Marvell returned in 1647 from travels in Europe, where he had, according to a later employment reference written by John Milton, learned some Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish. He also learned to fence. In Italy he may also have acquired grounding in political theory, judging by a later allusion to him as ‘a notable English Italo-Machiavillian’. His first recorded action on his return was to sell some property in Cambridgeshire. All told, on his return he may have been well suited for a literary-political career in 1650s Britain.

During the republican decade he found employment first as a tutor working for the scions of powerful men – for Mary Fairfax, daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax, commander-in-chief of the army in England and Ireland, and subsequently for William Dutton, ward of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell – then as Latin Secretary to Secretary of State John Thurloe, and finally as MP for Hull. His life trajectory moves from personal associations and perhaps influence, as can be traced in the careful reflection of Fairfax’s own interests, concerns and library in the meditative poem Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax, to institutional status and authority. His writing during this period observes a more complex pattern. In contrast to the 1660s and 1670s, his literary output involved poetry rather than prose (though it cannot be said with any degree of certainty how many poems he wrote in these years). He is concerned with land and the nation, with political argument, political vocabularies, news, allegiance and loyalty. Yet, for all his pursuit of employment in the republican regime, his poems do not speak in a direct way of commitment or loyalty, or at least of the poet’s commitments.

When Gabriel Harvey sat at his desk, his copy of Livy before him, surrounded by other works with which he intended to compare the Roman history, he did so with a clear sense of purpose: he wished to contrive practical advice for policymakers, and thereby to make himself a useful reader. John Dee studied his occult manuscripts and books with an objective in mind: to furnish himself with a better understanding of nature and providence, to further his insight into the Magus's arts, to draw closer to the philosopher's stone. When John Milton read Euripides, it was perhaps for pleasure, but also to acquire the solid learning of a gentleman, and to tool himself the better to achieve his literary ambitions. When Thomas Hobbes read Thucydides, he sought knowledge of history and good government. In the most everyday of reading encounters, readers consulted the Bible, seeking comforting words, the advice of their maker or his Son, and surer knowledge of salvation or the paths that led to it.

Historians of the practices and interests of early modern readers have shown the centrality of reading to early modern history, especially but not exclusively cultural and intellectual history. They have emphasized the importance of ratio and utilitas in the conscious intentions of readers, and the sophistication of readers and their interpretive strategies. Reading, we are told, was ‘utilitarian or preparatory’ and radically analytic. Texts were anatomized and fragmented, individual words were subjected to perspicacious scrutiny.

Every three or four years the International Milton Symposium assembles to discuss the current state of Milton studies, providing an occasion for scholars from all continents to meet and reaffirm the enduring importance of Milton to our understanding of the progress of poetry and politics during the most radical period of Britain's history. The Sixth Symposium met at York in July 1999. Milton never visited York – though an adventurous traveller abroad, he was reluctant to view his own country, and felt little need to leave the metropolis – but the prominence of York in the events of the Civil War made it an appropriate setting for a conference permeated by a consciousness of the political strife of the mid-seventeenth century. York was the centre of the King's government in the north. It was from York in April 1642 that King Charles marched to seize the strategic port of Hull, which resisted his entry and so made him aware for the first time that his authority could not prevail in his own kingdom. York remained the great royalist stronghold in the north until it was besieged in May 1644 by the armies of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Earl of Manchester and the Scots under Lord Leven. The siege was raised by the arrival of Prince Rupert's army, but in the consequent confrontation at Marston Moor on 2 July 1644, the royalist armies of Rupert and Newcastle were comprehensively beaten by the Parliamentarians, who now had the decisive advantage of Oliver Cromwell's presence, and York fell to the victors. Royalist control of the north was lost for good. Fairfax prevented the pillage of York by the parliamentary armies, and he forbade the soldiers to touch the cathedral upon pain of death, thus preserving its monuments and stained glass from iconoclastic attack. York was the home of Fairfax, whose great townhouse was the principal private dwelling in the city, a few miles away from his country estate at Nun Appleton. Soon to become one of the parliamentary leaders most admired by Milton, his abilities became fully recognised when he was appointed Commander-in-chief of the New Model Army in 1645. Milton, like Andrew Marvell, had hopes that Fairfax would become the chief instrument in the creation of a just settlement after the end of the wars, for his integrity, ‘his firm unshaken virtue', shone out in the later years of the 1640s.

'What cares these roarers for the name of king?’ The Tempest, 1.1.15-16

I

IN his strictures in Leviathan (1651) on the dangers of ‘Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the antient Greeks, and Romans', Thomas Hobbes suggests an association between republicanism and linguistic shifti- ness:

Political interventions are supported by judicious acts of mis-naming. What Hobbes scornfully named ‘popular government’ could be justified, under the tutorship of Aristotle and Cicero, by calling it ‘liberty'; and monarchy could be ‘disgraced by the name of tyranny'. The use of an inaccurate name was for Hobbes an abuse of language and rhetoric, an act of redescription that reflected the speaker's passion rather than the thing itself. Calling a ‘king’ a ‘tyrant’ was a nonsense, but it could lead to regrettable effects by influencing other men's passions, and perverting the application of the law. Though killing a king was unlawful, it could be given a semblance of lawfulness by facilely redescribing it as ‘tyrannicide'; Hobbes is not only describing a disease, he is mocking its symptoms. Such paradiastole prevented ratiocina- tion and communication, and threatened linguistic anarchy. In case of dissent over the true meaning of words – ‘heresy’ and ‘opinion', ‘king’ and ‘tyrant', ‘liberty’ and ‘slavery’ – all subjects had to bow to the arbitration of the sovereign authority.

The English Parliament had defined their king as a tyrant (as well as a traitor and a murderer) early in 1649. Having executed him they then set themselves up as the arbitrators of language.