Andrew Marvell

Born in 1621 in Winestead, Yorkshire, the son of an Anglican clergyman who drowned crossing the Humber in 1641, Marvell was educated at Hull Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he briefly converted to Catholicism before his father retrieved him. He spent much of the 1640s traveling through Holland, France, Italy, and Spain while England tore itself apart in civil war, an extended tour that left him fluent in multiple languages and temperamentally detached from partisan fury. He served as tutor to the daughter of the parliamentary general Lord Fairfax at Nun Appleton House, where he wrote "Upon Appleton House" and likely "The Garden" and "To His Coy Mistress," poems whose wit, compression, and metaphysical daring would not be fully appreciated for another three centuries. Milton recommended him for a government post in 1653, and Marvell later helped secure Milton's release from prison after the Restoration. He served as Member of Parliament for Hull from 1659 until his death, writing anonymous verse satires against the corruption of Charles II's court that circulated in manuscript and made him the most dangerous poet in English politics. His Miscellaneous Poems appeared posthumously in 1681, published by his housekeeper Mary Palmer, who claimed to be his widow. He died on August 16, 1678, in London, possibly of poisoning, though the official cause was an ague treated by his physician with an opiate.

In 1677 Marvell published anonymously An Account of the Growth of Popery, accusing Charles II's court of drifting toward Catholic tyranny. The government offered a reward for the author's name and never learned it while he lived. He sat in the Commons as Hull's MP until his death the following year, still unmasked.