Holdernesse was not the original home of the Marvells, who would seem to have been mostly Cambridgeshire folk, though the name crops up in other counties.  Whether Cambridge “men” of a studious turn still take long walks I do not know, but “some vast amount of years ago” it was considered a pleasant excursion, either on foot or on a hired steed, from Cambridge to Meldreth, where the Elizabethan manor-house, long known as “the Marvells’,” agreeably embodied the tradition that here it was that the poet’s father was born in 1586.  The Church Registers have disappeared.  Proof is impossible.  That there were Marvells in the neighbourhood is certain.  The famous Cambridge antiquary, William Cole, perhaps the greatest of all our collectors, has included among his copies of early wills those of several Marvells and Mervells of Meldreth and Shepreth, belonging to pre-Reformation times, as their pious gifts to the “High Altar” and to “Our Lady’s Light” pleasingly testify.  But our Andrew was a determined Protestant.

The poet’s father is an interesting figure in our Church history.  Educated at Emmanuel College, from whence he proceeded a Master of Arts in 1608, he took Orders; and after serving as curate at Flamborough, was inducted to the living of Winestead in 1614, where he remained till 1624, in which year he went to Hull as master of the Grammar School and lecturer, that is preacher, of Trinity Church.  The elder Marvell belonged, from the beginning to the end of his useful and even heroic life, to the Reformed Church of England, or, as his son puts it, “a conformist to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of England, though I confess none of the most over-running and eager in them.”  The younger Marvell, with one boyish interval, belonged all through his life to the paternal school of religious thought.

Fuller’s account of the elder Marvell is too good to be passed over:—­

“He afterwards became Minister at Hull, where for his lifetime he was well beloved.  Most facetious in discourse, yet grave in his carriage, a most excellent preacher who, like a good husband, never broached what he had new brewed, but preached what he had pre-studied some competent time before.  Insomuch that he was wont to say that he would cross the common proverb which called Saturday the working-day and Monday the holyday of preachers.  It happened that Anno Dom. 1640, Jan. 23, crossing Humber in a Barrow boat, the same was sandwarpt, and he was drowned therein (with Mrs. Skinner, daughter to Sir Edward Coke, a very religious gentlewoman) by the carelessness, not to say drunkenness of the boatmen, to the great grief of all good men.  His excellent comment upon St. Peter is daily desired and expected, if the envy and covetousness of private persons for their own use deprive not the public of the benefit thereof."[6:1]

This good man, to whom perhaps, remembering the date of his death, the words may apply, Tu vero felix