Marvelous Mutable Marvell

Twelve years to the day after King Charles I ascended the scaffold at Whitehall to become the first European sovereign decapitated by his subjects, and his son had the remains of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector during England’s republican decade and the man whom as much as any other was responsible for the regicide, exhumed from his tomb in Westminster Abby so that the favor could be returned. Interregnum signified dreary theocracy, when the theaters were closed, Christmas abolished, and even weekend sports banned. By contrast, Charles promised sensuality, a decadent rejection of austere radicalism. But if there was one area of overlap, it would be in issues of rapprochement, for though pardons were issued to the opposition rank-and-file, Charles still ordered the execution of 31 signers of his father’s judgement, remembered by the subject of this essay as that moment when the king had “bowed his comely head/Down as upon a bed.” Even the dead would not be spared punishment, for in January of 1661 Cromwell was pulled from his grave, flesh still clinging to bone, languid hair still hanging from grey scalp, and the Royalists would hang him from a gibbet at Tyburn.

Eventually Cromwell’s head would be placed on a pike in front of Westminster Hall where it would molder for the next two decades. Such is the mutability of things. Through this orgy of revenge, a revolutionary who’d previously served as Latin Secretary (tasked with translating diplomatic missives) slinked out of London. Already a celebrated poet, he’d been appointed by Cromwell because of his polemical pamphlets. After the blanket pardon he emerged from hiding, but still Charles had him arrested, perhaps smarting when in 1649 the author had described Royalists as a “credulous and hapless herd, begott’n to servility, and inchanted with these popular institutes of Tyranny.” By any accounting’s living body should have been treated much the same as Cromwell’s dead one, for he was arrested, imprisoned, and no doubt fully expected himself to be flayed and hung up at Tyburn. But he would avoid punishment (and go on to write ). Milton’s rescue can be attributed to another poet a decade his