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he not taken this speciall care, that noble Library had been utterly destroyed, for there were ignorant Senators enough who would have been contented to have had it so.’ 8 In retirement he wrote poems, made a collection of coins and engravings, translated from Latin and French, composed a history of the Church to the Reformation, a treatise on the breeding of horses, and a metrical version of the psalms and other parts of the Bible. During the Protectorate there were constant rumours that ‘Black Tom’ (so called because of his very dark complexion) was engaged in Royalist intrigues against the government, but these appear to have been unfounded. 9
    The selection of Marvell as a tutor – presumably some time after Fairfax’s resignation in June 1650, but no more precise date can be given – seems to have been natural enough. They were fellow Yorkshiremen, poets (though not of matched talent) and temperamentally inclined towards the contemplative rather than the active life, whatever their proven distinction in the latter had been or would prove to be. But there may have been a more specific contact between the Fairfaxes and the Marvell kin that caused Marvell to be recommended to this very important post as tutor to the daughter of one of the most famous men in England at that time. When the Reverend Andrew Marvell was curate at Flamborough in the first years of the century, the local Lord of the Manor, Sir William Constable, married Dorothy, daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax (the Lord General’s grandfather). When the Reverend Andrew Marvell moved to Hull in 1624 he was brought into contact with the Alured family, as noted above, who lived next door in the house built on the ruins of the old Carthusian Priory. The Alureds had known the Fairfaxes for many years. The signature of John Alured of Hull, alongside Fairfax’s, is found on a petition of 28 July 1640 from the Yorkshire gentry to the King, complaining about the burden on the poor of forced billeting of soldiers on them. John Alured’s name (though not Fairfax’s) is on the list of fifty-nine who signed the warrant for the King’s execution. John Alured, as Colonel Alured, makes several appearances in the Short Memorials. Fairfax, in choosing a tutor for his young teenage daughter, would be reassured that he came from a good Yorkshire family known to the Fairfaxes. 10
    Mary Fairfax – not a great beauty if the miniature painted by Samuel Cooper in 1650 is an accurate portrayal – was known as ‘Little Moll’. Although Marvell writes of her as a symbol of ideal virtue in ‘Upon Appleton House’, she would later marry the rakish second Duke of Buckingham in September 1657. Buckingham, son of Charles I’s minister, was no Puritan, and proposed to use the marriage as a means of regaining his confiscated estates. Fairfax gave Parliament his personal security for his son-in-law’s good behaviour but, after the Restoration, Buckingham became rather more useful to Fairfax as a protector. Mary’s early life had been exciting for she had accompanied her father with her nurse on one or two dangerous escapades, including the escape through enemy lines from besieged Bradford in 1643. At Nun Appleton, she was tutored by Marvell in foreign languages.
    Dating Marvell’s poems – particularly those (the majority) which were not printed until after his death in 1681 – is a perilous activity. A few occasional verses, as has already been seen, can be dated with confidence, but most of the poems on which Marvell’s current reputation rests are impossible to pinpoint with accuracy. The long poems, ‘Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax’, and ‘Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borow’, obviously belong to this period of rural seclusion, but the garden poems, the pastoral exercises and the religious poems are more uncertain. Given the facts of Marvell’s life, there is a strong