Conscience in Marvell

Mottram, Stewart

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

• 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