MARVELL, Andrew (1621-78), of , Westminster.

Marvell, like his friend and fellow poet John Milton, derived from relatively humble origins. Although descended from a venerable Cambridgeshire family, he was the first of his line – and would be the last – to sit in Parliament.23L.N. Wall, ‘Andrew Marvell of Meldreth’, N and Q, cciii. 399. His grandfather, a Cambridgeshire yeoman, had left his native county to join his eldest son (Marvell’s father) at Hull in 1627, leaving unpaid his £2 assessment for the Forced Loan.24‘Andrew Marvell (c.1584–1641)’, Oxford DNB; W.M. Palmer, ‘A list of the Cambs. subsidy rolls, 1250-1695’, East Anglian, n.s. viii. 315; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 19. It was Marvell’s father, Andrew Marvell senior, who established the family at Hull. Having taken holy orders, he began his ministry in the East Riding, where his reputation as a preacher brought him to the attention of the region’s largest and wealthiest audience for godly sermons, the townspeople of Hull.25Marchant, Puritans, 262. In 1624, he was appointed lecturer of Hull’s principal municipal church – Holy Trinity – and master of the Charterhouse Hospital in nearby Sculcoates. The family’s connection with Hull was strengthened during the mid-1630s with the marriages of two of Marvell’s sisters to leading Hull merchants.26von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 17-18, 21, 22. Marvell senior was also held in high regard by the town’s wealthiest and most influential inhabitant during the early Stuart period, Sir John Lister*.27von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 27.

Marvell was raised in a godly environment. Andrew Marvell senior, although conformable to the established church, was (in his son’s words) ‘none of the most over-running or eager’ in his observance of the rites of Prayer-Book worship. An enthusiastic preacher, he was described by the antiquary Anthony Wood as ‘Calvinistical’.28Ath. Ox. iv. 232; Marchant, Puritans, 118-21, 262; ‘Andrew Marvell (c.1584–1641)’, Oxford DNB; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25-6, 27. He was also a close friend of one of the East Riding’s foremost godly families, the Alureds of Sculcoates. The Alureds not only owned the manor of the Sculcoates but also the capital messuage of the Charterhouse and were thus neighbours of the Marvells, who resided in the master’s house of the Charterhouse Hospital. In 1628, Marvell senior was a signatory to the will of Henry Alured†, the father of the future parliamentarians John* and Matthew Alured*, and would take as his second wife one Lucy Alured, who was almost certainly a kinswoman of the Sculcoates family.29Infra, ‘John Alured’; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 19-20, 24-5. Through the Alureds, the Marvells would have been linked to a network of godly East Riding families that included several prominent future parliamentarians, notably Sir Matthew Boynton*, Henry Darley* and Richard Darley*. It was possibly John Alured – a leading member of the Fairfax interest in Yorkshire – who would introduce the young Andrew Marvell to Sir Thomas Fairfax*, in whose service Marvell was to write some of the finest poetry of the interregnum.30Infra, ‘John Alured’.

Marvell received a very thorough education – first at Hull grammar school and then, from the age of just 13, at Trinity College, Cambridge.31Al Cant.; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 20. Having remained at Trinity after graduating to study for his Master’s degree, he was enticed from the university by some ‘Jesuits ...seeing in him a genius beyond his years’, but after ‘some months his father found him in a bookseller’s shop in London and prevailed with him to return’.32Kelliher, Marvell, 25; ‘Andrew Marvell (1621-78)’, Oxford DNB. This episode suggests that the young Marvell’s intellectual curiosity outweighed the reflexive antipathy towards Catholicism of the typical godly Protestant.

With his father’s death in January 1641, Marvell was now free to follow his own inclinations, which took him, once again, to London (Trinity expelled him that autumn for absenteeism).33von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 29. By February 1642, when he took the Protestation, he was living on the north side of Cowcross Street, in Clerkenwell. That same month he was a signatory to a deed of mortgage between two of Yorkshire’s wealthiest men, the future royalists Sir William Savile* and Thomas Viscount Savile.34von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 29. Sir William Savile is known to have had lodgings in Fetter Lane, near Cowcross Street, in the 1630s, while another of the Saviles had a house in Clerkenwell.35Notts. RO, DD/SR/211/128/1/130; Strafforde Letters, i. 218; Kelliher, Marvell, 31. If Marvell was indeed on familiar terms with Sir William Savile it would certainly be consistent with the royalist sympathies he was to evince later in the 1640s and with his evident admiration for men of power and strong will. Savile was a man of great pride and ambition, who aspired to military glory in the king’s service.36Infra, ‘Sir William Savile’. However, his lack of talent as a general would be mercilessly exposed by Sir Thomas Fairfax – Marvell’s patron during the commonwealth.

Marvell’s own commitment either to the king’s cause or to the ‘true, reformed Protestant religion’ and to the privileges of Parliament that he had sworn to uphold in the Protestation was not sufficient to keep him in England. At some point in 1642 or 1643, he made his way to the continent, where he spent four years or so travelling in Holland, France, Italy (including Rome) and Spain and acquiring the linguistic and martial skills of a gentleman.37CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 176-7; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 30-1. According to a later report, he had been employed on his foreign travels as a tutor to ‘noblemen’s sons’.38von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 43. His choice of Italy and Spain again demonstrates his lack of Protestant squeamishness about contact with popery. He had returned to England by mid-November 1647, when he styled himself a gentleman and denizen of Hull.39von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 31.

Between his return to England and the regicide, Marvell wrote at least two – and very probably three – poems that indicate strong royalist sympathies on his part.40The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell ed. H.M. Margoliouth (Oxford, 1971), i. 2-5, 429-32. In one of these works – published in a commendatory verse collection for the royalist poet Richard Lovelace – Marvell refers to ‘the grim consistory’ and the severity of the ‘young Presbytery’. Evidently Marvell, like his fellow royalist contributors, had no great liking for the Presbyterian church discipline of the Scots and their English allies.41Marvell ed. Margoliouth, i. 3; Kelliher, Marvell, 37; N. McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2008), ch. 4. The attribution to Marvell of the poem ‘An Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers’, who was killed by parliamentarian soldiers during the second civil war, has been questioned. However, scholars have identified similarities in this work with other Marvell poems and have also found evidence that place him at least on the fringes of the Villiers’ circle both in England and, in 1645-6, in Rome.42Marvell ed. Margoliouth, i. 429-35; Kelliher, Marvell, 36-7; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 33; McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 24-9; W. Chernaik, ‘Was Marvell a republican?’, The Seventeenth Century xx. 81. The young Marvell was clearly drawn to ‘forsaken virtue’s cause’ – to the values of loyalty and nobility, of learning and civility, that some of the king’s devotees sustained in defiance of puritan austerity. Equally appealing, perhaps, were the richer pickings for patronage among the royalist grandees than among their parliamentarian peers.

The beginning of a shift in Marvell’s political allegiance was announced by his poem ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, written in the summer of 1650. This work, his most accomplished political poem, praises Cromwell not in conventional moral terms but as a man of destiny, the ‘force of angry Heaven’s flame’. Marvell pays lip-service to ‘how good he [Cromwell] is, how just And fit for highest trust’. But what clearly excites his admiration is the lord general’s irresistible power as the instrument of fate – ‘the War’s and Fortune’s son’. Marvell’s endorsement of the fledgling English republic is correspondingly conditional. He ‘unambiguously counsels support of the commonwealth ... but does so provisionally, on the understanding that allegiance can be withdrawn under less auspicious circumstances’. Moreover, in the midst of this homage to the dictates of providence and Cromwellian force majeure are moving couplets on the execution of Charles I, in which ‘the royal actor born’ is eulogised for his Christ-like deportment upon the ‘tragic scaffold’.43Marvell ed. Margoliouth, i. 91-4; J. Raymond, ‘A Cromwellian centre?’, in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell ed. D. Hirst, S.N. Zwicker (Cambridge, 2010), 142-4.

Marvell’s seeming transformation from royalist to parliamentarian was largely a shift in the object of his preoccupation with greatness and majesty from Charles to Cromwell. What connects his admiration for the two men is their common nobility: virtuous and tragic in the case of Charles, heroic and glorious where Cromwell is concerned. He was never to support Cromwell on the basis of a belief in the Good Old Cause, still less in the rule of the Saints. Even so, his praise of Cromwell in the ‘Ode’ represented more than simply a poetic exercise in anatomising the ‘arts’ of republican rule or a hopeful punt for preferment in the new state; it also reflected Marvell’s perception of the lord general as the pre-eminent champion of English sovereignty against the confederal claims of Covenant-engaged Presbyterianism. Marvell’s allegiance, at least during the 1650s, was shaped by an Erastian hostility to godly fanaticism, not by identification with any particular party; his main sources of literary inspiration remained the heroic and the sublime rather than more obviously political or religious themes.44McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, ch. 5; C. Wortham, ‘Marvell’s Cromwell poems: an accidental triptych’, in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell ed. C. Condren, A.D. Cousins (Aldershot, 1990), 22, 23.

At some point in 1650, Marvell was engaged by Sir Thomas (now 3rd Baron) Fairfax as tutor to his daughter Mary.45von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 34-5; D. Hirst, S. Zwicker, ‘High summer at Nun Appleton, 1651’, HJ xxxvi. 248-9. Fairfax had resigned his command of the parliamentary army that summer upon his refusal to countenance an invasion of Scotland and had then retired to the seclusion of his Yorkshire estates. Marvell remained in Fairfax’s service for about two years – although there are grounds for conjecturing that he punctuated his time in Yorkshire with a sojourn in the entourage that accompanied Oliver St John* as the Rump’s ambassador to the United Provinces early in 1651. How Marvell had entered St John’s orbit is a mystery – unless, perhaps, he had joined the embassy as part of the entourage of St John’s partner on this mission, Marvell’s fellow Yorkshireman Walter Strickland* (the Stricklands were closely linked with the Alured-Darley network), and had then transferred to the circle of much the more influential of the two ambassadors. If Marvell was not involved in this embassy in some capacity, then the Latin poem he addressed to St John that year, urging an aggressive stance in negotiations with the Dutch, would seem to have been an act of gross presumption on his part, given the disparity in their stations.46Infra, ‘Walter Strickland’; ‘Sir William Strickland’; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 36-7; B. Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, 2007), 116-30, 399-404. Certainly his temperament was not well suited to a life of rural quietude in Yorkshire, for by the winter of 1652-3 he was seeking employment in the service of the commonwealth.

In February 1653, John Milton, Latin secretary to the council of state, wrote to its president, John Bradshawe*, recommending Marvell’s appointment as his assistant (Milton was by this time totally blind). Milton described Marvell as ‘a man whom both by report and the converse I have had with him [is] of singular desert for the state to make use of’. He added that Marvell could speak Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish and was well read in the classics.47CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 176-7; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 38. It is possible that Marvell either wrote or substantially revised his poem ‘The Character of Holland’ – in which he referred to the commonwealth as ‘our better Rome’, ‘our infant Hercules’ – in support of this job application.48Marvell ed. Margoliouth, i. 100-3; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 38; Worden, Literature and Politics, 130-2. The apparently self-serving nature of his admiration for the Rump’s martial prowess may help to explain why the council of state ignored Milton’s recommendation.

Having failed to obtain public office, Marvell quickly secured a private post of almost equal significance – as tutor to William Dutton, the nephew and heir presumptive of Cromwell’s close friend John Dutton*. Marvell was appointed to this post by Cromwell himself, who at that time regarded William Dutton as a prospective son-in-law.49Supra, ‘John Dutton’; Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 98-9; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 39. The appointment of Marvell as the boy’s tutor suggests that Cromwell held the poet in high esteem. Who recommended Marvell to Cromwell is not clear, although the most likely candidates are Lord Fairfax or Oliver St John.50Marvell ed. Margoliouth, i. 99; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 36. Marvell wrote to Cromwell in July 1653, after he and his pupil had joined the household of the Independent divine John Oxenbridge (St John’s brother-in-law) at Eton, thanking him for having placed them ‘in so godly a family’.51Original Lttrs. ed. Nickolls, 98-9. In 1655-6, Marvell accompanied his young charge on a visit to France.52von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 42-4.

Following the establishment of the protectorate in the winter of 1653-4, Marvell wrote a series of poems in praise – sometimes in apocalyptic strain – of Cromwell and the achievements (particularly military) of his rule. But as in his ‘Horatian Ode’, the focus of Marvell’s admiration and interest is not the nature of the regime that Cromwell’s genius helped sustain but the man himself and his accomplishments. Although he has been described as a constitutional monarchist, Marvell showed little interest in constitutional forms in any of his writings during the 1650s, beyond a preference for firm government by a single person.53Marvell ed. Margoliouth, i. 295; Wortham, ‘Marvell’s Cromwell poems’, 26, 35, 39-40. It was Cromwell’s divinely-conferred power to protect England from the domestic threat of Presbyterianism and the sects, as well as the foreign threat of popery, that commanded Marvell’s allegiance.54N. McDowell, ‘Marvell among the Cromwellians’, in The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution ed. L.L. Knoppers (Oxford, 2012), 488-9.

The main point of difference between Marvell and those who remained loyal to the Stuarts was, it seems, in his ascription of political legitimacy on the basis of inherent greatness and providential imprimatur rather than hereditary right. At least one contemporary suspected a likely source for this de factoist creed, describing him in 1656 as ‘a notable English Italo-Machiavellian’.55von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 44; B. Worden, ‘The politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, HJ xxvii. 535-9. The main objects of Marvell’s political and poetical scorn were not the royalists, however, who denied only Cromwell’s legitimacy, but the radical sectaries and republicans, who were opposed to the very notion of rule by a single person.56McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 248-50; ‘Marvell among the Cromwellians’, 490-1; Chernaik, ‘Was Marvell a republican?’, 89. Not surprisingly, Marvell appears to have warmed to idea of Cromwell accepting the crown under the Humble Petition and Advice – ‘The best of lands should have the best of kings’ he wrote in 1657.57Marvell ed. Margoliouth, i. 120.

Early in September 1657, Marvell secured the Latin secretaryship that he had sought in 1653, although he was appointed as an assistant to the Cromwellian courtier Secretary John Thurloe* rather than to the republican Milton.58TSP vii. 487; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 47; Kelliher, ‘Some notes on Andrew Marvell’, 130, 131. Marvell’s salary was £200 a year and his duties included liaising with diplomats and in drafting and translating the protectorate’s correspondence with foreign powers and its own representatives on the continent.59TSP vi. 743, 747, 769, 770; vii. 69, 487; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 47-55. He was one of the official mourners at Cromwell’s funeral in September 1658 and apparently had no difficulty transferring his allegiance to the considerably less heroic figure – a fact he evidently appreciated – of Richard Cromwell*.60CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 131; Burton’s Diary, ii. 524; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 54; Raymond, ‘A Cromwellian centre?’, 153. In November, Hull corporation sent Marvell a barrel of the town’s much sought after ale, either for services already rendered at Whitehall or in connection with the £60 a year that the protectoral council granted to the town in December for upkeep of Hull’s magazine.61Hull Hist. Centre, C BRB/4, f. 268; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 55. Later that same month, his brother-in-law Edmund Popple, the sheriff of Hull, requested that Marvell be made a freeman, which the corporation granted in consideration of the ‘good service he [Marvell] hath already done for this town’.62Hull Hist. Centre, C BRB/4, f. 274.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Marvell stood as one of the candidates at Hull, very probably with the backing of the corporation. Competition for the two borough places was fierce, with at least four other candidates vying for election, including the former Hull alderman John Ramsden* and the town’s MP in the Long Parliament and the Rump, Sir Henry Vane II. The front-runners were reportedly Marvell and Ramsden (who may have been standing together), although it was conceived that Vane – who was said to have had a ‘considerable party’ among the freemen – might gain a seat ‘by the divisions of the rest’. This suggests that the other candidates were all canvassing, and thus threatening to split, the pro-Cromwellian vote. Vane and his republican friends would later claim that his return for Hull had been thwarted ‘through ... the influence of the [Cromwellian] court party’. On election day (10 Jan. 1659), the town sheriff was obliged to call a poll and Ramsden and Marvell duly received the ‘major vote’ of the corporation and freemen and were returned in that order.63Supra, ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’; Add. 21427, f. 262; Hull Hist. Centre, C BRL/635; C BRB/4, f. 277; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 51.

Regardless of Vane’s allegations, there is no evidence that the government had actively sought his defeat or for the claim that Marvell owed his election to the influence of Lord Fairfax.64von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 7, 56; Hirst and Zwicker, ‘High summer at Nun Appleton’, 265. Aside from the fact that the corporation tended to resent interference in the town’s electoral affairs, Marvell would have had little need of outside assistance.65Supra, ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’. His return was secured largely, it seems, on the strength of his past – and in anticipation of his future – ‘good service’ to the town as assistant to Secretary Thurloe. The fact that Marvell’s brother-in-law was the town sheriff and returning officer may also have worked to his advantage. Perhaps Vane was alluding to chicanery by Popple when he laid part of the blame for his defeat at Hull to the ‘practices’ of some of the townsmen during the election.66Hull Hist. Centre, C BRL/635.

Marvell attended the Commons on at least 86 days between taking his seat and 22 April 1659, when the army forced Protector Richard to dissolve Parliament.67Hull Hist. Centre, C BRB/4, f. 284; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 57. Despite his regular attendance, he appears to have been one of the less prominent Members of the House. He was named to only four, minor, committees and made no recorded contribution to debate.68CJ vii. 600a, 622b, 638a, 639a. On paper, at least, he was a firm supporter of the court party. In a letter to George Downing*, the Cromwellian envoy at The Hague, in February 1659, Marvell attacked the republicans in the House for their opposition to the bill recognising Richard Cromwell as protector and for their doctrine that ‘all power is in the people: that it is reverted into this House by the death of his Highness [Oliver Cromwell]; that Mr Speaker is protector in possession ... that this House is all England’. Marvell admitted that the republicans ‘have much the odds in speaking, but it is to be hoped that our justice, our affection and our number, which is at least two thirds, will wear them out at the long run’. 69Kelliher, Marvell, 74-5. Marvell’s prediction proved accurate, although the only effect of the court party’s triumph was to provoke the army into dissolving Parliament. Marvell’s support for the protectorate was not sufficiently conspicuous or adamantine to render him unemployable by the restored Rump, for the council of state continued him in his post as Latin secretary, although it removed him from his lodgings at Whitehall.70Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 178, 187, 196, 217; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 58.

As an opponent of the republicans and sects, Marvell almost certainly welcomed the Restoration, although he lost his office at Whitehall at some point during the first half of 1660. He stood for Hull again in the elections to the 1660 Convention and once again faced strong competition, with at least five other candidates in the running (it is likely that Marvell and John Ramsden stood together as supporters of a restoration of monarchy). The contest went to a poll, with Ramsden receiving 227 votes and Marvell coming second with 141.71HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’. Both men were marked by Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, as likely supporters of a godly church settlement.72G.T.F. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 344. In debate, Marvell sided with those Members seeking to resist the full re-establishment of the pre-civil war church, and he was a minority teller in favour of a bill to give effect to the Worcester House declaration for modified episcopacy.73HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Andrew Marvell’; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 60, 61.

Marvell was returned for Hull a third time in the elections to the Cavalier Parliament, where he worked diligently in support of the town’s interests. He spoke rarely in debate but was probably influential behind the scenes as an adviser and strategist for Wharton and other members of the ‘country’ interest.74HP Commons 1660-90; N.H. Keeble, ‘“I would not tell you any tales”’, in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell ed. Condren and Cousins, 116-120; von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 7-10; P. Seaward, ‘Marvell and Parliament’, in The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell, ed. Dzelzainis and Holberton, 96-113. A highly effective, if occasional, polemicist for the 1st earl of Shaftesbury (Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*) and his allies, he shared their dislike of prelacy, their support for a more comprehensive national church and their belief in a court-centred plot, supported by the episcopate, to impose popery and arbitrary government. Marvell’s own religious inclinations are hard to pin down, but by the 1670s he seems to have favoured a Baxterian ‘middle way’ between high Anglicanism and rigid Calvinism, with toleration for all, even Catholics.75HP Commons 1660-90; W. Lamont, ‘The religion of Andrew Marvell’, in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell ed. Condren and Cousins, 135-56; C. Condren, ‘Andrew Marvell as polemicist’, in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell ed. Condren and Cousins, 157-87; J. Spurr, ‘The poet’s religion’, in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell ed. Hirst, Zwicker, 158-72; N. von Maltzahn, ‘Milton, Marvell and toleration’, in Milton and Toleration ed. S. Achinstein, E. Sauer (Oxford, 2007), 86-96.

Marvell died suddenly (and thus intestate), of a malarial fever, on 16 August 1678 and was buried two days later at St Giles-in-the-Fields.76von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 213-14. The administration of his estate was granted in March 1679 to Mary ‘Marvell’, his landlady and housekeeper during his final years, whose claim to have contracted a clandestine marriage with him in 1667 is generally disputed.77von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 11-12, 219, 220, 226-7, 229-31; F. S. Tupper, ‘Mary Palmer, alias Mrs Andrew Marvell’, Procs. of the Modern Languages Assoc. liii. 367-92. None of Marvell’s immediate family sat in Parliament.