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  On 26 January 1656, Alexander Callander, a Scot living in Saumur, wrote to his friend Joseph Williamson, then a young graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford but later a statesman and diplomat, and, after his knighthood, Secretary of State in the reign of Charles II. In Williamson’s papers in the Public Record Office the letter from Callander is preserved. The latter says to Williamson (the original letter is written in French): ‘If you visit Mr Dutton and Monsieur Merville his tutor (Gouverneur) I beg you to give them my humble salutations.’9 Callander took English pupils in a house owned by his sister at Saumur but was absent on business in England in January 1656 when Williamson came to visit. The latter was accompanied by two pupils of his own. Callander wrote from Paris, either having met Marvell and Dutton there en route to Saumur, or being aware of their expected arrival around this time.

  Saumur, a town on the Loire, was no accidental choice for these young Puritan gentlemen and their tutors. It was the home of the celebrated Protestant Academy and, as Legouis points out: ‘The intellectual atmosphere of the town was strongly Protestant, even though the Protestants were in a minority.’10 The French Protestants, however, were generally appalled by the English regicide, and the man in charge of a pupil destined to be the son-in-law of Oliver Cromwell might have experienced some coolness of reception. Given Marvell’s domestic circumstances when he left for France, living in a strongly Puritan household and having the charge of a ward of the Protector himself, the sojourn in Saumur would nonetheless have been the natural culmination of his most Puritan phase. Whether he sampled the famous wine of Saumur or, as Legouis suggests, made the acquaintance of Father Abel-Louis St Marthe, the learned Father Superior of a nearby Catholic Oratory, or met the local scholar and bon viveur Tallemant and through him the most un-Puritan works of Rabelais, must remain conjectural.11

  The pair remained at Saumur at least until August and probably until September when the academic year ended. On 15 August, James Scudamore, the English Royalist, wrote to Sir Richard Browne, Charles II’s resident at Paris and the father-in-law of the diarist John Evelyn, filling him in on the activities of the English at Saumur. Scudamore was rather disparaging of his compatriots’ ability for ‘acting anything serviceable’ to the Royalist cause. He reported that: ‘Many of the English are here but few of Noate.’ This small noteworthy company included, however, Dutton whom the French called ‘le Genre [sic] du Protecteur’, his connection with Cromwell thus very public indeed. Scudamore also adds that Dutton’s ‘Governour’ is ‘one Mervill a notable English Italo-Machavillian’.12 This is the first recorded indication of Marvell’s reputation of being a rather crafty figure whose cards may not always have been placed on the table. He would later be sent on diplomatic missions of a public and of a more clandestine kind. In this instance, it may be no more than a disgruntled Royalist’s observation on a young Puritan who had done rather well for himself by toadying to the Cromwellian camp, but it also implies that Marvell was seen as something more than just a travelling tutor: Dutton’s companion was ‘notable’ in his own right. What might have secured him this reputation – whether after leaving Nun Appleton he had engaged in some more subtle political intrigue that had upset the Royalists – must remain a mystery.

  Certainly, Marvell did not disguise his allegiances and connections while at Saumur. During the summer he carried out a task for Milton by circulating in learned circles copies of the latter’s Defensio Pro Se, published the previous August. In a letter written on 1 August 1657, Milton asked his friend Henry Oldenburg (later the first secretary of the Royal Society) to distribute further copies for him. Oldenburg, yet another Englishman in Saumur with a pupil, would tactfully advise Milton against drawing any further attention in France to this provocative tract, but in his initial request Milton enthusiastically describes Marvell’s success in putting the pamphlet about, although he does not identify his ‘friend’:

  A learned man, a friend of mine, spent last summer at Saumur. He wrote to me that the book was in demand in those parts; I sent only one copy; he wrote back that some of the learned to whom he had lent it had been pleased with it hugely. Had I not thought I should be doing a thing agreeable to them, I should have spared you trouble and myself expense.13

  Back in Eton probably by the end of 1656, Marvell continued in his duties in the Oxenbridge household as Dutton’s tutor. Still closely connected with key figures like Milton and Cromwell, he may have felt that he deserved some more important role in the new order that matched the abilities of a ‘notable’ thirty-five-year-old, rather than remaining an eternal young gentleman’s companion and Latin teacher. But twelve months had still to elapse before he would make that transition to a servant of the State. Early in 1657 he would read the reports of a great English naval victory and see in it the opportunity for a poem. The result – ‘On the Victory Obtained by Blake over the Spaniards, in the Bay of Sanctacruze, in the Island of Teneriff’ – was a poem that has generally been considered to detract from Marvell’s reputation in that it has been seen as a rather questionable attempt to curry favour with Cromwell. Its omission from the edition of Marvell’s poems obtained by the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1945, known familiarly by scholars as ‘Eng.poet.d.49’ – an edition whose contemporaneous manuscript additions and corrections have given it an air of greater textual authority than the first 1681 Folio edition – has led some scholars to excise the poem from the Marvell canon.14 According to Legouis, who prints the poem in the standard edition of Marvell’s poems: ‘It would be no loss to Marvell’s reputation, literary and moral, for it smacks of courtisanerie.’15 But Marvellians have sometimes been too ready to drop awkward poems from the canon when they fail to measure up. The balance of probability is that Marvell is the author. It was first published, anonymously, in an anthology in 1674, with the allusions to Cromwell cut out to fit the mood of the time.

  The great naval commander, Sir Robert Blake, was one of Cromwell’s most able and effective admirals. He had been engaged since May 1655 in blockading the Spanish coast in order to intercept treasure ships returning from America. On 20 April 1657 Blake destroyed a fleet of sixteen Spanish treasure ships at Tenerife in spite of the fact that the bay of Santa Cruz was deep and narrow-mouthed and flanked by shore batteries armed with heavy guns. Not one of the English ships was lost in the action. News of the victory reached England towards the end of May and there was a public thanksgiving in London on 3 June. Blake’s health was poor following an earlier battle wound and he died on 7 August, two hours before reaching Plymouth. The poem must therefore have been written at some time between June and early August.

  Its tone is triumphalist, scorning the weak fear of the Spanish when faced with the English navy. The line ‘The best of Lands should have the best of Kings’ has been taken as an endorsement by Marvell of the idea that Cromwell should accept the crown, something he had declined to recommend in his previous poem on Cromwell’s first anniversary as Protector. Cromwell had, by the time the poem came to be written, rejected the offer of the crown, so the sentiment was otiose. The climatically blessed Canary Isles, however, are said to lack ‘nothing Heaven can afford,/Unless it be, the having you [i.e. Cromwell] their Lord.’ The repeated invocations of Cromwell (‘For your renown, his conquering Fleet does ride’, ‘And all assumes your courage in your cause’, ‘For your resistless genious there did Raign’) give the poem a rather sycophantic air that is far removed from the carefully balanced subtleties of the ‘Horatian Ode’. Whether kingly gratitude or aesthetic reservation were uppermost in Cromwell’s mind as he read the poem, with its closing couplet ‘Whilst fame in every place, her Trumpet blowes,/And tells the World, how much to you it owes’, very shortly after its completion the poet was rewarded with the post he sought of Latin Secretary in the Protectorate. At last he had entered the public, political world in which he would remain until his death. His days of tutoring were over.

  9

  A Good Man For the State to Make Use Of

  At len
gth, by the interest of Milton, to whom he was somewhat agreeable for his ill-natur’d wit, he was made Under-secretary to Cromwell’s Secretary. Pleas’d with which honour, he publish’d a congratulatory poem in praise of the Tyrant.

  Samuel Parker, History of His Own Time1

  The office that Marvell entered, probably on 2 September 1657, was that of John Thurloe, Secretary to the Council of State. Although Thurloe was strictly his superior in that office, his job was to assist Milton as secretary of Foreign or Latin tongues and therefore he is more usually described as assistant Latin Secretary. Latin was the language of international diplomacy and communication, so Marvell’s duties would involve translation between English and Latin, drafting letters and documents, and attending on foreign dignitaries in London as translator.2 Milton’s blindness would obviously hamper him in most respects, so Marvell would have plenty of writing and drafting to do. He would probably also have taken some dictation from Milton and generally deputised for him. Marvell was also a frequent visitor at this time to Milton’s house in Petty France. Some of the documents worked on by Marvell survive in the British Library and the Bodleian Library, one of which is a forty-page translation of a political tract by the Swedish envoy to England, Johann Frederick von Friessendorff, done in Marvell’s neat, legible hand probably a few months after starting work, at the beginning of 1658. The aim of the tract was to persuade Cromwell to send his navy, with that of Sweden, against Holland and Spain.3 The historian Christopher Hill says of Marvell: ‘Like Pepys, he was one of the new type of civilian middle-class official who came into their own after the Civil War, during the soberer years of the Protectorate.’4 Marvell’s salary was a comfortable £200 a year. He would find himself at the heart of government, and, since Thurloe was an immensely powerful figure in the administration and head of the overseas intelligence service, he would be gaining an insight into an area in which he would later become personally involved.

  His first recorded piece of work was a translation of an official despatch to Thurloe from Hamburg in September 1657.5 Other documents in his hand that have survived include letters from Cromwell to overseas ambassadors and dignitaries. Among the colonial papers in the Public Record Office is a document recording a petition from a Scottish merchant, Mathias Lynen, on behalf of members of the Guinea Company of Scotland, to Cromwell (‘their only remaining refuge under God the righteous’) asking for help in recovering a ship ‘perfidiously seized’ by the Portuguese on its way back from Africa in 1637. The crew had been murdered and the ship had still not been released. On the document is written: ‘John Thurloe has desired And. Marvell to write a letter upon this petition to the King of Portugal.’6 Marvell continued in this work probably until the autumn of 1659.

  John Thurloe had been appointed Secretary of State in March 1652 and had helped Cromwell in his ascent into the Protectorate. His charge of intelligence included supervision of the internal and foreign post, and he was reputed to have a strong intelligence network with spies able to intercept letters. According to Bulstrode Whitelocke, he was one of a small knot of friends with whom Cromwell would occasionally relax and ‘lay aside his greatness’.7 At the Restoration, Thurloe was accused of high treason but was released to enjoy his retirement at Great Milton in Oxfordshire, where he was said to be consulted for his vast and privy knowledge of foreign affairs. With the return of Charles II he concealed a vast hoard of papers relating to the Protectorate which were to be rediscovered in the reign of William III in a false ceiling in Lincoln’s Inn. It is possible that Marvell visited Thurloe in these retirement years at his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn.

  Marvell himself dated his involvement in public affairs to this time, denying that he had any prior political engagement, despite his having consorted for several years with leading Puritan figures in ways that had aroused the suspicions of Royalists. In a passage from the second part of The Rehearsal Transpros’d, published in 1673 when Marvell was distancing himself from these associations, he wrote:

  for as to myself, I never had any, not the remotest relation to publick matters, nor correspondence with the persons then predominant, until the year 1657, when indeed I enter’d into an imployment, for which I was not altogether improper, and which I consider’d to be the most innocent and inoffensive towards his Majesties affairs of any in that usurped and irregular Government, to which all men were then exposed. And this I accordingly discharg’d without disobliging any one person, there having been opportunity and indeavours since his Majesties happy return to have discover’d had it been otherwise.8

  This is a very dubious passage, which contains a straight lie: we have already seen several examples of his ‘correspondence with the persons then predominant’. His representation of himself as someone who reluctantly took up a civil service post because it was the best use of his abilities, and exercised it in strict neutrality without any endorsement of the administration, always with a disinterested care for ‘his Majesties affairs’, is laughable if it is not something worse. ‘He was Latin secretary to Oliver, and very intimate and conversant with that person,’ wrote Anthony Wood of the reluctant civil servant.9 Even his reference to ‘that usurped and irregular Government’ – one in which he eagerly served and sought preferment and whose poetic propagandist he became – is a slippery piece of hindsight that does him little credit.

  Meanwhile two marriages took place that autumn. The first was of his former pupil at Nun Appleton, Mary Fairfax, who on 15 September married the second Duke of Buckingham, George Villiers, a rake later satirised by John Dryden as Zimri in Absalom and Achitophel (1681). Cromwell disapproved of the match, unsurprisingly, if Bishop Burnet’s brief character sketch of the groom is a true one: ‘He had no principles of religion, vertue, or friendship. Pleasure, frolick, or extravagant diversion was all that he laid to heart. He was true to nothing.’10 It was an unfortunate fate for the innocent emblem of ideal virtue celebrated in the poems written at Nun Appleton House. Two months later, on 19 November, Cromwell’s third daughter, also called Mary, married Thomas Belasyse, second Viscount Fauconberg, a kinsman of Lord Fairfax, at Hampton Court and Marvell composed two songs for what was probably a musical entertainment devised for the occasion (‘Two Songs at the Marriage of the Lord Fauconberg and Lady Mary Cromwell’). They are both in the pastoral mode that Marvell loved, the first a dialogue between the shepherd, Endymion, and the moon, Cynthia, the second between three rustics, Hobbinol, Phillis, and Tomalin. The first contains an oblique reference to the marriage of Frances Cromwell to Robert Rich, frustrating Cromwell’s plans to have her marry William Dutton. The second alludes to Fauconberg’s Yorkshire origins by calling him ‘the Northern Shepheard’s Son’. Listening to the applause die away after the performance of these songs, Marvell might reflect on the marriages of all these young people he had known and contrast them with his own increasingly confirmed bachelor status.

  The fact that, amid all his official duties and political tribute poems, Marvell was still writing pastoral verses is a reminder that poems like ‘The Garden’, or, as some have suggested,11 ‘Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borow’, could have been written after the Yorkshire period to which they are customarily assigned.

  The pastoral mode was commonly used by poets in the seventeenth century and, without an appreciation of its conventions and properties, one cannot fully appreciate Marvell’s way of reanimating conventional material. The case against pastoral is plain enough and the prevailing eighteenth-century view was expressed with his habitual trenchancy by Dr Johnson when he argued that the pastoral machinery of Milton’s elegy Lycidas was inconsistent with ‘the effusion of real passion’ and that: ‘Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.’12 Such naive views of poetic spontaneity, which were also a characteristic of English poetry in the postwar period – one thinks of Larkin’s denunciations of ‘the myth-kitty’ – may have receded in the more complicated critical climate of the late twentieth century, although some readers may still have diffic
ulty with a poetry that is not plain utterance but that speaks through a poetic convention. The special pleasure of Marvell’s poetry lies often precisely in this play with tradition. Understanding it is the key to enjoying him. The critic J.B. Leishman put it well when he wrote: ‘For, although Marvell’s poetry is highly original and, at its best, unmistakably his own and no one else’s, he is almost always acting upon hints and suggestions provided by earlier poets, and almost never writing entirely, as children would say, out of his own head.’13

  Marvell was also a learned classicist and would be familiar with the origins of the pastoral tradition in the Idylls of Theocritus, the third-century BC Sicilian poet who laid the groundwork of this bucolic genre where shepherds and shepherdesses acted out their little dramas with an interesting mixture of idealisation and realism that Marvell’s talent readily embraced. Virgil’s eclogues and the second-century AD Greek poem by Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, developed the tradition which, after disappearing in the middle ages, returned at the Renaissance in the poetry of Torquato Tasso, Miguel de Cervantes, Sir Philip Sidney, William Browne and many others. The genre eventually expired when the Romantic poets rediscovered a more naturalistic response to rural life, throwing the convention aside to commune directly, as they supposed, with nature. But Marvell, as well as drawing on the historical tradition of the genre, also played with and echoed the work of his contemporaries working with the same matter. Sometimes he appears even to be answering their poetic arguments in his own variations. As the Marvell scholar and critic Frank Kermode put it: ‘It seems to have been Marvell’s habit to assume in his readers an acquaintance with the other poems of the genres in which he chose to work.’14 A modern reader, impatient with these conventions – which can admittedly invite on occasion a wry or satiric response – could reflect that much popular entertainment in late twentieth-century culture, particularly television comedy, practises an identical generic parasitism.