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  Cromwell returned from his brutal mission in Ireland in May 1650, his hands dripping with blood. Even sympathetic biographers of Cromwell such as Christopher Hill make no attempt to whitewash this episode or minimise the truth of ‘Cromwell’s racial contempt for the Irish’.5 As Hill points out, this hatred of the Irish was not unique to Cromwell but common to most propertied Englishmen at the time. Even articulate exponents of political liberty like Milton ‘shared the view that the Irish were culturally so inferior that their subordination was natural and necessary’. Cromwell arrived in Ireland in August 1649 and on 11 September he sacked the town of Drogheda, slaughtering virtually the whole garrison and all priests that were captured. This was closely followed by another massacre at Wexford where, after an eight-day siege, the town was sacked and up to 2,000 troops, priests and civilians were butchered. The remainder of the town’s population fled, leading Cromwell to report to Parliament that it would now be a good place for English colonists to settle. Cromwell was untroubled by doubt and declared: ‘We come (by the assistance of God) to hold forth and maintain the lustre and glory of English liberty in a nation where we have an undoubted right to do it.’6 Cromwell’s conviction – shared by Marvell and other Puritans – that liberty and religious freedom did not apply to Catholics because of their religion’s sinister connections with foreign powers with designs on the liberty of Protestant Englishmen ran very deep.

  We cannot be certain how much Marvell knew about the conduct of Cromwell’s campaign and therefore the extent to which there was moral complicity in the Lord General’s genocidal ferocity. But his ‘Ode’ was not hagiography and is characterised by a measured tone that oscillates between praise of Cromwell – in terms that seem to portray him now as an elemental force of nature, now as one living precariously by force majeure alone – and recognition of the constitutional enormity of what had occurred, sharpened by a picture of the dignity of the monarch he had usurped.

  Twentieth-century criticism has subjected this poem to much analysis and commentary. Directly opposing conclusions have been drawn and Marvell’s politics continue to elicit powerful and contradictory critiques. A similar pattern of interpretation is found in relation to the other poems in the Marvell canon. Indeed, Marvell criticism has been punctuated by periodic expressions of dismay from the leading scholars in the field, decrying the lack of balance and judicious understanding in many attempts at interpretation. Rare is that finely adjusted, knowledgeable tact that has characterised the best criticism and been so scandalously absent from the worst.7 One such scholar, John Carey, even went so far as to say: ‘The amount of Marvell criticism is growing rapidly, and there is more bad than good.’8 Long before the emergence of critical theories about the arbitrary signification of texts, Marvell critics were having a field day with interpretation. In one sense, of course, this is a tribute to the complexity of Marvell’s art, its refusal of definite closure around one clear meaning, its rich, ambiguous, polysemic texture. It is the prerogative of great art to leave the critic fumbling in its wake, even as we recognise the vital importance of informed criticism in helping to understand texts. And the texts, where Marvell is concerned, are fraught with the possibility of error. Again and again, critics have sought to reduce the poems to philosophical schema or to identify them too closely with the political circumstances of the time (this ‘represents’ the state of the Church of England; that ‘is’ the Battle of Marston Moor). The truest readings of the poetry are those which are sensitive to the strangeness of Marvell’s genius: its delicate equipoise, held between the sensual and the abstract, its refusal to treat experience too tidily, the uncanny tremor of implication that makes the poems’ lucid surfaces shimmer with a sense of something undefined and undefinable just beneath. There may have been political reasons for this. Eliot’s ‘lukewarm partisan’ was not smugly detached from the contemporary political mayhem. In less than a decade he would be sitting on the benches of the House of Commons and he would remain an MP until his death. But it may have been that he saw the function of the artist at a time of revolutionary change as being not a war artist or propagandist but a witness to the true, inner nature of the conflict.

  His hesitations, his attention to nuance, his willingness to reflect both sides, his holding of the line for contemplation, may have been not an evasion but a gesture of aesthetic responsibility. Two centuries later another English poet, Matthew Arnold, would argue that a society in the process of rapid change needed at least a few voices prepared to step back from the immediate call to ‘lend a hand at uprooting certain definite evils’9 and to reflect, not as a means of shaking off their responsibilities to act, but to allow the sort of profound critical reflection that would make subsequent acting more effective. It has been suggested that the characteristic motion of a Metaphysical poem is to create images or conceits that juxtapose apparently discordant things (‘The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,’ complained Dr Johnson in his Life of Cowley).10 It is possible – but also possibly too fanciful – to suggest that a society riven by war and unexpected violence might prompt an objective correlative in poetic technique, an attempt at the level of art to manage these disturbing dislocations.

  At a more immediate level, a country in the grip of civil war, with its constant demand to take sides, to resolve issues by declaring one’s wholehearted support for this or that faction, might prompt the artist to reassert a notion of poetry as something other than propaganda for one or other faction, to recover the sense of it implicit in Wallace Stevens’s assertion: ‘The poem is the cry of its occasion.’ Complexities of this kind, issues of artistic principle and conscience, would have run through Marvell’s mind as he approached the subject of treating the most powerful man in the mid-seventeenth-century state.

  Marvell’s great poem, as its title clearly signals, is modelled on the Odes of Horace, perhaps the most potent single influence on a poet saturated in Latinity. The classical precedent gave the poem a ready-made shape, a stock of usable images, a framework of decorum, that a skilled poet like Marvell could use as a starting point to launch his own individual variations. The poem has a dramatic structure that allows the contradictions of Cromwell’s career to be held up for examination and contrasted with those of his opponents. Unlike Marvell’s later, and lesser, poems on Cromwell, it does not consist of statement. The Horatian precedent also helped Marvell to attain some distance and avoid the risk of sycophancy or servile praise of the regime.

  The very opening lines of the poem refer, in characteristically Marvellian fashion, to the tension between the contemplative and the active life, the need for even the learned young scholar to ‘forsake his Muses dear’ and take up arms. Cromwell too, the country gentleman from the Fens, had to abandon his ‘private Gardens, where/He liv’d reserved and austere,/As if his highest plot/To plant the Bergamot’ to fulfil his destiny. Marvell represents him as a natural force, uncheckable like a thunderbolt:

  So restless Cromwel could not cease

  In the inglorious Arts of Peace,

  But through adventrous War

  Urged his active Star.

  And, like the three-fork’d Lightning, first

  Breaking the Clouds where it was nurst,

  Did thorough his own Side

  His fiery way divide.

  After this, all Cromwell’s actions are seen as inevitable, righteous, ordained by a historical necessity to ‘cast the Kingdome old/Into another Mold’ in spite of the pleas of constitutional monarchists – which Marvell might have been at heart – that the ‘antient Rights’ were a prohibition against regicide. In the most morally unattractive passage of the poem, Cromwell is shown as the embodiment of a principle that might is right, a seventeenth-century Stalin. Just as nature abhors a vacuum so everything must cede to Cromwell’s exerted power, because it is power, and ‘must make room/Where greater Spirits come’. Yet these lines are immediately followed by a passage on the comportment of King Charles I on the scaffold on 30 Janu
ary 1649 that has become as famous as the much quoted stanzas of ‘To his Coy Mistress’:

  He nothing common did or mean

  Upon that memorable Scene:

  But with his keener Eye

  The Axes edge did try:

  Nor call’d the Gods with vulgar spight

  To vindicate his helpless Right,

  But bow’d his comely Head,

  Down as upon a Bed.

  Some details here – the fact that a mattress was laid by the scaffold, and a detail from the famous later account of the execution by the Venetian ambassador Momigliano that referred to the rejection by the King of a proposal to pass a restraining cord around his neck should he not voluntarily submit himself to the blow of the axe – suggest that Marvell might have been an eyewitness to the execution on that bleak Tuesday afternoon in Whitehall.11

  This passage has attracted much comment as an indication of Marvell’s political ambivalence, his possible misgivings about the regicide and Cromwell’s implacability, embodied in the latter’s famous assertion: ‘I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown on it.’ But it is less often remarked that these lines on ‘the Royal Actor’ (itself a metaphor opening up the possibility of a stagey, even insincere royal performance) are immediately followed by a resounding endorsement of the ‘forc’d Pow’r’ that was now triumphant. An allusion to a legend recorded by Pliny in his Natural History about a human head being found during the excavation for the foundations of the temple of Jupiter Capitolium in Rome, an augury that Rome should be the capital of the world, presses the decapitation into service as a promising augury for the Cromwellian republic. And the Irish, who are ‘asham’d/To see themselves in one Year tam’d’, are invited to share in this bloody triumphalism.

  It is a characteristic of this poem, however, not to rest in one judgement of its subject for long. The last third of the poem introduces a different note, offering a view of Cromwell not as a vengeful fury or thunderbolt of Jove, but as a potentially fallible human actor, mindful of his accountability to Parliament. The mere mention of his being ‘still in the Republick’s hand’ raises the possibility that a day could come when he might not be. His tribute of Ireland as ‘A Kingdome, for his first years rents’ shows that he is expected to, as it were, pay his way as supreme commander. A new metaphor now enters the poem, of falconry. Cromwell is the state’s raptor, trained to return to its leather gauntlet, bearing the kill. His forces will also hunt down the Scots – a detail that allows us to assert that the poem was completed before Cromwell’s Scottish campaign which started on 22 July 1650 – in their ‘tufted brake’. The poem ends on a note, not of triumph, but of warning:

  The same Arts that did gain

  A Pow’r must it maintain.

  In the end, Marvell is not prepared to give Cromwell a blank cheque. Just as the King came to an unfortunate end, so Cromwell, currently favoured by fortune and men’s eyes, could fall out of favour. This concluding couplet is generally regarded by scholars as a political commonplace of the Renaissance. Two years earlier Anthony Ascham, in A Discourse: Wherein is Examined What is Particularly Lawfull during the Confusions and Revolutions of Government (July, 1648), had observed: ‘the Usurper … will find himself oblig’d to secure his conquest by the same meanes he obtained it’.12 Ultimately, the thought is traceable back to Sallust, but its position here as the closing apothegm suggests that it was the closest Marvell would come to a definitive judgement on Cromwell and one that was not without principled reserve about the danger of granting too much to the political leader or surrounding him with the aura of historical inevitability.

  Some scholars have seen the influence of the poet Tom May’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, even down to some close verbal parallels, in the ‘Ode’. If this is true, then Marvell was profoundly ungrateful, for several months after having composed the Cromwell poem he wrote a savage satire on May who died on 13 November 1650. May, who abandoned the idea of a career in the law because of a speech impediment, was a playwright, poet, historian and translator who had made his reputation at the court of Charles I but who switched allegiance to the Parliamentary cause, his detractors suggested, when he failed to succeed Ben Jonson as Poet Laureate, the job being given instead to Sir William D’Avenant. According to Anthony Wood he was both a freethinker and a free liver: ‘He became a debauchee ad omnia, entertained ill principles as to religion, spoke often very slightly of the holy Trinity, and kept beastly and atheistical company, of whom Thomas Chaloner the regicide was one.’ Wood also describes the manner of May’s death: ‘going well to bed, he was therein found next morning dead, occasioned, as some say, by tying his nightcap too close under his fat chin and cheeks, which choked him when he turned on the other side’.13 At the Restoration May’s body was removed from Westminster Abbey and his monument taken down as an act of repudiation of the author of A History of the Long Parliament (1647), considered as the work of a Parliamentary apologist.

  The problem presented by the poem ‘Tom May’s Death’, which was first published in the posthumous 1681 folio, is that Marvell’s authorship is not certain and it is puzzling, for it seems to come from the pen of an avowed Royalist, not from an author moving rather rapidly into the embrace of Cromwell and his party. Its mockery of May as a political turncoat has struck some, in the circumstances, as a little rich. Grosart solved the enigma by saying: ‘the renegade and purely self-seeking republicanism of May and his evil living were offensive to the high-souled poet’.14 Closer in style to the poem on Richard Flecknoe with its satirical couplets, the poem mocks May’s drunkenness and corpulence and has him visiting, in the Elysian fields, the shade of Ben Jonson who calls him: ‘Most servil’ wit, and Mercenary Pen’. Jonson accuses May of turning ‘the Chronicler to Spartacus’, a reference either to Fairfax or the Earl of Essex; if the former, the puzzle of the poem deepens because Marvell was shortly to enter Fairfax’s employment. The notion that it may have been simply May’s character that was under attack rather than his political mobility is suggested by a passage that sets out Marvell’s elevated view of the role of the public poet, endorsing the independence of judgement with which the Cromwell ode had recently ended:

  When the Sword glitters ore the Judges head,

  And fear has Coward Churchmen silenced,

  Then is the Poets time, ’tis then he drawes,

  And single fights forsaken Vertues cause.

  He, when the wheel of Empire, whirleth back,

  And though the World’s disjointed Axel crack,

  Sings still of ancient Rights and better Times,

  Seeks wretched good, arraigns successful Crimes.

  The strange echo in this passage of the ‘antient rights’ Charles I was said in the earlier poem to have pleaded in vain at his trial by Cromwell’s men only deepens the puzzle. And notwithstanding the stirring call to poetic duty contained in these lines, Marvell was shortly to leave London and its political excitements and poetic opportunities for the rural solitude of Yorkshire (indeed, if he had not done so already). If we assume his spell in London to have been financed by the sale of the Meldreth property, those funds would not last for ever and some form of employment, for a young man soon to turn thirty, would in any case have been a prudent thing to search for. Closet Royalist or lapsed Royalist, his company for the next decade would be unambiguously Puritan.

  5

  The Batteries of Alluring Sense

  My gentler rest is on a Thought,

  Conscious of doing what I ought.

  On 25 June 1650, five years after the House of Commons appointed him to be Commander-in-Chief of the Parliamentary forces, the Lord General, Thomas, Lord Fairfax, sent a letter resigning his command. He retired to his Yorkshire estates to pursue his scholarly and antiquarian interests and cultivate his garden. He was also concerned about the education of his daughter, Mary, then aged twelve. His choice of tutor was the young poet, Andrew Marvell, who was about nine years his junior. Such an appointment – given Fairfa
x’s love of poetry and learning, and his authorship of a collection of poems called The Employment of My Solitude – was inspired. It was also testimony to Marvell’s high esteem with the Puritan party, any Royalist dalliance clearly having been put aside. For Marvell, Nun Appleton would offer a relaxed ‘atmosphère familiale et puritaine’, as Legouis puts it.1

  Lord Fairfax clearly had a great deal in common with his new tutor. Although a distinguished and courageous soldier in the Civil War he may have shared some of Marvell’s reluctance at the outset to take up the cause. In his autobiographical Short Memorials, probably written around 1665, Fairfax – who had been knighted by Charles I in 1640 for his performance in the Scottish wars – declared: ‘I must needs say my judgement was for the Parliament, as the King’s and Kingdom’s, great and safest Council.’2 This is the tone of someone whose first instinct was the loyalism of a constitutional monarchist and who was dragged reluctantly into ‘that unhappy War’. It echoes a much quoted comment of Marvell’s written a few years later that has become a crucial piece of evidence in the debate about Marvell’s true political allegiance. Writing in the first part of The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672), Marvell, deploying the faintly obsequious tone of a Restoration public figure, declared:

  Whether it were a War of Religion, or of Liberty, is not worth the labour to enquire. Which-soever was at the top, the other was at the bottom; but upon considering all, I think the Cause was too good to have been fought for. Men ought to have trusted God; they ought and might have trusted the King with that whole matter. The Arms of the Church are Prayers and Tears, the Arms of the Subjects are Patience and Petitions. The King himself being of so accurate and piercing a judgement, would soon have felt where it stuck. For men may spare their pains where Nature is at work, and the world will not go the faster for our driving. Even as his present Majesties happy Restauration did it self, so all things else happen in their best and proper time, without any need of our officiousness.3