Andrew Marvell | Page 3

in 1608, he took Orders; and after serving as curate at
Flamborough, was inducted to the living of Winestead in 1614, where
he remained till 1624, in which year he went to Hull as master of the
Grammar School and lecturer, that is preacher, of Trinity Church. The
elder Marvell belonged, from the beginning to the end of his useful and
even heroic life, to the Reformed Church of England, or, as his son puts
it, "a conformist to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of England,
though I confess none of the most over-running and eager in them."
The younger Marvell, with one boyish interval, belonged all through
his life to the paternal school of religious thought.
Fuller's account of the elder Marvell is too good to be passed over:--

"He afterwards became Minister at Hull, where for his lifetime he was
well beloved. Most facetious in discourse, yet grave in his carriage, a
most excellent preacher who, like a good husband, never broached
what he had new brewed, but preached what he had pre-studied some
competent time before. Insomuch that he was wont to say that he would
cross the common proverb which called Saturday the working-day and
Monday the holyday of preachers. It happened that Anno Dom. 1640,
Jan. 23, crossing Humber in a Barrow boat, the same was sandwarpt,
and he was drowned therein (with Mrs. Skinner, daughter to Sir
Edward Coke, a very religious gentlewoman) by the carelessness, not
to say drunkenness of the boatmen, to the great grief of all good men.
His excellent comment upon St. Peter is daily desired and expected, if
the envy and covetousness of private persons for their own use deprive
not the public of the benefit thereof."[6:1]
This good man, to whom perhaps, remembering the date of his death,
the words may apply, _Tu vero felix non vitæ tantum claritate sed
etiam opportunitate mortis_, was married at Cherry Burton, on the 22nd
of October 1612, to Anne Pease, a member of a family destined to
become widely known throughout the north of England. Of this
marriage there were five children, all born at Winestead, viz. three
daughters, Anne, Mary, and Elizabeth, and two sons, Andrew and John,
the latter of whom died a year after his birth, and was buried at
Winestead on the 20th September 1624.
The three daughters married respectively James Blaydes of Sutton,
Yorkshire, on the 29th of December 1633; Edmund Popple, afterwards
Sheriff of Hull, on the 18th of August 1636; and Robert More. Anne's
eldest son, Joseph Blaydes, was Mayor of Hull in 1702, having married
the daughter of a preceding Mayor in 1698. The descendants of this
branch still flourish. The Popples also had children, one of whom,
William Popple, was a correspondent of his uncle the poet's, and a
merchant of repute, who became in 1696 Secretary to the Board of
Trade, and the friend of the most famous man who ever sat at the table
of that Board, John Locke. A son of this William Popple led a very
comfortable eighteenth-century life, which is in strong contrast with
that of his grand-uncle, for, having entered the Cofferers' Office about

1730, he was made seven years later Solicitor and Clerk of the Reports
to the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, and in 1745 became in
succession to a relative, one Alured Popple, Governor of the Bermudas,
a post he retained until his death, which occurred not
"Where the remote Bermudas ride In the ocean's bosom unespied,"
but at his house in Hampstead. So well placed and idle a gentleman was
almost bound to be a bad poet and worse dramatist, and this William
Popple was both.
Marvell's third sister, Elizabeth, does not seem to have had issue, a
certain Thomas More, or Moore, a Fellow of Magdalen College,
Cambridge, whose name occurs in family records, being her stepson.
In the latter part of 1624 the elder Marvell resigned the living of
Winestead, and took up the duties of schoolmaster and lecturer, or
preacher, at Hull. Important duties they were, for the old Grammar
School of Hull dates back to 1486, and may boast of a long career of
usefulness, never having fallen into that condition of decay and
disrepute from which so many similar endowments have been of late
years rescued by the beneficent and, of course, abused action of the
Charity Commissioners. Andrew Marvell the elder succeeded to and
was succeeded by eminent headmasters. Trinity Church, where the
poet's father preached on Sundays to crowded and interested
congregations, was then what it still is, though restored by Scott, one of
the great churches in the north of England.
The Rev. Andrew Marvell made his mark upon Hull. Mr. Grosart, who
lacked nothing but the curb upon a too exuberant vocabulary, a