A more important figure in Charles’s life who was in Oxford at this time was a young actress, Eleanor ‘Nell’ Gwyn, who had had some success in a play by John Dryden, The Indian Emperor, earlier that year. She was the mistress and acting partner of the well-known star actor of the day Charles Hart, and the two specialized in playing a pair of ill-matched but witty lovers, an act with some foundation in fact. She and some of the other actresses who were at court were there to provide entertainment to the exiled king, being granted the right to wear the king’s livery and proclaimed ‘women comedians in His Majesty’s Theatre’. While her affair with the king did not begin until 1667, her good looks and pleasant character caught his eye long before.
For all the distractions offered by ‘pretty, witty Nell’, Charles’s thoughts lay on other matters than simple fornication and indulgence. After a strong start, the Anglo-Dutch war was beginning to drift, not least because France was on the verge of entering into a treaty with Holland, which would have been militarily and socially disastrous. Clarendon, never a supporter of what he described as ‘this foolish war’, was ordered to make peace with Holland before any treaty with France could be struck, but it seemed as likely that the Dutch would ally with the powerful Habsburgs as with the French. Charles’s hopes for a quick, complete military victory looked likely to be dashed.
There were other matters at home that were beginning to concern him, too. After the initial excitement of his return had worn off, there were murmurs that the licentious atmosphere at court was morally poisonous, and dark rumours persisted about the extraordinary behaviour exhibited by some of the more notorious members of Charles’s circle. It was said of Barbara Castlemaine that she had done everything from seducing her servants to practising witchcraft (the former, at least, she probably was guilty of). She was far from popular, and a libellous notice was put up at Merton College, where she had given birth to her fifth child, George, during the court’s stay at Oxford in December 1665, saying: ‘The reason why she is not ducked? Because by Caesar she is fucked.’ As it was Oxford, the note was written in both Latin and English. Charles, furious when he heard of this, offered a reward of £1,000 for intelligence about who was responsible, but none was forthcoming. Had Charles had both courage and conviction and a less priapic temperament, he could have dropped the increasingly embarrassing Barbara. His refusal to do so, and continuing instead to father children by her, meant that much of the shine was taken off his initial popularity.
To address the religiously tinged campaign of castigation of his behaviour, Charles saw to it that the Five Mile or Nonconformists Act was passed in 1665. Despite his own sympathies leaning to the suspect faith of Catholicism, he attempted to introduce a new religious orthodoxy shortly after the Restoration which, in its own way, was as forbidding as Cromwell’s. The Church of England was re-established and it was made compulsory to attend church every week, under pain of being fined a shilling. It proved to be a popular activity, although mainly for swapping news and gossip rather than for religious observance. The text used for services was the Book of Common Prayer, which was introduced in 1662 and which was deliberately designed to drive a wedge between Nonconformists and Anglicans.
Nonconformists were further stigmatized by the Five Mile Act, which forbade dissenting clergymen from living within five miles of a parish from which they had been banned, unless they swore an oath of allegiance to the king and promised never to disobey his laws again. To do otherwise meant losing their influence, as well as their living. Nearly a thousand ministers were prepared to suffer this fate, with the result that Charles now had a substantial number of resentful, disenfranchised clergymen who were only too happy to rail against the sin and iniquity of the royal court.
Rochester watched these developments wryly. He still retained some vestige of Francis Giffard’s religious instruction, as he would do all his life, but his enquiring and cynical mind was also open to other possibilities. A typical example of this came in an extempore poem that dates from about this time, when Rochester returned to Adderbury, only to find the sexton singing the psalms of a notoriously awful pair of sixteenth-century writers, Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, in a church at nearby Bodicote. Hearing the caterwauling noise that this unfortunate man produced, Rochester was said to remark:
Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms
When they translated David’s psalms
To make the heart full glad;
But had it been poor David’s fate
To hear thee sing, and them translate,
By God! ’Twould have made him mad.
It is not reported what the tuneless sexton said in response. However, Rochester did not have the monopoly on wit in his encounters with clergymen. On a visit to Whitehall, he was greeted by the royal chaplain and theologian Isaac Barrow, a shambolic, slovenly and pale figure who Rochester, like most of the wits at court, regarded as a joke. Bowing in an ironic way, Rochester parodied the conventional excessive greetings of the day by saying, ironically, ‘Doctor, I am yours to the shoe-tie.’ Barrow, responding smartly, bowed even lower and replied, ‘My lord, I am yours to the ground.’ Rochester, vexed by this impertinent response, countered with ‘Doctor, I am yours to the centre [of the earth].’ Barrow, not to be outdone, answered, ‘My lord, I am yours to the Antipodes.’ Rochester, losing his temper and feeling angered that he was to be outdone by a man he referred to as ‘a musty old piece of divinity’, executed an even more ridiculous bow and shouted, ‘Doctor, I am yours to the lowest pit of hell!’ At this point, Barrow, showing a sharp wit that put many of the courtiers to shame, departed, saying, ‘There, my lord, I leave you.’ Rochester, for once, was outmatched.
Charles’s court, including Rochester, returned permanently to London on 1 February 1666. The plague, which at its peak the previous September had been claiming 7,000 lives a week, had now died down and was more of a threat to France than England, having travelled across the Channel via trading vessels. London was a diminished place, with the theatres and parks having been shut during the plague, and many people welcomed Charles’s return as a means of injecting some much-needed life and vitality into a city that had recently come close to feeling the hopelessness that it had experienced throughout much of the Commonwealth era. Once again, optimism and excitement coursed through London, and Rochester’s rising fortunes seemed to mirror those of the city.
On 21 March, to symbolize the closeness of the bond between him and Charles and his renewed standing in royal favour, Rochester was created Gentleman of the Bedchamber. This was a position that carried a substantial annual salary of £1,000 a year and provided lodgings in the Stone Gallery at Whitehall, a prestigious area of the palace overlooking the Privy Garden, where his neighbours included the likes of Charles’s first cousin Rupert and, while she was in favour, Barbara Castlemaine. The lodgings enabled the king’s familiars to be in close contact, as well as making them available to fulfil his desires. The role was an exacting one, rather than a mere sinecure; tasks that Rochester performed in rotation with the eleven other Gentlemen included serving private meals, helping dress and undress Charles, sleeping on a mattress next to his bed, and, unofficially, acting as a pander and facilitator of his sexual liaisons. He was expected to perform these tasks for a total of a month each year, or more often if his fellow Gentlemen were absent on an approved purpose. The tasks were not only demanding and time-consuming but faintly squalid at times. Some might have considered acting as a glorified nursemaid to anyone—even the king—as beneath them.
Rochester did not. Part of this was because he was still a bachelor, enjoying untrammelled access to the various women of ‘quality’ who were traipsing through Charles’s quarters. The king might have had jus primae noctis—‘right of the first night’—allowing him the richest sexual spoils, but Rochester and the other members of the ‘merry gang’, who were also Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, most notably Buckingham and Buckhurst, also benefited. The other reason was that, still mi
ndful of his transgressions with Elizabeth Malet the previous year, Rochester wanted to press his suit once again and required Charles’s renewed assistance. The intimacy that the monarch and the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber enjoyed led to an opportunity to talk in a far more candid fashion than was otherwise possible at court. Elizabeth was being pursued vigorously by Edward Montagu but had no interest in his advances; she shocked him at one point by jokingly suggesting that the only sort of proposal that she would accept was an elopement. Rochester, and his dashingly wrong-headed attempt at abduction, remained in her thoughts.
The year 1666 was a good one for Rochester. In June he received a commission in Prince Rupert’s regiment of horse guards, a prestigious appointment that only those who were at the peak of royal favour were given. In the same month his military prowess was also called upon once again when he was given royal leave from his bedchamber duties to rejoin the now losing English side in the Anglo-Dutch war. Fighting earlier that month had gone disastrously. The Four Days’ Battle off Ostend, which had lasted from 1 to 5 June, had resulted in a heavy defeat, despite the English being under the capable command of George Monck, Charles’s sponsor at the Restoration. It was estimated that 1,800 men were killed, nine ships destroyed or captured, and as many as ten captains dead. By any standards, this was an embarrassingly bad defeat, so much so that Rochester’s old ally, Sir Thomas Clifford, wrote to Charles to say that ‘some of the English captains deserve hanging’. In this vacuum of competence, Rochester had ample opportunity to distinguish himself.
Rochester had joined the flagship that Clifford was on, the Royal Charles, by 20 June, when the commander Sir Edward Spragge notified the king that the young earl was on board. He arrived in the midst of a confused and frightened group of people, all frantically attempting to blame one another for the debacle that was now unfolding. Rochester, a veteran of the bloody and horrific fighting of the year before, was able to put his previous experience to good use. On 25 July he behaved in a conspicuously gallant manner, volunteering to carry a message from Spragge to another ship while under heavy fire. As Burnet said, this behaviour ‘was much commended by all that saw it’. Given that most of the other young men who were on board died, lacking Rochester’s experience (and luck), his actions were a rare moment of heroism in what was an increasingly dismal series of bloody and unsuccessful engagements. They were not unnoticed at court, and it is likely that Charles would have recalled Rochester for another round of prizes, titles and honours, had something even more seismic not occurred.
London in 1666 was still essentially a medieval city. The streets were tightly packed together, with the poorer areas crowded and filthy. One of the reasons for the plague’s rapid spread the previous year was that basic hygiene was non-existent, so that anyone at risk of illness—children and the elderly and infirm, among others—saw their chances of death vastly increased. Houses and shops jostled for space brick by brick, and they were also placed near countless sources of fire and heat, ranging from bakers to foundries. There were even tons of gunpowder, left over from the Civil War, stored in private houses.
It was perhaps inevitable that a fire should break out. It did so on Sunday 2 September at Thomas Farriner’s bakery in the appropriately named Pudding Lane, just after midnight. What was not inevitable was the way in which a fire that could have been locally suppressed spread through the streets like the apocalypse. In a few hours, dozens of important buildings and as many as 300 houses were destroyed, and as the wind helped spread the fire, the inferno seemed uncontrollable. London, it appeared, would be turned to ash.
For another three nights, the city burnt. The devastation stretched from the Tower of London in the east to Fleet Street and Ludgate in the west, going as far north as Moorgate. Tuesday saw the destruction of St Paul’s; in one of the hideous moments of irony that marked the devastation, the cathedral had been covered in wooden scaffolding and lit up like a tinderbox. When the fires eventually died down on Wednesday evening, it was estimated that as many as 200,000 people were homeless and £10 million worth of damage had been caused; countless houses and churches had burnt to the ground, as well as such important public buildings as the Custom House and the Royal Exchange. Traditional estimates of the death toll have been low, but given how few accurate censuses must have existed at the time, it is likely that many more died than the ten or so people who have been accounted for.
The belief that many held was that the fire was a divine judgement on the decadence of Charles’s court. While the previous six years had been an enjoyably free-spirited time for some, others had found it a combination of the restrictive and the hypocritical, with the newly licentious and permissive atmosphere of the time and rumours of unrestrained libidinousness at Whitehall sitting uneasily with the ongoing news of military defeat in the Anglo-Dutch war and the uncertain implementation of the Book of Common Prayer. The Great Fire of London did not spell the end of the Restoration, but it certainly heralded the end of the beginning. Despite rumours of his efforts at assistance, whether genuine or propaganda, the fire closed the first chapter in the story of Charles as an entirely accessible, everyman monarch, and instead launched a more cynical age, where those newly in positions of power and influence would come to the fore, and where older and wiser heads would despair or, on occasion, roll.
Rochester returned from naval service shortly after the end of the fire, unscathed in body but with a mind full of the horrors and deaths that he had witnessed. He came home to a city half erased, but his base of Whitehall and the grounds around lay undamaged. Perhaps he felt a sense of kinship with those who had suffered in the weeks before, but he also—reasonably—believed that after several months of death, devastation and hopelessness, his thoughts should rest on pleasure, rather than further horrors. One of the sources of this pleasure was a renewed attempt to woo Elizabeth Malet, this time by words rather than frantic carriage rides. He continued various other romantic intrigues, including one with the young actress Sarah Cooke, but it was the witty, sophisticated Elizabeth who was his best match.
With the potential marriage between Edward Montagu and Elizabeth having foundered by August 1666 (Montagu was said by Pepys to dislike ‘the vanity and liberty of her carriage’, a remark that smacks of a rejected lover’s hurt feelings), Elizabeth was still a virginal prospect. While he made no official approach, perhaps knowing it was unlikely to meet with approval from her grandfather Sir Francis Hawley, Rochester secretly began a correspondence with Elizabeth, attempting to seduce her this time by wit and charm. Like many a young man of the time, he chose to use poetry as his tool.
Poetry—or at least verse—in the Restoration era was a normal part of everyday life for everyone, whether they were aristocrats or commoners. It was a public rather than private art, designed to be read aloud, or even sung. Lyric songs were sung in the taverns and at the theatres, and it was considered a refined and ladylike art to be able to sing a lyric with a mellifluous voice. Booksellers, meanwhile, did a roaring trade with collected editions of these verses, with titles such as The Academies of Compliments. It seemed to many of the new breed of courtiers that they could do a good deal worse for themselves than get involved in this new style of entertainment. Not that they needed the money—at least, most of them did not—but it was an unrivalled source of fun.
By the time Rochester arrived at court in 1664, the courtier poets Sackville and Sedley were already notorious for their public escapades, most outrageously Sedley’s indecent exposure and pranks at The Cock tavern. Their closest antecedents were not the metaphysicals such as Donne or Marvell, but the ‘Cavalier poets’ such as Richard Lovelace, John Suckling and Robert Herrick, who flourished between the reigns of James I and Charles I. Beginning with probably the best known of their number, Ben Jonson, they produced exuberant, witty poetry that gloried in the carpe diem spirit, celebrating sex, life and love. There was also a strong pro-monarchical bent in their work that, for obvious reasons, fell away after t
he execution of Charles I in 1649.
By the time of the Restoration, the only surviving figure of these Cavalier poets was Herrick. Aged seventy-five in 1666, and far from young and glamorous, he had retired to his restored living at the vicarage in Dean Prior in Devonshire. The Restoration courtier poets shared the Cavaliers’ closeness to the king, but this closeness did not translate into po-faced solemnity or a desire to live quietly. Instead, they joined their king in what Clarendon described as ‘drollery and railery’, claiming that they ‘preserved no reverence towards God or man, but laughed at all sober men’. Their chosen means of entertainment and mockery, both of society and of each other—including Charles—was verse.
Any Restoration courtier worthy of the name wrote poetry,*2 albeit to wildly varying degrees of competence. Some of their writing was little more than rhyming bawdy squibs or parodies and ‘answer poems’—replies to the works of others; these were designed to be used as part of an ostentatious display of public wit, with the intention of furthering the author’s name and reputation at court. Some took pains to celebrate Charles, his mistresses and the newly restored monarchy, while others, such as the future Poet Laureate John Dryden, used it as a public art and called themselves ‘poets’. If poetry was written down, it was seldom for publication, which the well-to-do regarded as beneath them, or for financial gain, but was intended to be passed around in manuscript, either in the original hand of the writer or, more likely, in a fair copy dictated to a scribe. Some of these scribes, most notably ‘Captain’ Robert Julian, self-styled ‘secretary to the muses’, made a good living out of producing forgeries in leading writers’ styles and distributing them as if they were genuine. This had the effect of allowing scurrilous satire and obscene suggestion to circulate in a clandestine and underhand fashion, delighting the elite with speculation on which of their number was responsible. They were not answerable to patrons or publishers, but to themselves and each other.
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