Andrew Marvell | Page 2

education, many of his friends and acquaintances, are all
known. He wrote nearly four hundred letters to his Hull constituents,
carefully preserved by the Corporation, in which he narrates with much
particularity the course of public business at Westminster.
Notwithstanding these materials, the man Andrew Marvell remains
undiscovered. He rarely comes to the surface. Though both an author
and a member of Parliament, not a trace of personal vanity is noticeable,
and vanity is a quality of great assistance to the biographer. That
Marvell was a strong, shrewd, capable man of affairs, with enormous
powers of self-repression, his Hull correspondence clearly proves, but
what more he was it is hard to say. He rarely spoke during his eighteen
years in the House of Commons. It is impossible to doubt that such a
man in such a place was, in Mr. Disraeli's phrase, a "personage." Yet

when we look for recognition of what we feel sure was the fact, we fail
to find it. Bishop Burnet, in his delightful history, supplies us with
sketches of the leading Parliamentarians of Marvell's day, yet to
Marvell himself he refers but once, and then not by name but as "the
liveliest droll of the age," words which mean much but tell little. In
Clarendon's Autobiography, another book which lets the reader into the
very clash and crowd of life, there is no mention of one of the author's
most bitter and cruel enemies. With Prince Rupert, Marvell was
credited by his contemporaries with a great intimacy; he was a friend of
Harrington's; it may be he was a member of the once famous "Rota"
Club; it is impossible to resist the conviction that wherever he went he
made a great impression, that he was a central figure in the lobbies of
the House of Commons and a man of much account; yet no record
survives either to convince posterity of his social charm or even to
convey any exact notion of his personal character.
A somewhat solitary man he would appear to have been, though fond
of occasional jollity. He lived alone in lodgings, and was much
immersed in business, about a good deal of which we know nothing
except that it took him abroad. His death was sudden, and when three
years afterwards the first edition of his poems made its appearance, it
was prefaced by a certificate signed "Mary Marvell," to the effect that
everything in the book was printed "according to the copies of my late
dear husband." Until after Marvell's death we never hear of Mrs.
Marvell, and with this signed certificate she disappears. In a series of
Lives of Poets' Wives it would be hard to make much of Mrs. Andrew
Marvell. For different but still cogent reasons it is hard to write a life of
her famous husband.
Andrew Marvell was born at Winestead in Holdernesse, on Easter Eve,
the 31st of March 1621, in the Rectory House, the elder Marvell, also
Andrew, being then the parson of the parish. No fitter birthplace for a
garden-poet can be imagined. Roses still riot in Winestead; the
fruit-tree roots are as mossy as in the seventeenth century. At the right
season you may still
"Through the hazels thick espy The hatching throstle's shining eye."

Birds, fruits and flowers, woods, gardens, meads, and rivers still make
the poet's birthplace lovely.
"Loveliness, magic, and grace, They are here--they are set in the world!
They abide! and the finest of souls Has not been thrilled by them all,
Nor the dullest been dead to them quite. The poet who sings them may
die, But they are immortal and live, For they are the life of the world."
Holdernesse was not the original home of the Marvells, who would
seem to have been mostly Cambridgeshire folk, though the name crops
up in other counties. Whether Cambridge "men" of a studious turn still
take long walks I do not know, but "some vast amount of years ago" it
was considered a pleasant excursion, either on foot or on a hired steed,
from Cambridge to Meldreth, where the Elizabethan manor-house, long
known as "the Marvells'," agreeably embodied the tradition that here it
was that the poet's father was born in 1586. The Church Registers have
disappeared. Proof is impossible. That there were Marvells in the
neighbourhood is certain. The famous Cambridge antiquary, William
Cole, perhaps the greatest of all our collectors, has included among his
copies of early wills those of several Marvells and Mervells of
Meldreth and Shepreth, belonging to pre-Reformation times, as their
pious gifts to the "High Altar" and to "Our Lady's Light" pleasingly
testify. But our Andrew was a determined Protestant.
The poet's father is an interesting figure in our Church history.
Educated at Emmanuel College, from whence he proceeded a Master of
Arts