Cambridge and the continent

On 13 December 1633, three months before his thirteenth birthday, Marvell matriculated from Trinity College, Cambridge. If entry to the university at such an early age suggests precocity it may also explain why he graduated after five years instead of the normal three. As a sub-sizar, the lowest rank of student, he carried out day-to-day tasks for seniors for an annual allowance of 6s. 8d., with a further 4d. each week for food. The scholarship to which he was elected in April 1638 more than doubled his income, and further funds would have come from the 'dry' chorister's place that he appears to have held from 1640 to 1642 (BL, Add. MS 5846, fol. 133v). Although this post, which his contemporary Abraham Cowley also enjoyed, did not carry any duty of singing, Marvell's love of music is apparent throughout his poetry. His only known compositions at this time are some Greek verses and a Latin reworking of an ode of Horace that he wrote, in anticipation of the birth in March 1637 of Princess Anne, for the university's congratulatory Sunwdía‎. After subscribing for his BA degree on 27 February 1639, the young puritan fell under the influence of Catholic proselytizers. As his earliest editor puts it, some 'Jesuits … seeing in him a Genius beyond his Years' enticed him from the university, but after 'some Months his Father found him in a Bookseller's shop in London, and prevailed with him to return' (Works, ed. Cooke, 1.5).

At home in Hull, the death of Marvell's mother in April 1638 had been followed in November by his father's marriage to Lucy Harris, and his drowning on the Humber in January 1641. The Revd Andrew died intestate, but, on 23 July, Jane Grey, the remarried widow of his brother Edward (d. 1631), made over to young Andrew 47½ acres of copyhold land that the Marvells had long farmed in Meldreth, Cambridgeshire (LMA, H1/ST/E79/24, m.37). These he at once mortgaged to his brothers-in-law Edmund Popple and James Blaydes for £260, repayable in two instalments by the eve of his majority; nine years later they were still unredeemed. At the same time he paid a fine of £3 to retain the house and 2½ acres which can be identified with the property traditionally known as the Marvells and nowadays as Meldreth Court. The sudden inheritance and his release from paternal control freed Marvell to turn his back on academic life. On 24 September 1641 an entry in the college conclusion book warned that he and four other graduates 'in regard that some of them are reported to be maryed and the other looke not after their dayes nor Acts … shalbe out of their places unles thei show just cause … for the contrary in 3 months'.

Early in 1642 Marvell was in London, taking the protestation oath on 17 February as a resident of Cowcross Street in the fashionable area of Clerkenwell, not far from the inns of court. In the same month he witnessed three deeds transferring lands in Yorkshire from Sir William Savile of Thornhill to Thomas, first Viscount Savile. At some unknown date, possibly following the outbreak of serious hostilities in August, he left England and in doing so escaped the first civil war entirely. Much later he was to pass over his failure to engage himself with the paradox that 'the Cause was too good to have been fought for' (Rehearsal Transpros'd, 135). All that is known of the extent of his itinerary comes from Milton's remark that he had passed four years in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain 'to very good purpose, as I beleeve & the gaining of those 4 languages' (Milton to J. Bradshaw, 21 Feb 1653, TNA: PRO, SP 18/33/75). While a later allusion to his 'Fencing-master in Spain' (Poems, 2.324) suggests that he had lived in some style, his own resources would hardly have sufficed for such a prolonged stay. The likeliest explanation is suggested by a later report of his having been employed as governor to a young nobleman on his travels. A fixed point is provided by his brilliant if cruel lampoon 'Fleckno, an English priest at Rome', which belongs to Lent 1646. Richard Flecknoe was a literary protégé of the second duke of Buckingham and his brother Lord Francis Villiers, former contemporaries of Marvell at Trinity who in the previous autumn had taken a house in Rome.

Poetry and politics

Marvell was back in England at the latest by 12 November 1647, when he sold the Meldreth house, apparently for £80, attending the transfer in person. Although the deed describes him as 'of Kingstone super Hull Gentleman', some poems that he wrote over the next three years imply close contact with literary circles in London. 'An elegy upon the death of my Lord Francis Villiers', who had met his death in July 1648 during a brief royalist uprising, represents Marvell's first independent, though anonymous, venture into print. Commendatory verses 'To his noble friend Mr. Richard Lovelace', published in the Lucasta of May 1649, were followed in June by a lament on the death of the nineteen-year-old Henry, Lord Hastings, written for Richard Brome's commemorative Lachrymae musarum. But his pronounced royalism had changed by June 1650, when he wrote 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland', one of the greatest political poems in English. While reflecting sympathetically on Charles I's conduct at execution, it hails Cromwell as the dominant figure in the new republic. Critics and historians have debated at length the precise extent of Marvell's conversion to the parliamentarian cause, especially since 'Tom May's Death', written in November, denounces a former royalist poet for turning 'Chronicler to Spartacus' (ll. 73–4). What probably provoked this outburst was the grant of a state funeral to May while his rival Davenant, whose poetry Marvell admired, lay under threat of death. The safest reading of his politics in the 1650s is probably that he was prepared to accept any government that would operate within a constitutional framework, and that his admiration of Cromwell was conditional on his remaining 'still in the Republick's hand'.

Nun Appleton

Composition of the 'Horatian ode' coincided with the resignation of Thomas, third Lord Fairfax, from supreme command of the parliamentary forces, largely in opposition to the Scottish campaign, which the poem welcomes. On Fairfax's withdrawal to his native Yorkshire, Marvell was employed as tutor in languages to his twelve-year-old daughter Mary. It says much about his character and religious temper that her devoutly Presbyterian parents and formidable grandmother Lady Vere found him, in Milton's phrase, 'of an approved conversation' (TNA: PRO, SP 18/33/75). By the winter he was praising his pupil in some English verses prefaced to the translation of James Primrose's Popular Errors (1651) by the Hull physician Robert Witty.

Marvell's new surroundings proved both congenial and conducive to poetry. The family domain stretched eastward from Fairfax's birthplace at Denton, above the River Wharfe, to his town house on Bishophill in York, taking in the country retreats of Bilbrough and the former nunnery of Nun Appleton, his favourite seat. All are celebrated in a series of English and Latin verses dedicated to the employer who had left the world of action for a life of rural contemplation. The longest of these, 'Upon Appleton House', stands out among contemporary estate and topographical poems by sharp perception of the natural setting, and startling images. The mower sequence of poems, which sets the 'wild and fragrant Innocence' of fields above the 'enforc'd' culture of gardens, has also been ascribed to this interlude, though 'The Garden' itself, with its Latin counterpart, may date from an altogether later period. That Marvell was still writing lyric verse after the Restoration is confirmed by the graceful epitaph 'Enough: and leave the rest to fame' (March 1672).

Cromwell's poet

By the winter of 1652–3 Marvell was back in London, where in mid-February the prospect of a career at the centre of public life presented itself by the death of Rudolph Weckherlin, assistant to the blind Milton in the Latin secretaryship to the council of state. On 21 February Milton wrote to President Bradshaw recommending Marvell in strong terms both as 'a scholler & well read in the Latin and Greeke authors' and as 'a man whom both by report, & the converse I have had with him, [is] of singular desert for the State to make use of' (TNA: PRO, SP 18/33/75). Soon after, Marvell marked an English naval victory with 'The Character of Holland', in which he calls on personal experience to satirize Dutch manners, and proclaims the new regime at home as the 'Darling of Heaven'. Despite failing to obtain the government post he was taken up by Cromwell himself as governor to his protégé William Dutton, nephew and heir of Cromwell's wealthy friend John Dutton of Sherborne in Gloucestershire. As prospective husband for Cromwell's youngest daughter, Frances, it was essential that the youth be brought up in sound religious doctrines. On 28 July, Marvell wrote to his employer of their reception in the house of the puritan John Oxenbridge, vicar of Windsor and fellow of Eton College. The friendship that he developed with their hosts is confirmed by the Latin epitaph for Oxenbridge's wife, while the hymn of religious exile 'Bermudas' has been traced to recollections of the Oxenbridges' retreat there from Laudian persecution. A year later Marvell was promising to study a presentation copy of Milton's Defensio secunda 'even to the getting of it by Heart' (Poems, 2.306).

Two important poems that Marvell wrote at this time extol Cromwell and promote his political aims. In December 'The First Anniversary of the Government under O. C.' drew on musical and biblical analogies to celebrate the political harmony created by a protector who declines to be king. It was issued anonymously by a government printer in mid-January 1655. Some months later Marvell sent a long verse-letter in Latin to Nathaniel Ingelo, a fellow of the college who had gone as choirmaster to Bulstrode Whitelocke's embassy to Kristina of Sweden. Its overtly political message was reinforced by the message of the well-known Latin tetrastich that Marvell composed to accompany the gift of Cromwell's portrait to the queen.

Late in the same year Samuel Hartlib in London jotted down some information sent by John Worthington, an occasional visitor to Eton, about:

one Marvel of 40. years of age who hath spent all his time in travelling abroad with Noblemens sonnes and is skilled in several Languages, who is now again to goe with one's sonne of 8. thousand a year who is fitter to be a Secretary of State &c.

Sheffield University Library, H50/29/5/50A

By the following January, Marvell and his charge had passed through Paris and reached Saumur in the Loire valley, a leading centre of protestantism favoured by the well-to-do of several nations for the education of their sons. On 15 August a royalist visitor, James Scudamore, reported that he had seen virtually no Englishmen of note but 'M^r Dutton called by the french Le Genre [that is, Gendre, son-in-law] du Protecteur whose Governour is one Mervill a notable English Italo-Machavillian' (BL, Add. MS 15858, fol. 135). Marvell seems to have been promoting republican writings there; he is evidently the learned friend whom twelve months later Milton mentioned to Oldenburg as having sent back word of local interest in the Defensio. In all likelihood the death of Dutton's uncle early in 1657 brought to an end three and a half years of close fellowship.

Civil servant

Nothing certain is known of Marvell's activities for most of this year. The verses on Blake's victory at Santa Cruz in April, separately printed in 1674 and incorporated in the posthumous Miscellaneous Poems (1681), do not seem to be his (see Duncan-Jones). But on 2 September he finally entered the civil service as Latin secretary in the office of John Thurloe, secretary to the council of state and head of the government's intelligence service. His salary was £200 per year and his duties included writing letters to heads of state, translating foreign documents, acting as interpreter, and occasionally even receiving foreign envoys. After the Restoration he was to deny having had 'the remotest relation to publick matters' until taking up this post, 'which I consider'd to be the most innocent and inoffensive … of any in that usurped and irregular Government' and which he claimed to have discharged 'without disobliging any one person' (Rehearsal Transpros'd, 203). In November he wrote two lyrics to be sung at the festivities in Whitehall for the wedding of Viscount Fauconberg and Mary, third daughter of the music-loving protector; they include a tactful glance at the marriage of Frances Cromwell to Lord Rich one week earlier. Ten months later Cromwell was dead, and Marvell and Milton were granted six yards of mourning to walk in procession with Dryden, Hartlib, and Peter Sterry at his state funeral. 'A Poem upon the Death of O. C.', besides conveying the writer's sense of awe and personal loss, dwells on the human side of a great public figure. Although it was scheduled for publication in January 1659 along with elegies by Dryden and Sprat, its place was taken by a reprint of Waller's elegy.

Member of parliament

Under the new protector, Richard Cromwell, Marvell not only retained his civil service post but was returned in January 1659 as one of the two MPs for Hull. In the Commons he voted with the majority against the opposition until the fall of the protectorate in May, when the restoration of the Rump saw him unseated by his predecessor, the younger Harry Vane. The regicide Thomas Scott now replaced Thurloe as Marvell's superior in the civil service and by July Marvell had been granted lodgings in Whitehall; when the council was dissolved in October his salary was £86 in arrear. That winter he may have spoken at the Rota, the political club founded by his 'intimate friend' the republican James Harrington. Marvell was returned at the elections of 2 April 1660 to the Convention Parliament that recalled the Stuarts, coming a distant second to his partner in defeating Hull's republicans. There he was not entirely allowed to forget his recent affiliations: in July he was ordered to help in replying to a letter of congratulation on the Restoration, and in December was rebuked when he offered a complaint on the treatment of Milton, whom he had defended while his life was at stake during the indemnity debates. Unlike his friend he was not implacably opposed to monarchy, and had moreover been encouraged by Charles's promise of 'a liberty to tender consciences' at Breda. Marvell's own religious position has never been clearly defined. While more than sympathetic to dissent, and bitterly opposed both to Catholicism and episcopacy, he seems himself to have been a conforming Anglican. But a failed attempt in November to bring in a bill for a modified episcopacy, on which he acted as teller for the ayes, was an early indication of how little headway comprehension was to make in the Restoration settlement.

Marvell's continued exertions on Hull's behalf after the December dissolution were rewarded by re-election in April 1661. In the Cavalier or Pensionary Parliament he retained his seat for all but the sixteenth and last session, receiving from the borough a salary of 6s. 8d. per day while the house sat, besides expenses and occasional barrels of ale. He proved an able and attentive constituency member, his zeal reflected in the self-mocking description of how

The portly burgess, through the Weather hot,Does for his Corporation sweat and trot

Last Instructions, ll. 831–2and in the newsletters that he addressed to 'my very worthy friends'. Almost 300 of these, written between November 1660 and his death, still survive, though there are considerable gaps in the series. In the general dearth of parliamentary reportage at this period they provide a useful firsthand account of public business. Though more impersonal than might be wished—in October 1675 he remarked that 'I am naturally and now more by my Age inclined to keep my thoughts private' (Poems, 2.166)—they do not lack an occasional dry wit. In the Commons he proved by the standards of the day moderately active, attending regularly when not absent abroad and acting as teller in eight divisions. He was named to 120 committees, though evidence of his work there is largely confined to examination of an informant in December 1666 as to the causes of the great fire. Records survive of his speaking on fourteen occasions only, and as late as 1677 he was apologizing for lack of practice (Grey, 4.330). His effectiveness as a politician was doubtless hampered by the fact that he 'had not a generall acquaintance' (Brief Lives, 2.54). Cooke alleges affiliations with two leading opposition figures, Prince Rupert, whose 'Tutor' in political matters he was said to be, and William Cavendish, later first duke of Devonshire (Works, ed. Cooke, 1.10–11). His natural loyalties lay with the country party, that:

Gross of English Gentry, nobly born,Of clear Estates, and to no Faction sworn

Last Instructions, ll. 285–306but his tendency to act according to his own lights made him difficult to manage. Moreover his behaviour in the house could be unruly; in March 1662 he was forced to apologize for having provoked Thomas Clifford into striking him.

Embassy to Russia

The extent of Marvell's involvement in Hull's affairs is also witnessed by sixty-nine surviving letters to the Trinity House there, two-thirds of which relate to a plan for a lighthouse at Spurn Head. On 8 May 1662 he advised the wardens that 'by the interest of some persons too potent for me to refuse … I am obliged to go beyond sea' (Poems, 2.250). Promoting this unstated errand was a former member of Cromwell's bodyguard, Charles Howard, newly created earl of Carlisle, whose brother-in-law Sir George Downing was playing host to Marvell at The Hague by 24 May. When an extension of his stay over the following winter led Lord Bellasis, the royalist steward of Hull, to urge his replacement in parliament, he abandoned his 'private concernments' and was back in his seat by 2 April. But on 20 July, one week before the house rose, he wrote again of an immediate departure, with leave from the house and 'his Majestyes good liking', as secretary to Carlisle's embassy to the northern powers (ibid., 2.254). The main purpose was to secure the restoration of privileges revoked from English merchants at Archangel by Tsar Alexis following the execution of Charles I. An account that was published later by Marvell's assistant Guy de Miège describes how, after landing at Archangel in August, they were delayed for three months at Vologda before taking sledge to Moscow. Exception taken to a Latin form of address used by Marvell of Alexis at an audience in February 1664 drew from him a learned but ultimately unsuccessful defence. In June the embassy, with some bitterness at Carlisle's returning the tsar's gifts, left for audiences with the kings of Sweden (14 September) and Denmark (30 October) in an equally unproductive attempt to secure backing for war with the Dutch. Near Hamburg, in December, Marvell threatened an unco-operative waggoner with his pistol and had to be rescued from a 'barbarous rout', sparking off a general skirmish (Miège, 430–31). After an almost continuous absence of two and a half years he returned to the house a month before it rose in March 1665.

On 4 March 1665 Charles declared war on the Dutch. The progress of the long campaign was followed in a series of satirical poems that took their rise from Waller's panegyric Instructions to a Painter on the duke of York's leadership in the battle off Lowestoft in June 1665. Recent editorial opinion inclines to Marvell as the author of the Second and Third Advice (April and October 1666), as he was of the later and more ambitious Last Instructions to a Painter (September 1667). From his seat in parliament he was well placed to observe political developments, while his maritime expertise was to be acknowledged by his election in May 1674 as an elder brother of the Deptford Trinity House, of which in the year of his death he rose to be younger warden. In Last Instructions the debates of October 1666 on a measure to impose a general excise are made the occasion for a mock-heroic catalogue of members (ll. 121–334); a section describing the progress of Dutch warships unopposed up the Thames almost to the heart of the capital (ll. 523–760) leads to an attack on administrative failures. Marvell derides attempts to shuffle the blame onto the navy commissioner Peter Pett (ll. 765–90), whom he defended in the house also, being named (17 October) to the committee to consider the conduct of the war and the sale of Dunkirk.

During Marvell's absence abroad the predominantly Anglican and loyalist parliament had repealed the Triennial Act and passed a law against conventicles, thus concluding the series of measures that became known as the Clarendon code. Whatever his views on the administration, and despite having given voice to popular suspicions of misappropriation in 'Clarindon's house-warming' (July), Marvell now argued against shaming the chancellor in a vote to the king and opposed precipitate action to impeach him on the ground of his 'not being likely to ride away post' (Grey, 1.14). In November his call for substantiation of Clarendon's alleged remark regarding Charles's unfitness to govern drew his fellow poets Denham to testify to it and Waller to call for its retention in the articles (ibid., 1.36–7).

In February 1668 Marvell attacked the new chief minister, Arlington, 'somewhat transportedly', for buying his place and title, but when asked to elaborate said that the matter 'was so plain, it needed it not' (Grey, 1.70). Arlington was instrumental in the same month in concluding with the Netherlands and Sweden a triple alliance for consolidation of protestant liberties, but any hopes that it raised in Marvell were dispelled over the next two years by the increasingly pro-French policies of king and government. Marvell's private letters testify to a growing fear of civil and religious absolutism, and his anger at the treatment of protestant dissenters. On 21 March 1670 he sent his nephew William Popple a bleak account of affairs (Poems, 2.315), deploring recent enlargements of royal authority, particularly in the establishment of a Scottish militia and in the renewal of the bill against nonconformist conventicles, which he had opposed in the house, and now described as 'the Quintessence of arbitrary Malice'. Altogether, he concluded, no king since the conquest was 'so absolutely powerful at Home', and the diminution of Stuart powers now became one of his main concerns. His disillusion with Charles sought expression in satirical ballads, the jocular manner of 'The King's Vows' (early 1670) eventually giving way to the darker tone of 'Upon his Majesty's being Made Free of the City' (December 1674). 'The Loyal Scott' (1669/70) redeploys the Douglas episode from Last Instructions as part of a bitter attack on Episcopal opposition to union with Scotland.

A year later, when the prorogation of parliament threatened his livelihood, Marvell entertained hopes of some unspecified 'honest fair Employment into Ireland' (Poems, 2.323). A report of 1671 appears to link him, in a faction formed against Ormond by Buckingham, with Thomas Blood, whose attempt on the crown jewels in May gave Marvell the cue for a sharp epigram on clerical cruelty. Despite his manifest patriotism and his complaining that summer of how we 'truckle to France in all Things' (ibid., 2.325), he drafted five Latin distichs in response to Colbert's prize competition for an inscription for the pediment of the Louvre. By Christmas he was at Winchendon, a seat of the prominent dissenter Philip, fourth Lord Wharton, acting as moderator in the search for a bride for his eldest son. They shared an interest in poetry, and in April 1667, 'having nothing of mine own to deserve your acceptance', he had sent Wharton Simon Ford's Latin and English verses on the great fire.

Controversial writings

In the following autumn there appeared the first part of the work by which Marvell was best-known in his own time and for long after: The Rehearsal Transpros'd. Its target was Samuel Parker, later bishop of Oxford, whom Marvell had first met in Milton's house in 1662–3, before the zealous young dissenter had conformed, risen in the church, and turned on his former fellows. By 1670 Parker was upholding the power of the civil authority over religious externals in A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity, but it was the attack on toleration of nonconformity that he prefaced to Bramhall's Vindication (September 1672) that finally provoked Marvell to respond. The title of his anonymously published reply, and the name Bayes which he uses to mock his opponent, derive from Buckingham's satirical play The Rehearsal, where the protagonist—a caricature of Dryden to which Marvell was to return in his prefatory verses to the second edition of Paradise Lost—defines his practice of turning prose into verse as 'transversing'.

Marvell's tract pursues no coherent line of argument but is framed in what Wood called 'the then, but newly, refin'd art of sportive and jeering bufoonery' (Wood, Ath. Oxon., 4.231). Ill-advised innuendos about the love life of ‘Mr Bayes’ were repaid with interest by the writers of five printed replies and a scurrilous verse-lampoon entitled 'A love letter to the author of the RT' who accused Marvell of sodomy and impotence, alleging that he had been surgically castrated. A second issue was allowed to pass by the censor, L'Estrange, with only slight changes, after the king read it and let it be known that 'Parker has done him wrong, and this man has done him Right' (Leics. RO, Finch MSS, DG7, box 4985) over the recent declaration of religious indulgence (March 1672). The forced withdrawal of this hasty measure twelve months later aided Parker in his long Reproof, to which Marvell replied with a second part (1673), issued under his own name. This defiantly quotes on its title-page a threat made against his life if he should publish any further 'Lie or Libel' against his opponent. The verdict of contemporaries was that the 'victory lay on Marvell's side' (Wood, Ath. Oxon., 4.231), and a generation later Swift, hailing him as an innovative genius, remarked that 'we still read Marvel's Answer to Parker with Pleasure' (Apology to Tale of a Tub, 1710).

In March 1672 Charles II joined Louis XIV in a third war against the Dutch. Marvell, who was ultimately to play a part in framing the parliamentary address for peace, seems to have been active in a Dutch fifth column headed by Peter Du Moulin and including John Ayloff. Spies of Secretary Williamson reported a brief conference early in 1674 between William of Orange and a member of parliament, 'a thicke short man … much like Mervell' who went under the name of Mr George, and, in June, giving his codename as Mr Thomas, alleged that a difference of opinion with his fellows had led to his retiring into the country (Hayley, 57–8, 62–3). If so, his place of retreat may have been the Highgate property, known much later as Marvell's Cottage, where in the next summer he resolved to 'sequester my self one whole day' (Poems, 2.341). In a clever and libellous mock speech (Poems on Affairs of State, 1704, vol. 3) composed perhaps as early as the following February, he anticipated Charles's inevitable plea for supply at the reassembly of parliament on 13 April. Its exposure of the king's wayward inclinations is matched in a series of related verse-satires comprising 'The statue in Stocks-Market' (after October 1674), 'The Statue at Charing Cross' (July 1675), and 'A Dialogue between the Two Horses' (late 1675), the attribution of which to Marvell has sometimes been disputed. During the same session he acted as teller for the yeas in a failed bill to prevent MPs accepting public offices, a device much used by Lord Treasurer Danby to buy off opposition, as satirized that year in 'The Chequer Inn'. It was no small part of the emerging Marvell legend that the alleged royal bribe offered to him in his modest lodging in Maiden Lane by Danby himself should have been firmly rejected (Works, ed. Cooke, 1.11–14). Before the house rose he was named to the committee on the bill to disable Catholics from sitting in parliament and appointed a commissioner for recusancy in his native Yorkshire.

During the fifteen-month prorogation that followed, Marvell took it on himself to defend the views of an Anglican dignitary while continuing his attack on episcopacy. Herbert Croft, bishop of Hereford, had argued in The Naked Truth (1675) for an accommodation with the nonconformists and had been taken to task by Francis Turner in Animadversions (1676), written in an attempt at bantering humour. Marvell's Mr. Smirke, or, The Divine in Mode (May 1676), published under the pseudonym Andreas Rivetus junior—the borrowed identity makes a convenient anagram of (res nuda veritas'naked truth')—mocks Turner in the character of Lady Bigot's 'pretty spruce' chaplain in George Etherege's Man of Mode. Croft had drawn on precedents from the primitive church; Marvell followed him in A Short Historical Essay, Concerning General Councils, which he appended to the tract, and in which he explored the origins of disputes between rival sects in the third century, concluding that 'the true and single cause then was the Bishops' (Mr. Smirke, 71). Government attempts at prosecution failed, though Nathaniel Ponder suffered a brief imprisonment for publishing the work without licence. On 27 March 1677 Marvell made his longest recorded speech (Grey, 4.321–5), opposing a bill for educating royal children in the protestant faith that had been inspired by the prospect of the duke of York's succession to the throne. Faced with a difficult choice, he concluded that whether the bill would 'prevent Popery, or not' it would 'secure the promotions of the Bishops'. Two days later a friendly tussle with Sir Philip Harcourt was drawn to the attention of the house by the speaker and debated; despite an initial smart rejoinder Marvell submitted himself to censure.

In September, Marvell wrote 'an excellent epitaph', now lost, on James Harrington, but suppressed it because it 'would have given offence' (Brief Lives, 1.293), perhaps because of his increasing apprehension of personal danger. Early in the previous year had occurred the collapse of a banking partnership set up by a group of London merchants that included two of his distant relatives, Edward Nelthorpe and Richard Thompson. After commissions of bankruptcy were issued against them they went into hiding in July 1677 in a house in St Giles-in-the-Fields that Marvell had taken for the purpose. An appeal for their discovery was published in the London Gazette for 28–31 January 1678, and Marvell himself was named to a committee to consider their case. Not content with harbouring fugitives, he risked prosecution with a work written largely in the autumn and given the finishing touches in December 1677. An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government marks Marvell's final abandonment of any hopes that he had in Charles II. It opens with the bold contention that 'There has now for diverse Years, a design been carried on, to change the Lawfull Government of England into an Absolute Tyrrany, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery.' The stages of this alleged conspiracy are traced from the triple alliance to Charles's adjournment of parliament in July 1677, the declaration of indulgence is presented as a Catholic subterfuge, and the heroes are Buckingham, Wharton, and the two other lords committed in February 1677 for questioning the legality of the recent prorogation. The tract, timed to appear before the next session of parliament in April 1678, alarmed the government, which in the Gazette for 21 February – 5 March offered £50 for the discovery of author and publisher. Marvell himself told Popple in June that 'great Rewards have been offered in private', but affected to make light of the matter (Poems, 2.357). L'Estrange replied from a tory perspective in An Account of the Growth of Knavery (1678), and much later a hostile critique and scurrilous personal attack appeared in Parker's posthumous History of his Own Time (1727, 335–49).

For his last published work Marvell intervened in a theological dispute between two nonconformist ministers. Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse, issued anonymously under an imprimatur dated 17 April 1678, defends views on a question framed by Robert Boyle that had been expressed in John Howe's Reconcileableness of God's Prescience against the Calvinist interpretation offered by Thomas Danson in De causâ dei. Following a visit to Hull in July 'about the Towns affaires' Marvell contracted the tertian ague which brought about his end on 16 August 1678, in the rented property on the north side of Great Russell Street, a few yards to the west of the present British Museum. A professional report alleged medical incompetence, and concluded that an ounce of quinine might have saved him. Two days later he was buried under a window in the south aisle of the old church of St Giles-in-the-Fields.

Marriage

No will was found, and, though Marvell is said to have owned a house in Hull, Thompson's mention of a 'small paternal estate' remains unverified (Works, ed. Thompson, 3.480). But a surprising light was thrown on Marvell's last years by a series of chancery suits now initiated by the third member of the failed banking partnership. John Farrington, desperate to release hidden assets, searched the Maiden Lane lodgings soon after in the vain hope of recovering a bond for £500 formerly made out to Marvell by Nelthorpe, who himself died one month later. During his search he is said to have removed 'trunks bonds bills & other goods', leaving only 'a few Books & papers of a small value' (Tupper, 374 n. 42). Then, having secured the administration of Nelthorpe's affairs, he enlisted Marvell's eldest sister, Anne Blaydes, to forestall any similar attempt on the poet's estate. But in September 1680 Marvell's housekeeper, Mary Palmer, laid claim to be his widow and by the following March had been granted administration jointly with her lawyer, one of his creditors. In February 1682 Farrington challenged the marriage on the grounds that it was unsuspected even by Marvell's close friends, and that the widow of a poor tennis-court keeper—one Thomas Palmer—was no fit match for a learned man and an MP. In reply (7 April) she asserted that the ceremony had taken place 'on or about' 13 May 1667 at Holy Trinity, Little Minories, as 'by the Register Book … may appeare'; moreover, 'the difference in their Conditions … might be (as this Defend^t believes it was) One reason why the said M^r Marvell was pleased to have the Marriage kept private' (Tupper, 380). Holy Trinity was one of only two London churches that were licensed to celebrate clandestine marriages, the number there rising from over 500 in 1661 to almost 1000 in 1677. Attempts were periodically made to suppress them, and early in 1678 Marvell and his colleagues had to swear that they had not stolen the engrossed bill to abolish this popular practice (Poems, 2.219). Although the relevant Holy Trinity register is now missing, there is no reason to doubt that it would have been available to the court authorities of the time. It may be significant that in the year of their marriage a bookseller of the same name as Mary's son, Thomas Palmer, who traded in Westminster Hall, was pilloried for selling Directions to a Painter (CSP dom., 1665–6, 159), and again in March 1671 for Advice to a Painter (Poems, 1.376).

Posthumous reputation

After Marvell's death a collection of his Miscellaneous Poems was issued in 1681 by Robert Boulter, one of the original publishers of Paradise Lost, who that summer was to be arrested for predicting the imminent fall of the monarchy. The prefatory note, dated 15 October 1680 and signed 'Mary Marvell', describes them as being 'Printed according to the exact Copies of my late dear Husband, under his own Hand-Writing'. It served to authenticate the contents for a general readership, to whom Marvell's poetic talents were known, if at all, from his commendatory verses to the second edition (1674) of Milton's epic, and perhaps from some satires. The folio volume includes religio-philosophical dialogues; verses on the pleasures (both sensuous and spiritual) of the retired life in pastoral surroundings; poems that depict innocence on the verge of sexual maturity; love lyrics, from the classic persuasion of 'To his Coy Mistress' to the dark complaint of 'The Unfortunate Lover'; and some Latin epigrams and epitaphs. Almost the only public response to such late-appearing metaphysical poems is Wood's grudging statement that the volume was 'cried up as excellent' by those of the author's own persuasion (Wood, Ath. Oxon., 4.232).

Failure of nerve during a temporary crisis in whig fortunes had led to excision of the three Cromwell pieces before sale from almost all known copies of the work. It is scarcely surprising therefore that the collection did not include any of the political satires that were to be claimed for Marvell in anthologies printed after the revolution of 1688, from A Collection of the Newest … Poems … Against Popery (1689) to successive editions of Poems on Affairs of State (1697–1704). Definitive authentication, hampered by lack of demonstrably authorial texts and a marked disparity in style from Marvell's other poems, is further hindered by the tendency for a topical genre or subject to attract a number of writers. But to judge from the commonly accepted pieces, Parker's sneering allusion to Marvell's 'proper trade of Lampoons and Ballads' (Reproof, 526) was not wholly undeserved, for though they address serious issues, they do so chiefly through burlesque and ridicule. Marvell himself told Aubrey that the earl of Rochester was 'the only man in England that had the true veine of Satyre' (Brief Lives, 2.54, 304).

Aubrey, who knew Marvell personally in the 1670s, praised him as 'an excellent poet in Latin or English: for Latin verses there was no man would come into competition with him', recalling that he 'kept bottles of wine at his lodgeings … to refresh his spirits, and exalt his Muse'. Yet he was:

in his conversation very modest and of very few words. Though he loved wine he would never drink hard in company: and was wont to say, that he would not play the good-fellow in any mans company in whose hands he would not trust his life.

In appearance he was 'of a middling stature, pretty strong sett, roundish faced, cherry cheek't, hazell eie, browne haire' (Brief Lives, 2.53), a description borne out in the oil portrait, executed about 1655–60 by an unidentified artist, that was presented by Marvell's grandnephew Robert Nettleton in 1764 to the British Museum and is now in the National Portrait Gallery. A line engraving of a related type, but with image reversed, appears as frontispiece to Miscellaneous Poems, and a smaller version was executed by John Clark for Cooke's edition of 1726. Another oil, in Hull City Art Gallery, which belonged to Ralph Thoresby and later to Thomas Hollis, bears an inscription that gives the sitter's age as forty-two; it was engraved by Cipriani for Hollis (1760) and by Basire for Thompson's edition (1776). Vertue attributed to Lely a now unlocated portrait that belonged before 1726 to the Hon. Maurice Ashley, Marvell's nephew by marriage (BL, Add. MS 23070, fol. 22v).

In September 1678 Hull voted £50 for Marvell's funeral expenses and 'to perpetuate his memory by a Grave-stone' (Tupper, 373–4 n. 42), but the rector is said to have objected. Mary was buried in St Giles's on 24 November 1687, under the surname of her first husband. In the next year Popple wrote an epitaph, of which a slightly altered version was placed on a tablet set up in the new church in 1764 by Nettleton. Verse elegies survive by John Ayloffe (Poems on Affairs of State, 1697, 160–61) and two anonymous admirers (ibid., 122–3, and Davies). Marvell's posthumous reputation as a proto-whig defender of constitutional liberties and a 'sincere and daring Patriot' encouraged Thomas Cooke in 1726 to reprint the lyrics alongside the satires in a collection grandly entitled The Works of Andrew Marvell Esq. A brief biography was prefixed, and some private letters were supplied by 'the Ladys his Nieces' (vol. 1, p. x), daughters of William Popple. Fifty years later the same spirit led Captain Edward Thompson, a native of Hull, to publish a luxurious folio edition to which Burke and Wilkes subscribed, and Thomas Hollis and T. J. Mathias contributed material. Here the expurgated Cromwell poems were first brought to public notice.

Over the next hundred years Marvell's poetry was increasingly praised by poets and anthologists in Britain and America, earning pride of place in Alexander Grosart's comprehensive edition of the Complete Works in 1872. T. S. Eliot's influential essay for the Hull tercentenary volume of 1921 pointed the way to a major critical reassessment that was facilitated by H. M. Margoliouth's 1927 Oxford edition of the Poems and Letters and Pierre Legouis's biographical and critical study of 1928, André Marvell. Since then the ambiguity of Marvell's poetry and the elusiveness of his personality have helped to make him of all seventeenth-century lyrists the subject of the most extensive exegesis.