Blazing Star

by Larman, Alexander;

  It is conceivable that the references to arms and training regiments for rebellion are a desperate attempt to remind interested parties of Henry Wilmot’s similar actions, and hence the bond between the two families, just as they indicate the comparatively petty nature of the supposed offence. Throughout the letter, he seeks to portray himself as honest and wronged. While he claims that ‘if there be upon earth a man of common honesty who will justify a tittle of her accusation, I am contended never to see her’, he skilfully creates the possibility that his nemeses at court are far from possessed of this common honesty.

  His reference to Louise as ‘more an angel than I find her a woman’ is clearly designed to be fed back to her as flattery, but there is an edge of panic in Rochester’s refutations. While, at the time of writing, Charles was apparently unaware of the feud—​‘for her generous resolution of not hurting me to the King, I thank her’—​Rochester knew that it was inevitable that gossip of this sort would reach royal ears eventually, noting worriedly: ‘I do not know how to assure myself the Duchess will spare me to the King.’ Even Savile, who was in royal favour to the extent of having accompanied Charles on his trip on the yacht the previous month, had to be treated with the kid gloves of diplomacy. Rochester, hoping for reassurance, writes that he is unafraid of this incident damaging their friendship, and claims: ‘I dare swear you don’t think I have dealt so indiscreetly in my service as to doubt me in the friendship I profess to you.’

  At last, Rochester’s tone changes from atypical bluster and fear into something more measured. Asking that he be given a fair hearing by Louise upon his return to court, as even a footman might expect, he puts the blame for the libel on ‘a less worthy creature’, and seeing that his reputation runs the risk of lying in tatters, attempts to defend it: ‘I would not be run down by a company of rogues, and this looks like an endeavour towards it.’ Rochester, a man who had made many enemies on his ascent to the top, was now frightened that, on his descent, those he had trodden on contemptuously would make the small effort required to give him a kicking in return. This explains his almost childish desire to be reassured of his standing with others, begging Savile to ‘send me word how I am with other folks’ and hoping that the Lord Treasurer and, more fancifully, Charles might be prepared to take his side in the matter.

  If Rochester’s fear seems out of character, it should perhaps be viewed as another exercise in realpolitik. Unable to defend himself in person, he had to use the willing Savile as a proxy to keep what remained of his name intact. Failure would spell disaster and ruin, both for him and for his family.

  A second letter, sent soon afterwards, strikes a less panicky and more reflective note. Abandoned by many of his fair-weather acquaintances, Rochester writes to the steadfast Savile that ‘if it were the sign of an honest man to be happy in his friends, sure I were marked out for the worst of men, since no-one e’er lost so many as I have done, or knew how to make so few’. The Louise business continued to trouble him, although fear-induced flattery has given way to defiance, as he claims: ‘this may be a warning to you that remain in the mistake of being kind to me, never to expect a grateful return, since I am so utterly ignorant how to make it.’ He considered himself ill used by Louise, given that the only crime he was guilty of was one of ‘cunning’, but his resentment at the ‘cunninger’ world of the court, with her in it, was at its height. He draws a distinction between his heartless enemies—​‘those whom I have obliged may use me with ingratitude and not afflict me much’—​and the would-be Judases he saw himself surrounded by, whom he curses heartily. Paranoia and poetic exaggeration were familiar bedfellows for Rochester.

  Some of the few friends he had left, apart from Savile, included Fleetwood Shepherd, a well-known court wit who added a postscript to Savile’s earlier letter and receives thanks for being a man of ‘fluent style and coherent thought’, and the wealthy politician Henry Guy, a confidant of Charles; it was through him that Rochester hoped to return to royal favour. However, the earl has no illusions about the severity of his situation: ‘I shall scarce think of coming til you call me, as not having many prevalent motives to draw me to the Court, if it be so that my master has no need of my service, nor my friends of my company.’ The fat, jovial Savile was a true foul-weather friend, a debt graciously acknowledged by Rochester in another letter, when he thanks him for his forbearance in ‘the trouble I have given you in this affair’ and hints at his gratitude to Savile for distributing bribes from his own pocket, or ‘growing poorer’ on his behalf. For Rochester, he was ‘the only man of England that keeps wit with... wisdom’.

  Others were less sanguine. Charles, far from forgiving Rochester, decided to continue his humiliation. On 29 October Rochester received a letter from Sir Joseph Williamson, the Secretary of State, informing him that, after his death, the Rangership of Woodstock Park would not pass to his heirs, but would instead revert to his uncle, Sir Walter St John, to be held in trust for a distant relative of his, Edward, Earl of Lichfield. This was a severe blow indeed, showing how far out of favour he had fallen. On one of his few, low-key visits to London during this time, Rochester sent a petition to Charles, begging him to change his mind, but to no avail. He was given a couple of token payments, amounting to around £1,000, as an acknowledgement of some of the money that he had not been paid for his various roles, but after late November 1675 he was effectively debarred from the royal purse. As he lingered in Adderbury late that year, everything seemed lost. Rochester was poor both in pocket and in health. He made no obvious signs of contrition for his behaviour in the Privy Garden, apparently considering Charles fair game for insults, but the accusation that he had libelled the blameless Louise hung heavy on him. The only small consolation during this time was that he had a third daughter, Malet, born to him in December. The unusual christening was a reference to his long-suffering wife, whose maiden name the girl took.

  The only poem of any significance that he wrote at this time was a stinging attack on Dryden, in ‘An Allusion to Horace’. Dryden had looked for a new patron in Rochester’s absence and was taken up by Mulgrave, who ensured that his new play, Aureng-Zebe, was performed in front of Charles in November. While he remained Poet Laureate, it never hurt to have another wealthy friend at court. By this time there was little love lost between Dryden and Rochester; Dryden and his play The Indian Emperor had been openly mocked in ‘Timon’, and, a few years before, The Conquest of Granada had been similarly ridiculed in Sodom, for which Dryden believed Rochester responsible. Nonetheless, Dryden’s affiliation to Mulgrave appeared to be a calculated snub, and Rochester responded in kind with an opening sally of considered abuse:

  Well, sir, ’tis granted I said Dryden’s rhymes

  Were stolen, unequal, nay dull many times.

  What foolish patron is there found of his

  So blindly partial to deny me this?

  Rochester goes on to allow that Dryden’s plays contain ‘wit and learning’ but are full of ‘heavy mass’ and therefore tedious and wordy. After a tour of ridicule of the contemporary writers of the day (a few friends such as Etherege, ‘a sheer original’, and Wycherley conspicuously excused), he returns to further castigation of the hapless Poet Laureate:

  Dryden in vain tried this nice way of wit,

  For he to be a tearing blade thought fit.

  But when he would be sharp, he still was blunt:

  To frisk his frolic fancy, he’d cry ‘Cunt!’

  Would give the ladies a dry bawdy bob,

  And thus he got the name of Poet Squab.

  Byron, in the opening of his epic Don Juan, would attack his own Poet Laureate enemy Robert Southey in exactly the same way over a century later, gaily claiming that Southey was ‘quite a dry bob, Bob’. In both cases, the allusion is to impotence, specifically orgasm without emission, and Rochester gives the added mockery of describing the short, round Dryden as a ‘squab’. Dryden (like Southey) exhibited a mannered pomposity that endeared him to royalty, ev
en as Rochester’s (like Byron’s) more outrageous libertine writing and personae made him too shocking a figure to be a tame writer. It is impossible to imagine Rochester as Poet Laureate, even if he had not been a courtier. In the case of Dryden, his failed attempt to be ‘a tearing blade’ mirrors the ‘reverend band and beard’ of ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’, with his own impotent wish to be sufficiently witty to attack wit itself in a ‘sharp essay’. However, Dryden, a man who was apt to make ill-considered exclamations such as inviting assembled guests to group sodomy, would always be blunt, both in speech and in attitude. Rochester criticizes him for further ‘gross faults his choice pen does commit’ and ridicules his ‘loose, slattern muse’, claiming that his major works ‘were things perhaps composed in half an hour’. Rochester even offers some valuable literary criticism to Dryden, and to others, including himself:

  To write what may securely stand the test

  Of being well read over, thrice at least

  Compare each phrase, examine every line,

  Weigh every word, and every thought refine.

  Scorn all applause the vile rout can bestow,

  And be content to please the few who know.

  Nonetheless, Rochester retained an amused fascination with the ridiculousness of Dryden. In a letter to Savile written early the next year, Rochester says of Dryden, with whom he was said to be ‘out of favour’ after the appearance of ‘An Allusion to Horace’: ‘I have ever admired [him] for the disproportion of him and his attributes.’ He goes on, with knowing absurdity, to compare the Poet Laureate to ‘a hog that could fiddle, or a singing owl’, and says, disingenuously, ‘I cannot but be fond’ of him.

  Rochester was far from finished with his quarrels, though, picking a fight with the poet, wit and courtier Carr Scrope, a former friend of Buckingham’s who had become an ally of Mulgrave’s. Scrope was described witheringly, in ‘An Allusion to Horace’, as ‘the purblind knight / Who squints more in his judgement than his sight / Picks silly faults, and censures what I write’. For some men in the depths of disfavour, creating new enemies might have been seen as unwise, but from this time forth, whether out of boredom, mental illness brought on by the effects of syphilis or a desire to shock, Rochester seemed intent on causing as much havoc as he could. The world had rejected him, his reasoning went; therefore, he would reject everything that others held sacred.

  While enduring a long and tedious winter sojourn in Adderbury, the earl received news of his own death on 29 February 1676. It is probable that this was a scurrilous rumour started by his enemies, but his continued absence from court could also have led to such a story being circulated. Of course, had he actually been declared dead, it would instantly have invalidated his Rangership of Woodstock Park and the accompanying stipend, so he wrote to Savile, and by extension to the court, to inform him that accounts of his demise were greatly exaggerated, sardonically noting: ‘it was no small joy to me that those tidings prove untrue... my passion for living is so increased that I omit no care of myself, which, before, I never thought life worth the trouble of taking.’ There is a dig at Charles—​‘the King, who knows me to be a very ill-natured man, will not think it an easy matter for me to die now I live chiefly out of spite’—​and Rochester, though careful to ask after Savile and his other intimates’ health, notes the paucity of those friends.

  That the rumours of Rochester’s death were taken seriously can be seen by a letter written to him by the Treasury Secretary Robert Howard. Dated 7 April, it offers some solidarity with the beleaguered poet: ‘though this town is apt enough to like an ill entertainment better than a good one, yet I cannot believe them so stupid as to be insensible [to] what they should have lost by your death.’ Howard, who professed himself ‘so well pleased with your health’, was a better politician than he was a doctor in his blithe dismissal of Rochester’s illnesses, which included everything from temporary blindness and joint pain to urinating blood, the hallmarks of tertiary syphilis and gonorrhoea. Alluding to how Rochester’s physician had acted like ‘an angry impeacher’ against his way of life, Howard offered him some heavy-handed statements of jocular support, but any sense that not all had turned against him was undeniably welcome.

  One of his few other remaining allies was George Etherege, the wit and playwright. Etherege had come to public attention in 1664 with the farce The Comical Revenge, or, Love in a Tub, and moved in the same circles as Rochester and his cronies. Known as ‘gentle George’ on account of his pleasant and charming temperament, he had not written a play since 1668, when he produced She Would If She Could. Spending the years from 1668 till 1671 in Constantinople as secretary to the English ambassador Dennis Harvey had given him a keen eye for observation, which he put to good use in his next and most famous work, The Man of Mode, which had its first performance at the Duke’s Theatre on 2 March 1676.

  While the play’s subtitle, Sir Fopling Flutter, refers to its outrageous fop character—​who was based on the ‘man of fashion’ of the day, Beau Hewit—​the main character is in fact Dorimant, an affectionate portrait of Etherege’s friend Rochester. Dorimant is a dashing, devil-may-care seducer, of whom ‘a thousand horrid stories have been told’, but whose wit and intelligence mark him out as an attractive and charismatic protagonist. The most famous description of Dorimant comes when his former mistress Mrs Loveit (the names of the characters are, as ever in Restoration comedy, far from subtle) says of him: ‘I know he is a devil, but he has something of the angel yet undefaced in him, which makes him so charming and agreeable that I must love him be he never so wicked.’ In the same scene, Etherege even tips a nod to Rochester’s ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’, when Loveit’s servant Pert announces: ‘Your knowing of Mr. Dorimant, in my mind, should rather make you hate all mankind.’

  The play ends happily, with Dorimant pledging fidelity to the witty Harriet: ‘The first time I saw you, you left me with the pangs of love upon me, and this day my soul has quite given up her liberty.’ Etherege’s concern to maintain good relations at court is clear in his having the play’s prologue and epilogue written, respectively, by Scrope and Dryden, simultaneously flattering their vanity and allowing Rochester to be amused by his proxy’s juxtaposition with two of his enemies.

  While Dorimant was strutting glamorously upon the stage, applauded by the multitude, Rochester continued to cool his heels in the country, bored. He wrote to Savile complaining about ‘the tediousness of doing nothing’, and cynically dismisses the world as a place ‘still so insupportably the same that ’twere vain to hope there were any alterations’. His fear and anger at his dismissal from court had given way to resignation, although he notes wryly that ‘Livy and sickness’ have given him a hitherto unsuspected interest in politics. His contempt for Charles was unabated; continuing the themes of his satire, he writes: ‘Kings and princes are only as incomprehensible as what they pretend to represent, but apparently as frail as those they govern.’ Rochester wrote in Lent—​‘a season of tribulation’—​and dropped vague hints about giving up drinking and wenching upon his eventual return to town, but there seemed no imminent prospect of this, especially as a subsequent letter requests a visit to Woodstock by Savile and Buckingham in order to amuse him.

  This or another similar visit duly took place, and debauched antics occurred. Rochester recalls in a later letter how a naked romp around Rosamund’s Well in Woodstock Park saw ‘two large fat nudities’, presumably Buckingham and Savile, disporting themselves around ‘the poor violated nymph’, who was the unfortunate spectator of ‘the strange decay of manly parts’. It is worth remembering that, while the urban legends of Rochester’s public debauchery soon became incredible after his death, there was often some basis in fact. There may be some exaggeration in the retelling when Rochester writes to Savile: ‘prick, ’tis confessed, you showed but little of, but for arse and buttocks (a filthier ostentation, God wot!) you exposed more of that nastiness in your two folio volumes than we all together in
our six quartos.’ Nonetheless, it shows that Rochester’s Woodstock sojourn was not entirely uneventful.

  At last Savile’s subtle but persistent interjections with Charles, emphasizing (and probably exaggerating) his friend’s contrition, went in Rochester’s favour, and he returned to court in May 1676. The reason for Rochester’s return was not sentimentality: Charles needed his vote in the Lords, and his earlier remarks to Savile that he was now interested in politics saw him brought back as a useful servant to a man he despised. It was a changed world. His former tormentor, Louise, was now out of favour with Charles, having had a miscarriage in March, and would be packed off to Bath in June. The Italian temptress Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, had arrived in England in December 1675 disguised as a boy, having fled her mad husband Mazarin, and swiftly captured Charles’s interest. Ironically enough, the king had proposed to her while in exile in 1659, but had been rejected on the grounds that he lacked prospects. Her masculine attire acting as a signal of her rumoured bisexuality, Mancini’s arrival was greeted with horror by most of the country, and she was given the sobriquet ‘the great whore’. Sermons were preached against her, and her Catholicism held up as another sign of Charles’s lack of morals. Rochester wrote a poem imagining a dialogue between Nell Gwyn and Louise, which, although typically bawdy, was not without some sympathy for the exiled duchess: