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. Opera in the 1650s first seeded the idea that women might be able to act and entertain for money in public ‘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
