What Elizabeth made of all this can only be imagined, as few of her letters to Rochester survive. Probably lonely and frustrated, she would have felt disheartened and miserable. A subsequent letter of Rochester’s makes excuses for his infrequent correspondence—‘if two letters from me came not to your hands this last week and that before, they have miscarried’—but the demands of Whitehall and the Ballers proved more compelling than writing to her. One poem that he wrote, discovered in the surviving manuscripts of Rochester’s letters and apparently an extempore response to her servant’s request for an answer,*1 strikes an intriguing balance between sincerity and disinterested wit, with the odd outright lie merrily thrown in:
I am, by fate, slave to your will
And shall be most obedient still.
To show my love, I will compose ye,
For your fair finger’s ring, a posy,
In which shall be expressed my duty,
And how I’ll forever be true t’ye.
With low-made legs and sugared speeches,
Yielding to your fair bum the breeches,
I’ll show myself in all I can,
Your faithful, humble servant, John.
It was a demanding time for everyone. Charles had begun his notorious relationship with Nell Gwyn, having ‘inherited’ her from Charles Buckhurst, and jokingly referred to himself as her ‘Charles the Third’, alluding to her previous relationships with Buckhurst and the actor Charles Hart. The fiery Barbara Castlemaine found herself marginalized, although her relationship with Charles had been in decline since the birth of her fifth child by him, George, in 1665. She still took other lovers, ranging from an acrobat, John Hall, to her second cousin John Churchill, and enjoyed gifts and patronage, but, at twenty-eight, her appeal was coming to an end and she was all too aware that Charles, never a constant figure, was seeking to supplant her. Her outbursts of temper remained impressive, but her days of enormous influence at court were over.
With the moral authority of Clarendon revoked, a new air of liberty settled on Whitehall. Burnet wrote, scathingly, that ‘the court fell into much extravagance in masquerading; both king and queen, and all the court, went about masked, and came into houses unknown, and danced. People were so disguised, that without being on the secret none could distinguish them.’ Of course, Rochester enjoyed the opportunity to disguise himself, even if the disguise that others took such delight in was for him a further means of projecting another identity. Others dressed up for an evening as entertainment, but Rochester took it more seriously. Burnet supposes that his masquerades (in the form of such personae as porters and beggars) are a means of following ‘mean amours’, and sometimes for ‘diversion’, but this misses the point. Like a method actor, he threw himself so fully into his roles that Burnet’s puzzled comments in his later book Some Passages in the Life and Death of John Earl of Rochester—that ‘even those who were in the secret, and saw him in these shapes, could perceive nothing’—were quite accurate. These subterfuges were not restricted to Whitehall; even in Adderbury he was rumoured to don disguise to elicit unfavourable comments about ‘the rakehell, Lord Rochester’, and then to take whatever action he deemed appropriate, which more often than not was a fight, followed by the taking of a glass. As Charles had found before, disguise had the happy effect of eliciting truth.
Commenting on other such dissimulation outside Whitehall, Pepys noted on 2 December 1668 that he ‘heard the silly discourse [of Charles]… telling a story of my Lord Rochester’s having his clothes stole, while he was with a wench; and his gold all gone, but his clothes found afterwards stuffed into a feather bed by the wench that stole them’. This is perfectly possible, indeed even probable. What Pepys neglects to mention is that this could well refer to another semi-apocryphal story of Charles and Rochester’s intimate involvement at the Newmarket races at this time. Charles, always making an effort to be discreet in sexual matters, disguised himself while visiting one of the ‘women of quality’ who were on hand to service the royal court in temporary exile, but while he was engaged in burying the royal sceptre, Rochester saw to it that his clothes and money were hidden. When Charles had finished his labours, he found himself embarrassed for money, and, in desperation, offered his royal ring to the brothel-keeper as surety. Taking it to a nearby goldsmith, the jeweller realized that it was the king’s and the madam returned to the brothel, grovelling in fear. Charles, surrounded by his terrified and panicking subjects, summoned up something of the amused suavity of his cross-England flight from nearly two decades before, and was said to ask, ‘Will this ring stand a second bottle of wine?’
Relations between Rochester and Charles were not always so amicable. On 16 February 1669 a dinner was given at the Dutch ambassador’s to commemorate the uneasy peace between the two countries. A good deal of drink was had, and in the half-exuberant, half-paranoid atmosphere, Thomas Killigrew, the so-called king’s jester, managed to upset Rochester sufficiently with his ‘mirth and raillery’ that Rochester was driven to box him on the ear. What he mocked him about was not recorded, but the normally even-tempered Rochester was unlikely to have responded so violently to anything other than an extremely fool-born jest, possibly about his then childless marriage, or some half-witted jibe about his comparatively lowly standing.
Had most others committed such an act of disrespect, they would have been arrested and sent to the Tower. However, Rochester was sufficiently in favour with Charles not only not to be punished, but to be seen publicly with him the next day. This attracted a good deal of surprised and disgusted reaction—Pepys wrote that the king had made himself look ‘cheap’ by having ‘passed by’ Rochester’s actions and that it was to his ‘everlasting shame’ that he had taken for himself ‘so idle a rogue’ as his companion. Pepys was never a particular admirer of Rochester’s, and this description of him summed up what many felt about the young debauchee. Charles’s apparent amusement at Rochester’s actions only served to frustrate many, who felt that the moral bankruptcy of the court was epitomized by this laissez-faire attitude.
Charles might have let the matter slip, were it not for the Secretary of State, Henry Bennet, whose idea the dinner had been. Angry and humiliated, Bennet made it clear to Charles that Rochester’s behaviour had gone beyond the pale and could even result in a major diplomatic incident. He demanded Rochester’s expulsion from court, but the king proposed a compromise. After a visit to the Newmarket races, Rochester was dispatched to Paris on 12 March 1669 in company with the newly appointed diplomat Ralph Montagu, ostensibly to deliver a letter to Charles’s sister Henrietta, but in reality to pay lip service to the idea that this notorious man should be disciplined for his actions. It was a reasonable solution, and Rochester accepted. In the letter Charles praises his errant protégé: ‘Pray use him as one I have a very good opinion of. You will not find him to want wit, and did behave himself in all the Dutch war as well as anybody, as a volunteer.’ En route to Paris, Rochester wrote to his heavily pregnant wife: ‘I hold you six to four I love you with all my heart, [and] if I would bet with other people I’m sure I could get two to one… it will content me if you believe me and love me.’ He hoped for an uneventful couple of months, perhaps retracing his steps to some of the haunts visited on his grand tour, but, as ever, he was incapable of restraint.
The first problem that Rochester faced was that his reputation had preceded him, but not in the best of ways. The incident of his striking Killigrew was well known in the French court, but rather than treating it with the relaxed humour with which Charles had regarded it, Louis XIV refused Rochester a reception, stating that ‘those that struck in Kings’ presences should have no countenance from him’; he also implicitly criticized Charles’s tolerance of his favourite’s actions by saying that he would be equally opposed to ‘those that the King his good brother of England frowned on’. As a result, Rochester’s later poetic references to French royalty are utterly uncomplimentary: his notorious satire on Charles II alludes
to ‘a French fool wandering up and down’, and he writes, ‘All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on/From the hector of France, to the cully [dupe] of Britain.’ It was also subsequently rumoured, in the 1745 publication The Agreeable Companion, that Rochester had defaced a marble pillar at Versailles in honour of Louis’ military triumphs with this simple but hugely insulting couplet:
Lorrain he stole, by fraud he got Burgundy,
Flanders he bought, ’ods you shall pay for it one day.
Had this been proven to be the work of Rochester, a hugely embarrassing diplomatic crisis would have followed, but if it was him, he remained undetected. However, there were many other difficulties that arose during his French sojourn. On 19 April he was assaulted and robbed by a gang of six masked bandits on the Pont Rouge, who made off with his favourite periwig, and on 21 June he was involved in an unseemly scuffle at the theatre along with his fellow libertine William Cavendish, as they were attacked by a retinue of Louis’ guards acting on anti-English sentiment. Rochester escaped unharmed, but Cavendish was badly wounded and would have been killed had others not intervened.
Rochester’s thoughts lay as much on the birth of his first child as they did on the excitements and intrigues of the French court. In a letter that he wrote to Elizabeth from Paris, he expresses a desire to be assured of her well-being: ‘I should be infinitely pleased with the news of your health, hitherto have not been so fortunate to hear any of you but assure yourself my wishes are of your side as much as is possible.’ The tone of the letter is anxious and seeks reassurance, and it was a relief when he was allowed to return home in July and head to Adderbury, to find his daughter alive and well. She was named Anne after his mother. A letter from Ralph Montagu to Henry Bennet describes Rochester as having lived ‘discreetly’ in Paris, something of a euphemism, but also says that ‘he has other good qualities enough to deserve... your Lordship’s favour and countenance’. Once again, Rochester managed to charm and impress those around him and emerge triumphant from a potentially compromising situation.
The next few months were a time of peace and relaxation in his life, as he had little to distract him other than his new child and marital occupations. His health was still relatively good, with the effects of his whoring and drinking more an occasional inconvenience than an ongoing agony. When he returned to Whitehall for the opening of Parliament in late October 1669, he expected to spend the rest of the year in the quieter manner to which he had become accustomed, but the demands of the merry gang and the Ballers meant that trouble was never far away. It was his bad luck at this time to make a lifelong and implacable enemy, in the unlovely shape of John Sheffield, the Earl of Mulgrave.
Mulgrave was the son of Edmund Sheffield, a Cromwellian councillor, but he had proved his worth to the Restoration court by volunteering in the navy, where he served without particular distinction in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. He was nearly the same age as Rochester, but could scarcely have had a more different life. Constipated, vain and bitter where Rochester was amicable, self-deprecating and generous, Mulgrave had spent his formative years in self-education, desperately trying to cast off the taint of association with a despised regime. Both men wrote poetry, but while Rochester’s was frequently brilliant, Mulgrave’s was unstintingly dreadful.*2 The differences extended back to their progenitors, too. While Henry Wilmot was swashbuckling, daring and reckless, Edmund Sheffield had been cautious, reliable and prudent. His most notable achievement was to be responsible for the preservation of game in the former royal forests of Lincolnshire. While no doubt useful, this hardly compares with Henry Wilmot’s simultaneously hot-headed and noble attempts to bring about the Restoration without money, influence or arms.
Had personality and family been the only differences between the two men, their quarrels would have been insignificant. However, Mulgrave was notoriously thin-skinned and soon found himself convinced that he had been libelled by Rochester—or, as he put it in his groaningly flatulent memoirs: ‘I was informed that the Earl of Rochester had said something of me which, according to his custom, was very malicious.’ Ironically, this was one of the few occasions when Rochester hadn’t ridiculed someone, as Mulgrave soon realized, but the pomposity of the man was so great that ‘the mere report… obliged me… to go on with the quarrel’.
Satisfaction having been demanded, the preparations for a duel were farcical. After a fight on horseback had been agreed, Mulgrave and his second headed to Knightsbridge the day before. There, they were taken for highwaymen and treated accordingly. The next day, Rochester turned up with ‘an errant lifeguardsman’ as his second and promptly excused himself from the encounter on the grounds that he was not in a fit state to fight. Mulgrave begged him to have a quick tussle at least, on the grounds that both men would be laughed at if they returned to court without such an encounter, but Rochester continued to refuse, citing his poor health and saying that he would inevitably lose such a duel. Mulgrave noted that, when this account was spread around court, Rochester ‘entirely ruined his reputation as to courage’, and sneeringly and insincerely remarked ‘of which I was really sorry to be the occasion.’
In fact, Rochester was feigning ill health through prudence rather than cowardice. The Killigrew business was still fresh in the king’s memory and to be involved in a very public fight with another high-profile member of court would be socially disastrous. For once, he emerged from the encounter without any culpability, saying, with an appealing air of faux-innocence when questioned about the matter: ‘I have never been angry with the Earl of Mulgrave, and I have no reason to believe that he was so with me; for his lordship hath always carried himself so gently and civilly toward me.’
Perhaps because of this, Rochester continued to keep a low profile throughout much of 1670. He spent the first few months of the year at home in Adderbury, where Elizabeth conceived their second child—a boy, Charles, who was born at the end of the year and named after the king, its godfather. Sackville, who represented Charles at the baptism, wrote Rochester a drolly witty letter on 24 December 1670 in which he announces that he will be the infant Charles’s ‘lieutenant general against the world, the flesh and the devil’, and—referring to his own licentious behaviour—that he is ‘resolved to behave myself so discreetly that the Enemy, as vigilant as he is, shall have no suspicion of the quarrel’. ‘The Enemy’ is, of course, Satan, and Sackville goes on to claim: ‘I must confess this with some unwillingness… I begin a war against a prince I have so long served under.’ So much for the young Charles receiving godly advice from his surrogate godfather. Little poetry of any worth was produced during this time; instead, Rochester amused himself with free translations and jeux d’esprit. This is not to say that he was lacking things to do; Elizabeth’s stepfather Sir John Warre died in early 1670, with the consequence that Rochester’s doubtful expertise in financial affairs were called upon.
Meanwhile, Charles was consumed with larger state decisions, aided by Buckingham. Following Ralph Montagu’s arrival in Paris in 1669, the relationship between England and France, enhanced by a diplomatic visit by Buckingham and Savile that summer, was warmer than it had been since the Restoration. Building on this good relationship, Charles proposed a new treaty that would supersede the existing Triple Alliance with Sweden and the Dutch Republic. A condition of this treaty (the Treaty of Dover) was that Charles would declare himself Catholic, a risky move at a time when antipapal feeling was as high as ever in England, and would in return be granted the enormous sum of two million crowns, after which England and France would join forces against the Dutch Republic. The clause about Charles’s Catholicism was kept secret, so the negotiations took place while his courtiers had no idea of the enormity of what they were attempting.
The treaty was signed on 27 May 1670, and it was completed amidst merry events that saw Charles’s sister Henrietta briefly return to England for a month’s revelry and celebrations. One of her attendants, Louise de Kérouaille, caught the king’s e
ye and soon became a royal mistress, strengthening what would be a decidedly cordial entente. Henrietta’s presence was scarcely a coincidence, given that she had been an informal go-between for the two courts for many years, but her fiercely jealous husband Philippe resented what he suspected was her rampant infidelity with everyone from Louis XIV downwards. While he was hardly a model of sexual probity, Philippe’s intense pride was damaged by stories that his wife—even if she was married to him mainly in name only—was free with her favours.
When she returned to France in late June, she was sequestered by Philippe, and a mere matter of weeks later what Rochester called the ‘saddest story in the world’ was reported—namely, that she had died on 29 June after taking a strong opiate that her doctor had prescribed. Rochester, by now in London, wrote to his wife to recount the story of her death, adding that a distraught Charles, who had been informed of his sister’s death by the ambassador Ralph Montagu, was in ‘the highest affliction imaginable’; he strongly implied that Philippe’s ill behaviour and threats were linked to the death, before remarking that their correspondence had become ‘very tedious’ and chiding her for not writing to him enough. As if conscious that this struck something of a downbeat note, he requests some ale and signs off with a blithe ‘Tarara’. He gives his address as Arbor House in Portugal Road, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, next to the playhouse there, rather than Whitehall—perhaps because his earlier lodging had only been temporary, or because this was the house that he used for his more outré assignments.
A year that had begun quietly and promisingly soon spiralled into debauchery. Rochester was enjoying his usual cornucopia of carnal entanglements, and it was around now that the first serious signs of syphilis manifested themselves, as he complained of severe pains that he put down to ‘kidney stones’. It is possible that he did not know the truth about the potential seriousness of his condition, and equally possible that he did not care, viewing it as a form of payment for the pleasures he enjoyed.
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