 (Poetry and Allegiance, 25), and in 1666 when Marvell witnessed one of Valentine Greatrakes’ cures, he seems to have been acting in some proximity to Rupert. 21 See Chris Kyle and Jason Peacey, ‘“Under cover of so much coming and going”: Public Access to Parliament and the Political Process in Early Modern England’, in Kyle and Peacey, eds, Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power, and Public Access in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2002), 1–24.

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times politically forthright letters to his nephew William Popple are well known, as are those to the Thompsons of York and Sir Edward Harley. Less noted has been his passing, though still consequential, tribute to parliamentary friendships at the start of what was to prove his last session in the House in 1678: he had only brief business to report, he informed Hull, ‘this being a day of meeting many of our friends’ (P&L 2: 209). Whatever we take the implications of that plural possessive to be, the sociability of doing business on behalf of neighbours would have included a reciprocity that could scarcely have been empty of feeling. The fact of Marvell’s attachments is as undeniable as their importance in a world where the domestic and the particular were bound to the civic in so many ways.22 It may even be possible to infer a little of the quality and affective meaning of those attachments. One series of associations—and these lifelong—centred on Hull. It was with the assistance of his brother-in-law, Edmund Popple, that he gained election for Hull in 1659, and the Popples’ son Will was to become his most intimate friend and confidant later in life. In 1670 he was to begin a letter to William Popple, ‘Dear Will, I need not tell you I am always thinking of you’ (P&L 2: 317). And he remained in close contact with a group of northerners—especially the Thompsons of York—throughout the Restoration. As Phil Withington has demonstrated, members of that network not only helped frame his public world but also constituted, and complicated, his domestic environment in London in the years up to his death. Marvell escorted some of those northern associates out into the world, for his 1666 published attestations of cures by the ‘Stroker’, Valentine Greatrakes, in what seems, by their situation in the volume, to be a London context, were subscribed as well by a group of his Hull contacts. He was, by all accounts, a loyal and lasting friend: he worked to save Milton at the Restoration and remained thereafter one of his few ‘familiar learned Acquaintance’; he wrote an admiring though politically unsafe epitaph for his republican friend James Harrington, who died in 1677; and his remarkable elegies for the sons of the Trott family of Wiltshire in 1667, and likely for the paterfamilias too in 1672, surely testify to the presence of deep and continuing feelings.23 We might also note that those feelings could have their 22 For evidence of Marvell in a different circle of friends, see Harold Love, ‘Sir William Petty, the London Coffee Houses, and the Restoration “Leonine”’, Seventeenth Century 22:2 (2007), 381–94. 23 ODNB, under ‘Marvell, Andrew’; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), 274–7; John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark (London, 1898), I, 293 and II, 72; A Brief Account of Mr. Valentine Greatrakes (1666), 84–5; and Henning, The History of Parliament: The Commons 1660–1690, 3: 608.

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lighter side, for it was horse-play, a cheerful box on the ear, with the Oxfordshire gentleman Sir Philip Harcourt that brought him his last official, and unwelcome, parliamentary notice in 1677. Marvell may not have been, as Aubrey averred, a man of ‘generall acquaintance’, but what acquaintance there was ran deep. The comfort and familiarity that Marvell displayed in the exchanges with Trott and Harcourt point to an unexpected facet of his self-imagining. Certainly, in the extensive correspondence there is little assertion of selfhood altogether or of social pretension, but at points in the lyric verse traces of the Marvellian hero, even perhaps of Andrew Marvell himself, emerge and these are figured in the language of aristocratic ethos and value. Marvell of course celebrated the social elevation of Lord Francis Villiers against the backdrop of vulgar bodies; he honoured the social ease of his ‘Noble Friend Mr. Richard Lovelace’; and he made obeisance to Lord Fairfax’s preoccupation with family history and place—these are the very stuff of clientage and its conventions, and they need betray no trace of self-division in the client, no sense of a betrayal of his humble origins, his subsizar servility while an undergraduate at Cambridge. But what are we to make of gestures that are not anchored in the overt circumstances of patronage? Pastoral convention may privilege visions of harmony, but it did not in the early modern period privilege visions of social elevation and exclusivity. Marvell’s exercises in this genre allow surprising glimpses of emulation and of social disdain. In Damon the Mower, Juliana dismisses Damon’s humble gifts and their rural giver. Rather more intriguingly, that same rural figure indulges his own pretensions of funerary magnificence, the countryside transformed into the very stuff of heraldry (The Mower’s Song, ll. 27–8). More significantly, Marvell gives voice to a very particular social imaginary in The unfortunate Lover, the poem in which he sounds his most abandoned and isolate notes. Amidst all the noise of catastrophe are heard claims of heroic valour and assertions of chivalric identity and entitlement. To imagine the doomed and battered lover as Ajax, the very type of bluff soldierly heroism, may be to participate in romance tradition; and the characterization of the lover as ‘the only Banneret | That ever Love created yet’ (The unfortunate Lover, ll. 57–8) surely declares as much. But there is nothing conventional about the heraldic imagery, with all the weirdness and intensity of its badges and symbols, ‘a Field Sable a Lover Gules’ (l. 64), so carefully wrought in the poem’s concluding stanza. What the minister’s son from Hull seems to have imagined for himself in this poem is the slightly archaic world of aristocratic display, of aristocratic selfhood. And likely from the very same moment of political unsettledness and personal rootlessness emerged another piece of self-imagining,

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‘the forward Youth’ of An Horatian Ode. Although this figure has been repeatedly explicated, what students of the verse have passed by is the social setting of the poem’s opening, the armour on the wall. Its meaning is not wholly absorbed by the subject of civil war: this forward youth would emerge from a household that possessed its own armour, and hung it in a hall—in the seventeenth century surely the great hall of aristocratic display. And such fantasies are echoed in other traces of Andrew Marvell’s social projection: the field of honour was defined and policed by the duel, the final exercise in social exclusiveness, and much later this once lyric poet was to reminisce of the lesson of his fencing master—the best defence is to strike the first blow (P&L 2: 324). Marvell clearly identified with the gentleman. As an MA from Cambridge, he had every right to claim that identity as he did in 1647, setting himself apart from his rather humble origins and his subsizar status at Cambridge.24 And he soon upped the ante: among his personal seals was a distinctively armorial one; and one of his crests displayed a ducal coronet.25 Marvell’s decisions to hold and to withhold the manuscripts of his poetry was, as we have argued, part of a complex of guardedness that originates far from social postures. But the choice to write in complex forms and venerable traditions and then to hold that verse back from print was also an assertion of literary identity, now slightly mannered, even antiquated, but unmistakably elevated. But when we turn to those lyric forms and genres that Marvell practised with such brilliance, what is striking is the insistent loneliness of his literary landscape. Pastoral may not be the most sociable of genres, but the drinking song, the dialogue, and the consolations of like-minded companionship all privilege varieties of the social, and in a formal sense Marvell seems to acknowledge and perform such sociality: after all, he wrote a series of dialogues—Thyrsis and Dorinda, Clorinda and Damon, Ametas and Thestylis, Daphnis and Chloe, and we might even include in that grouping A Dialogue, between The Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure and A Dialogue between the Soul and Body. Marvell was drawn to dialectical procedures, but he seldom allows the sociable synthesis promised by dialectic’s structure. Set against the rich archive of Renaissance pastoral, the affective range of Marvell’s work in this mode is narrow indeed. Even in his georgic moments, opened as these are to work and community, we encounter isolate and inwardly-turned figures: Damon the Mower and 24 Kelliher, Andrew Marvell, 32. And did Marvell’s contest with those humble, if godly, origins play out in his reported flight to the Jesuits? For that flight, see the letter from the Reverend John Norton to the Reverend Andrew Marvell, likely January 1640, reproduced by Kelliher, 25. 25 For images of Marvell’s seals and crest, see Kelliher, Andrew Marvell, 95–6, 114.

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that Mower against Gardens who seems endangered not only by art and artefacts but by civility itself. Yet perhaps the ghost of sociability pressed in upon these solitary spaces. Marvell does allow country entertainments, but in the mowing scenes of Upon Appleton House these are observed from without, the narrator excluded and excluding himself from a conviviality that threatens even as it entertains. Perhaps closer to his condition than those country-house mowers is the furtive narrator in the Picture of little T.C., observing, yearning, and from the side. And in The Nymph complaining the central figure is bereft of community; she seeks solace in the faun and in the garden, only to imagine herself finally abandoned, isolate, and immobile. Marvell’s richest study of pastoral isolation is of course The Garden: not only for its famed rejoinder, ‘Two Paradises ’twere in one | To live in Paradise alone’ (ll. 63–4), but also for its argumentative counterpointing of the social and the silent, its insistence that solitude is the essential condition of the imagination, its programmatic rejection of social congress and sexual encounter. The Ovidian myths—Apollo hunting Daphne, Pan chasing Syrinx—as critics have often remarked, are wittily rewritten as fables of undesire, or at least of human undesire since the narrator himself imagines ecstasy only in vegetal embrace. Marvell was without question a brilliant pastoralist; he was also pastoral’s most estranged practitioner. And beyond pastoral, Marvell is repeatedly the anatomist of isolation. It is definitively the condition of The unfortunate Lover, and the grave is the most deeply imagined prospect in To his Coy Mistress: ‘a fine and private place, | But none I think do there embrace’ (ll. 31–2). When Marvell imagined the origins of society in Musick’s Empire, he turned away from the conventional Aristotelian account of natural sociability and man as the social being, favouring instead for his vision of social beginnings a Ciceronian myth of the originary orator who drew wild men from caves to conversation.26 And even here he imagined the resulting ‘Progeny of numbers’ withdrawing—withdrawing in their colonies, but withdrawing nonetheless (l. 11).27 The mood of The Bermudas—hushed, reverent isolation—could not be more fitting. Throughout the lyric verse, solitude is fashioned into an inimitable construction of selfhood. At the outset of Marvell’s most obvious exercise in pastoral sociabilities, the country house celebration of Nun Appleton, the poet offers an appreciation of social architecture whose tones are surprisingly cool and

26 On that Ciceronian myth, see Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton, 2004), 35. 27 See Nigel Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 150, note 12 for Marvell’s unusual verbal construction here.

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detached. Ben Jonson had set fecundity and hospitality at the centre of the country estate, and at the centre of a genre that was to be forever associated with Penshurst. It is clear that Marvell had Jonson’s panegyric in view, yet he shaded his poem’s sociabilities in a very different way. The silence of Marvell’s scene, its vacancy of pleasure, and its strenuous functionality, form a tribute to the Lord General’s virtues, character, and indeed self-representation. But we might wonder whether it was Fairfax’s tastes alone that governed the choice of that strangely impersonal, even dehumanized, image of Fairfaxian generosity and sociability: that ‘Stately Frontispice of Poor’, that ‘Daily . . . Furniture of Friends’ (ll. 65, 68).28 They are there to ‘adorn’ and ‘commend’ the great house and its values, and in this purely functional representation Marvell superbly captures the tensions between the traditional role of the great house and the stern rectitude of Nun Appleton’s present master. The implicit contrast with Jonsonian revelry heightens the silence and austerity of these scenes. There is, however, one scene in Upon Appleton House whose warmth and sociability Jonson might have enjoyed, though it was in its own way a further compliment to Fairfaxian rectitude. We refer to Marvell’s account of the Cistercian nunnery on whose foundation the house was raised. Certainly, the conventions of anti-popery demanded some pointscoring at the expense of sensuality and indulgence, and this Marvell enthusiastically delivers. But there is something odd about the scene’s spiritual arithmetic. Marvell does deploy a set of rather crude jokes at the expense of pregnant nuns, but he also devotes energy, descriptive space, and imagination to their sociability. Stanza after stanza in this history details warmth, companionship, and sensual pleasure. The scenes are comic and light-hearted in a way that we do not usually associate with Marvell’s poetry, not even with his satiric art. And in fluent and untroubled fashion they mix the social and the erotic. What the Fairfaxian estate offers is singleness, indeed singularity; what the Cistercian nuns enjoyed was community. While the delights of art and of errant sexuality are folded into the complexities of the scene’s sociability, there is here, more fundamentally, an embrace of human intercourse and consolation. Yet Marvell only acknowledges such embrace outside the domain of heterosexuality and reproductivity. He stood, it 28 Smith cites the suggestive parallel between this gesture and the verse of Lord Fairfax’s cousin Charles Fairfax, ‘Come, come my good Shepherds’ (c. 1650), verse found in the Fairfax collection housed at the Brotherton Library, Leeds. The verbal parallels here seem closer and more persuasive than those in the published verse of Constantijn Huygens, ‘Hofwyck’ (1651) that Smith also cites; see Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 218 n.

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needs scarcely be said, far distant from Jonson’s celebration of sociability and fecundity. Marvell offers one other depiction of sociality as entertainment, as fully imagined and as barren. In his narrative of the visit to Richard Flecknoe, resident among the Roman Catholic émigrés in Rome, Marvell flourishes the details and furnishings of sociality even as he discloses its discomforts. He is not, as he so often imagines himself in the pastorals, at the margins; rather, as befits the young man on the Grand Tour, he is at the centre of various acts of exchange. The scene shares with his account of the nunnery a delight in sexual punning and again an undeniable frisson in situating the spiritual in intimate proximity to the sexual as well as the social, and not merely to the sexual but to the deviant and perforce to the non-reproductive: ‘and I, that was | Delightful, said there can no Body pass | Except by penetration hither, where | Two make a crowd, nor can three Persons here | Consist but in one substance’ (ll. 97–101).29 Surely it is the scene’s non-heterosexual and non-progenitive embrace that allows Marvell witty rapprochement with both sociability and sexuality, and perhaps it is only wit that allows that rapprochement. True, he indulges the mischief of social and sexual miscegenation as well across the canvas of The last Instructions, but the episodes of sexual misconduct there are of course, and argumentatively, barren. The argument of infertility obviously indicts courtly corruption; does it not also catch up the deeper disappointments and anxieties of the poet? These scenes remind us of the difficulty with which Marvell’s selfimagining was fitted to the social order in which he lived, and he seems to have been as interested in troubling as in reifying that order. The discomforts of sociality within a patriarchal frame are powerfully present in Upon Appleton House; they are no less to the fore in The First Anniversary, his other extended meditation on forms of order. Singularity is the claim of the latter poem, and of the politics of its moment, and this has been variously explicated. Marvell constructs his argument in The First Anniversary through juxtaposition, through variations of the one and the many, and he displays these encounters in panels that situate the Lord Protector within, but in tension with, an order that is pre-eminently social and civic. The hero, the creator, the consummate statesman, the horseman, the captain, the paterfamilias: all depend on configurations of the social, and it is through these constellations that the figure of Cromwell gathers meaning. Indeed, Marvell’s poem argues, only through such configurations of the social can we approach an understanding of the Lord Protector. While we can never fully apprehend the singular, there can be no doubt about its relationship to the social, which is always endangering, 29

See Chapter 2.

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threatening, shaming.30 And through that other figure shadowing this poem, the poet-narrator, Marvell plays out anxieties of competition and engagement. As Cromwell ‘outwings the wind’ (l. 126), he outwings as well the poet as solitary singer abandoned in his wake. And at the close of the poem, the poet yields the prize, walks away from contention, refuses engagement. The diffidence of the narrator of the First Anniversary might remind us of the abrupt erasure of ‘the forward Youth’—the poet manqué—of An Horatian Ode in face of the challenges and exultations of entry into the world. Such occlusions suggest the costs to Marvell of encounter with the public world. For one who was, as poet, so drawn towards solitude and, as political broker, so practised in the arts of accommodation, Marvell showed a fitting sensitivity to what was for him the paradox of entry into the world. The dilemma of entry formed an important and troubled juncture on which Marvell repeatedly meditated. It is the crux of An Horatian Ode, and the centre of Upon Appleton House, and it haunted the poet of The Garden. Its traces are indeed to be discovered throughout his work, for repeatedly Marvell projected it onto those whom he serviced in verse. He could place himself too at the heart of such dilemmas: decrying court and parliamentary alignments in 1670, he protested to William Popple, his nephew and friend, ‘In such a Conjuncture, dear Will, what Probability is there of my doing any Thing to the Purpose?’(P&L 2: 315). That question certainly seems part of a prudential political calculus, yet we must wonder whether, despite his skills as a parliamentary agent and solicitor of business, despite his celebrated record as polemicist, something other than caution prevented him from venturing further into the world of politics. He had a slightly odd habit in the letters, even in those to William Popple, of referring to himself at key junctures in the third person: was this only prudence, or was it as well a way to put himself at some distance from the world, even perhaps from the self ? The question of Marvell’s motives is of course irresolvable, but there can be no doubt of the powerful resonances that entry into the world excited in him. It is the very burden of the revolutionary moment, and it is as clearly announced as such in Tom May’s Death—‘Then is the Poets time’ (l. 65)—as it is in An Horatian Ode—‘The forward Youth that would appear’ (l. 1). The verses in which Marvell wrestled with conjunctures were, it should be recognized, pre-eminently the work of his time in the ante-room of public life, when he was whiling away the hours as tutor in the fields of Nun Appleton and Eton. We must recognize too that the 30 See Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1698 (Ithaca and London, 1993), 83–8.

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problem of entry into a public world that Marvell there set up was in a sense the problem of the republic. In the traditional monarchical order, political participation came for most as a matter of course: householders, and above all members of the social elite, qualified by birth in every sense—social rank, birth-order, gender—assumed their appropriate roles. But in a republic—the republic that both Fairfax and Cromwell came to serve—participation required choice; it was a matter of the will. The ‘destiny’ that had to be the ‘choice’ of Lord and Lady Fairfax was no simple concession to the stringencies of engagement to and under a usurping republic and to participation in a progenitive order of time;31 it was, much more broadly, the formation of the self in an active world. And that engagement the Cromwell of An Horatian Ode and still more of The First Anniversary knows all too well. Marvell was, we may suspect, sheltering— as he had done in The unfortunate Lover and, so more broadly throughout his pastoral reflections on action and attachment deferred—his own hesitations and tribulations in the momentous exigencies and dilemmas of life in the revolutionary order of the 1650s. More certainly, Marvell was drawn to the juncture of entry by its condition of liminality, and that condition is brilliantly examined in the epic balancing act that is Upon Appleton House. At every juncture in this narrative Marvell contends with familiar yet pressing oppositions: the house small in large, urbs in rure, the scene of otium and negotium intermingled, and so too that of arms and flowers. But the instabilities of liminal condition do not exhaust for Marvell the fascination of the moment of entry, the point of becoming. At the heart of Upon Appleton House lie the circumstances that surround Lord Fairfax and his daughter. And while Fairfax is caught exactly at the moment of decision constituted by the Scots’ irruption into the northern landscape, Mary is transfixed on the threshold of change and maturation. At the close of the poem she is faced with the Marvellian moment of crisis: entry into the world, here of course cast as reproductivity. For the virgin Mary and for the Fairfax family to which she was heir, the force of that crisis was and is obvious; little could she have known that in its pains and poignancy her story was to be triangulated with the poet’s own through the figure of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham—sometime husband, sometime patron, sometime Marvellian hero.32 It was of course characteristic of Marvell to savour his own 31 As John M. Wallace argued in Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1968), 9–68 and 232–57. 32 And we must wonder whether Marvell’s long familiarity with Nun Appleton and its residents and with George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, may not have helped facilitate the Villiers–Fairfax marriage alliance of 1657. After all, at other points in Marvell’s life his name was attached to other nuptial undertakings: Dutton, Fauconberg, Wharton.

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dilemmas under the roof of patron and patronage, on the occasion and in the body of another. Even more instructive is the escape Marvell imagines both from the annihilative force of time and from all that is represented by reproduction. If vitrification and regression are, as we have earlier argued, the wistful and wishful subtext of the envoi to Upon Appleton House, we must ask after the politics of such moves. Mary Fairfax is the emblem of nubile expectancy, with its promises and traumas: here Marvell used the occasional, and its particularity, as a way of lighting up from another angle that juncture of becoming which confronted the ‘forward Youth’. It is such moments and spaces that are occupied in other of his verse by Little T.C. (Picture of little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers), by the figure of Caelia (To his worthy Friend Doctor Witty), by the virginal Frances Stuart (The last Instructions ll. 891–904), by Henry Lord Hastings (Upon the Death of Lord Hastings), by Francis Villiers (An Elegy Upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers). But what is withheld from these figures, and hence in Marvell’s imagining through these figures, is physical fruition—their participation in reproductivity, in lineage, in destiny: that is, in the costly story of patriarchy. This story is most boldly rendered by the narration-inreverse of Archibald Douglas’s developmental history, from husband and father back into the androgyny of youth. But it is most poignantly suggested in The Nymph complaining. There, pathos is conjured as Marvell shadows the nymph with the myth of Niobe, icon of parental loss.33 Just as surely, pathos turns to bathos as the myth dissolves in the adolescent, indeed sentimentalized, tears of the Nymph: First my unhappy Statue shall Be cut in Marble; and withal, Let it be weeping too: but there Th’ Engraver sure his Art may spare; For I so truly thee bemoane, That I shall weep, though I be stone. (ll. 111–16)

The poem is a tapestry of substitutions: the subtlest and most profound comes when those adolescent tears displace the deeper sorrows of Niobe, 33 As Smith notes, ‘an engraving depicting the young, deceased Lord Hastings surrounded by weeping muses, and with Latin verses by Edward Montague that make reference to Niobe, was attached to the second edition of Lachrymae Musarum (1650)’ (Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 71n); Marvell’s elegy for Lord Hastings appeared in Lachrymae Musarum. If The Nymph Complaining were to be dated in proximity to this volume and hence in proximity to Upon Appleton House, we might be tempted, as Pierre Legouis was long ago, to see Mary Fairfax in the nymph and to imagine Marvell pondering for her the consequences of futurity.

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the classical epitome of mourning. It may be that the psychology of adolescence is at stake in this portrait, but the poem’s striking substitution of the loss of the faun for the loss of Niobe’s children points to deeper matter, and that is more surely the poet’s than the poem’s. Marvell repeatedly turns to sites of futurity, at one moment to interrupted adolescence, at another to scenes of sexual coupling, but just as surely he abandons, evacuates, aborts, physical conjunction itself. The light-hearted but conclusive banter of Ametas and Thestylis expresses what must seem at least an ambivalence about coition, the foundational act of progenitive destiny; in such poems as The Gallery, Mourning, and Daphnis and Chloe, Marvell adds a darker colour to the mood. Could male aversion to sexual encounter also be the drama seen through the eyes of the abandoned female in The Nymph complaining? Even To his Coy Mistress proves to be an exercise in extenuations: however much the ironies of the first verse paragraph mock, they also inhabit the poetics of deferral. Of course, the ecstatic physics at the end of the poem might seem to refute any notion that Marvell could only turn away from consummation, from what is in the conventional male imagination the moment of becoming, the moment of origin. But all the readings of that stanza have demonstrated that the one thing the poem does not allow is fruition and fulfilment. It is hard not to suppose that there is a parallel to be drawn between Marvell’s fraught imagining of heterosexual union and his figuring of incompleteness, his descants on the moment before entry into the world. Such poems as On a Drop of Dew, Ros, and Bermudas shimmer with expectancy, and the mood suffuses the philosophical and eschatological longings of these pieces. More strikingly, and surely more provocatively, expectancy defines the desires and the trepidations of Little T.C. She is the very emblem of entry into the world in what was for Marvell all of entry’s impossible allure, its fatal embrace of time. The crisis of entry into the world is most strikingly anatomized in The unfortunate Lover, Marvell’s essential piece of self-writing. Against the soft green spaces of sexual coupling and social conjoining Marvell sets the scene for heroic encounter. Critics have certainly puzzled over the oddity of the poem’s opening, noting the distance of its mood from everything that follows. The disjuncture underscores how estranged and yet how necessary it was to posit the trauma of entry against the condition of sociality. Otherwise, there can be no rationale for the poem’s descent into torturous narration. Of the traumas of that entry itself the poem makes a feast. In this text Marvell starkly insists on the violence of entry as he figures it through Caesarean section; but violence is not the only significance of Caesarean section. Marvell writes a violation of nature into the scene. He also contemplates a birth clear of the father, and of what was surely for

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him the taint of genital sexuality—indeed, imagining a form if not of immaculate conception, at least of immaculate birth.34 Hence the utter strangeness of this unfortunate lover, his singularity declared in the isolation into which he is ‘cast away’ (l. 12), and enacted in a life premised in desire. What we must insist on is both the centrality of the isolate state in Marvell’s imagination and its essential and impossible embeddedness in the other, figured either as sexual or social conjoining. In The unfortunate Lover Marvell analyzed the conundrum and conditions of heroic achievement in dream and myth; in the Cromwell poems as in Upon Appleton House he situated exactly this configuration in history. The disparateness of poetic forms and of their overt subjects may conceal the congruence of the dilemma and its deconstruction. There should, however, be no mistaking the similar lineaments, indeed the mirrored identities, of the heroes at the centre of these poems. While encounter with the world is a story of trauma, entry is for both a climacteric: in The unfortunate Lover torment and violence surround and run through the scene; in An Horatian Ode the energies unleashed by entry are those of breaking, burning, blasting; in The First Anniversary an apocalyptic rush accompanies Cromwell’s bursting free of mortal constraint. And when Marvell figures this hero’s origins he insists on a strange form of singularity, for these beginnings are clear of sexuality and of paternity alike. Glancing at Genesis in The First Anniversary, Marvell rewrites Cromwell’s origins free of the Fall and born of a mother herself chosen from better earth, one who in her turn had ‘smelt the Blossome, and not eat the Fruit’ (ll. 160, 164). What Marvell achieves through Cromwell’s miraculous birth is the emergence of the hero into the world without paternity. It can be no coincidence that Marvell used a similar construction of Genesis in Upon Appleton House to figure the lesbian nuns in a community free of men, simultaneously pleasured and preserved: ‘So through the mortal fruit we boyl | The Sugars uncorrupting Oyl: | And that which perisht while we pull, | Is thus preserved clear and full’ (ll. 173–6). And in a striking echo of the Caesarean section that brought the Unfortunate Lover into the world, Cromwell’s emergence as political man in the Horatian Ode is an act of self-penetration, self-division: ‘And, like the three-fork’d Lightning, first | Breaking the Clouds where it was nurst, | Did thorough his own Side | His fiery way divide’ (ll. 13–16).35 ‘Thorough 34 For the striking parallel with the reproductive dilemma and the violence of Coy Mistress, see Chapter 3. 35 Both Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Brighton, 1986), 275–6, and Donald Friedman (‘Rude Heaps and Decent Order’, in Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis, eds, Marvell and Liberty (New York, 1999), 127), have observed the Caesarean associations of self-penetration.

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his own Side’ is commonly glossed as topical reference to Cromwell’s indifference to the niceties of partisan loyalties in the later 1640s; it also returns through civic violence to the trauma of origins. This striking passage recounts the origins of a Cromwell cast as Caesar, and provides a powerful analogue for the Caesarean origins of the Unfortunate Lover, ‘Till at the last the master-Wave | Upon the Rock his Mother drave; | And there she split against the Stone, | In a Cesarian Section’ (ll. 13–16). This juxtaposition renders yet more intriguing, and perhaps more intelligible, the beginning of An Horatian Ode where the ‘forward Youth’ metamorphoses into ‘restless Cromwel’ through that similitudinous ‘So’, a conjunction that marks sequence but urges identification. And could there be a further chapter to this story?36 In his Latin poem to Dr Witty, written within months of An Horatian Ode, Marvell turned aside from the familiar metaphor that makes of the production of books an act of birthing.37 Instead, he chose language that allowed such work to be imagined through the strikes of the printing press and more immediately through the wound from which ink, and books, issue: Nempe sic innumero succrescunt agmine libri, Saepia vix toto ut jam natet una mari. Fortius assidui surgunt a vulnere prœli: Quoque magis pressa est, auctior Hydra redit. (ll. 1–4) Truly, books are increasing in such an endless stream That now scarcely one cuttle-fish swims in the whole sea. Unceasing presses spring more strongly from the wound: And the more it has been pressed, the larger the Hydra returns.38

Surely the anxiety hidden in this playful and punning conjuncture of wounds and print points towards Marvell’s caution over print publication; it points as well towards the poet’s abiding fascinating with the modes and costs of reproduction. Running beneath all these themes and representations of selfhood, endeavour, and identity is essential estrangement: from social encounter, from sexual congress, from the world and the self at the very moment of entry, of creation, and of self-creation. Can it be accidental that The unfortunate Lover and An Horatian Ode, whose composition was so proximate, should be set on facing pages of the 1681 folio? It is as if poet and 36 It may be mere coincidence, but the Reverend Andrew Marvell closed his sermon on circumcision by insisting on the impossibility of self-begetting out of the belly; Hull City Library, Ms ‘Sermons of Reverend Andrew Marvell’ ff. 137–42 at f. 142. 37 We might wonder whether Marvell had come across Milton’s vivid rendering of the birth of the book in Areopagitica (1644). 38 McQueen and Rockwell, Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell, 37.

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compositor were negotiating between the biological and the circumstantial as the foundation of identity. There are other and more familiar disjunctures within this life. Nothing is more commonplace in Marvell commentary than the distance between lyric and polemical vocations, and readers often feel a certain unease when they juxtapose Marvell’s meditative freedom against his regimes of advocacy. Marvell began his writing life, or at least the published part of it, in conventional and high-flying idioms of royal and aristocratic panegyric. And in 1650 he understood both the magnetism of courtly culture and the dynamism of republican achievement; he duly became an ardent Cromwellian—indeed, Mrs Anne Sadleir, Little T.C.’s great aunt who had known the Marvell family for decades, was in 1652 or 1653 perfectly prepared to believe that Andrew Marvell had helped Milton write Eikonoklastes, that infamous defence of regicide.39 At the Restoration, Marvell quietly adjusted his dress and conformed to the extent of becoming a diplomat’s secretary, and certainly made some appreciative noises about the person and regime of the restored king. In particular, he discovered common cause with Charles II in the project of toleration, and his admiration for Charles’s work in that cause found an echo in the King’s own appreciation for Marvell’s services and wit.40 Marvell was scarcely alone in such a trajectory: everybody had a past, and the revolutions of the seventeenth century were many and various. It was the remarkable career that betrayed little to no inconsistency. King Charles II had taken the Covenant, John Milton had celebrated courtier and Catholic aristocratic families, and many were the republican administrators who served the later Stuart monarchs, and to mutual profit. Yet Andrew Marvell showed his unease with aspects of this trajectory. And however gnomic his expression, in The Rehearsal Transpros’d: The Second Part, of a ‘Cause . . . too good to have been fought for’, his contemporaries would have understood his meaning and his motive when he sought to elide his own past by excusing inconvenient loyalties and what had come to seem inconstancy, folding his discomforts into those of the nation (PW 1: 192). Could he have been refashioning himself according to shifting tides with the rewritten The Character of Holland of 1665, that likely job performance from 1653, which now in 1665 reshaped inconvenient republican tribute as royalist panegyric? Whoever it was in the printer’s shop in 1681 that worked to ensure the respectable moderation, the essential monarchism, of Marvell’s proto-Whiggery by removing the Cromwell poems from the folio volume 39 40

Legouis, ‘Andrew Marvell: Further Biographical Points’, 416–17. This exchange of course reached its height over Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d.

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may not have been alone in attentiveness to the poet’s reputation and to the problem of his past. Adjustments were the stuff of life in revolutionary times, but there are more unsettling incongruities in Marvell’s life. We can only speculate about what Marvell might have thought he was doing—what spirit might have driven this ‘unknowing hand’—when in Upon Appleton House he wrote out the history of successive valour in the Fairfax family in such a way as to allow the spectre of Oliver Cromwell to haunt the military achievements and political meaning of Thomas, 3rd Lord Fairfax, to think Cromwell even as he wrote Fairfax. And what of the depth of Marvell’s now celebrated commitment to religious toleration? Thanks to the work of Martin Dzelzainis, Nicholas von Maltzahn, Annabel Patterson, Nigel Smith, and John Spurr we know a good deal about the programmatic and the sympathetic elements of Marvell’s commitment to religious toleration.41 He seems repeatedly in his Restoration polemics to espouse a protestant practice of toleration and in the most memorable language: ‘the Body is in the power of the mind; so that corporal punishments do never reach the offender, but the innocent suffers for the guilty . . . the Mind is in the hand of God, and cannot correct those perswasions which upon the best of its natural capacity it hath collected’ (PW 1: 166–7). But in The Character of Holland, written in 1653 and with its crucial section surviving in the revised version of this verse published in 1665, Marvell derided as mercantile fraud just such tolerationist practice: Hence Amsterdam, Turk-Christian-Pagan-Jew, Staple of Sects and Mint of Schisme grew; That Bank of Conscience, where not one so strange Opinion but finds Credit, and Exchange. (ll. 71–4)

Rank opportunism is surely the charge to be levelled here. Does that charge find an echo in the fact that Marvell turns up in 1669 in the list of ‘such as may bee ingaged by the Duke of York and his friends’ drawn up by Sir Thomas Osborne, Yorkshireman and at that point client of the Duke of Buckingham?42 And does opportunism inflect Marvell’s odd contribution to the Duc de Colbert’s competition two decades later for Latin distichs to be set before the newly-built Louvre Palace? When Marvell turned towards that project he chose language that is hard to rationalize in terms of the political values that define The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government: ‘Sunt geminæ Jani Portæ, sunt Tecta Tonantis; | Nec

41 42

See footnote 5 in Introduction. Kelliher, Andrew Marvell, 84–5.

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deerit Numen dum Ludovicus adest’ (‘These are double gates of Janus, these are roofs of the Thunderer; | nor is divinity lacking while Louis is present’).43 The Marvell who in 1671–1672 offered this deification of Louis XIV was the Marvell who in August 1671, in a letter ‘To a Friend in Persia’, blasted the tyranny of the French King and lamented, ‘We truckle to France in all Things, to the Prejudice of our Alliance and Honour’.44 We might also note that in so inhabiting the point of view of the patron he set his entry off from other English exercises for the competition, and underscored his own remarkable talent for subordination.45 The fact that Marvell’s friend the Duke of Buckingham headed the delegation in France negotiating with Louis in 1670–1671 may have played a part in the submissions of these verses. Is there not as well something of a puzzle about Marvell’s idealization of a king rather closer to home? The letters to Hull contain ample language of compliment to Charles II, even to the ‘Blessed Memory’ of the ‘martyr King’.46 Such language was of course politically expedient, and in some circumstances and on some occasions no doubt required. But when Marvell used that particular phrase in his letter to Hull, it was to tell his constituents that he had just heard a 30 January sermon on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I. Even in the worst of times it was not incumbent upon him to deliver that news, or to express those views. His act of obeisance sits oddly with the notorious passage in The last Instructions where Marvell imagined, though he did not compass, the death of the king: Shake then the room, and all his Curtains tear, And with blue streaks infect the Taper clear: While, the pale Ghosts, his Eye does fixt admire Of Grandsire Harry, and of Charles his Sire. Harry sits down, and in his open side The grizly Wound reveals, of which he dy’d. And ghastly Charles, turning his Collar low, The purple thread about his Neck does show: Then, whisp’ring to his Son in Words unheard, Through the lock’d door both of them disappear’d. (ll. 915–24)

43 McQueen and Rockwell, Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell, 41. Nigel Smith suggests that the lines to Louis XIV are ironic but offers no evidence (Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven, 2010), 243). 44 P&L 2:325. 45 See Love, ‘Sir William Petty, the London Coffee Houses, and the Restoration “Leonine”’, 382. 46 P&L 2:211 (31 January 1667/8).

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That dangerous act of imagination in turn sits oddly with his outpourings of anxiety in 1677 when those supporting the parliamentary bill for the bishops’ education of the king’s children did, as he insisted, imagine the death of the king.47 Was it strategy or was it perhaps deep conviction that then prompted Marvell to deplore any attempt at structural change that might contain the effect of a Catholic succession?—‘That the King being in health, and the hearts of Princes in the almighty, he might turne them before they came to the Crowne, and [he was] against goeing about to prevent things att soe great a distance, as this seemed to bee’.48 The storm that was to break in the form of the Exclusion Crisis followed Marvell’s death, but we must wonder where he would have taken shelter had he lived. The stakes involved in properly understanding Marvell’s career are high. Of course, he has been attached, and with some reason, to what we think the ‘correct’ side—liberalism, parliamentary democracy, toleration. And he has gained iconic status from the seductive poise and intelligence that he displays not only in the privacy of the green world but in the midst of climacteric and catastrophe. Marvell’s is surely one of the most alluring models of a literary career; there is nothing here of the grind, or the sheer scale, that has weighed on the reputation of a Milton or a Dryden: everything with Marvell seems first-rate, and there is just enough of it. But what is at stake in an understanding of Marvell’s career is more significant than the grounds of appreciation; what is at stake is an understanding of ideology’s work in a life. Marvell constitutes what we believe to be a case study in the deep structures of early modern ideology. Modern scholars have attached Marvell to abstract, to disembodied, programmes. That there were early modern ideals of liberty and toleration, of moderation and balance, of royalism, loyalism, and republicanism, is undeniable. With any and all of them Marvell can be plausibly associated, and that is part of the problem: not for nothing did the History of Parliament Trust team conclude that Marvell’s record in the Commons was ‘worse than inconsistent’.49 Ideology is never, can never be, mere intellection; it is never inhabited by the mind alone. In the early modern world, with its dominant metaphor of the body politic, with its dominant social condition of the patriarchal family and its inescapable system of personal loyalties, attachments, and associations, political

47 Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 4: 321–5. 48 Kelliher, Andrew Marvell, 90. 49 Henning, The History of Parliament: The Commons 1660–1690, 3: 27.

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programmes were inevitably experienced in and through the body, doubtless with the mind but just as surely through the senses and the feelings, all the range of affect. This seems to be Andrew Marvell’s case, and surely not his case alone. Thinking through the body was not peculiar to Andrew Marvell, and nor was a relationship with the powerful figure of a father who was at once destructive and inspirational. Marvell’s writings as we have shown are shadowed by the dangers of fatherhood, but the idealization is also clear, most famously in the tribute that the son passed in his return to The Rehearsal Transpros’d: his father ‘liv’d with some measure of reputation, both for Piety and Learning’ (PW 1: 288–9). There were as well the two occasions in 1650 when he initialled his verse as his father’s son. But did the inspiration take a more direct form? We have lately learned of the heterodox religious interests of the Reverend Andrew Marvell. Most especially, we have been alerted to his possession of a manuscript copy of the Racovian Catechism, that sourcebook of Socinian heresy and challenge to the divinity of Christ.50 In that catechism, Athanasius and the Athanasian creed form a milestone in the history of theological discrimination and persecution. For Andrew Marvell, his father’s son, Athanasius was no less the starting point of persecution, but the poet and polemicist imagined this argument not only in the doctrinal terms of his father’s library, but in the most bodily and puerile condition.51 For all the rare intellection of his work, for all its precision and brilliance, Marvell lived in the body and in the world. Nowhere is this more daringly expressed than in Fleckno where the poet imagined his own body as the precise point of intersection for God the Father, God the Son, and human sociability: and I, that was Delightful, said there can no Body pass Except by penetration hither. (ll. 97–9)

‘No one comes to the Father, except through me’ (John 14: 6, AV). Do Jesus’ words haunt Marvell’s verse?52 Perhaps few would have been willing to venture this far towards blasphemy, but Marvell’s concern to invest hierarchical relations in

50 See Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, 22, 24. We night note that Marvell’s friend John Milton was associated in 1652 with the first English print publication of the Racovian Catechism; see, Sabrina Baron, in Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer, eds, ‘Licensing Readers, Licensing Authorities’, Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, 2002), 235. 51 See Chapter 2, pp. 68, 71. 52 Jesus’ words are given in the same form in the Geneva and the Douai-Rheims bibles.

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the body as well as the soul was not so unusual. The great post-War historian Sir Lewis Namier was traduced as a crude materialist for daring to suggest that the early modern political universe turned on ties of family, association, and interest, rather than on high-minded ideals or the terms of party. But what Namier recognized, even if in attenuated form, and what historians of partisanship and of political thought have turned us away from, was a world of attachment.53 The language of community and association is returning to the study of early modern politics, but political historians by and large still neglect its affective force, content to understand attachment as merely interest and convenience.54 Recently, Alan Bray has offered another model, and in some cases a compelling one, of male friendship in this period as an almost spiritualized version of earlier ideals and practices of brotherhood. But while this clearly fits a pairing like that of Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville, it does not seem to comprehend the more diffuse but still significant relationships of Marvell himself.55 Without recognizing the force of such attachment, what are we to make of the divided self modelled by Marvell’s friend James Harrington—attendant and devotee of Charles I in his sufferings, one indeed who ‘passionately loved his Majestie’, but as well a theorist of the republic who cast Oceana, paradoxically, into the form of romance?56 And how are we to put back together again all the disparate and contradictory elements of Marvell’s career: political thinker, habitual client, and a writer whose imagination comprehended both texts of political argumentation and scripts of desire?

53 Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1929). For the main challenge, see Herbert Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London, 1957). That world of affinity encompassed not only politics but also business, commerce, the burgeoning order of capitalism and putative modernity; see Richard Grassby, Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family, and Business in the English-Speaking World 1580–1740 (Cambridge, 2001). 54 The affective content of attachment has overwhelmingly been the concern of historians of gender and sexuality, though there is more than a little irony in the way that military history has so long honoured the role of bonding in morale. The beginnings of a new understanding of attachment are apparent in Laura Gowing, Michael Hunter, and Miri Rubin, eds, Love, Friendship, and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800 (Basingstoke, 2005); and Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2001). 55 Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, 2003). Bray’s model challenges the gloomier conclusion of Francis Bacon, who insisted on the impossibility of friendship among equals. Marvell surely understood Bacon’s claim, ‘that that is, is between Superior and inferior, whose fortunes may comprehend one another’ (Francis Bacon, Of Followers and Friends, in Essays (1696), 132). 56 Aubrey, Brief Lives, I, 288; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994), 246–9; and see above Chapter 2.

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Here we must return to the meaning of a life framed by and turned towards a series of attachments to others.57 It was surely through service— to his constituents, his associates, his employers, his tutees—that Marvell engaged with the social, and we must think therefore that for him service in some way helped constitute the self. Service also and of course instantiated abiding material realities: employment, office, household, with all their perquisites. Such material realities shaped the world and the ways in which it was perceived, structured as it was around personal monarchy, personal ties, hierarchy, and masculine authority. The force of these material realities is obvious, but the ghost in the machine is always idealization—a structure of feeling that encompasses not only instrumentality but admiration, affection, even desire, and always with Marvell, the shadows of subversion. Sometimes we are drawn to infer the meaning of attachment and affinity from the repeated associations with, gestures towards, and idealizations of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.58 Sometimes the circumstances of clientage and service can seem directly reflected in his writings. Upon Appleton House is a work of service, and in ways obvious and oblique. It is a work of ideals and idealizations, of Lord Fairfax preeminently, but as well of the patriarchal order and patrilineal descent, and of national destiny. While scholars are fully willing to acknowledge the play of fantasy in the forest and on the riverbank, and to assume a rather different kind of work in the address to Fairfax, in fact all the delineations and representations of the house, the estate, the occupants, and their genealogies, are no less works of fantasy than are the scenes in the forest, though it is easier to think of the former as expressions of ideology. Even at moments in Upon Appleton House when Marvell seems most self-absorbed, he is holding aloft a mirror to that patron. The biographical 57 It was no doubt Marvell’s continuing interest in the literary circles of his youth that led him in 1661 to adjust the text of Tom May’s Death. For in 1661 May’s remains were exhumed and expelled from Westminster Abbey, an event surely glanced at in Marvell’s verse (ll. 85–7). Further, in 1661, Davenant was no longer in impoverished and diseaseridden exile as he had been in 1650 when Tom May’s Death was composed; he was the successful survivor and by then, and as the poem notes, able to laugh (ll. 78–9). Marvell’s interest in keeping fresh and correct the personal details of his past may be inferred from the updating at some point of the Latin ‘Letter to Doctor Ingelo’ in order to incorporate Ingelo’s doctorate, earned in 1658 and long after the original composition of Marvell’s verse; see Edward Holberton, ‘The Textual Transmission of Marvell’s A Letter to Doctor Ingelo: The Longleat Manuscript’, English Manuscript Studies 12 (2005), 239. 58 We might wonder too at Marvell’s willingness to endorse the activities of Valentine Greatrakes, ‘the Stroker’. It may or may not be mere coincidence that Marvell’s testimonials were printed next to an account of a cure performed ‘in his Highness Prince Rupert’s Chamber’, but they certainly all appeared in a work dedicated to Robert Boyle, a figure long of considerable significance to Marvell. Here attachments of more than one kind, and in an odd form, shaped the work of idealization—for what else was the conviction of Greatrakes’s extraordinary powers?—and seem to have gone hand-in-hand; see A Brief Account of Mr. Valentine Greatrakes (1666), 84–5. For Marvell and Boyle, see especially Chronology, 11.

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and circumstantial details of the residents at Nun Appleton in 1651 are sufficiently well known to enable us to track with some precision the many and various ways in which Marvell’s poem functions within a relationship, and expresses and instantiates an ideology, of service. And when the world beyond Marvell’s verse seems more opaque, we may still discover him operating within that domain. The Picture of little T.C. coyly fuses the green world with lineage, estate, and authority, innocence with service. Coy engagement, as we have seen, may well be detected too in The Garden, Marvell’s most famous rendering of ecstatic absorption within a green world. The programme of celebration and commemoration that Marvell variously offered to his patrons extended deep into the pastoral order, the exigencies of service deep into the psyche. Can we then imagine a self as well as a career formed of and shaped by dependency, and the mutual implication therefore of psychology and ideology? In such a construction, idealization articulates both a public and a private order. Panegyric, of course and always, elevates, but it also opens the door to less idealizing moves. The poet-narrator’s deference to the Lord Protector in The First Anniversary is imagined within a frame of service, though as we have seen at some cost to this narrator himself; so too is Damon’s hapless stance as he presents his vulgar gifts to an uncaring and condescending Juliana. Indeed, to register Marvell’s lifelong participation in a culture of service—his role as tutor, his unofficial laureateship to Oliver Cromwell, his parliamentary career with its ostentatious servicing of his Hull constituents and his aristocratic patrons, his repeated caressing in satire and prose of the interests of that not altogether rewarding and reciprocating figure, the Duke of Buckingham—is to recognize how embedded was this poet and polemicist within the mechanisms and mentality of an order, and of an understanding of the world, that expressed an ideology, though one that had no necessary connection with the partisan.59 Conventional accounts of the growth of Marvell’s political personality have had him emerging from an early royalism into a mature republican or at least anti-Stuart intelligence, but such accounts have failed to acknowledge that the impulse to idealize is not developmental.60 It was there in his first published verses in the 1630s, and it is unmistakable in his evocation of a violated prince in An Horatian Ode. That impulse lived on, not just into the semi-official poetry of the 1650s but also into the

59 On Buckingham’s withholdings, see Bruce Yardley, ‘The Political Career of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, 1628–1687’, D.Phil, Oxford University, 1989, 284. 60 Such development is the burden of the still-cogent argument of Caroline Robbins, ‘A Critical Study of the Political Activities of Andrew Marvell’, 259–303.

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satires, squibs, and polemics of his later years. In the Restoration satires he excoriates the follies of the great; perhaps more surprising, in a recursive pattern he also finds a way to articulate innocence, heroism, elevation, indeed even kingship. And there can be no doubt of the soft idealizing of king and country, of unity in an organic whole, that Marvell tucks into his envoi to Charles II in The last Instructions: ‘(But Ceres Corn, and Flora is the Spring, | Bacchus is Wine, the Country is the King)’ (ll. 973–4). It was exactly such idealizing, more tightly and argumentatively focused on the king himself, that Marvell repeated as he recycled part of The last Instructions at the close of The Loyall Scot: ‘Charles our great soul this onely Understands: | Hee our Affection both and will Commands’ (ll. 62–3). It is easy to dismiss such passages as polite gesture, but he did not need to make it. Nor did he need to heighten the organic vision of the body politic with that affecting scene of contented bees under the care of the royal husbandman (ll. 266–73). Idealizing also characterizes Marvell’s eager embrace of Charles in The Rehearsal Transpros’d. That embrace could have been premised merely on the religious toleration that Charles then espoused, but for the fact that idealizing returns in his hopes (even in 1677 in The Growth of Popery) that the King might still prove to be the ‘Intelligent Ruler over a Rational People’, and in his fears of the implications of the bishops’ education bill. Idealizing too defined his parliamentary conduct in the attacks on Clarendon in 1667 and on Arlington in 1668. Before opposing the demand that Clarendon be sent summarily to the Tower, Marvell was heard to protest, ‘The Raising and Destroying of Favourits and Creatures is the sport of Kings, not to be medled with by us. Kings in the Choice of their Ministers move in a Sphear distinct from us.’61 He may well have been fearful and reluctant to contravene royal privilege; but he did not need to speak out, and in a language so redolent of the older idioms of patrimonial rule. And four months later, having denounced Secretary Arlington for the inadequacy of his intelligence and for his corruption, he may have acted simply out of prudence when the next day he was the first to move on the floor of the House that the king’s speech, with its request for supply, be taken into consideration. But again, such prudence participated in a very old culture of idealization of kingship and the person of the king.62 The king might have evil ministers, but the king could do no wrong.

61 Caroline Robbins gives this version of the speech, slightly expanded from Milward’s account; see Robbins, ‘A Note on a Hitherto Unprinted Speech by Andrew Marvell’, Modern Language Review 31: 4 (1936), 549–50. 62 Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 1: 70–1; Chronology, 99.

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We may wonder too if there is not a shadow of such idealizing in The last Instructions, even as Marvell takes down, even as he humiliates, the great—and the portrait of Castlemaine’s worn beauty is a superb example. It may seem harder to credit ‘the monkey Duchess’, the Duchess of Albemarle in the Third Advice to a Painter, as a figure of desire. And yet, as Marvell moralizes her prophecies and disclosures, he unmistakably discovers ideals of integrity, valour, indeed victimhood, and perhaps above all service—to Albemarle himself and the nation alike—‘Thou still must help them out when in the mire: | Gen’ral at land, at sea, at plague, at fire’.63 It was no less service which kept that heroic innocent, Archibald Douglas, on board the burning ship, and before Marvell’s gaze; and it was the violation of that ideal by the runaways and the rest that drew the poet’s anger and derision. Can we detect then a fundamental consistency in Marvell’s career? Repeatedly, what appear to be gestures of programmatic commitment turn out to be located within relationships of service to and patterns of idealization of the great man. Long ago, Margoliouth suggested that the Horatian Ode may have been a job presentation to the by-then disaffected Lord Fairfax, and though we may doubt whether such an event ever took place, we may well imagine that Marvell thought himself into such a circumstance. The contention can be expanded: Upon Appleton House was of course written in intimate conversation with Fairfax, his poems, his occasions; both the brief Latin verse for Queen Christina and the First Anniversary ventriloquized the Lord Protector, while A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector imagined its author as close to the hero as a poet could be. Indeed, Edward Holberton has argued that personal attachment to Cromwell ‘proved an enabling factor in his support for the Protectoral Regime’.64 And we may go on. Marvell’s anti-Dutch poem, The Character of Holland, has been plausibly cast as a pitch for a job with the belligerent Republic, while his scarcely enlightened opposition to the sale of Dunkirk in 1667 looks like a favour to his friend Sir Edward Harley, the last governor of the garrison.65 This is not on its face the record of a man of partisan commitment, conventionally defined, although the record might fit one who prized loyalty to patron, employer, and benefactor. Even Marvell’s brilliant and disturbing preoccupation with endangered 63 See Martin Dzelzainis, ‘“Presbyterian Sybil”: Truth-Telling and Gender in Andrew Marvell’s The Third Advice to a Painter’, in Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne, eds, Rhetoric, Women, and Politics in Early-Modern England (London, 2007), 111–28. The text is quoted from Nigel Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 355, ll. 432–3. 64 Holberton, ‘Commentary’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 November 2008, 14–15. 65 For the Dunkirk episode, see Robbins, ‘Political Activities of Andrew Marvell’, 67–8.

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youth seems contained—and perhaps normalized—within an order of service. As tutor by profession, his responsibility was the care and protection of the young; and the reference to his relationship with Prince Rupert, and Parker’s scorn for his tendency to spin out prognostications of national catastrophe from the quarrels of schoolboys and their tutors, indicate that contemporaries recognized his abiding concern, even his mission; they recognized too the capacity of that mission to shape partisan commitments.66 If service is understood in the large sense that we have been arguing, public principles and private convictions prove to be not merely coincident but mutually constitutive. Service, in all the early modern senses of that word, explains at once the psychology, the offices, and the ideals that animated Marvell . . . up to a point. For certainly, and as Marvell’s immediate followers and later scholars have urged, a strong advocacy of religious toleration runs through and binds together his later career. From the hopes in 1660 that the king’s Declaration of Breda would be ratified in statute, through the denunciation of that ‘Quintessence of arbitrary Malice’ of the Second Conventicle Act of 1670 (P&L 2: 314), to the rhetorical heights of The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) and the deeply felt enumeration of evil in The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677), Marvell flew the banner of toleration high in public view. There were undoubtedly those in the seventeenth century, and certainly since, who made of toleration an ideology in and of itself, let alone in combination with those other liberal values drawn from the parliament chamber at Westminster. And yet in Marvell’s case there is a puzzle. Of the coolness, the rationality, of his religious temperament there can be little doubt, but such coolness rarely leads to the polemical heights to which Marvell ascended. John Spurr has found Marvell’s religion a constantly receding prospect and one of his deepest scholars, Caroline Robbins, professed herself unable to locate the principles that framed and defined, or we might say impelled, Marvell’s advocacy of toleration;67 she concluded rather that the foundation of his high-mindedness was experiential. She urged Marvell’s political experience as that foundation, and discerned expediency at its centre. Political expediency and political experience no doubt explain the repeated tolerationist moves of Charles II, but we would argue that the experience that defined Marvell’s positions was of another kind. What cannot be comprehended in a conventional construction of

66

Samuel Parker, A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed, 515–25. Robbins, ‘Political Activities of Andrew Marvell’, 129. One well-informed tract at the end of Marvell’s life certainly purported to find his religion opaque: A Letter from Amsterdam to a Friend in England (1678), as quoted and dated in Chronology, 205. 67

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ideology is the violence of his denunciation of the bishops and their tyrannies. That violence may in fact have been the other side of Marvell’s paternal inheritance.68 Repeatedly, when Marvell found himself in the neighbourhood of episcopal power, his responses seem to overwhelm occasion, even perhaps argument. In his imaginings, a bishop is a murderer, a cannibal, a rank beast, a very Lucifer: ‘a Bishops self is an anathema’.69 Not coincidentally he imagines his enemy and doppelgänger, Samuel Parker, in postures of episcopalian necrophilia, ‘a dead Bishop his Mistress’ (PW, 1:56). We might explain this rhetorical abuse in part as the convention of antiepiscopal satire, where the piling-on of epithets and execrations is common enough. We cannot, however, but help observe the way in which anger and outrage at the bishops derail the rhythms and argumentation of The Growth of Popery. What lay behind the weirdly disproportionate and verbatim rehearsal of the entire text of the Bishops’ Education bill of 1677 was that recurrent pressure-point for Marvell: the vulnerability of the young. Marvell had made strange music out of this theme—these are the disturbing predations that he traced out in Young Love and The unfortunate Lover. He knew something of their temptations and feelings, and not only as victim. He surely understood the violence, and he no less imagined the violation in The Picture of little T.C. and in Dr. Witty. And it was this powerful confluence of understanding and empathy, of anger and fear, and even perhaps guilt, that drove his anti-episcopal politics. In a late letter to Sir Edward Harley, friend and political ally, in August 1677, Marvell anchored his outrage against the bishops’ misdeeds in Scotland in an otherwise inexplicable catalogue of offences against the child: The Field Conventicles in Scotland are very rife, more then ever. And the proceedings against them as violent. Even poore herd-boys are fined shillings and sixpences. They quarter Troopers all where they heare Conventicles haue bin kept. One Gentleman fined 500li. sterlin & imprisond because he will not take the Oath to answer all their questions & tell the Nonconf[ormist’s] name that baptized his child. At a Nonc[onformist] Ministers childs buriall at Glasgow there came from seuen miles about neare 3000 people to spight the Bishop of Argyle who is also Parson of Glasgow who would not suffer 68 By this we mean not just the violence and rigour that the Reverend Andrew Marvell preached in his 1636 sermon on magistracy (see above, p. 89) but also the irascibility in controversy to which scholars have recently drawn notice. See Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, 19; and Murray, World Enough and Time, 12–13. 69 Scaevola Scoto-Brittannicus translated by McQueen and Rockwell, Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell, 71. The poem concludes by asking ‘What is the difference between a bishop and an executioner? | The difference between a Lucifer and a gallows-rogue!’. The Loyall Scot offers a compendium of abuse of the bishops.

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the Bellman to publish the buriall after the usuall manner . . . Child to such an one Minister of the Gospell at Maidlan but sometimes Minister wherefore they imployd not the Bellman at all but a Woman seeing the Bishop peep out cryed aloud Ha Theefe thou wilt never haue so many at thy buriall except thou be hanged. (P&L 2: 355–6)

Ideology, in particular the ideology of service, may explain much of Marvell’s politics, and the structure and content of his adult occupations and preoccupations. Memories and imaginings of the vulnerabilities of childhood surely animated his high-minded commitment to religious toleration. We have drawn repeated attention to the conjoining in Marvell’s writings of vulnerability and violation, and we might note that he seems to have softened towards his foes or oppressors when they in their turn became victims—Clarendon and Castlemaine in 1667, and even a bishop (Croft of Hereford) in Mr. Smirke. Vulnerability and violation constituted a conjunction not only in Marvell’s texts but also in the life of Andrew Marvell. We might wonder about the extent to which Marvell, this man of feeling, can ever be characterized as a truly disinterested man of principle. Certainly, in his later years there were some notes of what seem like recalibration. Early in the Restoration he could reflect tranquilly on his own childhood, writing warmly to the mayor of Hull as he recalled the militia exercises of the town’s youth he had watched so many years before.70 Positive feelings of some kind for the circumstances of clerical families such as his own must have underwritten his willingness to chair a Commons’ committee for a bill to ensure adequate remuneration for poor clergy.71 And in what may have been his last work—Remarks Upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse, with its good-natured address to the ecclesiological concerns of a Calvinist and post-Calvinist clergy—he seems to have drifted away from the passions of political partisanship and back towards the kind of concerns that might once have animated his father’s friends. But we would not argue an easy displacement of one set of feelings by another, an easy resolution that would tie in an untroubled fashion beginnings and endings, a simple going home. After all, the corruscations of The Growth of Popery were nearly simultaneous with Remarks, and in the poem to Maniban, that troubled text, Marvell was, as late as 1676, still brooding over secrecies and pryings, over auspices and entrails. Whatever the broodings, there is no question that Marvell conducted an effectual public life. It seems equally clear that it was service and the 70

P&L 2: 2. Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 8 (1660–1667) (London, 1802), 193 and P&L 2: 5–6. 71

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ideology of service that both structured and allowed what fluency he achieved in that life, and even that enabled the transitions between the phases of his career and the genres of his writing. But it is also necessary to recognize the broodings and their meaning. We have argued the ineluctable complicity of ideology and psychology in the writings and the career of Andrew Marvell, but we must observe that such complicity was not quite the seamless affair towards which we gestured in the introduction to this book. For all Marvell’s success in a public world, and for all his management of movement between and among partisan commitments and literary forms, there remained gaps between experience and idealization, between the life lived and imagined—in its injuries and insufficiencies, its denials and disappointments—and the ideology that inhabited him. From these gaps Marvell fashioned both poems and violence.

Conclusion This book began in a study of the work that one poem, Upon Appleton House, could be shown to have been doing, perhaps for its dedicatee, certainly for its author, at Nun Appleton in the high summer of 1651. When we came to recognize that the themes and gestures we had encountered in Upon Appleton House were to be found in other of Marvell’s writings, published and (apparently) unpublished, whether in print or manuscript form, and across his career, we realized that we needed to broaden our understanding of the ways in which Marvell’s texts were at work. Themes and gestures manifestly purposive in 1651 surely in some way remained so in very different circumstances and on other occasions; they must be presumed to have been doing work of some kind whatever the published or circulated status of the texts that contained them. That uncertain status has long constituted a dilemma for scholars who seek to position Marvell’s words in their world, to understand something of what impelled them. In this book we have paused repeatedly over the question of what impelled Marvell’s words, but where those words were going, and what work they did will always demand attention. Perhaps the concept of ‘illocutionary force’ advanced by philosophers of language to explain the work of words in the world may help us to address such dilemmas. For as we came to reflect on the difficult problems that Marvell’s texts set us in their disparate states, illocutionary force offered an unusual purchase not only on public performance but also on private conditions.1 Surely Marvell’s polemical texts possess illocutionary force: the purposiveness and the rhetorical tilt of his assertions of the liberty of tender conscience are as obvious as those of his defence of political moderation or his anti-catholic idioms denigrating popery and absolutism. Those polemical words were soldiers in campaigns of print and persuasion. No less engaged with the world were the words that Marvell so assiduously delivered in letters on behalf of his patrons and clients in their great houses or back at Hull, and in occasional interventions on the floor of the House. 1 For ‘illocutionary force’, see J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words, second edition (Cambridge, MA, 1975).

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To the interrogation of both polemical words and serviceable words, the methods and approaches of philosophers of language are well suited. But many of Marvell’s words do not seem, in any obvious way, to have been delivered to the world. Indeed, Marvell seems to have withheld some of his texts: not only those that we have most prized, that is, the lyric poetry, but ostensibly serviceable work like A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector, or, for all we know, Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax. What might one say of the force of words withheld from public view? What kinds of performances are such acts of privacy? To imagine the purposes of language in poems which were not put into print, and perhaps not even circulated in manuscript, is to ask of illocution a different question from that entertained by theorists of language and scholars of politics.2 This is not to say that illocution has only public valency; but we must wonder what happens to illocutionary effect when a text has no published status, no public bearing, no readers, no auditors. Can we turn questions of illocutionary force inwards, can we ask after the internal bearing of words and forms? Such questions emerge in relation to Upon Appleton House, with its anti-Catholic history of the nunnery and its celebration of Fairfaxian destiny. Whether or not the poem was read by anyone other than Andrew Marvell, that such scenes had illocutionary force is obvious. But what of the more private and ecstatic and embarrassed moments in the poem? They may have been intended to ‘service’ the patron; just as surely, they worked on behalf of the pleasures and needs of their author. It is difficult under the rubric of illocutionary force exactly to equate private gratifications and public causes; but to see exchange or negotiation among the diverse and diverging programmes of Upon Appleton House is to become alert to a broad range of gestures––some readily visible, some less so. Indeed, identifying the negotiations within this poem helps us to recognize how determinative across Marvell’s entire career are gestures that point both within and without. A complex traffic of gratification and service animates lyrics preoccupied with inwardness, as well as the panegyric and satiric verse, the letters, and the pamphlets that mark the work Andrew Marvell did in Cromwellian and Restoration England. And we can go further. A recognition that words have performative force even when they have no external audience surely suggests something more–– that the echo of words within may be no less constitutive of ideology than is the material circumstance or the partisan allegiance of their maker. 2 On illocutionary force in early modern politics, see especially Quentin Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole’, in Neil McKendrick, ed., Historical Perspectives, (London, 1974), 113–21.

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And that is not all to remark about the inward turning of words. They form not only values but also narratives, scripts of a life in its deficiencies as well as its ineffabilities. There is indeed a narrative continuity that runs from Marvell’s first published words in Musarum Cantabrigiensium of 1637 (Ad Regem Carolum) to The Growth of Popery forty years later, and that continuity declares––in texts that fold together mortal threats to the child and the fall of empire––Marvell’s story of the self and its engagement with the world.3 Out of such imaginings he wrested aesthetic victory, and as well political value: for his contemporaries, and surely for some of ours. But the imagined life is a site of value of another kind, therapeutic or somatic. The life that Marvell imagined of and for himself enabled work, in the world and in his imagination––that is in his writings. And the imagined life is surely a part of what makes Marvell’s work so strange and compelling. Was the imagined life compelling for him in another sense? Our emphasis on yearning and vulnerability may seem to have deprived Andrew Marvell of imaginative freedom as well as to have diminished his standing as one of history’s incorruptibles.4 To the latter charge we plead guilty, for one conclusion of our study is that in this unusually documented case the internal origins of the words, responses, and arguments of an important historical actor were not always those which we associate with high principles, though that is scarcely to deny the political, indeed ethical, value of those words, responses, and arguments. To the former charge––an ethical one in a very different way––the answer must be even more modulated. While our attempt to recover and to disclose Marvell’s imagined life may not leave him quite the free-ranging intelligence that some so prize, it does open Marvell’s texts to new interrogation and deep reading. And for sure, and more importantly, the imagined life offers the prospect of an interpretable whole, interpretable for Andrew Marvell, interpretable for us. 3 The most salient change over those forty years was the replacement of the threatening Turks of the 1630s (a concern in Ad Regem Carolum) by the French threat of the 1670s. 4 The legend of Marvell’s poverty has long undergirded the Whig assertion of Marvell’s political independence and incorruptibility from his own time to ours. Samuel Parker jibed at Marvell’s dependence on his Parliamentary wages (Bishop Parker’s History of His Own Time, 1727, translated from the Latin by Thomas Newlin, 332–4), and Annabel Patterson claims that the legend of poverty has now been ‘confirmed’ by the legal cases in which creditors wrangled over the poet’s estate. Yet we should note that the house that Marvell took in Highgate in the early 1670s was rated at seven hearths for the Hearth Tax, scarcely an insubstantial structure, and of course Mary Marvell and Nathaniel Ponder had their own reasons to inflect and embellish their claims; see Patterson in PW, 1: xxx–xxxi. The matter of Marvell’s poverty remains uncertain, though Marvell’s possession of more than a few pounds in his pocket is suggested by his ability to pay thirty of them on election in 1674 to the largely sociable office of Elder Brother of Deptford Trinity House; Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven, 2010), 288.

Appendix: Chronology and the Lyric Career of Andrew Marvell For a long time, students of Marvell’s poetry were content to think that his pastorals emerged from the very countryside that is their subject, and Marvell left traces of a country life that encouraged scholars in that conviction—the most significant being, of course, the local materials that he wove into the poem he wrote ‘to my Lord Fairfax’. That poem, as we know, was both imagined and written on the estate at Nun Appleton in east Yorkshire; and into that moment and circumstance in Marvell’s life it was easy to fold other pastorals—the Mower poems, and surely The Garden with its suggestive echoes of Upon Appleton House. Perhaps there was a naivety to the positivist assumption that coordinates could be drawn of place, time, and the literary imagination. But in the last few years a rather dramatic corrective has been administered, leaving no few bystanders surprised to learn that Marvell wrote neither The Garden nor The Mower Against Gardens nor presumably a number of other pastorals among the hayricks of east Yorkshire in the early 1650s but somewhere in or near the Rhenish Wine Yard off King Street, Westminster, in the late 1660s, or in the early 1670s perhaps at the house known as Marvell’s in Highgate, or on one or other of Lord Wharton’s estates north of London.1 It is the discovery of traces of Marvell’s pastoral footsteps in London print products of 1667 and 1668 that seems to have freed us from the old and simple biographical fantasy about the life of pastoral poetry. And perhaps that discovery offers a differently materialized life of poetry, one in which pastorals as easily emerge from urban or patrician sociability as from the inspiration of scenes and solitudes. As it turns out, those who have attempted to re-date Marvell’s pastoral lyrics to the Restoration and hence to Marvell’s residence in London and his busy service in Parliament have not been interested in such sociabilities or indeed in the locale of poetry altogether. What is striking about the re-dating of Marvell’s lyric poetry is how little, argumentatively, has been done with the removal of pastoral lyrics from Yorkshire to London or its environs. The effort to re-date Marvell’s poetry seems to have had two objects in view: first, surely, to free Mar-

1 On Marvell’s address at Richard Hill’s in the Rhenish Wine Yard, Westminster, in 1670, see Chronology, 96; on the Highgate cottage, see Kelliher, Andrew Marvell, Poet and Politician, 1621–78: An Exhibition to Commemorate the Tercentenary of His Death (London, 1978), 87–8; Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven, 2010), 239; and Chronology, 5. For Marvell and Lord Wharton’s gardens, see Chronology, 102 and von Maltzahn, ‘Marvell’s Restoration Garden’, The Andrew Marvell Society Newsletter 1:1 (2009), .

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vell’s pastoral from its material tethers and thereby to reclaim the timeless and disembodied sovereignty of the lyric imagination; but as well, by relocating some of the lyrics to the 1660s or 1670s, to assert the simultaneity of the polemic and lyric career and hence imagination. We shall return to the larger question of poetry’s location in time and place, and to the ways in which we might imagine the conjunction of time and place with the body of the poet. But for the moment we need to follow the footsteps of those who have moved Marvell’s pastorals from the banks of the Wharfe to somewhere in the Thames Valley. In 1983 Allan Pritchard announced that Andrew Marvell’s The Garden, a poem long considered safely coincident with the poet’s sojourn in Yorkshire in the early 1650s, could not have been written before 1668.2 Prior to this intervention, the chronology of Marvell’s lyrics had of course rested on the easy assumption that his poetry reflected the sites and occasions of his life. And it was easy to see in Marvell’s brilliant sequence of dialogues, pastorals, and complaints the opportunities as well as the pressures of landscape: the capacity of the land to shelter allegory, the capacity of allegory to diffuse labour, and nature’s reminders of the seasons and cycles of mortality. Though the exact chronological markers of Marvell’s writing life are few, a rather firm notion of the shape of that life early emerged: with youth, lyric longing; with maturity, civic engagements that spanned the republican and parliamentary careers—a simple and appealing model that has had some staying power, from the first arrangement of Marvell’s poems in the 1681 folio to the many editions and anthologies that have appeared almost to our own time. But because of apparent borrowings from two volumes of poems, one appearing in 1667 and the other in 1668, Marvell could not, Allan Pritchard claimed, have written The Garden prior to the print publication of those works. By 2006 Paul Hammond declared this hypothesis ‘convincingly established’;3 and a new orthodoxy took shape. It is registered in both editions of Nigel Smith’s lavishly annotated Longman edition, The Poems of Andrew Marvell (2003, 2007), in his biography, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (2010), in Nicholas von Maltzahn’s carefully detailed Chronology (2005), and by von Maltzahn again in 2009 when he affirms that The Garden has been ‘persuasively dated to the Restoration’. And this judgment has been subscribed to by a number of other scholars, among them Andrew Shifflett (1998), John Creaser (1999), Andrew Barnaby (2000), Annabel Patterson (2000, 2001), Hero Chalmers (2004), Harold Love (2004), Blair Worden (2007), and Paul Davis (2011).4 Pritchard’s

2 Allan Pritchard, ‘Marvell’s “The Garden”: A Restoration Poem?’ Studies in English Literature 23:3 (1983), 371–88; especially 387–8. 3 Paul Hammond, ‘The Date of Marvell’s “The Mower against Gardens”’, Notes and Queries 53 (2006), 178–81. 4 Andrew Shifflet, Stoicism, Politics, and Literature in the Age of Milton (Cambridge, 1998), 53–4; John Creaser, ‘Marvell and Existential Liberty’, in Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis, eds, Marvell and Liberty (London, 1999), 170, note 14; Andrew Barnaby, ‘The Politics of Garden Spaces’, Studies in Philology 97:3 (2000), 360; Annabel Patterson, ‘Lady State’s First Two Sittings: Marvell’s Satiric Canon’, Studies in English Literature 40:3 (2000), 16; and Annabel Patterson, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Revolution’, in N.H. Keeble, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2001),

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assertion was remarkable enough; its growing currency surely makes its own claim on our attention. Pritchard and those who have followed his re-dating challenge us first of all to think about what constitutes evidence for the date of a composition; the re-dating also raises questions about the relationship of print to manuscript; and the whole encounter, we shall argue, demands that we think about the ways in which the material life haunts the imagination. Pritchard’s work of re-dating rests primarily on the contention that the discovery of verbal and thematic parallels amidst coincident rhyme words can be used to date or re-date compositions. We do not dispute this premise. Our own dating of Upon Appleton House to the high summer of 1651 began with just such a discovery, that the crocodile remaining among the flooded ‘Meads’ of Nun Appleton crawled out of Robert Waring’s 1651 commendation of William Cartwright’s Comedies Tragi-Comedies, With other Poems, and that Marvell’s ‘bellowing Cattle’ similarly emerged from Waring’s verse. There is no question that sources and analogues have long and properly fascinated editors and literary scholars: to see the transmutation of sources is to understand something of the alchemy of the literary imagination. So when Pritchard found coincident figures of speech and rhyme among the writings of Abraham Cowley, Katherine Philips, and Andrew Marvell, what was he to make of his discovery? In formulating an answer, Pritchard began with a significant though unstated assumption about intertextual relations: that print was the signal mode of publication in the mid seventeenth century, that print is if not synonymous with then proximate to composition, and that it is therefore print that makes texts available for allusion, adaptation, and borrowing. As a result of Marvell’s encounters with collections of work by Philips and Cowley that were printed and published in 1667 and 1668, Pritchard argued, Marvell made a number of choices about words and figures of speech. Pritchard further reasoned that textual relations flowed from Philips and Cowley to Marvell since, he urged, Marvell’s perfectionism as well as his privacy precluded the reverse. It is easy enough to trace the footsteps of borrowing and commonplacing through the known and finite materials of scripture or the classics, but when we enter the indeterminately expansible world of early modern textuality it is more difficult to establish just what an author was reading and when, although the careful work of a number of scholars has made us aware of the range, depth, and importance of Marvell’s encounters with others and their texts.5 But when the

113; Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689 (Oxford, 2004), 123; Harold Love, English Clandestine Satire, 1660–1702 (Oxford, 2004), 104; Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, 2007), 56; Paul Davis, ‘Marvell and the Literary Past’, in Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 2011), 43. The list could doubtless be extended. 5 See the scholarship of Marvell’s editors and critics referred to in Chapter 1, note 2. In addition, mention should be made of the careful contributions on Marvell’s sources by Ian Parker, all in Notes and Queries: ‘Marvell and the “more Inhabitable zone”’, 51:1 (2004), 34–40; ‘Marvell and the “Tygress fell”’, 52:3 (2005), 318–24; ‘Marvell’s Uses of Sylvester’s Du Bartas, II, iv. 4’, 53:3 (2006), 172–8; ‘Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” and “The City”: An Alternative Interpretation’, 54:1 (2007), 46–54; ‘Marvell’s “A Dialogue between the Soul

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dating of a text is at issue, and echoes, adaptations, and parallels are to be used to fix the moment of composition, the protocols of evidence become acutely important. It is one thing to witness Marvell’s remarkable variations on Ovidian tales; it is quite another to date the composition of The Garden by declaring a ‘parallel’ a source. For that is exactly what Allan Pritchard and those who have accepted his re-dating propose. Pritchard begins by noticing a set of ‘parallels’—sentiments, ideas, phrases, and rhyme words—that occur in The Garden and in poems from the two collected volumes, Katherine Philips’ Poems (1667) and Abraham Cowley’s Works (1668). Others had observed such parallels but discarded the notion that borrowing or adaptation had taken place because Marvell’s pastoral verse was not known to be in circulation and Philips and Cowley reached print so much later than the date conventionally assumed for the composition of The Garden. Pritchard solved the problem by re-dating The Garden to 1668. He did not seriously consider that the verse of either Philips or Cowley could have circulated prior to 1668; and because of the assumption that ‘Marvell appears to have allowed very little manuscript circulation of his work’, he dismissed the possibility that either Philips or Cowley could have read The Garden in manuscript.6 On just such grounds, and on the basis as well of affinities to The Garden, now re-dated, Paul Hammond proceeded when he enlarged the canon of Marvell’s post-Restoration pastorals by relocating The Mower against Gardens from the 1650s to the later 1660s. There are a number of questionable assumptions here, the most obvious being the insistent privileging of print as mode of publication. Though neither Pritchard nor Hammond acknowledges such privileging, it is in fact the foundation of their whole train of argument. When Pritchard declares that the poems of Philips and of Cowley were ‘published’ in 1667–1668, he seems to ignore the extent and significance of manuscript circulation and scribal publication throughout the period.7 What we know about the distinct and yet coincident practices of manuscript and print is that a vast amount of material circulated by choice in manuscript, and that manuscript culture was especially vibrant in literary coteries. Whatever the practices of Andrew Marvell, to which we shall return, Abraham Cowley and Katherine Philips were certainly members of literary coteries and circulated their verse, sometimes years before print publication. Pritchard himself acknowledges that Philips was a literary celebrity before her poems emerged in print; indeed, according to the ODNB the manuscript collections of her works comprise ‘one of the best documented centers of MS circulation in the 17th century’.8 Peter Beal concludes that the evidence for manuscript circulation of Philips’ and Body”: Probable Sources and Implications’, 55:3 (2008), 291–9; ‘Marvell’s “Crystall Mirrour,” 56:2 (2009), 219–26; and ‘Marvell, Nathaniel Whiting, and Cowley’, 57:1 (2010), 59–66. 6 Pritchard, ‘Marvell’s “The Garden”’, 371, note 2. 7 The coincidence of early modern manuscript and print circulation through to the late seventeenth century was the subject of Harold Love’s ground-breaking work in Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993). 8 Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, ed. P.J. Croft et al., 4 volumes in 11 parts (London, 1980—), vol. 2, part 1 (1987), 235–6.

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verse dates to the later 1650s and 1660s, but the fact that her verse tribute is the very first one printed in the 1651 Cartwright collection—a collection of considerable literary, celebratory, and cultural elevation and one that we know Marvell read—suggests that her poems, as yet of course unprinted, had already gained for her a reputation despite her youth (b. 1632). And while Beal notes that it is to the 1660s rather than the 1650s that the evidence of manuscript circulation points in the case of Abraham Cowley (a poet characterized by Harold Love as an exemplar of scribal authorship and publication), Cowley’s closeness to the Duke of Buckingham in the 1640s and 1650s, and Marvell’s own connections to Buckingham, must at least raise the possibility that some of the verse from what was to become Cowley’s 1668 volume was circulating in manuscript in select quarters before the Restoration.9 Given the accidents of survival, and the sorry fate of so many single manuscript copies—what happened, for example, to Philips’ youthful verse?—we cannot assume that the lack of evidence of circulation at a certain point indicates that there was no circulation at that point; the absence of evidence for early manuscript circulation is not the same as evidence of the absence of such circulation. All we know is that Cowley and Philips were given to coterie circulation of their manuscripts, and that Marvell had connections with both, through Buckingham for Cowley and their shared time at Trinity, Cambridge, and through the Oxenbridges for Philips. Were he to have read Philips and Cowley, it is hard to see why he would have had to await the appearance of their verse in print; indeed, Susan Clarke and Peter Beal both draw attention to the early circulation of Philips’ verse in manuscript.10 Do other categories of ‘evidence’ for re-dating have any more substance? We may indeed allow Marvell’s familiarity with the works of either or both Philips and Cowley at some point in his career, but was he influenced by them? In Pritchard’s account, ‘the likeliest starting point’ for the opening of Marvell’s The Garden: How vainly men themselves amaze To win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes; And their uncessant Labours see Crown’d from some single Herb or Tree (ll. 1–4)

was Katherine Philips’ celebration of the laurel as tree rather than emblem: No other Wealth will I aspire, But that of Nature to admire; Nor envy on a Laurel will bestow Whil’st I have any in my Garden grow.11

‘Influence’ seems a questionable judgement here, and not just because the verbal echo is generalized and vague. Why, in years when men were abandoning public 9 Love, private communication; Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 240; and Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars, 39–42. 10 Susan A. Clarke, ‘Marvell in Royalist Gardens’, The Andrew Marvell Society Newsletter 2:2 (2010), . 11 Pritchard, ‘Marvell’s “The Garden”’, 374.

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life in droves and when interest in gardening and arboriculture was waxing, in years too when poets drew on a long and rich pastoral tradition, should we assume that Marvell needed a single literary source to arrive at the not very remarkable proposition that men might retire from civic business to garden contemplation? Katherine Philips was scarcely alone in such a figuration; retirement from civic care had after all been the choice of Thomas Lord Fairfax in 1650. And if we want sources for Marvell’s arboriculture we might turn to Joseph Beaumont’s Psyche (1648) with its repeated counterpointing of ‘Palm and Bays’. But there is in fact a surer source for The Garden, and it is one that Marvell drew on extensively for Upon Appleton House. Ian Parker’s recent demonstration of Marvell’s borrowings from Nathaniel Whiting’s Pleasant History of Albino and Bellama (1637) for various sections of Upon Appleton House, indeed for the whole framework of the nunnery episode and much of its detail, and his demonstration that Marvell drew on that work too for Hortus as well as for The Garden, Upon the Death of Lord Hastings, The Gallery, Young Love, and A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure, raises questions about contiguity of composition in a group of lyrics all of which are indebted to the same source and some of which are precisely dateable—the elegy for Lord Hastings and of course Upon Appleton House.12 Or are we to assume instead that Marvell, having written of Lord Hastings in 1649 and Lord Fairfax in 1651, put away Whiting’s Pleasant History for close to twenty years before deciding to adapt more particulars from that book? But to return to the matter of borrowed language: need we assume that the coincidence of Marvell’s language of ‘herbs and flowers’ with Cowley’s repeated use of that phrase constitutes the ‘cumulative’ evidence of influence that Pritchard urges? As Pritchard observes, that phrase was a ‘favorite’ of Marvell and Cowley alike;13 it was a favourite phrase for others as well—the phrase ‘herbs and flowers’ registers hundreds of ‘hits’ in the EEBO full-text database for the years 1640– 1655.14 Who knows but that Marvell, and Cowley too, remembered the phrase from Herrick’s To the King, To Cure the Evil, perhaps circulated in manuscript and certainly printed in Hesperides (1648), and a poem from which, as Nigel Smith and others note, Marvell likely derived the striking gesture that closes The First Anniversary:15 12 See Parker, ‘Marvell, Nathaniel Whiting, and Cowley’. To Parker’s list of Marvell’s adaptations from Whiting we add To His Coy Mistress; see Chapter 3. The popularity of Whiting’s romance is attested by its three editions of 1637–1639; its appeal to the wits of the literary circle with which Marvell seems to have been associated in the late 1640s may be partly explained by the book’s flourishing of what was soon to become the royalist mantra of ‘Halcyon dayes’; see, A Pleasant Historie, 1. On Marvell’s literary associations in the 1640s, see Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, chapter 1. 13 Pritchard, ‘Marvell’s “The Garden”’, 379. 14 The EEBO data base was consulted on 1 February 2010. For a careful case study of rhyme words and lexical incidence as a basis for arguments about borrowings and influence, see Parker, ‘Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” and “The City”: An Alternative Interpretation’. 15 Nigel Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, revised edition (Harlow, UK, 2007), 298n.; see Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate (Oxford, 2008),

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Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane To finde Bethesda, and an angel there, Stirring the waters, I am come; and here, At last, I find (after my much to doe) The tree, Bethesda and the angel too: And all in Your Blest Hand, which has the powers Of all those suppling-healing herbs and flowers.16

No question, particular phrases can suggest indebtedness and adaptation—provided that the language does not belong to the common stock of idioms. But in his case for re-dating The Mower against Gardens, Paul Hammond asserts that the combination of subject matter and rhyme words—in this case, the motif of grafting and the rhyming of ‘tree’ and ‘see’ or ‘hand’ and ‘stand’—is sufficient to indicate Marvell’s borrowings from Abraham Cowley.17 But how exclusive was such a theme and how exclusive were such rhyme schemes in the early modern period? These seem the commonest of pairings, and grafting was a subject of wide contemporary interest. Marvell and Cowley shared a fund of literary and linguistic resources. Ian Parker shows that Cowley as well as Marvell drew on Whiting’s Albino and Bellama, and Marvell and Cowley also shared, with many writers from the middle decades of the seventeenth century, a fascination with rural retreat, estate matters, and the culture of gardens and propagation. Indeed, as a number of scholars have demonstrated, in the late 1640s Marvell belonged to literary circles and scribal communities engaged in literary competition and adaptation.18 That striking phrase, ‘between the bark and tree’, which Hammond imagines Marvell to have borrowed from the polite pages of Cowley’s essays in the 1668 Works, was, James Howell assures us, both proverbial and proverbially sexualized in the 1650s.19 Should we need sources for Marvell’s grammar of arboriculture, we might note that Sir Hugh Plat’s handbook, The Garden of Eden, which had long circulated in manuscript, was at last printed in 1652 and graced with the index entry, ‘Grafting between the bark and tree’.20 By the early 1650s political upheaval, retirement, and exile had reconstituted pastoralism as a rich discursive field, and by September 1651, when Marvell had completed Upon Appleton House, he had come to own its themes, gestures, and language. Though Hammond introduces a contextual challenge when he argues that it was the abusive political climate of the late 1660s that rationalized the conjoining of sexuality and tyranny in The Mower against Gardens, the Mercurius Politicus editori-

103–4 and 118 on Marvell’s strategic adaptation of royalist topoi from Herrick and Carew; and Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, 1978), 78, on Marvell’s adaptation of Herrick as a critique of royalist idolatry. 16 Robert Herrick, Hesperides (London, 1648), 66. 17 Hammond, ‘The Date of Marvell’s “The Mower Against Gardens”’, 178–9. 18 See Susan A. Clarke, ‘Marvell in Royalist Gardens’; James Loxley, ‘The Social Modes of Marvell’s Poetry’, in Hirst and Zwicker, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, 8–25; and Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, chapter 1. 19 James Howell, Paroimiographia (1659), 3; Hammond, ‘The Date of Marvell’s “The Mower Against Gardens”’, 179. 20 Sir Hugh Plat, The Garden of Eden (1652), 22, 139; for evidence of the prior circulation of this work, see 7–9.

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als of 1650 against ‘the young Tarquin’, Charles Stuart, had invited contemplation of that juncture long before.21 The early 1650s formed a remarkably productive moment both in a literary career and a political culture. But to return to the widely shared conviction on which revisionist claims depend—that Marvell’s lyric verse did not circulate—the evidence seems at best uncertain. We are told that the traffic must flow from Philips and Cowley to Marvell, and yet at the time when Marvell was in the employ and household of Philips’ aunt and uncle (1653–1654) he was circulating some of his verse.22 He had already published in print commendatory verse to Lovelace and commemorative verse for Lord Hastings (respectively 1648 and 1649), and Nicholas McDowell suggests that both John Hall and Marchamont Nedham read An Horatian Ode in or about 1650; Milton read it soon thereafter, echoing the language of the ode in his sonnet on Cromwell of 1652.23 In early 1654 Marvell sent a Latin verse letter to Nathaniel Ingelo, chaplain to Bulstrode Whitelocke’s embassy to Sweden; Whitelocke presented the verse to Queen Christina, and it survives in more than one manuscript copy. Marvell also supplied two epigrams in praise of Cromwell to accompany a portrait of Cromwell for Queen Christina, and on a Cromwell portrait by Robert Walker, no doubt meant for presentation—as Edward Holberton has shown—a poem Marvell wrote in praise of Christina is inscribed.24 From these same months, February through May 1654, there is evidence that Marvell’s Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda was in circulation, turning up, for example, in Thomas Washbourne’s A Pastoral Dialogue (1654); and Rhodri Lewis raises the possibility that some members of the Hartlib circle may have seen the Horatian Ode in the mid 1650s.25 Nicholas von Maltzahn, like Nicholas McDowell, inclines to the conclusion that Marvell’s one-time colleague John Dryden had read

21 The stage was set with the first editorial after the battle of Dunbar in September 1650: Mercurius Politicus, 5–12 September 1650 (British Library, E612[14]). For non-editorial use, see for example Mercurius Politicus, 12–19 September 1650 (British Library, E613[1]), 230. The licentiousness of the young Tarquin was not merely an interest of Marvell’s associates among the journalists, John Hall and Marchamont Nedham; see for example Sir Percy Herbert, Certain Conceptions (1650), 29. And while Nicholas von Maltzahn has urged a reference to Charles II’s Royal Oak in Hortus—claiming for the Restoration this Latin parallel poem to The Garden—Susan A. Clarke has demonstrated the commonplace associations of oaks and crowns in the reign of Charles I and indeed before; see Clarke, ‘Marvell in Royalist Gardens’. 22 Chronology, 40–1; and see the note in P&L 1: 248, on the appearance of one version of Marvell’s A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda in the autograph of William Lawes, who died in September 1645. 23 McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 10–11, and passim 221–54. As several critics and editors have noted, the opening of Milton’s sonnet echoes The Horatian Ode: ‘Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud | Not of war only but detractions rude, | . . . thy glorious way hast ploughed’ echoes the figure of Cromwell ‘Breaking the Clouds where it was nurst, | Did thorough his own Side | His fiery way divide.’ 24 Edward Holberton, Commentary, ‘Bellipotens virgo’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 November (2008), 14–15. 25 Rhodri Lewis, ‘An Unpublished Letter from Andrew Marvell to William Petty’, Notes and Queries 53:2 (2006), 181–3. Although Lewis is uncertain if members of Hartlib’s circle had seen a manuscript copy of Marvell’s ode, he notes the congruence between their aims and the sentiments of Marvell’s poem.

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An Horatian Ode by the early 1660s, of course in manuscript.26 And evidence has recently come to light that Upon Appleton House, a poem that was so long supposed not to have circulated in manuscript, was read and partially adapted by Lady Hester Pulter, likely in the 1650s but for sure before the poem’s print publication in 1681.27 Could Katherine Philips have seen, indeed been influenced by, some of Marvell’s poems when he was in the Oxenbridge household from 1653 to 1655? So too in the case of Abraham Cowley: there is evidence that some of Marvell’s verse was circulating in the 1660s, the very time Marvell himself is alleged to have been borrowing from Cowley’s printed works. We could as well hypothesize that literary traffic went the other way, from Marvell’s manuscript to Cowley’s print. The underlying premise for re-dating by evidence of print publication simply does not hold. Yet echoes, parallels, and adaptations between and among Marvell, Philips, and Cowley undeniably remain. And there may be more than Pritchard and Hammond have offered in evidence. The extent of Marvell’s interest in Cowley’s verse in a number of redactions has long been known, but what are we to make of the surprising coincidence of language, affect, and argument in a poem that Cowley published in 1667 and verse that all scholars agree Marvell imagined and wrote at the end of the 1640s in the shadow of the trial and execution of the King? The poems in question are Cowley’s ode To the Royal Society, prefacing Sprat’s History of that institution, and Marvell’s The unfortunate Lover. There has been no suggestion of the circulation of Marvell’s poem prior to print publication in 1681, but in Cowley’s ode of 1667, with its critique of the tyranny of received opinion, Cowley figures true ‘Philosophy’—that hopeful heir nursed and fed, amused and speciously increased—in terms strikingly similar to those Marvell used for ‘the orphan of the Hurricane’ in The unfortunate Lover. Indeed Cowley shows himself shockingly attuned to the drift, the whole argument, of Marvell’s poem, and moves knowingly from amusement at the plight of an ‘Heir’ toyed with and malnourished by ‘the Guardians and the Tutors’ to derision for ‘Authority’ expressed in terms of masculine and reproductive incapacity. Cowley surely adapted classical sources for that ‘useless Sith of Wood’, the ‘inutile lignum’ of Horace, Virgil, and Martial, whose useless fragments of wood were conventionally the detritus of shipwreck.28 Could it have been that very figuration in the classical texts which drew Cowley to Marvell’s poem about shipwreck and the denial of masculine authority? He then transformed the Latin ‘lignum’ into a Marvellian scythe, and figured authority as ‘that Monstrous God’, standing in the midst of an orchard and claiming the whole:

26

Chronology, 68. See Hester Pulter, ‘The Larke’ (manuscript verse) for a scene that includes the mowing of birds and seems to echo Upon Appleton House; printed in Jill Millman and Gillian Wright, eds, Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, (Manchester 2005), 251 and notes. 28 See Guillermo Galan Vioque, Martial Book 7: A Commentary (Leiden, 2002), 154. It may be mere coincidence, but it is striking that the Reverend Andrew Marvell, like Andrew Marvell’s friend Abraham Cowley, and indeed many others, saw this useless piece of wood as a penis; see Hull City Library, ‘MS Sermons of Reverend Andrew Marvell’, f. 143. 27

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with a useless Sith of Wood, And something else not worth a name, (Both vast for shew, yet neither fit Or to Defend, or to Beget; Ridiculous and senceless Terrors!) made Children and superstitious Men afraid.29

It is probably a mere piece of happenstance, but the Reverend Andrew Marvell had preached on the very figure, lignum inutile, as the ‘Priapus’ that Cowley conjured to frighten the children in the orchard.30 By the logic of privileging print publication over manuscript circulation we would need now to re-date The unfortunate Lover to 1667 at the earliest, however quixotic this might seem. Indeed, every time a new parallel turns up in print to a manuscript of whose circulation we have no evidence, we would be impelled to a similar re-dating. Under such a regimen the whole of Marvell’s lyric poetry might be relocated to Restoration London. On the other hand, it is just as possible that at some stage or stages of his career Marvell circulated, of course selectively, privately, in coterie fashion, manuscript copies of his verse, and that Cowley—Marvell’s contemporary at Trinity College, Cambridge, and like him an admirer of the Duke of Buckingham and in 1667 of Archibald Douglas too—read not just The unfortunate Lover but also the pastoral verse.31 After all, as Nicholas McDowell has shown, Cowley had read An Horatian Ode by 1661 and if Marvell was circulating An Horatian Ode and To his Coy Mistress as well as The unfortunate Lover and Upon Appleton House, why not The Garden too?32 There are several issues at stake in our assessment of the dating and re-dating of some of Marvell’s verse. One is methodological—a matter of properly posed questions. The habits of commonplacing, the exemplary character of literary education, as well as the tributary nature of literary association meant that borrowing and adapting were common practices in early modern literary culture. Echoes and allusions abound, and in the nature of things the true original of any usage is often impossible to establish. Since there are so many shared sources, scholars need to go beyond textual ‘parallels’ if they are convincingly to establish borrowing and thereby to date or re-date a text; they also need to ask how their claims cohere with other kinds of evidence. Let us take as cases in point, on the one hand, our own observation of some years ago that Marvell had borrowed from a poem that Robert Waring contributed to the Cartwright volume and our use of that borrowing to date Upon Appleton House, and on the other hand Pritchard’s argument that The Garden ‘bears marks of the influence of Katherine Philips’s Poems and Abraham Cowley’s Works, respectively 1667 and 1668’. In the case of Upon Appleton House, the dating conclusion that we drew is consonant with the

29 Abraham Cowley, ‘Ode to the Royal Society’, in Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667), sig. B-Bv. 30 Hull City Library, ‘MS Sermons of Reverend Andrew Marvell’, f. 143. 31 On Cowley’s admiration for Douglas, see Temple, The Works of Sir William Temple (London, 1720), 2:40. 32 McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 256–8.

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abundant familial, local, and political evidence in the text and beyond the text, and such dating manifestly has consequences for the ways in which we understand the function of the poem in relation to the crisis of retirement and engagement that pressed in upon both Marvell and his patron in the summer of 1651. But the question remains for The Garden, The Mower against Gardens, and other lyrics, which some scholars have been tempted to remove to the Restoration: what other evidence is consonant with such re-dating? Little has been offered, and we should observe that ‘the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes’ were much more clearly in view in England as victory emblems in the early 1650s than they would have been between 1667 and 1672. And how does the mood of those lyrics cohere with the anxious and angry, even apocalyptic, tones of Marvell’s work of the period in question—The last Instructions, the letter to Sir John Trott, The Loyall Scot, and the translation of the second chorus from Seneca’s tragedy Thyestes? There is a second methodological point to be made, namely that the pursuit of sources, parallels, and analogues should not be conducted wholly within the narrow range of what are considered canonical literary texts: the rich contemporary discourse of grafting, for example, cannot be set aside for a (late) printed source, no matter how canonical the source might seem. Literary authority does not in itself trump the quality of the evidence. The kind of unspoken privileging that deference to literary authority can entail is displayed in J.B. Leishman’s dating of A Dialogue Between The Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure to 1667 or beyond on the strength of what is surely the faintest resemblance of Marvell’s language to that of Paradise Lost, published in 1667.33 Marvell’s ‘Pleasure’ argues of the Soul (ll. 51–4): All this fair, and soft, and sweet, Which scatteringly doth shine, Shall within one Beauty meet, And she be only thine.

And here is ‘Pleasure’s’ supposed source in Book 9 of Paradise Lost in Satan’s words to Eve: Thence forth to Speculations high or deep I turned my thoughts, and with capacious mind Considered all things visible in heaven, Or earth, or middle, all things fair and good, But all that fair and good in thy divine Semblance, and in thy beauty’s heavenly way United I beheld. (Book 9, ll. 602–8)

But the much more powerful alliance of Marvell’s stanza to lines in a 1647 poem by Cowley are often overlooked for the supposed debt to Milton:

33 J.B. Leishman The Art of Marvell’s Poetry (London, 1966), 31–2, note 1; see as well Smith, ‘The Boomerang Theology of Andrew Marvell’, Renaissance and Reformation 25:4 (2001), 141.

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If all things that in Nature are Either soft, or sweet, or fair, Be not in Thee so Epitomized That nought material’s not comprised, May I as worthless seem to thee As all but though appear to me.34

Perhaps Milton himself was adapting Cowley’s language. Similarly, the close textual echoes of verse in Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans of 1650 that Paul Hammond concedes in The Mower against Gardens do not dissipate in face of the parallels to the language of Philips and Cowley that he invokes; nor do what some might deem striking similarities in language and image in The Garden and Upon Appleton House evaporate with Pritchard’s judgement that these are ‘more ordinary’.35 We need to be clearer about what constitutes evidence as opposed to coincidence; we also need to ponder what the uses of evidence might be. Hammond insists that ‘there appears to be no actual evidence to counter Pritchard’s argument’,36 and while we recognize that there is no hard evidence for dating the pastorals either to the early 1650s or to the Restoration, the balance of probabilities must tilt towards the former. Pritchard’s claims have been widely endorsed, but that endorsement has not changed their argumentative status: they remain speculation. That there is verbal consonance among the texts of Marvell, Cowley, and Philips is beyond question; but that there was traffic among these three and that it flowed in a certain direction has to remain, for an era with abundant common sources and a flourishing manuscript culture, unproven. What is striking about the present academic conjuncture is the way a number of distinguished scholars have recognized the weakness of Pritchard’s argument, at times offered evidence countering that argument, and yet accepted his re-dating. Andrew Shifflett understands that the early 1650s provide a more likely context for The Garden than the late 1660s and that if Marvell drew on Philips and Cowley he could well have done so before the print publication of their verse; nevertheless, he laments that Pritchard’s claim ‘still has not gained the currency it deserves’. Nigel Smith, who is particularly sensitive to the force of hermeticism in the early 1650s and its importance for Marvell’s The Garden, and notes too that ‘the more striking elements of the vocabulary’ of the poem ‘are to be found in devotional literature of the 1640s and 1650s rather than the 1660s’, still assigns the poem—and with some signs of an honourable reluctance—to 1668 ‘until better evidence to the contrary is produced’.37 Nicholas von Maltzahn in his admirable Chronology gives

34 Cowley, The Soul, ll. 17–22, The Collected Works of Abraham Cowley, vol. 2 Poems (1656), ed. Thomas O. Calhoun, Laurence Heyworth, and J. Robert King (Newark, 1993), 39; Margoliouth had long ago noted parallels with Cowley. 35 Hammond, ‘The Date of Marvell’s “The Mower Against Gardens”’, 180; Pritchard, ‘Marvell’s “The Garden”: A Restoration Poem?’, 376, note 12. For a very helpful discussion of the relation of Vaughan’s poem ‘Corruption’ to Marvell’s verse, see Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 132, and the works there cited. 36 Hammond, ‘The Date of Marvell’s “The Mower Against Gardens”’, 178. 37 Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 152.

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evidence of the circulation of various pieces of Marvell’s lyric verse in manuscript at points in his career, including To His Coy Mistress which, von Maltzahn observes ‘surfaces in a tranche of poems from the mid- to late-1660s’, though he too seems to accept Pritchard’s argument which hinges on a claim about the noncirculation of Marvell’s verse.38 And Hammond bases his argument for the late dating of The Mower Against Gardens on a confident denial of the circulation of that poem in manuscript, though he himself had not long before discovered new evidence for manuscript circulation of other of Marvell’s lyrics.39 In the nature of things, evidence for the manuscript circulation of early modern verse is at best erratic, and it seems hazardous to base an argument about dating on an absence of such evidence. And yet the allure of re-dating the pastorals remains; perhaps the shadow of postmodernity with its easy reshufflings of memory and its sense of fleeting identity encourages us to see poems as fungible artefacts, floating free of body and circumstance, as easily dated to one decade as the next, to one locale as to another. Those who advocate re-dating the pastorals are in fact quite conventional in their critical orientation and their scholarly assumptions and practices, unlikely recruits to the cause of postmodernity. Their enthusiasm stems rather from a generalized unease over the division of the lyric from the polemical career and, we suspect, from a lingering new-critical conviction that poetry ought not to be tied too closely to a poet’s time and place, perhaps even to the assumption that the lyric impulse does not age over time.40 Intent on conjecturing the proximity of lyric imagination and polemic zeal, those who advocate re-dating proffer a convenient if arbitrary solution in the relocation of the pastorals to the London suburbs of the late 1660s or the gardens of Lord Wharton’s estate in the early 1670s. But perhaps there are other and less mechanical ways to discover the cohabitation of lyric and polemic energies. What we have tried to show in this book is that the energies that shaped Marvell’s lyrics and drove his polemics perforce cohabited since they constituted the very self of poet and polemicist; their expression, however, differed over the course of the career and the life. We need therefore to understand what is at stake in the matter of dating. It is not the positivist dream of facticity, nor simply the recovery, in this instance, of pastoral’s sentient origins; nor is it only a dialectic of texts and the discursive spaces they might have occupied. Getting right the chronology of an emergent career allows us to recover the

38

Chronology, 102. Hammond, ‘Marvell’s Coy Mistresses,’ in Maureen Bell et al., eds, Re-constructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission (Aldershot, UK, 2001), 22–33; ‘The Date of Marvell’s “The Mower”’, 178. 40 Pritchard, ‘Marvell’s “The Garden”: A Restoration Poem?’, 371; Love, English Clandestine Satire, 104. See too Worden’s peculiar disclaimer of scholarly agency in the matter of the dating: ‘It was supposed that his lyric and pastoral verse, so little of which indicates the time of its composition, was written before his entry into politics in the late 1650s. Now that he seems to have been found writing pastoral poetry—indeed writing “The Garden”—in the reign of Charles II, the circular reasoning behind the assumption dissolves’ (Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England, 56). 39

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writing of an embodied self—the practice of a writing life imagined, no less than lived, in a place, in a body, and in time. In the past two decades and more, literary scholars have become increasingly aware of, increasingly attuned to, the ways in which bodies inhabit texts. This has been especially true for those interested in the relations of sexuality and gender to literary identity—not only feminist critics and queer theorists but also those who have examined the representation of the body in pain, the social body stigmatized, the body ageing, the body delinquent and deliquescent. If we mean to engage such arguments, we need to know something of when and of where a writer’s texts come from, and where a writer’s desire would have them dwell. These issues can only ever be addressed in partial ways, and as we go back in time it often becomes more difficult to recover the data that allows such address; but that makes no less compelling William Empson’s conviction that to make ‘human sense’ of the paradoxes in a poem like The Garden is to understand the lyric situated within and emerging from quite specific circumstances—in this instance we believe, circumstances shared by the tutor and poet Andrew Marvell and by his employer, the retired army commander Thomas Lord Fairfax. Frank Kermode once worried that recovering a date of composition for The Garden would narrow our sense of the poem’s imaginative work.41 In fact, the more deeply and exactly we situate Marvell’s poems in time and place, internally and externally, the more mysterious and luminous they become as acts of imagination. 41 Frank Kermode, ‘The Argument of Marvell’s “Garden”’, Essays in Criticism, 2:1 (1952), 226–7. See William Empson’s response to Kermode’s strictures: ‘Mr Kermode also, I think, expresses an over-excitable loathing for “biography” and the obvious assumption that Marvell was writing in Fairfax’s garden—as a young tutor to a child, rather uneasily secure against the Civil War, feeling he ought to pull his weight but not really liking either side or believing their fight was necessary. To imagine this personal situation helps you to make human sense of the paradoxes of this poem which don’t pretend to be dogmas; and it still would even if they were copied directly from the French, which Mr Kermode does not prove’ (The Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford, 2006), 205, to F.W. Bateson, January 1953).

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Wolfe, Don M., et al., eds, The Complete Works of John Milton, 8 vols (New Haven, 1953–1980). Wootton, David, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society 1649–1776 (Stanford, 1994). Worden, Blair, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge, 1974). —— Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, 2007). —— ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Council’, in Patrick Little, ed., The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007), 82–104. Wormald, B.H.G., Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion 1640–1660 (Chicago, revised edition, 1976). Wrightson, Keith, Earthly Necessities (New Haven, 2000). Wrigley, Eric A. and Schofield, Roger S., Population History of England and Wales: A Reconstruction (London, 1989). Yardley, Bruce, ‘The Political Career of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, 1628–1687’, D.Phil. Thesis (Oxford University, 1989). Yoshinaka, Takashi, Marvell’s Ambivalence: Religion and the Politics of Imagination in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2011). Zwicker, Steven N., ‘Virgins and Whores: The Politics of Sexual Misconduct in the 1660s’, in Condren and Cousins, eds, The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, 85–110.; —— Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1698 (Ithaca and London, 1993). —— ‘Sites of Instruction: Andrew Marvell and the Tropes of Restoration Portraiture’, in Julia Marciari Alexander and Catharine MacLeod, eds, Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II (New Haven, 2007), 123–38.

Index Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, An 68, 90, 105, 120, 124, 125, 127, 134, 148, 155, 157–9, 163 Albemarle, Anne, Duchess of 156 Albemarle, George Monck, Duke of 36, 116, 131–2, 156 Avedon, Richard 87 n 25 Aversion 57, 94–6, 144 Barkan, Leonard 1 Belasyse, John, Lord 131 Bermudas 34, 138, 144 Biography 1, 5, 7–8, 54, 68, 74, 78, 85, 87, 121, 128, 177 n 41 Birth 3, 78, 79, 85, 96, 98, 144–5; see also Caesarean section Bishops 4, 67–9, 80, 90, 93, 123, 125, 150, 155, 158 Body natural 43, 65–6, 73, 74 Body politic 6, 43, 45, 65–6, 73, 74, 117, 150, 155 Boehme, Jacob 24, 25 n 54 Buggery 44, 56 Butler, Samuel 43, 106 n 12 Caesarean section 76, 78, 79, 96, 98, 144–6 Calumny 5, 91, 103 Cannibalism 48, 84, 98 Carlisle, Charles Howard, Earl of 134 Cartwright, William 14, 15, 166, 168, 173 Castlemaine, Barbara Villiers, Countess of 54, 119, 156, 159 Castration 43–4, 97 Censorship 105 Character of Holland, The 43 n 6, 97, 147, 148, 156 Charles I 27, 86, 101, 149, 152 Charles II 9, 65, 67, 69, 71, 147, 149, 155, 157, 176 Childhood 68–9, 71, 109, 159 Christina, Queen of Sweden 138, 156, 171 Chronology 165, 176 Church lands 28 Circulation see Manuscript Circumcision 41–3, 146 n 36

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of 23 n 47, 36, 101, 130 n 8, 134, 155, 159 Clark, Stuart 3, 45 Clarke, Susan A. 168 Cleveland, John 80 Clorinda and Damon 48, 94, 96, 109, 137 Claypole, Elizabeth see Cromwell, Elizabeth Clergy 80–1, 85 n 22, 86, 89–90, 131, 159 Clientage 30, 35, 36, 136, 158 Coercion 89; see also Conscience Coffee house 43, 105–6, 126 Coke, Sir Edward 51, 51 n 23 Conscience 22, 26, 27, 30, 34, 38, 45, 46, 47, 66, 67, 69, 89, 130, 148, 161 Consumption 97, 111, 112 Cormorants 80–2, 86, 97, 98; see also Prey, birds of Cornewall, Theophilia 72 Coronet, The 109 Corruption 23, 42, 67, 68, 114, 117–120, 132–3, 140, 155 Country-house poem 11, 15, 138 Coupling(s) 3, 24, 45, 50, 52, 77, 85, 96, 110, 112, 144; see also Non-coition Court 6, 54, 67, 115–17, 120, 125, 140, 141, 147 Covenant 14 n 12, 19, 42, 65, 147 Cowley, Abraham 118–19, 133 n 17, 166–73, 175 Cromwell, Elizabeth (mother of Oliver) 145 Cromwell, Elizabeth Claypole (daughter of Oliver) 72 Cromwell, Frances 133 Cromwell, Mary 101, 133 Cromwell, Oliver, Lord Protector 3, 12 n 6, 13, 14, 20, 33, 35–6, 58–65, 69, 72, 82, 101, 131, 133, 140–2, 145–8, 154, 156, 191 Cromwell, Richard, Lord Protector 64, 130 Cruelty 3, 79–80, 90 Culpepper, Nicholas 14 Damon the Mower 13 n 10, 55, 98, 113, 136, 137 Daphnis and Chloe 48, 75 n 1, 94, 96, 97, 98, 109, 137 Davis, Paul 5, 60 n 4, 165 Definition of Love, The 94

192

Index

Dell, William 24 Dependency 7, 36, 38, 45, 49, 56, 63, 73, 126, 154 Descent 3, 10, 11, 16, 28, 31, 41, 47, 50, 51, 63, 79, 100, 153 Desire 3, 39, 44, 48, 49–50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 61, 66, 81, 83, 91–8, 101, 102, 114, 129, 144, 152, 156, 177 Destiny 13, 22, 27–28, 31, 38–39, 45, 47, 50, 51, 58, 61, 82, 83, 108, 142, 143, 144, 153, 162 Dialectic 6, 45, 50, 61, 76, 95, 99, 100, 103, 106, 137, 176 Dialogue 8, 23, 95, 137, 165 Dialogue Between, The Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure, A 109, 137, 169, 174 Dialogue between the Soul and Body, A 98, 109, 137 Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda, A 137, 171 n 22 Dials 32–3 Discipline 17, 24, 29, 38, 68, 89, 93 Disclosure 38, 45, 49, 65, 74, 104, 106, 112, 114, 117, 122, 156 Discomfiture, discomfort 3, 50, 59, 92, 117, 140, 147 Displacement 39 n 87, 52, 54, 55 n 29, 58, 60, 87, 92, 109, 121, 159 Dissolution 10, 66, 97, 102, 103, 109, 111, 120 Dodsworth, Roger 28–9, 39 n 86 Douglas, Archibald 36 n 80, 50, 54, 66, 67, 72, 82, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 115, 116, 117, 118 n 34, 120, 143, 156, 173 Dryden, John 133, 150, 171 Dugdale, Sir William 28 Dunbar, battle of 12 n 6, 14, 59, 171 n 21 Dutton, William 9, 133, 142 n 32 Dynasty 45–6 Dzelzainis, Martin 5, 148 Eagleton, Terry 20 Echo 23, 93, 97 n 47, 112, 113, 145, 148, 162, 164, 167, 172, 173; see also Narcissism Elevation 3, 36, 58, 68, 78, 136, 155, 168; see also Idealization Embarrassment 37, 38, 58, 63, 162 Emblems 66, 72, 75, 76, 78, 110, 112, 126, 143, 144, 168, 174 Empson, William 15 n 19, 39 n 87, 55, 126 n 51, 177 n 41 Endangerment 3, 58, 69, 76, 92 n 40, 123 Engagement 18–19, 49, 50, 57, 70, 107, 110, 141, 142, 163, 174

Entail 28 n 63, 31, 39, 46 Entry into the world 21, 141, 142, 144 Epistemology 104 Equipoise 57, 58, 59, 76, 99 Erbery, William 25 Erotics 3, 24, 48–9, 54–5, 81, 91, 95, 98, 101, 115 Estrangement 10, 87, 146 Eunuch 43 n 6, 112, 113 Evelyn, John 21 Exodus 42 Exposure 6, 8, 38, 48, 57, 63, 68, 92, 104–6, 112, 114, 117, 119, 121, 122, 124, 126 Eyes and Tears 121 Fair Singer, The 97, 109 Fairfax, Lady Anne 26–7, 28–30, 53, 142 Fairfax, Mary 12, 16, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 82, 93, 143 Fairfax, Thomas, 1st Lord 33 n 74 Fairfax, Thomas, 3rd Lord 2, 4, 7, 9–41, 58–9, 61, 63, 82, 139, 142, 148, 153, 156, 169, 177 Fairfax, Sir William 21, 26, 29, 58 Fatherhood 41, 42, 64, 71, 151 First Anniversary, The 3, 33–5, 57, 63–5, 108, 133, 140, 141, 142, 145, 154, 156, 169 Fleckno 55, 151 Flecknoe, Richard 56 n 33, 92 n 40, 140 Flora 50, 91, 155 Forest retreat 22, 25–6, 38 France, French 23, 53, 125, 149, 163 n 3 Futurity 47, 50, 96, 99, 101, 113, 143–4; see also Immortality Gallery, The 48, 54, 75, 94, 98, 109, 112, 144, 169 Garden, The 12, 31–3, 48, 52, 99–100, 120, 138, 141, 154, 164–8, 173, 174, 175, 177 Gardens 55, 98, 110, 170, 176 Gazetteer 105, 106 Gender 11, 28, 29, 38, 42, 55, 142, 152 n 54, 177 Genesis 48, 145 Genre 6, 8, 44 n 10, 68, 70, 94, 119, 136, 137, 139, 160 Gowing, Laura 2–3 Grafting 52, 83, 98, 170, 174 Great man 35, 156; see also Hero Greatrakes, Valentine 135, 153 n 58 Green world 11, 31, 38, 52, 150, 154 Guardians 80, 90, 172

Index Habermas, Jurgen 104, 105, 106 Hammond, Paul 39 n 87, 57 n 35, 165, 167, 170, 172, 175, 176 Harley, Sir Edward 135, 156, 158 Harrington, James 72, 135, 152 Hastings, Henry, Lord 91, 143 n 33, 169, 171 Henrietta Maria, Queen Mother 54 Heraldry 85, 136 Hermes Trismegistus, see Mercurius Trismegistus Hermeticism 23, 24, 275 Hero 3, 12, 16, 25, 26, 54, 55, 58, 59, 69, 83, 114, 116, 136, 140, 142, 145, 156 Herrick, Robert 169 Heterosexuality 38, 39, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52, 56, 57, 94, 95, 96, 97, 139, 144 Hobbes, Thomas 21, 29 n 68 Holberton, Edward 5, 131, 156, 171 Homoeroticism 55 n 31, 97 n 47 Horace 36, 93 n 43, 101, 172 Horatian Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland, An 12 n 6, 35, 57–61, 82, 99, 100, 109, 137, 141–2, 145, 146, 154, 156, 171–73 Household 2, 7, 9, 10, 11, 20, 24, 28, 32, 34, 36 n 82, 37, 50, 63, 91, 121, 137, 153, 171, 172 Hutchinson, John 36 n 81 Hutchinson, Lucy 29 Hull 7, 9, 20, 34, 52, 59, 64 n 47, 89, 104, 107, 128, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136, 154, 161 Hyde, Anne, see York, Duchess of Idealization 1, 2, 7, 45, 52, 63–5, 67, 69–71, 93–4, 125, 149, 151, 153, 155, 160 Ideology 4, 7, 34, 58, 70, 72, 130, 150, 153–4, 157, 159–60, 162 Image 15, 18, 31, 38, 43, 54, 74, 94, 95, 111, 112, 115, 122 Imagined life 1, 7–8, 10, 75, 86, 100, 163 Immortality 47, 96, 99; see also Futurity Incandescence 50, 91, 93; see also Vitrification Incapacity 43 n 5, 57, 75, 94, 96–8, 101, 114, 172 Incompleteness 4, 6, 40, 45, 57, 102, 113, 116, 125–6, 144 Independency 29, 86 n 23 Information 104–5, 124, 125; see also Gazetteer Ingelo, Nathaniel 54, 153 n 57, 171 Inheritance 22, 28, 29, 50, 158

193

Innocence 3, 51, 53, 68, 94, 122, 154–5 Inscribenda Luparæ 118, 148 Intelligence 104, 105, 123, 154; see also Secrets Interiority 11, 103–4 Intolerance 68, 90–2 Inversion 2, 4, 22, 28, 38, 45, 47, 55, 57, 110 Irony 55, 56, 58, 70, 76, 99 Jonson, Ben 60, 139 Keeble, N. H. 5, 129 n 3 Kelliher, Hilton 9 n 1, 103 n 1, 118 n 33, 137 n 24, 164 n 1 Kermode, Frank 177 King, see Charles I, Charles II Kirk, Scottish 29 Langton, Prioress Anna 28–9 Last Instructions to a Painter, The 4, 6, 36 n 80, 50, 54, 65–7, 82, 93, 104, 113–18, 140, 149, 155, 174 Law 51 Legouis, Pierre 9 n 2, 12, 25 n 55, 64, 129, 143 n 33 Leishman, J. B. 174 Lesbianism 39, 47, 48, 50, 145 Letter to Dr Ingelo, A 54, 131, 153 n 57 Letter to Sir John Trott 41–3, 65–6, 70, 100, 117, 118, 174 Levellers 17 n 24, 18 Liberty 62, 80, 93, 125–26, 150 Lilburne, John 17 Lilly, William 14 Liminality 49, 106, 142 Logic 2, 4, 57, 76, 97, 173 Loss 38, 41, 48, 57, 63–5, 71, 91, 101, 119, 121, 126, 143–4 Love, Christopher 21, 29 Loxley, James 5, 9 n 2 Loyalism 44 n 10, 150 Loyall Scot, The 67, 68, 80 n 14, 89, 93, 120, 125, 155, 158 n 69, 174 McDowell, Nicholas 5, 165, 171, 173 Maecenas 36 Maltzahn, Nicholas von 5, 114, 123, 129, 134, 148, 165, 171, 175, 176 Maniban, Joseph 107–9, 114, 126, 127, 159, Mann, Thomas 8 Manuscripts, circulation of 10, 32 n 71, 80 n 14, 116, 118 n 35, 124, 128, 161–2, 167–73, 175–6 Marginality 39, 109–10

194

Index

Margoliouth, H. M. 30 n 69, 49 n 20, 51 n 22, 53 n 28, 129, 156 Marvell, Andrew Aggression 122 Borrowings 9 n 2, 46 n 15, 49 n 20, 76, 77 n 8, 165, 169, 170 Career 2, 4–11, 34–5, 51, 57, 66–8, 70, 74, 91, 100, 103–8, 119, 123, 130, 150, 152, 154, 156, 160–62, 164–177 Concealment, habits of 8, 45, 105, 107 Diplomacy 6, 13 n 8, 107, 131, 147 Dueling 122, 137; see also Aggression Friendship 55 n 31, 134–35, 152 Functionary 129 n 6 Isolate 45, 136–8, 145 Marriage 126 Parliamentary record 35, 44, 104–5, 107, 116, 123, 124 n 49, 129–3, 132–6, 141, 150, 154–5, 165 Polemicist 68, 69, 89, 91, 92, 106, 114, 119, 121–22, 126, 141, 151, 154, 176 Portraits of 114, 128 Poverty 163 n 4 Religion 5, 90, 157 Self-presentation 11, 22, 124 Sexual slanders 43–4, 68, 70, 97 Spirituality 32, 34 Spy 105 Marvell, Andrew, the Reverend 72, 79 n 11, 89, 146 n 36, 151, 158 n 68, 172 n 28, 173 Marvell, Mary 126 n 51, 128, 163 n 4 Masculinity 3, 42, 45, 47, 57, 72–3, 98, 153, 172 Match, The 48, 96, 109 Maturation 68, 127, 142, 154 May, Thomas 44 n 8, 59–61, 153 n 57 Mayerne, Elizabeth 91 Mayerne, Theodore 72 Medway 41, 54, 104 Melodrama 76, 79, 84–5, 93 Menarche, menstruation 16, 50–1, 54 Mercurius Politicus 170–1 Mercurius Trismegistus 23 Metaphysics 23, 31, 34 Millennialism 17 Milton, John 1, 13 n 8, 35, 44, 122, 125, 130, 133, 135, 147, 150, 171, 174 Miscellaneous Poems (1681) 42, 75 n 1, 86, 100, 128, 146–7, 165 Misogyny 52–4, 88, 97 Mr. Smirke 67–7, 91, 97 n 48, 120–21, 124, 159 Mitchell, James 83 n 19

Mock-heroics 26, 46 Monck, George, see Albemarle, Duke of Monmouth, James Scott, Duke of 131 Moses 41–2, 45, 72, 100 Mourning 54, 87–8, 109, 144 Mower against Gardens, The 43 n 61, 52, 138, 164, 167, 169–70, 174, 176 ‘Mower’ poems 12, 48, 109, 114, 137–8 Mower’s Song, The 109, 136 Mower to the Glo-Worms, The 77, 109 Musarum Cantabrigiensum 163 Musicks Empire 52, 138 Mutilation, see Wounds Namier, Sir Lewis 152 Narcissism 48, 54, 92, 113, 115–6, 120 Nature 13, 16, 79–80, 92, 144, 165; see also Green world Nedham, Marchamont 171 Neo-Platonism 23–5, 38 News, newsbooks, newsletters 14, 59, 104, 106–8, 116, 122, 128, 131, 149 Nicaea, Council of 68 Night-walking 53 Niobe 143–4 Noah 62 Non-coition 83, 94–6, 144; see also Couplings Norbrook, David 5, 87 n 25 Nun Appleton 10, 12, 15, 18, 20 n 35, 31, 33, 39, 46, 52, 72, 78, 138, 141, 154, 164–5 Nunnery 26, 29, 39, 46–7, 50, 53, 110–11, 139, 169 Nuns 16, 46–7, 98, 111, 139–40, 145 Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun, The 4, 48, 52, 55, 82, 87, 94, 109, 138, 143–4 Objectification 87, 91 Occasion 2, 4, 8, 11, 15, 21–2, 34, 40, 46, 65, 101, 117, 119 Oceana 72 n 60, 152 Office, officialdom 10, 153; see also Marvell, Andrew, functionary On a Drop of Dew 98, 109, 144 On Mr. Milton’s Paradise lost 69–70 Origins 3, 8, 61, 68, 74–5, 78–9, 84, 93, 97–8, 136–8, 144–6 Orphan 3, 45, 72, 76, 79, 81–2, 84–5, 172 Osborne, Sir Thomas 148 Overton, Richard 80 n 13 Ovid 54, 138, 167 Owen, John 86n Oxenbridge, John 9, 34, 168, 171

Index Paedophilia 49 n 19, 98 Painting 113–5; see also Image Panegyric 3, 11, 16, 30, 33, 35, 45, 49, 68, 74, 93 n 43, 133, 139, 147, 154, 162 Paradise Lost 174 Parents 16, 27, 31, 38, 46, 50, 72, 93 n 43, 99, 101, 143 Parker, Ian 26, 28 n 65, 49 n 20, 169–70 Parker, Samuel 43, 70, 85, 90, 92–3, 107, 120, 124, 132, 157–8 Parliament-man 6–7, 69, 90, 93, 104–7, 123–4, 128–33, 134–6, 150, 154–5, 164 Partisanship 2, 67–8, 123, 148–50, 152, 154–7, 160, 162 Pastoral 5, 11, 33, 36, 54, 66, 116, 129, 137–8, 154, 164–5, 170, 176 Paternity, see Fatherhood Pathos 63, 99, 143 Patriarchy 2–3, 27, 38–9, 42–3, 45, 50, 59, 63–4, 66–8, 70–2, 94, 100, 140, 143, 150, 153 Patrilineality 3, 41, 50, 63, 99–100, 153 Patronage 2, 11, 30, 33–9, 59, 136, 142–3, 148, 153, 161–2 Patterson, Annabel 5, 148, 165 Pedagogy 25–6, 91, 101 Pederasty 96–7 Penshurst 139 Petrarch, Petrarchanism 56, 78, 81, 84, 96 Philips, Katherine 166, 169, 171, 173, 175 Philosophy 11, 18, 31, 34, 172 Picture of little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers, The 48–51, 74, 91, 93, 109–10, 138, 143, 154, 158 Plat, Sir Hugh 170 Platonist 74, 96, 120–1, 129; see also Neo-platonist Play 10, 18, 22, 26, 48, 55, 79, 90 n 36, 91, 92n, 95, 136, 146, 153 Pleasant History of Albino and Bellama 25 n 55, 26, 28, 39, 46, 111, 169–70 Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector, A 63–5, 108–9, 156, 162 Polemics 43, 66, 68–9, 74, 92–3, 103, 105, 119, 121–2, 125–6, 128, 148, 155, 161, 165, 176 Popery 68–9, 110, 120, 125, 133, 161 Popple, Edmund 135 Popple, William 135, 141 Positivism 100, 164, 176

195

Prepubescence 50, 94 Presbyterians 19–21, 27–8 Press 105, 146; see also Print Prey, birds of 3, 79–81, 96, 98; see also Cormorants Print 70, 121, 124–5, 128, 161–2, 164–70, 173–5; see also Press Pritchard, Allan 32 n 71, 165–76 Privacy, private matter 6, 10, 106–8, 111, 117, 124, 150, 162, 166 Progenitiveness 38–9, 41, 50, 59, 63, 66, 73, 116, 140, 142, 144 Prophecy 14, 21, 26, 31, 46 Protector, Lord, see Cromwell, Oliver Providence, providentialism 21–2, 31, 34, 107 Psychology 4, 6, 70, 79, 85, 87, 94, 98, 100, 102, 129–30, 154, 157, 160 Public knowledge 103–6, 116–7, 119, 123, 125 Public world 6, 87, 103–4, 107, 124, 126, 129–30, 141–2, 160 Publication 10, 70, 100, 103, 127, 146, 161, 166–73, 176 Pulter, Lady Hester 172 Punishment 83, 89, 148 Queen Mother, see Henrietta Maria Racovian Catechism 151 Rail 17, 50, 72 Ranters 24–5 Raymond, Joad 5 Readership 30, 37, 111, 162 Recumbency 47, 111 Reflexivity 42 Regicide 65, 147,149–50 Rehearsal, The 70–1 Rehearsal Transpros’d, The 6, 67–71, 89–90, 92, 120, 122, 124, 134, 151, 157 Rehearsal Transpros’d: The Second Part, The 106, 122, 147 Remarks Upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse 159 Reproductivity 38–9, 47, 52, 77, 96, 98, 113, 117, 120–1, 139–40, 142–3, 146, 172 Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed 92 Republic 11, 17, 19, 25, 60, 142, 156 Republicanism 7, 44, 71, 74, 147, 150, 154 Retirement 2, 12, 20, 22, 26, 34, 119, 122, 169–70, 174 Retreat 7, 12, 18–19, 21–3, 30, 47, 170 Revolution 58–9, 77, 87, 92–3, 141–2

196

Index

Richmond, Charles Stuart, Duke of 131–2 Rigour 68, 89, 158 n 68 Ripon 18 River-bank 37–8, 46–7, 91, 109, 111 Robbins, Caroline 157 Roman Catholicism 29, 45–6, 139–40 Ros 109, 144 Royalism 7, 21, 61, 71, 86, 147, 150, 154 Royal Society 172 Rump Parliament 20–1 Rupert, Prince of the Rhine 134, 153 n 58, 157 Ruyter, Michael de 115–16 Sadleir, Anne 51 n 22, 147 Said, Edward 126 Saint-Amant, Antoine Girard, sieur de 25 Salmon-fishers 16, 30 Satire 35, 43, 65, 69, 74, 94–5, 125, 155 Saumur Academy 133 Scaevola Scoto-Brittannicus 83 n 19, 125 Scandal 43, 104–5, 107, 116, 124 Scotland, Scots 14, 19–20, 27–8, 61, 67, 86, 116, 142, 158 Scott, James C. 36–7 Scripturalism 17–8, 41–2, 65 Scythe 113–14, 118, 172 Secretary 6, 64, 147 Secrets 6, 38, 63, 106–7, 109, 119, 124–6, 159 Seduction 3, 53, 111, 115–16 Seeing 110–11 Self-display 38, 45, 48, 63, 83–4, 92, 108–9, 111–14, 117, 125 Selfhood 7, 10, 70, 74, 77, 79, 84, 87, 100, 102, 109, 111, 113, 121, 125, 127, 140–2, 147, 153, 163, 176–7 Senec. Traged. ex Thyeste Chor. 2 [Marvell’s translation] 117, 174 Seneca 117–19, 174 Service 2–3, 7, 34, 45, 92, 104, 121, 130, 132, 141, 153–4, 156–7, 159–60, 162 Serviceability 91, 121, 162 Sexuality 42, 48, 50, 54, 65, 94–5, 107, 112–14, 117, 120–1, 139–40, 145–6 Shame 37–8, 63, 81, 106, 141 Shelter 36, 45, 48, 71, 94, 117, 121, 126, 142 Shifflett, Andrew 165, 175 Shipwreck 4, 76, 78–9, 83, 102 n 57, 106 n 13, 122, 172 Short Historical Essay, Concerning General Councils, A 68, 71, 91, 98 Sidney family 36 Sidney, Sir Philip 152

Singularity 61, 78, 82–6, 88, 96, 139–40, 144–5 Smith, Nigel 5, 9, 129, 148, 165, 169, 175 Sociability 9–10, 37, 39, 103, 128–9, 132, 134–6, 138–40, 151, 164 Socinianism 151 Solemn League and Covenant 19 Solitude 10, 45, 129, 137–8, 141, 145, 164 Somatics 56, 92, 98, 163 Sons 41–2, 65, 72, 99, 101 Speaker (of the Commons) 123–5 Spelman, Sir Henry 28 Sprat, Thomas 172 Spurr, John 5, 148, 157 Stanley, Thomas 9 Stock doves 94 Stuart, Frances 143 Subversion 45, 50, 52, 58, 66–7, 70–1, 125, 153 Succession, royal 68, 150 Sweden 6, 133, 134, 171 Syllogism 57, 76 T.C., see Cornewall, Theophilia Therapeutics 102, 163 Thomason, George 14 Thompson, Edward 135 Thompson, Sir Henry 132, 135 Thornton, Curtis 51 Thwaites, Isabel 21, 26, 46, 53, 111 Thyestes, see Senec. Traged. ex Thyeste Chor. 2 Time, orders of 30, 32–3, 35, 50, 78, 96, 142–3 To his Coy Mistress 52, 56–7, 95–8, 138, 144, 173 To his Worthy Friend Dr. Witty 53, 91, 93, 143, 158 Toleration, religious 67, 69, 74, 89, 93, 103, 123, 125–6, 147–8, 150, 155, 157 Tom May’s Death 59–61, 141 Topicality 67, 77, 80–1, 84, 86–7, 102, 116 Transcendence 47, 75, 77–8, 84, 86–7, 99 Transgression 63, 65, 92, 98, 106, 117, 121 Transience 77, 79, 85 Transproser Rehears’d, The 43 Trauma 59, 76, 78–81, 85, 143–6 Trinity College, Cambridge 118, 133, 168, 173 Trinity House 128, 163 n 4 Trott, Edmund 65, 99, 101–2 Trott family 50, 71–2, 128, 135 Trott, Sir John 41–2, 50, 65–6, 70, 93, 100–2, 117, 128, 134, 136, 174

Index

197

Trott, John 93 Turner, Francis 91–2, 120–1 Tutor 10, 12, 15, 22, 28, 45, 49–50, 90–1, 133–4, 141, 154, 157, 172, 177 Tyranny 66–7, 90, 149, 170, 172; see also Arbitrary government

Virgil 36 Virginity 53–4 Vitrification 48–50, 116, 143 Voyeurism 45, 48, 63, 66, 93, 106, 110–15, 117 Vulnerability 7, 11, 42, 64, 82–3, 91–2, 120–1, 125–6, 158–9, 163

Unfortunate Lover, The 3–4, 48, 74–88, 94–100, 103, 136, 138, 142, 144–6, 172–3 Unfortunate Lover, the 3, 78–9, 81–2, 85–6, 88–9, 92–3, 96–9, 112, 146 Upon an Eunuch; a Poet 57, 99, 112, 120 Upon Appleton House 2, 8, 10–40, 45–53, 58–9, 63, 71, 77, 79, 91–4, 98, 108–12, 138–42, 145, 148, 153, 161–2, 164–5, 169–70, 173–5 Upon the Death of Lord Hastings 91, 143, 169

Waller, Edmund 21, 114 Walker, Robert 171 Walton, Izaak 16 Walwyn, William 17, 80 n 13 War 16–18, 86–7 Waring, Robert 166 Washbourne, Thomas 171 Wharton, Philip Lord 134, 164, 176 Whiggery 124–5, 129, 147 Whitelocke, Bulstrode 171 Whiting, Nathaniel 25–6, 46, 111, 169–70 Winstanley, Gerrard 25 Withington, Phil 5, 135 Witty, Dr. Robert 12, 93, 146 Worcester, battle of 13, 21 Worden, Blair 5, 13 n 8, 165 Wounds 48, 74, 80, 84, 97–8, 112–14, 125, 145–6 Writing 1, 4, 11, 74–5, 77, 85, 108–9, 114, 117, 144, 147, 165, 176

Vale of York 15 Vane, Sir Henry 23 n 47 Vaughan, Henry 175 Vegetal embrace 33, 47, 54, 98, 138 Vere family 17, 27 Vergil, Polydore 61 Villiers, Barbara, see Castlemaine, Countess of Villiers, Frances, Viscountess Purbeck 51 Villiers, Lord Francis 52, 55, 60, 133, 136, 143 Villiers, George, 2nd Duke of Buckingham 35, 43, 66, 70, 118, 133–4, 142, 148–9, 153–4, 168, 173 Violation 3, 81, 85, 87, 119, 159 Violence 7, 52, 57, 76, 89–90, 112–13, 117, 122–3, 144, 158, 160; see also Marvell, Andrew, aggression

Yearning 10, 45, 61, 66, 71, 73, 94, 119–20, 163; see also Desire York, Anne Hyde, Duchess of 54, 72, 119 York, James, Duke of 86, 148 Yorkshire 13, 32–3, 164 Young Love 49–50, 82, 109, 169 Youth 31, 91, 93–4, 101, 143, 157–8 Zipporah 41–2, 45, 70