So our great Prince when the Dutch fleet arrived,
Saw his ships burnt, and as they burnt, he swived.
Charles, embarrassed and furious at the outcome, sought desperately for a high-profile scapegoat and soon alighted on Clarendon. The unfortunate earl had managed to alienate virtually everyone at court over the previous years, whether it was for his contempt for ‘royal whore’ Barbara Castlemaine or for his involvement in the unpopular Act of Indemnity. Never mind that Clarendon had sought to limit England’s involvement in the war from the outset, or that he had desperately sought peace with France: it was now declared that he was responsible for the war’s failure and had connived with the enemy, selling Dunkirk to the French for his own purposes. Various other accusations were flung around, from his being accused of having used the stones of the destroyed St Paul’s to build his palatial new home, Clarendon House, to being a papist, polygamist and sodomite. Most of the charges lacked veracity, but the overall impression was a furiously negative one, and Charles dismissed Clarendon from office on 30 August 1667.
His fate was soon sealed once he had irreparably lost royal support. An immensely energetic and potent figure, he had made many enemies and many of them were happy to connive in his downfall. He fled to France, fearing the worst. When Parliament convened on 10 October, Clarendon was sentenced to exile and stripped of his office in absentia. Eventually, he was informed that if he returned to England again, he would be impeached for high treason and executed. It was a truly ignoble end to one of the great political careers of the time. Eventually, in 1674, he died in France, still an exile—a diminished figure who had suffered from ill health in the last years of his life.
Rochester’s involvement in his mentor’s downfall was small but crucial. As he did not attain his majority until early 1668, he was not yet in a position to vote in the House of Lords, but he nevertheless appeared at the opening of Parliament, as well as signing the petition in November 1667 that decreed that Clarendon should be arrested if he returned to England. His decision was a coldly calculated moment of realpolitik; his loyalty was to Charles and the court, rather than to one of his mother’s closest advisers and the man who had affectionately kissed him on the cheek as he handed him his Oxford degree. By throwing in his lot so explicitly with the king, he proved himself a very willing subject, just as Clarendon’s influence came to an end. In a later impromptu verse, Rochester declared ‘the Devil take Hyde’, indicating a final severance of all relations between the two men. His decision to turn against Clarendon proved to have wider repercussions than he might have guessed, not least because it angered his mother, who remained grateful to her former benefactor.
The co-signatories of the petition included George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, and George Monck, the Duke of Albemarle. Although Albemarle was irreparably associated with the military failure of the recent war, Charles was still grateful to him for his actions that led to the Restoration, and so he continued to be a figure at court, albeit no longer young at nearly sixty and inevitably diminished in influence. Buckingham, however, was an entirely different case, and it is fair to describe him as Rochester’s most significant mentor from this point onwards.
Although later portraits show him as a bloated, debauched figure, his face lined with the effects of wine and sexual excess, he was a beautiful youth, first painted as an angelic blond-haired boy by Van Dyck. Like Rochester and many other aristocratic young men of the time, Buckingham had grown up without a father. Buckingham père was a hugely influential figure in the early Stuart court, probably James I’s lover and a close supporter of Charles I until his untimely assassination in 1628. His son was a surrogate elder brother to Charles II, brought up in the royal household practically from birth. He was taught for a while by Thomas Hobbes, but was a wayward student; it was said that he masturbated in his lessons, hinting at an early reputation for salaciousness. After graduating from Cambridge, he served with distinction on the Royalist side in the Civil War and followed Charles into exile on the continent, before returning in 1657. While his machinations were entirely self-interested, he nevertheless regained royal favour when Charles returned, being created Gentleman of the Bedchamber and Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire.
His great nemesis was Clarendon. The two men loathed each other—Clarendon believing that Buckingham was venal and unworthy of holding high office, Buckingham seeing Clarendon as a poisonous voice in Charles’s ear and accusing him of treachery and papist sympathies. Clarendon hated Buckingham so much that he bribed spies to follow him and report on his movements, which were said to be as licentious as those of any man alive. Buckingham had also done himself few favours with his behaviour at the outset of the Anglo-Dutch war, demanding a seat on the naval council of war and generally making a nuisance of himself. Lesser men might have found themselves in trouble, but Charles, amused by his arrogance, sent him to Yorkshire, frustrating Clarendon.
Buckingham was helped immensely by the contempt that many at court felt for Clarendon, which allowed him to get away with actions such as his attack on Clarendon’s ally the Marquess of Dorchester, whose periwig he pulled off in an argument—an act of enormous symbolic insolence. While he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London in June 1667—perhaps in the quarters that Rochester had occupied a couple of years before—he was pardoned and released in July, thereby allowing him to spearhead Clarendon’s downfall, which he did with gusto.
Clarendon and Buckingham were studies in contrast. The older man was principled to the point of pig-headedness, to such an extent that he was unable to understand the new age that he found himself in. Disapproving of the Restoration era that he, as much as anyone, had engineered, he found himself an anachronism amongst the younger and more decadent figures of the time. Buckingham, by contrast, lived up to Burnet’s censorious comments: ‘He had no principles, either of religion, virtue or friendship... pleasure, frolic and extravagant diversions was all that he laid to heart... he was true to nothing, for he was not true to himself.’ Like Rochester, he thrived in this new era, where everything was up for grabs, because he was a pragmatist who had no existing set of beliefs to bind him. By the end of 1667, Buckingham had been created minister of state and was the most powerful man in the country. He was so influential that Pepys felt driven to say, ‘The King is now become... a slave to the Duke of Buckingham.’
If Rochester wished to take any figure at court as his mentor, then Buckingham was the obvious choice. In addition to his wealth and good standing with Charles, he had a Mephistophelean charm that impressed and seduced the younger man. It is a mark of how close their relationship became that a letter exists from Buckingham to Rochester, asking his protégé to cover his duties as Gentleman of the Bedchamber because of an appointment to go hunting; in it he notes: ‘I am very particular in this matter that your Lordship may see I am a man of business, and take the liberty of troubling you upon this occasion because I had rather be obliged to you than anybody else.’ The combination of flattery with the implicit claim to superior status—he is ‘a man of business’—was a typically brilliant ruse, and probably achieved its desired end.
A man described as ‘both the father and mother of scandal’, Buckingham had a great facility for making himself indispensably entertaining, so much so that Burnet commented on his ‘great liveliness of wit’, in addition to ‘his peculiar faculty of turning all things into ridicule’. Both of these would prove substantial influences on Rochester, as would his undoubted talent for extricating himself from difficult situations. He was by no means unpopular; the diarist Sir John Reresby called him ‘the first gentleman of person and wit I think I ever saw’, and he associated with a set at court that included Edmund Waller, Abraham Cowley and Samuel Butler, as well as Thomas Sprat, historian of the Royal Society. As interested in the arts and sciences as he was in drinking and sex, he conducted experiments at his home laboratory and played the violin with some skill.
Bucki
ngham was also a poet and playwright. While his work lacks the intellectual brilliance of Rochester’s later poems, it is suavely executed nonetheless, offering an insight into the concerns of those in the inner sanctum of court. An early libertine poem of his, sometimes called ‘The Honest Lover’, probably dating from around this time and dedicated to the Countess of Shrewsbury, neatly captures the energy and joie de vivre that many at court brought to the priapic excitements of the time:
Since you will needs my heart possess,
’Tis just to you I first confess
The faults to which ’tis given:
It is to change much more inclined
Than women, or the sea, or wind
Or aught that’s under heaven.
Nor will I hide from you the truth
It has been, from its very youth,
A most egregious ranger
And since from me it has often fled
With whom it was both born and bred
’Twill scarce stay with a stranger.
The black, the fair, the gay, the sad
(Which often made me fear ’twas mad)
With one kind look could win it:
So naturally it loves to range,
That it has left success for change;
And, what’s worse, glories in it.
Oft, when I have been laid to rest
’Twould make me act like one possessed,
For still ’twill keep a pother;
And though you only I esteem,
Yet it will make me, in a dream,
Court and enjoy another.
And now if you are not afraid,
After these truths that I have said
To take this arrant rover
Be not displeased, if I protest
I think the heart within your breast
Will prove just such another.
The message is headily appealing, a giddy carpe diem exhortation to go forth and take pleasure in loving ‘the black, the fair, the gay, the sad’ in turn. Although the narrator appears to pay lip service to constancy by saying ‘I only you esteem’, the ‘arrant rover’ will not be quietly enjoying the pleasures of hearth and home at any point soon. Buckingham presents a seductively captivating view of interpersonal relations that his young protégé Rochester would have taken to heart.
Rochester’s attitude towards constancy changed while under Buckingham’s patronage. While it is anachronistic (and naïve) to think of him as ever a purely faithful husband, it is also cynical to think that a man who could write to his wife ‘I would fain make you the author and foundation of my happiness’ was doing so merely out of habit—although, of course, Rochester’s high-flown rhetoric could be seen as verbal brilliance rather than sincere emotion. A similar tension between showing apparently heartfelt sentiment and adopting the arch persona of the removed lover dominates one of his greatest love lyrics:
Absent from thee I languish still:
Then ask me not, when I return
The straying fool ’twill plainly kill,
To wish all day, all night to mourn.
Dear: from thine arms then let me fly,
That my fantastic mind may prove
The torments it deserves to try,
That tears my fixed heart from my love.
When wearied with a world of woe
To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love, and peace, and truth does flow,
May I contented there expire.
Lest once more wandering from that Heaven,
I fall on some base heart unblessed;
Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven,
And lose my everlasting rest.
In contrast with the jauntily swaggering tone of Buckingham’s lyric, in which constancy is looked upon with an amused man-of-the-world disdain, there is a combination of wit and spiritual anguish in Rochester’s poem that recalls Donne. The narrator acknowledges his heart ‘once more wandering’, as Buckingham does, but the idea of how he might ‘fall on some base heart unblessed’ has the biblical echo of Satan and Adam alike being expelled from the Eden of his wife’s affections. This religious interest is strengthened by Rochester’s final invocation of how he might be ‘unforgiven’ and ‘lose my everlasting rest’ in his beloved’s ‘safe bosom’, where, in happier circumstances, he might ‘contented there expire’.
It is a pleasing coincidence that in 1667 Milton published a work entirely concerned with the effects of a similar fall, Paradise Lost; Rochester probably did not read it then, given the old blind poet’s status as a renegade and republican, but there might well have been mutterings at court about this strange, epic work, itself the product of no less a ‘fantastic mind’. Rochester probably read Paradise Lost in the early 1670s, possibly when the book’s ‘revised and augmented’ edition appeared in 1674. Although no evidence exists that Rochester and Milton ever met, each must have been aware of the other’s interests and concerns via their mutual friend Andrew Marvell, and Rochester’s later poem ‘The Fall’ feels heavily indebted to Milton’s eroticized passages between Adam and Eve, even if Rochester’s sexual explicitness would have been alien to the older writer.
Like Milton, Rochester was given to introspective self-awareness that verged on melancholy. This might partly be a poetic affectation, but was also an inevitable result of the brief moments of respite from a hard-living, heavy-drinking lifestyle that would have stunned even the hardiest of constitutions. As a result of this, he set great store by alternating between licentiousness and near-despair, as he questioned the entire basis of the world in which he found himself. In one letter to Elizabeth, he wrote, ‘’Tis not an easy thing to be entirely happy, but to be kind is very easy, and that is the greatest measure of happiness.’ He acknowledged his own faults in a self-deprecating fashion while writing to her—‘I must not be too wise about my own follies, or else this letter had been a book dedicated to you and published to the world’—but was also able to say of himself, ‘I am not in pain to satisfy many, [so] it will content me if you believe me and love me.’
As he busied himself at court, few doubted that Rochester was fully adept at surrounding himself with pleasure. On 2 October 1667 he had another annual pension of £1,000—around £80,000 in today’s money—authorized by Charles, for vaguely defined ‘services to the King’, and the following week he took his seat in the House of Lords, where he proved a largely disengaged participant, save at the great formal occasions, where failure to attend incurred royal displeasure. The next few months proved a comparatively frugal period in terms of literary composition, and there were few occurrences of note, with the only major public event taking place on 28 February 1668, when Rochester was appointed Ranger of Wychwood Forest and Gamekeeper of Oxfordshire.
If Rochester was not openly engaged in either heroic or disreputable acts, however, it was still a hugely eventful time. The so-called ‘merry gang’ of Rochester, Buckingham, Sedley, Buckhurst and Savile, as well as various good-time members, charged around the taverns and brothels of London, brawling, drinking and whoring until their bodies wilted with exhaustion and disease. In Rochester’s case, this torrid activity came about as he founded a secret club known as the ‘Ballers’, the purpose of which was to enjoy orgies of sex and exuberant consumption of imported French wine. The nickname literally meant ‘those who attended balls’, but the innuendo was obvious. It was commonly enough known for Pepys to be familiar with it, and in one diary entry he referred to their ‘dancing naked, and all the roguish things of the world’ and called them a ‘loose, cursed company’, although he did allow that they were ‘full of wit’, and he took delight at having been present at their gathering of ‘mad bawdy talk’ in late May. This club even imported leather dildoes to use in their shenanigans; a later letter from Savile to Rochester bemoans the confiscation of ‘those leather instruments’ by the overzealous agents of the custom house.
Prostitutes in 1668 London were well-frequented members of society, even
if the fire of two years before had been disastrous for many of the brothels that had permeated the city. With their destruction, savvy independent operators could flourish. The so-called ‘Crafty Bawd’ Damaris Page was London’s most infamous madam, whose habit of supplying press-ganged young men to serve as sailors endeared her to some of the highest in the land, such as the naval commander Sir Edward Spragge, who once said to Pepys, ‘As long as Damaris Page lives, I shall not lack men.’ Gentlemen of quality visited her whores, who were believed to be ‘clean’; they were armed only with primitive condoms fashioned from sheep’s guts, leather or linen.
While the Ballers took care, on the whole, to visit Page’s whores and to restrict their nocturnal visitations to ‘women of quality’ who attached themselves to Whitehall, Rochester had no such scruples. Profligate and egalitarian in his sexual tastes, he slept with everyone from ladies at court to the whores of the cheapest brothels in the city. His sexual appetites, aided by the consumption of copious quantities of wine, were at their peak, and even by the standards of the time, his near-mania for putting flesh into flesh was remarkable.
It was a far cry from his wife’s far more sedate life in Adderbury. Elizabeth became pregnant in around summer 1668, but Rochester, balling away, was a peripatetic visitor home. A letter that he wrote in May 1668 castigates her, hypocritically, for being an infrequent correspondent, saying, ‘You know not how much I am pleased when I hear from you, if you did you would be so obliging to write oftener to me, I do seriously with all my heart wish myself with you.’ Interestingly, he strikes contradictory notes about his relationship to the court, both loathing and thriving on his time there. In one breath he bemoans that ‘[I] am endeavouring every day to get away from this place which I am so weary of, that I might be said rather to languish than live in it’, and then, as if unable to help himself, resorts to sharing court gossip with her: he describes great women’s ailments and makes a sneering allusion to Elizabeth’s maternal grandfather Sir Francis—‘he drinks puppydog water to make himself handsome, but [his intended wife] having heard he had a clap, has refused to enter into conjugal bonds til she be better assured of his soundness.’
Blazing Star Page 13