THE GREEN AND THE GOLD

A fictional re-creation of the life and exploits of English poet and adventurer Andrew Marvell.

Best known to generations of American students as the author of “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvell (1621–78) was too much an English gentleman to take his own verse seriously and spent most of his life preoccupied with politics. There was plenty to keep him busy in those days: The aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation had left England bitterly divided along religious lines, with the Crown passing back and forth like a greasy football between Papists and Anglicans while the Court and the Church struggled to keep score. While a student at Cambridge (a Puritan stronghold), Marvell was recruited as a secret agent for the Roundheads—radical Calvinists who loathed the monarchy and despised the Church of England as too close to Rome. Sent abroad, ostensibly on a Grand Tour, he made contact with Protestant allies on the Continent and became adept at gathering information and breaking codes. He also started what was to be an illustrious career as a womanizer who took particular delight in seducing the wives of friend and foe alike. Back in England, he served as an agent for Oliver Cromwell, just back from subjugating the Irish and now in charge of the armies that would overthrow the Royalists in England’s Civil War. Droll and ironic by nature, Marvell is too cynical to fit in comfortably with the likes of Cromwell and the archzealot John Milton (who dreams of infiltrating the Vatican with a cadre of Protestant moles), but he marches in Cromwell’s funeral procession and secures Milton’s release from prison after the fall of the Commonwealth. Balance, restraint, and reason were, after all, the hallmarks of the metaphysical poets.

A nice diversion: second-novelist Peachment (Caravaggio, 2003) writes in a credible approximation of 17th-century prose and gives fresh insight into a fascinating character in a turbulent age.