Old English Worthies: A Gallery of Portraits is attributed by the British Library to the Utilitarian Lord Henry Brougham (1778–1868) and others. Largely biographical, the long article on Marvell shows the influence of Hartley Coleridge (see No. 52), who is called ‘Marvell's best biographer,’ even though the anonymous author was aware of Dove's earlier effort (see No. 50) which, in turn, had been based on previous accounts. As such, the portrait may be correctly said to represent a diffusion both of true and specious facts about Marvell.
Extract from Old English Worthies: A Gallery of Portraits (1847), pp. 150–4.
A few beautiful verses, an acquaintanceship with the immortal Milton, and a traditional reputation for great political honesty in a most corrupt age, have given Marvell a permanent and honourable place among the worthies of his country. His public life was never illustrated by any great or very conspicuous deed, and of his private life very little, with any certainty, is known. Yet is his name familiar to every Englishman that loves his country and his country's literature, and that reveres the associations of genius….
In the summer of the following year, 1653, Marvell, who had taught languages to my Lord General Fairfax's daughter, was appointed by Cromwell to take charge of the education of his nephew, a young Mr. Dutton. It has been said of a letter which honest Andrew wrote to the ‘magnanimous usurper,’ shortly after getting this appointment, that it is ‘rather more respectful than would please either a Royalist or a determined Republican’ [Coleridge]; but Marvell was never either a decided Royalist or a determined Republican; he, apparently, never indulged in abstract political speculation; his mind, on that side, being wholly of a practical, ready-working kind; he would have loved a free constitutional monarchy if any such could have been established, and if Church had been separated from State; but, as matters stood, after the terrible intestine war, he, in common with some of the honestest hearts and brightest intellects that ever did honour to this land, rallied round the almost kingly Protector as the only barrier to mad, intolerant fanaticism, anarchy, and dead-levelling, on the one side; and to the unconditional restoration of a vicious and faithless prince, and of a tyrannical church supremacy, on the other. Marvell's sober nature could not be intoxicated by the effusions of an orator and enthusiastic Republican like Sir Harry Vane; still less could his eyes be dazzled by the visions of ordinary Fifth-monarchy men, who would have no king or ruler but King Jesus, and who would divide the whole world and the fulness thereof, in mathematically-equal portions, among the saints—i.e. among themselves. He knew that the English people were not—and were not likely soon to become—fit for Republican institutions; of war and its horrors he had seen enough; he dreaded a renewal of the war, he dreaded anarchy, he dreaded an unconditional restoration; and therefore he clung to the Protector, whose entire ecclesiastical polity, however unseemly and odious to others, conciliated his respect and admiration; and this son of the Low-Church lecturer of Hull seems always to have dreaded the ‘Prelates' rage’ more than the tyranny of kings or of any other lay-rulers. But a greater man than Andrew Marvell, and one quite as honest, might, without any moral abasement or sacrifice of principle, have written the respectful letter he wrote to the great Cromwell. If the pupil was such as the tutor describes him,—and we have no good reason to doubt that he was not, as, generally, the kith and kin of Oliver were eminent for their virtues if not for their acquirements—there is not a word of flattery in it. We will quote the epistle, which is otherwise interesting, and the reader will judge for himself:—
[Quotes Letters, pp. 304–5.]
Early in 1660 he was elected by his native town of Hull to that Parliament which voted the restoration of Royalty. The Houses met on the 25th of April, and then Marvell made his first public appearance as a statesman. But for the patriotism and forethought of a few men like himself, and the jealousies and fears of the Presbyterian leaders, this parliament, which gave far too much, would have denied absolutely nothing that the king or his courtiers could have asked. We have no reports of Marvell's parliamentary speeches; but when he had been a few months in the House he began to correspond regularly with his constituents; and from these letters may be gathered what was his conduct, and what were his opinions on the great state questions of that most critical time, when the vast majority of the nation seemed anxious to make a renunciation of liberty. Marvell's parliamentary conduct was cautious, circumspect, calm, and persevering. For a long time his aim and hope was rather to prevent or diminish evil than to do good. He always considered things practically, never theoretically or speculatively, or angrily, except, perhaps, the one question of church government, with the re-establishment of episcopacy. The great Protector being gone, Marvell could be no Cromwellite; and so far was he from being a disappointed, soured, and intolerant Republican, that in the earlier of his letters to his Hull friends, he spoke respectfully, and even favourably, of Charles II. and the rest of the restored royal family. Of the execution of the king's unhappy father he had sung in the Cromwellian days, and in an ode addressed to Cromwell himself:
[Quotes ll. 55–64.]
Marvell, too, is said to have written a most pathetic letter, in prose, on the execution of King Charles. It seems, therefore, quite certain that he did not sympathise with the anti-monarchical prejudices of Milton, and that he could have lived not only tranquilly but happily under the government of Charles II. if he had not found it rapidly degenerating into a despotism, and a source and centre of national demoralization. For some few years, though unable to give it his full approbation and confidence, Marvell did live happily under this government, and found pleasure in serving it. And this, his moderation of political temper being well known, enabled him to serve his friend Milton at the hour of need. The fanatic Royalists would have excepted the great poet out of the Bill of Indemnity, but Andrew Marvell, uniting with Sir William Davenant, Sir Thomas Clarges, Mr. Secretary Morrice, and other friends of literature prevented this useless piece of vengeance and barbarity. True, Marvell had held office under Cromwell as well as Milton; but it was not for his having been Latin secretary to the Protector, but for his having written the Eiconoclastes and the two Defences of the trial and execution of Charles I., that Milton was so obnoxious to the Royalists. Marvell, on the contrary, though he had been tutor to Cromwell's nephew, and under-secretary to Milton, had shed tears over the Whitehall tragedy, and had given in a few verses the most graceful, pathetic, yet noble picture of that royal execution: Marvell, therefore, may very well be supposed to have possessed some influence at court at the rime when the Bill of Indemnity was being voted; and he certainly enjoyed favour and influence at court about three years after this period when he was appointed to accompany an embassy….
Busy as he was in parliament he found time to devote to friendship and to poetry. In the year 1667, ‘a great epoch in the history of the human mind’ [Coleridge], because Milton then first gave to the world his ‘Paradise Lost,’ Marvell took up his pen to serve his friend, writing some English couplets, which were inserted among the commendatory verses prefixed, as usual, to the epic. To a lover of literary history these commendatory verses, which come thick upon us in most old books, are very interesting, even though the quality of the rhyme should not be first-rate. But Andrew Marvell's couplets on the first [second] appearance of ‘Paradise Lost’ offer many good lines. He thus judiciously calls the public attention to Milton's blindness, and to the sublimity and awfulness of his subject:—
[Quotes ll. 1–10.]
He thus defends the great poet's preference of blank verse to rhyme:—
[Quotes ll. 45–54.]
About five years after the appearance of ‘Paradise Lost,’ Marvell again stood forth as the champion of Milton. One Doctor Samuel Parker, who had gone through most of the changes in politics and religion, having been royalist, republican, fifth-monarchy man, conventicler, and now royalist and high-churchman over again, published, in 1670, in a book called ‘Ecclesiastical Polity,’ the most violent invectives against Nonconformists and Commonwealthmen like Milton, against all who favoured and protected them, and against every approach to liberty of conscience…. Marvell instantly took up the pen; and soon there came forth, to the amusement of court and town, his first brilliant prose satire, entitled ‘The Rehearsal Transprosed;…’ This production overran with wit and irony; while here and there the writer's wrath was as majestic as that of Juvenal. Of the invention of printing he writes with this finished irony:—
[Quotes RT I, pp. 4–5.]
Besides much more wit of the same kind, there is in the ‘Rehearsal Transprosed’ much solemn and most energetic writing—Marvell pleads for toleration in language which seems inspired. Parker, as deficient in modesty as in wit, attempted a reply, under the title of ‘A Reproof of the “Rehearsal Transprosed,” with a mild Exhortation to the Magistrate, to crush with the Secular Arm, the pestilent Wit, the Servant of Cromwell, and the Friend of Milton.’ But this turncoat politician and unmannerly polemic, who very probably knew that Charles II., whose keen relish for wit of all kinds has passed into a proverb, had declared Marvell to be the best prose satirist of the age, much doubted whether the vengeance of the secular arm could be made to fall upon his adversary, and therefore had recourse to other threats. An anonymous epistle, ‘short as a blunderbuss,’ was pitched into honest Andrew's very humble lodging. No doubt it was written by or for the Doctor, and thus was it worded:—‘If thou darest to print any lie or libel against Dr. Parker, by the eternal God I will cut thy throat.’ The pestilent wit, Marvell, adopted the words as a motto, and printed them on the title-page of his ‘Second Part of the Rehearsal Transprosed,’ which was published in 1673. However dull and obtuse he may have been to the sense of shame, this second pamphlet must have brought some blushes to the cheek of Parker. Milton, though blind, poor, and otherwise afflicted, was still alive, and it was easy for his witty friend to expose the monstrosity of attempting to make still more wretched the last hours of such a man. Marvell also exposed, in his happiest manner, the baseness and interested changeableness of the poet's assailant, telling the world how Parker, in former times, used to pride himself on the friendship of Milton, much frequenting his house in Moorfields, and there predicting to Marvell himself the speedy death of Charles II. and the consequent restoration of the Commonwealth and the Cromwellian order of things.
[Quotes RT II, p. 312.]
Marvell's generous and tender care of the author of ‘Paradise Lost,’ began with his troubles at the Restoration, and never ceased until the poet's death. Edward Phillips, the nephew of Milton, states that ‘Marvell, with other friends, frequently visited the poet when secreted on account of the threats of Government.’
In the tyrannous temper of the times it was necessary to use caution, not only in writings destined for the press, but even in private letters, the privacy of which was but too often invaded. Before this time, however, Marvell had given up the good hopes he once entertained of the restored monarch; and the vices of the court and the corruption of nearly all public men had converted him into an habitual political satirist. He frequently used the medium of verse, but prose was more natural to him. His first prose satire [sic], ‘Letter to a Friend in Persia,’ appears to have been written in 1671, though not published until some years after. The following extract from it, which contains not a word that is not more than borne out by other historical evidence, may convince the reader that there was enough of guilt, and shame, and national dishonour, to sour the temper of any amiable man who loved his country:—
[Quotes Letters, pp. 324–5.]
It was seldom that Andrew Marvell could make common cause with a bishop: he had imbibed from his father, a decided low-church man, a dislike of the hierarchy; and the general conduct of the restored king's bench of bishops was certainly not calculated to conciliate him: yet, on one occasion, he found a prelate into whose views he could heartily enter. In 1675, Dr. Herbert Croft, bishop of Hereford, published a short treatise, entitled ‘The naked Truth, or the true State of the Primitive Church. By an humble Moderator’…. The whole was written with great plainness and piety, as well as with much force of argument and learning. It was assailed with fury by several of the high-church party; but no one was so vituperative as Dr. Francis Turner, Master of St. John's College, Cambridge, a very fashionable but very shallow and affected divine. To Turner's pamphlet, called ‘Animadversions on the naked Truth,’ Marvell replied with great vivacity in a brochure, entitled ‘Mr. Smirke, or the Divine in Mode.’ A part of honest Andrew's wit lay in a peculiarly happy knack of calling names, or in appropriating a ludicrous character in some popular comedy, and dubbing his adversary with it. In this spirit, he ridiculed Dr. Turner, by giving him the name of a chaplain in Etherege's comedy of ‘The Man of Mode,’ and thus, by the mere application of a name, conveyed the idea which he wished to convey of ‘a neat, starched, formal, and forward divine’ [from A. Wood]. In the same way, he had taken the name or character of Bayes out of Buckingham's ‘Rehearsal,’ and had applied it to his older adversary, Dr. Parker. But in combating for the wisely tolerant bishop of Hereford, Marvell did a good deal more than bestow a nick-name. He dwelt eloquently upon the great principles which that prelate had ventured to promulgate in his modest essay.
[Quotes Grosart IV, pp. 9–10.]
The last work of Marvell's, published before his death, was, ‘An Account of the Growth of Popery and arbitrary Government in England.’ It was printed in 1678, the year made memorable in history by the production of the so-called Popish Plot; and it was reprinted in the State Trials soon after the Revolution of 1688. In this work the principles of our constitution, or rather what ought to be its principles (for our constitution was not practically established until after the expulsion of the Stuarts), are clearly laid down; the legal authority of the kings of England is nicely ascertained and defined; and the glory of the monarch, and the happiness of the people, are proved equally to depend upon a veneration of the laws, and a strict observance of their respective obligations. He gives the consoling proof that the constitutional monarch of a free country may, and indeed must be, more glorious and far more happy than the absolute monarch of an enslaved people. He says, in his happiest manner:—
[Quotes Grosart IV, p. 250.]
He likewise drew a striking contrast of the miseries of a nation living under a degrading Popish administration, and the blessings enjoyed under a liberal Protestant government….
Although his poetry is inferior to his prose, and only a few of his verses are of transcendant grace and beauty, Marvell can have been excluded from an honourable post among our minor poets only by political prejudice and a want of taste and feeling. Nearly all the poems which can be proved to be his were juvenile productions. We quote one of them which, though well known, has not been so universally read as it deserves to be.
[Quotes ‘Bermudas’ entitled ‘The Emigrants.’]
Among the satirical poems attributed to him, there are some so flat and dull and so offensively coarse, that we cannot for our lives believe that they were ever written by the friend and bosom companion of Milton. Marvell, as we have said, put forth a good many of his productions anonymously. On the title-page of other pieces he placed some fictitious fanciful name, which other writers of the day, according to a prevalent practice, may have assumed after him for their frouzy trash….
As a senator honest Andrew's character does indeed appear to have been unimpeachable. He was above corruption when nearly all were corrupt: his untiring attention to the interests of his constituents, and to parliamentary business in general, might make him a model for parliamentary men, now that gross and direct corruption at least has ceased.