World Enough and Time Page 8

  The other poem was a Latin verse addressed to Oliver St John, who was chosen in February 1651 to undertake a mission to the United Provinces to negotiate an alliance with the Dutch. He reached the Hague on 17 March, but the mission was unsuccessful and he returned in June. The existence of the poem indicates that in Yorkshire Marvell was not isolated from the political world.

  The hints of impatience with rural seclusion in the Fairfax poems make it unsurprising that Marvell was now looking for new employment. It is unlikely that the thirteen-year-old Mary had nothing more to learn in the field of foreign languages, but her tutor was getting restless. It was time to call in some favours. And Marvell’s first approach was to another poet, John Milton.

  7

  A Gentleman Whose Name is Marvell

  Cromwell had now dismissed the parliament by the authority of which he had destroyed monarchy, and commenced monarch himself, under the title of protector, but with kingly and more than kingly power.

  Dr Johnson, Life of Milton

  In the period after Lord Fairfax retired to his Yorkshire estate to write poetry and collect medals, Oliver Cromwell had pressed ahead with the military action against the Scots from which Fairfax shrank. The following year, in 1651, Cromwell defeated Charles II at Worcester after his invasion of England, launched from Scotland. Cromwell was consolidating his power throughout this period. In 1653 he dissolved the Rump Parliament, choosing in its place the ‘Barebones’ Parliament of impeccable Puritans whom he told: ‘Truly you are called by God to rule with him and for him.’ By December 1653, however, Cromwell had clawed back the powers of the Barebones Parliament and styled himself Lord Protector. He refused the title of King but the matter of his acceptance of the crown continued to be debated and, in the view of some observers, Cromwell began to acquire the airs and graces of a monarch. For uncompromising republicans like Milton, however, Cromwell was the Great Helmsman, enjoying both temporal power and the additional convenience of having the endorsement of God. In his eulogy of Cromwell in the 1654 Defensio Secunda – the latest polemical exchange in Milton’s propaganda war in defence of the anti-Royalist cause – Milton called his Lord Protector pater patriae (father of the fatherland). The unsympathetic Tory, Dr Johnson, later remarked: ‘Caesar, when he assumed the perpetual dictatorship, had not more servile or more elegant flattery.’1

  Only weeks after the beheading of King Charles in 1649, Milton had been appointed Secretary for the Foreign Tongues and in that capacity the now blind poet and functionary dictated a letter to the President of the Council of State, John Bradshaw, on 21 February 1653:

  … there will be with you to morrow upon some occasion of busines a Gentleman whose name is Mr Marvile; a man whom both by report, & the converse I have had with him, of singular desert for the State to make use of; who alsoe offers himselfe, if there be any imployment for him. His father was the Minister of Hull & he hath spent foure yeares abroad in Holland, France, Italy, & Spaine, to very good purpose, as I beleeve, & the gaineing of those 4 languages; besides he is a scholler & well read in the Latin and Greeke authors, & noe doubt of an approved conversation, for he com’s now lately out of the house of the Lord Fairfax who was Generall, where he was intrusted to give some instructions in the Languages to the Lady his Daughter. If upon the death of Mr Wakerley the Council shall thinke that I shall need any assistant in the performance of my place … it would be hard for them to find a Man soe fit every way for that purpose as this Gentleman.2

  Evidently, Milton did not consider the Fairfax connection to be a drawback, in spite of the former general’s falling out with the Cromwellians. The letter shows him fully aware of Marvell’s linguistic skills and scholarship, Milton’s own being so formidable. The senior poet’s willingness to praise others was so notoriously constrained that an encomium from him would be doubly valuable. Both author and recipient of this letter were fierce republicans. John Bradshaw had been President of the Parliamentary Commission to try the King in 1649 and his signature had headed the list on Charles’s death warrant. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford keeps the high-crowned beaver hat lined with plated steel to ward off blows that he wore during that turbulent time. In a particularly grisly moment at the Restoration his was one of the corpses dug up and hanged in their coffins at Tyburn on 30 January 1661, the twelfth anniversary of the regicide. Although Bradshaw would later oppose Cromwell’s assumption of arbitrary power, he was at the time of Milton’s letter an important figure in the government. Milton’s entreaty, however, was fruitless. Marvell had to wait another four and a half years before gaining such a post. Perhaps Bradshaw was unwilling to favour a recent employee of the man who, unlike himself, had refused to sign the King’s death warrant and whose wife had cried out in open court that he had more wit than to do so. The job went instead to Philip Meadows, later knighted and made ambassador to Denmark.

  It is worth noting Milton’s spelling of Marvell’s name as ‘Marvile’. Its spelling on the baptismal register leaves no doubt that we have it right but English orthography was looser in those days and Marvell’s name occurs in a variety of forms: Mervill, Mervile, Marvel, Mervail – all these by people who knew him well. Marvail was the spelling used by his fellow Hull MP Colonel Gilby. Current donnish practice is to pronounce Marvell’s name with the stress on the second syllable (like the Irish patriot Parnell), but those of us who prefer to pronounce it as if Marvell were what he can so often seem, a prodigy in nature, may have equal warrant.

  The letter of February 1653 is the first record of Marvell’s acquaintance with Milton. The tradition that they met in Rome, deploring the papacy in the cloisters of the Vatican itself, is absurd, since by the time Marvell reached Rome Milton was back in London, teaching his schoolboy nephews in Aldersgate Street. The connection between the two poets – natural because of their common erudition and classicism, though the political temperature of the two differed markedly – would later serve Milton well when the enthusiastic defender of regicide found himself under threat of retaliation at the Restoration. It proved useful to have a friend in Parliament. When Milton had fallen from grace Marvell would visit him discreetly at his house in Jewin Street, Petty France in the early 1660s but probably less cautiously before the Restoration. Milton’s nephew, Edward Phillips, in his Life of Mr John Milton (1694) claimed that ‘he was frequently visited by persons of Quality … and … by particular Friends that had a high esteem for him, viz Mr Andrew Marvel’.3 This was probably some time after Milton moved to Petty France on 17 December 1651. John Aubrey’s brief life of Milton cites Marvell as being among the senior poet’s ‘familiar learned Acquaintance’.4 It has even been suggested that Marvell was the author of an anonymous life of Milton but the usual attribution now is Milton’s friend Cyriack Skinner, the relative of the Mrs Skinner who figures in the story of the Reverend Andrew Marvell’s drowning.5 Marvell is also alleged to have helped Milton to write either his Eikonoclastes (1649) or his first Defensio pro populo Anglicano in 1651, which would imply an active collaboration between the two before and during the Nun Appleton residence, whereas the tone of Milton’s 1653 letter is of one who has recently made Marvell’s acquaintance. The evidence for Marvell’s involvement in this tract is a letter from Anne Sadleir, Mrs Skinner’s sister and an acquaintance of Marvell’s father. In a letter to Roger Williams, the New England colonist and pioneer of religious liberty, she wrote: ‘as I have heard he [Milton] was faine to have the helpe of one Andrew Marvell or els he could not have finished that most accursed Libell’.6

  It is clear that Marvell was forging useful contacts close to the government. Either Fairfax or Cyriack Skinner may have brought about the introduction to Milton. Although it was unproductive on this occasion, Milton may have felt moved to help Marvell find something else. In Paris he had met John, Viscount Scudamore, whose daughter would later marry William Dutton, the young man taken under Cromwell’s wing with a view to his becoming the husband of his youngest daughter, Frances Cromwell. It may have been Scudamore
, at Milton’s prompting, who now proposed that Marvell could be tutor to William Dutton. Or it may have come about because of Marvell’s connection with the family with whom the orphan Dutton was staying at Eton, the Oxenbridges. Elizabeth Oxenbridge, sister of the Reverend John Oxenbridge, a Fellow of Eton, had in 1645 married Oliver St John, Chief Justice of Common Pleas, to whom Marvell had written his Latin verses at the time of St John’s embassy to Holland in the spring of 1651. Marvell was clearly moving closer to the government and would have been drawn increasingly to Cromwell’s attention. His new post would complete the process.

  It has always been assumed that Marvell went straight to Eton to take up his post as tutor to Dutton, but a memoir of the Dutton family, published privately in 1899, claimed that early in 1653 William Dutton, together with his new tutor, was living as part of Cromwell’s household ‘at their residence in the Cockpit at Whitehall or at Hampton Court’ before moving to Eton in the summer. No biographer has ever reported this hypothesis; it cannot be called a fact because the author of the Dutton family memoir, Blacker Morgan, offers no evidence and there is no mention in any other source of Marvell’s presence in Cromwell’s London household.7 Clearly the tradition existed in the Dutton family and could have a basis in fact. If it were true, it would be an important confirmation of the closeness of Marvell to Cromwell and might explain the absence, in those poems praising the Protector that he was to write later in the decade, of the sort of qualified eulogy that had entered into the ‘Horatian Ode’. Marvell came to admire Cromwell personally in the years from 1653 to the latter’s death in 1658 and was a de facto laureate to the state, a role that Milton might have been expected to fulfil but which his passionate engagement in pamphlet warfare at the time probably prevented him from discharging.

  William Dutton was the son of a Royalist who died soon after the surrender of Oxford in 1646. He was left in the care of an exceedingly wealthy uncle, John Dutton of Sherborne Court, Gloucestershire, described by Anthony Wood as ‘a learned and a prudent man, and as one of the richest, so one of the meekest men in England’. Marvell’s former employer, Lord Fairfax, knew Dutton because the general’s signature appears on a pass dated 24 June 1646, giving Dutton free passage out of Oxford during the Civil War, though the mystery of why a prominent Cavalier should come to an agreement with the Lord Protector has never been solved. Dutton seems to have admired Cromwell in some fashion and even described the arrangement that they made, linking the two families, as ‘a blessing from God’.8 Thus Cromwell, for no apparent reason other than finding the boy a suitable prospective husband for his daughter, made an agreement that he would become the boy’s guardian on John Dutton’s death, which eventually happened in January 1657. In return, Dutton would promise to make his nephew heir to the ancestral estate, an arrangement that John Dutton’s daughters would have to suffer. Whatever the benefits of this arrangement to the two older men, it was not a success for the young people. Frances Cromwell, then aged fourteen, was a beautiful young woman, deeply in love, not with Dutton but with Robert Rich, grandson of the Earl of Warwick. It was rumoured that the future Charles II also wished to marry her, not least to ease his passage back to the throne by an alliance with the Cromwell dynasty. Frances and Robert eventually married in November 1657 but their happiness was short-lived, Robert dying three months after the marriage. Frances Cromwell lived on into her eighties and William Dutton also died without issue, Sherborne passing to his brother Ralph, later a baronet. The whole elaborate plan had come to nothing.

  But at the start of 1653 Cromwell immediately took the boy’s education in hand. It was important that he was brought up in a good Puritan atmosphere and the household of the Oxenbridges was perfectly cast. The Reverend John Oxenbridge had been deprived of a tutorship at Magdalen College, Oxford by Archbishop Laud in 1634. They had then gone to the Bermudas to escape this ‘prelate’s rage’ and, on 25 June 1653, Oxenbridge was made one of the seventeen (non-resident) commissioners responsible for the colony. The family’s new guest would hear vivid reminiscences from his hosts of their spell as colonists, which may have stimulated him to start to compose his very Puritan poem, ‘Bermudas’.

  A little earlier than this, Marvell wrote his first political satire. No longer was he the pastoral poet playing with notions of detachment, nor was this a poem embodying the judiciously balanced examinations of the ‘Horatian Ode’. It was more in the nature of verse propaganda by a poet who had put his rustic interlude behind him and was busily cementing himself into the new regime. Never again would he write political verse of the subtlety and complex artistry of the ‘Horatian Ode’. The poem was probably written after the English victory over the Dutch fleet off Portland on 18–20 February 1653, though it was not actually published until 1665, when it was issued during the later Dutch wars with the addition of some more topical extra lines purporting to have been written by Marvell. This first Dutch war had been in progress since 1652 in consequence of the Navigation Acts of October 1650 and October 1651, which aimed at wresting control of sea trade from the Dutch. Marvell was able to draw on details of his own Dutch travels in the previous decade when writing this poem.

  The native of Holderness was apparently unaware of the ironies of ‘The Character of Holland’ mocking the flat and low-lying physical geography of the Netherlands and the country’s attempts to reclaim land from the sea: ‘They with mad labour fish’d the Land to Shoar’. The expressions are vivid; in driving foundation-piles into the sea, the Dutch are said to have ‘to the stake a strugling Country bound’ and there is much wit in the poem, reminiscent of the Nun Appleton verses. Frequent flooding results, for example, in a situation where ‘The Fish oft-times the Burger dispossest,/And sat not as a Meat but as a Guest’. The poem flows smoothly and wittily in those rhyming couplets to which Marvell was addicted. He was a skilled poetic craftsman and a master of the elegantly turned couplet – pace the contention of Legouis that he was an ‘amateur’ – but he was not a radical innovator in the craft of verse. It is one of the ways in which he was John Donne’s inferior. He tended to keep with the forms and rhythms he knew and never risked losing control for the sake of a new effect. There are lines in ‘The Character of Holland’ so smoothly achieved in their balancing wit that they could have been written by Pope, his gibe at the country’s obsession with reclaiming land as the only civic good, for example: ‘To make a Bank was a great Plot of State;/Invent a Shov’l and be a Magistrate.’ The mockery and the ceaseless puns go to work on the country’s hospitality to religious sects and then its conduct in the recent naval wars. The victory at Portland Bill in February, when seventeen or eighteen Dutch ships were taken along with their crews and with thirty merchantmen, not to mention those ships that were destroyed, sent the country into a frenzy of patriotic joy which culminated in a solemn thanksgiving by order of Parliament on 12 April. Marvell’s triumphalist tone reflects this national euphoria. Cromwell would have been well pleased with the poem, had a copy been passed to him.

  The two men were in correspondence that summer when Marvell wrote to Cromwell from the Oxenbridges’ house at Windsor on 28 July 1653 ‘to render you some account of Mr Dutton’, addressing his letter ‘For his Excellence, the Lord General Cromwell’. The tone of the letter is rather pious and even sycophantic (‘indeed the onely Ciulity which it is proper for me to practise with so eminent a Person is to obey you’) but that may have been no more than the appropriate convention of the time. Marvell told Cromwell that he had examined William several times in the presence of John Oxenbridge. Making use of a metaphor of false and genuine coinage, the tutor admits to what sound like some initial misgivings about Dutton: ‘For I thought that there might possibly be some lightness in the Coyn, or errour in the telling, which hereafter I should be bound to make good.’ But he promises to bring the best out of the boy in the way Cromwell has already laid down it should be done. He describes Dutton as being ‘of a gentle and waxen disposition’ and continues piously: ‘He hath in him two t
hings which make Youth most easy to be managed, Modesty which is the bridle to Vice, and Emulation which is the Spurr to Virtue.’ This spotless youth, it appears, has been put down in an even more blameless household (‘so godly a family’) ruled over by John Oxenbridge, a man, Marvell unctuously observes, ‘whose Doctrine and Example are like a Book and a Map, not onely instructing the Eare but demonstrating to the Ey which way we ought to trauell’. Mrs Oxenbridge is also reported to have exhibited ‘a great tendernesse’ towards the boy, fitting up his room as a study to work in and feeding him so well that his waxy pallor is disappearing: ‘he hath already much mended his Complexion’.9

  Since John Oxenbridge was a Fellow at Eton, it has been suggested that William may have attended the school for formal academic instruction, leaving Marvell with the responsibility for the boy’s general moral welfare. Given the strong Puritan atmosphere of the Oxenbridge household, such a task for Marvell would have been otiose and it is hard to conceive of his not having some more active tutorial role. There would, however, have been plenty of time for carrying on his own studies and for writing poetry. ‘Bermudas’ shows Marvell’s almost hypnotic mastery of rhythm, the rocking verses mirroring the regular motion of the waves and the plashing oars of the Puritan pilgrims: ‘And all the way, to guide their Chime,/With falling Oars they kept the time.’ The poem expresses the thankful words of the pilgrims at God’s providence in sending them to these happy isles ‘Safe from the Storms and Prelat’s rage’. It embodies that characteristic Marvellian play with Puritan rigour and luscious sensuality. In spite of the intense piety of the divinely favoured occupants of the little boat, the waterborne elect can still relish the pleasures of the taste-buds if not those of the flesh. The divine Provider hurls his bounty at them: