The religious geography of Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode”: popery,presbytery, and parti-coloured picts

ABSTRACT

Marvell’s “Ode” (1650) is an English poem about a British problem – a problem further problematized by religion. The “Ode” lauds Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns, but English responses to these “colonial” wars were in reality complicated by protestant infighting among presbyterians, independents, and sectarians. Writers like Milton and Nedham rallied English support for Cromwell’s Irish campaign by recycling Spenserian stereotypes of Irish catholic barbarity. But Milton and Nedham also undercut English protestant unity by flinging these same anti-catholic stereotypes at Scottish presbyterians in Belfast and Edinburgh. Departing from previous studies, this article argues that Marvell’s “Ode” eschews Milton and Nedham’s anti-Presbyterianism in ways calculated to elide, rather than divide, protestant communities. The article explores how the “Ode” presents Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns as exclusively anti-catholic (rather than anti-presbyterian) crusades, comparing Marvell’s presentation of Cromwell in the “Ode” with his identification of Cromwell as an anti-catholic crusader in “First Anniversary” (1655). Both poems anticipate in this respect Marvell’s later anti-catholic, but pro-nonconformist, approach to Ireland in Rehearsal transpros’d (1672–1673). The article is therefore concerned to root Marvell’s post-Restoration commitment to protestant tolerationism within the anti-catholic language of the “Ode”.     

The date of Marvell’s Hortus

A post-Restoration dating of Marvell’s poem The Garden and its Latin companion piece “Hortus” to around 1668 has been generally accepted in recent criticism, despite some counter-arguments from those who defend the traditional dating to Marvell’s period at Nun Appleton (1650–2). None of these analyses, however, have attempted to date the Latin rather than the English poem. This article offers a new dating of “Hortus” to around 1654, during Marvell’s time at Eton as tutor to John Dutton. The argument is based on a series of parallels and allusions to Latin poetry either dating from, or demonstrably particularly fashionable in, the period between 1646 and 1654, as well as close attention to the political resonance and contemporary understanding of the poem’s classical sources. As such, it is also a case study in the dating of neo-Latin verse, of which many thousands of examples survive from seventeenth-century England.     

Andrew Marvell,the Lord Maynard and the Ballastage Office

In the Restoration, Andrew Marvell was elected to the Elder Brethren of the London (Deptford) Trinity House (May 1674). Some “new” documents reveal him assisting that shipmasters’ corporation in its business. In this work, he was helping to protect a charity, shoring up a corporate bulwark against the rising tide of Court interest; he was soon to lament in An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677). At issue was the drafting of letters rejecting a claim by the Lord Maynard, a prominent courtier who, with the support of James Duke of York and of Charles II, sought the reversion of the Ballastage Office. That lucrative office was a major resource for the London Trinity House, and one which fuller profits it was reluctant to concede. Whatever Marvell's own observation of decorum, the heavy correction of his initial draughts shows his more abrupt style coming under review, with a more flourishing courtliness characterizing the final letters sent by the group.     

Marvell as libertin: Upon Appleton House and the Legacy of Théophile de Viau

Abstract

This paper argues for a ‘libertine Marvell’ as heir to a line of intellectual and poetic influence stretching from the atheist philosopher Lucilio Vanini, through the poets Théophile de Viau and Marc-Antoine Gérard de Saint-Amant, via their English translators Charles Cotton, Thomas Stanley, and Thomas Fairfax, to Marvell’s poem Upon Appleton House. It argues that Upon Appleton House captures the libertine spirit of Théophile more faithfully than Stanley and Cotton’s largely sanitised versions. Conversely, French libertine poetry and thought of the 1610s and 1620s are seen to provide the best context for understanding the ‘vitalism’ of Marvell’s garden poems, as well as their unusually divagating observational style.     

Andrew Marvell and the Dutch fifth column: new evidence from a copy of Mr Smirke with authorial annotations

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses a previously unknown copy of Andrew Marvell’s Mr Smirke, which features annotations in his hand. We argue that the recipient of the volume was the Anglo-Dutch agent “William Freeman”, who was closely involved with a Dutch fifth column, set up by William of Orange and his spymaster Pierre Du Moulin, which lobbied Parliament during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The essay discusses further archival evidence of Marvell’s links to Freeman and argues that their connection persisted after the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch war. Finally, the essay argues that these links throw new light onto the development of Marvell’s late prose work, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, which is more closely influenced by other pamphlets associated with William’s propaganda efforts in England in the 1670s than has been hitherto realised.