While all this spiralled ever further out of control, Rochester, whose ostentatious proof of his Protestantism had kept his name safe for the moment, left London and returned to the country for further recuperation. The religious hysteria had both frightened and repulsed him, and it was around late 1678 that he began to correspond with the deist Charles Blount, whom he had met on his last visit to court. Blount was another ‘perfect Hobbist’ who, for Rochester, stood out from the ‘frantic crowds of thinking fools’ that dominated the age less on account of his intellectual brilliance than the fortunate coinciding of his interest in man’s immortal soul with Rochester’s increasing belief that his own death was imminent. Born in 1654, he had been brought up in great comfort by his free-thinking libertine father Henry, eschewing the conventional school and university-based education of the day and instead being allowed to express sacrilegious and challenging ideas of the sort that normally resulted in, at best, censure, and at worst incarceration. Ironically, he had written a defence of Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada, ‘Mr Dryden Vindicated’, in 1673, the existence of which probably amused his new correspondent.
Blount’s letters to Rochester, while often a turgid hotch-potch of contradictory ideas loosely cribbed from the likes of Hobbes and Milton, at least indicate that Rochester, while busily occupied with trying to keep his family’s name from being besmirched, was still engaged with the philosophical ideas of the day. His first letter to Rochester dates from December 1678, and refers to ‘your Lordship’s candour’, which ‘gave me the freedom of venting my own thoughts’. No doubt Rochester, no longer interested in hiding his opinions, gave voice to apparently heretical thoughts that excited and stimulated Blount.
An area where the two men agreed was in the ‘wickedness of men’s natures’, and also in the metaphysical belief that there was a divide between the flawed, doomed corporeal body and the transcendent soul. However, at the end of 1678, Blount published a book entitled Anima mundi, or, An Historical Relation of the Opinions of the Ancients concerning Man’s Soul after This Life, according to Unenlightened Nature, which promptly attracted mass disapproval. Either by design or through intellectual incompetence, Blount appears to argue for the immortality of the soul, but does so in such an ambiguous and half-hearted way that the book becomes an ironic refutation of what it appears to be claiming. This led to much controversy, at a time when arguments over religion could reach fever pitch, and the book was publicly burnt in early 1679.
Blount’s politics were those of the Whigs. Like Buckingham and, to some extent, Rochester, he stood against the establishment, and joined the Green Ribbon Club, an organization that reflected the loathing of Catholicism widely disseminated by the Popish Plot and the suspicion that the royal court harboured too many papist sympathizers. At this time, the so-called ‘Exclusion Crisis’ had begun, triggered by the belief that the Duke of York’s accession to the throne after Charles’s death—potentially hastened in the event of a plot to assassinate him—would result in England becoming a Catholic country once more. Shaftesbury and others tried to bring about an Act of Exclusion that would have removed James from the line of succession—something that Blount, a card-carrying believer in Oates’s fantasies, doubtless supported.
Rochester did not. He loathed the excesses and emptiness of kingship, but faced with the prospect of either continued royal patronage and support—albeit in a reduced form from previous years—or a cut-price solution where one of Charles’s various bastard children was ‘legitimized’ through a compromise of some kind,*2 he took the attitude ‘better the devil you know’ and continued to support Charles. In this, ironically, Buckingham joined him. Although he remained a committed Whig, Buckingham similarly disapproved of the court skulduggery, and thus sowed the seeds of his eventual quasi-reconciliation with Charles by refusing to offer his influence and support to the Act. Bereft of the universal acclaim of court worthies that it needed, the Act accordingly failed.
Rochester returned to court in early 1679 to find that the clamour of the Popish Plot showed few signs of abating. Although he continued to be weak and prone to fits of illness, a combination of a diet composed mainly of pure milk—commonly believed by physicians to be a cure for weakness and anaemia—and the intellectual and social excitements of town gave him a purpose and strength that he had lacked while idling in the country. While he had few illusions that he was likely to recover fully, the torpor of the previous year had given way to a need for drastic action.
One of these areas was in finally severing relations with Elizabeth Barry. Although their love affair had been over since the birth of their daughter Elizabeth in late 1677, the final straw came when Rochester, aided by one of his servants, removed the child from Barry’s keeping in March 1679 while she was appearing at the Dorset Garden Theatre, and had her taken to live with his other sons and daughters. What Elizabeth Wilmot felt when presented, as a fait accompli, with the task of raising her husband’s illegitimate daughter—by an actress, to boot—can only be guessed at, but her resignation to most aspects of her husband’s life probably meant that the arrival of the infant was less of a surprise than it might have been to most other long-suffering wives.
Elizabeth Barry was distraught at the seizure of her daughter. The final surviving letter that Rochester sent her, soon after the abduction, is a businesslike affair. ‘I am far from delighting in the grief I have given you by taking away the child’, he claims, admitting the ‘ill nature’ of his actions, but he lays the blame at her door, announcing that it was she ‘who made it so absolutely necessary for me to do so’.
Why, exactly? Rochester was jealous of her inconstancy and reputation for loose living, but then he was hardly guiltless himself. To claim that the child would be brought up in a happier and more stable environment amongst its half-siblings than as the daughter of an actress was a more effective argument, save that the child’s father was impecunious and severely ill. What little money the family had was provided by the child’s stepmother and grandmother. It is most likely that he acted out of pique, choosing to end an all-consuming passion in the coldest and most decisive way he could. He offers a couple of platitudes, claiming that the child will be brought up so well that ‘you need not apprehend any neglect from those I employ’ and that she will eventually be restored to Elizabeth Barry ‘a finer girl than ever’, but he ends in a curiously half-patronizing, half-sympathetic register: ‘you would do well to think of the advice I gave you, for how little show soever my prudence makes in my own affairs, in yours it will prove very successful if you please to follow it.’
No record exists of any further encounters between the two, or of the eventual return of the child Elizabeth to her mother, whose reputation was besmirched both by her association with Rochester and by her subsequent affairs with such notables of the theatrical world as Etherege and Buckhurst. However, Rochester may have seen her at least once more, in February 1680, when she played the lead role in Otway’s domestic tragedy The Orphan at Dorset Garden. The play, a baroque fantasia of unrequited love, was written by Otway with his own passions for Elizabeth Barry in mind, and Rochester, had he watched his former protégé’s work, might have been moved. Certainly, the rest of the audience were: a contemporary account reports how Barry ‘forced tears from the eyes of her auditory, especially those who have any sense of pity for the distressed’. Some described her as little more than a whore, but Rochester’s behaviour towards her also attracted sympathy, and it is telling that her career truly achieved greatness after she and Rochester parted. Acting until 1710 and commonly regarded as the finest female lead of the Restoration age and beyond, she never married nor had any further children, and died in 1713 at the age of fifty-five.
Away from personal involvements, Rochester became embroiled in a motion to impeach Charles’s first minister Danby for high treason. Danby had made too many enemies, especially the all-powerful Shaftesbury, and was now arraigned for his involvement with Louis XIV i
n supplying money to Charles in exchange for an undertaking not to invade France. It was irrelevant that he had been acting on Charles’s instructions rather than on his own behalf; he was judged and found wanting, despite Parliament being dissolved throughout January 1679, and it was little surprise when his inevitable deposition by Titus Oates, the snot-nosed face of doom, came on 22 March.
Danby was not alone in his fate. On 9 April, a day after his impeachment, four of the five Catholic lords (Bellasyse was too ill to attend) were sent to the Tower to await their trial for high treason. That this extraordinary state of affairs was not regarded as unusual was symptomatic of a country in chaos. Nobody trusted anyone, with neighbours deposing neighbours on the slightest pretext and anti-Catholicism practised as fervently as any religion. Rochester was born into a country obsessed with seeking out witches and burning them; three decades later, all that the social and intellectual advances of the Restoration had achieved was to advance from burning women suspected of witchcraft to beheading men suspected of Catholic sympathies.
Rochester kept as low a profile as he could. He was often at the House of Lords, but few letters from him survive, possibly because he thought it was politic not to adopt any potentially contrary opinions or viewpoints. A couple of brief, cryptic missives to his wife are the only indication of his state of mind at this point. He offers the view that lingering in the country would be ‘best for me’; he wishes that he had been in London ‘a month ago than at this time’ and expresses a desire to return to her ‘when I am in any tolerable health’. In another, he is slightly more explicit. He gives a wry description of the hysteria that he faces on every side: ‘London grows very tiresome… things are now reduced to that extremity on all sides that a man does not turn his back for fear of being hanged.’ He is typically witty about this—‘an ill accident to be avoided by all prudent persons’—but the danger for anyone who was seen as a dissident was real enough. Unusually, Rochester found himself muzzled by his own fear of the situation he was in. The great satirical poem that he could have written about this strange, horrific and hilarious dispute between heaven and earth was never put to paper.
Word soon spread abroad about the strange situation in England. Savile, still in Paris, wrote to Rochester on 6 April 1679, presumably ignorant of what was going on, as the letter consists of little more than tittle-tattle and a further request that Rochester visit Paris and stay as Savile’s guest. A later letter, dating from 20 June, indicates that Savile is now aware of the debacle, as he talks of ‘the great changes that have happened in England since I left it’. By now, Parliament had been dissolved so that the proposed Exclusion Bill that would have put forward the illegitimate Duke of Monmouth as heir apparent could not be passed, Danby was in the Tower, and public hysteria was growing, whipped up by the increasingly powerful and influential Shaftesbury.
However, Savile was more upset by his friend’s neglect. He alludes to his not having heard from Rochester, despite having sent him some gifts—‘I have now been four months forgot by your lordship’—and is hurt by this, judging by his comment:
[I have shown] a most particular kindness and service for you... I may reasonably presume that either you are not well, or I am not well with you; either of these... would afflict me extremely.
On a cheerier note, Savile wishes Rochester some of the ‘good wine I daily drink’, and notes that French beer and tobacco are of a deeply inferior quality.
Rochester had not meant to ignore his Falstaffian friend, but the continual tumult at court, as well as his poor health, meant that writing to his friends was a more arduous process than usual. He had begun to write to Savile on 30 May 1679, ascribing his failure to reply to ‘neither pride or neglect... but idleness on one side, and not knowing what to say on the other’—the latter statement presumably a coded reference to contemporary events rather than an uncharacteristically tongue-tied admission on Rochester’s part.
The letter took him nearly a month to complete, only being sent to Savile on 25 June 1679; he acknowledges the reason in his early claim that ‘changes in this place are so frequent that Fanshaw himself can no longer give an account why this was done today, or what will ensue tomorrow’. Briefly outlining the mercurial political situation, Rochester strikes an atypically grave and socially committed note, one that he self-mockingly acknowledges is ‘a taste of my serious abilities and to let you know I have a great goggle-eye to business’. He praises Savile for his ‘high Protestancy in Paris’, in which Savile had acted as a protector of the country’s remaining Protestants, interceding with the French court to ensure that they were treated decently (for which he was accordingly soon appointed England’s French ambassador). Then, moved by Savile’s letter of 20 June, Rochester declares, ‘I thank God there is yet a Harry Savile in England’, before announcing his intention of drinking Savile’s health with Sir William Coventry (Savile’s great-uncle) ‘til Shiloh come, or you from France’. Shiloh, a term loosely used for the Messiah, indicates that Rochester’s religious contemplations remained ever present, perhaps all the more so in a time of such uncertainty.
Rochester, feeling paranoid and exhausted, left London in late June 1679, and headed to Woodstock. He spent some time with Coventry, a local resident at nearby Minster Lovell, a clear-headed and generous man who tried to calm him. Rochester, however, still oozed spleen, as can be seen by one of his last poetic works. Dating from around this time, it is an attack on his nemesis Mulgrave, indicating that, regardless of his health and the national situation, Rochester was unable to let a perceived slight rest. Entitled ‘My Lord All-Pride’, it positively reeks of vituperation against Mulgrave, as if Rochester, knowing he has less time to live than he would have liked, wants to settle a final score against his most significant enemy.
The poem appears to respond to some unknown lampoon or satire of Mulgrave’s from earlier in 1679. Mulgrave, who by this point had become a significant public figure and rejoiced in such titles as Governor of Hull and Lord Lieutenant of the East Riding of Yorkshire, continued to be an implacable foe of Rochester’s. It is likely that it was he who spread rumours of Rochester’s death a few years before, and his close association with Dryden offered a calculated snub, on the part of both men, to Rochester’s poetic and social standing; the implication was that they were the modern, successful figures, Rochester a ruined has-been.
As with ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’ and his satire on Charles, personal loathing colours the poem’s sentiments. From the opening salvo, it is clear that Rochester has scores to settle:
Bursting with pride, the loathed impostume swells;
Prick him, he sheds his venom straight, and smells.
The weak couplet aside, the reference to venom makes the nature of Rochester’s anger explicit, and a grudge permeates the poem. Belittling Mulgrave as nothing more than ‘so lewd a scribbler’, who ‘writes with as much force to nature as he fights’, Rochester sneers at the ‘baffled fop’, ‘hardened in shame’, who is not only mocked by schoolboys but capable of no original thought of his own; instead, he is forced to rake ‘among the excrements of others’ wit / To make a stinking meal of what they shit’, in a clear allusion to his involvement with Dryden.
As usual, vivid description is key to the pungent physicality of the poem. Mulgrave is ridiculed for his ‘red nose, splay foot’ and—in a phrase first used in his June letter to Savile—‘google eye’, to say nothing of his ‘stinking breath’. In a touch that will bring a smile to anyone who has misspent too much time by the seaside, Rochester even compares Mulgrave to Punchinello, the ancestor of Mr Punch; only the most even-handedly humourless might compare the spat between the two men to a Punch and Judy fight, although the inevitable arrival of the Devil would have rather different consequences for Rochester. Mulgrave’s military prowess is similarly mocked as ‘vile success’, which has done nothing more than turn him ‘like Harlequin to jest’. Rochester refers to the sighting of an elephant at Smithfield�
�s Bartholomew Fair in early September 1679, turning this piece of bestial trivia into an attack on Mulgrave’s hulking physical appearance and sneering that ‘all his brother monsters flourish there’.
Eventually, wearied by his own vitriol, Rochester writes some valedictory final lines that might apply to himself as much as to Mulgrave:
Go where he will, he never finds a friend;
Shame and derision all his steps attend.
Alike abroad, at home, i’th camp and court,
This Knight of the Burning Pestle makes us sport.
The final allusion to Francis Beaumont’s burlesque drama satirizing heroism is an explicit reference to Mulgrave’s red nose and the ‘vile success’ of his supposed military triumphs. Yet, if there was anyone for whom ‘shame and derision’ was a constant presence in their life, it was Rochester, who, weak and weary of existence, was aware that his own sport was drawing to a close.
Rochester did not return to London until early October 1679. The summer months had been eventful, not least because Charles had been very ill after catching a severe chill on 21 August while in Windsor; his death would have led to mutterings of a plot against his life, possibly masterminded by the French, which would then have led to insurrection or foreign war—or perhaps even both. Had Charles died and Shaftesbury made a bid for yet greater power, his public standing was such that he could have succeeded. Stranded in Paris, Savile writes of Charles’s potential death that ‘the very thought of it frightens me out of my wits’, and adds that, were Charles to die, then chaos would ensue. Thankfully for those who were not convinced by the veracity of the Popish Plot, he soon recovered. He was sufficiently aware of the public hysteria to redress a perceived pro-Catholic bias at court by sending the Duke of York to Belgium in September 1679 and by publicly stripping Monmouth of his title of commander-in-chief of the army.
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