Review Article: William Dugdale, Historian

Abstract

Review Article: William Dugdale, Historian Christopher Dyer and Catherine Richardson (eds), William Dugdale, Historian, 1605-1686: His Life, his Writings and his County, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2009, pp. xvi + 248, h/b. £50.00, ISBN: 978-1-84383-443-4Andrew Marvell's great country-house poem of the early 1650s, 'Upon Appleton House', conjures a whole history of family and place. Dedicated to Lord General Thomas Fairfax, victorious leader of the Parliamentary armies in the Civil Wars, it contrives to celebrate his military prowess, passed down the line from his forebears, while applauding his retirement from public life, in the aftermath of regicide, to his modest North Yorkshire estate. The poem tells the backstory and ponders the future of the place. The very fabric of the house, stone-built from the ruins of a Cistercian Priory, embodies the process of dispossession and acquisition unleashed a century and more before by the Dissolution of the Monasteries from which so many landed families like the Fairfaxes benefited. Before that it was the scene in 1518 of a key episode in Fairfacean fortunes - here relished at some length - when the heiress Isabel Thwaites (beguiled by her guardian the Prioress into entering the cloister) was lawfully freed by force to marry her betrothed, William Fairfax of Seeton, through whom the property, redeemed from popish superstition, eventually descended to Marvell's hero.The gardens, too ('laid ... out in sport / In the just figure of a fort') salute family valour. But the regiments of flowers firing 'fragrant volleys' are timely reminders of what Britain was - 'garden of the world ere while' - before tragically planted with ordinance and sown with powder. The 'meads below', too, remain undesecrated, a living, working landscape of water-meadows, pastures, streams, woods and river. It is a prospect of 'pleasant acts', of shifting scenes pitched between play and earnest, of perplexing perspectives and magical transformations. A theatre, no less, of the elements, of earth, water, air and fire, where poet-tutor (Puck-like thaumaturge) and his pupil (an Astraean goddess-nymph) Mary, the Lord General's heir, act out the deep harmony between man and nature, person and place. Elsewhere all is 'negligently overthrown'; but this family estate, a bastion against Root and Branch upheaval, where the union of the Fairfax-Vere pedigrees is inscribed in the 'double wood of ancient stocks', stands intact and grounded. Here is 'paradise's only map'.In the early 1650s, however, the way ahead was shrouded in uncertainty; and Marvell's poem ends at nightfall withdrawing, with 'Let's in', to the safety of Appleton House. We must wait upon events as Fairfax (unlike restless Cromwell, who has no time for 'the inglorious arts of peace' in Marvell's counterpoint showpiece, 'An Horation Ode') wisely does; and like him, as the poet-prophet puts it, make destiny our choice. This is no more opting out of history, however, than Milton's 'They also serve': 'Let's in', offering sanctuary, is also (a typically Marvellian double entendre) charged with commitment and may well, come the hour, sound a call to action. In 1659-60 - even Marvell cannot have foreseen the moment - that call would come in the shape of General Monck's demarche, when Fairfax returned once more to public life, first at the head of an army and then as negotiator with the King in exile, to play a decisive part in the Restoration of the Monarchy. Back at Appleton House in the early 1650s surveying his patron's property, the poet seems, nonetheless, to be in the know, prefiguring (in general terms) Mary's union of 1657, across the old partisan divide, with the Cavalier George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham. Dynastic marriage and inheritance were central to that world, and the link between land and lineage more than ever vital to continuity and stability in a time shaken by civil war and sequestration. Appleton House estate, still intact, its lawful owner still in place, the soldier home from the wars, pursuing the arts of peace, is something to cherish and celebrate. …