The flowering of enlightenment under Oliver Cromwell

In 1651, the poet Andrew Marvell was working for the parliamentarian military hero Sir Thomas Fairfax, tutoring his daughter Mary on Fairfax’s Nun Appleton estate near York. When he wasn’t delivering language lessons to his young charge, Marvell was busy composing one of the most astonishingly experimental poems of the 17th century.

‘Upon Appleton House’, dedicated to Thomas Fairfax, is, on the one hand, just another variety of early modern patronage poem in which a writer praises a member of the aristocracy and their values in return for favour or reward. From another perspective, the poem is profoundly avant-garde. It suggests that established ways of looking at things can be productively disrupted, as revealed when a minor character in the poem, a seasonal agricultural worker on the estate, objects to the way that she and her co-workers have been described by the poet-narrator, confidently and accurately predicting the metaphorical direction of the lines to follow. While such breaking of the realistic frame has become commonplace in post-modern literature and film, it’s a show-stopping, screeching handbrake-turn moment in early modern poetry. 

Even though it doesn’t pause for very long over this particular Marvell poem, Alice Hunt’s excellent new book helps contextualise and explain it. The author’s primary aim is to rescue the 1650s as a revolutionary decade and to show that the period’s politics cannot be isolated from the riches of its art, philosophy and science. Often cast as an ‘interregnum’, i.e. a period between (two periods of Stuart monarchical rule) rather than a meaningful chronological span in its own right, the decade following the execution of Charles I in 1649 was a time of revolutionary change in a half-century marked by revolutionary changes, as Hunt shows.