Rochester refers to Savile’s own afflictions as a ‘glorious disgrace’, and the tenor of much of his letter is atypically serious. Clearly conscious that he might be near death, he produces a list of sensible, unhistrionic advice on how to deal with Charles, directed towards ‘your friend’ Nell Gwyn but also implicitly towards Savile. Rochester would have benefited from it himself, had he deigned to follow it. As an example of an aristocrat’s thoughts on how to deal with the day-to-day business of keeping the king happy, it is fascinatingly unadorned:
Take your measures just contrary to your rivals; live in peace with all the world and easily with the King; never be so ill-natured to stir up his anger against others, but let him forget the use of a passion which is never to do you good; cherish his love wherever it inclines, and be assured you can’t commit greater folly than pretending to be jealous: but on the contrary, with hand, body, head, heart and all the faculties you have, contribute to his pleasure all you can and comply with his desires throughout; and for new intrigues, so you be at one end ’tis no matter which; make sport when you can, at other times help it.
The impression that Rochester consciously gives of Charles, even while appearing to flatter him, is that of a petulant, spoilt child, one easily bored and likely to be dangerous when out of sorts. This explains Charles’s inconsistent attitude towards bad behaviour at court, enjoying the outrageousness of it unless he himself was affected by it, and forgiving everything except personal insults almost immediately. Ridiculous though he appeared at times, he was still the divinely ordained monarch of England (albeit after some earthly interjection), and the most significant figure at court, as Rochester, Buckingham and Savile all knew. The allusion to Nell contributing to his pleasure with ‘hand, body, head, heart and all the faculties’ is a likely reference to ‘A Satire on Charles II’ and its description of ‘poor, laborious Nelly / whilst she employs hands, fingers, mouth and thighs / Ere she can raise the member she enjoys’.
Savile appreciated such a piece of arch, bawdy buried treasure. Even at his most sincere, Rochester was incapable of solemnity. In his reply of 15 June 1678, Savile flatters Rochester by referring to the ‘good news’ of the length of his letter, comparing his rustication to ‘this wicked place of temptation’. Like Rochester, Savile was wearying of court life. Older than Rochester at thirty-six and considerably heavier, he lacked his younger friend’s former energy and dedication to all things debauched. Thinking himself out of favour with Charles and describing himself as ‘of late so battered in politics’, he saw his role as MP for Newark as scant compensation for his fall from grace. He knew that he should quit the stage—‘if there be a man alive who ought to retire from business and have no more civil plots, it is myself’—but a combination of greed and his loathing of his nemesis Lauderdale kept him in place a while longer.
The corpulent, good-natured and jolly Savile had a Falstaffian quality to him, one that Rochester recognized in a reply to him shortly afterwards, in which he begins with an allusion to the ‘merry fat gentleman’s’ comment in Henry IV, Part 2, that ‘if sack and sugar be a sin, God help the wicked’. Rochester was ill, but his gentle teasing of his friend continued. He writes, wryly, ‘I confess that upon several occasions you have put me in mind of this fat person’, but attempts to cheer him by saying ‘all your inconveniences... draw very near their end’. Rochester himself hints that he is coming to terms with the fact that his own inconveniences are drawing to a close: ‘I’m taking pains not to die without knowing how to live on when I have brought it about.’ He mocks human affairs as ‘nonsensical’, comparing them unfavourably with his pet monkey (an echo of ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’, as well as an allusion to the famous portrait of him), but the first glimmer of a greater interest in religion and the afterlife can perhaps be gleaned from this fleeting allusion. With time on his hands and the ‘improving’ presence of his mother, Rochester spent his days reading both scripture and the writings of such contemporary philosophers as Locke and Hobbes. He did this out of both curiosity and fear.
A decidedly corporeal complaint that Savile and Rochester shared was syphilis, or ‘the French disease’. Its prevalence in society had spread across the classes, and its rise, occasioned by casual sex with sufferers, led to the grim joke ‘one night with Venus, a lifetime with mercury’. It was so widespread by the mid-1670s that both physicians and, in graver cases, surgeons had to be enlisted in the quest to find cures; the national obsession with the disease was such that doctors were frequently attended by hypochondriacs, who were not satisfied until they had been diagnosed with syphilis and treated accordingly. A contemporary physician, Richard Wiseman, published a book in 1676 entitled Several Surgical Treatises, in which he took a robust attitude towards his patients, describing how other inferior doctors ‘ruined both their bodies and their purses’ and how his methods were the right ones. These involved a stringent course of mercury steam baths, colloquially known as ‘the sweats’, which were thought at least to arrest the disease’s progress.
Rochester had been suffering from it for at least the previous decade, but Savile was a comparatively recent victim. A letter to Rochester of 25 June 1678 ends in uncharacteristically vicious style when he states ‘women are bitches whom God confound’. The explanation soon came in a subsequent letter, dated 2 July, from a ‘sweat shop’ in Leather Lane in Hatton Garden. He described it as ‘a neat privacy’, where he would reach ‘the last act of a tedious course of physic which has entertained me ever since December last’. The disease was agonizingly painful. Summoning up what remained of his Falstaffian wit, Savile writes: ‘[had I chosen] whether I would have undergone what I suffered, or have turned Turk, notwithstanding all my zeal for the true Protestant faith, I doubt my whole stock of religion had run a great hazard.’
The only minor consolation—and that a doubtful one—was that there was no particular stigma attached to visiting the sweat shop. Savile reports that he was joined by Jane Roberts, court lady-in-waiting and sometime mistress to both Rochester and Charles, who was in the final throes of suffering. He claims that ‘what she has endured would make a damned soul fall a-laughing at his lesser pains’, and that the agonies she experienced ‘were so far beyond description and belief’ that the usually garrulous Savile felt it wiser to draw a veil over them. Light relief, of a sort, came when they were joined by the ever-unfortunate Will Fanshaw, who pretended that his own syphilis was scurvy in order to keep his wife ignorant of his extra-marital predilections; Savile sardonically describes him as ‘a filthier leper than ever was cured in the gospel’.
After the usual round-up of gossip and tittle-tattle, Savile finishes his letter by describing his present home ‘as remote from noble court notions as either Oxford or Banbury’. The idea of the horrific environs of Leather Lane as some kind of enchanted kingdom amused Rochester, who wrote back: ‘were I as idle as ever… I should write a small romance.’ It was typical of his wit and invention that, even in the midst of severe illness—‘a damned relapse brought by a fever, the stone and some ten diseases more’—he sought some new way of entertaining his friend in distress. He characterizes the fat, ailing Savile as a knight-errant, speaking ‘the most passionate fine things’ to the rather distressed damsel Jane Roberts. Yet almost before he has begun his conceit, Rochester abandons it, writing half-apologetically, half-pathetically: ‘it is a miraculous thing when a man half in the grave cannot leave off playing the fool and the buffoon.’
The end seemed imminent for Rochester. He was under no illusions about the appalling state of his health, and sarcastically adapted an old drinking song of John Fletcher’s: ‘But he who lives not wise and sober / Falls with the leaf still in October.’ Another blow came when Savile, recovered both in health and in royal favour, departed for France to take up a diplomatic post in Paris. He entreated Rochester to accompany him, claiming, probably rightly, that the warmer climate of France would suit him better than another cold and grim English w
inter. Yet both funds and poor health would prevent Rochester from leaving Adderbury until much later in the year.
As it so happened, staying out of London was the wisest move that an ailing Rochester could have made, as a bizarre and remarkable series of events was about to unfold that would turn the established order in England upside down.
Some very strange men came to prominence in the Restoration, but few were stranger than Titus Oates. Born in 1649, he had an undistinguished childhood, being a snot-nosed brat with few friends and unfounded delusions of grandeur. The only thing remarkable about him was his unremitting unpleasantness. Physically repulsive and charmless, he was given to swearing in what was said to be a ‘harsh and loud’ voice. Expelled from Merchant Taylors’ School by the master, William Smith, for cheating him of his tuition fees, Oates vowed vengeance on Smith, just as he would later swear undying hatred of his former tutors at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was sent down for the once-in-a-lifetime combination of idiocy, buggery and his ‘canting, fanatical manner’. Lucky not to be imprisoned, he failed to take advantage of his good fortune. Conning his way into a vicar’s position in Kent in 1673, he duly accused the local schoolmaster of sodomy, hoping to obtain his post once this unfortunate had been imprisoned.
Oates, a prolific and ardent homosexual himself, was fond of using accusations of this kind to malign his enemies and improve his standing in society. Unfortunately, as these were always false, and hypocritical to boot, they were normally seen through. After his lies were exposed, he was forced in 1675 to flee on the ship Adventure, taking a position as a naval chaplain en route to Tangier. It was an unhappy journey, ending with Oates, by now a drunkard, being sacked for homosexual practices on ship, but it gave him the germ of an idea. What, wondered Oates, if I first infiltrated the Catholic establishment, and then alerted the world to the existence of a so-called ‘Popish Plot’ to kill Charles and overthrow the monarchy, thereby elevating me to the top echelons of society?
As often happens with bizarre and borderline insane plans, it worked superbly at first. Oates was received into the Catholic Church in 1677, under the assumed name of Samson Lucy. Around this time he fell in with a similarly mad co-conspirator, Israel Tonge, a puritanical fanatic who was convinced that the Jesuits were on the verge of invading England. After the two bonded by writing anti-Catholic pamphlets—something normally incompatible with attending a seminary to be a priest in the church, as ‘Samson’ was—Oates, by now armed with a fraudulent doctorate from the University of Salamanca, managed to convince Tonge that there was a Jesuit plan well in play to assassinate both Charles and his brother James, as part of a Catholic conspiracy stretching across Europe. The two men constructed an indictment of forty-three articles against the Jesuits. This they then passed to an acquaintance, Christopher Kirkby, who on 13 August 1678 buttonholed Charles while he was taking a walk in St James’s Park.
Charles was often approached by cranks and conspiracy theorists, and so initially took little notice. However, when it was mentioned that it involved a direct threat to his life, he was concerned enough to elicit an investigation by his first minister, the Earl of Danby. The greatest irony was that Charles was himself highly sympathetic to the Catholic faith, albeit in private, so the existence of such a conspiracy struck him as ridiculous in the extreme. In due course, the trail led back to Oates, who began to provide forged letters implicating various figures in the plot. As luck would have it, one of those fingered, the Duchess of York’s secretary Edward Coleman, had long been suspected of harbouring anti-establishment views, being a Catholic keen to see the re-establishment of the Roman Church in Britain. Oates appeared before the Privy Council in late 1678 and was questioned at length about his sources and the involvement of various figures. He lied, wildly, inventing evidence and implicating Catholics or suspected Catholics almost at random. However, there was just enough corroborative proof for his falsehoods to be taken at face value, even in spite of his habit of contradicting himself almost immediately. The mysterious murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a staunch Protestant and leading MP, on 12 October 1678 helped whip up a tide of anti-Catholic feeling, as his death was immediately blamed on papists, and acknowledged or rumoured Catholics were duly banished from a twenty-mile radius around London. Given that, in a country with a population of around six million, Catholics made up no more than one per cent of the total, this was overkill. By this time, Oates was sufficiently in favour to be given lodgings at Whitehall, a monthly pension of £40, and, more importantly, the right to have his ridiculous statements heard in public, and believed. Titus Oates, cheat, liar, apostate and sodomite, was about to become the most influential man in England.
Initially, Rochester’s involvement in all this was tangential. He was probably unaware of Oates’s first accusations, which concerned Jesuit priests and the likes of Coleman. However, as with all hysterical conflagrations, the flames of suspicion soon spread beyond the usual suspects, and Oates accused five leading Catholic lords of treason, namely Arundel, Bellasyse, Petre, Powis and Stafford. Charles refused to believe these accusations, but he was powerless to act against the groundswell of public opinion, which was cynically whipped up by the Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury, no friend of Charles since his imprisonment in the Tower of London the previous year for supporting Buckingham, saw Oates’s lies as a means of repressing royal power, as well as of implicating the Catholic gentry, and the lords concerned were duly imprisoned in the Tower on 25 October 1678. No aristocratic Catholics could rely on their high standing to save them from public humiliation, and possibly worse. Unfortunately, these included Rochester’s wife Elizabeth.
Elizabeth had converted to Catholicism a decade before, at Rochester’s behest, shortly after their marriage. The priest who converted her was a known Jesuit, Father Thomson, whom Rochester had been introduced to by his former servant Stephen College. Rochester did not undergo a similar conversion, his own religious beliefs being more questionable, but given the strong Catholic presence at court—James, Duke of York, was a keen supporter of the faith who would formally convert in 1668, albeit secretly, and Charles’s wife Catherine of Braganza was loathed by many for her Catholicism, which she made no effort to hide or recant—it was politically expedient to be seen to be on the right side, and one’s sympathies could be expressed more than adequately by being married to a Catholic.
There were other expressions of anti-Catholic feeling in the years following, such as the 1673 Test Act which punished Catholics alongside Nonconformists by refusing to let anyone who believed in transubstantiation hold public office,*1 but nothing came close to the severity and fervour with which the Popish Plot dominated public opinion. Rochester, aware that both he and Elizabeth would be accused of fantastical crimes if attention turned to them, returned to London alone in early November 1678, only to find himself in the midst of a witch-hunt that was growing in size and scope by the day. There were those in Adderbury, such as his disgruntled former servant College, who would happily claim that the wicked Lord Rochester was a Catholic sympathizer. In the ghastly serendipity of the time, College became a drinking companion of Rochester’s former steward Stephen Dugdale, who united with Oates in November 1678 to begin making accusations against Catholic aristocrats. What these accusations were barely mattered, although once again Catholics were said to be responsible for the Great Fire in 1666. In the febrile and paranoid atmosphere of the time, just to be labelled ‘different’ was enough to ensure suspicion, a trial and even execution if found guilty.
Whether or not Rochester knew of College and Dugdale’s acquaintance, he was all too aware that murmurings and mutterings were flying around, and decided to put himself at the centre of the storm. He could rely on Buckingham’s support in interceding with Shaftesbury, who was rapidly becoming a hugely prominent figure in national opinion, but he knew that patronage and the help of friends were not enough. Despite his weakened state and continued illness, he attended the House of Lord
s on several occasions in November and December 1678. During this time, he took part in a debate on the trustworthiness of Titus Oates (if he spoke, his opinion of Oates, a man of legendary hypocrisy and repulsiveness, can easily be surmised); and on 4 December he publicly swore, along with the other lords, an oath of loyalty to Charles and to the Protestant faith. They were acting out of fear as much as patriotism; the previous day had seen the five ‘popish lords’ found guilty of high treason, and none wanted to join them in the Tower.
By this time, Charles knew that Oates was a charlatan and a liar, and had developed a significant personal animosity towards him, as Oates, along with another of his equally crooked partners in crime William Bedloe, had accused Queen Catherine of plotting to murder Charles. A step too far even for Oates, who was by now increasingly drunk on power and wine, it resulted in Charles, who suspected the guiding hand of Shaftesbury in the accusation, sending for the blundering bugger. At a private audience with the king on 24 November, and with the Privy Council the next day, Oates was cross-examined over the details of how the queen was privy to a Catholic conspiracy against her husband. His lies were easily exposed by their inconsistencies, and he was confined to his lodgings and his papers seized.
Under any normal circumstances, Oates would have been put on trial and hanged for his perjury and lies, and the whole disagreeable business would have spluttered to an anticlimactic end. Unfortunately, Edward Coleman had by now been tried (with Oates as chief witness), found guilty of sedition, and duly executed on 3 December. The result of this was that Oates, although known privately to be a dangerous fantasist, was pardoned and allowed to act as a key witness in several subsequent trials. This may seem incredible, but—as with the Salem witch trials just over a decade later—a carefully choreographed hysteria whipped up by a few cynical parties had turned into a smorgasbord of far-fetched stories. A second gunpowder plot was suspected, fuelled by stories of digging near the House of Commons. A French invasion of Dorset was said to be imminent. Catholics were in league with the devil. And so it went on.
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