11
LEE ERICKSON c3CaTveN’s Upon Appleton House and the Faifax Farnib EADERS of Upon Appleton House have found it difficult to discern any unity in the poem. It appears to begin as a country R house poem, and then, as G. R. Hibbard says, to become “some- thing new and different.”‘ Many critics have attempted to affirm the poem’s unity through allegoricalinterpretations,zor through readings ofthe poem’s persona? The lavish praise given Mary Fairfax as Maria has seemed espe- cially to warrant interpretations of Mary as the symbol of some particular virtue.4 On the other hand, some have attempted to consider the poem’s irregularities as an aesthetic discordia c01~0rs.5 Although they all occasionally i. G. R. Hibbard, “The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 19 (1956), 169. For further study of the country house theme in the poem, see Donald M. Friedman, MarveN‘s Pastoral Art (London. 1970), pp. 19p-252; and William A. McClung, The Country Horrse in English Renaissance Poetry (Berke- 2. Maren-Sofie Rastvig, “Upon Appleton House and the Universal History of Man,” English Studies, 42 (1961), 337-51; Harold E. Toliver, Marvell’s Ironic Vision (New Haven, 1965). pp. 113-29; John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). pp. 232-57; and David Evett, ‘I ‘Paradice’s Only Map’: The Topos of the Locus Amomus and the Structure of Marvell’s Upon Appleton House,” PXA, 85 (1970). 504-13. 3. Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison, 19 jo), pp. 295-318; Harry Berger, “Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’: An Interpretation,” Southern Review (Adelaide), I, no. 4 (1965), 7-32; and Charles Molesworth, “Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’: The Persona as Historian, Philosopher, and Priest,” Studies in English Literature, 13 (19731, 149-62. 4. For example, D. C. Allen, Image and Meaning, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 1968), pp. 219-25; and Rsstvig, p. 350. 5. Kitty Scoular, Natural Magic (London, 1965), pp. iza-go; and more fully, Rosalie Colie, “My Ecclioing Song”: Andrew Mawell‘s Poetry .f Criticism (Princeton, 1970). pp. ley, 1977). pp- 147-74. 181-294. [. 158 1

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Page 1: Marvell's Upon Appleton House and the Fairfax Family

LEE ERICKSON

c3CaTveN’s Upon Appleton House and the Faifax Farnib

EADERS of Upon Appleton House have found it difficult to discern any unity in the poem. It appears to begin as a country R house poem, and then, as G. R. Hibbard says, to become “some-

thing new and different.”‘ Many critics have attempted to affirm the poem’s unity through allegorical interpretations,z or through readings ofthe poem’s persona? The lavish praise given Mary Fairfax as Maria has seemed espe- cially to warrant interpretations of Mary as the symbol of some particular virtue.4 On the other hand, some have attempted to consider the poem’s irregularities as an aesthetic discordia c01~0rs.5 Although they all occasionally

i. G. R. Hibbard, “The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 19 (1956), 169. For further study of the country house theme in the poem, see Donald M. Friedman, MarveN‘s Pastoral Art (London. 1970), pp. 19p-252; and William A. McClung, The Country Horrse in English Renaissance Poetry (Berke-

2. Maren-Sofie Rastvig, “Upon Appleton House and the Universal History of Man,” English Studies, 42 (1961), 337-51; Harold E. Toliver, Marvell’s Ironic Vision (New Haven, 1965). pp. 113-29; John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). pp. 232-57; and David Evett, ‘ I ‘Paradice’s Only Map’: The Topos of the Locus Amomus and the Structure of Marvell’s Upon Appleton House,” P X A , 85 (1970). 504-13.

3. Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison, 19 jo), pp. 295-318; Harry Berger, “Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’: An Interpretation,” Southern Review (Adelaide), I, no. 4 (1965), 7-32; and Charles Molesworth, “Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’: The Persona as Historian, Philosopher, and Priest,” Studies in English Literature, 13

(19731, 149-62. 4. For example, D. C. Allen, Image and Meaning, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 1968), pp. 219-25;

and Rsstvig, p. 350. 5 . Kitty Scoular, Natural Magic (London, 1965), pp. iza-go; and more fully, Rosalie

Colie, “My Ecclioing Song”: Andrew Mawell‘s Poetry .f Criticism (Princeton, 1970). pp.

ley, 1977). pp- 147-74.

181-294.

[. 158 1

Page 2: Marvell's Upon Appleton House and the Fairfax Family

Lee Erickson 159 annotate the poem by referring to the family’s affairs: they have generally overlooked the Fairfaxes’ family history. They have, I believe, missed see- ing that Mary Fairfax’s place in that history, her parents’ hopes for her, and Marvell‘s adnuring, if somewhat playful, view of the Fairfax dynasty give the poem its unity. By demonstrating the Isabel Thwaites episode to be a fiction of Marvell’s invention based at best on family legend, and by clarifying certain details surrounding the Third Lord Fairfax’s building of a new house at Nun Appleton, I hope to show that Mary Fairfax is the unifying principle of the poem, “how loose Nature, in respect / To her, it self doth recollect” (11. 657-~8) .~

The Fairfaxes were a rising, socially ambitious family in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and, though they established a line which exists to this day, they reached their peak in the power vacuum ofthe Interregnum, when the Lord General Fairfax was the acknowledged political and mili- tary leader of the North.8 Sir William Fairfax of Steeton had founded the family’s fortune by marrying Isabel Thwaites, a wealthy heiress, in 1518. Their descendents were active in the service of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, and came into the public eye in the struggles against the Catholic forces on the Continent: “And with successive Valour try / France, Poland, either Germany” 01. 243-44). By 1648, when Milton wrote his sonnet cele- brating the Lord General’s siege at Colchester of the Scots who had de- fected from the parliamentary cause, Fairfax’s name in arms rang through- out Europe.

As remarkable as their rise was, &ere was little romance or grandeur in their shrewd marriages and careful acquisition of property for the historian or the poet to celebrate. So it had to be supplied. It was supposed, for ex- ample, to explain Thomas Fairfax’s absence in 1558 from William Fairfax’s will, that Thomas, great-grandfather of the Third Lord Baron, had been dismherited for fighting a t the Sack of Rome.9 Yet, as the second son of Sir William and Isabel and born in 1521, he could not at the tender age of six have fought under Charles V of Spain in 1527. Thomas and Guy, the eldest son, may have arranged to enjoy their patrimony in advance and

6. For the fullest annotation, see Colie, pp. 21g-n 7. My text is The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd ed.

8. The standard biography of the Lord General is C. R. Markham, The L$e ofthe Great

9. Fairfhx Correspondence: Memoirs of the R e i p of Charles I, ed. George W. Johnson

(London, 1971). AU quotations of Marvell’s poetry refer to line numbers in this text.

Lord Fairfax (London, 1870).

(London, 1848), I, mi. See also the comments on this myth in Markham, p. 5 , n. t.

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160 English Literary Renaissance under that arrangement purchased Nun Appleton,lo or may, indeed, have had a serious dispute with their father; but, whatever the explanation, the the story ofThomas’ fighting at the Sack of Rome appears to be an attempt to gloss an embarrassing irregularity in the line of descent-an attempt which has in mind the success of the later Fairfax generals against the Cath- olics on the Continent.

The dramatic story of William Fairfax’s rescue of Isabel Thwaites from the nuns of Nun Appleton (stanzas xi-xxxiv) is a similar kind of founder’s myth, apparently invented by Marvell, to show yet another ancestor of the Lord General opposing the Catholic Church. Marvell’s editors have un- fortunately lent substance to this fiction by relying upon C. R. Markham’s Life ofthe Grent Lord Fairjinx to annotate this part of the poem, not noting that Markham cites Marvell’s poem itself as the authority for his account of Sir William and Isabel’s marriage.ll Their marriage in fact appears to have been unevendul. According to the grant of livery made in 1518, Isabel was a ward of the King and under age sixteen when she married,’Z and there seems to have been no dispute such as Marvell describes, or court decision granting “the lawful Form; / Which licens’d either Peace or Force, / To hinder the unjust Divorce” (11. 234-36).13 The only court a p peal made during that time concerning Nun Appleton was Thomas’ in

10. The ownership of Nun Appleton shortly after the dissolution of the monasteries is a very complicated matter which I have been unable to puzzle out: on the dissolution of December 5 , 1539, see Victoria History oftbe Counfy Of York, ed. William Page (London, i907-13), m, 173, and Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic o f fbe Reign OfHenry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, et al. (London, 1864-1922), m, ii, 232; on Robert Darkenall’s ownership in 1541, see Letters and Papers, xvr, 642; on Darkenall’s transfer of title to Guy and Thomas Fairfax in 1542, see Letters and Papers, xw, 163-64; on Darkenall’s transfer of title to Sir William Fairfax in 1553, see Calendar o f the Patent Rolls: Edward VI, 1347-1553 (London, ip4-29), v, 266-67; also see the account given in Sir William Dugdale, Monactirun A&- canum, ed. and trans. John Caley, et al. (London, 1846-49), V, 652. I am not as sure that Sir William bad been buying land in his son’s name as is R. B. Smith in Land and Politin in the England OfHenry VIII: T h e West Riding Of Yorkshire: 1530-46 (Oxford, 1970). pp. z4g-so.

11. Markham, pp. 3-4. Markham cites as authorities Marvell’s Work, Francis Drake’s History uf Yorkshire, Ralph Thoresby’s Dzmttrs Leudiemis, and the Fairfax Currespundence. Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” is the sole source for Sir William’s rescue of Isabel Thwaites. The other sources cited merely fill in incidental names and dates. Margoliouth incautiously annotates h e 84 with Markham’s summary of the episode in Marvell’s poem, Poems and Letters, I, 282.

12. Letters and Papers, n, ii, 968. 13. Although the Fairfaxes are involved in other litigation, there is no case involvhg

Nun AppIeton or any claim of the nunnery on Isabel Thwaites’ inheritance in Lists Indexes: Calnidar of Early Chancery Proceediqs, vol. 5 (1892-1936; rpt., New York, 19631, XYXVIII.

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P L A T E ia (top): Appleton House circa 1656 sketched by Daniel King from Bodleian Library, Gough Maps I, fol. I. PLATE i b (center): Appleton House and Garden circa 1656 sketched by Daniel King. From Bodleian Library, Cough Maps I, fol. 1.

PLATE i c (bottom): Bishops-Hill House, Yorkshire. From Bodleian Library, Gough Maps 1, fol. 1.

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162 English Literary Renaissance were unripe, or a ruse was needed to divert suspicion, for Mary was engage! to the rich and disreputable Philip Stanhope, Second Earl of Chesterfield Still Buckingham, ifhe did not possess a more resolute character, did offe a larger fortune and a greater title. The marriage to Stanhope was called of in June 1657 after the banns had been read twice at St. Martin’s West minster, and she married the Duke in September 1657 at Nun Appleton.2 Abraham Cowley wrote a poem celebrating the occasion, and said of thc marriage:

There is in Fate (which none but Poets see)

And she has shown, Great Duke, her utmost Art in Thee There is in Fate the noblest Poetry,

For after all the troubles of thy Scene, Which so confius’d, and intricate have been

She has ended with this Match thy Tragicomedy.=

When she married, the estate in fee of Nun Appleton and Bolton Percy was settled on her and her male issue; and, when Fairfax died in 1671, the estate came to her.24

By providing their daughter with such a handsome estate, Lord Fairfax and his wife had chosen an uncertain future and committed themselves both fmancially and spiritually to the new line they hoped their daughter would found:

Hence She with Graces more divine Supplies beyond her Sex the Line; And, like a sprk ofMisleto, On the Fuirjacian Oak does grow; Whence, for some universal good, The Priest shall cut the sacred Bud; While her glad Purents most rejoice, And make their Destiny their Choice. (U. 737-44)

The Fairfaxes’ “Destiny” was to have, as their only child, a daughter, and they made her “their Choice.” So, when he meditates upon Mary Fairfax as the poem comes to a close, Marvel1 is not merely complimenting his patron indirectly by praising h s daughter, but, more than that, is under-

22. The mamage license is recorded at Bolton Percy. See “Philip Stanhope” and “George Villiers,” Dictionary ofNationol Biography, and also see the more romantic account in M. A. Gibb, The Lord General (London, 1938), pp. 236-41. 23. Abraham Cowley, “To the Duke of Bttckirtgham, upon his Marriage with the Lord

Fair& his Daughter,” Essays, Pluys and Stindry Verses, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, En& *5@, p. 464. 24. Markham, p. 404.

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Lee Erickson 163 lining the Fairfaxes’ dynastic hopes, by arguing that just as Isabel Thwaites founded a great line, so would Mary Fairfax. As fate would have it, their hopes would be ruined: George Villiers would turn out to be a scheming, dissolute philanderer, and the epitome of the Restoration rake; and his Duchess, Mary, although she loved her husband, would have a miserable life while married, would be hounded by the Duke’s creditors after he died, and would die childless in 1704?5 The Fairfaues’ hopes would meet with a hard historical irony. But neither they nor Marvell could have known it.

John Newman has persuasively argued that the Third Lord Baron prob- ably built his large, brick country house at Nun Appleton after Marvel1 wrote his poem, and not, as has generally been supposed following Mark- ham, between 1637 and 1650.~~ Newman points out that Fairfax was en- gaged by his military duties until, in protest of Charles 1’s being tried, he retired in 1650, and until then had little time for building houses. He also observes that the architectural details of the house, as recorded in Daniel King’s drawing of it around 1656 (Pl. ia),27correspond to “London-based, not local, work of the 1650s or 1660s,” and that the internal evidence of the poem suggests that “Lord Fairfax was still at that time living in a mod- est house cobbled up out of the nunnery, next to the ruined church.”28 His claim that the Appleton House of which Marvel1 speaks was made of stone and not brick is best supported by these lines: “And all that Neigh-

25. Lady Buckingham in 1700 attempted to sell Nun Appleton to meet some of her creditors’ demands, hut was prevented from doing so because she was without male issue (see Markham, pp. 404-05).

26. John Newman, “Marvell’s Appleton House,” Times Literary Supplement, January 28, 1972, p. 99. See also A. A. Tait, “Jvlarvell’s Appleton House,” Times Literary Scpplement, February 11, 1972, p. 157.

27. Newman believes King’s sketch was adapted for the engraving of Nun Appleton in Markham, p. 376. Reproductions of the picture in Markham appear in The Complete W o r k ofAndrew Mawell, ed. A. B. Grosart, 4 vols. (London, 1872), I, 2; and in McClung, The Country House, p. 157. A picture of Appleton House drawn by Brian Fairfax and engraved by Daniel King appears in An OrthographicaI Designe of Severall Viewes upon ye Road in England and Whales (n.d., but probably early 1660s), according to J. G. Turner, “Upon Appleton House,” Notes and Queries, 222 (1977), 54711. There is also a later prospect with Appleton House in the distance drawn by William Lodge which appears in John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Cen- tury (Baltimore, 1976). p. 38.

28. Newman, lor. cit. Marvell’s conceit, “where he comes the swehgyHall / Stirs, and the Square grows Spherical” 01. 51-52), thus cannot refer to the cupola seen inlKing’s draw- ing as has been thought, but instead probably alludes to Horace’s words, “Dinrit, aedijcat, mufat qundrata rofundis” (Epistles I, i, too), as Kitty Scoular suggests in Natural Magic, p. loo.

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164 English Literary Renaissance bour-Ruine shows 1 The Quarries whence this dwelling rose” (11. 87-88). Other h e s seem to support this view by making reference to an older architecture, not reflected in King’s drawing:

But a l l things are composed here Like Nature, orderly and near: In which we the Dimensions find Of that more sober Age and Mind, When larger sized Men did stoop To enter at a narrow loop; As practising, in doors so strait, To strain themselves through Heavenc Gate. (U. 25-32)

Further, Brian Fairfax says in his “Life and Memoirs of George Villiers” that Buckingham was wedded to Mary at Nun Appleton in the “new and noble house built by my lord Fairfax, and where he kept as noble hospital- ity,”29 which would argue, I think, that the house had just been com- pleted. All of this warrants reversing the accepted order of the composition of Marvell’s poem and Lord Fairfax’s “Upun the New built House att Apleton.” Marvell’s description of the old stone house as “an Inn to enter- tain / Its Lord a while, but not remaine” (11. 7C-71) not only refers to the transience of life here below, but also probably to Fairfax’s plans for a new building, and is remembered in these later lines by Fairfax:

Thinke not 8 Man that dwells herein This House’s a Stay but as an h e Which for convenience fittly stands In way to one nott made with hands But if a time here thou take Rest Yett thinke Eternity’s the Best.30

Markham’s claim that Fairfax started to build the house in 1637 after his marriage to Anne Vere and that his uncle Charles superintended the work in his absence is undocumented,3l and is apparently the result of reasoning backwards from the assumption that Marvel1 wrote his poem after the

29. Brian Fairfax, “Life and Memoirs of George VilIiers,” in T h e Rehearsal, English Re- prints, no. 10, ed. Edward Arbers (London, 1S68), p. 6. Henry Fairfax’s instructions for the interior decoration at Nun Appleton show that work was still in progress as late as 1658; see J. G. Turner, “Upon Appleton House,” p. 547.

30. The Poems of Thomas Third Lord Fairfar: From MS. Fairfax 40 in the Bodleian Library, Oxjord, ed. Edward Bliss Reed, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 14 (New Haven, igog), p. 279.

31. No mention of this project occurs in Fairfax Conexpondenre: Charles I, or in Fairfan Correspondence: Memorials ofthe Civil War, ed. Robert Bell (London, 1849).

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Lee Erickson 165 house was completed, and knowing that Marvell was at Appleton House between 1651 and 1653.

The house that Fairfax built near the site of the old stone house was surely meant to be part of his daughter’s dowry. As Richard Wilson has pointed out, and as the Fairfax Correspondence reflects, Denton had long been the seat of the Fairfax Lords, and was a much larger house.32 When he retired from his military duties, took up such antiquarian pursuits as medal collecting, translating, and genealogy, and began to cultivate his par terre garden described so tantalizingly by Marvell (and glimpsed in King’s drawing, P1. ib), Fairfax symbolically resided in the smaller, hum- bler quarters of the old stone Appleton House, within “Those short but admirable Lines” (1. G), rather than at his other, larger estates+

Him Bishops-Hill, or Denton may, Or Bilbrough, better hold than they: But Nature here hath been so bee As if she said leave this to me. (ll. 73-76)

When Ralph Thoresby in 1711 visited the great country house that the Third Lord Baron eventually built, and Alderman Milner, h s cousin, had bought from the Sixth Lord Fairfax, he enthusiastically described it as “a noble palace” and said: “There are a great number of chimney-pieces, of a delicate marble of various colours, and such a number of rooms, as I had heard of none that had numbered them.”34 This was not a house built for a retired, antiquarian gentleman, who would live out hs days in it, but for the dances, parties, and fox hunts of the Duke, his Duchess, and their traveling entourage. This was not the small stone cottage ofManell’s poem, but a mansion built to accommodate the Fairfaxes’ dream of Mary’s new dynasty.

Once he leaves the house and garden to stroll through the meadows and the woods, the narrator turns from praising the Fairfax family to meditate upon the landscape and to indulge his poetic fancy. This meditation and imaginative recreation may seem at first inappropriate to panegyric; but Marvell no doubt knew that Fairfax, who took pride in his scholarly ac-

32. &chard Wilson, “Marvell’s Denton,” Times Literary Supplement, November 26,1971, p. 1481.

33. Compare the new Appleton House with the smaller ruined Bishops-Hill, also known as Buckingham House, shown in PI. 1c.The house was in r u i n s by 1730 according to [Thomas Gent], The Ancient and Modern History oftlie Fumoits City of York (London, 1730). p. 184.

34. Diary entry ofApril 5,1711, The Diary ofRalph Th0re56y~ ed. the Rev. Joseph Hunter, 2 vols. (London, 1830), n, 74. Also see the diary entry of October 16, 1712, n, 174-75.

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I 66 English Literary Renaissance complishments, his poetic taste, and his family’s literary tradition, would appreciate the meditative detachment and intellectual agility of this part of the poem and consider them as entertaining as the praise ofhis daughter. For not only was Fairfax’s great-uncle, Edward Fairfax, the noted transla- tor ofTasso’s Certrsaleniine Liberata, and his cousin, Mildmay Fane, a gentle- man poet, but Fairfax himself translated psalms, wrote religious verse, and, finding the meditative landscape poetry of the French libertirz poets to his taste, also translated Saint Amant’s “La Solitude.”35 The influence of Saint Amant’s poetry on Marvell’s meditation in Upon Appleton House has been noted, as have allusions to Thtophile de Viau’s “La Maison du Sylvie,” which was probably known to Marvell through Thomas Stanley, the tutor of Fane’s children, who translated part of de Viau’s poem as “Sylvia’s Park” (16~1).~~ Fairfax’s appreciation of this libertiri poetry which mixed private musing with description of the landscape allowed Marvel1 then the freedom of an intellectual style which one might feel to have been otherwise unsuitable to a poem praising Fairfax’s daughter and family.

The narrator’s walk through the meadows (stanzas xlvii-hi), h s stroll in the woods and by the river (stanzas lxii-xci), his paean to Mary as Maria (stanzas xcii-xcvi), and his coy withdrawal into the house (stanza xcvii) emphasize the difficulty of the Fairfaxes’ fulfilling their dynastic hopes, and show how Marvell, despite his admiration for his pupil’s beauty and his patrons’ courage, remains a detached observer. For Marveu, to be a parent in the civil war, to invest one’s dreams in one’s children’s future, is to take great risks, which he dramatizes in the episode of the rails. The young rail becomes an innocent victim of the casual brutality of the mower, and the grief-stricken parents paradoxically become orphans:

Unhappy Birds! what does it boot To build below the Grasses Root; When Lowness is unsafe as Hight, And Chance o’retakes what scapeth spight? And now your Orphan Parents Call Sounds your untimely Funerd 01. 409-14)

One’s destiny can easily fall into the hands of chance, and one’s loving care

35. The Poems of Thomas Third Lord Fairfax, pp. 263-70. 36. Edward Bliss Reed, The Poems of Thomas Third Lord Faigm, pp. 247-48; GeoiEey

Woledge, “Saint h a n d , Fairfax, and Marvell,” Modern Language Review, 25 (1930). 481- 83; M. C. Bradbrook, “Marvell and the Poetry of Rural Solitude,” Review ofEnglich Studies, 17 (1941), 37-46; Wallerstein, Seventeenth-Century Poetic, pp. 306-17; and McClung, The Country House, pp. 149-52.

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Lee Erickson 167 tllrn into the “Orphan Parents Call.” In some the rails are to be faulted for choosing the wrong ground on which to raise their young, but in war no place is safe, just as no place in Yorkshire was untroubled by the times. But the Fairfaxes have accepted these risks, as the narrator tells us when he enters the wood:

The double Wood of ancient Stocks Link’d in so chick an Union locks, It like two Pedigrees appears, On one hand Fairfnx, th’other Veres: Of whom though many fell in War, Yet more to Heaven shooting are: And, as they Natures Cradle deckt, W d in green Age her Hearse expect. (L 489-96)

Both the Third Lord Baron and his wife, the daughter of General Aubrey de Vere, were born and bred for war. Consequently, they were prepared for the death of their children (their second chdd died in infancy), even while they expected much of them. Like the heron who the “eldest of its young lets drop, / As if it Stork-like did pretend / That Tribute to its Lord to send” (ll. ~ 3 4 - 3 6 ) , ~ ~ they actively accept whatever the Lord wills for their offspring. And like the hewel, who at once cleanses its environ- ment of dangerous threats and feeds its young, the Fairfaxes, too, protect and care for their daughter.

But the narrator of the poem is not so willing to be tied down to fretful parenthood. He plays, meditates, indulges h s wit, and acts the part of philosopher and prelate in the wood, safe from the demands love and marriage would bring:

How safe, methinks, and strong, behind These Trees have I incamp’d my Mind; Where Beauty, aiming at the Heart, Bends in some Tree its useless Dart; And where the World no certain Shot Can make, or me it toucheth not. (11. 601-06)

This and the half-sexual, half-religious play of stanza lxxvii suggest the personal distance, whether it be through wit or physical retirement, that Marvel] in the persona of his narrator puts between himself and any com- mitment. As the codrmed bachelor he evidently was, Marvel1 prefers the state of the “rational Ampkibii” (1- 774), or the state of gazing at himself

37. See Kitty Dam, “Marvell’s Stork: The Natural History of an Emblem,”]orrmal of the Warburg and CourtauId Institute, 31 (1968), 437-38. On the theme of parenthood, see Colie, “My Ecchoing Song,” pp. 247-49.

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168 English Literary Renaissance in the water “Where all things gaze themselves, and doubt / If they be in it or without” (11.637-38). He shows how much he admires the Fairfaxes’ commitment in the poem, especially in his praise of their daughter, but it is the intelligent appreciation of how much that commitment costs rather than the ready willingness or the ability to shoulder that cost. He desires the flexibility of a playful style, which, while enabling him to praise the dynastic hopes of the Fairfaxes, will allow him an extraordinary range of allusion. And, although this critical distance resembles political balance and compromise, it is not. It seems instead to be the distance of an outsider looking in on a world he cannot have, to be the voice of an itinerant tutor who can for a moment bask in his pupil’s light and admire his patrons’ kindness and courage, but who realizes that what he desires lies outside his act of praise.

When he retired to Nun Appleton, the Third Lord Fairfax became in- terested in Yorkshire history and his own genealogy; he encouraged the glorification of his family’s origins in Marvell’s poem, the antiquarian in- vestigations of William Dugdale, and the family history of Charles Fair- fax’s A n a h a Fairfaxiaria, and, wishing to consolidate his family’s standing, arranged for his daughter to make a handsome match with the Second Duke of Buckingham. Without knowing this history, one is likely to find the vehcle too fragile for the tenor when the narrator describes Maria as “Heaven’s Center, Nature’s Lap. / And Paradice’s only Map” (11. 767-68). The identification of Maria as Mary Fairfax seems to help little for seldom has such fulsome praise been bestowed on a child, even as indirect compliment; and readers have sought and found divine meanings or allegories of virtue in such praise. But, when we understand the degree to which the Fairfaxes’ happiness depended upon Mary, when we see how much they hoped for her, how they later built a domestic heaven for her at Appleton House, when we understand how “She leads her studious Hours, / (Till Fate her worthily translates, ,/ And find a Fairfax for our Tkwaites)” (11. 746-48), we see that Upon Appletori House is notjust a pretty compliment addressed to the retired Lord in his fortress-llke gardens, but a celebration of the Fairfaxes’ commitment to, and choice of, their destiny in their daughter. We can withdraw from this interpretation through the ironic perspective history supplies, or we can pursue the endlessly fascinating allusions and the ambivalences of the narrative voice; but lest we lose ourselves in the by-ways of the poem, we do well to take our directions from “Paradice’s o d y Map,” Mary Fairfax.

U N I V E R S I T Y OF C A L I F O R N I A , L O S A N G E L E S