Marvell’s Ghost

Abstract

In the north aisle of St Giles in the Fields, in Holborn, two notable memorials stand in suggestive relation to each other. That on a column to the right, as you face the altar, is for Roger L’Estrange, the remorseless Surveyor of the Press and unresting Tory pamphleteer, whose long services won him knighthood under James II, shortly before the Revolution of 1688/89 put an end to his public career. It advises simply that ‘In the Middle Isle near this Place tyeth [sic] the Body of Sr Roger L’Estrange Knt, / Born the 17^th of Dec^r. 1616 / Dyed the 11^th of Dec^r. 1704.’ Over his shoulder, as it were, is a memorial for Andrew Marvell, on the darker north wall. He predeceased L’Estrange by a generation, but his memorial is of much later date; the Corporation of Hull had voted moneys thus to commemorate its loyal servant soon after his death, but the present stone was erected only in 1764 by Marvell’s great-nephew. Celebrating Marvell’s ‘unalterable steadiness in the ways of virtue’ and ‘inimitable writings’, its long inscription proclaims him ‘a strenuous asserter of the constitution; laws and liberties of England’. The epitaph came from the hand of William Popple, Marvell’s nephew, and is in manuscript tellingly dated to 1688, the Revolution year when, it would seem, these Patriot sentiments might at last find appropriate expression.¹