Cloistered Virtue

This chapter focuses on Marvell’s Upon Appleton House (c.1651) and explores how Marvell uses the ruins of Nun Appleton Priory in this poem to meditate on the ruination of state-run religion during the puritan revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. The chapter sets the poem’s representation of Marvell’s patron—Thomas, third lord Fairfax—against the backdrop of the Scottish invasion of England in early August 1651, arguing that despite Fairfax’s decision the previous summer to resign his role as lord general of the parliamentary army, the poem nevertheless envisages a role for Fairfax in the military defence of northern England in August 1651, as governor of the important garrison town of Hull. Scotland, however, was not the only threat facing England in summer 1651. For the Fairfaxes, and other English presbyterians, the English church was a garden paradise overrun by the weeds of sectarianism, and it was English sectarianism that presbyterians on both sides of the border blamed for the outbreak of England’s war with Scotland in 1650. The chapter explores how Marvell gives voice in Upon Appleton House to presbyterian anxieties over the rise of sectarianism in the early 1650s, focusing on the poem’s representation of Nun Appleton’s meadows, garden, and priory ruins. In these catholic ruins, the chapter argues, Marvell sees English protestant sins reflected, and thus the poem’s remembrance of the dissolution of the monasteries is also an opportunity for a presbyterian meditation on the iconoclasm of English sectarians in the early 1650s.