World Enough and Time by Nicholas Murray Page B

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    With just a hint at the controversial status of Cromwell’s pre-eminence, the poet predicts that future ages will see him more clearly as an exemplar of courage, ‘When truth shall be allow’d, and faction cease’. He is now in Heaven, leaving behind his mourners ‘lost in tears’. The poem closes with an allusion to Cromwell’s son, Richard, who assumed the Protectorate as if Cromwell had been a hereditary monarch. The reference to Richard’s ‘milder beams’ implies delicately that he will not be able to match his father’s authority and power. His absence from the struggle to date is glossed as another example of Cromwellian reserve, waiting in silence until the call of duty comes. When it does, being a Cromwell, he will rise to the occasion: ‘A Cromwell in an houre a prince will grow.’ Richard survived, in fact, little over six months before his government collapsed in April 1659 to be followed by the restored Rump Parliament.
    A surviving document in the Public Record Office shows the detailed arrangements that were made for the funeral. It records the amount of mourning cloth allotted to each of the principal mourners:
9     6
 
Mr. John Milton
9     6
    9     6
 
Mr. Merville
    Sir Philip Meadows
    Mr. Sterry
   

   
Lattin
Secryes
9   0
 
Mr. Drayden 1
    â€˜Mr. Drayden’ is the poet John Dryden. The figures in the far left column are the number of yards of black cloth proposed and those in the next column the amount actually allocated (though an alternative interpretation is that the two columns represent the shillings and pence granted to buy the cloth). 2 In the event, only the Lord Mayor of London and prominent City officials were granted the full nine yards of mourning cloth. Another document listing those who walked in the funeral procession shows that in the Privy Chamber at Somerset House, where the official mourners assembled before moving off down the Strand, was a party described as ‘Secretarys of ye ffrench & Latin Tongs’. This little company of poets and scholars included Dryden, Marvell, Milton, Nathaniel Sterry (another assistant Latin Secretary drafted in to replace Sir Philip Meadows, the man who had beaten Marvell to the post in 1653 and who was now a diplomat) and Samuel Hartlib, a friend of Milton and occasional government servant. As they all moved off down the Strand towards Westminster Abbey, ‘Mr. Merville’, whose name was next to Milton’s in the official list, would have been able to steer the blind poet’s steps during the foot procession towards the Abbey.
    When Cromwell died, his body had been embalmed and removed from Whitehall to Somerset House, where it lay for many weeks in state, dressed in royal robes of purple and ermine with a golden sceptre in the hand and a crown on the head. The body was privately buried in the chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey on 26 September, but the public funeral in which Marvell and Milton took part was held on 23 November. It was done with magnificent pomp at a cost of £60,000, which caused controversy within the Republican camp. The route taken by the mourners from Somerset House to the Abbey was lined by soldiers in new red coats with black buttons. A king would not have received a more lavish send-off.
    Marvell retained his post as a Latin Secretary during the rule of Richard Cromwell and for some little time after, but it is clear that he was already contemplating a move from the civil service to a career in Parliamentary politics. If he were to stand as an MP then Hull, the town where he had so many associations and connections, was the obvious choice. Invariably shrewd in his career moves, Marvell may already have sensed that Richard Cromwell was not going to survive and that the era of powerful authoritarian rule by one man was over. A stronger Parliament, if not a Restoration, was more