Marvell the Patriot

When Emile Legouis memorably entitled his biography André Marvell, Poète, Puritan, Patriote, 1621‒78 (1928), he began a tradition since honoured more by silence than discussion. It is the first of the three terms that has generated Marvell’s reputation. Everybody wants to write about Marvell as a poet; ‘Puritan’ proved an oversimplification for the man who defended nonconformists by non-doctrinal arguments; and ‘Patriot’, the term that now revived, was largely dismissed. This chapter attends to the afterlife of the Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, on which Marvell’s reputation as a ‘Patriot’ was based. This involves not only its immediate reception, but those who brought it back to public attention: Thomas Cooke; Captain Edward Thompson, who built on Cooke’s 1726 edition; and the almost unknown tributes of James Ralph’s 1745 History of England and his notes to the parliamentary history we know as Grey’s Debates.