Andrew Marvell Newsletter | Vol

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Andrew Marvell Newsletter | Vol Andrew Marvell Newsletter | Vol. 6, No. 2 | Winter 2014 THE INSTABILITY OF MARVELL’S BERMUDAS BY TIMOTHY RAYLOR I How should we take Bermudas?1 Is it a straightforward propaganda poem, commemorating the commencement of the godly governorship of the newly appointed Somers Island commissioner and erstwhile colonist, John Oxenbridge? Or is the poem shot through with doubts and questions—with ironies that call into question the actions and purity of motive of its singing rowers? Both positions have been urged: the former especially in the nineteenth century, when Marvell came first to critical notice; the latter more commonly in the twentieth. The eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1853-60), for example, cited the poem approvingly as “one of the finest strains of the Puritan muse.”2 But in the twentieth century challenges to the propagandistic reading came from two directions. One was the New Criticism, with its tendency to read any narrative frame, any instance of playful wit, as debilitating irony—an approach to which the poem lends ample ammunition. The second direction was historical. As the early history of the Bermuda colony came to be better understood, the gap between that history—natural, economic, and religious—and Marvell’s poetic recreation of it came to appear so pointed as to be explainable only in terms of an ironic counter-narrative.3 From the natural and economic historical points of view, high hopes of vast resources were soon dashed. From the point of view of religion, the colony was not predominantly or even notably Puritan, and although we find a small tradition of Puritan ministers, including Oxenbridge himself, making their way there during the century, the Bermudas were settled in the first instance largely by economic migrants. (The first settlers were shipwrecked on their way to Virginia, not Massachusetts.) Despite the strength of its challenges to the propagandistic reading, the ironic reading never gained universal acceptance. And the move, in the 1980s and 1990s, to a more historically and ideologically alert criticism led to a resurgence of Puritan readings of the poem: readings buttressed by careful contextual scholarship.4 And yet the ironic reading has not been completely dispatched. In 1996 John Rogers could describe the poem, in an exemplary statement of the strong version of the ironic reading, as a “parody of Puritan utopian providentialism.”5 The increase in our contextual knowledge has not yet allowed us fully to resolve the problems with which the poem presents us. And doubt about one’s reading of the poem appears to be an occupational hazard of any serious attempt to get to grips with it. One may concur with Philip Brockbank, who noted in his York tercentenary lecture on Marvell that “there is a sense in which, whatever our knowledge of Bermudan history, the poem has always pulled both away from and towards our dashed expectations.”6 Brockbank’s point is borne out in the work of that doyenne of Marvellians, Rosalie Colie. In an article of 1957 Colie presented Bermudas as a rich but fundamentally unproblematic presentation of what she termed “The Puritan paradise.”7 But when after a dozen years of intensive work on Marvell she came to publish her magnificent book-length study of his poetry, Colie changed her tune: “We know [she wrote] a great deal about the poem and its content, perhaps even its occasion … What we do not know, though, is what is going on in this poem.”8 In this article I make no claim to solve, once and for all, the question of what is going on in Bermudas. My goal is more modest. I aim first to show that the problem 3 Andrew Marvell Newsletter | Vol. 6, No. 2 | Winter 2014 is real and is of long standing, although it has been largely hidden, for much of the poem’s textual and critical history, from scholarly view; it is, in other words, no mere chimera generated by mid-twentieth-century critical practices. Having sketched that textual history, I show that two details from the text which seem, at first sight, to function ironically may, if placed in the wider context of Marvell’s work, lend support to the Puritan reading. II Let us look first at the propagandistic, Puritan reading of the poem. According to this version, Marvell offers us an earnest celebration of a paradise found: a new Eden located by the operation of divine providence working through human agency. The singers, for instance, row not in order to propel the boat, but to keep time with their singing; the work of their voices in praising and not that of their arms in rowing, is the efficient cause of their propulsion. This, or something like it, was the dominant reading of the poem from the early nineteenth century up through the middle of the twentieth century. It is founded on such features of the text as its psalm-like form, its singers’ praise of the liberality of the creator, and their emphatic hope of spreading the gospel throughout the Americas. And it is endorsed by the frame narrative’s approval of the singers’ “holy” and “cheerful” note. And yet this reading is disturbed by some gaps and tensions. Who exactly are the rowers? Why are they rowing and where are they going? If they are Puritans, why do they seem so self- absorbed?9 So focused on the material riches (e.g. the ambergris of line 28) and the carnal comforts so provocatively and forcefully impressed upon them (“He makes the figs our mouths to meet”)? There seem here to be rather too many of the sensuous allurements of an alternate tradition of earthly paradises: the classical and romance tradition of the Fortunate Isles. And if the poem is an earnest celebration of a paradise found, why is the islands’ natural superabundance presented so comically (“throws the melons at our feet”)? Why, finally, are the sentiments expressed in the rowers’ song not clearly endorsed by the winds of the narrative frame, which listen but which do not respond? Such questions cannot be ignored. During the nineteenth century, such questions about the poem were addressed primarily by editors rather than by critics. And they were addressed by editorial interventions that mitigated or resolved them. The inter-involved questions of the identity of the rowers and the direction and purpose of their rowing were decisively dispatched by Thomas Campbell in the text printed in his popular anthology of 1819, Specimens of the British Poets. Campbell solves such problems by retitling the poem, heading his version “The Emigrants,” thus settling at one stroke the matter of who the rowers are and the question of where they are headed: they are migrants from England, headed to the new world.10 With this stroke he also solves the problem of why they are rowing: they are propelling themselves—like some unexpectedly early entrants in the Talisker Whisky Challenge—westward across the Atlantic. Campbell’s solution may have been historically inaccurate and nautically implausible; but it was efficient, and it was influential. Campbell’s Specimens was widely distributed, and nineteenth-century readers were more likely to encounter the poem in some variant of Campbell’s version than in the more accurate, but less readily available, editions of Cooke (1726, reprinted 1772), or Thompson (1776), or in the privately printed collection of Grosart (1872- 75), of which only 156 copies were issued. Campbell’s retitling was adopted by subsequent anthologizers and critics.11 In the “Selection” of poems appended to his 1832 Life of Marvell, John Dove prints the poem under Campbell’s title. To this he adds a clarifying headnote identifying the singers and the occasion: “The following stanzas are supposed to be sung by a party of those voluntary exiles for conscience’ sake, who, in a profligate age, left their country, to enjoy religious freedom in regions 4 Andrew Marvell Newsletter | Vol. 6, No. 2 | Winter 2014 beyond the Atlantic.”12 Dove’s title and headnote were reprinted in the 1835 edition of Hartley Coleridge’s version of the Life.13 Robert Chambers includes the poem under the still more precise title “The Emigrants in the Bermudas” as one of four samples of Marvell’s work in his Cyclopaedia (1844).14 And so the poem is identified in comments by the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier, of 1848 (“The Bermuda Emigrants”), and by Mrs. S. C. Hall in Sharpe’s Magazine for 1852.15 Under versions of this title, the poem became widely known. George L. Craik, writing in 1844-45 hailed it as a work “familiar to every lover of poetry”; according to Craik, its title was “Song of the Exiles.”16 Lovers of poetry were also furnished with a version of the poem in Palgrave’s immensely popular Golden Treasury (1861)—surely the work in which the greatest number of Marvell’s later nineteenth-century readers encountered the poem. Palgrave prints it as “Song of the Emigrants in Bermuda.”17 It was widely-enough distributed under this title for Archbishop Trench to justify excluding it from his 1868 anthology of English verse on the grounds that it was so well known.18 Campbell’s retitling also fortified the Puritan reading of the poem by allowing commentators to resituate it historically. Thus, in his rather belated review of Dove’s biography, published a dozen years after its appearance, Henry Rogers identifies the rowers as the Pilgrim Fathers—apparently spotted by Marvell during some hitherto unsuspected southern detour.19 Even in the twentieth century, such associations held.20 Traces of it can be found as recently as 1977, in Bruce King’s account, which describes the body of the poem as “the Pilgrims’ song.”21 But retitling alone did not suffice to stabilize the Puritan reading of the poem.
Recommended publications
  • 1 Manifesting the Soul in Andrew Marvell's 'On a Drop of Dew'
    Manifesting the Soul in Andrew Marvell’s ‘On a Drop of Dew’ Ben Faber Redeemer University College [email protected] 1. Paradoxical Marvell ‘The ideal simplicity, approached by resolving contradictions’ is the epigraph to the chapter on Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ in William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral.1 With Marvell, however, the phrase ‘ideal simplicity’ itself requires resolving: Marvell is anything but simple, and his versions of pastoral consistently complicate the relationship between the ideal and the real. The material world in ‘The Garden’, for instance, may be annihilated in an ideal ‘green thought in a green shade’ (48) but even that happy, pure, and sweet place in the mind is ‘beyond a mortal’s share’ (57, 61).2 A painfully English experience of the fall—the ‘luckless apple’ of the Civil Wars—turns the Edenic environment of Nun Appleton into militias, forts, and garrisons, with Switzers, artillery, engines, and pillaging (‘Upon Appleton House’, 327). Ecocritical studies by Diane Kelsey McColley, Robert Watson, Andrew McRae, and Takashi Yoshinaka all echo the critical consensus of Marvell as a poet of ambivalence, of contradictions that remain largely unresolvable.3 1 William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968), p. 117. 2 All references to Marvell’s poems are taken from The Poems of Andrew Marvell ed. by Nigel Smith (New York: Longman, 2003) and are cited parenthetically. 3 Diane Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Robert Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania, 2007); Andrew McRae, ‘The green Marvell’ in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, ed.
    [Show full text]
  • The Boomerang Theology of Andrew Marvell
    The Boomerang Theology NIGEL SMITH of Andrew Marvell Résumé : La poésie lyrique d’Andrew Marvell a suscité quelques discussions bien connues de la poétique protestante, puritaine et contre-réformatrice. Tou- tefois la religion joue un autre rôle, presqu’entièrement inexploré, dans sa poésie. On a remarqué jusqu’à quel point ses œuvres en prose des années 1670, dans lesquelles il exprime ses opinions sur la tolérancereligieuse, la liberté civile et l’absolutisme, incorporent des vers et des expressions remaniés de sa poésie, parmi d’autres références poétiques. Cet article considère la poésie de Marvell, autant en soi qu’en son remaniement, comme le chantier où a été forgée la largeur d’esprit manifestée dans sa prose. hirty years ago, the last time a large body of Marvell editions were Tpublished, the poet and politician’s public life and professed belief presented a number of seemingly unsolvable difficulties that were at least helpful in explaining the ambiguities and ironies for which his most famous poems were celebrated.1 A Parliamentarian and Puritan; a friend of Milton, but someone who apparently expressed sympathy for King Charles I, and so, perhaps, a covert royalist. A friend of the nonconformists, during the Restoration, and a stout defender of liberty of conscience, but despite his attack on the bishops, someone who was prepared to defend them in certain circumstances. A vehement spokesman against popery, and its concomitant, arbitrary government, but someone prepared occasionally to defend Catho- lics. We have come a long
    [Show full text]
  • John Denham: New Letters and Documents
    JOHN DENHAM: NEW LETTERS AND DOCUMENTS HILTON KELLIHER IT was inevitable that the fundamental divisions made in English society by the Civil Wars should affect the ranks of the poets and playwrights, and unsurprising that the former largely and the latter almost entirely would adhere to the king's party. Not that, from our more distant vantage-point at least, the literary advantage lay with the larger faction. When the lines were drawn the Parliamentarians could muster Milton, Marvell, the young Dryden, and, proximum longo intervalloj the elderly George Wither, who had done his best work in the reign of James L Edmund Waller occupied an unenviable position between the two camps; while Cowley, Denham, Fanshawe, Lovelace, Quarks, and Suckling, along with the dramatists Davenant, the two Killigrews and Shirley, are the most notable of those who either served Charles I or his successor in exile or suffered directly on their behalf. Among the latter party John Denham (fig. i) occupied in political terms a moderately distinguished place, acting as agent at home and as envoy abroad to both Charles Stuarts in turn. As a poet he is chiefly remembered as the author of Cooper^s Hill^ the first great topographical poem in the language, and he is sometimes said to be the one who did most to promote the transition of English verse from the Metaphysical to the Augustan mode. The purpose of the present rather disjointed notes is to supplement the very different but equally indispensable accounts given by his earliest biographer, John Aubrey,^ and his latest, Brendan O'Hehir,^ with some letters and documents that have recently come to light, more especially relating to his life in exile on the Continent between September 1648 and March 1653.
    [Show full text]
  • Remembering King Charles I: History, Art and Polemics from the Restoration to the Reform Act T
    REMEMBERING KING CHARLES I: HISTORY, ART AND POLEMICS FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE REFORM ACT T. J. Allen Abstract: The term Restoration can be used simply to refer to the restored monarchy under Charles II, following the Commonwealth period. But it can also be applied to a broader programme of restoring the crown’s traditional prerogatives and rehabilitating the reign of the king’s father, Charles I. Examples of this can be seen in the placement of an equestrian statue of Charles I at Charing Cross and a related poem by Edmund Waller. But these works form elements in a process that continued for 200 years in which the memory of Charles I fused with contemporary constitutional debates. The equestrian statue of Charles I at Charing Cross, produced by the French sculptor Hubert Le Sueur c1633 and erected in 1675. Photograph: T. J. Allen At the southern end of Trafalgar Square, looking towards Whitehall, stands an equestrian statue of Charles I. This is set on a pedestal whose design has been attributed to Sir Christopher Wren and was carved by Joshua Marshall, Master Mason to Charles II. The bronze figure was originally commissioned by Richard Weston (First Earl of Portland, the king’s Lord High Treasurer) and was produced by the French sculptor Hubert Le Sueur in the early 1630s. It originally stood in 46 VIDES 2014 the grounds of Weston’s house in Surrey, but as a consequence of the Civil War was later confiscated and then hidden. The statue’s existence again came to official attention following the Restoration, when it was acquired by the crown, and in 1675 placed in its current location.
    [Show full text]
  • The Literary Underground in the 1660S: Andrew Marvell, George Wither, Ralph Wallis, and the World of Restoration Satire and Pamphleteering
    Andrew Marvell Newsletter | Vol. 5, No. 1 | Summer 13 BOOK REVIEW STEPHEN BARDLE. The Literary Underground in the 1660s: Andrew Marvell, George Wither, Ralph Wallis, and the World of Restoration Satire and Pamphleteering. Pp. 208. OxforD: OxforD University Press, 2012. HarDback, $110 (£60). Stephen BarDle’s compact book on the Restoration’s “literary underground” follows in the footsteps of RicharD Greaves, Neil Keeble, David Norbrook, Sharon Achinstein, Harold Love, Martin Dzelzainis, Nigel Smith, anD Nicholas von Maltzahn, among others. While Demonstrating the enDuring value of Jurgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere for literary anD cultural analysis, it heeds the call of Habermas’s critics for recognizing the crucial role playeD by religion in the Restoration’s intermittently expanDing public sphere. Although the government trieD to use censorship to make the public sphere contract, the literary unDergrounD, consisting of writers like Wither, Wallis, anD eventually Marvell, as well as networks of “entrepreneurial,” “risk-frienDly” printers and publishers, was collectively “a thorn in the government’s siDe” anD helped expanD the public sphere, especially at times when Parliament was in session. It expanDeD enough to incluDe micro-public spheres in towns like Wallis’s Gloucester as well as in the prisons where he, Wither, Bunyan, anD many other Dissenters were confineD for extenDeD perioDs. Collectively, Bardle’s three authors contributeD to the survival of the public sphere by writing both for it anD in a sense about it. After emphasizing the comparative fragility of the RestoreD regime, which faileD to stamp out the revolutionary iDeas of the 1640s anD 50s, only senDing them unDergrounD, BarDle’s IntroDuction uses Steve Pincus anD Peter Lake’s religion-frienDly account of the public sphere to mount an argument that Wither, Wallis, anD Marvell interveneD in the public sphere in the 1660s via manuscript anD print in orDer to aDvocate religious toleration.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 1 CURRICULUM VITAE Nigel Smith Date of Birth
    1 CURRICULUM VITAE Nigel Smith Date of Birth: 29 November, 1958 Address: Department of English, McCosh 22, Princeton University, NJ, 08544-1016, USA. Telephone: 609-258-4064 Fax: 609-258-1607 e-mail: [email protected] A. Degrees D.Phil. (Oxford) Nov. 1985 M.A. (English), McGill University, Nov. 1981 B.A. (Joint Hons., English and History), Class 1, University of Hull, July 1980 B. Employment William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature, Princeton University, 2011-. Professor of English, Princeton University, 1999-. Reader in English Literature, University of Oxford, 1996-99. University Lecturer in English Literature, University of Oxford, 1991-6. Fellow and Tutor in English Literature, Keble College, Oxford, 1986-99. Lecturer in English Literature, The Queen's College, Oxford, 1986- 96. Junior Research Fellow, Merton College, Oxford, 1984-86. Part-Time Teaching Assistant in English Literature, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London, 1983-84. C. Administrative Experience 1) Administration i) Chair of Committee for Renaissance Studies, 2004-7; Acting Director, Center for the History of Books and Media (2004-5), Co-Director (2008-); Acting Chair, Department of English, Princeton University, 2001-2; Associate Chair, Department of English, 2000-1, 2002-3; Graduate Job Advisory Officer, 2011-12. Member of Financial Priorities Committee, 2002-3, 2011-12. Ex officio member of junior and 1 2 senior search committess, 2000-3 (10 separate searches). Member of Tanner Lectures committee (2004-present). Organizing, with Prof. S. Poor, Dept. of German, Conference on ‘Mysticism, Reform, and the Formation of Modernity’ February 21- 23, 2008, funded by CSR from April 2006.
    [Show full text]
  • Trans* Theory And17th Century English
    “SO TO ONE NEUTRAL THING BOTH SEXES FIT” Trans* Theory and17th Century English Metaphysical Poetry by DEAN DIER A THESIS Presented to the Department of English and the Robert D. Clark Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts September 2015 An Abstract of the Thesis of Dean Dier for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in the Department of English to be taken June 2015. Title: "SO TO ONE NEUTRAL THING BOTH SEXES FIT": Trans* Theory and 1ih Century English Metaphysical Poetry Dr. Benjamin Saunders In this paper, I utilize an experimental format of incorporating autobiographical narratives of my life as a genderqueer person to segue readers into questions of identity and trans* theory. I then use the tenets of trans* theory to analyze several poems by John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw. I expect trans* theory to help shape our collective understanding of gender and selfhood when utilized beyond the reach of this paper and incorporated into the analysis of a multitude of different literary genres. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the three professors who graciously offered their time and wisdom to this process: Professor Miller for steering me into more focused avenues of queer and gender theories; Professor Mossberg for her unfailing positivity, vigor, zeal, pizzazz, vitality, and vervitude in the face of any circumstance; and most certainly Professor Saunders, for his passion for literature, his dedication to both scholarship and wit, and his ability to inspire transcendence beyond the confines of time and place towards a place of appreciation and connection.
    [Show full text]
  • Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham
    Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham Edmund Waller; John Denham The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham, by Edmund Waller; John Denham This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham Author: Edmund Waller; John Denham Release Date: May 10, 2004 [EBook #12322] Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POETICAL WORKS *** Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Carol David and PG Distributed Proofreaders POETICAL WORKS OF EDMUND WALLER AND SIR JOHN DENHAM. WITH MEMOIR AND DISSERTATION, BY THE REV. GEORGE GILFILLAN. M.DCCC.LVII. Livros Grátis http://www.livrosgratis.com.br Milhares de livros grátis para download. THE LIFE OF EDMUND WALLER. It is too true, after all, that the lives of poets are not, in general, very interesting. Could we, indeed, trace the private workings of their souls, and read the pages of their mental and moral development, no biographies could be richer in instruction, and even entertainment, than those of our greater bards. The inner life of every true poet must be poetical. But in proportion to the romance of their souls' story, is often the commonplace of their outward career. There have been poets, however, whose lives are quite as readable and as instructive as their poetry, and have even shed a reflex and powerful interest on their writings.
    [Show full text]
  • By Patrick J. Mcgrath
    Andrew Marvell Newsletter | Vol. 5, No. 2 | Winter 2013 A RELIGIOUS HOUSE: MARVELL’S UPON APPLETON HOUSE, LAUDIANISM, AND EXODUS BY PATRICK J. MCGRATH In his recent edition of the poems of Andrew Marvell, Nigel Smith writes, “despite its length and its centrality in M.’s canon, Upon Appleton House has not occasioned the critical debate that surrounds M.’s most famous lyrics.”1 More and more, though, scholars are turning their attention to this complex and brilliant poem. Recent studies have focused on how Upon Appleton House (1651) responds to early modern politics, military theory, literary networks, and environmental issues.2 Scholarship on religion and Upon Appleton House has illuminated the poem’s engagement with anti-Catholic polemic, the Catholic history of the Fairfax family, and Protestant views of sacrilege.3 An account of how the poem responds to the religious upheavals of the 1630s and 40s, however, remains lacking. This essay provides such an account by showing how Upon Appleton House pursues a subtle and yet devastating critique of Archbishop William Laud (1573-1645) and the policies of High Church Anglicanism. In the end, it is the triumph over a Laudian anti-Christ that determines how Marvell depicts the controversial resignation of his patron, Thomas Fairfax, as commander- in-chief of the Parliamentary forces in 1650. Why, though, would Upon Appleton House make such extensive allusions to Laud and his innovations some six years after the Archbishop’s execution? The same question might be asked about the poem’s narration of Catholic monasticism over a century after the monasteries’ dissolution.
    [Show full text]
  • Synchrony of Sensual Fervor and Love Desire in Donne and Marvell With
    International Journal of Applied Research 2015; 1(2): 16-20 ISSN Print: 2394-7500 ISSN Online: 2394-5869 Impact Factor: 3.4 Synchrony of sensual fervor and love desire in Donne IJAR 2015; 1(2): 18-22 www.allresearchjournal.com and Marvell with reference to their major poems: Received: 16-08-2014 Accepted: 10-10-2014 Spiritual perspective Mohammad Ehsanul Islam Khan Mohammad Ehsanul Islam Khan Lecturer, Abstract Department of English, Metaphysical poetry deals with the intact understanding of human, but the poets’ aptitude, erudition Royal University of Dhaka, and earnestness means that the poetry is about the insightful vicinity of comprehending quixotic and Dhaka, Bangladesh. sensual love. It also deals with man's liaison with God- the eternal perception, and, to a less degree, about pleasure, learning and art. Though metaphysical means something beyond physical, but most of the metaphysical poets depict their sensual fervor in disguise of spiritual sex desire. John Donne and Andrew Marvell are two great poets who also wrote about physical love in concealment. They expose their intense corporeal desire through some spiritual words in several poems. A strong sensual passion and sacred desire of physical love are simultaneously depicted in the poems of these two major metaphysical poets. As these two poets are considered the forerunners of the metaphysical era so, this manuscript deals with the subject matters in reference to their celebrated poems. Keywords: Sexual Ecstasy, Strong Sensual Zeal, Metaphysical Camouflage, Carpe Diem theme, Commonness 1. Introduction The word ‘metaphysical’ was first initiated by John Dryden and Samuel Johnson to describe Donne and his followers in a derogatory sense.
    [Show full text]
  • Andrew Marvell
    ANDREW MARVELL Andrew Marvell was born on 31st March 1621 at Winestead in East Yorkshire where his father (also called Andrew) was rector. He was the first son after 3 daughters. Marvell’s father had moved north from Cambridgeshire in 1608/9 to become a curate at Flamborough and in 1612 married Anne Pease – a Yorkshire lass. In 1624 the Marvell family moved to Hull where Andrew senior became a “lecturer” at Holy Trinity and master of the Charterhouse. They lived in a house north of the town walls on the banks of the River Hull. It is widely believed that Marvell attended Hull Grammar School (near Holy Trinity Church), but official registers didn’t begin until 1635 so there is no documentary evidence to prove this. In 1633 Marvell went to Trinity College Cambridge, he was just 12 years old – this was not an unusual age to enter university in the 17th century. His studies would have been based on logic, rhetoric and the skills of disputation as well as classical history and literature. In 1637, at the age of 16, Marvell wrote his first published work, the University had put together a collection of Latin and Greek verses to celebrate the birth of King Charles I’s fifth child Anne. Marvell’s contribution was “Ad Regum Carolum Parodia”. However, tragedy was to strike the Marvell household soon after, Marvell’s mother died in 1638 and his father drowned while crossing the Humber in 1640. After leaving Cambridge University in 1641 it is believed that Marvell travelled abroad possibly as the tutor to a young gentleman on the Grand Tour and returned in 1647.
    [Show full text]
  • This Electronic Thesis Or Dissertation Has Been Downloaded from the King’S Research Portal At
    This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The militia of London, 1641-1649 Nagel, Lawson Chase The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 23. Sep. 2021 THE MILITIA OF LONDON, 16Lf].16Lt9 by LAWSON CHASE NAGEL A thesis submitted in the Department of History, King' a Co].].ege, University of Lox4on for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 1982 2 ABSTBAC The Trained Bands and.
    [Show full text]