Sometimes it is hard to remember that, beneath Rochester’s intellectual brilliance and social derring-do, he was subject to the same whims and caprices that everyone else was, and when he calls himself ‘the wildest and most fantastical odd man alive’, his characteristic exaggeration and theatricality do not obscure the depth and sincerity of his feelings for Elizabeth Barry. He writes ‘I must ever call the day I saw you last, since all time between that and the next visit is no part of my life, or at least like a long fit of the falling sickness wherein I am dead to all joy and happiness’, and in so doing he strips away the artifice of his poetry and his other personae in favour of something more revealing and heartfelt. This is, at last, the real Rochester.
Or so it might appear. His declarations of love could also be the rote pronouncements of someone who is on uncertain ground, perhaps for the first time, and is taking refuge in clichés as a result. Elizabeth Barry was far from conventionally beautiful, making his statement ‘you are the most afflicting fair creature in the world’ a double-edged one; and it is extraordinary that a writer of Rochester’s linguistic gifts could not come up with something more original than ‘I do you justice in loving you so as woman was never loved before’.
However, it is churlish to assume that Rochester was engaging in an affair with Elizabeth Barry as an intellectual challenge, or out of boredom. Certainly, he had unlimited opportunities to fritter himself away in carnal dalliance with others, whether with the women of quality at court or the whores in the cheap brothels and taverns he frequented, but specific details in his correspondence with her make it appear as if her presence in his life by this point had become the most important one, as he claims to ‘love [her] above all the world, whatever becomes of the King, Court or mankind and all their impertinent business’.
It was this ‘impertinent business’ that saw him appointed Master, Surveyor and Keeper of Charles’s hawks on 24 January, another badge of honour to add to the other titles that he had acquired by this point, which included the prestigious positions of Ranger and Keeper of Woodstock Park and his role as Gentleman of the Bedchamber, as well as his commission in Prince Rupert’s horse guards. Another word for these might be bribes: Charles needed Rochester’s help as a trusted member of his entourage to pass such bills as his Disaffected Persons Bill of May 1675, which would prevent ‘the Dangers which may arise from persons disaffected with the government’. In other words, Charles, feeling his power steadily weakening, sought to increase his status as an absolute monarch by having the authority to imprison anyone who stood against him, and was willing to hand out bribes to his favourites in order to be able to rely on their support. Savile and Buckingham opposed the bill on principle, disliking the idea of a ruler who could lock up anyone in the country on a whim, but Rochester bided his time, for the moment at least.
While political intrigues dominated London, country life at Adderbury was more sedate. In the midst of his affair with Elizabeth Barry, Rochester returned there and wrote to his wife, who, tiring of her dealings with Anne Wilmot, was lingering at her family house in Enmore. Rochester was, for once, alone, noting: ‘I find none but the housekeeper, the butler and rats, who squeak mightily and are all in good health.’ His casual reference to the sparsity of the staff, including a couple of ‘gentle and penitent’ maids, indicates that Rochester’s financial affairs were far from healthy, and certainly not ample enough to support a thriving household. The casual, matter-of-fact way in which he writes to Elizabeth about domestic matters—including a dig at his mother’s continuing poor temper (‘were my mother pleased, all were pleased, which God be pleased to grant’)—stands in amusing contrast to the passionate entreaties and effusions that he poured out in his letters to Elizabeth Barry.
One of these letters, apologizing for breaking an appointment, claims ‘the Devil has laid a block in my way’. It soon proved to be more accurate than Rochester had perhaps intended. Although he had only recently turned twenty-eight, he was starting to become one of the senior figures of the Ballers, along with Savile and Buckingham. Other young aristocrats and their associates were coming to court, such as the ridiculous and foul-smelling Will Fanshaw, ‘a meagre person of small attainments and unpleasant habits’, who married into the low-level aristocracy and was thus tolerated on the peripheries of Whitehall; and the young writer Francis Fane, with whom Rochester collaborated on various anonymous lampoons attacking and ridiculing Mulgrave, which, as usual, were distributed around court in manuscript. Lampooning was a commonly accepted means of attacking one’s enemies, with the cover of anonymity used to produce invective that ranged from the brilliantly penetrating to the merely obscene. Rochester himself had been lampooned since his arrival at court—if it is assumed that ‘Regime de Vivre’ is about him, rather than by him (see page 71), it anticipates a great deal of the satire that would later be directed at him. A lampoon was not necessarily intended as a grave insult—certainly ‘Regime de Vivre’ is affectionate, after a fashion—and many welcomed the fact that they had a sufficiently high profile to merit satire.
When they were not mocking others at court, Rochester and Fane worked on drama together. Fane’s first play, Love in the Dark, was not up to the standards of, for example, Wycherley’s brilliance, but a Rochester-penned epilogue gave it some kudos nonetheless, and the two worked on a revision of Valentinian. Rochester became a mentor to many young playwrights and was generous with both his time and liberal attitudes. Thomas Otway, who was also besotted with the ‘deceitful muse’ Elizabeth Barry, was the mere ‘scum of a playhouse’, but Rochester was magnanimous enough in romantic victory to intercede on Otway’s behalf with Charles in order to obtain funds for his plays—though he still describes him as ‘puzzling Otway’ in ‘An Allusion to Horace’ (some texts have this as ‘blushing’ or ‘puffing’, making a more explicit dig at his apparent lack of talent).
If it is accepted that Rochester was not the sole author of Sodom, then no complete play can be ascribed to him, something of a surprise for a man so immersed in the traditions and language of the theatre. There does exist, however, a tiny fragment of the beginning of a comedy in Rochester’s hand, probably written in the late 1660s, featuring the character of Mr Dainty. Dainty, a quintessential fop, is introduced ‘in his nightgown, singing’, although what he is singing—‘J’ai l’amour dans le coeur et la rage dans les os’, roughly translated ‘I have love in the heart and fury in the bones’—makes him an unusual protagonist, with unexplained hints of anger and disquiet that are subsequently undeveloped.
Dainty bewails, in a parody of an aubade (sunrise song), that he has been asleep for ‘seven dull hours… for naturally I hate to be so long absent from myself’. Traditional Restoration tropes of permissiveness are nodded at: ‘methinks not to sleep til the sun rise is an odd effect… and makes the night tedious without a woman.’ Dainty refuses to read books, as they speak of ‘other men’s affairs’. He arrogantly states: ‘I am resolved to write some love-passages of my life… I divert myself by reading my own story, which will be pleasant enough.’
There then follows some mediocre back-and-forth with a servant boy (a character who will reappear in Rochester’s poem ‘To the Postboy’), and some half-hearted introduction of other characters and hints at a plot that involves Dainty fighting with his young charge Squabb over matrimonial ties to the (presumably wealthy) Sir Lionel’s daughters, even while Dainty is bedevilled by his would-be lover Mrs Manners. The fragment ends, dangling, just before the promised introduction of Squabb. While Rochester did not continue the play, its very existence is still of some interest insofar as it suggests that his dramatic experience stretched only so far as writing about the world he inhabited. Dainty is not Rochester, but he is a character firmly of the court and his milieu.
Meanwhile, one of the other crucial characters in Rochester’s life, Charles, was continuing to lose his grip. The Disaffected Persons Bill was rejected by the Lords in early June 1675, and in order
to avoid a war with France, Charles agreed to a secret deal with Louis XIV whereby, in exchange for continued bribes of £100,000 a year, he would ensure ongoing neutrality in the event of any European wars, thereby leaving Louis’ continued hunger for power unchecked. He even offered to dissolve Parliament if they stood in the way of this. Even though this was not public knowledge, Charles’s lackadaisical attitude towards kingship was far from admired. Rochester’s sentiments about the ‘scandalous and poor’ monarch were now less an exceptional piece of scurrility and more a generally held belief. The king might have tried to endear himself to the wits about court by getting drunk with them at lavish dinners, but even while they took his hospitality, they still refused to respect him.
And then Rochester’s run of good fortune came to an abrupt halt.
The twenty-fifth of June 1675 was a warm early summer’s day in London. The evening had certainly seen rare sport amongst the merry gang, who had dined with Charles at court earlier that evening and were now embarrassingly drunk. The rakes and bravoes, including Sackville, Buckhurst and others,* headed into the Privy Garden at Whitehall, where they came across a new piece of ostentation by Charles. He was a keen collector of astronomical items, and the crown jewel in his collection was a large, ornate sundial set with a complex design of glass spheres, on which portraits of the royal family were engraved. It had been constructed a few years earlier by Reverend Francis Hall, professor of mathematics at Liège University, and was rumoured to be the most expensive and elaborate instrument of its kind in western Europe. It was commonly regarded as the king’s pride and joy, and took up a prominent position in the garden. A sensible or moderate man admired it from a distance, and then steered well clear. Rochester had no intention of doing any such thing.
To the horror of his friends, he drew his sword and threw himself at the sundial, apparently taking exception to its phallic shape. According to one source, he was heard to yell: ‘What! Do you stand here to fuck time?’ (Another, more restrained account had him say: ‘Kings and kingdoms will tumble down, and so shall you.’) He then attacked the elaborate structure, madly slashing away at it. Emboldened by alcohol and the adrenaline of transgression, his work was soon finished. The priceless object lay in ruins over the garden. Returning to their drink-sodden senses, the terrified bravoes ran away from the now roused watch, in desperate hope that they would not be found out. Most avoided detection; Rochester, the ringleader, did not.
When Charles discovered the destruction of his beloved toy, he became apoplectic with rage and left court immediately to attempt to calm himself, much to the consternation of his hangers-on, who had no idea of his whereabouts for ten days. It turned out, rather prosaically, that the king was on a short cruise aboard the royal yacht. But the damage was done. Rochester fled from court immediately, knowing that disgrace would follow him. While he had been banished before, and allowed to return before, Charles’s anger this time was unprecedented. When what must have been an almighty hangover had abated, Rochester guessed he had finally overstepped the mark and lost Charles’s favour forever. At the time, he was twenty-eight. He had five years left to live. Or, to look at it another way, five years left in which to die.
What his wife and children made of his forced rustication can only be surmised, especially as it seemed inevitable that he would be stripped of his titles and pensions. He was more a burden than a respected husband and father. He also found himself in debt; one letter, dated 2 July, records a payment of the not inconsiderable sum of £152, which was an added difficulty.
At the same time, Rochester found himself deprived of the company of Elizabeth Barry at the apex of his passion for her. He knew he could not rely on her faithfulness or constancy and wrote her a letter in his exile that swings giddily between the wheedling and the suspicious. He describes how ‘you may know you are not a moment out of my thoughts’ and continues to call himself ‘your creature and servant’, and demands that ‘happiness of all kinds’ be absent from his life. Nonetheless, remembering she had suffered the previous advances of such court hangers-on as Otway, he ends his epistle by writing: ‘both in love and jealousy, pray mankind be far from you.’ It would be several months before he saw her again, during which time she would appear in the leading role of Draxilla in Otway’s play Alcibiades at the Dorset Garden Theatre. Otway, relishing his former mentor’s discomfort and the chance to gain intimacy with Elizabeth Barry once more, referred to the incident of the smashing of the sundial in his prologue:
The Bacchanals all hot and drunk with wine
He led to the almighty thunderer’s shrine,
And there his image seated on a throne
They violently took, and tumbled down.
How the king, or Rochester, received this cheeky dig is not recorded.
A poem that Rochester probably wrote while lingering at home at this time is ‘The Disabled Debauchee’, which is dated 1675 on the existing manuscript copy. In its parody of the form of the heroic stanza, it looks back to Dryden and other far more earnest poets, but the sentiments it expresses are altogether closer to home as Rochester, still only twenty-eight but with more experience of the seamier side of life than others thrice his age had accumulated, reflects on what has gone before. It begins by using a metaphor of military conflict to denote bawdier adventures:
As some brave admiral, in former war
Deprived of force, but pressed with courage still,
Two rival fleets appearing from afar,
Crawls to the top of an adjacent hill.
From whence, with thoughts full of concern, he views
The wise and daring conduct of the fight,
Whilst each bold action to his mind renews
His present glory and his past delight.
This is Rochester at his wittiest, with an intellectual conceit worthy of Donne, yet also with a delightfully innuendo-laden sensibility. On an initial reading, the allusions to ‘deprived of force’, ‘two rival fleets’ and ‘the wise and daring conduct of the fight’ can be taken straight, perhaps with the half-submerged memory of his own gallant conduct in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. However, this is wry satire, rather than celebration, and it soon becomes clear that his sensibility is an entirely different one.
An excellent argument for claiming that Rochester had qualities far beyond the centuries-honoured tag of ‘smutty poet’ is the fine balance that he achieves here between witty conceit and wryly elegiac self-knowledge. When he writes ‘When my days of impotence approach’, he refers to both sexual and creative stagnation, with Rochester perhaps reflecting on the way in which other, lesser talents such as Dryden and even Buckingham appeared to thrive, as he reluctantly lingered in Adderbury in ‘lazy temperance’. This is one of the first times that he acknowledges poetically that his illnesses were caused by his own agency, namely by ‘pox and wine’s unlucky chance’, but his uneasy half-loathing, half-loving relationship with the ‘pleasing billows of debauch’ is expressed in his longing recollection of ‘fleets of glasses’ and ‘volleys of wit’. The verse ends with a moment of pure reflected carpe diem spirit: ‘Past joys have more than paid what I endure.’
As the poem continues, it becomes an account of the corruption of youth mixed with boastfulness. Rochester calls to mind his Oxford tutor Robert Whitehall as the poet thinks of himself taking a virginal youth and ‘the ghost of my departed vice’ and thoroughly corrupting him, by telling him of his exploits when he was ‘strong and able to bear arms’.
Rochester revels in the details of a rampantly lewd life. From the mock-heroic account of ‘handsome ills’, which consist mainly of scraps with prostitutes, pimps and night watchmen rather than gallant battles against great warriors, to a lasciviously evoked allusion to bisexuality and a ménage à trois—‘the best kiss was the deciding lot / Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy’—‘The Disabled Debauchee’ represents Rochester at his most theatrically unashamed, as he ironically adopts the persona of a mentor, advanced in both years and
moral decrepitude:
Thus, statesman-like, I’ll saucily impose,
And, safe in action, valiantly advise;
Sheltered in impotence, urge you to blows;
And now, being good for nothing else, be wise.
Whether Rochester was ever wise is debatable, but the sly wit and poetic intelligence of ‘The Disabled Debauchee’ make it one of his most enjoyable and accessible pieces.
Meanwhile, Savile had some more bad news for the exiled Rochester. It was rumoured at court, by Mulgrave or one of his other enemies, that Rochester had libelled Charles’s mistress Louise, Duchess of Portsmouth. Perhaps out of some otherwise submerged sense of self-preservation, or simply because he had no animosity against her, the duchess was so far one of the few great ladies at court whom Rochester had not libelled; even the allusions to her in ‘A Satire on Charles II’ are almost flattering, with her description as ‘the most dear of all his dears’ affectionate compared to the vitriol directed towards Charles. However, as Rochester had noted so accurately in ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’, the court was a place full of backbiting and intrigue, and one of the easiest ways to come into royal favour was by supplanting a man who was currently in the depths of ignominy.
Accordingly, a letter that Rochester wrote to Savile in August 1675 indicates his horror at the ‘more than ordinary indignation’ that was felt against him. Perhaps hoping that the letter would be distributed more widely, he first attempts to solicit sympathy by claiming that he is ‘bruised and bed-rid’ after a fall from his horse, before openly refuting the allegations against him. As usual, this is done in a theatrical and rhetorically ostentatious fashion: ‘What ill star reigns over me, that I’m still marked out for ingratitude, and only used barbarously by those I am obliged to?’ The cynical might mutter that the reign of the ill star, present in some capacity ever since the coming of the comet that heralded Rochester’s arrival at court in December 1664, was mightily reinforced by his outlandish behaviour. He also knew that his recent actions had put him beyond the pale, so there is an arch side to his self-confessed disbelief. Nonetheless, the letter’s balance of outrage and surprise has a different tenor to the witty resignation of his other correspondence with Savile. That it was meant for public, even royal, consumption can be seen from his indignant insistence that his supposed libel was ‘a false, idle story’ and that ‘I have no more offended her in thought, word or deed’—another use of religious language to sanctify a statement—‘or uttered the least thought to her contempt or prejudice, than I have plotted treason, concealed arms, trained regiments for a rebellion’.
Blazing Star Page 22