For women, the process was an even more demanding and expensive one. The wife of a figure at court, or a great lady, dressed in her finery at all times in public, advertising her wealth and status by donning the most lavish attire that money could buy. This normally consisted of a gown made of silk or velvet, with a lengthy train and a petticoat underneath. The effect was then set off by braids and different linings, all of which made women look like beautiful, strutting peacocks. These various accoutrements could cost an obscene amount of money, sometimes running to hundreds of pounds for costumes for special occasions. Hair was generally an elaborate construction of frills, curls and extensions, and could take a couple of hours of preparation to give it the curled and bunched effect that is often seen in portraits.
Fashion accessories such as fans, purses and gloves were obligatory for ladies of quality, and often had symbolic connotations. A fan rapidly opened and closed, for instance, denoted sexual availability, while dropping one’s glove was often intended as a hint to one’s gallant that picking it up would be a precursor to later bedroom favours. Jewellery was hugely desirable and could cost the earth; Charles was said to have spent nearly £10,000, or £800,000 today, on a pair of diamond earrings, presumably for the rapacious Barbara. At a time when the average gentleman of quality was lucky to earn £500 a year, this was a staggeringly excessive sum.
To be beautiful was everything, and great pains were taken—and great expense expended—to look one’s best. Both sexes ladled on vast amounts of cosmetics and make-up, which consisted of a variety of bizarre substances that included everything from urine and extract of snail to white lead and rosewater. These were slathered all over faces, hands and any other exposed part, and then beauty spots made of velvet or leather were placed over any marks or blemishes. In this way, even those who had unsightly pox scars or boils could hold their own at court. Even as the plays of the time mocked fops and courtesans who spent huge sums and effort on beauty products, which could frequently melt under the heat of candlelight or sun, there was an ever-growing appetite for more expensive and elaborate ways of concealing one’s true identity. This could even lead to dying for one’s art. At least one great lady of the time perished of mercury poisoning, having used so much of the stuff that it killed her. Others suffered the misfortune of having their teeth turn black, resulting in another round of treatments and palliatives.
People took such time and pains to advertise themselves because they were, essentially, all actors on an elaborately created set, with the king as producer, director and leading man—with the occasional touch of diva thrown in. Charles’s easy-going nature did not conceal the fact that his court was a showy place where etiquette and a certain standard of manners prevailed at all times. Nobody was allowed to sit down in the king’s presence unless they were asked to, or to turn their back on him while leaving the room.*1 Conversation was intended to be light, witty, clever and suggestive, preferably all at once. Men and women were entirely conscious of their rank and standing in the social order, and in the perilous game of snakes and ladders that they played, it was as easy to lose royal favour as it was to gain it. Charles was like a bright but easily bored child, wanting to be entertained at all times and taking very badly to indolence or those who would get in the way of his fun.
The court was a place where everyone knew the part they had to play, and those who succeeded did so because they had learnt their script to perfection. Royal mistresses had to be beautiful, sexually adventurous, discreet and entirely lacking in jealousy or personal whims.† In return, they were lavishly rewarded, often making advantageous marriages to wealthy lords and retiring from court, rich and sated, in their mid-twenties. Courtiers and wits had to be funny, gallant and capable of drinking their body weight in alcohol, should they wish to keep up with the king’s desires. Charles’s carnal and culinary requirements soon became legendary; contemporary accounts of royal banquets make breathless reference to dozens of dishes ranging from larks and veal to macaroons and cheesecakes, all washed down with brandy, beer and even—a recent import—champagne (first found at court in the early 1660s, it is referred to as ‘brisk’, on account of the steady rise of the bubbles in a glass). Charles’s ironic nickname ‘Old Rowley’ probably alluded as much to his appetite for food and drink as it did to his sexual prowess. The actual Old Rowley was, fittingly, a racehorse. There is an enjoyable story that this nickname spawned a popular song of the day, revolving around Old Rowley’s lecherousness and bed-hopping. When Charles heard a maid at court singing the song, he was said to have smilingly advanced towards her, saying joyfully: ‘’Tis Old Rowley himself, madam.’
Even if the fleshy excess and gluttony seems off-putting, even revolting, to those who were not in the midst of the court, there can be little doubt that, after the drabness and bleakness of the Commonwealth, Charles brought fun and glamour back into people’s lives. The playhouses reopened, operating with a mixed repertoire of new, sexually charged comedies and revivals of Shakespeare and Jacobean plays, often in new versions by the fashionable writers of the age. The theatres could hold anything up to 800 predominantly male attendees, from nobles to servants, in such places as the Lincoln’s Inn Theatre, home to William Davenant’s Duke’s Company. They were illuminated by wax candles, and the scenery tended to be portable, to allow for rapid set changes. Tickets cost anything from one shilling for the ordinary visitors perched in the gallery or sitting on benches in the pit to four shillings for the gentlemen and ladies of fashion in their boxes, who were more interested in holding assignations and mocking their enemies than they were in watching the entertainment on stage. (Pepys was appalled at the ‘ordinary prentices and mean people’ who made up much of the audience.) Visual arts flourished, with painters such as Lely and Huysmans finding themselves wealthy men, swamped by commissions from those of means who wanted to be immortalized, often in classical or heroic guise. Corpulence, gout and blemishes were tactfully omitted.
It is possible, with some imaginative licence, to reconstruct the typical day of a man or woman at court in the early 1660s. Rising early at home, either with one’s husband or wife or, more daringly, with one’s lover, the first part of the morning was taken up with dressing, aided by maids and servants. Breakfast was hearty, consisting perhaps of mackerel, or a slice or two of cold beef, probably with the first glass of wine of the day. After this, it was time to begin social obligations at court. Either a sedan chair or a four or eight-horse coach (depending on ostentation and means) was the appropriate way of arriving at Whitehall, where the first priority was to head for the newly convened ‘drawing rooms’, an innovation imported by Queen Catherine, where another new import, tea, was consumed, gossip swapped about shenanigans and royal favour, and Charles flattered, were he present. Lunch, if taken, was similar to breakfast, and heavy on meat and fish.
In the afternoon, once make-up had been reapplied and a short walk taken in one of the nearby pleasure gardens or one of the great parks, Hyde or St James’s, there was some gaming with dice, often for excessive stakes of money. Barbara Castlemaine, for instance, once lost £25,000 (around £2 million today) in one sitting. Yet to lose a great deal of cash and do so with humour and fortitude would have been graceful and gained you royal favour and a measure of respect from the other hangers-on.
Eventually, as the evening drew in, there was either an event at court such as a great ball, or a grand feast—the king dined publicly at the Banqueting House on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, watched*2 by a carefully vetted selection of nobles and commoners, and the spectacle, as elsewhere in Europe, was regarded as a grand entertainment for the onlookers. This might have been preceded by a trip to the playhouse to plot scandal, or to don a mask and flirt outrageously with other men and women of quality or, even more excitingly, with those who were mere prostitutes, actresses or coachmen, which gave a sense of danger and unpredictability to the outcome. The night ended with drunkenness, often relieved by sex, whether in a grandly
comfortable bed or in the grubbier surroundings of the same park in which a turn might have been taken earlier. Then, mercifully, sleep beckoned and a few hours were caught before the whole performance began afresh the following day.
To many, this might seem wearyingly mechanical and repetitive, rather than fun. Certainly, the amount of effort involved in seeking such pleasure was monumental. However, the stakes were high, and those who managed to serve with glory found themselves with titles, property and an endless variety of sexual partners from among the highest in the land. Those who disappointed or showed a lack of willing were either embarrassingly cast out from court or, still worse, had their land and property taken from them and given to those who were apparently more deserving. It was not a constant or consistent time, but playing the game with style could see vast success bestowed upon the best players.
A poem that has often been ascribed to Rochester but which feels too sketchy and obvious to be taken seriously as a work of his, is a near-contemporary satiric account of the everyday goings-on of a rake and libertine. Entitled ‘Regime de Vivre’, it has an appealingly licentious energy to it:
I rise at eleven, I dine about two,
I get drunk before seven, and the next thing I do,
I send for my whore, when for fear of a clap,
I spend in her hand, and I spew in her lap;
Then we quarrel and scold, till I fall fast asleep,
When the bitch growing bold, to my pocket does creep.
Then slyly she leaves me, and to revenge the affront,
At once she bereaves me of money and cunt.
If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk,
What a coil do I make for the loss of my punk!
I storm and I roar, and I fall in a rage.
And missing my whore, I bugger my page.
Then crop-sick all morning I rail at my men,
And in bed I lie yawning till eleven again.
The poem was passed in manuscript form from courtier to courtier, accompanied by whispered gossip about who the writer was, with especial interest in its depiction of sodomy. Allusion to it was both scandalous and intended to amuse; casual bisexuality was rife at Whitehall, as it had been at Oxford, although its open propagation was still frowned on. The poem itself shows the reverse side of the lavish play-acting and scheming that dominated the court. The anonymous narrator is more interested in sex and alcohol than pretending to be a grand man of fashion, mindful of the prevalent venereal disease that most prostitutes carried, but easily roused to temper by alcohol and the casual opportunism of theft. Rochester’s oft-debated bisexuality has often been ascribed to fleeting references such as the one in ‘The Disabled Debauchee’: ‘And the best kiss was the deciding lot/ Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy.’ Whether or not Rochester was the writer or subject of ‘Regime de Vivre’, the poor defenceless page is all too representative a victim of many an alcohol-fuelled debauch.
It is more tempting to see the hilariously amoral day described as a common experience in the lives of many young, bored men on the fringes of court and society life, who were not expected to put in daily appearances at the tea salons and gaming tables. They were more likely to spend their evenings drinking cheap, strong red wine at such popular taverns as The Cock—fittingly named—in Covent Garden, where they would sup on meat and pea soup before drunkenly disporting themselves, either with one of the fifteen hundred or so whores who thronged the streets of Restoration London, or in even more spectacularly public fashion.
Shortly before Rochester returned to court, there had been some very bad business involving the young playwright Charles Sedley. Sedley had been in company with some others at The Cock on 16 June 1663 and had taken a glass or six, all of which had compelled him to strip naked, defecate in the street and, in the no doubt shocked words of Pepys:
[act] all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined, and abusing of scripture… preaching a Mountebank sermon from that pulpit… that being done, he took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it and then drank it off; and then took another and drank the King’s health.
Even by the standards of the time, this was appalling. There was a public riot, with the onlookers throwing missiles and rocks at Sedley and his friends, who responded in kind by chucking urine-filled wine bottles back at them. Eventually, they were summoned to Westminster and indicted for causing a riot, and Sedley was fined an eye-watering £500—a year’s income for many. Unabashed, he cheerily asked: ‘Am I the first man ever to have been charged so much for shitting?’ Most ordinary people would have been bankrupted by such a fine, but Sedley was in favour with Charles, who, amused by the goings-on, authorized that the fine be paid out of the royal purse. Sedley, undaunted by such an unpleasant scrape, continued in this vein, with Pepys noting in October 1668 that he and his friend Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, had been found ‘running up and down all the night with their arses bare, through the streets; and at last fighting, and being beat by the watch and clapped up all night’. Again, royal indulgence led to their salvation; Pepys tells ‘how the King takes their parts; and the Lord Chief Justice hath laid the constable by the heels to answer it next Sessions’.
Charles, then, set great store by correct behaviour at court, but he also delighted in bawdiness and unrestrained wickedness, as long as it was entertainingly done. The ‘merry monarch’, enjoying himself immensely in this new world that he was in no small part responsible for creating, was content to allow virtually anything to take place, but even he would be challenged by the reappearance at court of a truly extraordinary figure, whose presence would threaten to upturn the basis on which the Restoration had occurred. Rochester might have been a surrogate son to Charles, but his intellectual curiosity and single-minded determination to question the whole basis of contemporary life through his poetry and actions alike would prove stimulating and challenging and would, eventually, be instrumental in bringing down the whole façade of court. The prodigal would return, and bring a new order with him.
*1 A tradition that holds true to this day in royal circles.
† Although Barbara Castlemaine, by my count, fulfils the first two and no more.
*2 Although Charles, tiring of being gazed at by the great unwashed, all but abandoned the practice as early as 1663.
The Tower of London in 1665 was still a forbidding place. While torture, prevalent around the time of Elizabeth I, had been outlawed, it was still offered, informally, to prisoners who were especially high-profile malefactors. While the Tower was less barbaric than the cesspit-like common jails of Newgate and the Fleet, with conditions comparatively clean and decent, it was still a place where the walls seemed to echo with the screams of the long-deceased, and where only the hardiest and most self-assured man—or the wealthiest—might manage to make himself comfortable.
Rochester, who became a guest of the Tower on 27 May 1665, was certainly self-assured, but hardy or wealthy he was not. Barely eighteen years old, he had ample time to reflect, as he took what meagre exercise and sustenance he was allowed, on the folly of what he had done. Less than six months after he had formally arrived at court, with the expectation of a glittering career as one of Charles’s most beloved and trusted courtiers, he was now in a position where he was, at best, out of royal favour, and at worst in possible danger of a capital charge against his life. As would become usual, the trouble stemmed from a woman.
When Rochester entered Whitehall in 1664, his first thought had been to establish himself as a great man. To do this required royal patronage, which he had, and a wife, which he did not. Although he had no money other than his royal pension, he had a title and influential friends such as the Duke of Buckingham and Henry Savile, the licentious 22-year-old son of the arch-Royalist Sir William Savile, who was newly arrived at court and similarly eager to glut himself with the pleasures of town with like-minded company. Rochester was also friendly with Savile’s elder brother George, who was made Marquess of
Halifax in 1668. A more serious and politically engaged man than his brother, George was nonetheless a close friend of Buckingham and an intimate of the circle close to the king. Likewise, Rochester’s good standing with the king endeared him to many aristocratic and wealthy families keen to marry off their daughter in a socially advantageous fashion. The young man was handsome, tall and witty, all characteristics that made him infinitely preferable as a husband to some of the pox-ridden sybarites who were other candidates for marriage.
There were many young women of quality who were attached to the court, and one of the most notable both in looks and breeding was Elizabeth Malet. Fifteen years old in 1665, she was the grand-daughter of Sir Francis Hawley, a wealthy Royalist and supporter of both Charles I and Charles II. She was sought after by many of the leading young men at court, including the MP and naval officer Edward Montagu and William Herbert, 6th Earl of Pembroke, who no doubt had their eye as much on the rumoured £2,500 a year that she was set to inherit as on her physical charms.
Fortunately, a match between Elizabeth and Rochester was thought probable, thanks in no small part to his mother’s scheming with her cousin Barbara Castlemaine to facilitate the marriage upon his return from his grand tour. As Barbara had a tight grasp on the king’s ear, as well as his other organs, Charles’s approval was soon granted for the match, and Rochester was encouraged to press his suit. Barbara’s own relationship with Rochester was a complex one; later on he would mock her in his poetry, but then he was content merely to try to kiss her when he saw her alighting from her carriage in Whitehall, for which he was knocked to the ground. Unabashed, he was said to have murmured an impromptu verse from his recumbent position: ‘By heavens, ’twas bravely done/First to attempt the chariot of the sun/And then to fall like Phaeton.’ Perhaps the grand harlot was keen to see him married off so as to distract him in future from such sallies.
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