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second Petition of Lovelace on 2 May 1648 (because he refers to the ‘first Petition by the Author sent’). It shows little patience for the contemporary political climate and its vengeful temper: ‘Our Civill Wars have lost the Civicke crowne, [a bitter reference to the oak leaves bestowed on someone who saved the life of a fellow citizen in war in ancient times]/He highest builds, who with most Art destroys.’ Marvell paints a portrait of petty literary rivalry and politically inspired abuse cast by self-righteous Puritans at the imprisoned writer:
    The Ayre’s already tainted with the swarms
    Of Insects which against you rise in arms.
    Word-peckers, Paper-rats, Book-scorpions,
    Of wit corrupted, the unfashion’d Sons.
    The barbed Censurers begin to looke
    Like the grim consistory on thy Booke;
    And on each line cast a reforming eye,
    Severer then the yong Presbytery.
    Another poem sometimes attributed to Marvell and written at about the same time is ‘An Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers’. Francis Villiers, another Grand Tourist at the time Marvell was in France and Italy and whom Flecknoe, as suggested above, may have tried to solicit as a patron, was killed on 7 July 1648 in a skirmish with Parliamentary forces in Surrey. The only surviving copy of the poem is in the library of Worcester College, Oxford, but it cannot be proved to be from Marvell’s hand. The strongest argument against its being a product of the future servant of the English Republic is its too stridently Royalist tone and the declaration in the closing lines of determination to renew the civil slaughter. Such passion (‘Not write so many, but so many kill’) is uncharacteristic of Marvell’s political temper.
    A further, this time undisputed, poem from this period is Marvell’s contribution to some verses published in 1649 to mourn the death on 24 June from smallpox of the twenty-year-old Henry, Lord Hastings, son of the Earl of Huntingdon. Among the contributors to this Lachrymae Musarum were Robert Herrick, Sir John Denham and John Dryden, a demonstration as much that Marvell was now naturally consorting with his poetic peers, his talent and stature fully acknowledged, as that he was in Royalist company.
    The contrast between the composition of these elegant verses and the brutal reality of the times could not be more pointed. For at the start of the same year that Lucasta and Lachrymae Musarum were published, King Charles I was beheaded in Whitehall, while Oliver Cromwell moved to suppress both the Levellers at home and the rebellious Catholics in Ireland. There is also a powerful aesthetic contrast between the achieved but not greatly distinguished occasional verses written by Marvell after his return to England and the triumphant artistic maturity of his ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ written probably in June or July 1650 when Marvell was twenty-nine years old, though caution must be expressed about the pastoral lyrics, which cannot be dated exactly. They were probably written during his period with Fairfax in Yorkshire.
    Cromwell returned from his brutal mission in Ireland in May 1650, his hands dripping with blood. Even sympathetic biographers of Cromwell such as Christopher Hill make no attempt to whitewash this episode or minimise the truth of ‘Cromwell’s racial contempt for the Irish’. 5 As Hill points out, this hatred of the Irish was not unique to Cromwell but common to most propertied Englishmen at the time. Even articulate exponents of political liberty like Milton ‘shared the view that the Irish were culturally so inferior that their subordination was natural and necessary’. Cromwell arrived in Ireland in August 1649 and on 11 September he sacked the town of Drogheda, slaughtering virtually the whole garrison and all priests that were captured. This was closely followed by another massacre at Wexford where,