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Conscience in Marvell

Mottram, Stewart

Authors



Contributors

Andrew Hadfield
Editor

Paul Hammond
Editor

Abstract

Andrew Marvell today enjoys a reputation as a Restoration champion of religious freedom, but this reputation can seem out of step with Marvell’s more outspoken attacks on protestant sects in his Commonwealth poems, and with his ambivalent approach, in Upon Appleton House (1651), to Thomas Fairfax’s conscientious objections to war. What, then, was Marvell’s position on conscience, and how far did it change with the prevailing political winds? This chapter brings Marvell’s Commonwealth poems and Restoration prose into dialogue with each other, with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), and with wider mid-century debates over the relative rights of governments to curb private conscience in the interests of public need. It argues that Marvell’s position on conscience remained constant throughout his career, and that it was characterised by support for a protestant consensus or comprehension of private religious opinions under the ‘public conscience’ of government, not by support for freedom of conscience per se.

Citation

Mottram, S. (in press). Conscience in Marvell. In A. Hadfield, & P. Hammond (Eds.), Words at War: The Contested Language of the English Civil War (237-50). Oxford University Press

Online Publication Date Feb 29, 2024
Deposit Date Jan 24, 2024
Publicly Available Date Mar 1, 2025
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 237-50
Series Title Proceedings of the British Academy
Series Number 261
Book Title Words at War: The Contested Language of the English Civil War
Chapter Number 16
ISBN 9780197267622
Keywords Andrew Marvell (1621-1678); Freedom of conscience; Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679); Thomas, third lord Fairfax (1612-1671); Eikon Basilike
Public URL https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4524864
Publisher URL https://global.oup.com/academic/product/words-at-war-9780197267622?cc=gb&lang=en&
Contract Date Nov 3, 2023