Rochester found ministering to his family a bind and irritation. He talks of ‘my constant resolutions to satisfy you in all I can’, but this is undercut by a sourer comment:
Since you have thought it a wise thing to trust me less… it has been out of my power to make the best of my proceedings… at a distance, I am likeliest to learn your mind, for you have not a very obliging way of delivering it by word of mouth.
He ends this especially peremptory letter by saying: ‘If therefore you will let me know the particulars in which I may be useful to you, I shall show my readiness as to my own part, and if I fail of the success I wish, it shall not be [my] fault.’ How Elizabeth reacted to this can only be imagined, so perhaps the hastily scribbled postscript—‘I intend to be at Adderbury some time next week’—was a last-minute sop to her hurt feelings.
When Rochester returned to London, things had changed once again. The Theatre Royal had burnt down in a fire on 25 January 1672, depriving the city of one of its major playhouses and forcing a hasty rearrangement of many of the leading players and playwrights of the day. The larger devastation that had been wreaked six years before was being partially ameliorated by the grand designs of Christopher Wren, who would be knighted the following year for his contribution to rebuilding the fabric of the city, including St Paul’s and fifty-one city churches. However, the grander and more ornate ideas that he had submitted to Charles were never adopted, in no small part because the king was in a state of penury. An ill-advised third Dutch war, this time with French support, was expensive and limped on until 1674, when it resulted in stalemate and a hastily made peace. Rochester, in poor health, did not volunteer for battle on this occasion, or ever again.
More than ever, Charles was losing his grip on his kingdom. A Declaration of Indulgence was issued on 15 March 1672, allowing religious liberty to Catholics and Protestant Nonconformists, but it was an unpopular move that was rescinded by Parliament the following year. Distracted by the attentions of the aristocratic Louise de Kérouaille and the earthier charms of Nell Gwyn, both of whom were lavished with gifts and property (and the title of Duchess of Portsmouth for Louise, with whom he had even conducted a mock wedding the previous year), he was no longer the vigorous, popular ruler he had been, but a weak and lecherous presence who was open to the ridicule of his courtiers and former friends.
It was a result of this perceived weakness that open satires on Charles began to circulate at court. The most protracted and grotesque was a lengthy burlesque, often ascribed to Rochester, entitled Sodom. Subtitled The Quintessence of Debauchery, it probably began its composition in 1672, with subsequent variations continuing long after Rochester’s death, up to a printed version (attributed to the ‘E of R’), which appeared in 1689, along with some of Rochester’s poems, and was promptly destroyed for obscenity and its publisher, the bookseller Joseph Streater, fined. (Among subsequent additions that might have incurred displeasure was the introduction of a parody of Louis XIV as ‘Tarsehole the King of Gomorrah’.) Sodom’s central character, Bolloximian, king of Sodom, is a none too subtle parody of Charles. The figure is introduced saying, ‘Thus in the zenith of my lust I reign / I drink to swive, and swive to drink again’—another spoof of The Conquest Of Granada, this time its opening ‘Thus in the triumphs of soft peace, I reign / And, from my walls, defy the powers of Spain’; he is the epitome of sexual and social corruption, his credo expressed in the lines: ‘My laws shall act more pleasure than command / And with my prick I’ll govern all the land.’ The plot, such as it is, involves Bolloximian wearying of conventional sex—‘I no longer cunt admire / The drudgery has worn out my desire’—and turning instead to sodomy, proclaiming that ‘buggery may be used / O’er all the land, so cunt be not amused’. The women of the kingdom, in return, adopt lesbianism as their creed.
The authorship debate over Sodom has persisted since its creation. As with the poem ‘Regime de Vivre’, the temptation for both Rochester’s contemporaries and later admirers or enemies has been to ascribe to him anything that was public and obscene composed between 1665 and 1680. It has been commonly attributed to Rochester since it became public knowledge that it existed, not least because of its early publishing history; in 1698 the publisher Henry Hill was the first man to be prosecuted by the Court of King’s Bench for publishing an obscene book—namely, the collected poems of Rochester and Sodom in one volume. That Rochester knew of it is certain; that he contributed to it, likely; that he was the sole author, doubtful. The reasons for ascribing at least some of it to Rochester are that there is an unfettered wit and imagination in places that feels closely related to his satirical verse, such as a lengthy paean to female masturbation with a horse’s tail, and such touches as the mockery of his enemy Mulgrave as the obsequious pimp Pockinello and the guying of Barbara Castlemaine as the sex-mad Fuckadilla. There are also sharp moments which combine wit with social observation that are reminiscent of Rochester at his most acute, such as when it is said of Cuntagratia, the Catherine of Braganza substitute: ‘Her cunt no longer invites / Clad with the filth of her most nasty whites.’ As an allusion to the queen’s barren state, it combines wit and repulsive imagery as brilliantly as many of Rochester’s satiric poems. There is even an occasional moment of tenderness; a moment between two lovers sees her vagina described as ‘the workhouse of the world’s great trade / On this soft anvil all mankind was made’, which is as striking and memorable as anything in Rochester’s verse.
All the same, the flashes of intelligence and brilliance present are outweighed by a frequent heaviness of language and characterization. The mock-heroic form, with its parodies of Dryden, is not developed in any interesting or exciting way, instead merely existing as a vehicle for a succession of increasingly vulgar and obscene epithets. The very crudeness of the rhymes and sentiments could conceivably be seen as an allusion to Dryden’s own lack of expertise at writing drama, but is more likely to be a result of a group of court wits writing the play as a means of airing their discontent at Charles and their enemies. Tellingly, none of the merry gang make an appearance in the play, suggesting either that they were seen by the writer(s) as above criticism, or, more likely, that most of them were involved in its construction. The episodic feeling only adds to this suspicion.
Sodom is not an enjoyable piece of writing, unlike most of Rochester’s poetry. Beneath all the sexual references and obscene words lies a genuine sense of misanthropy and despair, occasioned by the disease-ridden streets of London, the corrupt heart of the court, and all the scheming men and women on the make, whether they are prostitutes or aristocrats. Poorly written, vulgar and repetitive it might be, to say nothing of being mostly unamusing, but as a howl of anguish at the colossal disappointment that the moral vacuum of the Restoration had been, it is a vital historical document, perhaps indicating that Rochester’s influence was as present in the serious business of its satire as it was in its humour.
As 1672 went on, Rochester faced an eclectic selection of problems. His financial situation, always precarious, was worsened by the court’s inability to pay the annuity due for his position as Gentleman of the Bedchamber. A letter from Sir Robert Howard, Secretary to the Treasury and a family friend, states, in a somewhat embarrassed fashion, that ‘I will wish as much speed as I can endeavour to serve in the particulars of your wages and pension’, but this would not be done ‘so directly’, as the ‘King’s affairs are at the time very pressing’. Perhaps Rochester, receiving such a letter while sojourning in Somerset in August 1672, smiled wryly and wondered whether it was Charles’s love or military affairs that distracted him so much. The incompetence of the court’s accounts was such that a warrant issued for £500 on 9 September was cancelled immediately afterwards, probably owing to lack of funds to pay it.
Rochester, always embarrassed for money, was obliged to borrow from Elizabeth, and a wheedling letter describes him being denied money from the court until ‘I am well enough to fetch it myself’; and he cl
aims, perhaps disingenuously, ‘if I had not pawned my plate, I believe I must have starved in my sickness.’ Elizabeth was more concerned by the ill health of her son Charles. Rochester wrote that he was ‘extremely troubled for the sickness of [our] son as well as in consideration of the affliction it gives you, as the dearness I have for him myself’. The child suffered from what appeared to be scrofula, which was widely known as the ‘king’s evil’, as it was believed to be curable by the king’s touch. Rochester, somewhat bizarrely given his low opinion of Charles, wrote to Elizabeth of his plans that his son ‘comes up to London this week to be touched’. This unlikely practice was widespread throughout England and France, and had been for most of the seventeenth century. With the assumption that the king was somehow possessed of healing powers, he touched many afflicted people, many of whom were said to have been miraculously cured. It is more likely that royal physicians and surgeons put about the idea to bolster Charles’s fraying reputation. Certainly, Charles could not be accused of shirking his duty, frequently touching hundreds of people at a time. It was estimated that over the course of his reign, he touched nearly 100,000 of these unfortunates.
In Charles Wilmot’s case, as in so many others, it was in vain. It is more likely that the unfortunate infant had inherited syphilis from his father, as the symptoms were similar to those of scrofula. The child was sufficiently recovered to be at home later in the year, as a letter from Rochester indicates that he had sent a spaniel called Omrah, ‘so much reverenced at Indostan [i.e Whitehall]… at the feet of the Great Mogul [i.e Charles]’, along with a doll for his daughter. However, he remained a sickly boy for at least the next year.
Rochester’s own health continued to suffer and was not helped by his continued proximity to the distractions and temptations of court. He was still only twenty-five, but the effects of syphilis were starting to ruin his health beyond repair. In a letter to Elizabeth in September, he bemoans that ‘I recover so slowly, and relapse so continually, that I am almost weary of myself’, claiming that his long absence from Adderbury is because ‘in the condition I am, Kensington and back is a voyage I can hardly support’. If he was incapable of making such a comparatively short journey in London, then heading to Oxfordshire was even more impractical. When in town, he visited one of the king’s surgeons, Florence Fourcade, where he had his ‘gut griped’, an unpleasantly intimate procedure that involved grabbing a suspected kidney stone between finger and thumb and squeezing it. The procedure incapacitated him, and he wrote in October 1672 that ‘we are now in bed so that we are not in a condition of writing either to thy merit or our desert’, before passing his good wishes to his daughter Anne.
Elizabeth, still at odds with her mother-in-law, was frustrated by her husband’s continued absence, as the suspicious Anne Wilmot had an extremely low opinion of her abilities as both a wife and a householder. Rochester’s gaily imparted advice to his wife—to ‘be not too much amazed at the thoughts my mother has of you, since being mere imaginations they will as easily vanish as they were groundlessly created’—was considerably easier to give than to follow.
At last, Rochester recovered sufficiently to head home. A letter that he wrote to Elizabeth in late 1672 makes an allusion to an epistle of hers being ‘something scandalous’, presumably with her patience of him exhausted, but expresses his desire to leave court, with all its attendant horrors and difficulties, and to be ‘very shortly with you’. The letter strikes an atypically sentimental and romantic note, as Rochester, perhaps relieved to be feeling better and to be on good terms with his wife once more, playfully jokes that ‘it was my design to have writ to my Lady Anne Wilmot [his daughter] to intercede for me’ and looks forward to resuming ‘my service to you’. An added boon was that he was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Somerset on 31 October 1672, which shows his continued place in royal favour, something that he was careful to maintain despite his growing contempt for Charles.
He left London and played at being a happy husband and loyal son for a short time in Adderbury. It was an act that suited his purposes temporarily, just as the other acts he had engaged in had done. However, his thespian interests were about to be tested further, when he encountered the woman who would be his great love, and greatest challenge.
* The model here might have been a ‘Mr Butler’, described by Muddiman in his letter as ‘a gentleman of the cloak and gallow shoe’.
At the start of 1673, Rochester was suffering from a combination of lingering syphilis and debilitating drunkenness, rendering him less active than previously, but he was still aware of life beyond the court as he divided his time between Adderbury and London. In particular, the theatre played a considerable part in his life and interests. When he was not adopting costumed disguises to play out roles of his own creation in public, he took a great interest in both the writers and the performers of the time. An obsequious letter from Dryden in London to Rochester in Adderbury in April 1673, after Rochester had acted as a patron of sorts to him by offering him literary rather than financial assistance with the creation of Marriage-à-la-Mode, refers to ‘the most handsome compliment, couched in the best language I have read’ that he had previously been sent by Rochester. Dryden goes on to say, flatteringly but knowingly, that ‘your Lordship can write better on the meanest subject than I can on the best’.
If Dryden was something of a buffoon to the court set, he could nonetheless sometimes illuminate their world with the insight of an outsider. He continues his half-praise, half-coded criticism of Rochester by going on to talk of how the earl’s reputation had caused such ‘unmannerly and ungrateful’ writers as Dryden to regard him:
You are above any incense I can give you, and have the happiness of an idle life, joined with the good nature of an active. Your friends in town are ready to envy the leisure that you have given yourself in the country; though they know, you are only their steward, and that you treasure up but so much health as you intend to spend on them in winter. In the meantime, you have withdrawn yourself from attendance, the curse of courts.
Dryden’s letter is disparaging about Buckingham, who had planned to lead an invasion of Holland, saying that he ‘will not be satisfied but with his own ruin, and with ours... ’tis a strange quality in a man to love idleness so well as to destroy his estate by it’; but the implicit criticism of Buckingham reflects on Rochester as well. Pepys had infamously described Rochester a few years earlier as ‘so idle a rogue’ and Dryden might have been offering him some veiled advice in the comparison. To the distant observer, Rochester’s life seemed a pleasant and undemanding one. He had a loving wife, two young children and the run of two fine houses in Ditchley and Adderbury. He was also part of the elite set of wits and courtiers in London. He took his pleasure in town and performed his duty in Adderbury, and neither was especially onerous. In short, he appeared contented.
However, Rochester was anything but content. When he received Dryden’s letter, he was lingering in tedium at Adderbury and in attendance on an ill Elizabeth, rather than enjoying ‘the happiness of an idle life’. Lacking money and the company of the Ballers and feeling the growing effects of his illness, he concealed his fears beneath the usual round of drinking and brothel-creeping. By immersing himself in carnal or alcoholic pleasure, he blotted out his doubts and worries for a night or so, but they soon returned. He also acquired a reputation for rash actions, far from the gallant naval reputation he had once held. While at court in March 1673, he had ducked out of a duel with the short-tempered Robert Constable, Viscount Dunbar, and both men had narrowly avoided censure in the House of Lords on 22 March as a result of the intended combat. As with his dispute with Mulgrave, the cause of this was a trivial misunderstanding over a libel Rochester was believed to have written, but it was still considered politic that he absent himself to the country for a while. Away from the distractions of town, he frittered his time away.
In a witty pastiche of a letter begging for charity, he wrote to Savile asking that he assist
‘in preserving your humble servant Rochester from the imminent peril of sobriety, which, for want of good wine more than company (for I drink like a hermit betwixt God and my own conscience) is very like to befall me’. A bored Rochester asks that his friend perform an act of ‘sacred friendship’ by pointing him towards ‘the best wine in town’. Savile, who had been given the usual royal decree of forgiveness since the debacle with Lady Percy at Althorp the previous year and had become MP for Newark, was advised grandly that a gift of wine would ensure that he, Savile, was ‘no longer hovering ’twixt the unequal choice of politics and lewdness’. The underlying implication is clear: while he remained frivolous and witty in his correspondence, Rochester felt frustrated at the apparently stagnant direction that his life was taking, as his sporadic outbreaks of ill health rendered a more engaging existence impossible. Nonetheless, help, of a sort, was at hand.
Elizabeth Barry, a young would-be actress, arrived in London in 1673. The fifteen-year-old daughter of the lawyer Robert Barry, she was no great beauty, with heavy features, dark hair and a slightly over-large nose. But those who met her were struck by her charisma, and these included the poet and playwright William Davenant’s daughter Lady Davenant, who took her up when she arrived in town and attempted to indulge her wish of a theatrical career.
What then transpired involves both a romantic myth and a more prosaic reality. The myth put about by the eighteenth-century actor, playwright and Poet Laureate Colley Cibber in his memoirs—and one that has generally been believed since—is that Elizabeth Barry was initially a useless and untrained actress. Cibber describes her as having ‘a very bad ear’ and claims that it was ‘impossible to make her fit for the meanest part’; it was considered that ‘she never would be capable of any part of acting’. Her dreams of taking to the stage were nearly dashed before they had even begun, when she appeared in the actor Thomas Betterton’s company, playing Draxilla in Thomas Otway’s Alcibiades. Otway was a former actor who, beset by stage fright, had abandoned performing in favour of writing and saw his work staged by Betterton at the Dorset Garden Theatre. Unfortunately, Elizabeth Barry’s performance was said to be disastrous.
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