Grouped together in the 1681 Folio, and probably intended to be read as a sequence, are four poems where a mower rather than a shepherd is the pastoral protagonist. The poems play with the theme of art versus nature – the mower’s work being, symbolically, to disturb the latter in pursuit of the former. Poems by Thomas Randolph, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, and Christopher Marlowe, as well as Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Pliny and Theocritus, signal their presence under the surface of these poems. The first of the sequence, ‘The Mower Against Gardens’, is a diatribe by the mower against ‘Luxurious’ (lecherous or voluptuous) man who corrupted the simplicity of naturally occurring flora by creating gardens, artificially cordoned-off zones of corrupt pleasure where plant-breeding, grafting, importation of new species – and even statuary – become the signs of moral delinquency. To this Puritan argument against decoration (a bone of contention between the Puritan party and Archbishop Laud in the Church of England, where church architecture, rite and even church organs became a contested issue) is added a sexual undertone. The gardener has ‘dealt’ – acted as a pander – ‘between the Bark and Tree’ by grafting:
’Tis all enforc’d; the Fountain and the Grot;
While the sweet Fields do lye forgot:
Where willing Nature does to all dispence
A wild and fragrant Innocence.
The paradox of a highly artificial poem celebrating natural simplicity against artifice is not meant to be missed. Marvell, in the Nun Appleton poems and others, would celebrate the garden, its very artificiality, the comparison of ranked flowers with military drill yielding up memorable conceits. He loved gardens, their formality, their sensual pleasures (‘Stumbling on Melons, as I pass’), the way they stood as emblems of moderate civility. The poem is thus a carefully crafted argument, a form of aesthetic play, a tease, a gesture towards the pleasures of poetic genre. Yet there is, like a vein of colour in marble, as always with this poet, the tinge of a serious argument that links it to the real political world. It is a characteristic Marvellian movement, from art to society and back again, the mediation being done through the conventions of an informed literary tradition. The personal tension, too, is there, between an artistic sensibility that relished richness and ‘luxuriousness’ and a more dutiful social conscience.
As well as the great contest between King and Parliament, the seventeenth century witnessed a philosophical tussle between the old philosophy and the new. It was a great age of scientific inquiry, of hostility to the dying scholasticism and of hospitality to the new age of rational inquiry. Francis Bacon announced himself as buccinator novi temporis – the herald of the new age – dismissing, in The Advancement of Learning, the traditional thinkers, ‘their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator)’, in favour of an empirical, inquiring spirit. A similar movement was going on among the exponents of ‘rational theology’, trying to reconcile science with religion. The great seventeenth-century prose writer, Sir Thomas Browne, called man the ‘great amphibium’, thinking scientifically and religiously, trying to live reasonably in the two elements.
Marvell would find himself – at any rate at the level of language – in conflict with some of these trends, as a prose writer who loved rich expressions, linguistic borrowings, subtle allusions. His later antagonist, Samuel Parker, would rebuke him for his refusal of plain speech. In an attack on Platonism in philosophy, published in the year of the Great Fire, Parker declared: ‘Though a huge lushious style may relish sweet to childish and liquorish Fancies, yet it rather loaths and nauceats a discreet understanding then forms and nourishes it.’15 A Saussurean before his time, Parker believed language was a system of arbitrary signs: ‘The use of Words is not to explain the Natures of Things, but only to stand as marks and signs in their stead, as Arithmetical figures are only notes of Numbers.’ So, in these seemingly innocent pastoral poems, one of the finest poets of the age explored, reflected, illuminated – and, above all made into poetry – all these contested questions, but he did so by holding the various elements in suspension. His effects have often been diminished by critics who try to convert them into reductive exegesis, pinning them down too tightly to specific referents that can be at best only hypothetical.
On 23 April 1658 Jane Oxenbridge, who had taken such good care of Marvell’s charge, William Dutton, died at Eton. Marvell composed for her a Latin epitaph that was carved on black marble and erected in Eton College Chapel. At the Restoration it was painted over and later it was removed altogether. Anthony Wood dismissed it as a ‘large canting inscription’,16 presumably hinting at the overelaboration of a monument for the wife of a Puritan minister. It was printed in the 1681 Folio.
Several months later, news would come of a far more significant death that would draw from Marvell not lapidary platitudes but a major, and in parts unusually heartfelt, poem. On 3 September 1658, Oliver Cromwell died of pneumonia, the day after a violent storm that was immediately seen as symbolic. His health had been failing since the beginning of the year and after the blow of his favourite daughter Elizabeth’s death from cancer in August he lived on for less than a month. His body lay in state for weeks while people filed past to pay their respects. One of them was the Quaker, Edward Burrough, who was appalled by this outbreak of hero worship for one ‘who too much sought the greatness and the honour of the world, and loved the praise of men, and took flattering titles and vain respects of deceitful men’.17
There was, however, one man who knew that he would have to offer his tribute, and notwithstanding his later claim to have abhorred Cromwell and his circle, it was done with an unforced will.
10
I Saw Him Dead
So have I seen a Vine, whose lasting Age
Of many a Winter hath surviv’d the rage.
The death of Cromwell, under whose influence Marvell had flourished throughout the mid-1650s, was a personal blow but also an omen for the future. Presumably Marvell and his friends at the centre of the administration would have made their calculations. In the wake of the fall of a strong political leader, powerful undercurrents start to run. The Royalists, waiting in the wings, would have taken heart. Doubts about the ability of Cromwell’s son Richard to take over would surface. Almost a year to the day after entering government service, Marvell’s patron had been whisked away, and the future, suddenly, would look less hopeful. New political masters might want to install their own civil servants and his past associations might tell against him. In spite of those alliances, at heart he was not a revolutionary and would, in an ideal world, have chosen the path of supporting a constitutional monarchy. He could live with a restoration, but would it want to live with him?
Whatever his thoughts about his personal prospects, Marvell must have known that a panegyric would be expected of him. From the poem that emerged it seems likely that he needed no external prompting, for it is one of the few from Marvell’s hand that contains any expression of direct, personal feeling. It was almost certainly written in the immediate aftermath of Cromwell’s death because a volume of tributes, including Marvell’s, was entered in the Stationers’ Register by the publisher Henry Herringman on 20 January 1659. It was called simply ‘A Poem upon the Death of O.C.’.
Once again the Cromwell of this poem is represented as the reluctant actor who would have preferred a quiet life but whom ‘angry Heaven unto War had sway’d’. It recounts, in dignified, moving couplets, the known public events leading up to his death, including the death of his daughter and his love of her and the presaging storm of the night before his death. His victories at Dunbar in 1650 and Worcester in 1651 – both of which shared the date of his death, 3 September – are recalled. Marvell’s fatalism has already been noted. It was a complex thing that resulted in a tendency both to defer to the present power (first Cromwell, then Charles II) and to justify apparent shifts in allegiance (though, of course, Marvell became part of the Parliamentary Opposition to Charles, even if he did not challenge h
is kingship) by arguing that it was not his business to challenge the legitimacy of rulers. Loyalism rather than consistency was his standard of value. Thus, Cromwell is seen once again as an inevitable force, blessed by the stars, and, through the pathetic fallacy, his death marked by the sympathetic natural elements:
O Cromwell, Heavens Favorite! To none
Have such high honours from above been shown:
For whom the Elements we Mourners see,
And Heav’n it self would the great Herald be;
This is, of course, a public funeral elegy and a certain excess of praise is demanded by the genre. Copious allusions to classical models such as Virgil’s Georgics abound and Cromwell is celebrated in terms that suggest that his valour exceeds anything in the Arthurian legends and his piety that of Edward the Confessor. His sanctioning of religious war is approved (‘He first put Armes into Religions hand’) and his magnanimity is asserted. Towards the end of the poem a more personal note enters (‘All, all is gone of ours or his delight’), suggesting that the poet is writing from personal and intimate knowledge of Cromwell. Not in the remotest sense a confessional poet, Marvell here nonetheless lets his personal emotions show at last:
I saw him dead, a leaden slumber lyes,
And mortal sleep over those wakefull eyes:
Those gentle rays under the lids were fled,
Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed;
That port which so majestique was and strong,
Loose and depriv’d of vigour, stretch’d along:
All wither’d, all discolour’d, pale and wan.
How much another thing, no more than man?
With just a hint at the controversial status of Cromwell’s pre-eminence, the poet predicts that future ages will see him more clearly as an exemplar of courage, ‘When truth shall be allow’d, and faction cease’. He is now in Heaven, leaving behind his mourners ‘lost in tears’. The poem closes with an allusion to Cromwell’s son, Richard, who assumed the Protectorate as if Cromwell had been a hereditary monarch. The reference to Richard’s ‘milder beams’ implies delicately that he will not be able to match his father’s authority and power. His absence from the struggle to date is glossed as another example of Cromwellian reserve, waiting in silence until the call of duty comes. When it does, being a Cromwell, he will rise to the occasion: ‘A Cromwell in an houre a prince will grow.’ Richard survived, in fact, little over six months before his government collapsed in April 1659 to be followed by the restored Rump Parliament.
A surviving document in the Public Record Office shows the detailed arrangements that were made for the funeral. It records the amount of mourning cloth allotted to each of the principal mourners:
9 6
Mr. John Milton
9 6
9 6
Mr. Merville
Sir Philip Meadows
Mr. Sterry
Lattin
Secryes
9 0
Mr. Drayden1
‘Mr. Drayden’ is the poet John Dryden. The figures in the far left column are the number of yards of black cloth proposed and those in the next column the amount actually allocated (though an alternative interpretation is that the two columns represent the shillings and pence granted to buy the cloth).2 In the event, only the Lord Mayor of London and prominent City officials were granted the full nine yards of mourning cloth. Another document listing those who walked in the funeral procession shows that in the Privy Chamber at Somerset House, where the official mourners assembled before moving off down the Strand, was a party described as ‘Secretarys of ye ffrench & Latin Tongs’. This little company of poets and scholars included Dryden, Marvell, Milton, Nathaniel Sterry (another assistant Latin Secretary drafted in to replace Sir Philip Meadows, the man who had beaten Marvell to the post in 1653 and who was now a diplomat) and Samuel Hartlib, a friend of Milton and occasional government servant. As they all moved off down the Strand towards Westminster Abbey, ‘Mr. Merville’, whose name was next to Milton’s in the official list, would have been able to steer the blind poet’s steps during the foot procession towards the Abbey.
When Cromwell died, his body had been embalmed and removed from Whitehall to Somerset House, where it lay for many weeks in state, dressed in royal robes of purple and ermine with a golden sceptre in the hand and a crown on the head. The body was privately buried in the chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey on 26 September, but the public funeral in which Marvell and Milton took part was held on 23 November. It was done with magnificent pomp at a cost of £60,000, which caused controversy within the Republican camp. The route taken by the mourners from Somerset House to the Abbey was lined by soldiers in new red coats with black buttons. A king would not have received a more lavish send-off.
Marvell retained his post as a Latin Secretary during the rule of Richard Cromwell and for some little time after, but it is clear that he was already contemplating a move from the civil service to a career in Parliamentary politics. If he were to stand as an MP then Hull, the town where he had so many associations and connections, was the obvious choice. Invariably shrewd in his career moves, Marvell may already have sensed that Richard Cromwell was not going to survive and that the era of powerful authoritarian rule by one man was over. A stronger Parliament, if not a Restoration, was more than likely. At the end of December Marvell set the wheels in motion for selection as a candidate with a request to his sister’s husband, the local merchant Edmund Popple, to get him elected a burgess of the Hull Corporation. In the records of that body, the ‘Bench Books’, 28 December 1658 has the following entry: ‘This day Mr Edmund Popple Sheriffe of this Towne came into this Board and acquainted them that his brother in law Mr Andrew Marvell made it his request that the Board would please to make him a free Burgesse of this Corporation, which the Bench takeing into consideration and accompting the good service he hath allready done for this Towne, they are pleased to grant him his freedome.’3 The reference to the service Marvell had done for the town is intriguing and suggests that he may have used either his connections with Fairfax or his subsequent government connections to perform favours of some kind for Hull, possibly using his in-laws as the conduit.
Two weeks later, Richard Cromwell summoned a Parliament and Marvell stood as a candidate. He was elected on 10 January 1659 as one of a pair of representatives for Hull, his fellow MP being John Ramsden, the most significant merchant in the town. It was hardly a universal suffrage, the choice being made by the 500 or so freemen of the City, with Edmund Popple a prominent ally and canvasser on that body. Five days later Marvell wrote to Popple – in a letter that has survived as a puzzling fragment only – about some piece of politicking among the burgesses: ‘Pray, what say our 86 men of the businesse & of me?’4 But in spite of his ability to pull strings locally, Marvell lost his seat to the Republican Sir Henry Vane four months later when the Rump Parliament was temporarily restored in May in the wake of Richard Cromwell’s political demise. During this period, however, he retained his civil service post, and continued to draw a salary for it. So far from being inconvenienced by the restored Rump – whose existence was to some degree a repudiation of the Cromwellians – Marvell was actually granted official lodgings in Whitehall on 14 July.5 His superior, Thurloe, by contrast, was dismissed in May. As ever, Marvell was a survivor. Thurloe’s replacement was the regicide Thomas Scott, a Republican with far less regard for Cromwell than his Latin Secretary, who continued in his employment until at least the autumn when the Council of State was dissolved by the army. On 25 October the Council issued an order for payment to Milton and Marvell of £86 12s each in arrears of pay, covering the period since Thurloe’s fall in May.6
During the early months of 1659, however, when Marvell was riding two horses, he wrote two letters that have survived and give his views (or, strictly, those of Thurloe) about the political situation under Richard. Both are written to Sir George Downing, the British resident at the Hague who had headed the move for offerin
g the crown to Cromwell. On 11 February, Marvell wrote rather scathingly about the Republican argument in Parliament that power resided in the people and should not be handed over to another Protector. Their logic was: ‘That it reuerted into this house by the death of his Highnesse, that Mr Speaker is Protector in possession and it will not be his wisdome to part with it easily, that this house is all England.’7 Marvell was unimpressed by this democratic essentialism and observed tartly: ‘But we know well enough what they mean.’ In spite of the anti-Richard faction’s use of ‘all the tricks of Parliament’ Marvell was optimistic that his side had a two-thirds majority that would ‘weare them out at the long runne’. Again on 25 March Marvell gave Downing another routine update of Parliamentary business. The bill fully recognising Richard’s Protectorship was passed on 14 February.
While in London, and out of Parliament again, during the second half of 1659 and the early months of 1660, Marvell is said to have taken part in meetings of the ‘Rota’ and spoken there. This political club was founded by his friend James Harrington, the political theorist and author, in 1656, of the Commonwealth of Oceana, dedicated to Cromwell. The work was mentioned later by David Hume in his Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth as ‘the only valuable model of a Commonwealth’ extant. Harrington’s notion was that power depends on the balance of property ownership and his treatise, in offering an economic interpretation of history, has led to his being called the first Marxist. Like Marvell he was impressed by the traditional Elizabethan notion of the body politic, and the continuity of the natural and social order in contrast to the more ruthlessly pragmatic political vision of Hobbes. Although a Republican, he took no active part in the Civil War and was said to have been deeply shocked by the execution of the King. His moderation would have made him attractive to Marvell. The Rota Club met regularly from November 1659 to February 1660 and was attended by Cyriack Skinner, Henry Neville (the political writer and translator of Macchiavelli), and John Aubrey, who wrote a brief life of Harrington in which it was revealed that Harrington wrote poetry ‘but his Muse was rough’ and Neville had to talk him out of persisting with it. He also described the meetings of the Club, which Marvell attended that winter:
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