Andrew Marvell and Paul Best: New Light on Marvell’s Links to Non-Trinitarians
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Scholars have long been aware of connections between the poet Andrew Marvell (1621–78), his father, the Reverend Andrew Marvell (1584–1641), and the branch of non-Trinitarianism known as Socinianism. Marvell the poet was accused in print in the 1670s of holding Socinian beliefs, and the existence in his father’s manuscript sermon book (Hull History Centre, C DIAM/1) of a near complete English translation of the Socinian text, the Racovian Catechism, gives some credence to these accusations.1 However, it remains a mystery how Marvell Senior could have come by this copy—‘the first known English translation extant’, Nicholas von Maltzahn writes—of a Latin catechism considered so inflammatory that it was outlawed across Europe, with printed copies of the Racovian Catechism later burnt in England by order of parliament in 1652.2 The English Socinian, Paul Best, was active in East Yorkshire at intervals throughout the 1620s to 1640s and has been suggested as a possible source for the manuscript catechism in C DIAM/1.3 However, as Marvell’s biographer, Nigel Smith, writes, ‘the link with Best cannot at present be definitively confirmed’.4 New evidence of Best’s links with the Marvells has now come to light to help confirm these connections, in the form of a previously overlooked reference to Best’s Mysteries Discovered (1647) in a booklist bound into C DIAM/1. The reference not only helps widen our awareness of the Marvells’ interests in Socinianism. The fact that Mysteries Discovered was published in July 1647, six years after Marvell Senior’s death in January 1641, also raises new questions about who could have compiled the booklist in C DIAM/1. In what follows, I compare the hand in the booklist with exemplars of the poet Andrew Marvell’s handwriting from the mid-seventeenth century, and I argue on this basis that the booklist’s compiler was most likely to be the poet Marvell himself. The booklist (Figure 1) is bound into the Hull History Centre miscellany, ‘SERMONS &C OF THE REV. ANDREW MARVELL’ (C DIAM/1). The list, which is written upside down on the verso of the final leaf (220b) of ‘Complaint against the perverse behaviour of some of the Inhabitants of Kingston upon Hull’ (218a–20a), has conventionally been attributed, along with all other items in the miscellany, to the poet’s father, the Reverend Andrew Marvell, and Nigel Smith duly draws inferences about Marvell Senior’s eclectic religious views, ‘typical of the early seventeenth-century Protestant consensus’, based on the ‘huge variety of opinions and approaches’—from Mede’s commentary on the Book of Revelation, Clavis Apocalyptica, to the Laudian Miscellanies of minister, Edward Kellett—represented in the booklist.5 Booklist (unknown hand, possibly identifiable as the poet Andrew Marvell’s), in ‘SERMONS &C OF THE REV. ANDREW MARVELL’ (Hull History Centre, C DIAM/1), 220v. Reproduced by permission of Hull Local Studies Library, Hull History Centre, Hull. I have argued elsewhere, on the evidence of the inclusion in C DIAM/1 of ‘A Most Excellent Medicine against the Plague’, dateable to no earlier than 1666, that the miscellany could not have been bound in its current form before the mid-1660s, and that, on the evidence of my detailed re-examination of the manuscript, Marvell Senior’s hand appears in only 196 of the manuscript’s total 323 leaves, which leaves 40% of the volume comprising writing in other, most likely later, hands.6 That the booklist on 220b is written in a different hand to Marvell Senior’s is clear from a comparison between the booklist (Figure 1) and Marvell Senior’s hand, here exemplified by the first page of ‘Complaint against the perverse behaviour’ which immediately precedes the booklist in C DIAM/1 (Figure 2). We can confidently attribute the hand in Figure 2 to Marvell Senior on the basis that the same highly distinctive hand reappears in all twelve of Marvell Senior’s English sermons in the manuscript, as well as in the financial accounts, ‘Things to be considered about the Charter House Hospital in Kingston upon Hull’ (114a–18a), which Marvell Senior wrote during his incumbency as Master of the Hull Charterhouse (1624–41). The same hand also appears in the Latin commentary (8a–9b), the account of Christ’s life, ‘Historia de vita’ (10a–113a), and the Latin and Greek tags found on 142b and 180b, respectively. Marvell Senior’s hand is a crabbed secretary distinguished, in English language script, by looped ascenders and descenders, by the liberal use of the ‘th’ ligature, and by its distinctive secretary upper case ‘C’, which has been described as looking ‘like a hot cross bun with the north-west quarter of the outer rim missing’.7 The ‘s’ letterform is medial at the beginning and middle of words, while terminal ‘s’ takes the form of a slanted ‘6’. Lower case ‘e’ is formed in various ways: sometimes as the Greek letter epsilon (ε), sometimes more like a running ‘d’. The lobes of lower-case ‘p’ have arms extending out and back beyond the downstroke. Figure 1 is, by contrast, a cursive hand highly dissimilar from Marvell Senior’s, both as exemplified in Figure 2 and elsewhere in C DIAM/1. In Figure 1, both lower and upper case ‘C’ (as in ‘Councell’, ‘Cyrill’) are formed as per modern English handwriting forms, while upper case ‘S’ is rounded and lower case ‘s’, exemplified in the words ‘Zanchius’ and ‘Damascen’, looped. Lowercase ‘e’, as in ‘Kellet’, is always rounded, and is in this sense distinct from both lowercase ‘e’ letterforms found in Figure 2. Marvell Senior’s hand, exemplified in the opening page of ‘Complaint against the perverse behaviour of some of the Inhabitants of Kingston upon Hull’, in ‘SERMONS &C OF THE REV. ANDREW MARVELL’ (Hull History Centre, C DIAM/1), 218r. Reproduced by permission of Hull Local Studies Library, Hull History Centre, Hull. While we can therefore say with certainty that the booklist was not written by Marvell Senior, there are sufficient similarities between the hand in Figure 1 and the poet Andrew Marvell’s hand, as exemplified in his letter to Oliver Cromwell, written in 1653, to speculate on whether the younger Marvell might himself have written the booklist in C DIAM/1. A comparison between the first word in the booklist, ‘Andrews’, and the first name ‘Andrew’ in Marvell’s autograph signature in the 1653 letter (Figure 3), for example, reveals identical letterforms in each comparable letter, excepting that the initial flourish on the ascending stroke of the uppercase ‘A’ in the 1653 letter is more muted in the equivalent ‘A’ in the booklist. The formality of the occasion of Marvell’s letter to Cromwell—effectively a cover letter for a government post in which the quality of the handwriting itself formed a key part of the success criteria—helps explain this and other incidental flourishes in the letterforms in Figure 3, for example in the descender of the uppercase ‘S’ of ‘Servant’ (Figure 3) as compared the ‘S’ of ‘Sam.’ in Figure 1. But these slight differences notwithstanding, the substantive resemblances between the cursive letterforms in the booklist and exemplar are nevertheless revealing, and while difficult, based on the twenty words in the booklist, to ascertain with certainty the identity of the writer of this list, we cannot on this evidence discount Marvell’s candidature. Were we to admit the possibility that Marvell the poet wrote the booklist, then the date of the exemplar—the 1653 letter to Cromwell—also gives us an approximate date for the compilation of the list. The fact that three truncated words, in the same ink and hand as the booklist, also appear to the right of the list on this page’s right-hand margin (Figure 1) confirms that the list must have been written at a point before the ‘Complaint’ was bound with the other material in C DIAM/1 in or after 1666, given that the truncated words were presumably cut off during the binding process. Andrew Marvell’s hand, exemplified in his autograph letter to Oliver Cromwell (28 July 1653), in ‘Correspondence and papers of Oliver Cromwell’ (Society of Antiquaries, MSS/0138), 66v. © The Society of Antiquaries of London. We can refine the likely date of the booklist further if we now turn to the publication history of those books listed in Figure 1, for here there is firm evidence, not previously noted in scholarship, that can help us establish a terminus a quo of 1647 for the list’s compilation. Until now, it has proven difficult to date the hand based on the internal evidence of the authors or book titles it lists: ‘Andrews’ (probably Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626)) and ‘Kellet’ (probably Edward Kellett (1580–1641)) were both anti-Calvinists associated with or co-opted for the Laudian cause in the 1620s–40s, and selected editions of Andrewes’ work, in Latin and English, were published posthumously by William Laud in 1629. ‘Clavis Apoc:’ is a clear abbreviation of Clavis Apocalyptica, although whether the Latin work by Joseph Mede, first published in 1627, the English translation by Richard More (1643), or the later version by Samuel Hartlib (1651) is intended is unclear. The continental reformers, Jerome Zanchius (1516–90) and Lambert Daneau (1535–90), both Calvinists, appear on the list alongside biblical commentaries by the Italian protestant theologian, Peter Martyr Vermigli (died 1562), while reference to ‘Councell Trent’ presumably refers to the Venetian reformer Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, first published in London in 1619 but with frequent reprints throughout the seventeenth century. Finally, the list includes works by two early church fathers, Damascen, or John of Damascus (c. 675–749), and Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444).8 Taken together, the list is as wide ranging chronologically as theologically, and none of the above items would, based on their earliest dates of publication, disprove long-held assumptions that the list was compiled in Marvell Senior’s lifetime. But the fifth entry on the list, ‘Comm: &c best Apoc’, is far more fruitful as a clue to the list’s earliest date of compilation. Previously overlooked, the occurrence of ‘best’ in this entry surely refers to Paul Best’s non-Trinitarian Mysteries Discovered (1647), an inflammatory work of biblical scholarship denouncing the doctrine of the Trinity through the language of the Apocalypse and calling for greater toleration of non-Trinitarianism among other ‘religions, not antipoliticall’.9 Mysteries Discovered might plausibly be described, in the language of the C DIAM/1 booklist, as an ‘apocalyptic commentary’ in the sense that Best reinterprets the Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17.3–18) to stand, not just for the Roman Church, but more widely for the Trinitarian orthodoxy that the First Council of Nicaea under Constantine (325 c.e.) introduced.10 Best’s commentary was published, and swiftly suppressed, while Best was ‘Prisoner in the Gatehouse, Westminster’ in July 1647.11 Only four copies of the 1647 printing are thought to be extant today, and Mysteries was never subsequently reprinted. The occurrence of this item on the booklist therefore gives us a reliable terminus a quo for the list’s composition of July 1647, and the fact that Mysteries Discovered was suppressed, and all known copies burned, in the same month implies a strong likelihood that the list was also compiled in summer 1647. The occurrence of Best’s name on this booklist should certainly reignite speculation about how a manuscript copy of the Racovian Catechism, condemned by one of the subsequent owners of C DIAM/1, the antiquarian John Warburton, Somerset herald (1682–1759), as ‘An abominable Socinian Book’, found its way into the Marvell miscellany.12 Best, as Sarah Mortimer observes, was one of the most prominent Socinians operating in mid seventeenth-century England and was also, like the Marvells, a resident of the Humber region, having spent his boyhood in East Yorkshire, at Hutton Cranswick and then at Elmswell, some twenty miles north of the Charterhouse in Hull.13 Best returned to East Yorkshire at intervals across the 1620s and 1630s, following a career as fellow of St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, and subsequently as a mercenary soldier in Germany and Poland, where according to his former roommate at Jesus College, Cambridge, Roger Ley, he ‘was drawn to the dangerous opinion [of] the denial of our Saviour’s divinity’.14 He was in Yorkshire and actively preaching and proselytising his non-Trinitarian views at the time of his arrest in February 1645, and it may therefore have been in this period that the copy of the Racovian catechism now bound into C DIAM/1 was circulating The occurrence of Best’s name within the booklist not only helps date the list to no earlier than July 1647, therefore, but also provides a plausible context, in Best’s proselytising activities in East Yorkshire in the mid-1640s, for the acquisition of the catechism. Whoever wrote the booklist in C DIAM/1 was certainly familiar with Best’s non-Trinitarian Mysteries Discovered and may therefore, on this evidence, have been acquainted with the Racovian catechism and other Socinian works Best imported from Poland. We can now be confident that the booklist was not compiled by the Reverend Andrew Marvell, who died before Mysteries Discovered was published in 1647 and whose handwriting does not resemble the hand who wrote the booklist. We cannot say for certain that the writer listing Best’s Mysteries Discovered in or around 1647 was Marvell the poet: but neither can we discount this possibility, given the clear resemblances between the hand of the booklist and known exemplars of Marvell’s hand surviving from the mid-seventeenth century. Of course, if the poet Marvell were the writer of the booklist, then this need not imply he was himself a Socinian or supporter of Best’s non-Trinitarian views.15 The list is silent on why the compiler has chosen to include Best’s work among the other books listed; nor does it indicate the wider purpose of this list, or for whom it was originally intended. What we can say is that Best’s call, in Mysteries Discovered, for toleration of ‘religions, not antipoliticall’ is consistent with the broadly Hobbesian views on religious toleration that Marvell, as I have argued elsewhere, was beginning to formulate in his Cromwellian poetry from the early 1650s.16 In these poems, Marvell sets out the case for a ‘sober liberty’ or a liberty of conscience exercised within the bounds of the law, but in the same breath he also attacks the ‘antipoliticall’ actions of Levellers, in ‘Upon Appleton House’ (c. 1651), and of Fifth Monarchists, in ‘First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector’ (1654–5).17 The unbridled fanaticism of these sects for Marvell stray beyond the litmus test for ‘sober liberty’ articulated in the English Commonwealth’s Instrument of Government (1653), which licenses only those Protestant beliefs and practices that neither threaten ‘the civil Injury of others’ nor ‘the actual disturbance of the publique peace’.18 It is perhaps this aspect of Best’s Mysteries Discovered—his call for toleration of ‘religions, not antipoliticall’ rather than his non-Trinitarian views per se—that appealed to Marvell, as the likely compiler of the booklist in the late 1640s. Other items in the list—Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, Cyril of Alexandria’s debates with Nestorius over the nature of the Trinity—also hint at the compiler’s wider interests in the questions of toleration and orthodoxy that also concern Best in Mysteries Discovered. These interests would preoccupy Marvell and his poetry in the years immediately following the compilation of the booklist in c. 1647. They may also have been prompted by Marvell’s reading of his father’s account of ‘antipoliticall’ fanaticism, in ‘Complaint against the perverse behaviour of some of the Inhabitants of Kingston upon Hull’, where Marvell Senior berates the ‘discourtesyes & injurious carriages’ he ‘experienced since my coming to Hull’ at the hands of Hull sectarians who, like Best, questioned the orthodoxy of ‘doctrine in [the] point of Christs merit’.19 The fact that the booklist is written on the verso of the final leaf of ‘Complaint’ strongly hints at associations between Marvell Senior’s encounter with non-Trinitarian views in Hull in the 1620s and 1630s and his son’s encounter with Best’s non-Trinitarian Mysteries Discovered via the booklist he likely compiled in c. 1647. Throughout his writing career, Marvell balanced support for ‘sober liberty’ with concern to curb the actions of sectarians who strayed beyond the bounds of law. In the booklist written on the back of his father’s ‘Complaint’ in C DIAM/1, therefore, we see the seeds of Marvell’s lifelong interests in tolerationism, and of their rootedness in the religious landscape of seventeenth-century Hull and East Yorkshire. Summary of contents for C DIAM/1 and variations between original and modern foliation {125–133} Foliation missing due to page damage {170–174} Foliation missing due to page damage Fragment of an English translation of the Racovian Catechism, corresponding to Catechesis Ecclesiarum (1651), B1v-K3v; L2r-L10r (end of volume). Note: all three chapters of the first section—‘De Scriptura Sacra’—are missing from the C DIAM/1 translation, and the translation begins three pages into first chapter of second section ‘De Via Salutis’ (mid-way down the corresponding passage on Catechesis, B1v). 210–317 Note this foliation (108 leaves) includes the six leaves of this item bound in at the start of the volume. {125–133} Foliation missing due to page damage {170–174} Foliation missing due to page damage Fragment of an English translation of the Racovian Catechism, corresponding to Catechesis Ecclesiarum (1651), B1v-K3v; L2r-L10r (end of volume). Note: all three chapters of the first section—‘De Scriptura Sacra’—are missing from the C DIAM/1 translation, and the translation begins three pages into first chapter of second section ‘De Via Salutis’ (mid-way down the corresponding passage on Catechesis, B1v). 210–317 Note this foliation (108 leaves) includes the six leaves of this item bound in at the start of the volume. Summary of contents for C DIAM/1 and variations between original and modern foliation {125–133} Foliation missing due to page damage {170–174} Foliation missing due to page damage Fragment of an English translation of the Racovian Catechism, corresponding to Catechesis Ecclesiarum (1651), B1v-K3v; L2r-L10r (end of volume). Note: all three chapters of the first section—‘De Scriptura Sacra’—are missing from the C DIAM/1 translation, and the translation begins three pages into first chapter of second section ‘De Via Salutis’ (mid-way down the corresponding passage on Catechesis, B1v). 210–317 Note this foliation (108 leaves) includes the six leaves of this item bound in at the start of the volume. {125–133} Foliation missing due to page damage {170–174} Foliation missing due to page damage Fragment of an English translation of the Racovian Catechism, corresponding to Catechesis Ecclesiarum (1651), B1v-K3v; L2r-L10r (end of volume). Note: all three chapters of the first section—‘De Scriptura Sacra’—are missing from the C DIAM/1 translation, and the translation begins three pages into first chapter of second section ‘De Via Salutis’ (mid-way down the corresponding passage on Catechesis, B1v). 210–317 Note this foliation (108 leaves) includes the six leaves of this item bound in at the start of the volume. Funding support for this article was provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/Y004779/1).
Source: Notes and Queries
Author: Stewart Mottram
Institution: University of Hull
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,461
OpenAlex ID: W4402623472