The eulogy continues in similarly mock-heroic vein:
I believe the errantest villain breathing is honest as long as that bottle lives… I have seriously considered one thing, that, of the three businesses of this age, women, politics and drinking, the last is the only exercise at which you and I have not proved ourselves errant fumblers.
The letter reaches a climax when Rochester urges him to ‘let us appeal to friends of both sexes and… live and die sheer drunkards, or entire lovers… it is hard to say which is the most tiresome creature, the loving drunkard or the drunken lover’.
Certainly, both categories were something that Savile and Rochester had had great experience of, particularly the former. Rochester might make jocular reference to Savile’s ‘fat buttocks’ and his piles, but his friend was capable of athletic, if wildly inappropriate, behaviour. Muddiman’s subsequent letter describes Savile’s attempt to seduce the highly regarded widow Elizabeth Percy, Lady Northumberland. ‘Tempted by his evil genius’, Savile was visiting Althorp and decided, presumably drunkenly, to attempt to have his way with her. Frightened, she sounded the alarm, and Savile was forced to flee (here, Muddiman adds the charmingly Molesworthian comment that he ‘retired overwhelmed with despair and so forth’). This episode was a source of enormous shame and embarrassment for Savile, who made himself scarce in Europe, given the certainty of punishment had he been found in England. Muddiman sardonically remarks that Northumberland’s family ‘breath nothing but battle murder and sudden death: so that either way we are like to lose a very honest fellow’, but it was a timely reminder that, even in the gilded world of the court, certain actions were seen as beyond the pale. Drunkenness and lechery were tolerated, but insulting people of quality was not.
Although actions of this kind were frowned upon, to see them dramatized was hugely popular. One beneficiary of the public appetite for scandal and sexual skulduggery was the young playwright William Wycherley. An Oxford graduate and a secret Catholic convert, he found fame with his daringly sophisticated play Love in a Wood, or, St James’s Park, which was produced in early 1671 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where it played to around 650 people for six performances. It was the norm for no new play to be staged for more than a week, as it was thought audiences were unlikely to come back more often unless a new production was being staged, and only the successful ones were allowed to last even as long as six days. Wycherley’s play concerns the amours of three young gentlemen, Ranger, Valentine and Vincent, and features such caricatured figures as the lecherous usurer Alderman Gripe and the affected widow Lady Flippant; it was a huge success, with innuendo-laden humour and bawdy situations marking it as one of the first of the ‘second breed’ of Restoration comedy, where the humour was both satirical and accessible. Wycherley, nobody’s fool, dedicated the published play to Barbara Castlemaine, his occasional lover. While she had been supplanted in the king’s bed, she still held a good deal of sway at court and was a useful ally, or implacable enemy.
Rochester met Wycherley around this time, and the two men became friends. Both were witty, both enjoyed drinking and the company of loose women, and both looked at Whitehall with a clear-eyed cynicism. Later, Rochester would praise him in ‘An Allusion to Horace’ as ‘slow Wycherley’ and claim that he ‘earns hard whate’er he gains... he frequently excels, and at the least / Makes fewer faults than any of the best.’ The figure in the play that Rochester is closest to is the libertine character of Ranger. Introduced in ‘a French house’, a tavern of low reputation, Ranger declares that ‘Women are poor credulous creatures, easily deceived’ and announces his intention to take ‘a ramble to St-James Park tonight, upon some probable hopes of some fresh game I have in chase’.
Ranger might end the play preparing for ‘the bondage of matrimony’ to his witty mistress Lydia, but Rochester took away a rather different view of female nature. It was soon after he saw Love in a Wood that Rochester, by now bored, alone and incapacitated in the country, began one of his most excoriating satires, ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’, the title of which was an explicit reference to the play he had recently seen and which parodied Edmund Waller’s 1661 sycophantic poem of praise, ‘St James’s Park, as lately improved by his majesty’. The opening sees the narrator in full tavern-bothering social mode, exchanging trivial gossip with his familiars:
Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse,
Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear,
While I, who still take care to see,
Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Went out into St James’s Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.
Matters soon take a stranger and more vivid turn, as Rochester’s poetic imagination soars in a hitherto untapped way. ‘Strange woods spring from the teaming earth’ and tell a fantastical tale of how ‘ancient Pict’, frustrated of his evening’s assignation (‘jilting, it seems, was then in fashion’) ‘would frig upon his mother’s face’, and this would result in ‘rows of mandrakes tall’ rising above, ‘whose lewd tops fucked the very skies’.
This bizarre location, then, is now the setting for the lewdest of goings-on, where ‘buggeries, rapes and incests [are] made’. All society comes ‘unto this all-sin-sheltering grove’, and Rochester treats the reader to a laundry list that ranges from ‘great ladies’ and ‘fine fops’ to ‘prentices, poets, pimps and jailers’. With an air of triumph, Rochester concludes that ‘here promiscuously they swive’. St James’s Park is no longer just an ordinary place for nocturnal sexual assignations, but a Dantean purgatory where lust dominates all.
It is a mark of Rochester’s philosophy that he saw not just the skull beneath the skin, but the soul under the skeleton. There was always some part of him, up until his death, that remained hopelessly attached to beauty and truth, and here it finds a fleeting, initially enraptured expression:
Along these hallowed walks it was
That I beheld Corinna pass.
Whoever had been by to see
The proud disdain she cast on me
Through charming eyes, he would have swore
She dropped from heaven that very hour,
Forsaking the divine abode
In scorn of some despairing god.
But mark what creatures women are:
How infinitely vile, when fair!
Again, another idealized woman appears, but the use of the name ‘Corinna’ rather than ‘Chloris’ or ‘Daphne’ is significant; Corinna was an ancient Greek poet rather than a deity, indicating that Rochester’s interests in personification here were earthly, rather than divine, even if she had ‘dropped from heaven that very hour’. His point is that her beauty might appear to be that of a goddess, but her behaviour is animalistic, not even human. The model for her could well have been a maid and dresser known to him named Elizabeth Foster, the niece of a Knightsbridge tavern-keeper who had had sexual relations with a number of people throughout London in 1670– 1 and infected all of them with the pox. Muddiman describes her in his letter as ‘a damsel of low degree’ and ‘very fit for the latter part of your treatment’—presumably a good seeing-to by Rochester; the poem is at least in part inspired by his desire for revenge on Foster.
The next fifty or so lines see Rochester tearing into three representatives of contemporary society, first in the shape of a Whitehall man about town and toady to the king, who ‘ventures to do like the best’, but, ‘wanting common sense’, ‘converts abortive imitation / To universal affectation’, meaning that every one of his actions, whether it is loving, living or looking, is done ‘by rote’, while dressed in his royal livery.* This character is an attack on all of the courtiers, including, of course, Rochester himself. The second, a ‘Gray’s Inn wit’, is a squinting and penurious law student, and the third a young man waiting to achieve his estate. The three ‘confounded asses’ speak ‘in a strain ’twixt tune and nonsense’
in clichéd amorous terms, and the ever-lusty Corinna, whose ‘cunt cries “Yes!”’, is all too ready to embrace their advances.
This is fairly straightforward social satire, witty and well observed but not much more remarkable than the work of another court poet, such as Buckingham, save for the obscenity of the language. Where ‘A Ramble’ becomes more interesting is in what occurs next. The poet, despairing of his own abilities, asks that:
Some power more patient now relate
The sense of this surprising fate.
Gods! That a thing admired by me
Should fall to so much infamy.
As with ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, the tone has darkened, from mere observation to near-hysterical comment. Rochester bemoans Corinna’s failing to satisfy her lusts with ‘some stiff-pricked clown’ or ‘well-hung parson’, which he claims he would have ‘praised’, on the grounds that ‘natural freedoms are but just’ and ‘there’s something generous in mere lust’. However, he soon takes a more misogynistic view, describing her as a ‘damned abandoned jade’ and ‘a whore in understanding / A passive pot for fools to spend in’, before climaxing with the condemnation ‘The devil played booty, sure, with thee / To bring a blot on infamy.’
This is disturbingly cold, even with its wit and wordplay, but passion is soon added to the mix. The next thirty or so lines are directed as much towards the various women who have wronged Rochester, either by infecting him with syphilis or by trifling with his (self-confessedly mercurial) affections, as they are towards Corinna, railing at her for her treachery to ‘humble, fond, believing me’ and furiously pillorying her ‘lewd cunt’, which is said to be ‘drenched with the seed of half the town’. These lines are undoubtedly disturbing to read but make a fascinating counterpoint to his letters to his wife, which, at this point, were still temperate and reasonable in their ideas and statements.
In ‘A Ramble’, however, women and ‘cunt’ are all-devouring and threatening. Of its seven uses in the poem, all but the first are directly sexualized and in relation to Corinna, and the two in this passage are particularly vicious, with the words ‘lewd’ and ‘devouring’ leaving the reader in no doubt about Rochester’s opinion of his former inamorata. The details are visceral, perhaps even unpleasantly so—‘the seed of half the town’ and ‘my dram of sperm’ are an explicitly physical commentary on male–female relations.
For all this, it is important to remember that Rochester is writing not as John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, but in a poetic persona as part of the satirical tradition. Therefore, when the narrator describes himself as ‘humble, fond, believing me’, there is a knowing element of self-deprecation here that helps to undercut some of the more scabrous and shocking statements. The narrator is consciously performing a self-penned monologue, the theme being ‘female inconstancy’, and is improvising wildly, throwing in ever more ridiculous and absurd metaphors and descriptions as he continues. Given Rochester’s own ability to produce a witty extempore piece of verse, the poem may have had its roots in speech, perhaps as the written remnant of a particularly giddy night’s drink-provoked harangue. Certainly, the final section contains a marvellously splenetic curse:
May stinking vapours choke your womb
Such as the men you dote upon!
May your depraved appetite,
That could in whiffling fools delight,
Beget such frenzies in your mind
You may go mad for the north wind,
And fixing all your hopes upon’t
To have him bluster in your cunt,
Turn up your longing arse to the air
And perish in a wild despair!
Syphilis, probably the ‘stinking vapours’ that Rochester refers to, led to madness, and this curse was especially trenchant if it alluded to one of the women who had infected him with the illness. The narrator produces a list of impossible occurrences to show the implacable nature of his hatred of Corinna: ‘cowards shall forget to rant... physicians shall believe in Jesus / And disobedience cease to please us’ before he ceases ‘to plague this woman and undo her’. The desire for eternal revenge could be an echo of Donne’s poem ‘The Apparition’, where he announces that he will come to his faithless lover as a ghost, and ‘since my love is spent’, terrify her into ‘a cold quicksilver sweat’. In both poems, the poet wishes to wreak revenge on his former inamorata while they have a new lover—in Rochester’s case, in the ‘most lamentable state’ of marriage. However, Rochester has even more vicious intent, announcing his desire to have Corinna ‘loathed and despised’ and expelled from town—and court—and driven into ‘some dirty hole alone’. He would have her ‘chew the cud of misery / And know she owes it all to me’. He builds to a final half-magnificent, half-bathetic rhetorical flourish:
And may no woman better thrive
That dares profane the cunt I swive!
Rochester’s satire is directed at virtually all of society, with a deliriously scatter-gun assault on the worthies of the day, but it is also aimed squarely at himself. If ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ tackles his physical impotence, then ‘A Ramble’ tackles something that courtiers of the day feared even more: removal from royal favour and subsequent redundancy. The narrator rants, and rails and curses, but ultimately his threats of vengeance and supremacy ring entirely hollow, as he remains a peripheral voyeur, ready to comment on the actions of others but, unmanned by betrayal and illness, unable to interfere. It was a self-aware reference to what Rochester saw as his waning influence at court. After a remarkable debut, the Killigrew and Mulgrave incidents had not helped his reputation, and his frequent bouts of ill health had frequently removed him from the action altogether.
He remained out of London until early 1672, sometimes at Adderbury but mainly at Ditchley and at Woodstock. He avoided his wife as far as he could while recovering from the various illnesses that were bedevilling him; a bemused and hurt note from Elizabeth from this time reads: ‘Though I cannot flatter myself so much as to expect it, yet give me leave to wish that you would dine tomorrow at Cornbury, where necessity forces, your faithful humble wife, E. Rochester.’ A touching postscript states: ‘If you send to command me to Woodstock when I am so near as Cornbury, I shall not be a little rejoiced.’ Their relations were suffering as a consequence of her absence at her family’s estates in Enmore; the difficulty of remaining in close quarters with Anne Wilmot led to her departure, and she and Rochester did not see each other for months. Whether or not he saw her on that occasion, he clearly felt a sense of guilt at his neglect.
A letter that he sent her upon his return to court mixed remorse with wit. It begins with a self-effacing comment: ‘[To] run away like a rascal without taking leave, dear wife… is an unpolished way of proceeding, which a modest man ought to be ashamed of.’ Rochester was anything but modest, but he was self-aware enough to realize that he had not only ‘left [Elizabeth] a prey to [her] own imaginations’ but also left her to the mercy of the dragon-like Anne Wilmot, whom he refers to as ‘my relations, the worst of damnations’, as he expresses the hope that, belatedly, ‘my mother be merciful unto you’. He then moves into his familiar parody of scriptural language, this time setting his sights on the liturgy of the funeral service: ‘I commit you to what shall ensue, woman to woman, wife to mother, in hopes of a future appearance in glory.’ He ends with good wishes to his children, claiming penury wittily by saying ‘excuse my ill paper and my ill manners to my mother, they are both the best the place and age will afford’.
Elizabeth, in charge of two young children, was both bored and frustrated. Like many witty and beautiful young heiresses of the age who had been much prized in town, she found herself out of sorts when removed from her urban milieu, sequestered either to her own family’s estate or to a cold, decrepit house in the middle of the countryside, where she had to live with Rochester’s domineering mother and his young nieces, Eleanor and Anne Lee, both of whom took exception to this arriviste. A more cheerful companion for h
er was Anne Wilmot’s indefatigable agent John Cary, who remained a constant presence at Adderbury; a note of Rochester’s refers to an order for firewood he had placed with Cary on Elizabeth’s behalf. Rochester, who approved of the agent, described him as ‘seldom failing in anything he undertakes’.
One of the few things that united Rochester and Elizabeth at this time was poetry, although their writing was entirely different. While Rochester’s verses were designed mainly to be passed in manuscript around a select group of friends and acquaintances at court, with the intention of amusing and shocking, Elizabeth’s writing, at least in the few poems of hers that survive in manuscript, was unlikely to have been intended for anyone’s consumption, save possibly that of her husband. Her poem ‘Chloris’ misfortunes that can be expressed’ can be read as her own despairing commentary on the situation that she finds herself in. When talking of her lover’s absence, it is hard not to draw a parallel with her husband’s long disappearances:
Such conquering charms contribute to my chain
And add fresh torments to my lingering pain
That could blind love, judge of my faithful flame
He would return the fugitive with shame
For having been insensible to love
That does by constancy its merit prove.
The distinction between Elizabeth’s constancy and the ‘lingering pain’ of the fugitive is sufficiently pointed that we may imagine that this poem, at least, was intended for her husband. Nonetheless, a tone of testy and growing irritation can be detected in Rochester’s replies to her letters. In one note, he responds: ‘I have too much respect for you to come near you whilst I am in disgrace, but when I am a favourite again I will wait on you.’ In another he claims: ‘the difficulties of pleasing your ladyship do increase so fast upon me, and are grown so numerous that to a man less resolved than myself never to give it over, it would appear a madness ever to attempt it more.’
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