Andrew Marvell stands at the junction of literature and history, a consummate poet who latterly became a prose writer of stunning virtuosity and forthrightness. His polemics touched upon every political and ecclesiastical crux of the Restoration era. A member of parliament for Hull and a client of aristocrats who were at odds with Anglican Royalism, he encapsulates sensibilities that were at once Puritan and proto-Whig. His Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–3) brilliantly skewered the persecutory Samuel Parker; his Mr Smirke; or, the Divine in Mode (1676) burlesqued the rising clergyman Fancis Turner, while its appendix, A Short Historical Essay on General Councils, exemplified the partisan weaponizing of the history of the early church. His Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677) was a clarion call of the emerging Whig movement, famed for its opening assertion that ‘there has now for divers years, a design been carried on, to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny’; while his (now obscure) Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse (1678) delved into the crisis of Protestant soteriology and the dilemmas of Calvinism. Marvell's career throws a bridge between the Revolutions of 1648 and 1688. During the Interregnum he served alongside John Milton in the task of vindicating the Commonwealth; in his last years (he died in 1678), his confidant was his nephew, William Popple, who would become an intimate of John Locke and translator into English of Locke's Epistola de tolerantia. To examine Marvell's adversaries, and his responses to them, is to exhume not only the substance of civil and religious contention during the 1670s but also their manner and form, their rhetorical and performative character. We may capture the latter aspect by reference to a single trope. Marvell took from the second duke of Buckingham's play The Rehearsal (1672) the character of ‘Draw-can-Sir’, a brawling buffoon, and applied it to Parker, thereby popularizing the figure of the swaggering, bullying authorial swordsman. The phrase caught on. One of the critics of the supreme Tory pamphleteer Roger L’Estrange called him a ‘Draw-can-Sir’. By 1698 a versifier could casually refer to a ‘Draw-can-Sir’ as a ‘fighting coward and a Tory’. Locke surely had such allusions in mind when, in the Second Treatise of Government, he called the defenders of absolute monarchy ‘arrant Draw-can-Sirs’.