The Admission Book of Trinity College, Cambridge records Marvell’s signature among the names of thirty-nine scholars on 13 April 1638 after the annual Easter Term elections: Andreas Marvell discipulus. The scholarship entitled him to draw an annual stipendium of 13s 4d, with a further shilling each week for food. When he graduated as a BA in the Lent Term of 1639, the latter sum would be raised by 2d a week.9 Another signature, now in the Cambridge University Archives, dated 27 February 1639 records the occasion when, according to a statute of 1613, Marvell had to sign articles promising to recognise the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical and temporal matters and give unqualified acceptance to the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles before he could ‘supplicate’ for the degree. He was already a year late in doing so for usually only four not five years elapsed before supplicating. Marvell had perhaps been considered too young the previous year, or had been absent from the University for some reason. The most obvious explanation was the strange episode of his seduction by Jesuits.
Marvell’s eighteenth-century editor, Edward Thompson, whose edition of Marvell’s works and the appended life Of That Most Excellent Citizen and Uncorrupted Member of Parliament Andrew Marvell appeared in 1776, was at pains to construct a legend of Marvell the incorruptible patriot and stout Protestant Englishman. The Jesuit episode caused him obvious embarrassment. He conceded stiffly that: ‘Mr Marvell at this excentrick period was not exempt from imprudence: the Jesuits at that time were sedulous everywhere to make proselytes.’10 Marvell’s lifelong phobia in relation to Catholicism, which he called ‘the Romish yoak’ oppressing so many other nations, makes the episode even more piquant.
It has been suggested that the Jesuits at this time had targeted the Universities for recruitment. The story of Marvell’s being led away by their Romish wiles first appeared in the Life of the poet written in 1726 by Thomas Cooke, Marvell’s first editor. Cooke claimed to have derived some of his information from conversations with Marvell’s family but, as with several other vivid anecdotes about Marvell, there is no supporting evidence other than tradition. In Cooke’s words: ‘They used all the arguments they could to seduce him away, which at last they did. After some months his father found him in a Bookseller’s shop in London, and prevailed with him to return to the College.’11 In 1872, Alexander Grosart unearthed a rather more substantial piece of evidence in the archives at Hull. It was a letter, unsigned and undated, though now identified as being from a local clergyman, the Reverend John Norton of the parish of Welton, close to Hull.12 Written about January 1640, the letter is addressed to his fellow clergyman, the Reverend Andrew Marvell, and relates a similar experience that befell his own son, then studying at Catherine Hall, Cambridge, at the hands of Jesuits. Norton’s son was apparently invited to supper by some proselytisers at the University, offered accommodation, and exposed to various ‘popish arguments’ of a ‘rotten and unsavory’ kind. He was also invited to Somerset House, then the location of Queen Henrietta’s chapel and an obvious centre of ‘Popish’ influence and intrigue if any existed. ‘I perceive by Mr Breercliffe [presumably some common acquaintance of the two clergymen] some such prank used towards your sonne: I desire to know what you did therin,’ Norton wrote. He added that the evidence should be used to persuade the government to take action ‘for if such fearfull practises may goe unpunished I take care whether I may send a child [words missing but probably something like “with confidence to any University”]’. The letter could not have been written earlier than November 1639 because it mentions the name of the Vice-Chancellor, Dr Cosens, who was not appointed until that date.
There is no concrete evidence for the length of time Marvell’s dalliance lasted. College bursars’ records show that he received his quarterly stipendium of 3s 4d throughout 1639 and 1640, so the date of the incident could have been a little earlier, perhaps in 1638, the absence for ‘some Months’ explaining his late subscription for his BA in February 1639. Whatever the truth of the episode and its exact dating, Marvell’s early biographers were in no doubt that the experience stiffened the poet’s resolve throughout the rest of his life to adhere to the cause of anti-Popery. In the Rehearsal Transpros’d he wrote with disdain even of the High Church ceremonies within the Church of England advocated by Archbishop Laud involving ‘so many several Cringes & Genuflexions, that a man unpractised stood in need to entertain both a Danceing Master and a Remembrancer’, a state of popish-inclined affairs ‘very uncouth to English Protestants, who naturally affect a plainness of fashion’.13
Andrew Marvell continued to work for his MA throughout 1640, but the following year, whether or not in consequence of the trauma of his father’s drowning on 23 January, he seems to have abandoned his studies. Towards the end of the long vacation of 1641 an entry in a Trinity College register known as the ‘Conclusion Book’ shows Marvell’s name among a list of scholars who had failed to make even the minimal attendances required for MA candidates. ‘It is agreed by the Master and 8 seniors,’ ran the entry for 24 September 1641, ‘that Mr Carter and Ds Wakefield, Ds Marvell, Ds Waterhouse, and Ds Maye, in regard that some of them are reported to be maryed and the others looke not after their dayes nor Acts, shall receave no more benefitt of the College, and shalbe out of their places unles they shew just cause to the College for the Contrary in 3 months’.14
No later than the summer of 1641, therefore, Andrew Marvell left Cambridge for good without obtaining his MA degree. A new phase in his life would open, of freedom from the schoolroom-like constraints of seventeenth-century undergraduate life that had been his lot for seven years. He had entered the University as a twelve-year-old boy from the provinces, but now, like any other bright, talented twenty-year-old, he would be preparing to face the challenge of making his way in adult life. The first thing that appears to have attracted him was the prospect of travel.
3
At the Sign of the Pelican
… he was sent abroad to gain Cunning and Experience, and beyond Sea saw the Bears of Bern, and the large race of Capons at Geneva, and a great many fine sights beside, and so return’d home as accomplish’d as he went out …
Samuel Parker1
The years between Marvell’s final departure from Cambridge in September 1641 and his certain presence in England again six years later, when he witnessed a deed at Meldreth on 12 November 1647, present biography with its greatest challenge. There is certain evidence of his presence in London at the end of February 1642 but for the four to five years subsequent to this, during the most turbulent period of the English Civil War, Marvell appears to have been absent from England.
Speculation about his whereabouts has included the suggestion that he could have studied briefly at the Inns of Court or returned to Hull to work in business with his brothers-in-law. It is possible also that he could have gone to Hull to receive either a legacy from his father or the compassionate support of the woman with whose daughter, allegedly, his father was drowned while crossing the Humber. But the most compelling evidence is that he spent most if not all of this period abroad, either funded by these same means or, what is more likely, working, as his step-uncle, Thomas Alured, had done, as tutor and companion to a young man of means. Certainly, the profession of personal tutor was to be Marvell’s for the whole of the 1650s.
Milton’s famous letter of 21 February 1653, recommending Marvell for the vacant post of assistant Latin Secretary under him, would refer to the fact that ‘he hath spent foure yeares abroad in Holland, France, Italy, & Spaine, to very good purpose, as I beleeve, & the gaineing of those 4 languages’.2 Scattered through Marvell’s later writings, in poetry and prose, are references to having been in these European countries and a mention of ‘My Fencing-master in Spain’3 suggests that he was not a penniless wanderer but someone engaged in the traditional gentlemanly pursuits of the Grand Tour.
During Marvell’s years at Cambridge, and throughout the 1630s, Charles I had ruled without Parliament. On 13 April 1640, desperate for funds to sust
ain his war with the Scots, he had summoned Parliament for the first time since May 1629, in the hope that it would grant him the funds he needed, but it was not so accommodating, presenting demands for its own liberty, for something to be done about the growth of ‘popery’, and for a lessening of taxation. The King was infuriated, causing him to dissolve it on 5 May. The collapse of this so-called Short Parliament was setting the King on a collision course that could end only in war. By the time the King raised his standard in defiance of the Parliamentary forces at Nottingham on 21 August 1642, however, Marvell was almost certainly abroad.
The alternative to the Grand Tour theory – which may point only to a delay, rather than constituting an argument that he did not travel at all (which appears unsustainable) – is that Marvell returned from Cambridge to Hull during 1641, possibly entering the trading-house of his brother-in-law Edmund Popple, ship-builder, master mariner and merchant. In his later years as an MP, Marvell would evince a shrewd knowledge of business and maritime affairs that could have been derived from an early experience of this kind. In Hull there has long been a tradition that Marvell was employed in this way. The city’s Wilberforce Museum has a small circular box said to have been made from oak taken from the building in the High Street in which Marvell served his clerkship. In the nineteenth century local historians described an armchair in an inn known as the White Hart made from oak of the same source. Others located his apprenticeship at a house on the corner of Rottenherring Street.4 William Empson, who has speculated liberally on various aspects of Marvell’s life in addition to his more famous analysis of the poems, endorses this tradition. He puts the following words into the mouth of Edmund Popple, making him argue that he supported Marvell’s decision to abandon an MA that would have been the passport to a career like his father’s as a parson: ‘What do you want an MA for? You ought to be joining us. First you must spend about a year in the office in Hull, learning the ropes; then you can go abroad. I will see you don’t starve.’5 Empson goes on to suggest that Marvell would have been used by Popple as a temporary employee in Europe with the job of reassuring the European shipping trade that Hull was open for business, in spite of the recent plague and the political uncertainty of the Civil War. Marvell’s lack of money at this time – the general condition of recent graduates in any epoch – may have been compounded by the fact that any money accruing through his father from the inherited wealth or property of the Cambridgeshire ancestors would have been used up in providing the dowries for his three daughters, all of whom married well, into prosperous families that would expect such generosity from the bride’s father.6
Another tradition holds that the Mrs Skinner whose daughter was drowned with the Reverend Andrew Marvell provided the young man with a bequest. The unreliable accounts of the drowning incident have contributed to this legend but it is now considered unlikely that Mrs Skinner’s daughter Bridget – the only possible candidate – was even in the boat that sank.7 There is a faint possibility that she offered some financial support out of compassion for the fatherless young man because she was a friend of the family. The Marvells and the Skinners certainly knew each other well as is evidenced by letters showing that Marvell was acquainted with Cyriack Skinner, another child of Mrs Skinner.8 Cyriack’s sister, Theophila, later married a Humphry Cornewall, becoming therefore the ‘T.C.’ in Marvell’s poem ‘The Picture of little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers’. There is also a very tentative speculation, discussed below, that Marvell’s young charge as tutor on the European tour was Edward Skinner, Mrs Skinner’s eldest son. The last piece of evidence is the fact that Marvell’s father dedicated a sermon to Mrs Anne Sadleir, sister of Mrs Skinner, describing her as ‘a Constant benefactress to me & to my family’.9
That Marvell was in London rather than Hull immediately before setting off on his European tour is confirmed by his signature, as a resident of Cowcross in Clerkenwell, to a ‘protestation’ of loyalty to the Protestant religion on 17 February 1642. The protestation had been ordered by the Long Parliament on 3 May 1641, against the background of an army plot against Parliament in which the King may have been partly implicated. MPs were obliged to sign a loyalty oath promising to uphold ‘the true reformed Protestant religion … against all Popery, and Popish innovation within this Realm’ and to defend the ‘Power and Priviledge of Parliaments, the Lawful Rights and Liberties of the Subjects’ and to ‘endeavour to preserve the Union and Peace betwixt the three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland’. Initially imposed on MPs, the Protestation was printed in January 1641 and circulated around the country for signature by ordinary citizens, who responded with enthusiasm. Marvell’s name appears as one of ‘severall persons which dwell within the said Liberty’ of Cowcross returned by a constable, Robert List.10 The relative proximity of Cowcross to the Inns of Court has encouraged the speculation – though there is no evidence in enrolment records – that Marvell may have been a student of law at one of the Inns at this time.
In the same month, on 8, 10 and 21 February, Marvell’s signature occurs again on three legal documents witnessing a lease, release and mortgage of a Yorkshire property owned by Sir William Savile of Thornhill and acquired by his distant relative, another rich West Riding landowner, Thomas, Viscount Savile. Lord Savile was the King’s Treasurer of the Household; Sir William Savile was nephew of the Earl of Strafford, Thomas Wentworth. One of the other witnesses to this property transaction was Sir Robert Lewys, a barrister of Gray’s Inn. This fact, combined with the evidence of the Protestation, implies that the deed was witnessed in London, probably at one of the Inns, not Yorkshire. Marvell, it has been suggested, could even have been in the service – possibly as a tutor – of one or other of these rich fellow Yorkshiremen, either before the signing or as a result of forging the contact at the signing, but there is no concrete evidence of his employment or the possible role of either in financing his subsequent foreign travel.11 Marvell’s fondness for these teeming London districts and the busy life of the capital – a preference that stayed with him throughout his life, in spite of his constant pull towards rural solitude and apartness – evidently began early.
Marvell probably began his European trip in the spring or summer of 1642 with a visit to Holland, a country he was later to satirise as ‘This indigested vomit of the Sea’ in the poem ‘The Character of Holland’. He was possibly in France in 1643, when the poet Antoine Girard Saint-Amant, author of a poem called ‘La Solitude’, which has been seen as an important influence on Marvell’s treatment of the theme, was at the height of his fame. According to Marvell’s detractors like Samuel Parker, who were keen to portray him as a vexatious Calvinist, he visited Geneva; Parker referred to him crossing the Alps and visiting Berne and Lyons. The nearest we come to a reliable sighting of Marvell, however, is in 1645 or 1646, when he visited the English poet Richard Flecknoe in Rome. Italy was an important stop on the English grand tour and Parker paints a vivid portrait of Marvell as one who has ‘seen all the Tredesian rarities and old stones of Italy, that has sat in the Porphyrie Chair at Rome, that can describe the method of the Election of Popes, and tell stories of the tricks of Cardinals…’12 There is a traditional, though once again unsubstantiated, story of Marvell meeting Milton in Rome and the two discoursing on the iniquities of popery in the vicinity of St Peter’s itself. In his Latin verses on the Louvre, ‘Inscribenda Luparae’, there is an allusion to a Latin inscription in the church of St John Lateran at Rome which he may have seen13 and in ‘The Garden’ his reference to a floral clock has led some scholars to surmise that he may have seen the famous example by Famianus Strada in the garden of Aldobrandini’s villa in Rome.14 As well as the reference to his Spanish fencing-master he seems to have attended at least one bull-fight while in Spain, if we take as a literal report on experience his comparison, in ‘Upon Appleton House’ of the newly mown meadows to the ‘Toril/Ere the Bulls enter at Madril’.
Despite his views on Catholicism, and the seminary’s reputation among hosti
le witnesses from the previous century as a place where treason was spoken (see, for example, Anthony Munday’s The English Roman Life of 1582), Marvell may in 1645 have visited the English College at Rome, as Milton certainly did before him in October 1638. The College was on the itinerary of English visitors to Rome, regardless of their religious affiliation, the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury being a particularly popular day for the English to call.
Marvell’s putative visit depends on a theory that he was a tutor to Edward Skinner. The College’s ‘Pilgrims’ Book’ contains an entry for 18 December 1645, mentioning a ‘N. Skinner’ having dined there with the seventeen-year-old Henry Howard (later the sixth Duke of Norfolk) and another young man, the son of the author and naval commander Sir Kenelm Digby. Skinner is said to have been there ‘cum suo tutore’ (with his tutor), which could be a reference to Marvell. Reserved and unobtrusive as ever, Marvell may not have pressed forward any other identity than ‘tutore’. The difficulty with this theory lies in that initial ‘N’. It could be an abbreviation of the familiar ‘Ned’, or it could simply be the customary initial used to indicate the place where a name was to be inserted. The College Rector, who would have made the entry, did not record young Digby’s first name either. Skinner’s two companions, however, were recorded seven weeks earlier in a register of British visitors kept at the University of Padua. On 31 October 1645 a Stephen Skinner – no relation to the family whose mother was not drowned in the Humber – was entered in the Padua record, making him a more likely candidate for attendance at the Roman lunch.15 Another name which appears several times in the Pilgrims’ Book of the English College in 1645 and 1646 is the much more interesting one of Richard Fleckno or Flecknoe, whose connection with Marvell is quite beyond doubt.
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