Enter, like a character from an unlikely fairy tale, Lord Rochester. Cibber’s anecdote continues that Rochester, returning to London and in need of a new distraction, found himself approached by various interested parties at the theatre and told about this unsuccessful woman. Seeing himself in the role of Pygmalion to this unlikely subject, Rochester entered into a wager with the playwright George Etherege that, within six months, he would turn Elizabeth Barry into the finest actress of her generation, who would be so successful that she would later be described by Dryden as ‘always excellent’. Rochester, a hard taskmaster, forced her to rehearse to the point that she was no longer a bad actress playing a part on a stage in a contrived and artificial manner, but a real woman who entirely understood the underlying truth and complexity of what she was saying. His unorthodox technique was a success. She was said to have made her debut proper as a leading actress in a production of Roger Boyle’s tragic drama Mustapha at the Theatre Royal; she took the lead role of Isabella and played in front of Rochester, Charles and others, and ‘the whole theatre resounded with applause’.
It is a charming story, but not a credible one. For a start, the dates are askew. Rochester probably first encountered Elizabeth Barry in 1673 and she appeared in Mustapha in 1675, so he would have lost his bet at the very least. Likewise, given that Alcibiades was also first performed in 1675, it is unlikely that she could have gone from amateurishness to professional excellence so quickly. The sources for this tale are Cibber’s autobiography and the French nobleman and English court habitué the Comte de Gramont’s notoriously unreliable memoirs; both of these were published a considerable time after the events that they describe, by which time Rochester’s name gave credence to any unlikely tale involving a young woman.
This is a shame, as the story perfectly encapsulates many of Rochester’s interests and abilities. Had he tutored Elizabeth Barry in this fashion, it would have reflected a simultaneous interest in the artifice of the theatre and performance, mirroring the duality that he adopted throughout his life. What is certainly true is that the two began a love affair that would become the most serious extra-marital involvement of Rochester’s life, and one that would affect both his writing and his attitudes immeasurably.
A poem that he wrote around this time, almost certainly inspired by his association with Elizabeth Barry in its allusions to the theatre and stage, indicates a poetic ambivalence about the world of play-acting and disguise that both of them inhabited:
Leave this gaudy, gilded stage,
From custom more than use frequented,
Where fools of either sex and age
Crowd to see themselves presented.
To Love’s theatre, the bed,
Youth and beauty fly together
And act so well it may be said
The laurel there was due to either.
’Twixt strife of Love and war the difference lies in this:
When neither overcomes, Love’s triumph greater is.
While Rochester divided his time between the idleness of Adderbury and the more frenetic excitements of London, change was afoot. An Anglo-French army besieged Maastricht in June 1673, resulting in an allied victory and great celebrations at court. Rochester’s sardonic response to the success was to write a satirical poem, ‘Upon his drinking a bowl’, which carefully and explicitly repudiates his past military career (‘With war I’ve nought to do/ I’m none of those that took Maastricht/ Nor Yarmouth leaguer knew’); continues his teasing allusions to sodomy with a mention of ‘two lovely boys’ whose ‘limbs in amorous folds entwine’; and then ends with a final, carnally triumphant paragraph that fully expresses the debauched credo of the twenty-seven-year-old Rochester:
Cupid and Bacchus my saints are:
May drink and love still reign.
With wine I wash away my cares,
And then to cunt again.
The momentary triumph of Maastricht was soon forgotten, and jockeying for position and influence at court became the order of the day for the likes of Buckingham, who, always a political animal, had allied himself with the newly formed Country party, which eventually became the Whig party. Opposed to the anti-tolerationist policies of Charles and his ministers, who continued to support only the ‘Established Religion and Laws’, it set up a schism at the heart of Whitehall between Charles, who looked weak and out of touch, and the reformers. Rochester did not take either part, but looked on from the sidelines, amused but uninvolved.
Instead, perhaps revitalized by the start of his affair with Elizabeth Barry, he found his poetic muse revived. Between November 1673 and late January 1674, he contributed to the bawdy social satire ‘Signior Dildo’. This poem exists in several different versions, all of which mock the marriage of Charles’s brother James to Mary of Modena, who thereby became the Duchess of York. It must originate at some point between Mary’s arrival in London on 26 November and the poem’s being cited in a letter from the soldier Sir Nicholas Armourer to the politician Sir Joseph Williamson on 26 January, indicating a comparatively swift composition. Anti-Catholic feeling ensured that this marriage, conducted solely for political ends, was an unpopular one, and the discontent was soon translated into verse.
The reason why the poem cannot be ascribed solely to Rochester is that, as with Sodom, it has a cruder and less witty feel to it than his other contemporary work. The copy-text credits Rochester alone, but other versions credit Fleetwood Sheppard and Charles Sackville, so there was clearly confusion over who was responsible. The central thrust is undisciplined and scatter-gun, with dozens of verses consisting of a simple recurring idea—namely, that some great lady of court is sexually unsatisfied by the foppish and unmanly Englishmen and thus uses the ‘noble Italian’ Signior Dildo. Again, as with ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, Rochester and the other writers ridicule the idea of male sexual prowess and potency, but while that poem used escalating absurdity to hilarious effect, ‘Signior Dildo’ comes less to a shuddering climax than to a half-hearted whimper. It might be more amusing at shorter and more focused length, but as it continues in one version for two dozen verses, and in others for three dozen, it ends up being more tiring than effective.
All the same, there are some wonderfully Rochesterian moments in it. His notorious cousin Barbara Castlemaine is mocked in particularly virulent but witty style:
That pattern of virtue, Her Grace of Cleveland,
Has swallowed more pricks than the ocean has sand;
But by rubbing and scrubbing so large it does grow,
It is fit for just nothing but Signior Dildo.
The list of those ridiculed and pilloried is lengthy, ranging from the singer and royal mistress Mary Knight to Elizabeth Percy; the latter is referred to in a verse that was either written or inspired by Henry Savile, as it makes knowing allusion to his incursion into her bedroom at Althorp:
By the help of this gallant the countess of Ralph
Against the fierce Harrys preserved herself safe.
She stifled him almost beneath her pillow,
So closely she embraced Signior Dildo.
A poem such as ‘Signior Dildo’ was written for the amusement of those at court, passed from aristocratic hand to hand, and treated with a certain detached pleasure at the witty conceit that the verse contained. This was a common and accepted means of entertainment, taking place most days in some form, and could lead to a certain notoriety; such was the success of ‘Signior Dildo’ that dildoes became known as ‘Signiors’ after it appeared. Rochester, however, was not always content merely to amuse. Instead, his coruscating disdain for the shallow, hypocritical world of the court, typified by the king himself, led him to write one of his most trenchant satires on the subject, at around the same time as the composition of ‘Signior Dildo’. While Rochester had little personal animosity against Charles (apart from his failure to pay him his various grants), the king’s personal and regal failings were so glaring that it fell to a gifted writer to articulate them in verse. E
ntitled ‘A Satire on Charles II’, the poem refuses to pull any punches from the start. Charles is mocked as ‘the easiest King and best-bred man alive’, but one with ‘no ambition’ who is content to wander ‘up and down / Starving his people, hazarding his crown’.
To an even greater degree than in his earlier satires, Rochester takes aim at the materialist and carnal values of the court with scrupulously moral disdain. Britain, synonymous only with ‘the best cunts in Christendom’, has become a place of starving and desperate people, where the earlier excitement and optimism of the Restoration has given way to nothing other than self-indulgence. Rochester spent a good deal of time outside London and saw a beaten, battered country, one simultaneously worn down by the after-effects of civil war and the Protectorate and Charles’s ill-fated foreign adventures. The story of the king having sex (‘for love he loves, for he loves fucking much’) while the Royal Charles was stolen informs the contemptuous disgust with which Rochester presents his moral judgements on his monarch. Of course, there were others who were also responsible for this state of affairs:
His sceptre and prick are of a length;
And she may sway the one who plays with th’other,
And make him little wiser than his brother.
Poor prince! Thy prick, like thy buffoons at court,
Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.
’Tis sure the sauciest prick that e’er did swive,
The proudest, peremptoriest prick alive.
Though safety, law, religion, life lay on’t,
’Twould break through all to make its way to cunt.
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
The metaphor of the sceptre—a symbol of immutable authority—being interchangeable with the royal penis again reflects Rochester’s fascination with emasculation and impotence, but here on a far grander scale than simple masculine vanity. As Rochester writes, ‘safety, law, religion, life’ must all give way to royal restlessness. And yet, despite all the sex, and the illegitimate children produced by royal mistresses, not a single royal heir was born.
Rochester’s half-fond, half-dismissive attitude towards the various royal mistresses is then made explicit as he describes Louise de Kérouaille (here called ‘Carwell’, a corruption of the surname) as ‘the best relief of his declining years’. Charles was forty-three at the time, but beset by ill health possibly caused by a form of syphilis. The royal body is mocked as having ‘dull, graceless ballocks’, and even the valiant efforts of Nell Gwyn, with ‘hands, fingers, mouth and thighs’, are painful and in vain. Rochester’s contempt is not limited just to Charles, but instead to the whole business of kingship:
All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,
From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.
A bracingly honest satire against the king, it shows how far Rochester had progressed from the frightened young man eight years before who claimed that he would rather have chosen death ten thousand times than have upset his ruler. Now it was dangerous enough, in the atmosphere of paranoia and distrust that had infected the court, even to write such a virulent satire. After its creation, it would not have been gaily passed from hand to hand, owing to how scurrilous it was; instead, a few fair copies were made (a surviving one of which is dated 1673) and shown only to his most reliable and trusted friends. However, with all the desire to shock and subvert that lived within him, Rochester was about to make another significant step into infamy.
Charles was, by and large, open-minded when it came to personal comments made about him. He regarded it as sport, one that he was as complicit in as his favourites, and he took pride in coming back with a well-timed riposte. One night, at dinner, Rochester was asked to provide an extempore poem about Charles, and he replied, perhaps after a glass of wine, with the following:
God bless our good and gracious King,
Whose promise none relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.
Charles, taking the sally in good spirit, answered: ‘That’s true; for my words are mine, while my actions are those of my ministers.’ It was a neat answer, and a telling moment of self-deprecation, which he was skilled at coming up with to defuse tension. However, in December 1673, an unfortunate encounter took place that would colour relations between Rochester and Charles forever afterwards.
At dinner at court, in the lead-up to Christmas, a rumour had reached the royal ears about a scurrilous poem that ridiculed many of the leading women of the day. Charles, who had had carnal knowledge of most of those featured, was intrigued and amused by the idea, and asked Rochester to hand him over the satire, which he believed to be ‘Signior Dildo’. Rochester by accident—or design—instead handed Charles the explosive satire that he had written about him earlier that year. He might always have wished Charles to see it and had it on him for that very purpose.
The resulting scene can be imagined only as one of the Old Masters might have painted it. In the centre is Charles, with his habitual expression of amused levity gradually giving way to a combination of horror, surprise and anger. To his right stands Rochester, smirking at his impudence but beginning to realize the enormity of his actions. Around the central pair are the great men of court, such as Buckingham, Savile and Sackville, all simultaneously amused by, and fearful of, the hugely public nature of such an act; whether they had known the satire or not, there was no mistaking Charles’s wrath. And scattered around the room are the uncomprehending royal servants, mistresses and hangers-on, all of whom witness the royal wrath in all its fury.
Traditional biographical accounts of this incident, such as that of Gramont’s, have Rochester as a blundering drunken idiot, incapable of distinguishing the (comparatively) mild satire of ‘Signior Dildo’ from the altogether more scurrilous libel of the satire against Charles. This is possibly true. However, given the authenticity of the sentiments expressed within the poem and the weariness with which he writes about the false life of court in his letters, it is equally likely that Rochester, summoning up a moment of self-destructive bravado, decided deliberately to hand over the ‘wrong’ poem and be damned, taking masochistic pleasure both in his certain punishment and in the knowledge that Charles would have the smile wiped off his face when he saw the unsentimental reality of how he was regarded by his favourites.
Unsurprisingly, the ‘merry monarch’ was enraged by what he read. Fleeing upon seeing Charles’s wrath, Rochester was straightaway formally banished from court, in what was the most serious breach of relations between him and Charles since his attempted abduction of Elizabeth nearly a decade before. That, for all its impropriety and arrogant dismissal of rules, could be put down to youthful high spirits of a kind. But this was an unforgivable breach of trust. As with Clarendon, formal banishment meant that to return uninvited would incur a potential death sentence, and all of Rochester’s endowments, pensions and payments were suspended with immediate effect. He returned to Adderbury a penitent Adam, cast out of his surrogate father’s affections, for what might have been forever.
It was said by the antiquary and biographer John Aubrey, as a result of this and other incidents, that Rochester had the devil enter into him whenever he passed Brentford on his way back to London, and that this satanic possession lasted until he left and returned to Adderbury or Woodstock. While Aubrey, who was no admirer of Rochester, was indulging in poetic licence, he hit upon a central aspect of his character and how he was perceived. Satan was commonly believed to encourage those who were otherwise temperate and sane to commit lewd acts and to behave disgracefully. Rochester, himself no stranger to ‘the demon drink’, was restrained, if bored, in the country, pouring his intellectual energies into his poetry. In town, it was another matter, and the incident with Charles soon became the year’s most talked-about occurrence in fashionable circles, arousing shock and reluctant admiration in equal parts.
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br /> The diabolic had become a source of fascination for many in the Restoration world. Those who had read Paradise Lost babbled excitedly about the central character of Satan, a sympathetic and articulate figure rather than the one-dimensional Vice, tempter of morality plays, while those who were less well-read equated Satanism with the interest in Catholicism emanating from the court, now that both Charles and his brother James were married to Catholics. While Matthew Hopkins’s witch-finding of three decades earlier seemed impossibly remote, the idea that one of the court’s most charismatic and seductive figures might literally be possessed by the devil was both horrifying and exciting—and of course made Rochester even more of a man of intrigue and magnetism.
The intriguing and magnetic man, meanwhile, was at home in Adderbury with his family in a state of trepidation and weariness. He had plenty of time to reflect on the ungrateful way in which he had repaid Charles’s generosity and patronage, and also to brood on his forced estrangement from Elizabeth Barry. A misanthropic poem, dating from around this time, might offer some insight into his miserable and bored state of mind, especially as far as issues of love and romance were concerned:
Love a woman? You’re an ass!
’Tis a most insipid passion
To choose out for your happiness
The silliest part of God’s creation.
Let the porter and the groom,
Things designed for dirty slaves,
Drudge in fair Aurelia’s womb
To get supplies for age and graves.
Rochester had many ways of artificially lifting himself from his low spirits. In town, this consisted of drinking, whoring and cavorting with the Ballers. In the country, where the opportunities were more limited, if they existed at all, lifting his spirits depended more on his remembrance of these events, which often took poetic form. With his wife and mother at hand, to say nothing of young children, he was unable to lead the free and easy life of London, whither he had no idea if he would be allowed to return. The second part of the poem indicates how Rochester considered these day-dreams:
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