Marvell and the Earl of Castlemaine

  • Martin Dzelzainis
Chapter

Abstract

In April 1678, the writer of A Letter from Amsterdam, to a Friend in England, already in the know it would seem about Marvell’s authorship of An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677), unhesitatingly identified him as ‘a shrewd man against Popery’. Beyond that, however, ‘his Religion’ was a mystery to the writer and even, so he suggested, to Marvell himself: ‘you may place him, as Pasquin at Rome placed Henry the Eighth, betwixt Moses, the Messiah and Mahomet, with this Motto in his Mouth, quò me vertam nescio’.1 Ever since, scholars have been far from sure which way they themselves should turn when seeking to establish Marvell’s religious identity. For Pierre Legouis, Marvell can be posited somewhere en route to the rationalism of a later age: while ‘all sense of the supernatural had not died out in [Marvell]’, his ‘deistic sallies’ suggest that he was yielding up ‘to infidelity’ theological positions the ‘importance’ of which ‘he did not realize’.2 More succinctly, Annabel Patterson pronounces him ‘in religion, indecisive’.3 Others judge him a conformist, albeit of an occasional and lukewarm kind and without it compromising his steadfast support for Nonconformists.4

Keywords

Full Answer True Account True Religion Peter Lake Parliamentary Sovereignty 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Anon., A Letter from Amsterdam, to a Friend in England (London, 1678), p. 5; dated 18 April 1678 (Old Style), p. 6.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 223.Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    Annabel Patterson, Andrew Marvell (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994), p. 66.Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    See Warren Chernaik, The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 123Google Scholar
  5. 1a.
    Neil Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), p. 327 n. 10.Google Scholar
  6. 2a.
    For Marvell’s West Country connections and their affiliations, see Newton E. Key, ‘Comprehension and the Breakdown of Consensus in Restoration Herefordshire’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 191–215.Google Scholar
  7. 8.
    See Hilton Kelliher, Andrew Marvell: Poet and Politician (London: British Museum Publications, 1978), pp. 25, 86; Patterson, Andrew Marvell pp. 25–30.Google Scholar
  8. 13.
    William Lloyd, A Reasonable Defence of the Seasonable Discourse (London, 1674), p. 39.Google Scholar
  9. 19.
    K. H. D. Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, 1672–1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 14.Google Scholar
  10. 3a.
    See also A. Tindal Hart, William Lloyd, 1627–1717 (London: S.P.C.K., 1952); and, for a bibliography of the Du Moulin—Castlemaine—Lloyd dispute, Martin Dzelzainis,‘Miltori s Of True Religion and the Earl of Castlemaine’, The Seventeenth Century, 7 (1992), 65–6.Google Scholar
  11. 20.
    Robert Latham and William Matthews (eds), The Diary of Samuel Pepys 11 vols (London: c, 1970–83), vol. VIII, pp. 393–4. For attempts to suppress The Humble Apologie see Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1666–1667 pp. 296, 323, 361, 430. Hereafter cited as CSPD.Google Scholar
  12. 21.
    See Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 351–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. 28.
    William Lloyd, The Late Apology in behalf of the Papists, Re-printed and Answered, in behalf of the Royallists (London, 1667), p. 41.Google Scholar
  14. 36.
    Michael Gearin-Tosh, ‘The Structure of Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter’, Essays in Criticism 22 (1972), p. 52; Chernaik, The Poet’s Time p. 154.Google Scholar
  15. Elsie Duncan-Jones, ‘Marvell: A Great Master of Words’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 61 (1975), 276, 278.Google Scholar
  16. 43.
    Andrew Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros’d and The Rehearsal Transpros’d: The Second Part ed. D. I. B. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 73. Hereafter cited as RT.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  17. 45.
    John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); RT p. xvii; Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, p. 92; Patterson, Andrew Marvell, p. 57.Google Scholar
  18. 49.
    Mark Goldie (ed.), Locke: Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 214–15.Google Scholar
  19. 51.
    See Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 167–8.Google Scholar
  20. 56.
    William Lloyd, A Seasonable Discourse Shewing the Necessity of Maintaining the Established Religion, in Opposition to Popery (London, 1673), p. 1.Google Scholar

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© Martin Dzelzainis 1999

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  • Martin Dzelzainis

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