Some stirring an old boiling kettle, of soot and urine, tinged with a little asafoetida and all the nasty ingredients that would render the smell more unsavoury; others tending the fires, some luting the retorts, others pounding bricks, and scraping powders from them.
The assembled company were attired ‘like the old witches from Macbeth’, and Rochester oversaw the whole charade, weighing and packaging the medicines, while dressed in a tatty old gown like the one that his old tutor Robert Whitehall had given him to abet his sneaking into the taverns of Oxford. Bendo’s nonsense was soon a success. His prices deliberately undercut the local apothecaries and drugsters, who swore and damned him, but he was much beloved by the poor, who described him as ‘a conscionable good doctor’ and prayed for his continued success.
Nor were his abilities purely medical. The multi-faceted doctor could deal with predictions, omens and interpretations of dreams. On occasion his work required him to see his female clients naked, a state of affairs that undoubtedly delighted Rochester, but he was sufficiently into his masquerade to adopt another elaborate scheme to keep Bendo’s name respectable. His prospective patient would therefore make an appointment to be attended by Mrs Bendo, a grave, matronly woman of sober appearance, who would caress her visitors in a purely respectable fashion. Sometimes, if the caresses went well, Dr Bendo offered his strictly professional cure for infertility; Burnet notes that his technique was ‘not without success’, suggesting that Rochester’s bastards littered London society for years, possibly generations, afterwards.
It is difficult to think of many other significant literary figures who would drag up to achieve their sexual ambitions. But the iconoclastic spirit of Rochester’s life is hard to compare to that of other poets, or indeed of other men. Rebounding from the horrors of Epsom, he found a practical expression of his contempt for society in all its forms with the ridiculous creation of Bendo, who could happily have stepped onto the stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane unchanged and acted in his own Restoration comedy: in Alcock’s words, The Famous Psychologist, or, The Noble Mountebank.
At last, Bendo came to an end. Rochester began to tire of his charade after a couple of months, deciding that there was greater entertainment to be had in his own guise at court, especially as there was no danger of criminal proceedings against him (after all, nobody of quality had died in the Epsom affray). While he never talked publicly about his adventures, he spoke to some of his friends about the Bendo masquerade,* and was still sufficiently mindful of it to discuss it with Burnet towards the end of his life. Besides, he was missed at court. Charles’s anger with him had passed, as usual, and word was sent to him (probably by Savile) that his presence would not be unwelcome any more. So he returned to Whitehall, after what Alcock knowingly described as ‘the quickest voyage from France that ever man did’, and was received with renewed royal favour. He was seen dancing at a ball the night after his return, as if nothing had happened in between.
As for Dr Bendo, he vanished into thin air, with no explanation for his sudden disappearance. Alcock wryly noted that the rumour went around that Bendo, his wife and their entire ménage were an enchanted crew, raised and now dispersed by necromancy. This story was swallowed whole by many of their disappointed, or embarrassed, patients, who saw witchcraft as the only logical explanation for the rapid departure of the noble Italian. His name was whispered incredulously for years afterwards around Tower Street and beyond, by his ‘patients’, creditors and observers, but it was not until Alcock, in a letter to Rochester’s daughter Anne over a decade later, told the whole story that the connection between Rochester and Bendo was made public. The tale, then as now, was an outrageous one.
There are many reasons why Rochester became Bendo. He needed to lie low for a few weeks, the masquerade offered him some easy entertainment (and access to women), and it tied in with his interest in play-acting and disguise. Yet there is something biting and angry about the satire of Bendo’s bill, which, given that the last thing Rochester had written was ‘To the Postboy’, also has about it a sense of Rochester degrading himself. He was by now very ill, the early signs of tertiary syphilis beginning to show, and the entire episode has to be seen as one of the last hurrahs of a man who knew that his end was not far away. Bendo represented an attack on society, but it also represented Rochester attacking himself.
The peerless peer was back in favour at court, his masquerade undetected, but his troubles with both Elizabeths continued. A letter from his wife, probably sent while Rochester was going about as Bendo, implied that she had not heard from him in a considerable time, suggesting that she was as much in the dark about his adventures as everyone else. She writes, piteously, that ‘the uncertainty of [not hearing from you] very much afflicts me; whether this odd kind of proceeding be to try my patience or obedience, I cannot guess, but I will never fail of either when my duty to you require them’. Wondering whether he was staying in Bath, she provides some inadvertent humour when she says: ‘I am confident you will find so much business as will not allow you to come into the country.’ The letter ends poignantly, though, when she talks of their children and ‘the long hopes I have lived in of seeing you’.
Much business had indeed been done over the previous couple of months, and Rochester, freed of the shackles of Bendo, prepared to resume his own business with Elizabeth Barry. Letters he wrote in early summer 1676 hint at the Bendo affair, but being easily intercepted, they are not explicit. In one he writes: ‘I will not tell you my endeavours nor excuse my breach of promise... but I hope to give you a better account shortly.’ In another, presumably a reply to a vexed missive from her, he claims: ‘That I do not see you is not that I would not... but for these reasons you [shall] know hereafter.’ These letters were probably written towards the end of his time impersonating Bendo. However, he was attempting to make amends, and in his statement that ‘I can give you no account of your business as yet, but of my own part’, he hints at his attempts to obtain for her a role in a play.
This part was probably Leonora in Aphra Behn’s play Abdelazer, which was staged at the Dorset Garden Theatre in July. Behn was a fascinatingly quixotic character, even by the libertine standards of the day. One of the first women to earn her living as a writer, she had lived a chequered life, having aroused controversy first for her Catholic upbringing, then for her service to the crown as a spy in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, in which she had adopted the code name ‘Astrea’. After some time in a debtors’ prison—perhaps because she had not been sufficiently recompensed for her work, a typical piece of royal thoughtlessness and ingratitude—she began an independent career, achieving some success with her early Restoration comedies The Forced Marriage and The Amorous Prince.
The nature of Rochester and Behn’s relationship has always aroused controversy. Each had a licentious reputation: Behn, a very merry widow, had been the mistress of John Hoyle, a bisexual lawyer with republican sympathies, and Rochester was, well, Rochester. No letters between the two survive, but their literary interests had a great deal in common. Her poem ‘The Disappointment’, in particular, owes much to Rochester’s own style, so much so that it was often thought to have been by him and was attributed as such in the first collection of his poetry. While it treads very similar territory to ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, the key difference is that it looks at an interrupted sexual encounter from the perspective of the woman’s, rather than the man’s, desire. The unapologetic treatment of longed-for sexual gratification was considered acceptable from a poet such as Rochester, but the forthright expression of female sexuality was a step too far, even in this supposedly libertine age.
It is amusing to speculate that Rochester and Behn tried and failed to have a sexual encounter, which both then wrote about from their separate perspectives. No evidence for this supposition survives, however, and it seems likely that Rochester’s interest in helping Behn was dictated by friendship rather than erotic desire. Behn was eight years Rochester’s senior, a cons
iderable age gap at that time. He assisted her with her writing, for which Behn praised him in a poem that she wrote after his death, and provided her with an introduction to the hard-drinking, hard-cursing life of court. She, meanwhile, paid him homage both direct and indirect, most notably in her 1677 play The Rover, which features a swaggering, witty rake-hero whose success with women is matched by his naval prowess. It was almost obligatory for a Restoration comedy of this time to feature a Rochester-libertine character—this was more a reflection of the writers’ affection for their friend than a sign of intellectual poverty—and, making the debt explicit, her protagonist is named ‘Wilmore’. Building on her previous stage success, Elizabeth Barry once again acted in a Behn play, appearing as Wilmore’s cross-dressing love, Hellena.
However, even while Elizabeth Barry found success in Abdelazer, her entanglement with Rochester was increasingly trying. Rochester’s letters appear to offer constant contrition for his behaviour, presumably because he kept expressing his drunken jealousy at her suspected infidelities whenever he saw her. In one, he pleads: ‘if I love anything in the world like you... may I ever be as unlucky and as hateful as when I saw you last’; in another, he juggles a playful mock-penitential style (‘Receive my confession and let the promise of my future zeal and devotion obtain my pardon for last night’s blasphemy against you’) with what appears to be sincere embarrassment at his actions: ‘til I have mended my manners, I am ashamed to look you in the face.’ A previously unpublished letter from around this time sees Rochester describe himself as ‘the idlest man alive’ and apologize for ‘a proof of that ill quality of sin’ that Elizabeth Barry has been privy to; he claims that ‘something fell out that ought not to have hindered me seeing you last night, but it did’ and begs forgiveness and a chance to see her.
Rochester’s mercurial dealings with Elizabeth Barry were inevitably coloured by his growing belief that his protégée was no longer in love with him. His letters make grand protestations of his own undying affections and fidelity—conveniently, he appears to forget the existence of his wife and children—but are constantly underpinned by statements such as ‘endeavour to give me some undeniable proofs that you love me’ and ‘for your sake use not that power… so unmercifully as you did last time’. Whether a loving drunkard or a drunken lover, he remained incapable of sobriety or restraint, which explains why Elizabeth Barry wanted to keep her distance.
Eventually, in August 1676, Rochester returned home to Adderbury for the first time in several months. Anticipating trouble, he sent his wife a letter in which he alluded to his spending money from her Somerset estates—as her husband, he had the right of access to these—and tried to mollify her by saying, ‘I intend to give you the trouble of a visit, ’tis all I have to beg your pardon for at present.’ As before, it is likely that the coming of the prodigal father was greeted with weary resignation, rather than unfettered joy. Bored with his rustication, Rochester was more interested in the court gossip, which he received in abundance from Savile in a letter dated 15 August 1676. Savile, apologizing for his epistolary interruption of Rochester’s domestic bliss, remarks that London ‘is full as foolish, full as wise, full as formal and full as impertinent as you left it’. Recounting a list of deaths and romantic entanglements (one including their Epsom partner in crime, George Bridges), Savile strikes a world-weary note, claiming that ‘were I not too old and much too fat for poetry, surely all this stuff should inspire me’. He was bound for Paris on court business; in a letter to Savile from Oxford the following month, Rochester expresses a desire to head to Europe on a reprise of his grand tour, ‘for the improvement of my parts’. Knowingly flirtatious, he writes: ‘if the temptation of seeing you be added to the desires I have already, the sin is so sweet that I am resolved to embrace it.’
Sin aside, Rochester was tired and worn out, as was his poetic muse. Compared to the previous few years, which had seen the composition of around fifty poems, encompassing everything from satires on the state of mankind to bawdy squibs about impotency, his writing was now far less prolific and, when it came, was more likely to be devoted to attacking his enemies than adding anything substantial to the world of literature. A small exception is his lyric poem ‘A Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover’. Perhaps influenced by his romantic difficulties with Elizabeth Barry, compounded by infidelity and impotence, Rochester adopts a female perspective to examine his woes:
Ancient person, for whom I
All the flattering youth defy,
Long be it ere thou grow old,
Aching, shaking, crazy, cold;
But still continue as thou art,
Ancient person of my heart.
The poem is a curious but affecting mix of the self-lacerating and the self-pitying. It can be taken as implicit commentary on Elizabeth Barry’s life, amidst the ‘flattering youth’ who would wish to importune her, with Rochester viewing himself as little more than ‘aching, shaking, crazy, cold’. At the age of twenty-nine, he was hardly ancient or old, but his exhausting, pell-mell existence had undeniably left him worn out. The second verse soon moves into wish-fulfilment. The young lady will bestow ‘brooding kisses’ on ‘withered lips’ and will ‘thy youthful heat restore... and a second spring recall’. As she swears fidelity—‘Nor from thee will ever part / Ancient person of my heart’—the reader might be forgiven for finding this unlikely. Rochester’s attentions soon turn to his ‘dead cinder’:
Thy nobler part, which but to name
In our sex would be counted shame,
By age’s frozen grasp possessed,
From his ice shall be released,
And soothed by my reviving hand,
In former warmth and vigour stand.
All a lover’s wish can reach
For thy joy my love shall teach,
And for thy pleasure shall improve
All that art can add to love.
It is a telling insight into Rochester at his most insecure and troubled, worried about matters sexual and romantic, but still able to imbue navel-gazing narcissism with humour (there is a touch of the mock prudery of Bendo in the refusal to name ‘thy nobler part’ because of the ‘shame’ involved in so doing) and, by the final couplet, with a touch of unadorned romanticism:
Yet still I love thee without art,
Ancient person of my heart.
These sentiments were at odds with how the affair between Rochester and Elizabeth Barry was progressing. In a letter sent from Adderbury on 7 October 1676—presumably by this stage Rochester no longer cared whether his wife learnt of the affair or not, as she eventually would do—he adopts a new tone, a clipped, diffident rebuttal of an angry missive from her. He shrugs off her ‘uncharitable censure’ and, in response to some criticism that she has heard from ‘wretches’, notes that they are ‘so little valuable that you will easily forget their malice’. He indicates that he will be returning to London in two days’ time, with the intention of resuming their affair.
Rochester’s life in London, especially without Savile and with only a partial resumption of royal favour, was increasingly empty. With the Rangership of Woodstock Park no longer due to go to his son after his death, tensions between him and Charles remained. The latter offered him no further sinecures, and even his existing allowances were seldom paid. He resumed the usual round of drinking and wenching in his old haunts of the city, but carnal pleasure failed to satisfy him. In a rare letter to his wife, he writes: ‘my head has been perpetually turned round, but I do not find it makes me giddy; this is all the wit you shall expect in my first letter.’ Relations with Elizabeth Barry, affected by suspicions and distrust on both sides, were far from cordial. Her ‘wretches’ were still impugning his name, and despite Rochester’s pleas that he was still ‘thoroughly your humble servant’, there was clearly deep distrust on her part. When he writes ‘Madam, I found you in a chiding humour today, and so I left you’, there is obvious irritation, only partially masked by
the black wit of the following sentence, when he expresses a desire not to see her before the next day, ‘til when neither you nor any you can employ shall know whether I am under or above ground’.
As a partial result of this boredom, his hitherto neglected legitimate children preyed upon his mind. His eldest daughter, Anne, was now eight, and it would only be a few years before she was a marriageable prospect, just as his son Charles, although only five, had to be educated and instructed how to be a gentleman. Thomas Alcock, his accomplice in the Bendo saga, became tutor to both Anne and Charles as he was both trustworthy and literate.
Alcock’s arrival at Adderbury from London was accompanied by a letter that Rochester intended for Charles. One of only a couple of letters to his son that survive, it is both poignant and revealing. Soliciting his son’s gratitude for the arrival of his tutor, Rochester requests that he be ‘obedient and diligent’, saying ‘you are now grown big enough to be a man if you can be wise enough’. He was told to ‘serve god, learn your book and observe the instructions of your parents first, and next your tutor, to whom I have entirely resigned you for this seven year’. This differed from Rochester’s own education at Burford Grammar School, which began when he was about nine and ended when he was admitted to Oxford at twelve. Clearly Rochester believed his son would be better instructed by a tutor with wide experience of the world than in one of the local schools. He notes that it is this education that will make him ‘happy or unhappy forever’, and praises his son by saying, ‘I have so good an opinion of you yet I am glad to think you will never deceive me, dear child.’ He counsels learning, obedience and diligence, and ends by saying ‘that you may be [good] are my constant prayers’. The mention of religion and prayer, although clearly designed to instruct his son, is a world away from the mockery of scripture that can be seen in his letters to his wife and Savile.
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