Marvell’s boyhood seems to have been surrounded with the things that most make for a child’s happiness.  A sensible, affectionate, humorous, religious father, occupying a position of authority, and greatly respected, a mother and three elder sisters to make much of his bright wit and early adventures, a comfortable yet simple home, and an atmosphere of piety, learning, and good fellowship.  What more is wanted, or can be desired?  The “Boatswains” and “Cabin-boys” of Bishop Parker’s fancy were in the neighbourhood, no doubt, and as stray companions for a half-holiday must have had their attractions; but it is unnecessary to attribute Andrew Marvell’s style in controversy to his early acquaintance with a sea-faring population, for he is far more likely to have picked it up from his great friend and colleague, the author of Paradise Lost.

Marvell’s school education over, he went up to Cambridge, not to his father’s old college, but to the more splendid foundation of Trinity.  About the date of his matriculation there is a doubt.  In Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses there is a note to the effect that Marvell was admitted “in matriculam Acad.  Cant.  Coll.  Trin.” on the 14th of December 1633, when the boy was but twelve years old.  Dr. Lort, a famous master of Trinity in his day, writing in November 1765 to Captain Edward Thompson, of whom more later on, told the captain that until 1635 there was no register of admissions of ordinary students, or pensioners, as they are called, but only a register of Fellows and Foundation Scholars, and in this last-named register Marvell’s name appears as a Scholar sworn and admitted on the 13th of April 1638.  As, however, Marvell took his B.A. degree in 1639, he must have been in residence long before April 1638.  Probably Marvell went to Trinity about 1635, just before the register of pensioners was begun, as a pensioner, becoming a Scholar in 1638, and taking his degree in 1639.

Cambridge undergraduates do not usually keep diaries, nor after they have become Masters of Art are they much in the habit of giving details as to their academic career.  Marvell is no exception to this provoking rule.  He nowhere tells us what his University taught him or how.  The logic of the schools he had no choice but to learn.  Molineus, Peter Ramus, Seton, Keckerman were text-books of reputation, from one or another of which every Cambridge man had to master his simpliciters, his quids, his secundum quids, his quales, and his quantums.  Aristotle’s Physics, Ethics, and Politics were “tutor’s books,” and those young men who loved to hear themselves talk were left free to discuss, much to Hobbes’s disgust, “the freedom of the will, incorporeal substance, everlasting nows, ubiquities, hypostases, which the people understand not nor will ever care for.”