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after an eight-day siege, the town was sacked and up to 2,000 troops, priests and civilians were butchered. The remainder of the town’s population fled, leading Cromwell to report to Parliament that it would now be a good place for English colonists to settle. Cromwell was untroubled by doubt and declared: ‘We come (by the assistance of God) to hold forth and maintain the lustre and glory of English liberty in a nation where we have an undoubted right to do it.’ 6 Cromwell’s conviction – shared by Marvell and other Puritans – that liberty and religious freedom did not apply to Catholics because of their religion’s sinister connections with foreign powers with designs on the liberty of Protestant Englishmen ran very deep.
    We cannot be certain how much Marvell knew about the conduct of Cromwell’s campaign and therefore the extent to which there was moral complicity in the Lord General’s genocidal ferocity. But his ‘Ode’ was not hagiography and is characterised by a measured tone that oscillates between praise of Cromwell – in terms that seem to portray him now as an elemental force of nature, now as one living precariously by force majeure alone – and recognition of the constitutional enormity of what had occurred, sharpened by a picture of the dignity of the monarch he had usurped.
    Twentieth-century criticism has subjected this poem to much analysis and commentary. Directly opposing conclusions have been drawn and Marvell’s politics continue to elicit powerful and contradictory critiques. A similar pattern of interpretation is found in relation to the other poems in the Marvell canon. Indeed, Marvell criticism has been punctuated by periodic expressions of dismay from the leading scholars in the field, decrying the lack of balance and judicious understanding in many attempts at interpretation. Rare is that finely adjusted, knowledgeable tact that has characterised the best criticism and been so scandalously absent from the worst. 7 One such scholar, John Carey, even went so far as to say: ‘The amount of Marvell criticism is growing rapidly, and there is more bad than good.’ 8 Long before the emergence of critical theories about the arbitrary signification of texts, Marvell critics were having a field day with interpretation. In one sense, of course, this is a tribute to the complexity of Marvell’s art, its refusal of definite closure around one clear meaning, its rich, ambiguous, polysemic texture. It is the prerogative of great art to leave the critic fumbling in its wake, even as we recognise the vital importance of informed criticism in helping to understand texts. And the texts, where Marvell is concerned, are fraught with the possibility of error. Again and again, critics have sought to reduce the poems to philosophical schema or to identify them too closely with the political circumstances of the time (this ‘represents’ the state of the Church of England; that ‘is’ the Battle of Marston Moor). The truest readings of the poetry are those which are sensitive to the strangeness of Marvell’s genius: its delicate equipoise, held between the sensual and the abstract, its refusal to treat experience too tidily, the uncanny tremor of implication that makes the poems’ lucid surfaces shimmer with a sense of something undefined and undefinable just beneath. There may have been political reasons for this. Eliot’s ‘lukewarm partisan’ was not smugly detached from the contemporary political mayhem. In less than a decade he would be sitting on the benches of the House of Commons and he would remain an MP until his death. But it may have been that he saw the function of the artist at a time of revolutionary change as being not a war artist or propagandist but a witness to the true, inner nature of the conflict.
    His hesitations, his attention to nuance, his willingness to reflect both sides, his holding of