Marvell, ANDREW, was born March 31, 1621, at Winestead, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where his father, who three years later became master of the grammar-school and lecturer at Trinity Church in Hull, was rector of the parish. In his thirteenth year he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, with a Hull exhibition, and in 1639 graduated B.A. In January 1641 he lost his father, drowned in crossing the Humber, 'to the great grief of all good men,' says Fuller, and at the close of the same year his university career came to an end, through non-observance of his 'days and acts.' It was probably after coming of age in 1642 that he set out on his travels. It is said that he met Milton in Rome, and that 'they publicly argued against the superstitions of the Romish Church, even within the verge of the Vatican;' but unfortunately for the legend Milton came home nearly three years before Marvell set out. He was four years abroad, in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, but there is no sign of his return until 1649, when his name appears to one of the 'Elegies on the Death of Lord Hastings,' and in the Lucasta of 'his noble friend Richard Lovelace,' the royalist. His sympathies were still more clearly shown next year in his fierce lines on May, the historian of the Long Parliament. In the summer of 1650 Lord Fairfax engaged Marvell, whose father he no doubt knew, as tutor to his young daughter Mary Fairfax, afterwards Duchess of Buckingham. By him, apparently, Marvell was introduced to Milton, who in February 1653 recommended him to Bradshaw as a good scholar and linguist, and well qualified to act as assistant Latin secretary. Though unsuccessful, the recommendation, it seems, brought him under Cromwell's notice, for in July he was appointed by him tutor to a Mr Dutton, called, unaccountably, Cromwell's nephew. In 1657 he was appointed Milton's assistant, and in January 1659 took his seat in Richard Cromwell's parliament as member for Hull, for which he was returned again in 1660, and again in 1661. In 1663-65 he accompanied Lord Carlisle as secretary to the embassy to Muscovy, Sweden, and Denmark, but the rest of his life was devoted to watching over the interests of his constituents in parliament, resisting the misapplication of the money voted for the defence of the nation, and doing battle, in the House and out of it, with the partisans of intolerance and arbitrary government. He died somewhat suddenly, August 18, 1678. The Popish
Plot panic had just set in, and, being a marked man, he was supposed to have been made away with by poison. His death, however, was really due to natural causes, an attack of tertian ague and 'the ignorance of an old conceited doctor' (Morton's Pyretologia, 1692: Athenæum, No. 2419). He was buried in St Giles's-in-the-Fields, 'under ye pewes in ye south side,' according to Aubrey.
Marvell's claims to remembrance are concisely summed up when he is described as 'poet, patriot, and friend of Milton,' but the second is the title by which he is best known. The refusal of a coarse bribe has sent him down to posterity as a prodigy of patriotic virtue, and the fact is as severe a satire on the corruption of his time as anything in his own writings. Attempts have been made to tone down popular admiration in his case, by suggestions, for example, of intemperate habits, founded on a casual remark of Aubrey's, though it is clear from the context that Aubrey meant nothing of the kind; and a stain on his character has been found in the grossness and virulence of the political satires that bear his name. But we should remember that, except in one or two cases, we have no right to assume that he was the author of these things. The Advice to a Painter is vouched for by Aubrey, but for the rest we have no better authority than the printer of Poems on Affairs of State (1689), a man with a muck-rake scraping together the scurrilities of the two past reigns: and, as he has put the name to two or three pieces Marvell did not write, he may have put it to more. But, even if Marvell did write them, we must recollect that it was a coarse age, and that to be effective he had to use its language and ideas. Because he served under Cromwell and was a friend of Milton, it is often assumed that he was a Roundhead and a republican, but his own words belie the assumption. The royalist fervour of his youth cooled, and he admired Cromwell because he put down anarchy with a strong hand, and 'made England great and his enemies tremble,' but he was no admirer of Cromwell's rule. He was a constitutionalist before all things. In his prose tracts and his letters to his constituents, he makes it clear that if Charles could have kept straight he would have had no sturdier supporter than Andrew Marvell, but even in his despair his attitude is expressed in his own noble line, 'Tis godlike good to save a falling king.' Marvell's works are divided by the Restoration into two very distinct groups. After 1660 his pen was given up to politics, except when his friendship for Milton drew from him the lines prefixed to the second edition of Paradise Lost. In 1672-73 he wrote the Rehearsal Transpros'd in answer to Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, who had come forward as the advocate of religious intolerance; and in 1676 a similar work, Mr Smirke, or the Divine in Mode, in reply to Turner, Master of St John's, Cambridge, to which he added a Historical Essay on General Councils. In 1677 his most important tractate, the Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, was printed at Amsterdam, the title-page says; in 1678 his defence of the Nonconformist John Howe; and to complete the list his voluminous correspondence with his constituents should be added. His poetry was printed in folio in 1681 with a preface by his widow, which Cooke, the editor of a new edition in 1726, denounced as the work of an impostor, an aspersion disposed of by the letters of administration granted in 1679 to Maria Marvell, relictæ. As a poet Marvell belongs altogether to the pre-Restoration period. Most of his poems seem to have been written during his residence with Fairfax, and all, clearly, before he entered public life. 'A witty delicacy,' as Lamb called it, and a certain classical turn of expression that betrays the scholar, give a peculiar character to his poetry, but unquestionably his distinguishing characteristic as a poet is his genuine, hearty enjoyment of nature, of which, perhaps, no English poet between Chaucer and Wordsworth had so large a share.
The only complete and accurate edition of Marvell's works is that of Dr Grosart, in 4 vols. 1872-74. The edition by Captain Thompson (3 vols. 4to, 1776) printed for the first time the poems on Cromwell, in one of which occurs the famous passage about the death of Charles I. For Thompson's absurd claim of poems by Addison, Mallet, and Dr Watts, see the Cornhill for 1869. There is an admirable selection by G. A. Aitken (1892).