Andrew Marvell and Paul Best: New Light on Marvell’s Links to Non-Trinitarians

Opening paragraph:Scholars have long been aware of connections between the poet Andrew Marvell (1621–78), his father, the Reverend Andrew Marvell (1584–1641), and the branch of non-Trinitarianism known as Socinianism. Marvell the poet was accused in print in the 1670s of holding Socinian beliefs, and the existence in his father’s manuscript sermon book (Hull History Centre, C DIAM/1) of a near complete English translation of the Socinian text, the Racovian Catechism, gives some credence to these accusations. However, it remains a mystery how Marvell Senior could have come by this copy—‘the first known English translation extant’, Nicholas von Maltzahn writes—of a Latin catechism considered so inflammatory that it was outlawed across Europe, with printed copies of the Racovian Catechism later burnt in England by order of parliament in 1652. The English Socinian, Paul Best, was active in East Yorkshire at intervals throughout the 1620s to 1640s and has been suggested as a possible source for the manuscript catechism in C DIAM/1. However, as Marvell’s biographer, Nigel Smith, writes, ‘the link with Best cannot at present be definitively confirmed’. New evidence of Best’s links with the Marvells has now come to light to help confirm these connections, in the form of a previously overlooked reference to Best’s Mysteries Discovered (1647) in a booklist bound into C DIAM/1. The reference not only helps widen our awareness of the Marvells’ interests in Socinianism. The fact that Mysteries Discovered was published in July 1647, six years after Marvell Senior’s death in January 1641, also raises new questions about who could have compiled the booklist in C DIAM/1. In what follows, I compare the hand in the booklist with exemplars of the poet Andrew Marvell’s handwriting from the mid-seventeenth century, and I argue on this basis that the booklist’s compiler was most likely to be the poet Marvell himself.