Farewell, woman! I intend
Henceforth every night to sit
With my lewd, well-natured friend,
Drinking to engender wit.
Then give me health, wealth, mirth and wine,
And, if busy love entrenches,
There’s a sweet, soft page of mine
Does the trick worth forty wenches.
Whether Rochester really was bisexual, itself an anachronistic concept, is hard to gauge from his poetry alone. There are numerous allusions to homosexual, as well as heterosexual, liaisons throughout his verse, but his letters are mostly devoid of any romantic or sexual passion towards men, with the major exception coming in some of his correspondence with Savile. Rochester once wrote, in French, that he was ‘a tired bugger’ and makes various allusions to some potential homosexual blackmail in which he was involved at the end of his life. That he had sex with both men and women, from his time at university onwards, is almost certain; few contemporary courtiers did not. As early as 1663, Pepys noted that homosexual liaisons at the court took place with impunity, saying ‘buggery is now grown as common among our gallants as in Italy’.* That Rochester was primarily heterosexual is likely, but he loved to shock and to cross boundaries. ‘The sweet, soft page’ that he writes about becomes a symbol of his resistance to the status quo, as the court of Charles II, while undeniably licentious, drew a line at the open recognition of sodomy (perhaps unsurprisingly given that Charles himself was avowedly heterosexual). While prosecutions for buggery were rare, it was still officially regarded as a capital crime on a par with treason, and could be used as a pretext for imprisonment, exile or even execution, if it was politic to do so.
Rochester’s ‘lewd, well-natured’ drinking companion referred to here was almost certainly Savile. In a letter that he wrote probably at the start of 1674, while stating that he is temporarily living alone at Adderbury (presumably his wife and children were at her house at Enmore), he continues to display his affection for his friend, claiming: ‘’Tis not the least of my happiness that I think you love me... if there be a real good upon earth, ’tis in the name of friend, without which all others are merely fantastical.’ The tone of Rochester’s letters to his main recipients are all subtly different. The swooning romance of his early correspondence with Elizabeth soon gives way to a mixture of jocular banter and irritated pedantry. His dealings with Elizabeth Barry are fond and apologetic and sometimes feel disingenuous, as if he is writing a love letter that is as much for public consumption as for private enjoyment. But it is with Savile that Rochester’s voice feels most authentic, as he moves between mock-grandiose biblical parodies, gossip and apparently heartfelt displays of affection.
There was also always a tinge of what Rochester termed ‘the melancholy experience’ that underpinned the jokes and fondness. Rochester, always interested in philosophy, was becoming increasingly convinced that the world was, as Hamlet put it, ‘weary, stale, flat and unprofitable’, and when he was bored at home, he took to wondering what the meaning of it all was. Writing to Savile, he openly questions why friendship is so debased in ‘the most difficult and rare accident of life’, and takes a startlingly clear-headed view of life at court: ‘you... think not at all, or at least as if you were shut up in a drum, you can think of nothing but the noise is made upon you.’ Rochester claims to desire the ‘competent riches’ that would be attendant on this position, but the letter clearly comes from a bored, lonely man who laments ‘the inconveniences of solitude’ and finds himself caught between the Scylla of empty chatter at Whitehall and the Charybdis of tedium in the country. He may have loathed the drum-like noise and the endless whirligig of events, but at least they stimulated him, while the only company he could enjoy at Adderbury while his family were away was that of his increasingly querulous and disapproving mother.
In a simultaneous letter to Elizabeth, Rochester mentions that Anne Wilmot is ‘now resolved against ever moving’ from Adderbury and that this will necessitate a removal of their family. Anne, who had recently renewed the lease on the house, was a difficult presence, and her immutable desire to stay there led Rochester to write, perhaps with tongue in cheek, that ‘fate shall direct, which is (I find) the true disposer of things whatever we attribute to wisdom or providence’.
In this instance, he was proved right, perhaps guessing that his fortunes would rise once more. While the offence that he had caused Charles was considerable and would be a lasting source of conflict and tension between the two men, the king was well aware that, with the rise of Buckingham and others who were less than well disposed towards him, he could not afford to ostracize a man who, at the very least, could be relied upon to support him in exchange for much-needed money and land. Thus, forgiven, Rochester’s banishment was rescinded in January 1674 and his grants restored, and he officially returned to Whitehall on 16 February and put his name to a petition in which he dutifully criticized Catholicism and all its works. (Gramont tells a story that he returned anonymously in late 1673 and busied himself with the citizens of the city while keeping an ear to the ground for Whitehall gossip; however, like most of Gramont’s tales, there is no proof of this.)
Perhaps in exchange for his renewed and conspicuous loyalty, Rochester was created Ranger of Woodstock Park on 27 February, a high-profile appointment that also carried with it the gift of the High Lodge there. This news was reflected in a jocular letter Rochester wrote his wife in which he claims that he will ‘be with you shortly... [and] think myself a very happy man’, and suggests that ‘I will deliver you immediately’. He might also, for once, have been in funds, as is suggested by his statement that ‘money you shall have as soon as ever I come to you’.
It was a happier time for Rochester. Restored to royal favour, he soon capitalized on this by being given the related and greater title of Keeper of Woodstock Park, which carried another pension (had Charles been reliable in paying the various annuities that Rochester was granted, he would have been a wealthy man by this point). The new Drury Lane theatre opened on 26 March 1674, allowing Elizabeth Barry an opportunity to be noticed on what was then the city’s most prestigious stage, and the affair between herself and Rochester was proceeding in fecund fashion. Meanwhile, he became a father again, with his second daughter born in late June. In a simultaneously uxorious and knowingly provocative move, he christened her Elizabeth.
Yet even while Rochester, briefly riding a wave of personal and public happiness, appeared content with his lot, his rancorous poetic muse still compelled him to look at the world, the flesh and the devil and produce a characteristically biting response to it. Two satires that he was associated with at this time were ‘Tunbridge Wells’ and ‘Timon’, an adaptation of Boileau’s third satire. ‘Collaboration’ is probably too strong a term to describe what occurred when poetry was written by more than one hand in the Restoration court. Instead, a poem might be added to by a jealous or unimpressed fellow courtier and then redistributed accordingly, or two separate poems might be conflated and turned into a manuscript copy. Thus, a poem could be ‘by’ two separate writers who had never exchanged any ideas about the work at all, or in some cases had never met.
‘Tunbridge Wells’, like ‘Signior Dildo’, is unlikely to have been the work of Rochester alone. The episodic accumulation of its structure lacks the discipline and ironic control that Rochester’s greatest work is known for. It also feels like a more sedate reprise of the panoramic social satire of ‘A Ramble In St James’s Park’, where all facets of society are held up for mockery and scorn. The difference is that ‘Tunbridge Wells’ feels more strained and consequently less witty. By way of comparison, take the bitingly laconic anger of ‘A Ramble’ when it describes an ardent young blade trying to woo a faithless woman:
One, in a strain ’twixt tune and nonsense,
Cries ‘Madam, I have loved you long since.
Permit me your fair hand to kiss’,
When at her mouth her cunt cries ‘Yes!’
; Compare this with the more mannered and less satisfying verbiage in ‘Tunbridge Wells’ on a similar theme:
The would-be wit, whose business was to woo,
With hat removed, and solemn scrape of shoe
Advanceth bowing, then genteelly shrugs,
And ruffled foretop into order tugs,
And thus accosts her, ‘Madam, methinks the weather
Is grown much more serene since you came hither
You influence the heavens; but should the sun
Withdraw himself to see his rays outdone
By your bright eyes, they would supply the morn,
And make a day before the day be born.’
With mouth screwed up, conceited winking eyes,
And breasts thrust forward, ‘Lord, sir!’ she replies.
‘It is your goodness, more than my deserts,
Which makes you show this learning, wit and parts.’
It is likely that Rochester was at least involved in some amendments and additions to this poem, as the odd flash of wit is of a piece with his other verse of this time; the last ten lines or so act almost as a prologue to ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’. There is also an interestingly approving reference to Marvell, the only one found anywhere in any writings attributed to Rochester. Nonetheless, the comparatively plodding nature of the work makes it more likely that a lesser court poet, such as Savile, was responsible for the bulk of its creation and that Rochester was credited as sole writer posthumously.
Another argument against its being a Rochesterian satire is that Rochester was engaged on ‘Timon’ at about the same time, and that work, in its brio, allusive complexity and wit, feels more in the spirit of his ‘mature’ poetry. It has been suggested that Sedley or Buckingham, rather than Rochester, is the author of ‘Timon’, but its wry intelligence, at least in its first half, feels much more like the work of the latter. Proving authorship definitively is difficult because no circumstantial contemporary evidence exists for one writer or another having written the work. Most readers, therefore, tend to judge the poems on the basis of internal evidence and subsequent attribution in early printed forms, which of course were often not authorized. Perhaps appropriately, ‘Timon’ is a rich and all-enveloping comment on the confused and confusing age in which it was written, taking the form of a dialogue where the main speaker, Timon, is an avatar for Rochester, or at least his public persona. The classical allusion could either be to Timon of Athens, the misanthrope, or to the satirical poet Timon of Phlius. Or, of course, to both: Rochester was seldom sparing when it came to displaying his intellectual prowess.
As with ‘The Disabled Debauchee’, the protagonist, Timon, is nearing the end of his life. An anonymous figure asks him whether ‘thou droop’st under a night’s debauch’, in a reference both to sexual and physical infirmity, and goes on to mention his debts to ‘needy rogues’, to whom he owes money on credit, or ‘on tick’. Rochester-as-Timon offers a wry insight into the everyday boredom that he faces at court. Buttonholed by a ‘dull dining sot’, he finds himself compelled to head to an inn with the god-awful bore, whose tedium is compounded by his belief that his fascination with poetry is sufficient to make him interesting. Reading various anonymous satires, the fop at last comes across one that was ‘so sharp’ that it had to be Timon’s—though Timon himself expresses his scepticism that his work had proliferated so far as to reach this mediocre man. What follows is a fascinatingly self-aware comment on the attribution of anonymous court poems, in which context it is particularly amusing:
He knew my style, he swore, and ’twas in vain
Thus to deny the issue of my brain.
Choked with his flattery, I no answer make,
But, silent, leave him to his dear mistake,
Which he by this had spread o’er the whole town,
And me with an officious lie undone.
Of a well-meaning fool I’m most afraid,
Who sillily repeats what was well said.
The ‘dear mistake’ is one that has persisted to this day, and one that Rochester, then enjoying a growing reputation at court as a poet, could only wryly stand by and watch, as his name was attached to countless inferior works passed around his circle. The number of contemporary manuscripts with entirely spurious poems that have ‘Earl of Rochester’ emblazoned on them, like a guilty secret, testify to this.
As Timon’s narrative continues, the parallels with Rochester’s life become even clearer. His friends Sedley, Buckhurst and Savile are all absent from the dinner, but ‘Halfwit and Huff, Kickum and Dingboy’, typical representatives of knavish idiocy, are all present. For the hapless Timon, ‘no means nor hopes appear of a retreat’, and the appearance of the wife of one of the fops, Sparkish, is the final straw:
A wife, good gods! A fop, and bullies too!
For one poor meal, what must I undergo?
The threatened wife duly appears, the incursion of age having ‘left her with more desire than power to please’, and her conversation is coquettishly focused entirely on love, ‘and hardly from that subject would remove’. As ever, remembering the biographical details of Rochester’s own life at this point gives extra spice to the poem; when ‘my lady’ wonders, in relation to Louis XIV’s extra-marital successes, ‘how heaven could bless / A man that loved two women at one time’, the unspoken but implicit comparison is with Rochester’s own marriage to Elizabeth and affair with Elizabeth Barry. Their dining companions are a charmless bunch; when Huff is asked whether ‘love’s flame he never felt’, his reply, delivered bluntly, is ‘Do you think I’m gelt?’
As usual with Rochester’s satires, merely guying the easy targets of predatory women and foolish fops was not enough. It soon transpires that their host lost an estate given for loyal service on Charles’s behalf, which was spent ‘whoring and drinking, but with good intent’. Here, Rochester subtly ridicules the free-handed way in which many (including himself) benefited from royal largesse, only to find themselves useless at coping with the responsibility. As for ‘my lady’, she is far from an admirer of Rochester’s poetry, which is seen as ‘unfit for modest ears’, preferring the two Cavalier poets Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, and Sir John Suckling; the joke is that their more modest verse is a far cry from the Bacchanal that is developing at the table.
The second half of the satire is less immediately enjoyable, consisting mostly of the various clueless hurrahs arguing about their preferred poets and dramatists with all the breezy bluster of the truly uninformed literary critic. Here, the author, whether still Rochester or Sedley, shows a fine grasp of the Restoration literary scene, as one of his characters praises Etherege for writing ‘airy songs and soft lampoons, the best of any man’, and now forgotten figures such as Elkanah Settle, John Crowne (who dedicated his heroic drama The History of Charles the Eight of France to Rochester) and Roger Boyle are all discussed. (Amusingly, Dryden’s play The Indian Emperor is praised by the host, who, presumably in his cups, ‘had said nothing in an hour’.) Eventually, the bravoes fall to violent disagreement about the competing merits of literature and the chance of future war—the heat is cooled only by the appearance of ‘six fresh bottles’—and Timon flees:
I ran downstairs, and with a vow nevermore
To drink beer-glass and hear the hectors roar.
Unsurprisingly, Rochester did not pursue this unlikely sounding wish. Shortly after his daughter’s christening at Adderbury, he returned to court, where the ever-present noise that he had likened to being ‘shut up in a drum’ continued to vex him. At last, frustrated and angered, he began writing a poem that would take revenge upon everyone. Not just the usual chorus of faithless lovers, imbecilic fops, priapic monarchs or talentless dramatists, but, this time, a far wider panorama of society. He would write a satire that would discuss the great issues of the day, without the sexual or scatological humour that had become his trademark, but with overtones of Montaigne or Hobbes. If people would mock and belittle him, after all, then
he would give them intellectual grounds to mock and belittle themselves. More ambitious than anything he had ever written before, the poem would be simultaneously the apotheosis of his literary career and the final time that he ever produced work of this brilliance.
* ‘Buggery’ was not simply a term for anal sex; it covered everything from bestiality to oral sex, as defined in the 1533 Buggery Act: ‘an unnatural sexual act against the will of God and man’.
When he began what became his most ambitious work in spring 1674, Rochester called the poem, portentously, ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’. Though he was still only twenty-seven, his implied aim was as grandiloquent as Milton’s Paradise Lost had been the previous decade. Not content with mocking humanity, Rochester also intended to take aim at reason, which he calls the ignis fatuus, itself a reference to the ninth book of Paradise Lost and meaning ‘foolish light’ or ‘will-o’-the-wisp’. Inspired by his loathing of the hypocrites and knaves who surrounded him, as well as by an intellectual curiosity that had seldom been given full rein in his poetry before, Rochester aimed to show his friends (and enemies) that he was a serious and considered thinker, rather than simply a rake about court. Mixing his customary wit and intellectual clarity with anger and passion, Rochester’s poem of 221 lines is believed by many to be his greatest and most enduring work. When it circulated around court, it was ascribed to ‘a person of honour’, a wittily double-edged attribution that became more telling when the satire was read.
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