What Marvell was doing during the stirring years 1646-1650 is not known.  Even in the most troubled times men go about their business, and our poet was always a man of affairs.  As for his opinions during these years, we can only guess at them from those to which he afterwards gave expression.  Marvell was neither a Republican nor a Puritan.  Like his father before him, he was a Protestant and a member of the Reformed Church of England.  He stood for both King and Parliament.  Archbishop Laud he distrusted, and it may well be detested, but good churchmen have often distrusted and even detested their archbishops.  Mr. Gladstone had no great regard for Archbishop Tait.  Before the Act of Uniformity and the repressive legislation that followed upon its heels had driven English dissent into its final moulds, it was not doctrine but ceremonies that disturbed men’s minds; and Marvell belonged to that school of English churchmen, by no means the least distinguished school, which was not disposed to quarrel with their fellow-Christians over white surplices, the ring in matrimony, or the attitude during Holy Communion.  He shared the belief of a contemporary that no system is bad enough to destroy a good man, or good enough to save a bad one.

The Civil War was to Marvell what it was to most wise men not devoured by faction—­a deplorable event.  Twenty years after he wrote in the Rehearsal Transprosed:—­

“Whether it be a war of religion or of liberty it is not worth the labour to inquire.  Whichsoever was at the top, the other was at the bottom; but upon considering all, I think the cause was too good to have been fought for.  Men ought to have trusted God—­they ought to have trusted the King with that whole matter.  The arms of the Church are prayers and tears, the arms of the subject are patience and petitions.  The King himself being of so accurate and piercing a judgment would soon have felt it where it stuck.  For men may spare their pains when Nature is at work, and the world will not go the faster for our driving.  Even as his present Majesty’s happy Restoration did itself, so all things else happen in their best and proper time, without any heed of our officiousness."[24:1]

In the face of this passage and many another of the like spirit, it is puzzling to find such a man, for example, as Thomas Baker, the ejected non-juring Fellow and historian of St. John’s College, Cambridge (1656-1740), writing of Marvell as “that bitter republican”; and Dryden, who probably knew Marvell, comparing his controversial pamphlets with those of Martin Marprelate, or at all events speaking of Martin Marprelate as “the Marvell of those times."[24:2] A somewhat anti-prelatical note runs through Marvell’s writings, but it is a familiar enough note in the works of the English laity, and by no means dissevers its possessor from the Anglican Church.  But there are some heated expressions in the satires which probably gave rise to the belief that Marvell was a Republican.[24:3]