NELL: When to the King I bid good morrow
With tongue in mouth, and hand on tarse,
Portsmouth may rend her cunt for sorrow,
And Mazarin may kiss mine arse.
PORTSMOUTH: When England’s monarch’s on my belly,
With prick in cunt, though double crammed,
Fart of mine arse for small whore Nelly,
And great whore Mazarin be damned.
Rochester, meanwhile, continued to be worried about Elizabeth Barry’s constancy. A melodramatic letter that he sent to her shortly before his return to London questions whether ‘there be yet alive within you the least memory of me’, and talks of how ‘your favours are to me the greatest bliss this world... can bestow’. However, he knows the ways of actresses in London and makes allusion to her suspected infidelity: ‘when you give another leave to serve you more than I... it will not be in your power to reward that more deserving man with half so much happiness as you have thrown away upon my worthless self.’
As with many witty men, Rochester was better at dealing with these matters in the abstract than in reality. Returning to court, he had his first meeting with Charles in nearly a year, at which he received the hugely displeasing news that Elizabeth Barry had indeed been unfaithful to him. Informing Rochester of his mistress’s infidelity might seem petty behaviour for a monarch, but Charles, who had been informed of the situation by Nell Gwyn, saw it as evening the score for the damage done the previous year. Rochester sent her a letter in equal parts dismayed and panicked, asking for an appointment at 10 a.m. that day and saying: ‘the affair is unhappy, and to me on many scores but on none more than that it has disturbed the heaven of thought I was in.’ It was an indication both of his love for her and of his naïvety that Rochester expected her to be faithful; he was disabused in the most violent way.
However, the matter was settled and their affair resumed as before, albeit now with a greater amount of jealousy and grumbling on Rochester’s part. Letters of his to Elizabeth Barry around this time eschew poetic conceits and expressions of undying love in favour of suspicion. ‘I know by woeful experience what comes of dealing with knaves’, he claims, and upon being proved correct in his suspicions that her neighbour was acting as a bawd on another’s behalf, declares: ‘May no man share the blessings I enjoy without my curses.’ He ends one letter asking that she ‘may remove my fears and make me as happy as I am faithful’, a piece of classic Rochesterian disingenuousness. Despite his avowed intent to restrain himself in matters vaginal and vinicultural, he soon returned with his friends to his old haunts of the taverns and brothels.
Rochester was received back at court both with disdain and with admiration. A fellow Groom of the Bedchamber, Henry Bulkeley, wrote to him, ‘I don’t wonder you fall into such persecutions as your last, since you live in an age when fools are your most powerful enemies.’ Bulkeley, equally weary of court life, describes how ‘a committee of those able statesmen assemble daily to talk of nothing but fighting and fucking at Locketts [a famous inn], and will never be reconciled to men who speak sense and reason’. Perhaps Rochester smiled wryly at the last allusion. Bulkeley was fond of duels and frequently imprisoned as a result, but there was no doubting his courage, nor his respect for the infamous rake-poet.
If it seemed, briefly, that things had taken a turn for the better, Rochester was soon involved in an affair that would plunge him into even deeper opprobrium. He headed to the fashionable races at Epsom on 17 June, nearly a year after the incident in the Privy Garden, with Etherege, another rake named George Bridges and a young soldier, Billy Downs. They soon abandoned the turf in favour of the bottle. Late that night, all were drunk. Coming upon some passing fiddlers, the group demanded that they play for them, and, when this request was reasonably refused, they showed their displeasure by abusing the unfortunate musicians.
Hearing this commotion, a nearby barber came over and, about to be abused in his turn, diverted attention by suggesting a visit to the house of the fairest woman in Epsom. This seemed like a fine plan, so the revellers agreed, only to be shown by the savvy barber to the house of the local constable. Hearing a raucous disturbance outside his door, the constable demanded to know what the men wanted, only to be peremptorily informed that they needed a whore. He, not being able to satisfy their request, refused to let them in, but four strong, inebriated men were not to be trifled with, so they broke down his door and set about him, injuring him badly. Eventually, the unfortunate constable escaped and called the local watch, who duly appeared fully armed.
Etherege, the most sober of the group, was able to calm the watch down with a ‘submissive oration’, and they departed. Had the matter ended there, all would have been well. However, Rochester, disappointed that the evening would end without further sport, drew his sword upon the constable, who then shouted ‘Murder!’ Downs, attempting to calm the situation, made to restrain Rochester, only for his actions to be misinterpreted by the returning watch. Downs was struck on the head with a staff and then had a pike thrust into his side. Panicking, Rochester and the others fled, abandoning the unfortunate Downs to his fate; he died of his wounds a few days later. Aghast, his fellow revellers returned to London and the consequences of their sport.
While, technically, it was the watchmen who were responsible for Downs’s death, few were in any doubt that the affair was Rochester’s fault. At best, his actions were atypically cowardly—even his friend and supporter Marvell described how he ‘abjectly hid himself’—and, at worst, he had single-handedly justified every slur and slander that had been placed upon him (by way of contrast, no such blame attached itself to Etherege or Bridges, who were never indicted for any crime). It was rumoured that Rochester would be tried for murder, and so, once again, he left court, this time voluntarily. Charles would not in any case have been a sympathetic ally to a crime of violence and cowardice. This time, to avoid the law, it was said that Rochester had left for France, but in fact he returned to the country, full of self-loathing, which he expressed in one of his most cuttingly autobiographical poems.
If most of Rochester’s writing is clear-sighted about his frailties and failures, it is often leavened by wit or a distancing conceit. In the case of one of his darkest works, ‘To the Postboy’, there is no such palliative. Instead, he writes a poem that stands out as a scream of self-laceration, rather than attacking the society in which he lived. It could accurately be termed ‘A Satire: On Myself’, were satire not too gentle a term for the vituperative sentiments expressed.
The poem takes the form of a dialogue between Rochester and a young letter-bearer, although this description implies a greater amount of exchange than the mainly one-sided work contains:
ROCHESTER: Son of a whore, God damn you, can you tell
A peerless peer the readiest way to hell;
I’ve outswilled Bacchus, sworn of my own make
Oaths would fright Furies, and make Pluto quake;
I’ve swived more whores more ways than Sodom’s walls
E’er knew, or the College of Rome’s Cardinals.
Witness heroic scars—look here, ne’er go! –
Sear cloths and ulcers from the top to toe.
Frighted at my own mischiefs, I have fled
And bravely left my life’s defender dead;
Broke houses to break chastity, and dyed
That floor with murder which my lust denied.
Pox on’t, why do I speak of these poor things?
I’ve blasphemed God, and libelled Kings.
The readiest way to Hell, Boy, quick, ne’er stir!
POSTBOY: The readiest way, my Lord’s by Rochester.
Admitting his cowardice and complicity in Downs’s death, Rochester condemns himself for his failings, implying that his selfishness has finally resulted in an event of tragic consequence. After writing it, he disappeared from view. Had any of his friends read the poem—which did not appear until the twentieth century, when it was published by
the Rochester scholar John Hayward—they might have assumed that it was a theatrical parting shot from a man destined to die by his own hand.
He did not. Instead, his love of ostentation and disguise lent itself to his most bizarre persona yet.
* Although not Savile, fortunately for him.
Tower Street was one of the most prosperous parts of London in June 1676. Predominantly inhabited by the emerging middle class of the day, it was home to aspirant tradesmen of the higher kind, as well as to a range of itinerant chancers. These included everyone from alchemists to confidence tricksters, all of whom hoped to make a few shillings from gullible passers-by before the law got wise to their unseemly antics. It was a place where people could adopt new identities if they were on the run from their creditors or family, with only the ever-present shadow of the Tower of London in the background to remind them of the punishment for their transgressions.
Into this milieu arrived a gorgeously attired figure, ‘the noble doctor, Alexander Bendo’. Dr Bendo was said to have arrived straight from Italy and was dressed in the rich clothes of his native homeland, including an enormous green gown, exotic multi-coloured furs, a substantial and noble beard, diamonds and jewels aplenty, and a great gold chain hung around his neck, a gift from the king of Cyprus for curing his daughter Princess Aloephangina. Being an Italian—and a papist to boot—he spoke no English, but instead communicated with his servants and familiars by means of a complicated series of hand gestures, all the while muttering to himself in a strange and unfamiliar tongue.
His arrival, even in ever-shifting Tower Street, caused quite a sensation. He lodged at a local goldsmith’s house, next to The Black Swan tavern, and soon set about declaring his presence. Town-criers and hawkers were sent out into the streets to announce the coming to town of the good Dr Bendo and to dispense handbills he had written, in which he announced his many accomplishments and patients cured. The bill itself was altogether more literate and well versed in the English language than might have been expected of an Italian. It begins by praising ‘the famous metropolis of England’ and ‘its worthy inhabitants’, but bemoans the fact that the city has become inundated with ‘a numerous company of such, whose arrogant confidence, backing their ignorance, has enabled them to impose upon the people either premeditated cheats, or... the palpable, dull and empty mistakes of their self-deluded imaginations’.
Bendo, a man of brilliance and integrity, instead offered something quite different from this ‘bastard race of quacks’, who were mired in ‘a repute of mere mists, imaginations, errors and deceits’. He was all too aware that he was in a world ‘where virtue is so frequently exactly counterfeited and hypocrisy so generally taken notice of’, and that his own name might be regarded with suspicion. He assured Londoners that ‘if I had intended any such foul play myself, I should [not] have given you so fair warning by my severe observations upon others’, and cites a parable of the coward and the valiant man: ‘the valiant man holds up his head, looks confidently round him, wears a sword, courts a lord’s wife and owns it, so does the coward; one only point of honour excepted, and that’s courage… makes the distinction.’
Bendo, being Italian and therefore given to floral verbosity, illustrated this with many other examples designed to show his wisdom and integrity. Only the hard-hearted could have read his bill and doubted his straightforward, manly honour. Then, he came to the crux of the matter. Bendo offered cures for scurvy, joint pain, bad teeth, poor skin, leg aches, obesity, consumption, kidney stones and other painful illnesses, all of which he would deal with in ‘great secrecy’. Bendo, a man of great moral stature, was keen that his bill should be wholesome and family-oriented, and made sure that no word ‘bears any unclean sound’, unlike others he had seen, ‘as bawdy as Aretine’s dialogues, which no man that walks warily before God can approve of’. His kindness and dedication extended to ensuring that ‘the reproachful mistakes of barren wombs’ might be cured by him as well, a matter of immense delicacy and caution.
Bendo was understandably coy about where he had obtained his medical knowledge, instead saying that his ‘secrets’ came from the best part of fifteen years’ wandering in France and Italy, and in the latter ‘women of forty bear the same countenance [as] those of fifteen’. Finally, he ended his bill with a ringing statement explaining why it should benefit him to bring about these cures:
Should Galen himself look out of his grave, and tell me these were baubles, below the profession of a physician, I would boldly answer him, that I take more glory in preserving God’s image, upon one good face, than I should do in patching up all the decayed corpses in the world.
Dr Bendo, this scrupulous figure of honour and trust, announced that he would be ‘at home’ at his lodgings from 3 until 8 p.m. each day, and commended himself to the good people of London. Only the most suspicious would read this bill, with its protestations of medical skill, mixed with a little continental wisdom, and fail to run straight to Tower Street to be waited upon by the good doctor. Or, to give him his more accurate name, the disgraced John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester.
Rochester’s interest in play-acting and disguise reached its zenith with the creation of Bendo. Run out of court and fearing prosecution for his involvement in Billy Downs’s death, he decided that the best option he had was to disappear for a couple of months. Fleeing to the continent was too expensive an option for him to consider, so laying low in the city at the epicentre of his world appeared the best solution. Whitehall had little authority in the half-ruined streets, with which he was all too familiar through his visits to the brothels there.
However, he had no wish merely to hide in the house of one of his friends, and so concocted an elaborate scheme, aided by his most trusted servant, the aptly named Thomas Alcock. Alcock had had some education, being able to read and write, as can be seen by his 1687 account of these adventures, The Famous Pathologist, or, The Noble Mountebank. Most body servants—those entrusted with their masters’ clothing and shaving—would have been able to read, at least, but fewer were entirely literate. Rochester and Alcock proved a well-matched pair.
Rochester decided to adopt the guise and manner of a physician, whose sudden appearance in town could be explained away by his being Italian. There were other, less showy means of evading the law and court displeasure, but once the initial idea had occurred to him, Rochester took great pleasure in elaborating on it in an ostentatious and public fashion. In this spirit, he created an apparently sincere but actually satirical document, ‘Alexander Bendo’s Bill’, which simultaneously offers a pitch-perfect parody of the countless other mountebanks and charlatans who set themselves up to offer miraculous cures to the gullible and unwary, while mocking the society that allowed them to prosper.
In the bill he attacks the great men of court, just as he had done throughout his satires:
the politician... finding how the people are taken with specious miraculous impossibilities plays the same game, protests, declares, promises... things which he’s sure can ne’er be brought about; the people believe, are deluded and pleased.
He also takes time to mock religion, describing ‘the expectation of a future good, which shall never befall them’, and ends by describing the political climber as nothing more than ‘a mountebank in state affairs’. Had one of those men, a Scrope or a Mulgrave, read Bendo’s bill, they might have been alerted to the presence of Rochester in their midst, still engaged in mocking society’s ills. But the Italian—what was his name again?—was just another mountebank, no different to scores of others. It is hugely doubtful that anyone at court would have read his bill, or cared if they had.
Rochester was far from the only person trying his hand at this fraud. A contemporary account, entitled The Character of a Quack-Doctor, describes exactly what the average mountebank’s strategy consisted of:
First, he prevails with some associate porters and tripe-women to call him Doctor... [He] deals as a private mountebank, and makes eve
ry blind alehouse he comes in his stage, where he tells a thousand lies of his miraculous cures, and has his landlady at his elbow to vouch them: he bribes all the nurses he can meet with, and keeps a dozen midwives in pension to proclaim his skill at gossipings, he endears the chambermaid by a private dose, to bring him in with her mistress; the new married citizen’s wife... comes to him for the reputed ability of his back, not his brains, and the suburb gamers admire him for toping a pot so sociably.
Rochester could certainly tope a pot sociably with the best of them, but his intention was a more elaborate one. It took some effort and expense, as Alcock put it, to ‘tacitly and satirically [expose] that ignorant sort of people, the mock astrologers, mountebanks, quack salvers, empericks and their insensible admirers’, but he was more than equal to the charade. Bill prepared and distributed, he hired a few casual labourers (the ‘associate porters’ who were easily bribed for a few pennies), sat back and awaited custom.
London was intrigued, so it was not long in coming. It was given out that Bendo could offer anything from ‘paint, powder, ointments’ to ‘opiates, tinctures and chemical preparations of all sorts’. These drugs were in fact made out of a mixture of ‘ashes, soot, lime, chalk, old wall, soap, and indeed anything that came to hand’ while the two men were walking the streets, and coloured accordingly. Alcock vividly describes the goings-on in the ‘laboratory’ (in fact a small room in the goldsmith’s house), which was full of ‘real mirth and continual hearty laughs’:
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