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High Summer at Nun Appleton, 1651: Andrew Marvell and Lord Fairfax'S Occasions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Derek Hirst  and
Steveb Zwicker
Derek Hirst
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
Steveb Zwicker
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
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Abstract

Andrew Marvell's country-house epic, Upon Appleton House, has long been understood as a meditation on conventional philosophical themes. An exact dating allows us to see the topical and polemical force of those themes. Moreover, situating the poem within particular chronological and geographical confines, the summer of 1651 and the household of the recently retired Lord General as well as the political geography of the vale of York, reveals the continuities and the patronage-afflicted contours of the poet's engagement with the crisis of the English revolution, a crisis he had so searchingly explored in An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , June 1993 , pp. 247 - 269
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 Colie's, Rosalie ‘My Ecchoing Song’: Andrew Marvell's poetry of criticism (Princeton, 1970)Google Scholar offers the most brilliant of such readings; see, as well, Friedman, Donald, Marvell's pastoral art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970)Google Scholar; MacCaffrey, Isabel, ‘The scope of imagination in Upon Appleton House’, Tercentenary essays in honor of Andrew Marvell, ed. Friedenreich, K. (Hamden, Conn., 1977)Google Scholar; McClung, William A., The country house in English renaissance poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977), pp. 157–74Google Scholar; Turner, James, The politics of landscape (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 61–84Google Scholar; Chernaik, Warren, The poet's time (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 28–42Google Scholar; and Skulsky, Harold, ‘Upon Appleton House; Marvell's comedy of discourse’, ELH, LII (1985), 591–620CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See, most notably, Wallace, John M., Destiny his choice: the loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 232–57Google Scholar; Patterson, Annabel, Marvell and the civic crown (Princeton, 1978), pp. 101–10Google Scholar; and Wilding, Michael, Dragons' teeth: literature in the English revolution (Oxford, 1987), pp. 138–72Google Scholar.

3 Cf. Colie, , ‘My Ecchoing Song’, pp. 220ff.Google Scholar, or Wallace, , Destiny his choice, p. 232Google Scholar.

4 Legouis, Pierre, Andrew Marvell: poet, puritan, patriot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 17–20Google Scholar.

5 See Bradbrook, M. C. and Thomas, M. G. Lloyd, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1940), p. 3Google Scholar.

6 Though Bradbrook and Lloyd Thomas long ago observed the Yorkshire setting of ‘To His Coy Mistress’ [ibid. p. 42], and Christopher Hill has suggested that the reference to the conversion of the Jews may provide an approximate dating: Hill, C., Writing and revolution in 17th-century England (Brighton, 1985), p. 158Google Scholar.

7 See below, n. 65.

8 Fairfax was still in London on 17 July 1650 [Mercurius Politicus 11–18 July 1650, p. 102], and would have taken some days, even if travelling light, to return to Yorkshire. Surely, An Horatian Ode is the product of the summer of 1650, written after Fairfax's resignation and also, we propose, after Cromwell's invasion of Scotland [pace E. S. Donno's dating prior to 22 July: Andrew Marvell, the complete poems, ed. Donno, E. S. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 238Google Scholar ]; the poem's reference to the Pict taking shelter in the heather reflects the Scottish general Leslie's evasive tactics in August before Cromwell managed to bring the ‘Caledonian Deer’ to bay at Dunbar on 3 September.

9 Witty himself dated parts of the volume to which Marvell contributed variously 30 November and 2 December 1650; see the commentary on Dignissimo suo Amico Doctori Wittie and To his Worthy Friend Doctor Witty upon his Translation of the Popular Errors, in The poems and letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. Margoliouth, H. M., revised by Legouis, Pierre and Duncan-Jones, E. E., 2 vols. (Oxford, 3rd edn, 1971), I, 307–8Google Scholar; all citations to Marvell's poems will be to this edition.

10 For the Fairfaxes' residence in Kingston, Surrey, see ‘Dr Thomas Thorowgood’, ed. Cozens-Hardy, B., Norfolk Archaeology, XXII (1924–1926), 333Google Scholar.

11 Six north country diaries (Surtees Soc., CXVIII, 1910), p. 37.

12 See, for example, ibid. 37; Mercurius Politicus, 18–25 March 1652, p. 1476, and 1–8 April 1652, p. 1520; contemporary almanacs also abound in comment.

13 See Worden, B., The Rump parliament (Cambridge, 1974), passimGoogle Scholar.

14 Ibid. p. 224. A convenient introduction to the defensiveness of parliament's war-aims is to be found in Sharp, A., Political ideas of the English Civil Wars (London, 1983), pp. 15–18, 61–76Google Scholar. Fairfax made his views clear at his resignation: ‘Human probabilities are not sufficient grounds to make war upon a neighbour nation, especially our brethren in Scotland, to whom we are engaged in a Solemn League and Covenant’ Dictionary of national biography, sub ‘Fairfax, Thomas’.

15 Whitelocke, B., Memorials of the English affairs (1732), pp. 493, 494Google Scholar; Culpepper, Nicholas, An ephemeris for the yeer 1651 (1651)Google Scholar, sub ‘July’; Lilly, William, Merlini Anglici Ephemeris (1651, recte 1650), sub ‘June’Google Scholar.

16 Catalogue of the pamphlets…collected by George Thomason, 1640–1661, ed. Fortescue, G. K. (2 vols., London, 1908), I, 837Google Scholar. For a recent vindication ofThomason's collecting methods, see Mendle, M., ‘The Thomason collection: a reply to Stephen J. Greenberg’, Albion, XXII (1990), 85–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the case of such a prominent item as the Cartwright collection, we may assume that Thomason was prompt in his purchase, all the more so given his political sympathies at that point.

17 Cartwright, Poems, playes, and miscellanies, sig.*7 For further understanding of Fairfax's library and his varied interests we must await the work of Mr Jeremy Maule, of Trinity College, Cambridge.

18 It is possible that Marvell's eye was caught by Waring's dismissive reference to ‘dumb Tutors, that descry/Ethicks and Arts’ at sig. *6v.

19 Thomason catalogue, I, 825.

20 Empson, William, usually quite acute about local matters, mistakenly suggests that the meadows were flooded in autumn, ‘Natural magic and populism in Marvell's poetry’ Andrew Marvell, essays on the tercentenary of his death, ed. Brett, R. L. (Oxford, 1979), p. 46Google Scholar.

21 Markham, C. R., A life of the great Lord Fairfax (London, 1870), p. 366Google Scholar.

22 Walton, I., The compleat angler (1653), p. 133Google Scholar.

23 , G. E. C., The complete peerage (12 vols., London, 1910–1959), v, 231nGoogle Scholar.

24 Thus, Mary's second cousin on the Vere side, Brilliana Harley, was sent to stay with Lord Fairfax's mother-in-law at the age of thirteen: Eales, J., Puritans and roundheads. The Hurleys of Brampton Bryan and the outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 24–5Google Scholar.

25 See, for example, Allen, D. C., ‘Upon Appleton House,’ Image and meaning, metaphoric traditions in renaissance poetry (Baltimore, 1968), pp. 203–10Google Scholar; Colie, , ‘My Ecchoing Song’, p. 262Google Scholar.

26 It may be merely coincidence that the rioters were attacking drainage works, but it is suggestive that Marvell chose to vent the canard about the levelling aims of the Levellers in one of the very contexts in which Levellers actually were levelling. See Lindley, K., Fenland riots and the English revolution (London, 1982), pp. 200–4Google Scholar; for the problem of Leveller interest in agrarian issues, see Howell, R. and Brewster, D. E., ‘Reconsidering the Levellers: the evidence of The Moderate,’ Past and Present, XLVI (1970), 69–86Google Scholar.

27 A declaration of the English army now in Scotland, 1st August 1650 (1650).

28 See for example the thanksgiving sermon for the battle of Worcester preached to parliament by Peter Sterry, chaplain to the council of state and soon to Oliver Protector: Sterry, P., England's deliverance from the northern presbytery compared with its deliverance from the Roman papacy (1651), pp. 44–5, also 26–7, 32–3, 41–2Google Scholar; for an example of resurgent millennialism in the parishes, see The diary of Ralph Josselin, ed. Macfarlane, A., (London, 1976), pp. 220, 267Google Scholar.

29 The bulk of the English field army was gathered around Ripon, less than a dozen miles west of Nun Appleton, from 13–16 August 1651; British Library, Additional MS 21420, fos. 172–3.

30 Cf. Allen, D. C., Image and meaning, p. 108Google Scholar.

31 Mercurius Politicus, 11–18 July 1650, p. 88; The speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. Roots, I. (London, 1989), p. 84Google Scholar; The complete prose works of John Milton, ed. Wolfe, Don M. et al. (8 vols., New Haven, 1953–1980), VI, 463Google Scholar.

32 Rosalie Golie suggestively speaks of Upon Appleton House as ‘a domestic intellectual record’: ‘My Ecchoing Song,’ p. 221.

33 See especially Wallace, , Destiny his choice, pp. 9–68Google Scholar; Skinner, Q., ‘Conquest and consent: Thomas Hobbes and the engagement controversy’, in Aylmer, G. E., ed., The interregnum (London, 1972), pp. 79–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Burgess, G., ‘Usurpation, obligation and obedience in the thought of the engagement controversy’, Historical Journal, XXIX (1986), 515–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Heywood's, OliverLife of John Angier of Denton, ed. Axon, E. (Chetham Soc., 1937)p. 67Google Scholar; The life of Adam Martindale, ed. Parkinson, R. (Chetham Soc., 1845), pp. 92–9Google Scholar; Stocks, H. and Stevenson, W. H., eds., Records of the borough of Leicester 1603–1688 (Cambridge, 1923), pp. I, 396Google Scholar.

35 See, in general, the Dictionary of national biography entry. Perhaps the clearest instance of Fairfax's political weakness is provided by Gerrard Winstanley, who observed the whisking of a petition out of the Lord General's hand by a busy-body [Hugh Peter?] and two colonels: The works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. Sabine, G. H. (New York, 1941), p. 389Google Scholar.

36 Worden, , Rump parliament, p. 224Google Scholar.

37 Nun Appleton was evidently something of a tourist attraction in the early 1650s, doubtless as a result of its architecture as well as its owner. Its novel motif of civic porch in rural setting might be taken as emblematic of Fairfax's own ambivalence. Loveday, R., Loveday's letters (1659), p. 80Google Scholar; Tait, A. A., ‘Post-modernism in the 1650s’, in Inigo Jones and the spread of Classicism, papers given at the Georgian group symposium, 1986 (London, 1987), pp. 33–4Google Scholar.

38 Mercurius Politicus, 11–18 July 1650, p. 102.

39 Underdown, D., Pride's purge (Oxford, 1971), p. 314Google Scholar; Coleby, A. M., Central government and the localities: Hampshire 1649–1680 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hutton, R., The British Republic 1649–1660 (New York, 1990), p. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Historical Manuscripts Commission 13th Report, Appendix Part I. Duke of Portland's Mss. (London, 1891), pp. 579–80, 582, 585, 586–8Google Scholar. The council obviously did not in the end credit the information, yet passions in parliament seem to have run high: Worcester College, Oxford, Clarke MSS, vol. xix, fos. 13v, 14, 17v, 18. It should be noted that Fairfax's former secretary John Rushworth was more clearly implicated: Spencer, L., ‘The politics of George Thomason,’ The Library 5th series, XIV (1959), 11–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Calendar of state papers, domestic, 1651, pp. 323–4.

42 Mercurius Politicus, 21–28 Aug. 1651, p. 1016; see also Whitelocke, , Memorials, p. 504Google Scholar, for another comment on the importance of the announcement.

43 Markham, , Fairfax, p. 364Google Scholar.

44 The reverberations of the Love trial can be felt in every newsbook from late June to mid August; fuller accounts are to be found in The tryall of Mr Love (1651) and The whole try all of Mr Love (1651), the latter being reprinted in State trials, V, cols 43–135. For the impact of the trial on the presbyterian clergy, see Anderson, P. J., ‘Sion College and the London provincial assembly’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XXXVII (1986), 83–4Google Scholar; for a vivid example of presbyterian bitterness, see A brief narration of the mysteries of state carried on by the Spanish faction in England (1651). Fairfax's continuing hold on the imagination of such groups is suggested by Jacombe, T., Enoch's Walke and Chang [sic] (1656), p. 50Google Scholar.

45 See Dictionary of national biography for entries under these names.

46 See above, n. 14.

47 Colie, , ‘My Ecchoing Song’ pp. 165–6Google Scholar.

48 Cf. Rostvig, Maren-Sofie, ‘Image s of perfection,’ in Seventeenth-century imagery, ed. Miner, Earl (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), p. 14Google Scholar; see, also, Patterson, , Marvell and the civic crown, p. 108Google Scholar, and Marcus, Leah, The politics of mirth (Chicago and London, 1986), pp. 257–61Google Scholar.

49 SirVane's, HenryRetired man's meditations (1655)Google Scholar charts the speculations of one politician in defeat; Clarendon, who meditated on David's Psalms in exile, provides another such example, see Wormald, B. H. G., Clarendon:politics, history, and religion 1640–1660 (Chicago, rev. edn, 1976), pp. 165–6Google Scholar.

50 See Hodge, R. I. V., Foreshortened time (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 135–7Google Scholar, for commentary on Fairfax's attraction to and careful engagement with hermeticism.

51 The phobia clearly existed, whether or not a n organized group called the Ranters did: see Davis, J. C., Fear, myth and history: the Ranters and historians (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar.

52 Smith, N., Perfection proclaimed. Language and literature in English radical religion 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989), passimGoogle Scholar.

53 Matthews, A. G., Calamy revised (Oxford, 1934), p. 161Google Scholar; Greaves, R. L. and Zaller, R., Biographical dictionary of British radicals in the seventeenth century (3 vols., Brighton: Harvester, 1982–1984), 253Google Scholar.

54 The connections between Fairfax and Winstanley have been widely noted; cf. Wilding, , Dragons' teeth, pp. 150–3Google Scholar. It is possible that Fairfax had local interests in north Surrey, so the sympathy he showed to Winstanley is all the more remarkable. ‘Dr Thomas Thorowgood’, ed. Cozens-Hardy, B., Norfolk Archaeology, XXII (1924–1926), 333Google Scholar.

56 In Heights in depths and depths in heights (1651), a text almost as vertiginous as Marvell's own, Joseph Salmon paused as ‘the dark Canopies of Earth and Flesh…bespread with obscurity…the Hemispheare’ of his spirit; can we see in both author and image a reflection of the last stanza of Marvell's poem? The reach of one of Marvell's central images is suggested, variously, by Salmon's likening of the spirit to a bird which soars only to fall, with ‘the golden plumes of our soring fancies’ singed; by the confidence of the Seeker Captain Francis Freeman that ‘Now there is nothing but mirth in [external forms], there is a continual singing of birds in them, chirping sweetly’ by the Boehmenist excursions of the leading Welsh Fifth Monarchist, Llwyd, Morgan, in his Book of the three birds [A collection of Ranter writings from the iph century, ed. Smith, N. (London, 1983), pp. 204, 208Google Scholar; Freeman, Francis, Light vanquishing darknesse (1650), p. 2Google Scholar; Greaves, and Zaller, , Biographical dictionary, II, 194Google Scholar ] Bauthumley, Jacob, in The light and dark sides of God (1651)Google Scholar, a text with a title almost as suggestive as Salmon's could ‘see that God is in all Creatures,…and every green thing, from the highest Cedar to the Ivey on the wall,’ just as Marvell could invest the ivy with spiritual significance in the narrator's wandering [Ranter writings, p. 232]. The case for Winstanley's own hermetic interests has also been urged: Mulder, D.The alchemy of revolution: Gerrard Winstanley's occultism (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.

56 See, for example, Friedman, , Marvells pastoral art, pp. 221–2Google Scholar; or, more recently, Wilding, , Dragons' teeth, pp. 149–50Google Scholar.

57 The presentation of protestant virtue as a political theme is the main point of Cousins's, A. D. ‘MarvelPs “Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax” and the regaining of paradise,’ The political identity of Andrew Marvell, ed. Condren, C. and Cousins, A. D. (Aldershot, Hants, 1990), pp. 53–84Google Scholar.

58 The most insightful approach to this phenomenon remains Thomas, K., ‘Women and the Civil War sects,’ Past and Present, XIII (1958), 42–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Annabel Patterson on the role of Lady Fairfax, , Marvell and the civic croum, p. 96Google Scholar.

59 For Lady Fairfax at the King's trial, see Wedgwood, C. V., The trial of Charles I (London, 1964), pp. 100, 117–8, 126, 143–4Google Scholar. Lord Lisle, on the council of state, noted Lady Fairfax's pressure on her husband in 1650 to decline the Scottish venture, while the equally well-placed Bulstrode Whitelocke noted that Fairfax ‘att first seemed to like well’ of the Scottish campaign, ‘butt afterwards being hourly perswaded to the contrary by the presbiterians & by his own Lady, who was a great Patronesse of them,…declared himselfe unsatisfyed.’ [Historical Manuscripts Commission Report, De L'Isle and Dudley Mss., VI (London, 1966), 477Google Scholar; The diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke 1605–1675, ed. Spalding, R. (British Academy, Records of Social and Economic History, new series, XIII, 1990), 260Google Scholar ]; for Lady Fairfax's alleged associations in 1651, see the sources cited at n. 40 above.

60 See Erickson, Lee, ‘Marvell's Upon Appleton House and the Fairfax family,’ English Literary Renaissance, IX (1979), 161Google Scholar.

61 McClung points out that Prioress Langton had long been dead by the time of William Fairfax's assault on the nunnery, and that Marvell had wholly imagined the scene: Country House, p. 166 n. 23, and cf. Erickson, , ‘Marvell's Upon Appleton House,’ pp. 160–1Google Scholar.

62 In 1657 the royalist herald and antiquarian, Sir William Dugdale, reported the attempts of those arriviste ‘Proud tits,’ Lady Fairfax and her daughter, to intercede with the Protector for the royalist duke of Buckingham. Such animosity for Lady Fairfax was surely personal rather than partisan, for Dugdale had had close contacts with the Fairfax household in 1650–2 through his fellow antiquarian Roger Dodsworth, a retainer of Fairfax and cousin of Fairfax's secretary Rushworth. Dodsworth had himself been confident enough that Fairfax would command against the Scots: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 5th Report (1876), p. 177Google Scholar; Hamper, W., ed., The life, diary and correspondence of Sir William Dugdale (London, 1827), esp. pp. 235, 245Google Scholar.

63 See for example Sterry's sermon on the 1651 victory at Worcester, whose argument is summed up in its title, England's deliverance from the northern presbytery compared with its deliverance from the Roman papacy. More famous testimonials to this association are Milton's ‘New presbyter is but old priest writ large,’ and chapter 47 of Hobbes's Leviathan.

64 Margoliouth long ago noted Marvell's echo of SirBrowne, Thomas, Religio Medici, I. 34Google Scholar, ‘man that great and true amphibium,’ The poems and letters, I, 293; and cf. Friedman, , Marvell's pastoral art, pp. 245–6Google Scholar.

65 The poem must have begun as a tribute to, perhaps even a send-up of, Johnson's To Penshurst. This poem had run its course in the tenth stanza, and is connected to the rest of Upon Appleton House in two mechanical and contrived couplets, ‘While with slow Eyes we these survey,/And on each pleasant footstep stay,/We opportunly may relate/The Progress of this Houses Fate’ (81–4). The first ten stanzas were not, we suspect, written in the summer of 1651. More likely, they came early in Marvell's stay at Nun Appleton, soon after Fairfax's return to his estate. These stanzas contain no trace of the topical, or still more obviously of the military, materials that mark every other section of the poem. And their only and very generalized seasonal marker comes in the coda in the tenth stanza, ‘fragrant Gardens, shaddy Woods,/Deep Meadows, and transparent Floods’ (79–80). That coda provides the motif for what we believe to have been the part of the poem Marvell next wrote, a party-piece in anticipation and celebration of Mary Fairfax's thirteenth birthday. Indeed, the coda, and in its exact order, is repeated in stanza lxxxvii, where Marvell takes us through Maria's harmonizing of gardens, woods, meadows, rivers. Clearly, the coda to the country-house piece frames and anticipates the narrative sections of the poem; nevertheless, the opening sequence as a whole connects most closely in tone, in metaphorical and panegyric extravagance, with the tribute to Maria. In the final disposition of the poem, Marvell saw the structural elegance of placing the two heiresses at either end of the long meditation on war that occupies him in the central panels of the poem. The last stanza, with all its indecision, uncertainty and foreboding, could not have been written after the beginning of the third week in August, by which time the Scots had gone west through Lancashire, and Fairfax had declared himself; still less after 3 September, when the military threat definitively ended. We can assume from the mood of that stanza that the composition of the poem was then complete.

66 The most scrupulous of all Marvell's philosophical musings, the Horatian Ode, surely reflects the same personage. That poem becomes especially comprehensible if it is read not as an abstract contemplation of authority and power, nor as disinterested political analysis, but rather as a construction of the personalities and events of 1648–50 from Lord Fairfax's point of view. Such a construction makes sense of the poem's general ambivalence towards Charles and Cromwell; it provides a logic for the otherwise puzzling echoes of Marvell's assessment of Cromwell in his tribute to Fairfax [An Horatian Ode, II. 27–32; Upon Appleton House, II. 283–4], and it makes particular sense of the complexity and ambivalence of MarvelPs handling of the Scottish venture in the Horatian Ode as well as of its climactic positioning. That was of course the very occasion of Fairfax's retreat from politics and retirement to Nun Appleton.

67 See Hirst, D., ‘“That Sober Liberty”: Marvell's Cromwell in 1654’, in Wallace, J. M., ed., The golden and the brazen world (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985), pp. 17–53Google Scholar.

68 Hirst, D., ‘The Lord Protector,’ in Morrill, J. S., ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English revolution (London, 1990), p. 133Google Scholar.

69 British Library, Additional MSS 21421, fo. 70; Historical Manuscript Commission, 5th Report (1876), p. 177.

70 After absenting himself from politics throughout Oliver's Protectorate, Lord Fairfax returned triumphantly to the head of Yorkshire's list of representatives in the elections to Richard Cromwell's parliament. It is surely no accident that members of his old household mad e their first entry to Westminster at the same time – his former secretary, the historian John Rushworth, for Berwick, and his daughter's former tutor for Hull. The literary interests of these two men were scarcely of sufficient weight to win them election for such major constituencies; but their ties to Lord Fairfax, when Fairfax seemed to offer the north the promise of a return to old ways, could have.

71 The absence of Buckingham from the gallery of court panders, pimps, and fools in The last instructions is suggestive enough; more telling is MarvelPs striking tribute to Buckingham's The rehearsal when he turned to ecclesiastical politics in The rehearsal transpros'd.

72 The importance of the issues of magnanimity, friendship and patronage not simply to the panegyrists but also to political philosophers in the seventeenth century is suggested by Thomas, K., ‘The social origins of Hobbes's political thought,’ in Brown, K., ed., Hobbcs studies (Oxford, 1965) pp. 190–214Google ScholarPubMed, and Marshall, J., ‘John Locke's religious, educational, and moral thought,’ Historical Journal, XXXIII (1990), 1001Google Scholar.

73 The role of Archibald Douglas, the sole object of panegyric in The last instructions [11. 649–96/, in such a sequence raises interesting questions about the organizing force and, of course, masculine identity of such figures; cf. Zwicker, S., ‘Virgins and whores: the politics of sexual misconduct in the 1660s,’ in The political identity of Andrew Marvell, ed. Condren, C. and Cousins, A. D. (Aldershot, 1990), pp. 100–1Google Scholar.

74 The ranks of republican politician-gardeners include John Lambert, the greatest parliamentarian commander after Cromwell and Fairfax [Dictionary of national biography, sub Lambert], and the regicide colonel John Hutchinson [Hutchinson, Lucy, Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. Sutherland, J. (Oxford, 1973), pp. 206n, 207Google Scholar ]. Cromwell's, own horticultural tastes may be hinted at in ‘An Horatian Ode’, II. 31–2Google Scholar.

75 Marvell was not alone in suffering the ambiguities of such a station: the newsletter-writer Captain Rossingham apparently felt free enough to satirize the Countess of Northumberland repeatedly in the 1650s from within the Percy household, but he earned repeated beatings in the process; the delicacy and the extraordinary detail of the instructions given, at the Restoration, by one minister to another contemplating employment in a household including females is suggestive as well. Wiltshire Record Office, Ailesbury MS. 1300/452; Somerset Record Office, MS DD/PH/205, pp. 142–7.

76 Cf. Duncan-Jones, Elsie, ‘Marvell: a great master of words’, The Proceedings of the British Academy, LXI (1975), 280Google Scholar.

77 It is tempting to read in Marvell's 1667 letter of condolence to Sir John Trott on the death of Trott's sons a similar confession of moral futility and paternal barrenness in a life ‘live[d] to so little purpose’: Margoliouth, and Legouis, , Poems and letters, II, 313Google Scholar.

78 For a seventeenth-century reader, the lines “Twere shame that such judicious Eyes/Should with such Toyes a Man surprize' [11. 653–4] must have connoted the ‘amorous sport’ which the OED gives as the primary meaning of ‘toy’ as a substantive.

79 There is something similarly suggestive of an interest in secrets and their disclosure in that series of voyeuristic pastorals that includes The picture of little T. C. in a prospect of flowers.

80 In this regard, it is crucial to note that Marvell's sexual identity was to become a matter of widespread gossip and innuendo; see, for example, Leigh, Richard, The transproser rehears'd (London, 1673), p. 135Google Scholar, ‘O marvellous Fate, O Fate full of marvel;/That Nol's Latin Pay two Clerks should deserve ill I/Hiring a Gelding, and Milton the Stallion;/His latin was gelt, and turn'd pure Italian.’ See, also, Legouis, , Andrew Marvell, p. 199Google Scholar; and, especially, Empson, William in Using biography (Cambridge, Mass.), 1984, 14–16Google Scholar, on both the erotic displacements in the lyric poetry and on the later pamphlet attacks on Marvell's sexual reputation.