Search Results

Like John Milton, Andrew Marvell can seem a spokesman for solitariness. Though he ‘would drink liberally by himself’, to ‘refresh his spirits and exalt his muse’, he would—unlike Marchamont Nedham—‘never drink hard in company’ or ‘play the good-fellow in any man's company’. Marvell's writing, like Milton's, makes a virtue of single-handedness. Like Milton's solitary heroes, Marvell's Oliver Cromwell, who in the poem on ‘The First Anniversary’ of the protectorate moves ‘in dark nights, and in cold days alone’, never seems to need a friend or counsellor, and would be a less imposing force beside one. Marvell himself can be vividly alone in his verse. If the later Marvell is a lyrical writer as well as a political writer, the earlier one proves to be as much a political animal, and as close to the world of public satire and polemic, as his successor.

This chapter examines the relationship between the Levellers in the 1640s (and their subsequent careers in the 1650s) and the classical republican authors of the 1650s. Contemporaries as well as historians have seen continuities between Levellers and republicans, and there are obvious similarities in their thought, as well as apparent continuities or linkages of personnel. However, classical republican language was an idiom which left few traces in the Levellers’ writings, and much 1650s republicanism had an anti-populist cast which did not sit easily with Leveller egalitarianism, and even enabled republicans such as Marchamont Nedham to attack the Levellers in print. When Leveller ideas and classical language or exempla were brought together, the fit was not always comfortable, and some of the most characteristic aspects of the republican thought might be modified. Two authors of the 1650s bear most comparison with the Levellers: Nedham, in his more populist republican phase, and John Streater; but it is in Streater’s writing that a genuine continuation of the spirit of Leveller writing, in classical language, is found.

John Milton's friendships can be hard to imagine. In his own accounts of himself he yearned for friendship and treasured it when he found it. True friendship, he maintained, survives when tested. So when, late in the 17th century, Anthony Wood stated that Marchamont Nedham was ‘a great crony of Milton’, one may at first be sceptical. However one has on the authority of Milton's nephew Edward Phillips that Nedham was among the ‘particular friends’ who, ‘all the time’ appeared at or ‘frequently visited’ Milton's ‘abode’ in Petty France. Nedham himself lived nearby, in Westminster Churchyard. As the merest glance at their careers in the 1650s suggests, their contact was not merely social. Friendships can be attractions of opposites, and in Milton and Nedham there were doubtless many opposites to attract. Nedham's unblushing acknowledgements of his ‘tergiversations’ contrast with Milton's massive and irreducible sense of his own constancy.

Marchamont Nedham is the serial turncoat of the Puritan Revolution. The civil wars, which shaped his life, broke out in the month, August 1642, of his twenty-second birthday. Nedham—or often Needham (his surname should be pronounced so as virtually to rhyme with ‘freedom’)—came from a family of moderate substance in Burford in Oxfordshire. After a period at All Souls College, Oxford, he was appointed usher and assistant teacher at Merchant Taylors' School, an experience that would leave him with a long-standing interest in education and a long-lasting awareness of its low levels of pay. In 1641 he found other employment, as a clerk at Gray's Inn. Then, in 1643, the growth of civil war journalism gave him his chance to expand his career. He wrote for parliament in the first civil war; for the king in the second; and for the successive Puritan regimes.

As writers of propaganda, John Milton and Marchamont Nedham were not immediately answerable to the parliament which had assumed sovereignty in 1649. They wrote at the behest of its executive arm, the council of state, which also employed Milton to write and translate diplomatic correspondence. In the mid-winter of 1650–1, just before Politicus took up Milton's literary cause, a contest between John Bradshaw and Oliver Cromwell for the chancellorship of Oxford University was resolved in Cromwell's favour. The appointment was no merely ornamental one. Cromwell would make maximum use of the post to try to change the religious and political complexion of the university. If the learned Bradshaw shared Milton's views on educational reform and on the need to reform the universities, no doubt he would have done the same — but with fewer compromises with the forces of conservatism.

This chapter considers four writers who exhibit varying degrees of success in manipulating the meanings of shifting alliances. The prose polemicist Marchamont Nedham seems to flourish directly in proportion to the flamboyance with which he switches sides. The three poets — Abraham Cowley, Edmund Waller, and Andrew Marvell — frequently appear together in manuscript collections that foreground their changing political loyalties. They experience quite different fates: Cowley bemoans his lack of preferment, Waller appears as a genial timeserver, and Marvell earns a reputation as a great patriot that belies his early poems. The chapter traces the shifting fortunes of their reputations as poets and politicians. It also attends to the ways in which these authors' writings imagine political obligation, with a particular focus on the recurring figures of Brutus and of David and Jonathan. Brutus is the betrayer who stands against absolute rule. David and Jonathan are the perfect biblical friends who enable divinely appointed monarchy.

John Milton and Marchamont Nedham were fellow writers for the government that came to power in 1649. The treatises that Milton published for the government were written in its first two years, when its rule was precarious. In their vindications of the regicide and of the rule of the republic, Milton's and Nedham's writings developed common arguments and a common vocabulary. The resemblances, at least in their persistence, set their prose apart from the run of polemic in the Puritan cause. Behind its shared features lie premisses and rhetorical methods that derive largely from the classical world, to whose history, and to whose civic values, both writers so often appeal. From that source they acquired a confident intellectual cosmopolitanism that is rarely matched in other defences of the new order of 1649–53, most of which were narrowly biblical or providentialist or legal or prudential in scope.

John Milton and Marchamont Nedham agreed that Pride's Purge and the regicide, the emergency measures, had delivered England from a return to tyranny. So long as the royalist military threat survived, Nedham's propaganda was mainly negative. It had more to say about the evils of royalism and Presbyterianism than about the virtues of kingless rule. Yet the concluding chapter of The Case of the Commonwealth in May 1650, a work published when the morale of the government was at its lowest point and when the regime was desperate for survival, departed from that policy and supplied his adventurous ‘discourse of the excellency of a free state above a kingly government’. By the time of the Battle of Worcester he had, on the same subject, a book or series of essays up his sleeve.

John Milton's explanation was needed, since his proposed solution, the perpetuation of what remained of the Long Parliament, ran contrary to a fundamental premiss of the commonwealthmen, those spokesmen for the ‘good old cause’, and of none of them more than Marchamont Nedham when he took their part. In another respect, however, Milton was now wholly with the commonwealthmen. His hopes of single rulers, however ‘supremely excellent’, had been destroyed by the rule of Oliver Cromwell. The ruler who had seemed to him a bulwark against the Stuarts now appeared of a kind with them. Milton may not have wanted a newly elected parliament in 1659–60, but he did want one with undivided and unlimited power. Nedham, as he worked his way back from the protectorate to the Rump, had to overcome venomous resistance to his own re-employment from among the commonwealthmen, who particularly resented his orchestration and publication of addresses in the Cromwellian interest.

This book places John Milton and Andrew Marvell beside a writer for whom no one would claim the same kind of immortality, and to whom the tactics and techniques of instant print were second nature. The writing of Marchamont Nedham, which may at first seem infinitely remote from theirs, was intimately bound to it. He occupied a unique place in the lives of both men during the Interregnum of 1649–60. As far as we can tell, no other contemporary was so close to the composition of Milton's political writing or, before the Restoration, of Marvell's. His relations with the two men does not circumscribe this book' investigation of their politics. Often the argument moves away from him. However he repeatedly works his way back.

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.

Before ‘The First Anniversary’ came about, Andrew Marvell wrote next to nothing about the internal politics of the Puritan regimes whose external policies he favoured. He was virtually silent about the political tensions and convulsions of the two years and more following the victory at Worcester. The protector's standing abroad is a main theme of ‘The First Anniversary’. In celebrating it, Marvell projected the images of the protectorate that Marchamont Nedham's writings of 1654 had already fostered. Under the protectorate, Politicus, with rare exceptions, eschewed the irony that had made it so incisive a publication under the Commonwealth. The contrast parallels that between ‘An Horatian Ode’ and ‘The First Anniversary’, for in the second poem Marvell sheds the tension of competing meanings that marks the first.

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.

This chapter examines ideological developments unfolding in the last months of the civil war. In particular, it examines the coalescence of a “propaganda collective,” centering on John Lilburne and his closest collaborators, which began to promulgate a distinctive vision of political reality, put forward as the need for a final settlement became evident. This “collective” established many of the ideological, organizational, and personal ligatures that would hold together the Leveller movement in 1647. However, this collective remained in 1645 an integral part of the wider “independent” coalition, sharing broader political and ideological objectives with other constituents of that coalition. Moreover, there were also important developments among other independent sympathizers, evident most notably in the emergence, for the first time, of overtly republican sentiments and arguments at the end of 1645.