If Marvell’s marriage is not categorically disproved by this evidence, it is certainly extremely difficult to sustain belief in it after a reading of his substantial correspondence and an examination of the records of his life. Nowhere does he reveal himself as anything other than a single man, enjoying the company of friends but living alone in a solitary, reserved existence. If Mary Palmer was his wife it would need to have been an arrangement of the kind she describes, being kept like a Victorian mistress, unacknowledged, unknown to any of his family, business associates, or acquaintances in the political world. Given Marvell’s ability to hold various worlds in suspension, his secretiveness, his reserve, it cannot be said to be utterly implausible, but the truth will never be known.
Two days after he died, Marvell was buried in St Giles-in-the-Fields. Anthony Wood said that he was told by the sexton that Marvell was interred under the pews ‘in the south isle by the pulpit’.13 Two days later, two of the Hull Trinity House Brethren, Thomas Coates and Edward Hodgson, wrote to Marvell’s friend Dr Robert Witty to say that their messenger, unable to find Marvell at his Covent Garden lodgings, made inquiries and discovered that he was dead ‘for which we are all very sorry and as unhappy in our loss of so faithful a friend to our society’.14 The Corporation voted £50 towards the funeral expenses and for a monument at St Giles that no longer exists (if it ever did), the church having been rebuilt in the eighteenth century. Legend has it either that the monument was destroyed in 1682 during the reaction against the Whigs or that the rector refused to allow the erection of a monument to such a man as Marvell. In St Giles Church today there is only the epitaph of 1764, the words thought to have been composed by his nephew Will Popple, with their echo of Eliot’s famous ‘tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace’ in the reference to his ‘joining the most peculiar graces of wit & learning with a singular penetration, & strength of judgement’. It stresses his Parliamentary service as ‘a true patriot’ and judges him finally to be: ‘a strenuous asserter of the constitution, laws & liberties of England’, the character his reputation would now assume until the recovery of his full poetic reputation in the early twentieth century.
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The Island’s Watchful Sentinel
But whether Fate or Art untwin’d his thread,
Remains in doubt. Fames lasting Register
Shall leave his Name enroll’d as great as theirs,
Who in Philippi for their Country fell.1
Shortly after Marvell’s death the above anonymous lines were written, although they were not published until 1697 in the collection Poems on Affairs of State. As well as hinting darkly at the possibility that Marvell did not die a natural death, they are the first foundation stone of the Marvell legend. For the next two centuries or more, Marvell would be regarded as his admiring contemporaries largely saw him: an incorruptible English patriot on the Roman model, a defender of English liberties against the threat from Europe, an island hero rather than a poet. Like all such legends a grain of truth was combined with rather more exaggeration. Marvell was indeed a courageous advocate of religious toleration, notwithstanding his deep prejudice against European Catholicism. A certain kind of English liberal outlook, about which it is no doubt easy to be complacent, finds its best expression in some of Marvell’s writings and official correspondence: the belief that the citizen has rights and freedoms that should not be surrendered lightly; that the balance of power between the metropolitan elites and provincial society always needs a little rectification in favour of the latter; that the power wielded by monarchical, civil, and ecclesiastical authorities must always be monitored with vigilance by the active citizen and required to justify any encroachment on the liberties of the individual. Although his Parliamentary interventions were few and not always entirely happy, Marvell seems to have been consistent in his principles. The same anonymous poet calls him ‘this Islands watchful Centinel’. The purity of the legend, however, has to be considered a little diluted when one examines the various instances recorded above of slightly questionable behaviour or partiality to questionable friends and associates, or the rewriting of history and the revision of his personal place within it. Even if one does not go so far as the distinguished Marvell critic Sir Frank Kermode, who judged passages in his political poetry ‘odious’,2 one might hesitate to elevate Marvell to sainthood. In one of many internal contradictions in this complex man – that between principle and a principle of pragmatism – there was sometimes too much of a readiness to adopt a new position on practical grounds, forgetting former objections and beliefs. Sitting generally on the fence, Marvell could sometimes leap off it with surprising agility. Equally, the peculiarly English stamp of his Yorkshire-rooted patriotism did indeed occasionally carry a xenophobic undertow, but he was a poet steeped in European literary culture, and in particular that of the Latin language. An accomplished linguist, an eager reader, a keen and knowledgeable traveller, Marvell cannot in any sense be compressed into the mould of a late twentieth-century ‘Euro sceptic’ or Little Englander.
The Marvell legend continued to be burnished after his death. An Account of the Growth of Popery and the verse satires attributed to him were frequently reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. In the year of his death a posthumous work, Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse, written by ‘A Protestant’ but from Marvell’s hand, appeared. A defence of John Howe, former chaplain to Cromwell, who had written a tract on predestination, it was probably the last thing on which Marvell had been working when he died. It is a characteristic attack on otiose theological debate, on ‘those peevish questions which have overgrown Christianity’ with ‘endless disputes concerning the unsearchable things of God’.3 In it he confesses that he ‘cannot boast of any extraordinary faculty for disputation’ but nonetheless comes to the defence of Howe as he came to the defence of Herbert Croft, condemning the pamphlet written by Howe’s antagonist Thomas Danson for ‘its street adages, Its odd ends of Latine, Its broken shreds of poets, and Its musty lumber of schoolmen’. The new critical prose of the late seventeenth century, influenced by the scientists, was making this old-fashioned, fussy discourse increasingly irrelevant. Had Marvell survived to write more prose he may well have developed a leaner, more tightly argued style. The signs of its beginning are present in his very late works. Summing up his task in this minor pamphlet, Marvell explained his own sense of his mission, in terms that would apply to his previous engagements in The Rehearsal and Mr Smirke:
As for myself, I expect in this litigious age, that some or other will sue me for having trespassed thus far on theological ground: but I have this for my plea, that I stepped over on no other reason than (which any man legally may do) to hinder one divine from offering violence to another.4
With those words, Marvell’s career as a prose polemicist ended.
Marvell’s enemies as well as his panegyrists were active in the years after his death. John Dryden, whom Marvell had done much to provoke, made in the preface to his poem ‘Religio Laici’ an indirect allusion to an earlier Elizabethan pamphleteer: ‘And Martin Mar-Prelate (the Marvel of those times) was the first Presbyterian Scribler, who sanctify’d Libels and Scurrility to the use of the Good Old Cause.’5 In the contest between Whig and Tory, Marvell was inevitably conscripted into the former’s ranks and his reputation became embroiled in their quarrels.
Apart from those brief biographical sketches by his contemporaries – John Aubrey, Gilbert Burnet, Anthony Wood, Samuel Parker6 – the first attempt at a biography of Marvell was the short Life of Andrew Marvell attached to the first collected edition of his works published in 1726, nearly fifty years after his death, by Thomas Cooke, who claimed to have had the benefit of privileged conversations with the poet’s surviving relatives, or as he put it, ‘the Ladies his Nieces’.7 Cooke – nicknamed ‘Hesiod Cooke’ after he translated the poet – was a man of Grub Street who died in poverty in Lambeth, his daughter being forced on to the streets. Cooke made no bones about represe
nting Marvell as a Whig hero: ‘My design in this is to draw a pattern for all free-born Englishmen in the life of a worthy patriot.’ He sketched out the first draft of the Marvell legend by painting him as combining poverty and high principle, and living dangerously because of the threat he posed to the rich and powerful. Another fifty years later, a large three-volume edition of Marvell’s works, retailing at three guineas a set with a subscribers’ list that included Edmund Burke and John Wilkes MP, ‘the friend of liberty’, was edited by Captain Edward Thompson and dedicated to the Mayor and Aldermen of Hull. It too contained a floridly characterised Life of That Most Excellent Citizen and Uncorrupted Member of Parliament, Andrew Marvell that recapitulated the anecdotes of Cooke to confirm the developing image of one ‘who was so far from being venal that he could not be bribed by the King into silence, when he scarce knew how to procure a dinner’.8 The lyric poetry did not seem to be at the centre of this enterprise, which was closely involved with the agenda of the eighteenth-century Whigs.
In the nineteenth century Marvell’s lyric poetry slowly began to emerge from behind the shadow of his political work. In 1819, Thomas Campbell printed ‘The Bermudas’, ‘Young Love’ and ‘The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun’ in his ‘Specimens of the British Poets’ and two years later Charles Lamb mentioned Marvell’s ‘witty delicacy’.9 The critic William Hazlitt praised Marvell several times, observing in 1825: ‘Marvell is a writer almost forgotten: but undeservedly so. His poetical reputation seems to have sunk with his political party … His verses leave an echo on the ear, and find one in the heart.’10 Other nineteenth-century poets and critics expressing their admiration in passing included Leigh Hunt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Clare (who paid him the compliment of passing off one of his own poems as being by Marvell), Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Matthew Arnold (who called the ‘Horatian Ode’ ‘beautiful and vigorous’) and Tennyson who loved to quote long passages from Marvell.
The first book-length, separately published life of Marvell was written by John Dove and appeared in 1832. In the same year, confusingly, Hartley Coleridge published a life of Marvell in a series called The Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire whose text seems indistinguishable from Dove’s. In 1872 Alexander Grosart published a four-volume edition of Marvell’s Complete Works in Verse and Prose, the last volume of which is still in use by scholars for those works which have not found a modern scholarly edition. He too attached an Essay on the Life and Writings of Marvell, which was an advance on all previous attempts and remained the standard account of his life until the start of the twentieth century when Augustine Birrell’s Andrew Marvell appeared in 1905 in the English Men of Letters series. Birrell was an MP and there is great emphasis in this biography on Marvell’s Parliamentary career. Birrell observed: ‘A more elusive, non-recorded character is hardly to be found … the man Andrew Marvell remains undiscovered.’11 This seems to have been the verdict of the twentieth century, even when the critical rediscovery of Marvell accelerated with breakneck speed in the wake of T.S. Eliot’s 1921 essay on the poet. This was also in spite of the appearance in 1928 of the major critical biography by French scholar Pierre Legouis: André Marvell: Poète, Puritain, Patriote. Written in French, the book was published in an edition of only 500 copies so many libraries do not have a copy, yet it has remained the standard biography of Marvell even though Legouis insisted that it was as much about the writing as the life (‘la biographie n’occupe pas ici la première place’). In 1965 he produced an abridged English version, shorn of its valuable footnotes, but nonetheless updated.
In 1978, the next landmark in Marvell biography was the staging of an exhibition at the British Library to commemorate the tercentenary of Marvell’s death. The catalogue of the exhibition by Hilton Kelliher, deceptively slight as its format was, represented an important advance on Legouis and was accompanied in the same year by a study of Marvell’s life and writings by John Dixon Hunt. Two decades later there is no life of Marvell in print and there has arguably (given Legouis’s insistence that his book was not a biography solely) never been a full biography of Marvell in the modern sense, concentrating primarily on the life and incorporating all the findings of recent biographical scholarship. In the belief that the time is right to attempt this, the present biography has worked from the premise that Marvell – however elusive and private his personality – can be known and better known than ever before. Given the cumulative work of scholars in recent decades, the old assumption that not enough was known about the poet can no longer be sustained. We have a clear outline of his life. We have his voice in public affairs. We have plentiful evidence of how he was seen by others. Above all we have the unique voice of the poetry itself: delicate, enigmatic, yet passionate as the man himself.
Marvell, since the full recovery of his reputation earlier in the twentieth century, has become one of the best-loved English poets. His life, even at its most tantalisingly elusive, remains fascinating both in itself and in the way it opens a fresh perspective on one of the most interesting periods in English history. Marvell was at the centre of that historical moment as he is at the centre of the development of English poetry in the seventeenth century. Like his contemporaries we may feel that we know him and we do not know him at the same time yet we cannot resist – nor cannot think that we would ever want to resist – the spell of his poetic voice.
Notes
Abbreviations
Aubrey: Aubrey’s Brief Lives (1949) edited by Oliver Lawson Dick.
Burnet: History of His Own Time (1687; 1833 edition in six volumes). Oxford. Vol. I, p477.
Cooke: ‘The Life of Andrew Marvell Esq’ from The Works of Andrew Marvell, Esq (1726; 1772 edition), edited by Thomas Cooke, Vol. I.
Grosart: The Works of Andrew Marvell Esq. (1872; four Volumes). Vol. IV contains all prose cited other than The Rehearsal and the letters.
DNB: The Dictionary of National Biography.
Kelliher: Andrew Marvell: Poet and Politician, 1621–78 (1978) by Hilton Kelliher. Catalogue of a British Library exhibition to commemorate the tercentenary of his death, 14 July-1 October 1678.
L.: The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell: Volume II. Letters (1971). Edited by H.M. Margoliouth. Third edition revised by Pierre Legouis with the collaboration of E.E. Duncan-Jones. Oxford.
Legouis 1928: André Marvell: poète, puritain, patriote, 1621–1678 (1928). Paris and London.
Legouis 1965: Andrew Marvell: Poet. Puritan. Patriot (1965; second edition 1968). Oxford.
Leishman: The Art of Marvell’s Poetry (1966; second edition 1968) by J.B. Leishman. P.: The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell: Volume I. Poems (1971) edited by H.M. Margoliouth. Third edition revised by Pierre Legouis with the collaboration of E.E. Duncan-Jones. Oxford. All quotations in the present work are from this edition.
The Rehearsal: The Rehearsal Transpros’d and The Rehearsal Transpros’d the Second Part (1971), edited by D.I.B. Smith. Oxford.
Thompson: The Works of Andrew Marvell Esq … With a New Life of the Author (1776) by Captain Edward Thompson.
Wood: Athenae Oxoniensis: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford (1813 edition edited by Philip Bliss in four volumes), IV.
Prologue
1. See Tom Paulin, The Day Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style (1998), p57.
Chapter 1: By the Tide of Humber
1. Samuel Parker, A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transpros’d, in a Discourse to its Author by the Author of the Ecclesiastical Politie (1673), p270.
2. Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum, Book VI (1598), satire I.v. 65–6: ‘A starved tenement, such as I guesse/Stands straggling in the wastes of Holdernesse’. Cited Legouis (1928), p3n. Legouis describes ‘La campagne environnante, plate et triste’, p6.
3. A.S. Ellis, Notes and Queries, 17 April 1880, p319. Describes three manuscript wills, with notes by a local antiquary, William Cole.
; 4. The evidence is presented by L.N. Wall ‘Andrew Marvell of Meldreth’, Notes and Queries, September 1958, pp399–400.
5. The Rehearsal, p133.
6. The Rehearsal, pp203–4.
7. Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England, ed. John Freeman (1952), p58.
8. Quoted by Kelliher, p27.
9. Samuel Parker, A Reproof, p77.
10. L.N. Wall, Notes and Queries, March 1958, p111.
11. Norman James Miller, Winestead and Its Lords: the History of a Holderness Village (1933), Hull, p169.
12. John Lawson, A Town Grammar School Through Six Centuries (1963), Hull, p83.
13. Mr Smirke or The Divine in Mode (1676), Grosart, Vol. IV, p15.
14. Samuel Parker, A Reproof, p227.
15. The Rehearsal, p41.
16. L.2.
17. Wood, pp230–2.
18. John Cook, The History of God’s House of Hull Commonly Called the Charterhouse (1882), p148.
19. Thomas Gent, History of Hull (1735), p39.
20. Grosart, pxxx.
21. T. Tindall Wildridge, The Hull Letters (1886), p164.
22. John Cook, op. cit., p148.
23. Thomas Gent, op. cit., p141.
24. See Hartley Coleridge, The Life of Andrew Marvell (1835), pp4–5.
Chapter 2: Cringes and Genuflexions
World Enough and Time Page 30
