SOURCE: "Cromwell as Machiavellian Prince in Marvell's An Horatian Ode," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XXI, No. 1, January-March, 1960, pp. 1-17.

First I ought to say that this essay will not be a study of the history of Marvell's political opinions, nor will I attempt to find more consistency in them than they will bear. His elegy on Lord Francis Villiers, the poem to Lovelace, the poems on the death of Hastings and on the death of Tom May, all furnish evidence of Royalist sentiment. The three poems on Cromwell furnish equal evidence of Puritan sentiment. Even if all the problems of dating and attribution of Marvell's poetic corpus could be solved, we would still be faced with understanding the transformations of an almost frighteningly complex mind, one that, as we know from his poetry, is capable of holding in consciousness simultaneously both the playful and serious implications of an analogy, and of surveying experience from multiple perspectives without trying to reduce them to one another. He is a master of the representation of those ranges of experience which are heterogeneous, of a poetry of transformations, each metamorphosis corresponding to a transformation of consciousness. I suspect that even if we knew what went on at various times in Marvell's life, the actual shifts in mood, feeling, and attitude in his unrecorded consciousness, we would still be left with as much of an enigma as confronts the Dante scholar who tries to show a consistent development from the Vita Nuova to the Paradiso.

The "Horatian Ode" does not give a simple or a ready answer to the question, What did Marvell think of Cromwell when he wrote this poem? Mr. Cleanth Brooks in a well-known essay surveyed various answers and furnished a tentative one of his own. If Pierre Legouis finds an utter impartiality toward both Cromwell and Charles, and Margoliouth a divided sympathy but with a genuine preference for Cromwell as an ideal civic ruler, Mr. Brooks concludes his analysis of the poem with the following summation: "These [ i.e., contrasting or contradictory] implications enrich and qualify an insight into Cromwell which is as heavily freighted with admiration as it is with great condemnation. But the admiration and condemnation do not cancel each other. They define each other; and because there is responsible definition, they reinforce each other."¹

I do not disagree with this view of the poem insofar as I too discover in it a double perspective on the events it imagines and interprets for us. Yet I think that the tension in the poem has far less to do with conflict of feeling in the poet (something difficult if not impossible to determine) than with the poet's deliberately maintained intellectual attitude to historical and political events which transcends questions of personal commitment and reveals his full awareness of the ethically irrational and problematic character of human experience.

I believe that fresh light is thrown on the dynamic structure of this poem when considered from the standpoint of Machiavellian political theory, for the "Horatian Ode" is the only literary work of the English Renaissance which is faithful to the authentic Machiavellian vision in all of its antinomies, courage, and complexity. And I would stress the word 'vision,' for the tensions and paradoxes of the "Horatian Ode" and The Prince stem not from ambiguity of feeling but from inclusiveness of intellectual insight, from fidelity to all relevant experience whether it can be neatly packaged or not. In neither work are we in a Christian universe; but if God is not present, neither is Satan, for both works move in a realm beyond those antitheses as tradition, at least, defined them. This does not mean that either work is amoral, any more than Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents or, for that matter, Montaigne's Essays. It simply means that traditional ethics and morality cannot interpret the whole of experience, that no one set of principles of identical ethical content can be applied to all of the disparate activities of life, commercial, military, political, or erotic.

Before defending and amplifying this perspective on the "Horatian Ode," let us turn to Machiavelli and briefly consider his achievement in The Prince and some of its leading general concepts.²

In that momentous work generalizations on statecraft and political theory are deduced from historical and contemporary instances of actual political behavior, with special attention to the intention of the agent, his qualities of mind and temper, and the results achieved by the actions he takes. To say that Machiavelli first treated politics as an autonomous activity is true enough, but it is not the whole truth.³ It implies a cool, descriptive, technical approach to the subject which any intensive reading of Machiavelli simply does not bear out. We might argue that such a technical description of politics was Machiavelli's intention but that his own passionate convictions on political and social values impeded its fulfillment, and this statement too would contain a partial truth. Nevertheless, it is perhaps more useful to say that Machiavelli does not give up all normative judgments but works from the perspective of the ethical irrationality of the world and of the enormous gulf between conscious intention and final achievement.

He most certainly abandons the ethic of ultimate or intended values but he never entirely abandons the ethic of responsibility. To say that man is responsible for the results of his actions whatever his conscious intent, even if that is for power, is surely not to escape from all normative judgment whatever. To imply that order imposed by a tyrant is better than a condition of bellum omnium contra omnes is, no matter what we may think of such an alternative, to make some decision concerning the better and the worse, and involves accepting the fact that force is not merely necessary to a political order but is essential to it, an essential element in the very definition of a state.

The ruler of Il Principe (a book primarily intended for new rulers favored by ability and chance, men in the process of building a state) is not a national hero leading a nation; for the nation—in the modern sense of a people having a common culture, mythology, and mystique—did not exist. Nor is he an anointed king of ancient lineage, a priest-king invested with supernatural authority, nor an armed religious prophet energizing his warriors with a sense of divine mission. He is simply a force. Autonomous in his lack of all the ideological and mythic apparatus which time and events give to many rulers, he is able to grasp the autonomous moment of political action. This is possible because he lives in the first autonomous state of modern times where all the traditional devices for the legitimizing of power had disappeared and only power itself remained.

He is indeed, at least for the imagination, as Burckhardt brilliantly maintained in his classic Renaissance in Italy, an artist who treats the individuals in his control with absolute authority, as if they were the words of a poem, capable of being shifted around to their proper places or even of being erased. Or perhaps his subjects are like the building blocks of a great edifice, capable of being cut and shaped to fit with one another. If medieval political theory sometimes left all historical explanation in the hands of a God who controlled everything, Machiavelli seems to have left his successful ruler in Il Principe with the power to manipulate events to an extraordinary degree. Sometimes Machiavelli's state seems just too plastic, too artificial, and his artist-ruler just too dexterous, too arbitrary, to be real.⁴ But in spite of this appearance Machiavelli knew better for, even when the laws of political physics are obeyed to the letter and in exemplary fashion, as they were by Cesare Borgia, a man of true virtù and 'prudence,' an extraordinarily harsh fortune may intervene and his achievement may crumble.⁵Virtù thus stands in polar opposition to fortuna. The harsh demands of concrete reality, what Machiavelli calls necessity (necessità), demand the immediate and swift exercise of virtù, but this very swiftness of necessitated action insures the operation of chance; there is never enough time to weigh, or even the possibility of weighing, all the alternatives. Virtù and fortuna divide world between them half and half, although the boundary between them is not absolutely fixed. One may prepare for the onslaughts of fortune by the exercise of virtu. If she is favorable, you lose nothing; if she is unfavorable, you may still be able to overcome her, at least in part.⁶

It is clear that Machiavelli's concepts are not metaphysical terms nor are they capable of being rigorously defined. They are poetic creations, like Lucretius' Venus and Mars or Freud's Eros and Thanatos, a way of talking about a whole dimension of human experience which would otherwise not be conceivable, for it would dissolve into many particulars, some of them inconsistent with one another.

If we try to sum up the originality and greatness of Machiavelli we will find it in two great perspectives from which he surveyed the world of politics and history, two points of view which also underlie Marvell's vision of Cromwell in the "Horatian Ode." The first is the recognition of the ethical irrationality of the world, the awareness of the fact that the same set of rules with exactly the same ethical content cannot govern all the activities of life. Men therefore live in a tragic universe where all choices entail some losses and where any action can never be au fond wholly unambiguous. The second principle derives from his awareness of the complex and heterogeneous relation which obtains between conscious intent and actual result achieved. This is surely familiar to us all as one of the central themes of literature, one which lies at the heart of both the tragic and the comic visions of life. What Machiavelli did was to transfer this perspective to the social and political realm, and this is precisely what Marvell did in the "Ode." It follows from both of these principles that political behavior cannot be judged entirely on the same principles which govern personal behavior, and that a man with the best intentions in the world cannot escape responsibility for a catastrophe which he engenders.⁷

Let us now turn to Marvell and apply what we have learned of Machiavelli to his "Horatian Ode."

The opening of the "Horatian Ode," as Margoliouth discovered, seems to portray Cromwell as a type of Caesar, Caesar as we find him in Lucan's Pharsalia, the young, ambitious, dynamic man of action who crashes like lightning through the opposition of both his party and of the enemy to the position of undisputed leadership.⁸ Restless for glory, 'forward' to 'appear,' he forsakes the arts of the Muses practiced in retirement and enters precipitously and successfully upon the life of action.

It is important to observe that Marvell begins the poem, not with Cromwell himself, but with a description of the nature of the times, the 'occasion.' Both Machiavelli and Marvell use the word to mean the particular circumstances and opportunities which condition a particular political action. They are not times when a young man of virtù who would make a name for himself can do so through the study of letters, the traditional vehicle for the acquisition of fame and glory in times of peace. The times, on the contrary, are troubled and warlike. Disorder reigns, and Cromwell, restless and ambitious, could not rest content with the arts of peace precisely because they are now inglorious. Both his restlessness, his need to engage in the activity appropriate to the times, and the urging of his 'active Star,' the sheer physical, cosmic power which seeks expression through him, marks him as the true Machiavellian man of virtù. He has fortune—here identified with the astrological powers which govern the processes of nature—and he has ability, and the external urgings of his fate are really aspects of one condition. His 'Star' is active in that its influence urges him, while he in turn urges it by grasping actively at the opportunity and power it offers.

The emphasis on youth and rapidity of action in these lines is striking and, in the context, suggests the concluding thoughts of the famous twenty-fifth chapter of Machiavelli's Il Principe:

I conclude then that since fortune varies and men remain obstinately fixed in their ways, men will succeed only so long as their ways coincide with those of fortune, but whenever these differ, then they are unsuccessful. In general, I think that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, for fortune is a woman, and it is necessary if you wish to master her, to strike and beat her; and you will see that she lets herself be vanquished more easily by the bold than by those who proceed more slowly and coldly. And therefore she is always a friend to the young, because they are less cautious, more fierce, and master her with greater audacity.

Cromwell's impetuosity, the nature of the times, the very sense of urgency in the rush of the lines, all indicate that he is the child of fortune. Nevertheless, like the successful child of fortune, he does not rely on fortune alone, for he would then seriously risk destruction, but exercises his own 'courage high,' his own virtù, in conjunction with it. The element of fortune as a favorable, natural, physical power, is again alluded to in the image of Cromwell as a three-pronged bolt of lightning smashing through the cloud in which it was born, at once the birth-portent and the birth itself, simultaneously overcoming and reconciling all the opposition in his own party, a feat more difficult than merely opposing an enemy.

Thus Marvell wishes us to realize that Cromwell's ability is not merely military and destructive but also political and creative. He further suggests, by making Cromwell himself an omen of the portent of power and ability he embodies, that Cromwell is no passive instrument of fortune but so active and 'virtuous' an agent that he becomes the fortune and the fate of others.

Marvell then continues with the effect of the Cromwellian lightning, which smashed palaces and temples, and finally struck 'Caesar's head.'

The allusion to both Cromwell and Charles I as 'Caesar,' the first indirect and revealed through the imagery of Pharsalia, the other explicit, has been puzzling to some readers of the poem, and the thesis that the poem is a poem of great personal conflict rests in part upon this identification of both Charles I and Cromwell as 'Caesar.' Yet as any student of Roman history knows, the name, after Julius himself, was no more a proper name than 'Kaiser' or 'Tsar.' Much more relevant, however, is the fact that Marvell, like Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and other historians of the Renaissance, uses historical allusions and events in a special way. Cromwell is like the Caesar who won a civil war, Charles I like the Caesar who was assassinated. This mode of exemplarism is no more strange than the fact that, in the fourteenth chapter of Machiavelli's Prince, Caesar is offered to rulers as a model to be studied along with Alexander, while in the tenth chapter of the first book of the Discourses he is execrated as the founder of a tyranny. Indeed, Machiavelli there reproduces all of the classic arguments in favor of tyrannicide. This is not really a contradiction but a consequence of the practice of reading history in order to seek particular examples from which to derive the norms of behavior for particular occasions. The life of one man can obviously afford many useful as well as useless exempla, many praiseworthy as well as damnable actions. Thus Cromwell is like Caesar in his brilliant success, in his ability to bring order to a nation torn by civil war. In these respects, he is Caesar at that moment when he rose to supreme power in the state. Charles I is like a Caesar at the moment of his destruction.

An analogous instance from Dante's Divine Comedy will make the exemplar method still more apparent. On the ledge of sloth in Purgatory, Caesar is offered as an example of the virtue of zeal, as a goad to virtue; "Caesar, to conquer Lerica, thrust at Marseilles and made haste for Spain." On the ledge where lust is purged Dante tells us that the sodomites being punished there "offended in that for which Caesar heard himself called Regina in a triumph."⁹ Thus Caesar is the example of both a vice and a virtue, and neither use of him cancels the other.

The next two lines have been used to argue that the poem has a religious character and presumably advocates a puzzled submission to the inscrutable will of God:¹⁰

'Tis madness to resist or blame
The force of angry Heavens flame:

It seems to me, however, that the context of this poem does not give us leave to interpret Heaven in too 'pious' a sense. Cromwell is the flame of heaven, a lightning bolt born in a cloud, but his success is also the work of fate (line 37), nature (41), and fortune (113). I would suggest that these are all mutually convertible terms. Although Marvell does consider the heavens as instruments of providence in 'The First Anniversary,' the universe of the "Horatian Ode" lacks the providential dimension in any religious sense. The angry heavens of the poem are more like those which rage above the head of King Lear. The difficulty here lies in the fact that the stars and their influence were considered at times to be in part the instruments of providence and at other times to be entirely the instruments of nature, fortune, and fate. Dante, for example, quite bluntly identifies fortune and celestial influence with the workings of a wise providence (Inf. VII). Machiavelli, equally bluntly, does not. While I cannot absolutely prove that Marvell does not mean Christian providence by 'heavens,' the universe of the poem is so exactly that of Machiavelli that the odds seem to me all against our reading a religious dimension into the poem. Indeed, it is precisely the physical, natural fatedness of Cromwell's forceful success that precludes both resistance and blame, a theme which culminates in the image of Cromwell filling a power vacuum.

The next lines delineate Cromwell in terms of another historical type, this time Cincinnatus, the type of old Roman republican integrity of character who left the farm he worked with his own hands to deliver Rome from the Aequians and, after ruling for sixteen days as dictator, returned to his farm. This analogy too suggests a Machiavellian context, his belief that when the state had reached a particularly grave level of disorder only a single individual of high virtù could restore it.¹¹

The covert allusion to Cincinnatus might conceivably be read as a covert hope that Cromwell would soon retire to his estate after settling things, and it is of course true that Cromwell led the country in the name of an impersonal state or government, whatever the realities of his rule were in 1650 or later. However, I think that Marvell here uses an historical parallel in the standard Machiavellian way, for a particular act. Cromwell's emergence into public life, like that of Cincinnatus, is a spectacular manifestation of a virtù which displays itself at the right time, for he

'Industrious valour' is the active ability and skill—an excellent rendering of one of the important meanings of virtù—by which restless Cromwell urges his propitious fortune or 'active Star.' Like the artist-ruler of Machiavelli he creates a new state in very little time out of the old state which was the work of ages. The following lines are the pinnacle of the Machiavellian vision of Cromwell:

Fortune conquers justice, but it is a justice which is purely abstract, without the force to concretize itself. It is therefore empty and yields to the virtù, the martial valor of Cromwell, who, be it noted, does not destroy effective justice but only that impotent justice which pleaded for the Stuart's 'legitimate' rights to rule. If the ruler can't rule he leaves a vacuum which is immediately filled by a capable successor, a law of politics as binding as the law of nature. Beyond all the trappings of tradition lies the irreducible fact of political power, its dynamic and its exercise.

Cromwell not only possesses the martial virtù of a successful new prince or usurper, but he possesses the requisite cunning. Marvell accepts as fact the story, quite certainly unfounded, that Cromwell connived at Charles' escape from Hampton Court to Carisbrook in November 1647 in order to trap him and, eventually, to execute him.¹²

It is, as I have tried to indicate, by no means insignificant that the imagery of Cromwell's assumption of power is physical. The King's impotence and Cromwell's power are facts of the natural order. There is for Marvell as for Machiavelli a 'physics' of politics. Nature in its rôle as fortuna brings about the revolution as blindly as it fills the vacuum it 'abhors.' This event is outside ethics as the dynamics of political force is outside ethics. Marvell is witness to the moment of force in political activity, has seen the coercive element that underlies all effective rights, and has learned, as did Lear, that much that appears to be nature is in fact convention, and that nature will reassert itself.

This phase of the poem corresponds to the Machiavellian concept of occasione, half-way between fortuna and virtù. This 'opportunity' is more than the favorable operation of fate or fortune when it blindly and accidentally presents the man of virtù with his opportunity. Just as fate or fortune overcomes the ancient rights and presents Cromwell with the occasione, so Cromwell shows his virtù by the cunning with which he purportedly trapped the King.

If Cromwell is in part the creature of fortune so too is Charles, but negatively. The 'Royal Actor' is an actor precisely because he lacks the force to assert his right, lacks virtù, and so becomes the unhappy instrument of the malignant side of the same fortune whose benign aspect Cromwell experienced. Charles I is an actor in that he has only the appearance of a King, but he is a tragic actor because his fated retribution is out of proportion to his guilt. The imagery of the stage is here especially interesting and revealing, and not merely because of the obvious and ancient stoic metaphor for life and history as a drama. Rather, it serves to indicate the particular 'aesthetic' and moral distance from which Marvell views the events of history. They occur on another plane according to a sense of 'justice' which is not ours.

How persistent this perspective on public life and history is with Marvell can be seen from his return to the imagery of the tragic stage at the very beginning of his poem on the death of Oliver Cromwell. There he explains that the 'spectators,' the people, esteem a horrid death a glorious one and, exactly like the audience at a play, actually want the 'Prince' to be slain. It is not merely appropriate but actually fitting for a martial prince so to die, a right which fortune should not deny him. But, alas, Cromwell died in bed precisely because his virtù was so great, his valor and clemency so enormous, that fortune was, in effect, able to find no one to give him a glorious and fitting closing scene since he had eradicated his enemies and his friends loved him too much.

The Machiavellian moment in the last poem on Cromwell is there subsumed into a providential conception of his rôle as Davidic King, as instrument of the God of the Bible and history. What is significant here for our understanding of the "Horatian Ode" is Marveil's sense of the typological figure for a valorous prince, his attempt to explain why Cromwell did not follow out some archetypal pattern appropriate to him. It would almost seem as if Marvell lamented the lack of opportunity to match for Cromwell his own magnificent lines upon the death of Charles I in the "Horatian Ode":

These lines are the culmination of the dramatic and tragic dimension of Marvell's political vision, the moment of pity for the King's benign conscious intent, and the moment of terror for the terrible and incommensurable result he achieved. Marvell is faithful to the necessity of what is and must be without trying to rationalize away the pain, suffering, and personal injustice involved. Charles' greatness, indeed, lies in his submission to his fortune, the nobility with which he accepts his fate. The drama of the Civil War is played out on a public stage with different laws than those which regulate ordinary life, laws which are intuitively known and understood by the great figures who act out their parts in the great drama. Cromwell accepts his fortune in leaving retirement to become a 'Prince' and Charles accepts his fate on the scaffold. What they are as private individuals is incommensurable with their public selves and their historical destinies. This they seem to understand and accept even if we, as spectators, find a powerful tension in that incommensurability.

The good ruler is not identical with the good private citizen, the ideal ethical agent. The catalogue of his virtues cannot correspond part for part with that of the good retired private man. This was Machiavelli's answer to the question which had been posed in earlier writings and answered in the affirmative, whether the good ruler and the good man were identical.¹³

Marvell then interprets the significance of the regicide by alluding to an event recorded by Pliny. The diggers of the foundations of the ancient Roman Capitol found the head of a man while excavating. This at first frightened them, but it was later correctly interpreted as a good omen for the state. Analogously, the bloody head of Charles I frightened the architects of the new state at first, but in that same frightening symbol the state found the beginning of a fortunate future. Like Machiavelli, Marvell here sees history in terms of the polarities Aristotle found in nature: 'generation and corruption.' The head which the Romans found, and the bloody head which the Puritan party made, converge into one gory symbol of the interdependence of creation and destruction. Everything decays when it has reached its apogee and there can be no creation without the decay of something else. The death of Charles I was the completion of his already actual death as a king. This concept, so morally acceptable when applied to the natural order, becomes shocking in the political order. Nevertheless, neither Machiavelli nor Marvell is timid on this score. Good and evil eternally succeed each other, but even more, they are here, in a sense, the cause of each other.¹⁴

The immediate consequence of the successful revolution is the conquest of the Irish, which Cromwell proved could be accomplished in a year by "one Man … That does both act and know." Marvell then proceeds to a description of the great prince as Machiavelli defined him in the Discorsi (I, 10), the man who seizes power in order to found a republic and not a tyranny, who is self-circumscribed by law and who endeavors to institute rule by law. Cromwell begins in the "Horatian Ode" as the Prince of Machiavelli's Prince and ends as the Prince of Machiavelli's Discorsi. And this is exactly what Machiavelli hoped such a man as he required for the salvation of Italy would do. Cromwell comes in this poem not as the despoiler of the state but as its reformer, not by authority of ancient rights but by his fortune and virtue as a creative political agent, as one who has effective imperium or stato over men, an artist who seeks the true and lasting glory which comes to the good prince who could have been a tyrant but refrains from acting as one:

Cromwell forgoes his fame, the Renaissance reward for great rulers replacing the promise of eternal glory in heaven which the medieval theorists saw as recompense, and surrenders all to Parliament. Indeed, he is like a falcon, that prince of trained birds who does not wantonly kill, but only at the bidding of the falconer, the bird who does the will of another:

The death of the king was, as Machiavelli would have put it, of necessità, by which, however, he does not mean physically necessitated. The kind of necessity in question occurs, for example, when a state simply has to undertake a course of action, no matter how risky or immoral, because any other would lead to its own destruction.¹⁵ Like Machiavelli's good prince, however, he performs all necessary cruelties once and keeps them to a minimum, exchanging such measures for those useful to his subjects.¹⁶ The moment of gross unethical necessity is largely confined or perhaps fully revealed in the founding of a new state. Once the state exists as a secure unit of force, as a regime, then the good prince submits to law. There is really far less conflict between the statecraft of The Prince and the Discorsi than there appeared to be to Taine, for example. Political idealism cannot exist unless the state is a really functioning unit with its substratum of power secured. The state as regime demands something else than the state which is coming into being as a unit of force, for the conditions are different and the 'times' are not the same, although in neither case will politics and morals ever exactly coincide.

Cromwell's success and his submission to law are signs of the future glory of the 'Isle.' He will be, incongruously enough, Caesar to Gaul and Hannibal to Italy (97-102). Again Marvell uses historical examples in the characteristic Renaissance way without any attempt at total integration of those exemplars. Not only do France and Italy, the seat of the Papacy, fear Cromwell but Scotland will shrink from the steadfast virtù, the 'Valour sad.'

The poem closes with an exhortation to Cromwell, the child of martial valor and of fortune, to remain armed and to maintain his power, as he must, by those same arts with which he won it.

It is important to observe here that although Cromwell must be alert to crush his enemies his sword is also 'moral' in that its cross-hilt can avert the spirits of evil. The exhortation is really one to continue in the rôle of the good prince of the Discorsi who seizes and maintains power, but who also submits to law and fights against evil.

The complexity of Marvell's vision and the tensions in the poem are those we feel in the work of Machiavelli. They result from a perspective on politics as an activity which cannot be entirely subsumed in the categories of traditional ethics. In the teleological ethics of Aristotle and of Christianity there are some acts which are just wrong and no goal whatever can give anyone leave to commit them. Machiavelli denied that this was true of political activity, without saying—and this is most important—that white was black and black white. He simply says that the safety of the state, the maintenance of the minimum order and peace necessary for civilized life within the state, may demand that the ruler commit acts which are evil from the strictly moral point of view. Further, there is never any course of action open to a ruler that is always safe or, we might add, always moral. All policies are doubtful, all ambiguous.

Finally, the question becomes basically: Are there particular circumstances in the history of states when, whether in external or internal policy, the correct course of action is not a good one from the moral point of view? If we can celebrate revolutions, acknowledge the necessity of a civil war, or reluctantly agree that some executions are necessary, some assassinations desirable, then we must agree with the basic perspective of Machiavelli whether or not we follow him elsewhere.

In the last analysis, man is moral but society is not. Any group is such for particular ends, and the only ethically unambiguous sphere is that of individual morality. This is the vision which is expressed in the "Horatian Ode." The poem does not express unresolved personal feeling any more than Oedipus Rex expresses an unresolved personal feeling of Sophocles about whether or not to side with Oedipus or with Fate. We are in a realm analogous to that of tragedy where we are compelled to recognize that the judgments concerning justice and injustice, good or evil, that we employ in our daily life cannot be easily or unambiguously applied when the context in which we use them is no longer the living room, but the state, the world, or the universe.

This is the perspective from which Marvell regards the central events of the Great Rebellion. Cromwell is the embodiment of two of the major dimensions of the Machiavellian new ruler, the man of virtù who creates a state from chaos, the central figure of Il Principe, and the legally self-binding new ruler of the Discorsi, who, having consolidated his power tries to establish the rule of good laws and good customs enforced by good arms. It would seem that the 'Prince' for whose arrival Machiavelli yearned, who, like his Moses, would be a new prince in a new state with new laws, finally arrived on the stage of history, but on the English and not the Italian stage. He comes fulfilling the prophecy of that greatest of unarmed prophets, Machiavelli himself, as if in fulfillment of the archetypal model Machiavelli had created. It seems to me that some of the awe and excitement the "Horatian Ode" communicates flows from Marvell's shock at finding this theoretical figure fulfilled in reality, not in distant Italy, but in his own time and country.

Notes

¹ Cleanth Brooks, "Literary Criticism," in English Institute Essays, 1946 (New York, 1947), 127-158. Brooks' comments on other critics are on 132-4, the citation on 153. I take Mr. Brooks' paper as my point of departure since he raised the issues which have since been debated in the interpretation of the "Horatian Ode." Mr. Douglas Bush answered him in "Marvell's 'Horatian Ode'" (Sewanee Review LX [1952], 363-376, esp. 364), contending that Brooks distorts the poem primarily because he forces the view that Marvell could not really have admired Cromwell. Instead, Bush agrees with M. C. Bradbrook and M. G. Lloyd Thomas (Andrew Marvell [Cambridge, 1940], 73-76) on a providential interpretation of the poem. Ruth Wallerstein agrees in general with Brooks in so far as she feels that the "Horatian Ode" expresses "an unresolved conflict of feeling." She recognizes a "Machiavellian" atmosphere to the poem but neglects to interpret it in terms of the authentic Machiavellism in the poem (Studies in Seventeenth Century Poetic [Madison, Wisconsin, 1950], 278-9). More recently James F. Carens in "Andrew Marvell's Cromwell Poems" (Bucknell Review VII [1957], 41-70) has surveyed the interpretations of the Cromwell poems, concentrating on the Anniversary. He has given us a very well balanced interpretation of that poem based on a skillful reading of the text and some use of seventeenth-century political and religious doctrine. Recently, L. W. Hyman maintained ("Politics and Poetry in Andrew Marvell," PMLA LXXIII [1958], 475-479) that the "Horatian Ode" rests on a distinction between the government that ought to be (Charles') and the government which had to be (Cromwell's). Unless this is fully amplified and qualified, the statement reduces the tension in the poem to a rather simple antithesis between an ineffective right on the one hand, and an efficient might on the other, plus a pious wish that the latter will eventually be moralized. It is the task of this paper to show that Marvell's viewpoint is substantially richer that that.

² Out of the vast Machiavelli literature three recent books are fundamental: the beautiful biography by Roberto Ridolfi, Vita di Niccolò Machiavelli (2nd ed., Rome, 1954), is the most just estimate of the character and temper of Machiavelli; Gennaro Sasso's Niccolò Machiavelli: storia del suo pensiero politico (Naples, 1958) is a masterly treatment of the evolution of Machiavelli's political thought, and Federico Chabod's studies collected in an English version under the title Machiavelli and the Renaissance, trans. David Moore (London, 1958), is indispensable for the cultural background and for the classic analysis of the method, style, and thought of Machiavelli. This last work also contains a splendid bibliography of Machiavelli and the Renaissance. I only indicate here some of the periodical literature and essays that I have found especially valuable. L. A. Burd's classic essay on "Machiavelli" in the Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I, The Renaissance, 190-218, is still very much worth reading. Ernst Cassirer's two chapters (10, 11) on Machiavelli in The Myth of the State are very suggestive and stress the innovative side of Machiavelli's work [cf. E. Cassirer, op. cit. (New York, 1955), 144-173, reprinted from edition of 1946, New Haven, Conn.]. Of recent more specialized studies, the essays of Felix Gilbert and J. H. Hexter are very illuminating on special questions. Of Gilbert's work I have drawn heavily on his "Machiavelli and Guicciardini," Journal of the Warburg Institute II (1938), 263-266; "The Humanist Concept of the Prince and 'The Prince' of Machiavelli," Journal of Modem History XI (1939), 449-83; "Bernardo Rucellai and the 'Orti Oricellari': A Study on the Origins of Modern Political Thought," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XII (1949), 101-131 "The Concept of Nationalism in Machiavelli's 'Prince'," Studies in the Renaissance I (1954), 38-48. Of Hexter's studies I have drawn on "'Il principe' and 'Lo stato',"Studies in the Renaissance IV (1957), 113-138.

³ Cf. H. Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (London, 1940), 109, who points out how a doctrine of necessity which foreshadows Machiavelli had been used both by Aquinas and the apologists of Frederick the Second to justify the right of a political community to self-assertion. In the Middle Ages this doctrine seems to be current as early as the papacy of Gregory VII, at least in regard to the breaking of positive law.

⁴ It cannot be stressed too much that Machiavelli understood the danger of absolute authority. His primary intent in politics was to find the means of assuring the stability of the state, an almost obsessive concern with him. He says more than once that a free government in a state with both good laws and customs is far more stable than absolute governments. Cf. Discorsi I, 35.

⁵ Cf. the illuminating remarks of Sasso, op. cit., 40 ff., on the lessons Machiavelli learned even from his first contact with Cesare on the factor of chance in all political action.

⁶ Cf. Il Principe, Ch. 25. On fortune see D. C. Allen, "Renaissance Remedies for Fortune: Marlowe and the 'Fortunati'," Studies in Philology XXXVIII (1941), 188-197; V'. Cioffari, "The Function of Fortune in Dante, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli," Italica XXIV (1947), 1-13. For fortune in antiquity see Kurt von Fritz, The Mixed Constitution in Antiquity: A Critical Analysis of Polybius' Political Ideas (New York, 1954), Appendix II, "Polybius' Concept of Tyche and the Problem of the Development of His Thought," 388-397. On virtù see the summary of various interpretations in L. J. Walker, The Discourses of Machiavelli (2 vols., London, 1950), I, 99 ff. Its precise meaning has led to considerable debate and disagreement. In the Machiavellian use of the word it is generally a dynamic and not an ethical concept. Among the most accurate translations, depending on context, are "efficiency," "valor," "technique," "ability to grasp the requisite course of action and act on it," "success," and even "devotion to the common good," the last the kind of meaning Livy sometimes gives the term. For a lucid and accurate outline of these and other Machiavellian key words, such as occasione, the opportunity or external circumstances for probably successful action, see Louis de Ville-fosse, Machiavel et nous (Paris, 1937), Appendix I, 191 ff.

⁷ See Max Weber's classic essay on the relations between ethics and politics, "Politics as a Vocation" in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edit. and trans H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), 77-128. On the relation between conscious intent and achieved result as a guiding principle in interpreting experience see Juergen Ruesch, M.D., Disturbed Communication (New York, 1957), 1 ff.

⁸The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1927), I, 237-238. A second edition of this masterly work was published in 1952. I cite, however, the text of Hugh MacDonald, The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), since it reproduces the unique copy of Marveil's Miscellaneous Poems (1681) containing the Cromwell poems.

⁹Pur. XVIII, 101-2 and XXVI, 76-8.

¹⁰ Cf. Wallerstein, op. cit., 281.

¹¹ Cf. Wallerstein, op. cit., 289, who does not, however, identify the notion with Machiavelli.

¹² The view that Cromwell lured Charles to Carisbrook in order to trap him was believed and seen not only by Marvell but also by others such as Flecknoe, Carrington, and the author, Henry Fletcher, of The Perfect Politician, as an example of the highest skill in statecraft. Cf. Robert S. Paul, The Lord Protector: Religion and Politics in the Life of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1955), 152-153.

¹³ Cf. the whole of Gilbert's article, "The Humanist Concept of the Prince." He also points out that, during the Renaissance, the idea came into being of the ruler or founder of the state as an inspired being who could freely shape the state itself. This developed into the concept of the ruler as a creative political agent as against the traditional view of the ruler as the head member of an objective moral order (esp.476). Minus any notion of divine inspiration this is certainly the view of Machiavelli and also seems to describe Cromwell as we find him in the "Horatian Ode."

¹⁴ Cf. Burd, op. cit., 204.

¹⁵ Cf. Walker, op. cit., I, 75.

¹⁶Il principe, Ch. 8, "Of Those who have Attained the Position of Prince by Villainy." Cf. also Ch. 17.