Derek Hirst

High Summer at Nun Appleton, 1651: Andrew Marvell and Lord Fairfax'S Occasions

Andrew Marvells country-house epic , Upon Appleton House, has long been understood as a meditation on conventional philosophical themes. An exact dating allows us to see the topical and polemical force of those themes. Moreover, situating the poem within particular chronological and geographical confines, the summer of 1651 and the household of the recently retired Lord General as well as the political geography of the vale of York, reveals the continuities and the patronage-afflicted contours of the poets engagement with the crisis of the English revolution, a crisis he had so searchingly explored in An Horatian Ode upon Cromwells return from Ireland.

Making Contact: Petitions and the English Republic

W Shakespeare turned the assassination of Julius Caesar on the dictator’s rejection of petitions, he gave dramatic force to a political commonplace. The encounter of supplicant and superior imparted a dynamic element to early modern visions of order, and although the rhetoric of rule changed markedly across the decades, the responsiveness and care expected of magistrates did not. In extreme cases, rulers who stumbled over petitions might face consequences. Only with difficulty did Charles I recover from his first grudging answer to the Petition of Right in 1628, and a generation later the army justified its expulsion of the Rump in 1653 by citing the latter’s failure to respond to the Council of Officers’ petition the previous August. In more auspicious circumstances a petition could even reshape regimes, and the role of the Humble Petition and Advice in remodeling the Protectorate needs no comment. That was of course the work of parliament men, who chose to proceed by petition; but not long before, civilian petitioners from outside parliament had first redirected the Protector’s course toward constitutional reform. On Christmas Day, 1656, Oliver Cromwell carried with him into the council chamber a petition from divers “wellaffected” London godly and drew on it as he wrote his letter questioning Parlia-

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE IN THE ENGLISH REPUBLIC

(1990). THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE IN THE ENGLISH REPUBLIC. The Seventeenth Century: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 133-155.