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The question of church settlement was one of the most important—and intractable—issues faced by the Cromwellian Protectorate. This essay traces the literary response to the Protector’s religious reforms in the poetry and prose of Andrew Marvell and John Milton. It confirms and extends our sense of their creative relationship during the mid-1650s as close, continued and reciprocal. But it also suggests that the two writers were fundamentally divided in their estimation of the Protectoral church. Milton’s profound suspicion of that church was evident even at the height of his public support for Cromwell, in the Defensio Secunda. Marvell’s The First Anniversary, in contrast, seeks to reconcile the older poet to the Protector’s authority as godly magistrate and guarantor of ‘sober Liberty’. Milton, however, was unpersuaded. His sonnet of 1655, ‘Avenge O Lord’, although closely connected to his official duties under the Protectorate, also intimates his deeply ambivalent attitude to Cromwell’s self-appointed role as defender of the reformed faith. The essay begins and concludes by considering the extent to which their differences on ecclesiastical polity in the 1650s continued to inform the divergent positions assumed by Milton and Marvell in their responses to the first Restoration crisis, 20 years later.
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