Marvell and the Church

Marvell’s hostility to the Church of England was a matter of faith for his clerical antagonists during his lifetime, and soon became a central component of his posthumous reputation. The present chapter re-examines this aspect of Marvell’s writings, which are contextualized with reference to the poet’s family background and the broader fortunes of the established Church in the early and mid-seventeenth century. Marvell’s complex and shifting political allegiances during the 1640s and 1650s had significant implications for his views on ecclesiastical settlement, but throughout the interregnal period he remained broadly in favour of a reformed national church establishment, in tacit opposition to the views of godly republicans such as John Milton and Henry Vane. This commitment survived, mutatis mutandis, into the Restoration period, and coloured Marvell’s support for a policy of ecclesiastical comprehension. Only with the king’s abandonment of that policy, and apparent surrender to the forces of intolerance, did Marvell come to identify the corruptions of the Church of England with the threat of arbitrary government on the part of the Stuart court.

Marvell and Parliament

Andrew Marvell represented Hull in Parliament for more than eighteen years. The record of his actual activity in Parliament is slight, and his political importance can, as a result, seem slight, at least compared to his significance as a satirist. Yet as well as his well-documented behind-the-scenes activity on behalf of Hull, Marvell’s parliamentary record can be interpreted as that of a very important fixer and strategist on behalf of the ‘Presbyterians’ in the Commons, a group which he did much to define and possibly also to call into existence. Analysis of Marvell’s ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ suggests that it may be not just a polemical and satirical description of a debate, but also intended as a means of rallying some of the disparate elements of an opposition to the court. It, and Marvell’s other political writings, emphasize how central Parliament was to his thought.

Marvell and Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Influence always leaves a wraith-like path, invisible to one person, transparent to another. The danger of reading-in is evident. This chapter proposes that Marvell’s influence on nineteenth-century poetry is manifold but frequently fugitive, now like centrifugal ripples in a still pond, now a sudden shower of meteors across the night sky. Nigel Smith reminds us that ‘The important point to remember is that Marvell was not unrecognized as a poet until the later nineteenth century, as has often been claimed’. Poets from Wordsworth to Tennyson are studied in relation to the nuanced ambivalence of Marvellian poetry; so too are critics and anthologists; so too is the range of poetic genres affected by Marvell’s influence.

Harsh Remedies

In The Rehearsal Transpros’d, Marvell characterized his approach to satire as being ‘merry and angry’ at once. Though politically opposed, Marvell shared John Dryden’s conviction that ‘the true end of Satyre, is the amendment of Vices by correction’—the satirist resembled a physician who prescribes ‘harsh Remedies to an inveterate Disease’. But where Dryden claims in the Preface to Absalom and Achitophel to be addressing ‘the more Moderate sort’, Marvell in ‘Last Instruction to a Painter’ (at nearly 1,000 lines, his longest poem) is openly partisan and controversially subverts the conventions of the royalist panegyric and portrait paintings, products of a court society excoriated by his friend John Milton as full of ‘flatteries and prostrations’. Marvell insistently links sexual and political corruption, vividly depicting a world in which appetite alone rules. Though deeply critical of Charles II as the fount of corruption in the sick state, its stance, rather than being openly republican, is to offer counsel to the King, in the hope that he is not yet beyond reform.

Greenland

Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ was written twice, first in simple-seeing English and then in marmoreal Latin, the latter paving over the first, but beautifully, as with a Roman mosaic. The English poem, with its uncanny, solitary, misogynistic speaker, explores the strange phenomenon of consciousness, but more fundamentally of prosopopoeia, of a face spookily appearing before us in a text, and speaking. We cannot read ‘The Garden’ theologically and we cannot read it morally, either, although these discourses are awakened in it. Nor can we read ‘The Garden’ even from the point of view of common sense, because to do so would destroy the adventure of the spirit that it offers: an encounter with the aesthetic as a new category of experience. In ‘The Garden,’ art becomes compensation for the loss of eternally existing things above the sphere of the moon. The poem is a metaphysical event.

Marvell and Science

While Marvell’s post-Restoration life and writings have been much scrutinized of late, his relation to the nascent scientific culture of the time—largely London-centred and symbolized by the newly founded Royal Society—has been largely overlooked. Important developments in what we (loosely) call science but contemporaries would have termed ‘natural’, ‘new’, or ‘experimental’ philosophy were happening on Marvell’s doorstep, yet the lack of scholarly curiosity about what he made of them is remarkable. The aim of this essay is accordingly to establish that Marvell’s writings were more deeply informed by the activities and findings of the Royal Society than previously thought. Indeed, as the case studies (the nature of effluvia, glassmaking, and comets and divination) will demonstrate, experimental philosophy was a major imaginative resource for him. Indeed, in many respects, there is not that much to choose between a dedicated practitioner of the new experimental philosophy like Boyle and an interested lay observer like Marvell.

Marvell and Nonconformity

This chapter examines Marvell’s relationship to, and representations of, the nonconformist convictions and practices that refused to comply with the 1662 Act of Uniformity and the ensuing penal religious legislation by which the restored regime sought to re-establish the episcopal Church of England and to outlaw dissent from it. It establishes the Puritan and nonconformist character of his native Hull, his sympathy for nonconformists and corresponding dismay at their persecution, and that he was a key figure in a series of interrelated nonconformist and oppositional networks that worked politically for a greater degree of toleration. In his published works, however, he avoided overt nonconformist partisanship to argue for a moderate, reasonable, and liberal middle way that could accommodate the widest possible range of opinion.

Marvell and Diplomacy

This chapter examines Marvell’s diplomatic career, with a particular focus on his role as secretary to the Earl of Carlisle’s 1663 embassy to Muscovy, Sweden, and Denmark. Modern accounts of the embassy have tended to represent it as a failure, which can be blamed partly on the haughtiness of speeches and letters written by Marvell and presented by Carlisle. The chapter discusses what constituted success and failure in the wider context of European diplomacy at this time, and asks whether Marvell might not have been judged too harshly. It explores the importance of contests over ceremony in early modern diplomacy, and argues that Marvell and Carlisle put together rhetorical performances of considerable skill and resourcefulness in the context of these contests. The speeches and papers written by Marvell in Muscovy throw into relief affinities between poetic and diplomatic forms of representation, particularly around the figure of prosopopoeia. The chapter ends by looking at Marvell’s continued interest in this figure following the end of his diplomatic career, and his ongoing aptitude for ventriloquizing royalty.

Marvell and His Adversaries, 1672–1678

Marvell exploded upon the public stage in 1673 with his coruscating satire The Rehearsal Transpros’d. This, and everything he wrote until his death in 1678, was provocative, and duly elicited angry—and sometimes witty—responses. His enemies were Anglican churchmen, most strenuously Samuel Parker, who were protective of clerical honour and sacerdotal authority, and defensive of the Church of England’s religious and political monopoly. These critics were joined by secular defenders of Charles II’s cause, notably the prodigious propagandist Roger L’Estrange. Marvell’s tracts and their contestation in the public domain are keys to understanding the formation of Whig and Tory sensibilities. His adversaries, their rhetorical strategies, and readers’ absorption in these print duels are guides to the genres and protocols of contemporary controversy, as well as illuminating the politics of memory, under the shadow of the Civil Wars, the theology of Calvinism in retreat, and the ecclesiology of Restoration Anglicanism.

Ruin the Sacred Truths

This chapter begins by reviewing the relationship between Milton and Marvell, but is devoted more expansively to their literary and intellectual ties. It examines the presence of Milton in Marvell’s pastoral poetry of the early 1650s where Marvell engages with the ‘Nativity Ode’, Comus, and ‘Lycidas’ but avoids reproducing the prophetic quality of Milton’s voice, hedging his allusiveness with delicate irony. The chapter also examines Marvell’s later engagement with Milton’s tolerationist treatises. Like Milton, Marvell is shaped by recent heterodox positions, but steers away from the boldness of the Miltonic vision. Where Milton asks the state to tolerate a variety of fully independent churches and religions, Marvell clings to the more conservative hope that the Church of England will merely include, or ‘comprehend’, a wider range of beliefs and believers. A political realist and a literary ironist, Marvell distances himself from the political idealism and prophetic literariness of Milton.