World Enough and Time (13 page)

But at my back I alwaies hear

Times winged Charriot hurrying near:

And yonder all before us lye

Desarts of vast Eternity.

Thy Beauty shall no more be found;

Nor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound

My ecchoing Song: then Worms shall try

That long preserv'd Virginity:

And your quaint Honour turn to dust;

And into ashes all my Lust.

The Grave's a fine and private place,

But none I think do there embrace.

Might not a young poet, still conscious of the need to find himself in the world and settle a career before his thirties were swallowed up, have an extra sense of urgency about getting the most out of life before it was too late?

After Marvell's Cromwellian poems of 1654 we enter another of those dark periods in his biography. Nothing is known of him from the time of the praise of Cromwell written at the end of 1654 until his next appearance in France in January 1656, other than that he was still tutoring William Dutton and it may have been that, at the start of 1655, he had managed to persuade Cromwell to allow him to take the teenager on a Grand Tour, pointing out how advantageous it had been for himself a decade earlier.
8
If language-teaching was Marvell's special gift, a foreign trip would have been an obvious step to take.

On 26 January 1656, Alexander Callander, a Scot living in Saumur, wrote to his friend Joseph Williamson, then a young graduate of Queen's College, Oxford but later a statesman and diplomat, and, after his knighthood, Secretary of State in the reign of Charles II. In Williamson's papers in the Public Record Office the letter from Callander is preserved. The latter says to Williamson (the original letter is written in French): ‘If you visit Mr Dutton and Monsieur Merville his tutor (
Gouverneur
) I beg you to give them my humble salutations.'
9
Callander took English pupils in a house owned by his sister at Saumur but was absent on business in England in January 1656 when Williamson came to visit. The latter was accompanied by two pupils of his own. Callander wrote from Paris, either having met Marvell and Dutton there en route to Saumur, or being aware of their expected arrival around this time.

Saumur, a town on the Loire, was no accidental choice for these young Puritan gentlemen and their tutors. It was the home of the celebrated Protestant Academy and, as Legouis points out: ‘The intellectual atmosphere of the town was strongly Protestant, even though the Protestants were in a minority.'
10
The French Protestants, however, were generally appalled by the English regicide, and the man in charge of a pupil destined to be the son-in-law of Oliver Cromwell might have experienced some coolness of reception. Given Marvell's domestic circumstances when he left for France, living in a strongly Puritan household and having the charge of a ward of the Protector himself, the sojourn in Saumur would nonetheless have been the natural culmination of his most Puritan phase. Whether he sampled the famous wine of Saumur or, as Legouis suggests, made the acquaintance of Father Abel-Louis St Marthe, the learned Father Superior of a nearby Catholic Oratory, or met the local scholar and
bon viveur
Tallemant and through him the most un-Puritan works of Rabelais, must remain conjectural.
11

The pair remained at Saumur at least until August and probably until September when the academic year ended. On 15 August, James Scudamore, the English Royalist, wrote to Sir Richard Browne, Charles II's resident at Paris and the father-in-law of the diarist John Evelyn, filling him in on the activities of the English at Saumur. Scudamore was rather disparaging of his compatriots' ability for ‘acting anything serviceable' to the Royalist cause. He reported that: ‘Many of the English are here but few of Noate.' This small noteworthy company included, however, Dutton whom the French called ‘le Genre [
sic
] du Protecteur', his connection with Cromwell thus very public indeed. Scudamore also adds that Dutton's ‘Governour' is ‘one Mervill a notable English Italo-Machavillian'.
12
This is the first recorded indication of Marvell's reputation of being a rather crafty figure whose cards may not always have been placed on the table. He would later be sent on diplomatic missions of a public and of a more clandestine kind. In this instance, it may be no more than a disgruntled Royalist's observation on a young Puritan who had done rather well for himself by toadying to the Cromwellian camp, but it also implies that Marvell was seen as something more than just a travelling tutor: Dutton's companion was ‘notable' in his own right. What might have secured him this reputation – whether after leaving Nun Appleton he had engaged in some more subtle political intrigue that had upset the Royalists – must remain a mystery.

Certainly, Marvell did not disguise his allegiances and connections while at Saumur. During the summer he carried out a task for Milton by circulating in learned circles copies of the latter's
Defensio Pro Se,
published the previous August. In a letter written on 1 August 1657, Milton asked his friend Henry Oldenburg (later the first secretary of the Royal Society) to distribute further copies for him. Oldenburg, yet another Englishman in Saumur with a pupil, would tactfully advise Milton against drawing any further attention in France to this provocative tract, but in his initial request Milton enthusiastically describes Marvell's success in putting the pamphlet about, although he does not identify his ‘friend':

A learned man, a friend of mine, spent last summer at Saumur. He wrote to me that the book was in demand in those parts; I sent only one copy; he wrote back that some of the learned to whom he had lent it had been pleased with it hugely. Had I not thought I should be doing a thing agreeable to them, I should have spared you trouble and myself expense.
13

Back in Eton probably by the end of 1656, Marvell continued in his duties in the Oxenbridge household as Dutton's tutor. Still closely connected with key figures like Milton and Cromwell, he may have felt that he deserved some more important role in the new order that matched the abilities of a ‘notable' thirty-five-year-old, rather than remaining an eternal young gentleman's companion and Latin teacher. But twelve months had still to elapse before he would make that transition to a servant of the State. Early in 1657 he would read the reports of a great English naval victory and see in it the opportunity for a poem. The result – ‘On the Victory Obtained by Blake over the Spaniards, in the Bay of Sanctacruze, in the Island of Teneriff' – was a poem that has generally been considered to detract from Marvell's reputation in that it has been seen as a rather questionable attempt to curry favour with Cromwell. Its omission from the edition of Marvell's poems obtained by the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1945, known familiarly by scholars as ‘Eng.poet.d.49' – an edition whose contemporaneous manuscript additions and corrections have given it an air of greater textual authority than the first 1681 Folio edition – has led some scholars to excise the poem from the Marvell canon.
14
According to Legouis, who prints the poem in the standard edition of Marvell's poems: ‘It would be no loss to Marvell's reputation, literary and moral, for it smacks of
courtisanerie.
'
15
But Marvellians have sometimes been too ready to drop awkward poems from the canon when they fail to measure up. The balance of probability is that Marvell is the author. It was first published, anonymously, in an anthology in 1674, with the allusions to Cromwell cut out to fit the mood of the time.

The great naval commander, Sir Robert Blake, was one of Cromwell's most able and effective admirals. He had been engaged since May 1655 in blockading the Spanish coast in order to intercept treasure ships returning from America. On 20 April 1657 Blake destroyed a fleet of sixteen Spanish treasure ships at Tenerife in spite of the fact that the bay of Santa Cruz was deep and narrow-mouthed and flanked by shore batteries armed with heavy guns. Not one of the English ships was lost in the action. News of the victory reached England towards the end of May and there was a public thanksgiving in London on 3 June. Blake's health was poor following an earlier battle wound and he died on 7 August, two hours before reaching Plymouth. The poem must therefore have been written at some time between June and early August.

Its tone is triumphalist, scorning the weak fear of the Spanish when faced with the English navy. The line ‘The best of Lands should have the best of Kings' has been taken as an endorsement by Marvell of the idea that Cromwell should accept the crown, something he had declined to recommend in his previous poem on Cromwell's first anniversary as Protector. Cromwell had, by the time the poem came to be written, rejected the offer of the crown, so the sentiment was otiose. The climatically blessed Canary Isles, however, are said to lack ‘nothing Heaven can afford,/Unless it be, the having you [i.e. Cromwell] their Lord.' The repeated invocations of Cromwell (‘For your renown, his conquering Fleet does ride', ‘And all assumes your courage in your cause', ‘For your resistless genious there did Raign') give the poem a rather sycophantic air that is far removed from the carefully balanced subtleties of the ‘Horatian Ode'. Whether kingly gratitude or aesthetic reservation were uppermost in Cromwell's mind as he read the poem, with its closing couplet ‘Whilst fame in every place, her Trumpet blowes,/And tells the World, how much to you it owes', very shortly after its completion the poet was rewarded with the post he sought of Latin Secretary in the Protectorate. At last he had entered the public, political world in which he would remain until his death. His days of tutoring were over.

9

A Good Man For the State to Make Use Of

At length, by the interest of
Milton,
to whom he was somewhat agreeable for his ill-natur'd wit, he was made Under-secretary to
Cromwell's
Secretary. Pleas'd with which honour, he publish'd a congratulatory poem in praise of the Tyrant.

Samuel Parker,
History of His Own Time
1

The office that Marvell entered, probably on 2 September 1657, was that of John Thurloe, Secretary to the Council of State. Although Thurloe was strictly his superior in that office, his job was to assist Milton as secretary of Foreign or Latin tongues and therefore he is more usually described as assistant Latin Secretary. Latin was the language of international diplomacy and communication, so Marvell's duties would involve translation between English and Latin, drafting letters and documents, and attending on foreign dignitaries in London as translator.
2
Milton's blindness would obviously hamper him in most respects, so Marvell would have plenty of writing and drafting to do. He would probably also have taken some dictation from Milton and generally deputised for him. Marvell was also a frequent visitor at this time to Milton's house in Petty France. Some of the documents worked on by Marvell survive in the British Library and the Bodleian Library, one of which is a forty-page translation of a political tract by the Swedish envoy to England, Johann Frederick von Friessendorff, done in Marvell's neat, legible hand probably a few months after starting work, at the beginning of 1658. The aim of the tract was to persuade Cromwell to send his navy, with that of Sweden, against Holland and Spain.
3
The historian Christopher Hill says of Marvell: ‘Like Pepys, he was one of the new type of civilian middle-class official who came into their own after the Civil War, during the soberer years of the Protectorate.'
4
Marvell's salary was a comfortable £200 a year. He would find himself at the heart of government, and, since Thurloe was an immensely powerful figure in the administration and head of the overseas intelligence service, he would be gaining an insight into an area in which he would later become personally involved.

His first recorded piece of work was a translation of an official despatch to Thurloe from Hamburg in September 1657.
5
Other documents in his hand that have survived include letters from Cromwell to overseas ambassadors and dignitaries. Among the colonial papers in the Public Record Office is a document recording a petition from a Scottish merchant, Mathias Lynen, on behalf of members of the Guinea Company of Scotland, to Cromwell (‘their only remaining refuge under God the righteous') asking for help in recovering a ship ‘perfidiously seized' by the Portuguese on its way back from Africa in 1637. The crew had been murdered and the ship had still not been released. On the document is written: ‘John Thurloe has desired And. Marvell to write a letter upon this petition to the King of Portugal.'
6
Marvell continued in this work probably until the autumn of 1659.

John Thurloe had been appointed Secretary of State in March 1652 and had helped Cromwell in his ascent into the Protectorate. His charge of intelligence included supervision of the internal and foreign post, and he was reputed to have a strong intelligence network with spies able to intercept letters. According to Bulstrode Whitelocke, he was one of a small knot of friends with whom Cromwell would occasionally relax and ‘lay aside his greatness'.
7
At the Restoration, Thurloe was accused of high treason but was released to enjoy his retirement at Great Milton in Oxfordshire, where he was said to be consulted for his vast and privy knowledge of foreign affairs. With the return of Charles II he concealed a vast hoard of papers relating to the Protectorate which were to be rediscovered in the reign of William III in a false ceiling in Lincoln's Inn. It is possible that Marvell visited Thurloe in these retirement years at his chambers in Lincoln's Inn.