At this stage, Rochester used poetry both to entertain and flatter others (as his university verses had done), to jockey for position at court, and to woo Elizabeth with his wit and intelligence. That it also offers an insight into his—or his avatar’s—love-struck condition is a by-product of his art. In one poem, probably dating from around this time or slightly earlier, ‘’Twas a dispute ’twixt heaven and earth’, we see one of the many deliberately idealized women who appear throughout Rochester’s work. The mock-heroic first verse certainly gives the sense of a young man anxious to prove himself a lover both in words and in action:
’Twas a dispute ’twixt heaven and earth
Which had produced the nobler birth.
For heaven, appeared Cynthia with all her train,
Till you came forth,
More glorious and more worth,
Than she with all those trembling imps of light
With which this envious queen of night
Had proudly decked her conquered self in vain.
It is certainly a charming enough account of idealized love, but what it lacks is a sense that it is addressed to a sentient human being rather than a figure as idealized and distant as the ‘envious queen of night’.
Another couple of poems, ‘Give me leave to rail at you’ and ‘The Discovery’, seem of a piece with ‘’Twas a dispute’ and can probably be dated to the same period. They convey the idea of a man frustrated by his supposed lover’s refusal to commit to him, as Elizabeth delayed her acceptance of Rochester, mindful of other, more deserving suits. In ‘Give me leave’, the narrator initially asks much-merited permission to insult and chide his would-be lover for her lack of commitment to him (‘I ask nothing but my due,’ he sniffily remarks); but then, resignedly, he moans ‘I must be your captive still’ and ends the verse by saying ‘Ah! Be kinder, then, for I/ Cannot change, and would not die.’ The second verse, which much later appeared in his adaptation of Fletcher’s play Valentinian, takes on a more resigned tone. The narrator, apparently now despairing of obtaining his lover’s affections, starts to rail against the world rather than just her:
Kindness has resistless charms;
All besides but weakly move,
Fiercest anger it disarms,
And clips the wings of flying love,
Beauty does the heart invade,
Kindness only can persuade;
It guilds the lover’s servile chain
And makes the slave grow pleased and vain.
Rochester may have felt ‘the wings of flying love’, but the ‘servile chain’ was not his accustomed stance. In ‘The Discovery’, an authentic note of disdain and anger is soon struck:
Since so much scorn does in your breast reside,
Be more indulgent to its mother, pride;
Kill all you strike, and trample on their graves,
But own the fates of your neglected slaves:
When in the crowd yours undistinguished lies,
You give away the triumph of your eyes.
While it seems impossible to consider Rochester signing himself ‘Yours undistinguished’, there is more than a hint of the wild, whirling accusations and rhetorical fluency of his later social satires here, especially in the near-hysterical invocation to ‘Kill all you strike, and trample on their graves’. At last the poet calms down and ends on a more restrained note, murmuring bitterly that ‘Love has carefully contrived for me/The last perfection of misery’, and claiming that ‘my worst of fates attends me in my grave/Since, dying, I must be no more your slave.’
While there is clearly a tongue-in-cheek element of exaggeration here, giving an edge of charm to what would otherwise be so much blustering and absurdity, the underlying point is clear: he is frustrated and surprised by the unwillingness of his would-be lover to commit to him. The parallel between Rochester and Elizabeth is irresistible.
It is probably around this time that Elizabeth wrote one of her own poems in a letter to Rochester, which feels like a response to ‘Give me leave to rail at you’. Her riposte, if such it was, is witty and clear-sighted; it begins ‘Nothing adds to love’s fond fire/More than scorn and cold disdain’ and goes on to strike a far less angry note than Rochester’s fiery lyric:
I, to cherish your desire,
Kindness used, but ’twas in vain.
You insulted on your slave;
To be mine you soon refused;
Hope not then the power to have
Which ingloriously you used.
Think not, Thyrsis, I will e’er
By my love my empire lose.
You grow constant through despair:
Kindness you soon would abuse.
Though you still possess my heart,
Scorn and rigour I must feign;
There remains no other art
Your love, fond fugitive, to gain.
What the ‘fond fugitive’ made of this bold and witty response is unrecorded, but it is likely that Rochester was delighted to have found a match both in intellect and in wit. Yet the two were publicly estranged. Pepys reports a conversation between himself and John Ashburnham, another Groom of the Bedchamber, in late November 1666 in which Ashburnham claimed that Elizabeth had said of her would-be suitors ‘that my Lord Herbert would have had her—my Lord Hinchingbrooke was indifferent to have had her—my Lord John Butler might not have her—my Lord of Rochester would have forced her; and Sir Francis Popham (who nevertheless is likely to have her) would kiss her breach to have her’. Assuming that the touch of witty earthiness that ends the account came from Elizabeth Malet, rather than Pepys, Rochester’s ardour by this point came as much from her simpatico qualities as her inheritance.
Two of his early poems, probably dating from around this time, give a fascinating insight into Rochester’s treatment of love. In the first, he might be wryly commenting on the various machinations that he has had to undergo in order to win Elizabeth’s hand. It begins amiably enough:
My dear mistress has a heart
Soft as those kind looks she gave me
When, with love’s resistless art
And her eyes, she did enslave me.
So far, so generic. However, the poem soon takes a more surprising, and vitriolic, turn:
But her constancy’s so weak –
She’s so wild, and apt to wander*3 –
That my jealous heart would break
Should we live one day asunder.
Another love song, ‘While on those lovely looks I gaze’, has a similarly unusual tension between the idealized object of desire and the wooer. The unnamed woman referred to is being pursued by a ‘wretch’, who looks forward to ‘his pleasing, happy ruin’ as a direct result of being accepted by his would-be lover. The end of the first verse has a particularly magnificent moment of self-abuse, when the poet, thinking on a time when he might end up in the happiest petite mort of all, declares:
’Tis not for pity that I move:
His fate is too aspiring
Whose heart, broke with a load of love,
Dies wishing and admiring.
Whether this was Rochester writing autobiographically or simply showing off his amorous intentions by proxy, it amuses as much as it charms. The second verse continues this strain of conflating love and death, with the now rampant narrator all but drooling over his fate in orgasmic rapture, looking forward to how ‘the victor lives with empty pride/The vanquished die with pleasure’.
By the end of 1666, Rochester was far from ‘vanquished’ when it came to his pursuit of Elizabeth. His dogged persistence was finally successful, and the two of them were married on 29 January 1667 at the Knightsbridge chapel of Westminster Abbey. On 4 February they astonished all society when they appeared together for the first time in public at the Duke’s Theatre for a performance of the play Heraclius. The match was less controversial in 1667 than it might have been two years earlier, partly because Elizabeth’s apparent disdain for her other suitors had caused the admirers of
this modern-day Penelope to drift to other, less demanding prospects, and partly because the previously reluctant Sir Francis Hawley looked differently on the idea of his grand-daughter marrying a man who was now an acclaimed military hero—even if, as Pepys notes, their marriage ‘was a great act of charity, for he hath no estate’. Pepys ignores Rochester’s various royal grants, but there was nothing settled on either Adderbury or Ditchley, so there were mutterings at court that he had married purely for money. The less cynical might have suggested that charity was superseded by her love for a charming, witty and handsome man whose high standing at court was mirrored by his private devotion to his fifteen-year-old bride.
Even Anne Wilmot was, initially at least, pleased. In a letter that she wrote to her friend and counsellor Ralph Verney on 15 February, she anticipated that he had heard of her son’s ‘sudden’ marriage and noted that, despite the match taking place ‘contrary to all her friends’ expectation... the King I thank God is very well satisfied with it, and they had his consent when they did it’. However, sentiment took second place to practical necessity for Anne, as she asked Verney for advice on how ‘to get [Elizabeth’s] estate… [It is] a great concern of a young man and a high concern to me.’ Anne, far from a wealthy woman, was more interested in her daughter-in-law’s fortune than her person.
Rochester, then, prepared to turn twenty with an adoring, wealthy wife, royal favour, a glittering reputation for heroism and bravery, and what was becoming a well-known name. Had he embraced a less tumultuous life simply as an MP or a high-profile courtier, this would now be the end of his story. However, Rochester was a man drawn to conflict like a moth to a flame, and his actions over the following years would result in his name becoming a notorious byword for immorality, wickedness and debauchery. In another world, that name might have been equally associated with wit, intellectual daring and—that rarest of rare things—integrity.
Throughout his life, this integrity would be the only thing that he could cling to.
*1 ‘Husband’ meaning ‘a thrifty, careful man’, in this context, rather than a married one.
*2 Little if any work survives from royal ministers, indicating either that they were unable to write poetry or, more likely, that it was considered below their station. Likewise, one looks in vain for any poetry from Charles.
*3 The Rochester scholar Nick Fisher makes the helpful suggestion that ‘She’s’ and ‘her’ might be editorial additions, implying that it is indeed Rochester who is ‘wild and apt to wander’.
While England suffered from the combined effects of the Great Fire of London, the growing likelihood of defeat in the Anglo-Dutch war, and mutterings that Charles’s court was -unworthy and morally bankrupt, Rochester, at least, was enjoying himself. He spent the early months of his marriage with Elizabeth both in London and at Adderbury, where the meetings between the witty young heiress and Rochester’s stern, puritanical mother, who soon disapproved of her daughter-in-law, can only be imagined. When he was called away to minister to the king, whether at the Newmarket races (where Charles’s equine namesake Old Rowley was put through his paces and where the court drank and wenched to excess) or at Whitehall, he wrote his wife impressively passionate love letters.
Those that survive give an insight into a character whose reputation as a man about town went before him, but who was nevertheless aware that it would be politically expedient to convey an impression, at least at first, that he had changed his ways. This alleviated the doubts of Elizabeth’s family, not least Sir Francis Hawley. In one letter, Rochester wrote to her: ‘’Tis not through vanity that I affect the title of your servant, but that I feel a truth within my heart... [there is] no pleasure but in your smiles, no life but in your favour, [and] no heaven but in your love.’
This is poetic and affecting, but it has the faint sense of Rochester adopting yet another persona to add to those of student, traveller, sailor and courtier—this time that of devoted and faithful husband. As he had already begun to do, Rochester offered a dazzling kaleidoscope of versions of himself to whoever he happened to be in contact with. Court wits saw a heavy-drinking, hard-living young man who matched them riposte for riposte and glass for glass, just as Charles saw in this surrogate son both the echo of his friend Henry Wilmot and an idealized version of his own youth. Only later would his enemies paint Rochester as the devil incarnate.
As he advanced himself at court, Rochester became something of a celebrity, smoothly building on his reputation for bravery and derring-do and combining it with charm and good looks. A contemporary letter by the essayist and dilettante Charles de Saint-Évremond said of him that he was ‘graceful, tho’ tall and slender, his mien and shape having something extremely engaging’. It went on to praise his intellectual abilities, saying that ‘his wit was strong, subtle, sublime and sprightly’ and that he was both ‘perfectly well-bred and adorned with a natural modesty’. Perhaps most endearingly of all, he was a brilliant conversationalist. Saint-Évremond praised his talk as being ‘so engaging, that none could enjoy without admiration and delight, and few without love’.
When it is asked what a young, handsome Rochester looked like, the answer can be supplied by referring to the most famous picture of him, found today in the National Portrait Gallery in London. It nestles snugly next to a particularly unflattering portrait of an aged, ravaged Charles II, probably by Thom as Hawker, and within spitting distance of Pepys, Nell Gwyn and Dryden. It has been rumoured to be by the leading portrait painter Jacob Huysmans and painted at some time between 1665 and 1670. While the Huysmans attribution is doubtful—he generally painted far grander figures than the youthful Rochester—the portrait can be dated to around 1667 or 1668, given that the man portrayed looks as if he is still in his early twenties. The painting has usually been attributed to the Dutch artist William Wissing, a protégé of Peter Lely, but given that Wissing was a decade younger than Rochester, it seems unlikely that he would have painted him while still an infant prodigy.
The picture shows Rochester, lavishly attired in a classically styled tunic, depicted in gorgeous hues of red and gold. The initial impression is of someone simultaneously relaxed and important, with the elaborate wig that he wears as the crowning touch. The subject looks out at the audience with a calm, serene and rather haughty expression that mirrors that of some of the great royal mistresses, implying in a sense that Rochester’s fortune lay as much in patronage as theirs did. The authentic touch of Rochesterian wit comes in the presentation of the monkey on the left, a jabbering little animal that is offering Rochester a torn leaf from a book, perhaps of its own poetry. The monkey became a key motif in his later work, especially in ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’ (Graham Greene’s early biography Lord Rochester’s Monkey made famous Rochester’s association with the creature). Monkeys were not uncommon in Restoration England. Pepys kept one as a pet, but was often angered by its un-reliability and inability to behave respectably: the parallel with Rochester is unmistakable.
Faced with the diminutive animal, Rochester responds by placing a laurel on its head, all the while holding a sheaf of unreadable papers—love letters? poems? affairs of state?—in his left hand. A briefly sketched, almost token pastoral scene behind him to the right offers an ironic counterpoint to the drollery depicted. No doubt the portrait was stage-managed by Rochester himself to offer his own commentary on the literary and social affairs of the day, albeit in an apparently inoffensive manner. The wider implication, that his pet monkey could write as well as most of the overpraised hacks of the day, would have been noted, and chafed at. The first-appointed Poet Laureate, John Dryden, might have seen this as the first sally in an uneasy and eventually combative relationship between the two men.
This portrait, more than any other, shows Rochester as a man in full control of how he represented himself to the world at large. Intelligent and witty, it was a magnificently ambiguous and challenging calling card and alerted everyone who saw it to the presence o
f a new and hugely significant figure at court. By contrast, the artist John Michael Wright’s 1668 portrait of Dryden, newly created Laureate and crowned with a laurel wreath, shows a man lacking both good looks and obvious charisma. If Rochester saw the picture, he probably enjoyed the disparity between the two.
While Rochester relaxed in the early days of his marriage, the Anglo-Dutch war cast a shadow over the country. The fighting went embarrassingly badly for England, especially when a Dutch fleet managed to sail into the English Channel on 12 June 1667, destroying three ships and capturing the flagship, the Royal Charles—an ignominious end for the ship that had heralded the Restoration by bringing Charles home from exile. This was a catastrophic blow to national pride, and on 21 July a hastily arranged peace treaty ended the war (ironically enough, this took place at Breda, where less than a decade earlier Charles’s return to England had been ratified by Parliament). The results were dire, both for the country and for the king, who was rumoured to have engaged in amorous activity even as his flagship was towed away. An anonymous lampoon soon circulated:
As Nero once with harp in hand surveyed,
His flaming Rome, and as it burnt he played:
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