World Enough and Time Page 6
The orotund smugness of this passage was characteristic of Restoration hindsight (and written under the censorship of Charles II) but it is consistent with Marvell’s sense of divine providence in human affairs (‘’Tis Madness to resist or blame/The force of angry heavens flame’). It has been suggested that the phrase ‘the Cause was too good to have been fought for’ means not that the Civil War should never have happened or that the King should have been trusted to resolve the political conflict in his own way, but that the cause was so transparently the right and just one that no one should ever have contemplated taking up arms against it.4 Both interpretations are consistent with a view that trusts to some degree in fate rather than the intervention of human agency. Marvell was not a political revolutionary or Utopian, in an age when plenty of both abounded, and it is likely that he and Fairfax, in their rural sequestration on the banks of the Rivers Wharfe and Ouse at Nun Appleton House, the former Lord General’s country seat at the confluence of the two rivers, enjoyed many reflections and discussions on these great issues of state.
Thomas Fairfax had been born on 17 January 1612 at Denton in Yorkshire. From the outset of the Civil War he was a prominent supporter of Parliament in Yorkshire but even when he accepted the appointment as Commander-in-Chief he was, according to his later reflections, diffident about doing so. ‘I was so far from desiring it,’ he wrote, ‘that had not so great an authority [the House of Commons] commanded obedience, being then unseparated from the royal interest, besides the persuasions of nearest friends, not to decline so free and general a call, I should have hid myself among the staff to have avoided so great a charge.’5 He went on to perform courageously – sometimes recklessly – as a military commander, in spite of frequent ill health. During the siege of Colchester in the summer of 1648, Milton – a far less equivocal and subtle praiser of politicians than Marvell, as his sonnet on Cromwell demonstrates – wrote a sonnet in praise of the Lord General which opened: ‘Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings/Filling each mouth with envy, or with praise,/And all her jealous monarchs with amaze’, and which celebrated the ‘firm unshaken virtue’ of Fairfax.6
But it was the trial and execution of the King that started the process of withdrawal of Fairfax from the Cromwellian cause. When he was appointed one of the King’s judges in 1649, and his name was read out as such, his wife is said to have protested that her husband would never sit as a judge. In the account by Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion, she called out in the court that her husband ‘had more wit than to be there’ and a few moments later when the impeachment of the King was read out, making use as it did of the expression ‘all the good people of England’, she cried out again, ‘No, nor the hundreth part of them’ before being bundled out of court.7 Though some historians are sceptical, her husband later claimed that he had not wanted the King to die: ‘My afflicted and troubled mind for it and my earnest endeavours to prevent it will sufficiently testify my dislike and abhorrence of the fact,’ he insisted in the Short Memorials. But Clarendon, a hostile witness of course, observed that Fairfax ‘out of the stupidity of his soul’ was throughout ‘overwitted by Cromwell, and made a property to bring that to pass which could very hardly have been otherwise effected’. The Lord General’s misgivings about the Parliamentary Army and its domination by the so-called Agitators (whom he dubbed ‘the Forerunners of Confusion and Anarchy’) came to a head the year after he had put down a mutiny of Levellers at Burford in the spring of 1649. In the summer of 1650 the council of state wanted to attack Scotland as a pre-emptive strike but Fairfax refused to condone an attack except in defence. ‘Human probabilities’, he said in his letter of resignation, ‘are not sufficient grounds to make war upon a neighbour nation, especially our brethren of Scotland, to whom we are engaged in a solemn league and covenant.’ Parliament pleaded with him but he was adamant. Only in his late thirties, Fairfax thus retired to Nun Appleton where he lived for the rest of the Commonwealth and during the Protectorate (though he was MP for the West Riding in the 1654 Parliament).
His love of literature and learning was legendary. John Aubrey, in his brief life of Fairfax, describes the Lord General’s action in setting a guard around the Bodleian Library in Oxford when the city was invaded by the Parliamentary forces in 1646: ‘He was a lover of Learning, and had he not taken this speciall care, that noble Library had been utterly destroyed, for there were ignorant Senators enough who would have been contented to have had it so.’8 In retirement he wrote poems, made a collection of coins and engravings, translated from Latin and French, composed a history of the Church to the Reformation, a treatise on the breeding of horses, and a metrical version of the psalms and other parts of the Bible. During the Protectorate there were constant rumours that ‘Black Tom’ (so called because of his very dark complexion) was engaged in Royalist intrigues against the government, but these appear to have been unfounded.9
The selection of Marvell as a tutor – presumably some time after Fairfax’s resignation in June 1650, but no more precise date can be given – seems to have been natural enough. They were fellow Yorkshiremen, poets (though not of matched talent) and temperamentally inclined towards the contemplative rather than the active life, whatever their proven distinction in the latter had been or would prove to be. But there may have been a more specific contact between the Fairfaxes and the Marvell kin that caused Marvell to be recommended to this very important post as tutor to the daughter of one of the most famous men in England at that time. When the Reverend Andrew Marvell was curate at Flamborough in the first years of the century, the local Lord of the Manor, Sir William Constable, married Dorothy, daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax (the Lord General’s grandfather). When the Reverend Andrew Marvell moved to Hull in 1624 he was brought into contact with the Alured family, as noted above, who lived next door in the house built on the ruins of the old Carthusian Priory. The Alureds had known the Fairfaxes for many years. The signature of John Alured of Hull, alongside Fairfax’s, is found on a petition of 28 July 1640 from the Yorkshire gentry to the King, complaining about the burden on the poor of forced billeting of soldiers on them. John Alured’s name (though not Fairfax’s) is on the list of fifty-nine who signed the warrant for the King’s execution. John Alured, as Colonel Alured, makes several appearances in the Short Memorials. Fairfax, in choosing a tutor for his young teenage daughter, would be reassured that he came from a good Yorkshire family known to the Fairfaxes.10
Mary Fairfax – not a great beauty if the miniature painted by Samuel Cooper in 1650 is an accurate portrayal – was known as ‘Little Moll’. Although Marvell writes of her as a symbol of ideal virtue in ‘Upon Appleton House’, she would later marry the rakish second Duke of Buckingham in September 1657. Buckingham, son of Charles I’s minister, was no Puritan, and proposed to use the marriage as a means of regaining his confiscated estates. Fairfax gave Parliament his personal security for his son-in-law’s good behaviour but, after the Restoration, Buckingham became rather more useful to Fairfax as a protector. Mary’s early life had been exciting for she had accompanied her father with her nurse on one or two dangerous escapades, including the escape through enemy lines from besieged Bradford in 1643. At Nun Appleton, she was tutored by Marvell in foreign languages.
Dating Marvell’s poems – particularly those (the majority) which were not printed until after his death in 1681 – is a perilous activity. A few occasional verses, as has already been seen, can be dated with confidence, but most of the poems on which Marvell’s current reputation rests are impossible to pinpoint with accuracy. The long poems, ‘Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax’, and ‘Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borow’, obviously belong to this period of rural seclusion, but the garden poems, the pastoral exercises and the religious poems are more uncertain. Given the facts of Marvell’s life, there is a strong possibility that he composed these delicate lyrics during these two years of rural seclusion – conditions of leafy tranquillity that are reflec
ted in many of the poems themselves – but this can only be guesswork. There would be a few more years of tutoring before he became increasingly drawn into public and political affairs, when the conditions for such compositions would not be so auspicious. But poets do not always compose in a methodical way. Their poems are often far from being contemporaneous reports on experience. They are picked up and put down. They are redrafted. Earlier fragments are recycled in later compositions. Emotion, in Wordsworth’s phrase, is recollected in tranquillity. Writing the poems on Appleton House and Bilborough could even have been a means of bringing back and reliving the experience later. Nor does the fact that Marvell wrote lively political satires mean that he had abandoned more delicate lyric verse. Poets can handle more than one genre at a time. He may have continued circulating in manuscript poems of a kind that would not interest the political public, as the existence of manuscript versions (though not in his own hand) suggests. Nevertheless, with all these caveats, the Nun Appleton period seems the most persuasive date of composition for these pastoral and religious lyrics.
Since Marvell left no other record of this period, except in verse, the precise nature of his relationship with Mary Fairfax can only be guessed at. In ‘Upon Appleton House’ a passage of fifteen stanzas is explicitly addressed to ‘The young Maria’ which celebrates her youth, her innocence, and her purity:
LXXXVII
’Tis She that to these Gardens gave
That wondrous Beauty which they have;
She streightness on the Woods bestows;
To Her the Meadow sweetness owes;
Nothing could make the River be
So Chrystal-pure but only She;
She yet more Pure, Sweet, Streight, and Fair,
Then Gardens, Woods, Meads, Rivers are.
Lines such as these – probably handed over immediately to the perusal of Marvell’s poet-patron – were conventional praise, but the poet manages, too, a more pointed judgement that suggests that Mary’s intellectual accomplishments might be more marked than her personal beauty:
For She, to higher Beauties rais’d,
Disdains to be for lesser prais’d.
She counts her Beauty to converse
In all the Languages as hers;
Mary was twelve or thirteen when her young tutor arrived at Nun Appleton. He was twenty-nine, old enough for a proper distance to exist between the two but young enough, perhaps, for a little playful teasing to enter into the relationship between the young daughter of Anne Vere, the strong and fiercely independent-minded mother who had defied the Cromwellian court, and a witty, clever poet, recently arrived from London where he had mixed with the leading poets of the day. Recurring in the lyrics tentatively assigned to this period of his life is the theme of childhood innocence and beauty, celebrated for the most part conventionally but occasionally – as in the poem ‘Young Love’ – with a faintly unsettling explicitness that can recall for the modern reader the charged ambiguities of Lolita. There is a preoccupation with prepubescent innocence in ‘A Dialogue Between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure’ – a very Puritan debate or verbal tournament between sensuality and purity in which ‘a single Soul does fence/The batteries of alluring Sense’, progressing through the sequence of human temptations to the ultimate triumph of the ‘victorious Soul’. Similar concerns are found in ‘The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun’, with its innocent childlike speaker, brushed by the real world with its ‘wanton Troopers’, a term that entered the language only with the arrival of the covenanting army in 1640. But there is also a parallel preoccupation with love. A conventional poem, ‘Eyes and Tears’ – Marvell’s poems invariably begin from some generic precedent or prior treatment, however deeply individuated, and are almost never a naked utterance or blurt of feeling – contains a phrase, ‘The sparkling glance that shoots desire’. An innocent shepherdess exhibits a shy sexual knowingness. The shepherdess Clorinda in ‘Clorinda and Damon’, who fails to persuade her newly pious swain, Damon, to sport with her in the hay, teases her companion. Did Mary Fairfax in this way tease her young tutor, in their garden walks, sensing his indifference? All these hints and suggestions culminate in ‘Young Love’.
The poem is of course derivative in theme. Scholar-critics such as J.B. Leishman in his essential The Art of Marvell’s Poetry (1966) have traced the topic from The Greek Anthology to Marvell’s contemporaries, Randolph and Stow. Perhaps it should be taken as no more than a poetic exercise, written – as many of these lyrics were – to be set to music, a wholly innocent playing with a conventional poetic theme. Or perhaps there was a little more personal pressure behind it:
I
Come little Infant, Love me now,
While thine unsuspected years
Clear thine aged Fathers brow
From cold Jealousie and Fears.
II
Pretty surely ’twere to see
By young Love old Time beguil’d:
While our Sportings are as free
As the Nurses with the Child.
The speaker goes on to argue that ‘Common Beauties’ must wait until the age of fifteen before experiencing love. His addressee’s innocent beauty, however, should be enjoyed now, not as sexual love (‘too green/Yet for Lust’) but as a more Platonic encounter. Implicated in this theme is the carpe diem subject that Marvell would treat so triumphantly in ‘To his Coy Mistress’: ‘Now then love me: time may take/Thee before thy time away’. The co-existence of these poetic moments with the religious lyrics celebrating the defeat of sensuality by the resolved soul, and the likelihood that these were poems written to be read at Nun Appleton by Mary’s father, should perhaps persuade us to cancel any thought that they might be anything other than conventional Renaissance tropes.
Several other lyrics of this pastoral group address more directly the theme of disappointed or frustrated love. Again, the frequency of the theme may have more to do with the fact that thwarted rather than fulfilled love was the conventional stuff of poetry than with Marvell’s need to deposit his own woes in verse. In ‘The Unfortunate Lover’ he draws on the Renaissance emblem tradition, specifically here the series drawn by Otto van Veen in Amorum Emblemata, published in Antwerp in 1608. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblem books illustrated and expanded various metaphors and allegories from classical or Biblical sources, decorating the picture sometimes with an improving text, and were enormously popular. In this poem Marvell paints a sequence of vivid verbal pictures in a way that shows the great creative potential in the encounter of a fine poetic intelligence with conventional matter, for the poet’s treatment is wholly his own. The eponymous lover had a violent birth when his pregnant mother was thrown against a rock after a shipwreck. From this nautical Caesarean the lover never looks back and is subjected to the rough handling of ‘Tyrant Love’ thereafter. Marvell contrasts the savage actuality of the unfortunate lover’s experiences with their literary transformation into a pleasant aesthetic construct (‘Musick within every Ear’). ‘The Coronet’ also expresses a doubt about the worth of art. In this poem the poet, weaving a garland of flowers as a coronet symbolically intended to replace Christ’s crown of thorns, finds that the serpent coils of ‘Fame and Interest’ smother and destroy his pious work of art, rendering its ‘curious [skilful] frame’ a futile tribute. There is a Puritan iconoclasm here, a doubt about the efficacy or the moral worth of the kind of highly wrought poetry (‘set with Skill and chosen out with Care’) that Marvell is devoting himself to, a ‘curious’ art that cannot redeem the world.
A refugee from literary London where he was well connected, the automatic choice for inclusion in any set of commendatory verses or in a celebration of any of the leading poets of the day, Marvell might have been reflecting on his prospects at this time. Surrounded by dedicated public men engaged, or fresh from engagement, with important political issues, he might have thought himself a litte frivolous. He was without a settled career and his only public skill was in the forging
of pretty verses. The Puritan in him rather than the aesthete might have felt uncomfortable at this, but before he left Yorkshire there would be further celebrations of landscape and living, the painting of a paysage moralisé that would go some way to assuaging these doubts if they existed.
6
Green Thoughts
Society is all but rude
To this delicious Solitude
Nun Appleton House was so called because a Cistercian nunnery once occupied the spot. The house that Marvell celebrated – though it is not the one that stands on the site today, which is owned by a well-known brewing family from Tadcaster – was built from stone taken from the ruined priory. Traditionally it was assumed that Lord Fairfax, whose family had owned the twelfth-century priory since its dissolution in 1542, came to live in a new house started in 1637 or 1638. This is referred to by the antiquarian Ralph Thoresby in his diary for 16 October 1712, where he reports visiting Nun Appleton with an aged local man, Robert Taite. The latter recalled having seen ‘the old house pulled down, and a stately new one erected by Thomas Lord Fairfax, the General, and now the most of that pulled down, and a much more convenient (though not quite so large an one) erected by Mr Milner’.1
Of these three houses, the first, cobbled together from the stones of the nunnery, is likely to be the one praised by Marvell in ‘Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax’. The second sounds too ostentatious for the modest building in the poem (though it is a poem filled with hyperbole that could make the great small as well as the small great). This second house was engraved by Daniel King somewhere between 1655 and 1660 and shows a cupola that has persuaded some readers of the poem to identify the lines: ‘the swelling Hall/Stirs, and the Square grows Spherical’ with this rather new-fangled architectural feature, which would have been unusual in a pre-1650 house. The third, present-day, house was the product of the work done in 1712 and described by Ralph Thoresby.