Blazing Star

by Larman, Alexander;

  Rebuffed kisses aside, all this was meat and drink to the young man. To be offered an intelligent, attractive and moneyed wife was joyous enough, but to do so with the blessing of Charles confirmed that the stars had aligned in Rochester’s favour. He had his first chance to woo Elizabeth in the early months of 1665. What Elizabeth initially made of the witty, debonair Rochester is unknown, as none of their early letters survive, but given her own reputation for sharp wit it is probable that she warmed to the charming young man. An independent woman even at her young age, she was intent on making her own choice, rather than being bullied into it. However, theirs was still an unequal match, given his lack of fortune and darkly whispered rumours about his father’s reputation for inconstancy and drunkenness. Sir Francis did not look particularly kindly on him, and while the king’s support counted for a great deal, his suit showed little immediate sign of being accepted.

  As Rochester’s dissatisfaction grew throughout the early months of 1665, the impulsive young man decided that there was a better option than waiting around for the various machinations to align in his favour: namely, abducting Elizabeth and marrying her by force.

  Although this sounds an unusually harsh means of entering into matrimonial bliss, abduction was at least a semi-accepted means of allowing younger sons or the otherwise unmoneyed to have a chance of attaining their beloveds. Although it was traditionally the case that marriage was a formal and much-planned union between two families, each of whom could obtain something from the other, rather than a romantic match, there were still those who sought to run away with their would-be wives. A couple could be married by the local parson as swiftly as possible, and while such an act was technically illegal and liable to see the participants fined, the chance of a young man being able to marry an heiress would more than cover any financial penalties.

  However, to dissuade people from taking this risk, there was a legal deterrent to the effect that ‘all ravishments and wilful taking away or marrying of any maid, widow or damsel against her will or without the assent or agreement of her parents’ were extremely serious crimes that could result in imprisonment or, at worst, execution. Of course, few parents approved of their daughters being abducted, although some of the more financially minded took the unorthodox circumstances of their scion’s betrothal as a crafty means of reducing or even forfeiting the dowry that they would have been required to give in a conventional match. Rochester’s decision to abduct Elizabeth Malet stemmed more from impatience and a headstrong attitude than from necessity. It is likely that Charles’s willingness to help him with his suit would have been enough eventually to help him win his wife, had he been patient. This is also the first significant account of the emergence of Rochester as a public figure, earning a reputation as a devil-may-care libertine in the true sense of the word—​as a free-thinker who ignored conventional codes of behaviour and morality. Rochester, a young man in a hurry to make a name for himself, knew that his actions would result in public infamy. But he may have blithely believed that he would remain in Charles’s favour even after such an action, knowing the king’s fondness for chutzpah and daring.

  On 26 May 1665 Elizabeth Malet was heading home after dining at Whitehall with her grandfather Sir Francis Hawley and her friend Frances Stuart. Pepys, who provides a contemporary account of the abduction, describes it with relish. Elizabeth ‘was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and footmen and forcibly taken from [Hawley] and put in a coach with six horses and two women provided to receive her, and carried away’. As abductions go, this was clearly a considered and ostentatiously public display—​designed to arouse the excited chatter of the likes of Pepys—​as well as a practical-minded one; a six-horse carriage would be a speedy and efficient means of making a rapid getaway. Rochester himself travelled separately in another, less showy vehicle. It is probable that he was headed for Oxfordshire, either to Ditchley Park or to Adderbury Manor, his father’s house nearby on which his mother had renewed the lease in 1661.

  Unfortunately, Rochester had reckoned without the indefatigable Hawley, who set out in immediate pursuit of his grand-daughter’s captor and, after a frantic chase lasting several miles, managed to apprehend the earl at Uxbridge. Whatever passed between Rochester and Hawley that evening is not noted by Pepys. Perhaps some colourful epithets were exchanged by both men, especially as there was no sign of Elizabeth, who had been spirited away. Nevertheless, Rochester was not so foolish as to attempt a quarrel with Hawley and so returned to London, tail firmly between his legs.

  He might have guessed that his behaviour would not go unpunished, and so it proved. The next day, Charles, furious at his protégé’s insolence and embarrassed at the disrespect shown to Hawley, had him committed to the Tower for his ‘high misdemeanours’ and ordered that Elizabeth be found and restored to her family. She was soon discovered, unharmed and possibly rather exhilarated by the whole adventure, and returned home, once again to be subjected to the romantic suits of several eligible men. Crucially, Rochester’s ‘rape’ had only been one of physical, rather than sexual, possession, meaning that her highly prized virginity was believed still to be intact—​unless, of course, she had had a previous liaison with one of her would-be suitors (although that would have been social suicide).

  As for Rochester, it dawned on the young man that he had gone too far, misreading Charles’s tacit support for the match as approval for a rash and bold action. Once the adrenaline of his exploits had worn off, he found himself in an unpleasant predicament, facing severe consequences for his actions. Frightened, he wrote a ‘Humble Petition’ to the king from the Tower, begging forgiveness for his ‘first error’, saying that ‘he would have rather chosen death ten thousand times’ than incur Charles’s displeasure, and claiming that ‘inadvertency, ignorance in the law, and passion’ were the causes of his offence. Charles, ever mercurial, may have been amused or irritated, but external events were about to change Rochester’s fortunes irrevocably.

  Britain in the seventeenth century was a place used to plague. There had been outbreaks in 1603, 1625 and 1636, when tens of thousands of people had died. Bubonic plague had originally been spread by the bite of an infected flea; those who had both literary knowledge and a wry sense of humour recalled John Donne’s poem ‘The Flea’ and its statement ‘Wherein could this flea guilty be/Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?’ ‘Guilty of the death of thousands’ might have been the rejoinder. Bubonic plague was an especially hideous means of death: essentially, the body rotted while the unfortunate subject was still alive, a decay manifesting itself in vomiting of blood and agonizing pain and seizures.

  Those who knew their history still talked in hushed tones of the infamous Black Death of the fourteenth century, which had killed tens of millions all over the world, reducing the global population by nearly a quarter. While the latest plague was on nothing like the same scale, its arrival in London in early June 1665 led to panic among the gentry and aristocracy. This led to the king and his followers leaving the city at the end of the month, bound for Oxford. In an irony that Charles surely appreciated, he mirrored the actions of his father two decades earlier in the Civil War by setting up a new court there, away from London and the ever-present risk of fatal infection.

  Before he left, the Rochester business momentarily distracted him. It was both an endearing habit and a sign of inconsistency that Charles was seldom angry with his favourites for very long. While Rochester’s behaviour had been embarrassing and presumptuous, it also amused the king, whose own inclinations had often tended towards the swashbucklingly licentious, and the ‘Humble Petition’ did not fall on deaf ears. So it was that, on 19 June, Rochester was released from the Tower, but he was conspicuously not invited to join the court at Oxford.

  Rochester was relieved to be free from captivity, but all else seemed lost. He was out of favour with Charles and his best hope of a financially advantageous marriage was dashed. Pepys noted in his diary that ‘my Lord Rochester is n
ow decidedly out of hopes’ of Elizabeth, and the more socially acceptable and far better-mannered Edward Montagu was the logical choice for the union. However, almost unbelievably, Charles still refused to give his assent to a match between Montagu and Elizabeth; perhaps this was the result of his residual loyalty towards Henry Wilmot’s son and a feeling of faint distaste for a man who, although the model of a gentleman, was nonetheless the son of a former Parliamentarian. Alternatively, it may simply be that the matter did not interest him enough. Plague ravaged London and his first major international conflict was at hand, so squabbles over arranged marriages for courtiers must have appeared very small beer.

  Nonetheless, Rochester, unwilling to give up on Charles’s favour so quickly, hit upon a bold solution that would simultaneously improve his standing at court and have the effect of wooing Elizabeth back. He would go to war.

  The First Anglo-Dutch War, fought by Cromwell and the Common-wealth, ended supposedly with an English victory. However, the auspices under which it had ended were dubious, and the central issue that had led to its commencement—​namely, a dispute over trade rights—​was not resolved, so a second engagement was inevitable. This, in the unlovely shape of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, duly arrived in March 1665. It had been hoped that the Restoration would lead to a détente, and for a time Charles’s good personal relations with the Dutch (whose lavish hospitality he had enjoyed while in exile) smoothed matters over.

  However, for reasons of realpolitik, war soon followed. Charles, still a relatively new and untested monarch, felt the need both to engage in some sabre-rattling and to ensure a steady source of income via overseas trade. Despite some attempts on the Dutch side to bring about peace, such as ceding New Amsterdam (or New York, as it was subsequently called) to the British in 1664, the appetite in England was clearly for a quick and lucrative war. Therefore, with Charles’s consent and approval, a situation was engineered whereby, after various guerrilla attacks on both sides, England could declare war on the Dutch with impunity. Charles’s hope was that he would win as impressive a victory as Cromwell had. An early battle off the coast of Lowestoft on 13 June 1665 was a clear win for the English and appeared to augur well for further success.

  It was under these circumstances that Rochester, perhaps rashly, offered to follow in his father’s footsteps. Probably expecting an easy campaign and a chance to regain his battered reputation, he joined his romantic rival Edward Montagu’s father, Lord Sandwich, with his fleet. Soon, in early July, he was placed on board the flagship Revenge, under the command of Sir Thomas Tiddiman. His head full of thoughts of rich prizes and derring-do, he hoped that this was a sinecure of sorts. At first, all went well. Under Tiddiman, the ship was bound for Norway with the intention of capturing the Dutch East India Fleet, wealthy and apparently an easy target.

  The arrogance that the English demonstrated would soon be to their cost. They had numerous close calls and near-shipwrecks; on one occasion the entire fleet arrived at a harbour that was about a third of the size that they needed. As Rochester wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘It was God’s great mercy we got clear and only that we had no human probability of safety.’ When he reached the port of Bergen on 1 August 1665, ‘full of hopes and expectation’, his happy thoughts of rich pluckings of ‘shirts and gold, which I had most need of’ were soon dispelled. The Dutch ships had already arrived, and after a short delay, a desperate fire-fight began the following day. As Rochester notes in his letter, ‘in three hours time, we lost some 200 men and six captains, our cables were cut and we were driven out by the wind.’ Although he puts a brave face on the action, saying ‘we came off having beat the town all to pieces without losing one ship’, it had not been a successful engagement and had failed to produce any of the hoped-for booty.

  The fight itself, a comparatively minor battle, is made more interesting by a fascinating metaphysical story that Gilbert Burnet recounts. Rochester (who Burnet says showed ‘as brave and as resolute a courage as was possible’, an opinion also held by Sir Thomas Clifford, a leading naval commander and member of the Privy Council) was on board the Revenge with two other young men of breeding, Sandwich’s nephew Ned Montagu and George Windham. All three were terrified at the apparent prospect of imminent death, and Rochester entered into a formal pact with Windham that, should either of them die, ‘he should appear, and give the other notice of the future state, if there was any’. Montagu, perhaps less superstitious than the others, refused to have any part in this arrangement, despite an equally strong foreboding of his approaching death.

  During the fighting, all three fought bravely, despite their nerves and inexperience, until late in the day, when Windham finally panicked and began to tremble violently. Montagu ran to his assistance, but then a cannon-ball killed Windham and ripped out Montagu’s stomach, killing him within the hour. Rochester, who escaped unscathed, watched the death of his friends with horror. Having led a relatively sheltered life, the sight of bloody and painful death was a great shock to him, even in an age when casual violence was rife. Yet, when the battle was over, he waited with a mixture of excitement and anxiety to see if a spectral Windham would come from beyond the grave to give him details of ‘the future state’.

  However, no ghost ever came, much to Rochester’s disappointment. According to Burnet, Rochester claimed that Windham’s non-appearance ‘was a great snare to him during the rest of his life’, although ‘he could not but acknowledge it was an unreasonable thing for him to think that beings in another state were not under such laws and limits that they could not command their own motions but as the Supreme Power should order them’ and that ‘one who had so corrupted the natural principles of truth, as he had, had no reason to expect that such an extraordinary thing should be done for his conviction’.

  In this, we see the early signs of what would become a lifelong duality in Rochester’s intellectual outlook, a man torn between a calmly considered and dispassionate observation of the world as it stood and an almost child-like and desperately expressed desire to believe in the possibility of another, more rapturous existence beyond. In this, he was not unusual. To believe in the existence of a religious afterlife was orthodox, even obligatory. What makes the story so compelling (unlike some of Burnet’s other tales) is the ring of truth that it has for Rochester. If the Elizabeth Malet saga had shown him as a swaggering, devil-may-care libertine, this reveals the penseur who sought desperately for a cosmic reassurance that there was more to life than mere fleshy engagement, whether in sex, eating and drinking or fighting. Had a ghostly Windham appeared to him, Rochester might well have been a happier and more contented man—​assuming, of course, that he did not die of shock at the sight.

  Nevertheless, Rochester was not purely traumatized by the experience, whatever Burnet might say. The jaunty tone of the letter to his mother that he wrote the following day (in which, self-deprecatingly, he apologizes for being ‘tedious’) is capped off by a splendidly wheedling postscript in which he says, ‘I have been as good a husband as I could,*1 but in spite of my teeth have been fain to borrow money.’ The letter’s gossipy but factual tone reads as if he has at least one eye on having it reach a wider, possibly royal, audience and regaining the king’s favour. Rochester was never someone purely sentimental in his dealings with his mother, or with anyone else for that matter.

  He continued to serve in the navy after this, with some distinction. He was involved in another battle on 9 September 1665, when the English fought against eighteen Dutch vessels. The result of the conflict was an English victory, with a thousand Dutch prisoners taken, two of their ships destroyed and many of the others captured. Rochester was sent to Charles and the displaced court in Oxford on 12 September, complete with a dispatch from Sandwich concerning the battle. In it, Sandwich was keen to praise the actions of the young sailor, describing him as ‘brave, industrious and of parts fit to be very useful in your majesty’s service’.

  When he arrived at court, the reconciliation with C
harles was a happy and long-desired one. Rochester had not seen Charles since the failed abduction attempt of May, and the last three months had placed a strain on what was previously a close relationship between the two men. It is wrong to over-sentimentalize what passed between them when Rochester returned; Charles was a king attempting to rule a country from a satellite court while plague ravaged the capital city, while Rochester was an errant and rash young man who had done some brave service in the country’s name. Charles did not respond to the young prodigal’s arrival with tears, outstretched arms and the killing of the fatted calf.

  Nonetheless, his return to royal favour ensured that the debacle of the abduction was forgiven completely, and on 31 October Rochester was granted a one-off payment of £750 by the Privy Seal as a gift, a thank-you present for services rendered. As he roamed around Oxford, his former tutor Robert Whitehall, as drunken and dissipated as ever, continued to prop up the taverns, although the circles that Rochester moved in had widened as exponentially as Whitehall’s breeches. Their paths may nonetheless have crossed, although Rochester was now able to mix with the finest examples of quality in the land, whether they were courtiers or courtesans, rather than skulking around taverns in his erstwhile mentor’s borrowed gown.

  The weeks passed pleasantly enough for Rochester, who indulged all his desires, social, alcoholic or sexual. Gilbert Burnet wrote, fancifully, that upon his return from war ‘he had so entirely laid down the intemperance that was growing on him before his travels that at his return he hated nothing more’, but also notes, more believably, that ‘falling into company that loved these excesses, he was, though not without difficulty and by many steps, brought back to it again’.

  Burnet exaggerates the difficulty. As a young bachelor, and a handsome one to boot, Rochester was a familiar face around women of quality, although he had the good sense and tact to avoid embroiling himself with any of the king’s mistresses, otherwise a second casting-out from Eden for this chastened Adam would have been inevitable. Barbara Castlemaine, herself no guileless Eve, was, at this stage in her pomp, openly flaunting herself as the royal concubine. She had a rival in the comely form of Frances Stuart, who had been present on the night of Elizabeth’s abduction and who was rumoured to have previously had a brief dalliance with Barbara herself, before she was seen as a threat to the latter’s complete hold over the king. Although Charles’s relationship with Frances had probably only been platonic, despite the Pepysian gossip that she too was a ‘common mistress’ to the king, it was enough to send the famously foul-tempered Barbara into paroxysms of jealous rage.