Andrew Marvell was impregnated with the new ideas about sea-power.  A great reader and converser with the best intellects of his time, and a Hull man, he had probably early grasped the significance of Bacon’s illuminating saying in the famous essay on the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates (first printed in 1612), “that he that commands the sea is at great liberty and may take as much and as little of the war as he will.”  Cromwell, though not the creator of our navy, was its strongest inspiration until Nelson, and no feature of his great administration so excited Marvell’s patriotic admiration as the Lord-Protector’s sleepless energy in securing and maintaining the command of the sea.

In Marvell’s poem, first published as a broadsheet in 1655, entitled The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord-Protector, he describes foreign princes soundly rating their ambassadors for having misinformed them as to the energies of the new Commonwealth:—­

“‘Is this,’ saith one, ’the nation that we read Spent with both wars, under a Captain dead!  Yet rig a navy while we dress us late And ere we dine rase and rebuild a state?  What oaken forests, and what golden mines, What mints of men—­what union of designs! ...  Needs must we all their tributaries be Whose navies hold the sluices of the sea! The ocean is the fountain of command, But that once took, we captives are on land; And those that have the waters for their share Can quickly leave us neither earth nor air.’”

Marvell’s aversion to the Dutch was first displayed in the rough lines called The Character of Holland, published in 1653 during the first Dutch War.  As poetry the lines have no great merit; they do not even jingle agreeably—­but they are full of the spirit of the time, and breathe forth that “envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness” which are apt to be such large ingredients in the compound we call “patriotism.”  They begin thus:—­

    “Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
    As but the off-scouring of the British sand,
    And so much earth as was contributed
    By English pilots when they heaved the lead,
    Or what by the ocean’s slow alluvion feel
    Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell,—­
    This indigested vomit of the sea
    Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.”

The gallant struggle to secure their country from the sea is made the subject of curious banter:—­

    “How did they rivet with gigantic piles,
    Thorough the centre their new-catched miles,
    And to the stake a struggling country bound,
    Where barking waves still bait the forced ground,
    Building their watery Babel far more high,
    To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky! 
    Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid,
    And oft at leap-frog o’er their steeples played,
    As if on purpose it on land