Andrew Marvell

Miscellaneous Poems

No autograph literary manuscripts by Marvell are known to survive. According to his landlady and supposed ‘widow’, Mary Palmer, the posthumous edition of Marvell's Miscellaneous Poems in 1681 was printed ‘according to the exact Copies of my late dear Husband, under his own Hand-Writing, being found since his Death among his other Papers’. These, however, have gone the way of most printers' copy of the period and no trace of them remains. Instead, Marvell is represented in manuscripts by a number of contemporary or near-contemporary copies of various of his poems — for the most part his later, satirical pieces — and by a large number of surviving original letters, as well as some miscellaneous official documents in his hand.

The original complete edition of the Miscellaneous Poems, including three poems on Cromwell on pages 140-144, is known today from an apparently unique exemplum, now in the British Library (C.59.i.8). Every other exemplum has had those pages cancelled.

Letters

Over four hundred letters by Marvell are known today, the great majority the originals written in his own hand, chiefly in his capacity as Member of Parliament for Kingston-upon-Hull in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Most of them are edited in Margoliouth, and a few others have come to light in more recent years (see MaA 522-567).

These letters are supplemented by a number of others whose texts are known today only from early printed sources. The majority of these are published in The Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Thomas Cooke, 2 vols (London, 1726), in his Volume II, Carmina Miscellanea, and thence in Margoliouth. They may be listed as follows:

To [William Popple], 21 March 1669/70. Cooke, II, 50-5. Margoliouth, II 313-16.

To [William Popple], 14 April 1670. Cooke, II, 61-4. Margoliouth, II, 316-17

To [William Popple], 28 November 1670. Cooke, II, 65-7. Margoliouth, II, 317-18

To [William Popple], [c. 24 January 1670/1]. Cooke, II, 56-9. Margoliouth, II, 321-2

To [a friend in Persia], 9 August 1671. Cooke, II, 71-7. Margoliouth, II, 323-6. The addressee identified as Thomas Rolt by E. E. Duncan-Jones in ‘Marvell's “Friend in Persia”’, N&Q, 202 (November 1957), 466-7.

To [William Popple], June 1672. Cooke, II, 68-9. Margoliouth, II, 327-8

To [William Popple], 24 July 1675. Cooke, II, 44-9. Margoliouth, II, 341-3

To [William Popple], 10 June 1678. Cooke, II, 70-1; Margoliouth, II, 357

An undated fragment of two lines in Latin. Cooke, I,.14. Margoliouth, II, 357.

Untraced Letters

Letters by Marvell which have appeared in sale catalogues, but were not clearly identified, include two to Sir Henry Thompson, one of them dated 1671, in The American Art Association, Anderson Galleries, New York, 21 May 1923 (unnumbered lot). These might, or might not, correspond to *MaA 540 and *MaA 541. In ‘Some Uncollected Letters by Andrew Marvell’, British Library Journal, 5 (1979), 145-50, Hilton Kelliher also draws attentionto ‘lost’, letters by Marvell last recorded in the nineteenth century. One, a letter of 1658, belonged in the 1840s to Dawson Turner and was sold at Puttick & Simpson's, 6 June 1859, lot 677. ‘Several’ others were allegedly written by Marvell from Highgate and were cited by John T. Taylor in a lecture given at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution in March 1882. In addition, two currently ‘lost’ letters were recorded by Reginald L. Hine (1883-1949) in his Confessions of an Un-Common Attorney (London, 1945), p. 7. In his recollections of his days working as an assistant solicitor to Messrs Hawkins & Co. of Hitchin, Hertfordshire, he records:

Tied up with a bundle of title-deeds in another cupboard I found two letters from the Cromwellian and Restoration poet, Andrew Marvell, written when member for Hull in 1670 and complaining that no one could expect promotions, spiritual or temporal, unless he made his court to the king's mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland.

E.E. Duncan-Jones has suggested as a possible recipient of these two letters Marvell's Hertfordshire friend Thomas Rolt.

Documents

A considerable number of other examples of Marvell's handwriting are preserved, ranging from student subscriptions at Cambridge in the 1630s to signatures on legal documents and papers written in an official capacity in his parliamentary years (see MaA 568-575).

In particular, as Latin secretary in the office of John Thurloe, Secretary of the Council of State, from September 1657 to February 1658/9, and then under Thurloe's successor, Thomas Scott, from May to August 1659, Marvell produced a series of transcripts of official papers and of translations of them from or into Latin. A number of these documents have been identified by Hilton Kelliher as surviving in Marvell's own hand among Thurloe's papers and in other official archives. Besides the few notable documents given entries below, including a tract on Sweden which is the longest autograph manuscript by him known to survive (*MaA 573), examples of official papers in his hand include items in the Bodleian (MSS Rawl. A. 53, 55, 56, 58, 60, 63, 65), British Library (Add. MS 22919) and National Archives, Kew (SP82/9 and 84/162).

Among the state papers in the National Archives, Kew, are also a series of diplomatic letters written in the hand of Marvell as secretary to Charles Howard, first Earl of Carlisle, English Ambassador to Russia, Sweden and Denmark, during their unsuccessful mission to Moscow, and all signed by Carlisle himself. Two from Moscow to Charles II are dated 12 March 1663/4 and 14 June 1664 (SP91/3, Part 1, ff. 103-4v, 1r05-6r); one from Moscow to Secretary of State Henry Bennet is dated 14 June 1664 (SP91/3, Part 1, ff. 107r-8v); one from Stockholm to the King is dated 13 September 1664 (SP95/5A, Part 2, ff. 143r-4v); and two from Copenhagen to the King and Bennet respectively are dated 1 and 16 November 1664 (SP75/17, ff. 209, 220). This series is edited and discussed in Caroline Robbins, ‘Carlisle and Marvell in Russia, Sweden and Denmark, 1663-1664’, The History of Ideas News Letter, 3/1 (January 1957), 8-17.

As in the case of Abraham Cowley, and possibly even of Milton, papers of this kind hitherto identified in public archives represent discoveries based on linevitably limited and selective searches. A systematic and comprehensive examination of the many scores of relevant volumes of State Papers in the National Archives, Kew, alone might bring to light other surviving examples of Marvell's handwriting.

Marvell's Books

There are no printed books owned by Marvell known to survive, or which can be identified as his. The only one which may once have passed through Marvell's hands and which apparently once belonged to his father, the Rev. Andrew Marvell (c.1584-1641), is a 1619 ‘Holy Bible, Prayer Book and Psalms, with the Musical Notes’ sold at Sotheby's on 5 March 1850 (George Lawford sale), lot 79, to J. Miller. According to the sale catalogue, the second page contained ‘An Autograph of Andrew Marvell’ (though it was not clear which ‘Andrew Marvell’), while ‘On the title of the New Testament is written, “My father Marvell's bible, given me by” — the second line of this inscription has unfortunately been cut through in the rebinding. This may fairly be presumed to be in the handwriting of the Patriot's only sister Ann…’. In fact, Marvell had three sisters, for besides Anne (who married James Blaydes in 1633), there were Mary (who married Edmond Popple in 1636) and Elisabeth (who married Robert More). Moreover, the phrasing ‘My father Marvell’ could easily denote in this period a reference to someone's father-in-law and thus may actually have been inscribed by one of the poet's three brothers-in-law.

Manuscripts of Marvell's Verse

Apart from the problematical A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda (see below), Marvell's poems before 1660 had little circulation in manuscript outside his immediate circle. Perhaps the two most notable surviving manuscript texts of this group are the recently discovered shorter versions of the celebration On the Victory obtained by Blake over the Spaniards, in the Bay of Sanctacruze, in the island of Teneriff. 1657. Margarita Stocker and Timothy Raylor have speculated that the 132-line text found among the papers of the scientific projector Samuel Hartlib (MaA 52) might conceivably have been transcribed from the original fair copy presented by Marvell to Cromwell, via Hartlib, as a step to the poet's preferment in 1657 (although, in fact, Marvell was already well acquainted with the Protector and was tutor to his ward William Dutton). This substantially different version, which they assume to be early, also provides, in their opinion ‘the best evidence to date for the view that Marvell did revise his poetry’ (evidence which, incidentally, is supplemented by that for different versions of A Letter to Doctor Ingelo: see MaA 46). This subject is, however, thrown wide open by Elsie Duncan-Jones's discovery of a further text, of a 130-line version, in the Petworth archive (MaA 51), where the poem is ascribed to ‘R F:’, possibly Richard Flecknoe. This raises the question whether it is the shorter or longer version that came first and, indeed, whether the poem was actually written by Marvell at all, one alternative being that he might have had a hand only in its revision.

After the Restoration, with the development of Marvell's disillusionment with Charles II's government and the sharpening of his satirical acumen, the poet clearly put into circulation a number of political compositions, anonymously or under other guises. Contemporary copies of these pieces proliferated — through groups or clubs of like-minded political dissidents and associates, or through the common means of professional scriptoria and the collections of Poems upon Affairs of State. Although Marvell moved in different social and political circles, his later works would probably have been disseminated in much the same manner as those of the Earl of Rochester (see Rochester below, Introduction).

Principal Manuscript Collections of Verse

For convenient reference, the principal manuscripts containing substantial numbers of poems by or attributed to Marvell (granted those caveats about the canon noted below) are briefly listed below, arranged for the most part alphabetically according to repository, with the delta numbers originally supplied in IELM:

Lost or Unidentified Verse Manuscripts

In 1776 the editor Edward Thompson acquired two manuscript volumes of poems which had apparently descended from members of Marvell's family. One, belonging to one Matthias, whose wife descended from the Popple family, can now confidently be identified with the ‘Thompson volume’ in the Bodleian (MS Eng. poet. d. 49). The other — unreliably described by Thompson as ‘a volume of Mr. Marvell's poems, some written with his own hand, and the rest copied by his order’ — was acquired from Thomas Raikes and had allegedly been ‘many years in the care of Mr. Nettleton’, probably a descendant of the husband of Marvell's niece (Thompson, I, vi, and see Margoliouth, I, 233). Among other poems, this manuscript contained texts of The Kings Vowes, The Statue in Stocks-Market, The Statue at Charing-crosse (in ‘Mr. Marvell's own hand’, according to Thompson, I, x) and additional stanzas for Upon his Majesties being made free of the Citty. No trace of this manuscript has come to light since the eighteenth century and its claim to authenticity, if any, remains obscure.

A few manuscript texts of certain of the Restoration poems in the Marvell canon recorded in earlier sources have not been given separate entries here since they cannot be identified positively and may, in some cases, correspond with manuscripts already recorded. They are as follows:

Advice to a Painter to Draw the Duke By, on four folio pages, offered in Dobell's sale catalogue The Literature of the Restoration (1918), item 1247, and probably the same again in his catalogue No. 68 (1941), item 115. Recorded in Osborne, p. 41, and probably the ‘Dobell MS’ recorded in Margoliouth, I, 227. This is possibly MaA 454 at Cornell, which has the word ‘Dobell’ scribbled in pencil at the foot of the third page.

The same poem, in a folio, bound with other pieces, recorded as ‘OWW’ (? in the library of Col.C. K. Wilkinson) in Osborne, p. 41.

A Ballad call'd the Chequer Inn, in a composite folio volume of verse, offered in Dobell's sale catalogue No. 68 (1941), item 347. This item may have been extracted and might conceivably be MaA 76 or MaA 80.

Further Advice to a Painter, on two folio pages, offered in Dobell's sale catalogue The Literature of the Restoration (1918), item 1248, and recorded in Osborne, p. 39. This might possibly be one of the Portland Manuscripts: see MaA 489-92.

The Second Advice to a Painter, on eight folio pages, bound with other pieces, recorded as ‘OWW’ (? in the library of Col. C. K. Wilkinson) in Osborne, p. 29.

At least nine poems by Marvell in two folio volumes of poems upon affairs of state etc. (including poems by Dryden, Milton, Rochester, Dorset, Etherege, etc.) in old morocco, in Thomas Thorpe's Catalogue of upward of fourteen hundred manuscripts (1836), item 1180.

In the same catalogue, item 1190 is a folio volume of poems ‘by Various Authors of the seventeenth century collected early in the last Century, neatly written’, including at least eight poems by Marvell (as well as poems by Rochester etc.), in calf, later owned by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bt (1792-1872) manuscript and book collector, sold at Sotheby's, 20 May 1897 (Phillipps sale), lot 737.

The Verse Canon

The great bulk of Marvell's verse — including all that written before the Restoration and for which he is best known — was posthumously published in Miscellaneous Poems (London, 1681). Marvell's editors all have different views on the canon, especially on those poems written after the Restoration. Apart from the problematical celebration of Blake's victory at Teneriff noted above (MaA 51-52), however, perhaps only one poem included in the 1681 edition has hitherto given serious cause for concern over authenticity: namely A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda (MaA 7-24), which appears in manuscripts and songbooks as early as the 1630s (see Chernaik, pp. 207-8). But for its appearance in the 1681 edition, there would be no reason to associate this pastoral with Marvell.

Lord's questioning of the authenticity of one other poem in the 1681 edition, Tom May's Death — as well, so it happens, as of A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda and On the Victory obtained by Blake over the Spaniards — is based on the exclusion of those poems from the Thompson volume (Bodleian, MS Eng. poet. d. 49: MaA Δ 1). Lord's reasoning here is, as Chernaik argues (p. 206 et seq.), based on a misinterpretation of the significance of that volume. The Thompson volume, which was apparently owned by descendants of Marvell's nephew, is certainly an important editorial source, but it also contains additional poems in manuscript not by Marvell. The later crosses drawn alongside a number of the titles, which Lord interprets as authenticating marks to distinguish Marvell's poems, can more readily be interpreted as marks to denote which poems were published in early editions of Poems upon Affairs of State. Thus the volume can hardly be accepted on this account alone as the last word on the canon.

Far more problematical is Marvell's post-Restoration and largely satirical verse, which was anonymously circulated in manuscripts; which may even have been subject to other people's changes and additions; and where, indeed, a certain element of disguise was sometimes essential for the author's own protection. While it is now generally accepted that there is strong evidence that certain poems traditionally associated with Marvell (such as Britannia and Rawleigh: MaA 98-124) can better be ascribed elsewhere (to writers such as John Ayloffe, for instance), an indefinite number of attributions are likely to remain controversial, and to tax the resources of editors, for the foreseeable future (see, in particular, Chernaik's discussion, pp. 208-14). Not least among such poems are various examples in the long series of ‘Advice to a Painter’ poems which were originally prompted by, and intended as satirical counterparts to, Waller's eulogistic Instructions to a Painter of 1665. One relevant group was published in 1667 as purporting to be written by Sir John Denham. Besides Further Advice to a Painter (MaA 476-99) and The last Instructions to a Painter (MaA 500-4), Marvell is sometimes credited with the so-called Second and Third Advice to a Painter poems (MaA 314-60, MaA 361-88). His claim to the often accompanying Fourth and Fifth Advices (MaA 389-423, MaA 424-33) is negligible; while the Advice to a Painter to draw the Duke by (MaA 434-75), which was once assigned to him, is now more commonly attributed to Rochester's friend Henry Savile. Nevertheless, the authorship of these poems remains a subject of controversy: see, for instance, the vigorous debate on the Second and Third Advices by George deF. Lord and Ephim G. Fogel in Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 62 (1958) 551-70, and 63 (1959), 223-36, 292-308, 355-71, and the further contributions to the discussion by Annabel Patterson in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 71 (1977), 473-86; by Chernaik, p. 211; and by John Burrows in ‘Andrew Marvell and the “Painter Satires”: A Computational Approach to their Authorship’, Modern Language Review, 100/2 (April 2005), 281-97 (supporting Marvell's authorship of the Second and Third Advices); as well as by Brendan O Hehir in Harmony from Discords: A Life of Sir John Denham (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1968), pp. 212-28 (where it is argued that ‘Denham seems still the most probable real author of the Second Advice to a Painter’ after all).

The verse canon adopted for present purposes is based on Margoliouth, with concessions on occasions, as noted in the entries themselves, to Lord and others. The emphasis here is on comprehensiveness, since even some of those texts now generally rejected as spurious will surely continue to play a role in scholarly discussions of the canon and may, in any case, throw light on the manuscript circulation and history of some of the authentic texts.

For this reason entries below are grouped according to: (i) all those ‘Miscellaneous Poems’ published in or before 1681 (MaA 1-61); (ii) Poems on Affairs of State attributed to Marvell by various of his modern editors, including a few poems which are very likely spurious, or at least whose authenticity has been seriously challenged by Chernaik and others (MaA 62-313); and (iii), as a supplementary section, those ‘Advice to a Painter’ poems that have at various times been attributed to Marvell, or played a significant role in discussions of his contribution to this genre (including the almost certainly spurious Fourth and Fifth Advices), poems which may usefully be considered together as a special group (MaA 314-504).

Prose

As D.I.B. Smith has noted, in his edition of The Rehearsal Transpros'd (Oxford, 1971, p. xxi), Marvell's vigorous prose satires The Rehearsal Transpros'd and Account of the Growth of Popery were probably printed by Anne Brewster from transcripts prepared for the author by her landlord, who was described on 23 August 1678 by Roger L'Estrange (in a letter to Sir Joseph Williamson) as ‘formerly an officer under Cromwell; one that writes three or foure very good Hands, and owns to have been employd in Transcribing things for a Counsellor in the Temple’ (National archives, Kew, SP 29/406/49, quoted in Kelliher, p. 113). Such transcripts, which, like those of the verse lampoons, would have disguised the identity of the author, do not appear to have survived the printing house. Some critical comments on The Rehearsal Transpros'd made in the late 1680s by one ‘P.D.’ are quoted in an article by G. Blakemore Evans (see MaA 519.7). What is headed ‘A Love Letter to the Author of the Rehearsall Transpros'd’ (addressed ‘These To his ever drolling Friend...’), subscribed ‘J. O.’ and dated from Whitehall, 30 January 1674[/5], is in the Royal Society (MS 32, ff. 41r-54r).

The amusing prose lampoon purporting to be Charles II's speech at the opening of Parliament on 13 April 1675, not published until 1704, was evidently circulated in manuscripts at Westminster and elsewhere (see MaA 508-19), and no doubt other copies will come to light in due course. One copy, possibly to be identified with one of those in the entries below, was among a collection of Restoration state letters and documents sold at Sotheby's on 23 October 1967, lot 250, to Dobell.

A few manuscripts survive of prose works uncertainly or spuriously attributed to Marvell. Three manuscript texts are known (MaA 505-507) of a still apparently unpublished squib of 1669 called The Alarme, which Legouis has considered of ‘doubtful authorship’. At least two transcripts of A Seasonable Argument (MaA 520-1) appear to have been made from the printed edition, and possibly others of this kind are to be found elsewhere. This work has been rejected from the canon by Legouis (pp. 468-9), as has, even more positively, the tract Flagellum Parliamentarium (London, 1678), which has been occasionally confused with the former work and of which one manuscript is known (MaA 507.8).

Among other works once attributed to Marvell Legouis records (p. 470, No. 94) The Earl of Shaftesbury's Speech in the House of Lords, upon the Debate of Appointing a Day for the hearing Dr Shirley's Cause Oct. 20. 1675, which was published in State Tracts (London, 1689), pp. 57-61. In Legouis's opinion there is no reason to suppose that this speech (which begins ‘Our All is at stake…’) was not by Shaftesbury himself. What may perhaps be significant light on this matter is thrown by the presence in the interesting Okeover MS (Leeds University, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt. 55, pp. 50-3) of another speech purporting to be by Shaftesbury, headed The Lord Chancellour's Speech to the Parliament. 20^th of October 1673. This text (which begins ‘I am comanded by his Majestie to acquaint you, that he exceedingly desired this day…to have prevented your present meeting…’) is undoubtedly a mock-speech satirising the King and Parliament ‘(…he could not but imagine by your constant silence, that his many Ladys of pleasure with the vast estates he gave them, & great honours heaped on them to dishonour of y^e Nobility was agreable to your desire…’). It is somewhat in Marvell's vein (though uncharacteristically heavy-handed in its satirical touch), it occurs in a manuscript of political satires of the 1670s including a number by him, and it bears a similarity in date with the Shaftesbury speech formerly attributed to Marvell. Could it be that this mock-speech, for 20 October 1673, has been confused with an authentic one by Shaftesbury for 20 October 1675 and that, whether actually by Marvell or not, it is the former that was at some time believed to be his?

As a Member of Parliament, Marvell made various speeches himself in the House of Commons, which have not been given separate entries below. The records of these are discussed in Legouis's biography. Notes on Marvell's speech of 14 October 1667 appear in a manuscript collection of parliamentary memoranda of Sir Henry Capel, now in the British Library (Add. MS 35865, f. 10r-v). These are edited and discussed in Caroline Robbins, ‘A Note on a Hitherto Unprinted Speech by Andrew Marvell’, Modern Language Review, 31 (1936), 549-50.

Miscellaneous

For various other documents associated with Marvell and his family, see notably Legouis; Pauline Burdon, ‘Marvell after Cambridge’, British Library Journal, 4 (1978), 42-8; Hilton Kelliher, ‘Some Notes on Andrew Marvell’, British Library Journal, 4 (1978), 122-44; Pauline Burdon, ‘The Second Mrs Marvell’, N&Q, 227 (February 1982), 33-44; her ‘Marvell and his Kindred: The Family Network in the Later Years’, N&Q, 229 (September 1984), 379-85, and N&Q, 230 (June 1985), 172-80; and the descriptions and facsimiles in Kelliher (1978). The latter includes (with a facsimile, p. 94) John Aubrey's autograph ‘brief life’ of Marvell (Bodleian, MS Aubrey 6, f. 104r), which also contains an addition by Anthony Wood.

A previously unknown poem on ‘M^r Andrew Marvells character’ (‘Tho' faith in Oracles be long since ceas'd’) was recorded in HMC, 6th report, Part I (1877), Appendix, pp. 342-3, as being in a manuscript — a quarto book of ‘Poeticall Essayes upon Severall Subjects, By an unknown Author, Principally intended For his own Private diversion’ — among the muniments of the Graham family, of Norton Conyers, near Ripon, North Yorkshire. It was first printed from thence in L.A. Davies, ‘An Unpublished Poem about Andrew Marvell’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 1 (1971), 100-1.

For an interesting and little-known reference to Marvell in 1655 in the manuscript Ephemerides of Samuel Hartlib (Sheffield University Library, H50/29/5/50a), see Stocker and Raylor's article on the poem on Blake's victory (MaA 52) in English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990), p. 120.

Some notes on Marvell by the Rev. Joseph Hunter (1783-1861) in his Chorus Vatum Anglicanorum (Volume VI) are in the British Library (Add. MS 24492, ff. 175v-7v). Some of the notes and collections of George Thorn-Drury, KC (1860-1931), literary scholar and editor, preserved in the Bodleian relate to poems in the Marvell canon, including his annotated exemplum of the 1710 edition of Poems on Affairs of State (Thorn-Drury Notebooks d. 22).

For a biographical account of John Ayloffe (c.1645-85), an associate of Marvell who was hanged for conspiracy and whose few poems have become associated with the Marvell canon, see George de Forest Lord, ‘Satire and Sedition: The Life and Work of John Ayloffe’, Huntington Library Quarterly (29) 1965-6, 255-73.

Peter Beal