3

At the Sign of the Pelican

… he was sent abroad to gain Cunning and Experience, and beyond Sea saw the Bears of Bern, and the large race of Capons at Geneva, and a great many fine sights beside, and so return’d home as accomplish’d as he went out …

Samuel Parker1

The years between Marvell’s final departure from Cambridge in September 1641 and his certain presence in England again six years later, when he witnessed a deed at Meldreth on 12 November 1647, present biography with its greatest challenge. There is certain evidence of his presence in London at the end of February 1642 but for the four to five years subsequent to this, during the most turbulent period of the English Civil War, Marvell appears to have been absent from England.

Speculation about his whereabouts has included the suggestion that he could have studied briefly at the Inns of Court or returned to Hull to work in business with his brothers-in-law. It is possible also that he could have gone to Hull to receive either a legacy from his father or the compassionate support of the woman with whose daughter, allegedly, his father was drowned while crossing the Humber. But the most compelling evidence is that he spent most if not all of this period abroad, either funded by these same means or, what is more likely, working, as his step-uncle, Thomas Alured, had done, as tutor and companion to a young man of means. Certainly, the profession of personal tutor was to be Marvell’s for the whole of the 1650s.

Milton’s famous letter of 21 February 1653, recommending Marvell for the vacant post of assistant Latin Secretary under him, would refer to the fact that ‘he hath spent foure yeares abroad in Holland, France, Italy, & Spaine, to very good purpose, as I beleeve, & the gaineing of those 4 languages’.2 Scattered through Marvell’s later writings, in poetry and prose, are references to having been in these European countries and a mention of ‘My Fencing-master in Spain’3 suggests that he was not a penniless wanderer but someone engaged in the traditional gentlemanly pursuits of the Grand Tour.

During Marvell’s years at Cambridge, and throughout the 1630s, Charles I had ruled without Parliament. On 13 April 1640, desperate for funds to sustain his war with the Scots, he had summoned Parliament for the first time since May 1629, in the hope that it would grant him the funds he needed, but it was not so accommodating, presenting demands for its own liberty, for something to be done about the growth of ‘popery’, and for a lessening of taxation. The King was infuriated, causing him to dissolve it on 5 May. The collapse of this so-called Short Parliament was setting the King on a collision course that could end only in war. By the time the King raised his standard in defiance of the Parliamentary forces at Nottingham on 21 August 1642, however, Marvell was almost certainly abroad.

The alternative to the Grand Tour theory – which may point only to a delay, rather than constituting an argument that he did not travel at all (which appears unsustainable) – is that Marvell returned from Cambridge to Hull during 1641, possibly entering the trading-house of his brother-in-law Edmund Popple, ship-builder, master mariner and merchant. In his later years as an MP, Marvell would evince a shrewd knowledge of business and maritime affairs that could have been derived from an early experience of this kind. In Hull there has long been a tradition that Marvell was employed in this way. The city’s Wilberforce Museum has a small circular box said to have been made from oak taken from the building in the High Street in which Marvell served his clerkship. In the nineteenth century local historians described an armchair in an inn known as the White Hart made from oak of the same source. Others located his apprenticeship at a house on the corner of Rottenherring Street.4 William Empson, who has speculated liberally on various aspects of Marvell’s life in addition to his more famous analysis of the poems, endorses this tradition. He puts the following words into the mouth of Edmund Popple, making him argue that he supported Marvell’s decision to abandon an MA that would have been the passport to a career like his father’s as a parson: ‘What do you want an MA for? You ought to be joining us. First you must spend about a year in the office in Hull, learning the ropes; then you can go abroad. I will see you don’t starve.’5 Empson goes on to suggest that Marvell would have been used by Popple as a temporary employee in Europe with the job of reassuring the European shipping trade that Hull was open for business, in spite of the recent plague and the political uncertainty of the Civil War. Marvell’s lack of money at this time – the general condition of recent graduates in any epoch – may have been compounded by the fact that any money accruing through his father from the inherited wealth or property of the Cambridgeshire ancestors would have been used up in providing the dowries for his three daughters, all of whom married well, into prosperous families that would expect such generosity from the bride’s father.6

Another tradition holds that the Mrs Skinner whose daughter was drowned with the Reverend Andrew Marvell provided the young man with a bequest. The unreliable accounts of the drowning incident have contributed to this legend but it is now considered unlikely that Mrs Skinner’s daughter Bridget – the only possible candidate – was even in the boat that sank.7 There is a faint possibility that she offered some financial support out of compassion for the fatherless young man because she was a friend of the family. The Marvells and the Skinners certainly knew each other well as is evidenced by letters showing that Marvell was acquainted with Cyriack Skinner, another child of Mrs Skinner.8 Cyriack’s sister, Theophila, later married a Humphry Cornewall, becoming therefore the ‘T.C.’ in Marvell’s poem ‘The Picture of little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers’. There is also a very tentative speculation, discussed below, that Marvell’s young charge as tutor on the European tour was Edward Skinner, Mrs Skinner’s eldest son. The last piece of evidence is the fact that Marvell’s father dedicated a sermon to Mrs Anne Sadleir, sister of Mrs Skinner, describing her as ‘a Constant benefactress to me & to my family’.9

That Marvell was in London rather than Hull immediately before setting off on his European tour is confirmed by his signature, as a resident of Cowcross in Clerkenwell, to a ‘protestation’ of loyalty to the Protestant religion on 17 February 1642. The protestation had been ordered by the Long Parliament on 3 May 1641, against the background of an army plot against Parliament in which the King may have been partly implicated. MPs were obliged to sign a loyalty oath promising to uphold ‘the true reformed Protestant religion … against all Popery, and Popish innovation within this Realm’ and to defend the ‘Power and Priviledge of Parliaments, the Lawful Rights and Liberties of the Subjects’ and to ‘endeavour to preserve the Union and Peace betwixt the three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland’. Initially imposed on MPs, the Protestation was printed in January 1641 and circulated around the country for signature by ordinary citizens, who responded with enthusiasm. Marvell’s name appears as one of ‘severall persons which dwell within the said Liberty’ of Cowcross returned by a constable, Robert List.10 The relative proximity of Cowcross to the Inns of Court has encouraged the speculation – though there is no evidence in enrolment records – that Marvell may have been a student of law at one of the Inns at this time.

In the same month, on 8, 10 and 21 February, Marvell’s signature occurs again on three legal documents witnessing a lease, release and mortgage of a Yorkshire property owned by Sir William Savile of Thornhill and acquired by his distant relative, another rich West Riding landowner, Thomas, Viscount Savile. Lord Savile was the King’s Treasurer of the Household; Sir William Savile was nephew of the Earl of Strafford, Thomas Wentworth. One of the other witnesses to this property transaction was Sir Robert Lewys, a barrister of Gray’s Inn. This fact, combined with the evidence of the Protestation, implies that the deed was witnessed in London, probably at one of the Inns, not Yorkshire. Marvell, it has been suggested, could even have been in the service – possibly as a tutor – of one or other of these rich fellow Yorkshiremen, either before the signing or as a result of forging the contact at the signing, but there is no concrete evidence of his employment or the possible role of either in financing his subsequent foreign travel.11 Marvell’s fondness for these teeming London districts and the busy life of the capital – a preference that stayed with him throughout his life, in spite of his constant pull towards rural solitude and apartness – evidently began early.

Marvell probably began his European trip in the spring or summer of 1642 with a visit to Holland, a country he was later to satirise as ‘This indigested vomit of the Sea’ in the poem ‘The Character of Holland’. He was possibly in France in 1643, when the poet Antoine Girard Saint-Amant, author of a poem called ‘La Solitude’, which has been seen as an important influence on Marvell’s treatment of the theme, was at the height of his fame. According to Marvell’s detractors like Samuel Parker, who were keen to portray him as a vexatious Calvinist, he visited Geneva; Parker referred to him crossing the Alps and visiting Berne and Lyons. The nearest we come to a reliable sighting of Marvell, however, is in 1645 or 1646, when he visited the English poet Richard Flecknoe in Rome. Italy was an important stop on the English grand tour and Parker paints a vivid portrait of Marvell as one who has ‘seen all the Tredesian rarities and old stones of Italy, that has sat in the Porphyrie Chair at Rome, that can describe the method of the Election of Popes, and tell stories of the tricks of Cardinals…’12 There is a traditional, though once again unsubstantiated, story of Marvell meeting Milton in Rome and the two discoursing on the iniquities of popery in the vicinity of St Peter’s itself. In his Latin verses on the Louvre, ‘Inscribenda Luparae’, there is an allusion to a Latin inscription in the church of St John Lateran at Rome which he may have seen13 and in ‘The Garden’ his reference to a floral clock has led some scholars to surmise that he may have seen the famous example by Famianus Strada in the garden of Aldobrandini’s villa in Rome.14 As well as the reference to his Spanish fencing-master he seems to have attended at least one bull-fight while in Spain, if we take as a literal report on experience his comparison, in ‘Upon Appleton House’ of the newly mown meadows to the ‘Toril/Ere the Bulls enter at Madril’.

Despite his views on Catholicism, and the seminary’s reputation among hostile witnesses from the previous century as a place where treason was spoken (see, for example, Anthony Munday’s The English Roman Life of 1582), Marvell may in 1645 have visited the English College at Rome, as Milton certainly did before him in October 1638. The College was on the itinerary of English visitors to Rome, regardless of their religious affiliation, the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury being a particularly popular day for the English to call.

Marvell’s putative visit depends on a theory that he was a tutor to Edward Skinner. The College’s ‘Pilgrims’ Book’ contains an entry for 18 December 1645, mentioning a ‘N. Skinner’ having dined there with the seventeen-year-old Henry Howard (later the sixth Duke of Norfolk) and another young man, the son of the author and naval commander Sir Kenelm Digby. Skinner is said to have been there ‘cum suo tutore’ (with his tutor), which could be a reference to Marvell. Reserved and unobtrusive as ever, Marvell may not have pressed forward any other identity than ‘tutore’. The difficulty with this theory lies in that initial ‘N’. It could be an abbreviation of the familiar ‘Ned’, or it could simply be the customary initial used to indicate the place where a name was to be inserted. The College Rector, who would have made the entry, did not record young Digby’s first name either. Skinner’s two companions, however, were recorded seven weeks earlier in a register of British visitors kept at the University of Padua. On 31 October 1645 a Stephen Skinner – no relation to the family whose mother was not drowned in the Humber – was entered in the Padua record, making him a more likely candidate for attendance at the Roman lunch.15 Another name which appears several times in the Pilgrims’ Book of the English College in 1645 and 1646 is the much more interesting one of Richard Fleckno or Flecknoe, whose connection with Marvell is quite beyond doubt.

Posterity has dealt harshly with Richard Flecknoe, the protagonist of Marvell’s poem ‘Fleckno, an English Priest at Rome’. John Dryden – prompted in part by Flecknoe’s fierce attacks on the obscenity of the London stage – would in 1682 make him the eponymous subject of his poem ‘Macflecknoe or a Satyr upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, TS.’, an attack on the poet Thomas Shadwell. In Dryden’s poem, Flecknoe is presented as the epitome of dullness and one who ‘In Prose and Verse was own’d, without dispute/Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute’. Although Marvell’s poem is scarcely more respectful, there is evidence in Flecknoe’s writing that he may have enjoyed occasional remissions from tediousness. His statement that ‘I write chiefly to avoid idleness, and print to avoid the imputation (of idleness), and as others do it to live after they are dead, I do it only not to be thought dead whilst I am alive’16 is not wholly devoid of wit.

Richard Flecknoe, described in Gillow’s Dictionary of the English Catholics as ‘priest, poet and dramatist’, was born in Oxford (date unknown) and was the nephew of the Jesuit, Father William Flecknoe SJ. He was sent abroad to be educated at one of the Jesuit colleges where he was said to have entered the Society of Jesus and been ordained priest. According to Gillow: ‘Naturally of an easy-going disposition, with a strong objection to the trammels of discipline, it was no wonder that he soon left the Society. His weakness was vanity and conceit, and fondness for society in which he was ambitious to shine as a polite English scholar.’17 It is not difficult to see why satirists were attracted to the pompous, social-climbing author of A Treatise of the Sports of Wit (1675) as an easy target, though his poems would earn passing praise from Robert Southey and Charles Lamb in the nineteenth century.

In 1640 Flecknoe left an England drifting towards a civil war in which Catholics might not prosper (though he would later write a worthless eulogy of Oliver Cromwell in 1659 which praised the Lord Protector, opining that ‘a Greater and more Excellent personage has no where been produc’d by this latter Age’).18 His travels began in the Low Countries and would later take him to Constantinople, Portugal and Brazil, as described in his A Relation of Ten Years Travells in Europe, Asia, Affrique, and America (1656). In the opening pages of this work he announces breezily his reasons for leaving a conflict-ridden country: ‘I’m too weak and slight-built a Vessel for Tempestuous Seas … England is no place for me and for Poets … I, like one who flies an Incendium, wholly indifferent whither I went, so I sav’d myself.’ We laugh, and Marvell laughed, but might his own motives have been similar?

Flecknoe enjoyed his exile amongst English titled expatriates, until, that is, their complaints about their losses at home began to bother him, at which point he moved on: ‘I, by relating all to the narrow compass of one Portmanteau, travel lightly up and down, injoying that Liberty, Fortune has bestow’d on me,’ he declares. In Brussels, he flattered various titled ladies: ‘amongst Men (such is the corruption of the Times) one learns nothing but Libertinage, Vice and Deboisherie’. He passed through France, then to Monaco, where he was lodged in the Palace of the Prince, and then into Italy, always on the run from political conflict. No sooner had he arrived in Genoa than the Marquis Philippo Palavicino despatched a carriage to fetch him from his inn to the Palace. By 1645 he had arrived in Rome where something clearly went wrong. ‘I swear I like it not,’ he writes. ‘Give me good Company, good Natures, & good Mirth, & the Devil of any such thing they have here.’ He was impressed by the ruins and the antiquities, but did not care for the living inhabitants of the city. He wrote to his noble friends in Flanders: ‘I converse more with the dead than the living here (their antient Statua’s and Pictures, I mean) … how melancolly a Creature I am.’ This was the condition in which Marvell found him, explaining in the poem’s opening lines that he called at the poet-priest’s lodgings because he was ‘Oblig’d by frequent visits’ from Flecknoe to do so, which suggests that Marvell had for some time been well-integrated into English expatriate life in Rome.

‘Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome’, which is formally reminiscent of the satires of Donne and Horace, is hardly a charitable poem, making fun of Flecknoe’s poverty and pinched surroundings, from which, on this occasion, no aristocratic patron had been able to rescue him. The poet mockingly recounts a visit to Flecknoe’s lodgings ‘at the Sign/Of the sad Pelican’. Once there, he is required to climb three flights of stairs, at the top of which he finds a garret which was so small, three feet by seven, it ‘seem’d a Coffin set on the Stairs head’. The act of opening the door blocked half the room, making it a ‘Wainscot’. In contrast to its tight dimensions, however, the room contains poetic stanzas in abundance and no sooner does Marvell squeeze himself in than the awful poet begins in ‘a dismal tone’ to read his ‘hideous verse’. He resigns himself to this ‘Martyrdom’, which is rapidly followed by a performance on the lute, over whose frets the poetaster’s ‘gouty Fingers’ move, the rumblings of his empty stomach making a sympathetic music with the strings. Marvell’s language in the poem is wittily blasphemous about the Catholicism of Flecknoe, who is pitiably thin from starvation ‘as if he only fed had been/With consecrated Wafers’, and who is fattened only by wads of his terrible rhymes. He watches the scarecrow dress and, after a farcical encounter with another caller while trying to get down the narrow stairs, all three go out for a meal where, replenished, the poems start again, read this time by the third party, probably an Italian because he is said to appreciate the poems ‘because he understood/Not one Word’. This local youth may also be hiring the poet to write hack verses addressed to his inamorata. Hearing his poems inadequately rendered, the ‘disdainful Poet’ stamps off in high dudgeon. Marvell, finding himself free at last, pretends mockingly that he will go off to St Peter’s to hang a votive offering there in gratitude for his release.

Such a bald summary, of course, does scant justice to the allusive wit and word play of the poem, which cleverly satirises such theological concepts as transubstantiation as well as Catholic practices such as the Lenten fast. Moreover, like every poem of Marvell’s, it is instinct with classical allusion and lightly worn learning. Such a wit implies an appreciative audience so perhaps the author, who on internal evidence had a long acquaintance with the city prior to the visit, had some learned friends among the English in Rome who would enjoy both the manuscript verse – it was not published until after his death in the 1681 edition of his poems – and the mockery of Flecknoe, who might have been a standing joke among them. Pauline Burdon speculates that the readership could have included the second Duke of Buckingham, who had been in Rome since late 1645 and would stay until May 1646. Flecknoe later addressed some verses to him and one reason for cultivating Marvell might have been the hope that the latter’s contacts might bring him together with a much needed potential patron.19

It is probable that the encounter between the two poets took place in March 1646 during Lent. Flecknoe seems to have arrived in Rome at least as early as January 1645, according to the English College records, to perform a mission for one of his patronesses, the Duchess of Lorraine. Once that mission was completed he seems to have slid gently, during late 1645 and 1646, into the poverty in which Marvell found him, having no other means of support.20 His visits to the English College may have occurred during this period of hardship when he would appreciate the opportunity to dine.

Another of Marvell’s poems can possibly be dated to this time. ‘A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda’ was set to music by the English composer William Lawes, the setting having survived in Lawes’s own hand in a manuscript now in the British Library. Since Lawes was killed fighting for the Royalist side at the siege of Chester in September 1645 the poem must have been written in the first years of the decade, though the version that appears in the 1681 edition of Marvell’s poems appears to have been revised later. It shows that the delicate pastoral verses, such as those that appear in the early pages of the Miscellaneous Poems, began early.

The final stage of Marvell’s tour was Spain. He would have set off from Italy no sooner than the spring of 1646, it being the habit of travellers to winter in cities. The next certain sighting we have of him is in Cambridgeshire, in the autumn of 1647. He would travel again, on official missions, some more clandestine than others, but this period of four to five years was the most extended and probably most relaxed of his periods abroad. His mockery of Flecknoe’s poverty suggests that this was not his own condition. To have sustained himself for such a long period implies some form of financial support, either from a patron at home or from the income derived from working as a tutor to a young man of wealthy family.

He would, however, return – with skills newly acquired from a Spanish fencing-master – to an England engaged in an altogether less frivolous and foppish presentation of arms.