World Enough and Time (6 page)

Marvell's mind would naturally turn to how he could earn his living. He was unmarried, apparently without a settled profession, and with no obvious means of support. He was probably starting to write the lyric poetry that is the basis of his current reputation, but it would have been invisible to most of his contemporaries, with the exception of those lucky enough to be given it to read in manuscript. The notion of a career as a professional writer would not even have occurred to a poet of his epoch.

Marvell had, however, identified a possible source of funds. In November he set off for Meldreth in Cambridgeshire, the village where his father was born, to arrange the sale of some family property he had inherited several years earlier. His signature appears on a deed of 12 November 1647 where he is described as ‘Andrew Marvell of Kingston super Hull Gentleman'.
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An accompanying document is also signed by Marvell, who promises, in Latin, that he will keep the bargain at a penalty of £80. The fact that two local men, Mathew East and Henry Gosling, were present as witnesses proves that Marvell was in Meldreth in person for the signing. A further note on the back of the main deed, dated 23 December, shows that Marvell was also present on that date.

Marvell may have inherited the property at Meldreth when his father was drowned on 23 January 1641. Had there been any doubt, or intestacy in his father's will, he would in any case have come of age in March 1642, shortly before he departed for Europe. The deeds also show that this was not the first such transaction for Marvell, for the Meldreth property in this instance is described as being situated ‘betweene the lands late of the sayde Andrewe Marvell now John Staceys on both sides', suggesting that Marvell had sold part of the property in 1642 just before going on his travels, which raises the possibility that his trip could have been financed by this means. In 1647 he was selling the remainder of his inheritance – his grandfather's house and three and a half acres of land – to John Stacey. The fact that his bond was for £80 suggests that the income from the sale was £40 (a bond generally being set at twice the value of the transaction), a considerable sum in 1647 and easily enough to have supported Marvell for the next couple of years in London. In 1624 his father had supported a wife and five children on an annual income of £12.

Although he was described as a gentleman of Hull, Marvell is more likely to have been establishing himself in London at this time, a city to which he was clearly attracted and where his career was most satisfactorily to be forged. Until his employment, in late 1649 or 1650, as tutor to the daughter of the famous Parliamentary general, Lord Fairfax, Marvell seems to have been not just his usual moderate self in politics but apparently to have leant towards the Royalist tendency. The historian Christopher Hill suggests that, taking the period of the European tour and the pre-Fairfax period together: ‘Most of Marvell's friends at this time seem to have been aristocratic young cavaliers of the type he was likely to meet in continental salons; and when he returned to England his own sympathies were apparently Royalist.'
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Marvell's witty and graceful manner in poetry would have endeared him to the Cavaliers, such as the poet Richard Lovelace (though Marvell's wit was of a more robust and intellectual kind). Lovelace was a wealthy and stylish courtier who was thrown into prison in 1642 for presenting a ‘Kentish Petition' on behalf of the King (a previous such petition having been ordered to be burnt by the public hangman). He and Marvell may have met at Cambridge in the 1630s, when the youthful Lovelace as described by Anthony Wood was ‘then accounted the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld … much admired and adored by the female sex'.
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After his release from the Gatehouse Prison in June, Lovelace set off, like Marvell, for Europe, where the two could have met again. The Parliamentarians had imposed censorship under a Printing Ordinance of June 1643 which was still in force in spite of such high-toned defences of freedom of speech as Milton's
Areopagitica
in November 1644. Lovelace was imprisoned for a second time in 1648, where he prepared for the press his volume
Lucasta.
The censors gave it a licence on 4 February 1648 and a series of ‘commendatory verses' was attached to the volume when it appeared in May 1649. Among the Royalist poets who offered their tributes were John Harmar and John Hall, Cambridge contemporaries of Marvell, who himself contributed a short verse commendation to this unimpeachably Royalist exercise.

Marvell's poem ‘To his Noble Friend Mr Richard Lovelace, upon his Poems' was probaby written at some time after the second Petition of Lovelace on 2 May 1648 (because he refers to the ‘first Petition by the Author sent'). It shows little patience for the contemporary political climate and its vengeful temper: ‘Our Civill Wars have lost the Civicke crowne, [a bitter reference to the oak leaves bestowed on someone who saved the life of a fellow citizen in war in ancient times]/He highest builds, who with most Art destroys.' Marvell paints a portrait of petty literary rivalry and politically inspired abuse cast by self-righteous Puritans at the imprisoned writer:

The Ayre's already tainted with the swarms

Of Insects which against you rise in arms.

Word-peckers, Paper-rats, Book-scorpions,

Of wit corrupted, the unfashion'd Sons.

The barbed Censurers begin to looke

Like the grim consistory on thy Booke;

And on each line cast a reforming eye,

Severer then the yong Presbytery.

Another poem sometimes attributed to Marvell and written at about the same time is ‘An Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers'. Francis Villiers, another Grand Tourist at the time Marvell was in France and Italy and whom Flecknoe, as suggested above, may have tried to solicit as a patron, was killed on 7 July 1648 in a skirmish with Parliamentary forces in Surrey. The only surviving copy of the poem is in the library of Worcester College, Oxford, but it cannot be proved to be from Marvell's hand. The strongest argument against its being a product of the future servant of the English Republic is its too stridently Royalist tone and the declaration in the closing lines of determination to renew the civil slaughter. Such passion (‘Not write so many, but so many kill') is uncharacteristic of Marvell's political temper.

A further, this time undisputed, poem from this period is Marvell's contribution to some verses published in 1649 to mourn the death on 24 June from smallpox of the twenty-year-old Henry, Lord Hastings, son of the Earl of Huntingdon. Among the contributors to this
Lachrymae Musarum
were Robert Herrick, Sir John Denham and John Dryden, a demonstration as much that Marvell was now naturally consorting with his poetic peers, his talent and stature fully acknowledged, as that he was in Royalist company.

The contrast between the composition of these elegant verses and the brutal reality of the times could not be more pointed. For at the start of the same year that
Lucasta
and
Lachrymae Musarum
were published, King Charles I was beheaded in Whitehall, while Oliver Cromwell moved to suppress both the Levellers at home and the rebellious Catholics in Ireland. There is also a powerful aesthetic contrast between the achieved but not greatly distinguished occasional verses written by Marvell after his return to England and the triumphant artistic maturity of his ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland' written probably in June or July 1650 when Marvell was twenty-nine years old, though caution must be expressed about the pastoral lyrics, which cannot be dated exactly. They were probably written during his period with Fairfax in Yorkshire.

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'.
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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.'
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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.
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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.'
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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'
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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
).
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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.