When he was not urging virtue on the young, Rochester’s court life proceeded as before. He associated with Buckingham a great deal, drinking and scheming; Buckingham, who by now stood in open dissent to Charles, was attempting to become leader of the newly formed Country party, which was a non-partisan coalition of Tories and Whigs, and aimed to reduce or remove all sources of organized power, whether it be royal or Parliamentary. Buckingham tried to seduce Rochester into participation, and Rochester, whose political interest was growing stronger at this point, gave tacit support to his scheme—a dangerous act for one whose reputation was still marred by his actions of the past few years. When not amusing himself by writing scurrilous satirical verse that mocked his enemies Dryden and Shadwell, Rochester, accompanied by Buckingham, Savile and others, attended the opening of Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer in December 1676. The play proved predictably scandalous, with its hints of lesbianism and cross-dressing, and delighted Rochester and his circle, for whom controversy and upset were an excellent counterpoint to an evening at the theatre.
The year 1677 began with further machinations, both political and poetic. On 15 February Parliament reconvened, with Rochester present. Representing the House of Lords as its speaker, Buckingham seized the initiative, citing a statute that Parliament, which had been dissolved for the previous fifteen months, was ineligible to be in session. This was a bold move, but a foolhardy one; few were willing to stand in open opposition to Charles, and so he, along with a small number of supporters including Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, found himself committed to the Tower on 16 February for gross insubordination. Their confinement was a purely punitive one, where visitors were refused and they were kept under close guard at all times. Nevertheless the quick-thinking Shaftesbury managed to obtain permission to have his own cook during his imprisonment, on the grounds that he might be poisoned by his enemies, who included Charles’s enforcer, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby.
The disproportionate severity of the sentence indicated, first, that Charles was vexed and frightened by the open challenge to his regal authority, and second, that Buckingham was fully out of favour. It was a considerable decline from his previous position as chief minister, in its own way a reversal of fortune as substantial as Clarendon’s had been in the previous decade. Rochester, however, remained loyal to his old mentor, and began intriguing, along with Buckhurst, to secure his release from the Tower. To do so, he turned to an unlikely source of support, the courtesan and actress Nell Gwyn.
‘Poor, laborious Nelly’ had been, by this time, supplanted in Charles’s bed, but not in his affections. Though she continued to appear on the stage, she enjoyed a lifestyle that most of the actresses of the time could only imagine, with a substantial townhouse in Pall Mall, of which she had been granted the freehold by Act of Parliament in 1676, and a country estate, Burford House in Windsor, as well as sundry gifts of cash and clothing. Tellingly, she was never to be ennobled or granted a title; the idea of bestowing such a bauble on a mere actor was unthinkable until Henry Irving received a knighthood in 1895. Charles might have loved her, but socially she remained the lowest of his mistresses. She remained close to Charles, offering him ‘breakfasts and concerts’—and, presumably, a good deal more besides.
It was due to Buckingham’s agency in 1667 that Charles and Nell had begun their love affair, and because of this well-remembered kindness Rochester enlisted her as an ally in his quest. She responded cautiously at first to his overtures; not only was Rochester’s reputation as a rake and blackguard well known by this point, but persistent rumours of his turbulent relationship with Elizabeth Barry were heard all over the playhouses. Their increasingly fraught dealings might well have turned many fellow actors and actresses against him.
Rochester’s behaviour over these months, however, proved entirely atypical, being sober, well judged and selfless. For once, he behaved like an honest politician—the sort of character he had hoped for in ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’, ‘who does his needful flattery direct / Not to oppress and ruin, but protect’. He was a constant presence on committees and in public offices, speaking in the House of Lords and gaining some approval by doing so. If his desire was to indicate to Charles that he had, at the age of nearly thirty, finally achieved what was expected of him, it worked.
However, the suspicious Nell was a harder nut to crack. Eventually, Rochester hit upon the simple but brilliant idea of supporting her claim for various lands in Ireland, which she had been granted by Charles and wished to retain in order to provide an income for herself and her children, but which were being disputed in the Irish Claims Court. In a letter dated 22 April 1677 to Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Rochester suavely alludes to both royal favour and his own influence in the matter. Beneath the shower of clichéd flattery (‘there is nowhere to be found a better friend or worthier patron’), the implication is clear: I am a man of stature, in good standing with the king, and this matter had better be sorted, quickly. It was: by June the tide was turning in her favour, and by November the land was hers, earning her a not inconsiderable income of £800 a year, or around £65,000 in today’s money.
In return for this assistance, Rochester solicited Nell to help by bringing her kind influence to bear on Charles. It was a delicate matter; Charles was famously indulgent to his favourites, but, as with Rochester’s destruction of the sundial two years before, his favour could swiftly be withdrawn after an insult or attack. A petition that Buckingham sent Rochester from the Tower in April 1677 begs him to ‘lose no time in making use of the King’s good nature and kindness to me’, knowing that the longer he was incarcerated, the more likely ‘certain well natured persons’ with no love for Buckingham would ensure that his stay in the Tower was a permanent one.
Eventually, the combination of Nell’s sexual charms and Rochester’s enhanced political standing saw Buckingham released from the Tower in July 1677, initially for a month’s parole and then permanently. A grateful letter from Buckingham to Rochester was sent shortly afterwards, enclosing a gift of ‘two of the civillest carps’ and praising him for his kindness; he claims that ‘I have not contaminated my body with any person below my quality since I saw you’, and adds: ‘I am now very busy drinking your Lordship’s health.’ Buckingham, like Rochester, was adept at flattery, and in a letter dating from August protests: ‘I assure you as long as I live you shall find me heartily and entirely your servant.’
Almost incredibly, Buckingham believed that he might yet resume royal favour and win the position of Lord Steward. While conniving for this role with the Cabinet Council, he stayed at Rochester’s lodgings in Whitehall, living in debauchery and womanizing—‘the usual life’, as Marvell sardonically called it. Buckingham’s enemies treated this open flouting of his pardon with horror—they persuaded Charles that a man with so little contrition had no place at court, and accordingly he was unsuccessful in his endeavour. With nothing left for him in Whitehall, he was ‘advised’ to leave court for his estate in Berkshire, Cliveden, where he intrigued from afar and hoped for a return to royal favour and influence.
If obtaining Buckingham’s release was a rare high point for Rochester, the rest of his life was less happy. Rochester impregnated Elizabeth Barry in March or April 1677, but they continued to distrust one another. Rochester’s letters are alternately wheedling or simply dismissive, and that she doubted his fidelity as much as he did hers is obvious, and probably deserved. A typical letter of his begins, with a combination of weariness and indignancy: ‘My visit yesterday was intended to tell you I had not dined in company of women... if your anger continue, show yourself at the play that I may look upon you and go mad.’ A greater formality also crept in; another, previously unpublished, letter is signed ‘Your humble servant, Rochester’ and states: ‘do me the favour to let me speak with you as soon as you please, it concerns yourself a little, and therefore very much.’
He also carried on his rivalries a
nd fights with various other members of court. Chief amongst these was the ridiculous Sir Carr Scrope. A short, angry and affected man who fancied himself a wit and man about town, Rochester had already mocked him as the ‘purblind knight’, and wrote a vicious parody of one of his love songs to Cary Frazier, a famous beauty of the court. His hatred stemmed in part from his belief that Scrope was making advances towards Elizabeth Barry. Scrope’s original begins, in classically dull ‘literary’ style:
I cannot change as others do,
Though you unjustly scorn,
Since that poor swain that sighs for you
For you alone was born.
It continues in similarly plodding and verbose manner. Rochester’s altogether sparkier parody takes aim at both Scrope and Frazier:
I swive as well as others do;
I’m young, not yet deformed,
My tender heart, sincere and true,
Deserves not to be scorned.
Why Phyllis, then, why will you strive
With forty lovers more?’
‘Can I’, said she, ‘with nature strive?
Alas I am, alas I am a whore!’
A tit-for-tat war of words soon began between the two, albeit one that was unequal from the start. Scrope’s heavy-handed description of Rochester as ‘the top fiddler of the town’ in his ‘In Defence of Satire’, complete with mockery of his ‘buffoon conceits’ and his cowardice at Epsom, was soon answered by the unparalleled vitriol of ‘On the Supposed Author of a Late Poem in Defence of Satyr’. Rochester was seldom driven to anger by his enemies, but the allusion to Downs’s death and his own complicity in it was a step too far. The resulting blast of hatred was quite sensational. Scrope is mocked for his ‘unmeaning brain’, for being ‘a lump deformed and shapeless’, ‘the most ungraceful wight’, possessed of a ‘grisly face’, nothing more than an ‘ugly beau garçon’, and, in the best metaphor in the poem:
Where, dreadfully, love’s scarecrow thou art placed
To frighten the tender flock that long to taste,
While every coming maid, when you appear,
Starts back for shame, and straight turns chaste for fear.
He is roundly abused as ‘half witty, and half mad, and scarce half brave’, ‘half honest, which is very much a knave’, and ‘entirely... an ass’. The wit of earlier satires is here drowned beneath personal opprobrium and what feels like a recklessly unchecked outpouring of fury.
Rochester was moved to such anger in part by an unfortunate incident that occurred in early June 1677, when he was dining at a tavern in Pall Mall and a cook there, a Monsieur Du Puis, was stabbed by an unpleasant character named Floyd. Although Rochester had nothing to do with the affray, the rumour soon went about that he was responsible, and his reputation was low enough after the Epsom affair for many to believe it. When Rochester had been at the pinnacle of royal favour, Scrope would not have dared criticize him in these terms. Now, he was fair game. Scrope responded to the attack in a dismissive and contemptuous fashion, mocking Rochester as nothing more than a ‘poor feeble scribbler’, who is described by the world in ‘bad terms’ and behaves like a ‘vexed toad’, full of ‘pox and malice’. The most cutting line comes at the end, when Scrope attacks Rochester both personally and poetically: ‘Thy pen is full as harmless as thy sword.’
Rochester, by now goaded into intemperance, produced a final and definitive burlesque on Scrope, entitled ‘On Poet Ninny’. Taking a popular contemporary figure of mockery from Shadwell’s 1668 play The Sullen Lovers, it soon becomes clear that Rochester’s pen was anything but harmless, as he sneers that Scrope cannot ‘ev’n offend, but with thy face’, and mocks him as ‘so wretched and so base’, composed of ‘harmless malice and of hopeless love’. Further abuse follows. The unfortunate Scrope is a ‘nauseous creature’ of equal parts ‘pride and ugliness’, and a ‘conceited ninny and a fop’. Once again, Rochester refers to Scrope’s unsightly appearance:
Thou art below being laughed at; out of spite,
Men gaze upon thee as a hideous sight,
And cry ‘There goes the melancholy knight!’
There are some modish fools we daily see,
Modest and dull: why, they are wits to thee!
He ends with a cruelly effective parting shot that alludes to Scrope’s lack of popularity at court:
The worst that I could write would be no more
Than what thy very friends have said before.
It stung, and it is telling that no further replies from Scrope exist. Nonetheless, Rochester knew that the final couplet had a self-referential quality to it. His own friends were few and far between. There was still the ever-loyal Savile, as well as Buckingham and a few other reliable cronies and drinking companions (including his former tutor Robert Whitehall, who in 1677 sent Rochester one of the twelve copies of his collection of biblical verses, the Hexastichon hieron, as a gift for his son Charles, possibly with a view to being allowed to guide Rochester fils in the same way that he had mentored Rochester père). These few aside, his fair-weather acquaintances had long since tired of him. His response to this was to behave ever more outrageously, perhaps on the grounds of diminished responsibility occasioned by his illness, or maybe because he simply thought he had nothing left to lose.
There is a story that was recounted later by George Etherege of Rochester’s behaviour around this time. It best conveys the remarkable gulf that had opened by now between the cynical worldliness of Rochester’s antics and his almost childlike yearning for a better world. Present but submerged throughout his life, it came to the fore towards the end, and would be skilfully and mercilessly exploited by Burnet and others. Etherege’s story bears retelling in full:
Often on some frolic, when as a mountebank or merchant, or as companion to the King, he seemed to be borne on the wings of enjoyment, his face would cloud over: and once at a debauch, when all his wit, his spirit, his abundant grace were more intoxicating than the wine, and he seemed himself to be Pan or the young Bacchus, he clasped my arm till the fingers wounded me and whispered passionately into my ear: ‘It isn’t there: it isn’t there.’
The search for ‘it’ would take up the remainder of Rochester’s life.
* It was, for instance, sufficiently well known for Savile to allude to ‘your chemical knowledge’ in a letter of 15 August.
The latest known surviving portrait that exists of Rochester was painted in mid-1677 by Peter Lely, court painter to the great and wicked alike. Lely was an old man by that time, but he was still sufficiently in vogue to have painted an official portrait of Charles in 1675, looking an apt combination of debauched and stately. His depiction of Rochester makes an interesting contrast with that executed by an unknown artist, whether Huysmans, Wissing or another, the decade before (see page 106 ). Whereas the young Rochester is represented almost coquettishly, with the humorous touches of the monkey and the laurel wreath, the older Rochester gazes out of the frame with more than a little ennui. Attired, as before, in the now ironic heroic garb of a breastplate and in flowing robes, the expression on his face is of barely restrained contempt for the world that he was living in. The monkey is notably absent.
Lely, always a flattering diplomat at the canvas, concealed any tell-tale sign that his subject was suffering from the advanced stages of tertiary syphilis, such as the chancres that by now adorned his body, but even the painter’s art could not obscure the fact that the delicate balance of Rochester’s health was finally tipping over into irrecoverable illness. His face is thin and drawn, with what were his voluptuously full lips now looking pursed and suspicious. The syphilis that Rochester was suffering from had been affecting his body for at least the last decade. Whether it was first contracted at Oxford, on his tour of Europe or in the early days of the Ballers at court, he was now paying the price for those heady days. The illness had progressed beyond the unsightly but curable stages of primary and secondary syphilis, which included skin rashes, warts, fever and hair loss. Now, Rochest
er suffered an abundance of indignities and torments, and knew from association with other sufferers what the outcome of the disease was likely to be: dementia, followed by the collapse of the nervous system and heart failure. The last few years of his life were destined not to be happy ones.
In August 1677, conscious that his health was failing, Rochester returned to Woodstock. In his absence, his enemies plotted to ruin what remained of his reputation. A panicked letter from Buckingham to Rochester on 11 August suggests that the likes of Mulgrave, ironically referred to as ‘my noble friends at court’, are attempting to ‘lie most abominably of your Lordship and me’, by ascribing a traitorous libel to Rochester. Buckingham adds that he, Lord Dorset and Fleetwood Shepherd would head to Woodstock to discuss the matter. It is doubtful whether Rochester cared a great deal, but he replied promptly, presumably cheerily and reassuringly, to invite him. As Buckingham’s swift response, on 19 August, states: ‘your kind letter has given me more satisfaction than I am able to express.’ In the end, it was only Buckingham who headed to Woodstock in late October 1677, the others thinking better of associating with Rochester at this time.
Buckingham and Rochester both shared something of a penchant for al fresco nudity, and during the couple of days that Buckingham stayed, the two men bathed in the river and then ran through a nearby field to dry themselves. They were observed by some locals, and the story soon exaggerated itself into an account of gross debauchery—something that was wryly denied by Rochester. His health remained poor and was not helped by such adventures, although he was able to make a joke of it; in a letter to his wife, he notes: ‘my pains are pretty well over, and my rheumatism begins to turn to an honest gout, my pissing of blood Doctor Wetherley says is nothing.’ Even his near-blindness—‘my eyes are almost out’—was said to be curable, as long as he ate meat and drank a medicinal cordial. The touch of Alexander Bendo’s tinctures in the latter amused Rochester, even as he literally pissed his lifeblood away.
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