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Although they are not named, John Selden and John Lightfoot — the two greatest Christian Hebraists of 17th-century Britain — stand behind the intermittent but fierce talmudic exchanges of Samuel Parker and Andrew Marvell. Parker relies on Selden’s scholarship when he explains that Christ drove the money-changers out of the temple with impunity because he followed rabbinic laws pertaining to Jewish zealots. For Marvell, the act was miraculous, and he accuses Parker of blasphemy. The Ius Zelotarum or right of zealots was an incendiary topic during the civil war period. Relying on both the New Testament (Matthew 23:15) and on the Talmud as interpreted by Lightfoot, Marvell vilifies Parker as a proselyte, a turncoat who abandoned Puritanism for the Church of England in order to advance his career.

After 1650 Andrew Marvell put himself forward on two fronts. He was a poet, but he also aspired to a post in diplomacy or foreign affairs. In February 1653, John Milton, the now blind Latin Secretary, wrote to his and Marchamont Nedham's friend the Commonwealth's statesman John Bradshaw to ask, in vain as it turned out, for Marvell to be offered a job as his own assistant. Milton pointed to Marvell's experience of foreign travel, and his knowledge of languages. On that basis he made the audacious claim that ‘in a short time’ Marvell would be able to do ‘as good service’ for the republic as that performed by Anthony Ascham, the ambassador to Madrid. Perhaps Marvell's upbringing at the great port of Hull, which traded with northern Europe, helped to explain why he cultivated a particular interest in the affairs of those rivals for mastery of the Baltic, the Netherlands, and Sweden, the subjects of his political poetry.

Chapter 2 revisits the question of Marvell’s place in the Engagement controversy, to map his ambivalent use of arguments from sovereignty. It contextualizes the mode of cavaliering activism celebrated in several of Marvell’s poems within contemporary republican and Engager challenges to the royalist doctrine of passive obedience. This includes a rapprochement with, and appropriation of, Davenant. This context provides the basis for, first, a new reading of Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ in comparison with the Engagers Marchamont Nedham and Anthony Ascham; and, second, a survey of Marvell’s poetic engagements with Davenant, and their political implications, in the 1650s poems ‘Tom May’s Death’, ‘Upon Appleton House’, and ‘Music’s Empire’. Marvell’s habitual emphasis on modest and participatory government is strategically suspended when he uses defactoist and absolutist arguments to magnify the personal authority of Oliver Cromwell.