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University Press Scholarship Online

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Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England

Blair Worden

Published in print: 2009 Published Online:October 2011ISBN: 9780199230822 eISBN: 9780191696480Item type: book

Publisher: Oxford University PressDOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230822.001.0001

This book takes a fresh approach to the literary biography of the two

great poets of the Puritan Revolution, John Milton and Andrew Marvell. The book reconstructs the political contexts within which Milton andMarvell wrote, and reassesses their writings against the background of volatile and dramatic changes of public mood and circumstance. Twofigures are shown to have been prominent in their minds. First thereis Oliver Cromwell, on whose character and decisions the future of thePuritan Revolution and of the nation rested, and whose ascent the twowriters traced and assessed, in both cases with an acute ambivalence.

The second is Marchamont Nedham, the pioneering journalist of thecivil wars, a close friend of Milton and a man whose writings prove to

be intimately linked to Marvell's. The high achievements of Milton andMarvell are shown to belong to a world of pressing political debate, whichNedham's ephemeral publications helped to shape. The book followsMarvell's transition from royalism to Cromwellianism. In Milton's case theprofound effect on his outlook brought by the execution of King CharlesI in 1649; his difficult and disillusioning relationship with the successiveregimes of the Interregnum; and his attempt to come to terms, in hisimmortal poetry of the Restoration, with the failure of Puritan rule.

Introduction

Blair Worden

in Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England

Published in print: 2009 Published Online:October 2011ISBN: 9780199230822 eISBN: 9780191696480Item type: chapter


This book places John Milton and Andrew Marvell beside a writer forwhom no one would claim the same kind of immortality, and to whom the

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tactics and techniques of instant print were second nature. The writingof Marchamont Nedham, which may at first seem infinitely remote fromtheirs, was intimately bound to it. He occupied a unique place in the livesof both men during the Interregnum of 1649–60. As far as we can tell, noother contemporary was so close to the composition of Milton's politicalwriting or, before the Restoration, of Marvell's. His relations with the two

men does not circumscribe this book' investigation of their politics. Oftenthe argument moves away from him. However he repeatedly works hisway back.

Nedham

Blair Worden


Published in print: 2009 Published Online:

October 2011ISBN: 9780199230822 eISBN: 9780191696480Item type: chapter

Publisher: Oxford University Press

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230822.003.0002

Marchamont Nedham is the serial turncoat of the Puritan Revolution. Thecivil wars, which shaped his life, broke out in the month, August 1642, of his twenty-second birthday. Nedham—or often Needham (his surnameshould be pronounced so as virtually to rhyme with ‘freedom’)—camefrom a family of moderate substance in Burford in Oxfordshire. After aperiod at All Souls College, Oxford, he was appointed usher and assistantteacher at Merchant Taylors' School, an experience that would leave himwith a long-standing interest in education and a long-lasting awarenessof its low levels of pay. In 1641 he found other employment, as a clerk atGray's Inn. Then, in 1643, the growth of civil war journalism gave him hischance 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.

Milton and Nedham

Blair Worden




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. Truefriendship, he maintained, survives when tested. So when, late in the17th century, Anthony Wood stated that Marchamont Nedham was ‘a

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great crony of Milton’, one may at first be sceptical. However one has onthe authority of Milton's nephew Edward Phillips that Nedham was amongthe ‘particular friends’ who, ‘all the time’ appeared at or ‘frequentlyvisited’ Milton's ‘abode’ in Petty France. Nedham himself lived nearby,in Westminster Churchyard. As the merest glance at their careers in the1650s suggests, their contact was not merely social. Friendships can be

attractions of opposites, and in Milton and Nedham there were doubtlessmany opposites to attract. Nedham's unblushing acknowledgements of his ‘tergiversations’ contrast with Milton's massive and irreducible senseof his own constancy.

Marvell and Nedham

Blair Worden




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

Marvell and the Ambassadors

Blair Worden




After 1650 Andrew Marvell put himself forward on two fronts. He wasa poet, but he also aspired to a post in diplomacy or foreign affairs. InFebruary 1653, John Milton, the now blind Latin Secretary, wrote to his

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and Marchamont Nedham's friend the Commonwealth's statesman JohnBradshaw to ask, in vain as it turned out, for Marvell to be offered a jobas his own assistant. Milton pointed to Marvell's experience of foreigntravel, and his knowledge of languages. On that basis he made theaudacious claim that ‘in a short time’ Marvell would be able to do ‘asgood service’ for the republic as that performed by Anthony Ascham, the

ambassador to Madrid. Perhaps Marvell's upbringing at the great portof Hull, which traded with northern Europe, helped to explain why hecultivated a particular interest in the affairs of those rivals for masteryof the Baltic, the Netherlands, and Sweden, the subjects of his politicalpoetry.

Marvell and the First Anniversary

Blair Worden




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

Milton and the New Order

Blair Worden




John Milton and Marchamont Nedham were fellow writers for thegovernment that came to power in 1649. The treatises that Milton

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published for the government were written in its first two years, whenits rule was precarious. In their vindications of the regicide and of therule of the republic, Milton's and Nedham's writings developed commonarguments and a common vocabulary. The resemblances, at least intheir persistence, set their prose apart from the run of polemic in thePuritan 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 sourcethey acquired a confident intellectual cosmopolitanism that is rarelymatched in other defences of the new order of 1649–53, most of whichwere narrowly biblical or providentialist or legal or prudential in scope.

Milton in Journalism

Blair Worden




As writers of propaganda, John Milton and Marchamont Nedham werenot immediately answerable to the parliament which had assumedsovereignty in 1649. They wrote at the behest of its executive arm,the council of state, which also employed Milton to write and translatediplomatic correspondence. In the mid-winter of 1650–1, just beforePoliticus took up Milton's literary cause, a contest between JohnBradshaw and Oliver Cromwell for the chancellorship of Oxford Universitywas resolved in Cromwell's favour. The appointment was no merelyornamental one. Cromwell would make maximum use of the post to tryto change the religious and political complexion of the university. If thelearned Bradshaw shared Milton's views on educational reform and onthe need to reform the universities, no doubt he would have done thesame — but with fewer compromises with the forces of conservatism.

Milton and the CommonwealthBlair Worden




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John Milton and Marchamont Nedham agreed that Pride's Purge and theregicide, the emergency measures, had delivered England from a returnto tyranny. So long as the royalist military threat survived, Nedham'spropaganda was mainly negative. It had more to say about the evils of royalism and Presbyterianism than about the virtues of kingless rule. Yetthe concluding chapter of The Case of the Commonwealth in May 1650,

a work published when the morale of the government was at its lowestpoint and when the regime was desperate for survival, departed fromthat policy and supplied his adventurous ‘discourse of the excellencyof 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 hissleeve.

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