World Enough and Time (11 page)

It is clear that Marvell was forging useful contacts close to the government. Either Fairfax or Cyriack Skinner may have brought about the introduction to Milton. Although it was unproductive on this occasion, Milton may have felt moved to help Marvell find something else. In Paris he had met John, Viscount Scudamore, whose daughter would later marry William Dutton, the young man taken under Cromwell's wing with a view to his becoming the husband of his youngest daughter, Frances Cromwell. It may have been Scudamore, at Milton's prompting, who now proposed that Marvell could be tutor to William Dutton. Or it may have come about because of Marvell's connection with the family with whom the orphan Dutton was staying at Eton, the Oxenbridges. Elizabeth Oxenbridge, sister of the Reverend John Oxenbridge, a Fellow of Eton, had in 1645 married Oliver St John, Chief Justice of Common Pleas, to whom Marvell had written his Latin verses at the time of St John's embassy to Holland in the spring of 1651. Marvell was clearly moving closer to the government and would have been drawn increasingly to Cromwell's attention. His new post would complete the process.

It has always been assumed that Marvell went straight to Eton to take up his post as tutor to Dutton, but a memoir of the Dutton family, published privately in 1899, claimed that early in 1653 William Dutton, together with his new tutor, was living as part of Cromwell's household ‘at their residence in the Cockpit at Whitehall or at Hampton Court' before moving to Eton in the summer. No biographer has ever reported this hypothesis; it cannot be called a fact because the author of the Dutton family memoir, Blacker Morgan, offers no evidence and there is no mention in any other source of Marvell's presence in Cromwell's London household.
7
Clearly the tradition existed in the Dutton family and could have a basis in fact. If it were true, it would be an important confirmation of the closeness of Marvell to Cromwell and might explain the absence, in those poems praising the Protector that he was to write later in the decade, of the sort of qualified eulogy that had entered into the ‘Horatian Ode'. Marvell came to admire Cromwell personally in the years from 1653 to the latter's death in 1658 and was a
de facto
laureate to the state, a role that Milton might have been expected to fulfil but which his passionate engagement in pamphlet warfare at the time probably prevented him from discharging.

William Dutton was the son of a Royalist who died soon after the surrender of Oxford in 1646. He was left in the care of an exceedingly wealthy uncle, John Dutton of Sherborne Court, Gloucestershire, described by Anthony Wood as ‘a learned and a prudent man, and as one of the richest, so one of the meekest men in
England
'. Marvell's former employer, Lord Fairfax, knew Dutton because the general's signature appears on a pass dated 24 June 1646, giving Dutton free passage out of Oxford during the Civil War, though the mystery of why a prominent Cavalier should come to an agreement with the Lord Protector has never been solved. Dutton seems to have admired Cromwell in some fashion and even described the arrangement that they made, linking the two families, as ‘a blessing from God'.
8
Thus Cromwell, for no apparent reason other than finding the boy a suitable prospective husband for his daughter, made an agreement that he would become the boy's guardian on John Dutton's death, which eventually happened in January 1657. In return, Dutton would promise to make his nephew heir to the ancestral estate, an arrangement that John Dutton's daughters would have to suffer. Whatever the benefits of this arrangement to the two older men, it was not a success for the young people. Frances Cromwell, then aged fourteen, was a beautiful young woman, deeply in love, not with Dutton but with Robert Rich, grandson of the Earl of Warwick. It was rumoured that the future Charles II also wished to marry her, not least to ease his passage back to the throne by an alliance with the Cromwell dynasty. Frances and Robert eventually married in November 1657 but their happiness was short-lived, Robert dying three months after the marriage. Frances Cromwell lived on into her eighties and William Dutton also died without issue, Sherborne passing to his brother Ralph, later a baronet. The whole elaborate plan had come to nothing.

But at the start of 1653 Cromwell immediately took the boy's education in hand. It was important that he was brought up in a good Puritan atmosphere and the household of the Oxenbridges was perfectly cast. The Reverend John Oxenbridge had been deprived of a tutorship at Magdalen College, Oxford by Archbishop Laud in 1634. They had then gone to the Bermudas to escape this ‘prelate's rage' and, on 25 June 1653, Oxenbridge was made one of the seventeen (non-resident) commissioners responsible for the colony. The family's new guest would hear vivid reminiscences from his hosts of their spell as colonists, which may have stimulated him to start to compose his very Puritan poem, ‘Bermudas'.

A little earlier than this, Marvell wrote his first political satire. No longer was he the pastoral poet playing with notions of detachment, nor was this a poem embodying the judiciously balanced examinations of the ‘Horatian Ode'. It was more in the nature of verse propaganda by a poet who had put his rustic interlude behind him and was busily cementing himself into the new regime. Never again would he write political verse of the subtlety and complex artistry of the ‘Horatian Ode'. The poem was probably written after the English victory over the Dutch fleet off Portland on 18–20 February 1653, though it was not actually published until 1665, when it was issued during the later Dutch wars with the addition of some more topical extra lines purporting to have been written by Marvell. This first Dutch war had been in progress since 1652 in consequence of the Navigation Acts of October 1650 and October 1651, which aimed at wresting control of sea trade from the Dutch. Marvell was able to draw on details of his own Dutch travels in the previous decade when writing this poem.

The native of Holderness was apparently unaware of the ironies of ‘The Character of Holland' mocking the flat and low-lying physical geography of the Netherlands and the country's attempts to reclaim land from the sea: ‘They with mad labour fish'd the
Land
to
Shoar
'. The expressions are vivid; in driving foundation-piles into the sea, the Dutch are said to have ‘to the stake a strugling Country bound' and there is much wit in the poem, reminiscent of the Nun Appleton verses. Frequent flooding results, for example, in a situation where ‘The Fish oft-times the Burger dispossest,/And sat not as a Meat but as a Guest'. The poem flows smoothly and wittily in those rhyming couplets to which Marvell was addicted. He was a skilled poetic craftsman and a master of the elegantly turned couplet –
pace
the contention of Legouis that he was an ‘amateur' – but he was not a radical innovator in the craft of verse. It is one of the ways in which he was John Donne's inferior. He tended to keep with the forms and rhythms he knew and never risked losing control for the sake of a new effect. There are lines in ‘The Character of Holland' so smoothly achieved in their balancing wit that they could have been written by Pope, his gibe at the country's obsession with reclaiming land as the only civic good, for example: ‘To make a
Bank
was a great
Plot of State;
/Invent a
Shov'l
and be a
Magistrate.
' The mockery and the ceaseless puns go to work on the country's hospitality to religious sects and then its conduct in the recent naval wars. The victory at Portland Bill in February, when seventeen or eighteen Dutch ships were taken along with their crews and with thirty merchantmen, not to mention those ships that were destroyed, sent the country into a frenzy of patriotic joy which culminated in a solemn thanksgiving by order of Parliament on 12 April. Marvell's triumphalist tone reflects this national euphoria. Cromwell would have been well pleased with the poem, had a copy been passed to him.

The two men were in correspondence that summer when Marvell wrote to Cromwell from the Oxenbridges' house at Windsor on 28 July 1653 ‘to render you some account of Mr Dutton', addressing his letter ‘For his Excellence, the Lord General Cromwell'. The tone of the letter is rather pious and even sycophantic (‘indeed the onely Ciulity which it is proper for me to practise with so eminent a Person is to obey you') but that may have been no more than the appropriate convention of the time. Marvell told Cromwell that he had examined William several times in the presence of John Oxenbridge. Making use of a metaphor of false and genuine coinage, the tutor admits to what sound like some initial misgivings about Dutton: ‘For I thought that there might possibly be some lightness in the Coyn, or errour in the telling, which hereafter I should be bound to make good.' But he promises to bring the best out of the boy in the way Cromwell has already laid down it should be done. He describes Dutton as being ‘of a gentle and waxen disposition' and continues piously: ‘He hath in him two things which make Youth most easy to be managed, Modesty which is the bridle to Vice, and Emulation which is the Spurr to Virtue.' This spotless youth, it appears, has been put down in an even more blameless household (‘so godly a family') ruled over by John Oxenbridge, a man, Marvell unctuously observes, ‘whose Doctrine and Example are like a Book and a Map, not onely instructing the Eare but demonstrating to the Ey which way we ought to trauell'. Mrs Oxenbridge is also reported to have exhibited ‘a great tendernesse' towards the boy, fitting up his room as a study to work in and feeding him so well that his waxy pallor is disappearing: ‘he hath already much mended his Complexion'.
9

Since John Oxenbridge was a Fellow at Eton, it has been suggested that William may have attended the school for formal academic instruction, leaving Marvell with the responsibility for the boy's general moral welfare. Given the strong Puritan atmosphere of the Oxenbridge household, such a task for Marvell would have been otiose and it is hard to conceive of his not having some more active tutorial role. There would, however, have been plenty of time for carrying on his own studies and for writing poetry. ‘Bermudas' shows Marvell's almost hypnotic mastery of rhythm, the rocking verses mirroring the regular motion of the waves and the plashing oars of the Puritan pilgrims: ‘And all the way, to guide their Chime,/With falling Oars they kept the time.' The poem expresses the thankful words of the pilgrims at God's providence in sending them to these happy isles ‘Safe from the Storms and Prelat's rage'. It embodies that characteristic Marvellian play with Puritan rigour and luscious sensuality. In spite of the intense piety of the divinely favoured occupants of the little boat, the waterborne elect can still relish the pleasures of the taste-buds if not those of the flesh. The divine Provider hurls his bounty at them:

He makes the Figs our mouths to meet;

And throws the Melons at our feet.

Notwithstanding the piety of a poem written to be read, no doubt, by his Puritan hosts as soon as the ink was dry, the poem recalls in its conceits the Fairfacian manner: the clusters of oranges on the trees, glowing in their surround of dark green foliage, are ‘Like golden lamps in a green Night'.

While at Eton, Marvell made friends with the poet and musician Nathaniel Ingelo and with the scholar John Hales. Ingelo had been a Fellow of Eton since 1650 and was passionately fond of music in church services. When he lived in Bristol some local Puritans took exception to this, prompting the reply from Ingelo: ‘Take away Music, take away my life.'
10
When Bulstrode Whitlocke was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of Sweden in September 1653, with the task of trying to persuade the neutral Swedes to favour the English in their naval war with the Dutch, Ingelo accompanied him as chaplain. Whitlocke sailed to Sweden in November and eventually a treaty was signed at Uppsala on 28 April 1654, establishing a political alliance and free commerce between England and Sweden. Marvell wrote a Latin poem, ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo', regretting his friend's absence and praising Queen Christina of Sweden. It also contains a reference to
‘Victor Oliverus nudum Caput exerit Armus'
(Cromwell in triumph, unhelmeted, takes up arms) and implies that Marvell was only recently acquainted with Ingelo. The poem also contains an interesting reference to a portrait of Queen Christina that Marvell has clearly seen, likely to be the one sent by her to Cromwell as a diplomatic courtesy. This suggests that Marvell enjoyed access to Cromwell's private apartments, where the picture was displayed and where it is said to have aroused the jealousy of Cromwell's wife. A newsletter of 20 May 1653 reports: ‘Though our General's lady when she casts her eye on that queenes picture lately presented to his Ex[cellenc]y sighs and sayes, If I were gon that were she that must be the woman.'
11

Marvell's other new acquaintance at Eton was the theologian, John Hales, originally made a Fellow of the College in 1619 and a learned and bookish man described by Anthony Wood as ‘a walking library'. After an early flirtation with Calvinism he had been found a canonry at Windsor by Archbishop Laud, which resulted in his being ejected by the Puritans in 1642 and forced to live in hiding. He eventually lost his fellowship in 1649, after refusing to swear the appropriate oath to the Commonwealth, and died in poverty in 1656. John Aubrey talks of his ‘bountifull mind' and notes: ‘He loved Canarie; but moderately, to refresh his spirits.'
12
Marvell later recalled Hales, still angry at the way the Civil War had undone him, as ‘a most learned Divine … most remarkable for his Sufferings in the late times, and his Christian Patience under them … I account it no small honour to have grown up into some part of his Acquaintance, and convers'd a while with the living
remains
of one of the clearest heads and best prepared brests in Christendom.'
13
The rough treatment handed out to this gentle scholar rankled with Marvell and helps to explain his unwillingness to look back on the Civil War with any affection.