Rochester spent much of the summer removed from this excitement in Woodstock, where his subsequent correspondence makes it appear likely that, with Elizabeth Barry absent from the picture, he forged a closer relationship with his family than he had had in years, if ever. Rochester was still desperately ill, but he was sufficiently in remission to seek a measure of grace, obtained by both the social acceptance of his family and a newly kindled spiritual interest.
A letter that he wrote to his wife shortly after his return to town adopts an apparently warm and penitent tone, strikingly different from the blasé and glib epistles he had sent her before. Claiming that ‘’tis not an easy thing to be entirely happy’, he goes on to praise her for her enduring kindness and compassion towards him. Perhaps because of her, and his mother’s, influence, he begins to display a sense of penitence: ‘I myself have a sense of what the methods of my life seem so utterly to contradict.’
He was by no means po-faced about this, noting wryly that ‘I must not be too wise about my own follies, or else this letter had been a book dedicated to you and published to the world’, but he warmly expresses a desire to head to Adderbury after the Newmarket races and asks that ‘in the meantime think of anything you would have me do, and I shall thank you for the occasion of pleasing you’. He even sent the letter care of a servant, Mr Morgan, whom he was rusticating ‘because he plays the rogue here in town so extremely that he is not to be endured’. The sentiment reads as if it is tongue in cheek—Rochester was not known for showing contempt towards his servants—but it might also be a self-conscious acknowledgement of his weariness at the way of life he has led for so long. This is echoed in a reply to a letter from his son Charles, in which he takes pleasure in playing the good father, chastising his son for writing ‘seldom’ and instructing him in obedience to his grandmother and teachers, which will make him ‘happy here and forever’; in particular, he should ‘avoid idleness [and] scorn lying’, in which case ‘god will bless you, for which I pray’.
The heartwarming sentiments of the letters were not entirely true. Rochester was not a reformed soul, especially when he returned to London. He had taken a young Frenchman as his valet, Jean-Baptiste de Belle Fasse. The man’s surname may not have been the one he was christened with, as it was a pun on belles fesses, or ‘beautiful buttocks’, and given what he subsequently wrote to Savile, it is likely that Rochester, having sworn off the whores of London, instead enjoyed the sexual favours of this good-looking Catholic. At a time when to be accused either of sodomy or of Catholic sympathy would have resulted in death, Rochester’s actions were reckless in the extreme, and on 1 November 1679 he sent his valet to France, out of harm’s way. He dispatched him to Savile in Paris, along with a cryptic and serpentine letter in which he attempts to explain Belle Fasse’s arrival and the goings-on in London while still taking care to cover himself in the event of the letter’s discovery. It shows another side of Rochester, that of the double-dealer and intelligence gatherer.
He begins by apologizing for the ‘great strait’ that he finds himself in, and drops Savile the written equivalent of a wink at the style of writing he is about to attempt: ‘you may have forgot the familiar one we used heretofore.’ Thereafter, everything he writes has an ironic twist or multi-faceted meaning. His description of London as a place ‘in such a settled happiness and such merry security’ is so obviously a lie that it comes as little surprise that Rochester immediately undercuts it by referring to ‘the misfortunes of malicious mistaken fools’, presumably an allusion to Titus Oates, and giving an ironic dig at ‘the policies of the times... which expose new rarities of that kind every day’.
He then gets down to business, in what becomes his most explicit reference anywhere in his letters to his bisexuality. He calls his news ‘Gyaris et carcere digna’, a quotation from Juvenal’s first satire which literally means ‘fit for prison or chains’; Juvenal was satirizing a corrupt and fanatical country, so the allusion is far from coincidental. Rochester calls the less than literate Belle Fasse ‘this pretty fool the bearer’, but inserts heavy innuendo into the letter about how his ‘qualities will recommend him more’ and how, if Savile was to meet him, ‘the happy consequence would be singing’.
‘Singing’, as used here, is as blatant a double entendre for sex as ‘china’ was in Wycherley’s The Country Wife, and Rochester reinforces this by his statement that ‘your excellence might have a share not unworthy the greatest ambassadors nor to be despised even by a cardinal-legate’. Savile, the implication runs, will be rewarded for his discretion with some forbidden pleasure. Rochester, continuing to pimp his valet, gloats that ‘the greatest and gravest of this Court of both sexes have tasted his beauties’, and, throwing caution to the wind, claims that ‘Rome gains upon us here in this point mainly’—a shameless allusion to Catholic buggery, which was believed to be widespread and had been encountered by Rochester on his grand tour. He then mocks the Popish Plot by claiming that ‘there is no part of the Plot carried with so much vigour and secrecy as this’—namely, Belle Fasse’s induction into the decadently sexual world at court. One has to pity the unfortunate young man, cynically tossed from pillar to post as if he were nothing more than a human version of the leather dildoes so popular with men and women of ‘quality’.
Belle Fasse duly pimped, Rochester then uses a complex and, in places, near-indecipherable series of codes to describe the contemporary political situation to Savile, all too aware that to be more explicit risked more than simply his own skin. Nonetheless, his attempts at discretion are relatively easy to unravel with some understanding of the time in which he was writing, possibly suggesting that some masochistic part of Rochester wanted to be discovered and punished—the same part, perhaps, that had once given rise at dinner to the scandalous lampoon about Charles. A typical example of this is how, to denote Monmouth’s illegal return from his banishment, Rochester refers to ‘Mr S—’s apology for making songs on the Duke of M—, with his oration-consolatory on my Lady D—’s death’—allusions which are near-incomprehensible now but would have been quite clear to Savile. He refers elsewhere to the ongoing series of persecutions of the Catholic lords in the Popish Plot and alludes to the debate about the Exclusion Act. Conscious that he is corresponding with a high-ranking ambassador as well as his friend, Rochester offers Savile the option of refusing to hear any more information: ‘I durst not send [more details] to you without leave, not knowing what consequence it might draw upon your circumstances and character.’ He indicates, nevertheless, his willingness to be an assiduous passer of secrets, claiming that in ‘a correspondence of that kind... I dare presume to think myself capable’.
Sex aside, the letter’s assertion of privileged information was presumably of use to Savile, as Rochester wrote again on 21 November 1679 in more explicit terms, referring to how ‘the lousiness of affairs in this place is such... ’tis not fit to entertain a private gentleman’, before going on to ridicule those who were de facto in charge of the country as ‘spies, beggars and rebels’. As if in unconscious fulfilment of ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’, Rochester writes that ‘busy fools and cautious knaves’ are on the rise, and openly so, ‘hypocrisy being the only vice in decay amongst us’. It was the crowning irony of his life that, after being pilloried for being the wickedest man in London, Rochester found himself outdone in a society where ‘few men here dissemble their being rascals and no woman disowns being a whore’.
There were still occasional efforts to maintain the national sanity, but they were short-lived. The increasingly deluded and power-hungry Oates had been arrested on 19 November 1679 on an accusation of assault brought by his former servants, but such was his influence and standing that he was soon acquitted of what was described in outraged terms as ‘the horrible and abominable crime of sodomy’. The sinless sodomite was soon intent on revenge. Rochester notes, drily: ‘Mr Oates was tried two days ago for buggery and cleared… the next day he brought his act
ion to the King’s Bench against his accuser… for the honour of the Protestant cause.’ The men who accused him, John Lane and Thomas Knox, might have acted out of loathing for their employer, or out of a genuine disgust at his actions, but their mistake was attempting to change the course of the inexorable tide. Oates, regardless of his guilt or innocence, was the living embodiment of the Popish Plot. Should he topple, then many others would fall along with him.
Moving from national to personal concerns, Rochester mentions that he is enclosing ‘a libel in which my own share is not the least’, which had also antagonized Charles. This libel was contained within a poem, ‘An Essay upon Satire’, that was written by Mulgrave, still smarting from his humiliation in Rochester’s ‘My Lord All-Pride’. Rochester also believed that Dryden was either partially or wholly responsible for it. Obviously indebted to ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’, the opening of which it half-apes, half-parodies, it feels oddly disconnected from the time of composition, concentrating on attacking court figures rather than addressing the Popish Plot. Perhaps this stemmed from an earlier poem, but it also indicated that Dryden and Mulgrave saw themselves as being above the common concerns of everyday people.
Most of the work consists of attacks against their perceived enemies, either implicitly (Charles is described as ‘sauntering’, perhaps a dig at the merry monarch’s apparent insouciance in the face of national emergency) or explicitly, in the case of Rochester, who is attacked at length towards the close of the poem. It is not hard to see why he was furious at his denigration. Beginning with the writer claiming ‘Rochester I despise for want of wit’, the satire pokes ridicule at an apparently enfeebled figure, rather than at a man thought worthy of consideration as an equal, or even as the diabolic rakehell of repute. The first dozen or so lines, especially, bear reprinting:
Though thought to have a tail and cloven feet;
For while he mischief means to all mankind,
Himself alone the ill effects does find:
And so like witches justly suffer shame,
Whose harmless malice is so much the same.
False are his words, affected is his wit;
So often he does aim, so seldom hit;
To every face he cringes while he speaks,
But when the back is turn’d, the head he breaks:
Mean in each action, lewd in every limb,
Manners themselves are mischievous in him:
A proof that chance alone makes every creature,
A very Killigrew without good nature.
The ‘ill effects’ referred to in the poem are probably Rochester’s advanced illnesses, but might also be a dig at his reduced social standing, a statement supported by his ‘harmless malice’. Rochester is accused of many of the failings that he levelled against his own enemies throughout his writing—sycophancy, backstabbing, hypocrisy and, worst of all, a lack of wit. Ironically, if Mulgrave was involved in the satire, it is considerably better and more cutting than the banalities of his earlier writing, indicating the presence of a more experienced co-writer, such as Dryden. It is not hard to imagine Rochester being driven to fury by this, but the next lines become even more cutting and dismissive:
For, there’s the folly that’s still mix’d with fear,
Cowards more blows than any hero bear;
Of fighting sparks some may their pleasures say,
But ’tis a bolder thing to run away:
The world may well forgive him all his ill,
For every fault does prove his penance still:
Falsely he falls into some dangerous noose,
And then as meanly labours to get loose;
A life so infamous is better quitting,
Spent in base injury and low submitting.
This again refers to the affray at Epsom and Billy Downs’s death, with its allusions to cowardice and running away, but it also hints at the original source of the friction between Rochester and Mulgrave ten years before—namely, the aborted duel that Mulgrave had demanded because of a perceived libel by Rochester. Finally, as if to rub salt in the wound, his literary achievements are comprehensively mocked:
I’d like to have left out his poetry;
Forgot by all almost as well as me.
Sometimes he has some humour, never wit,
And if it rarely, very rarely, hit,
’Tis under so much nasty rubbish laid,
To find it out’s the cinderwoman’s trade;
Who for the wretched remnants of a fire,
Must toil all day in ashes and in mire.
So lewdly dull his idle works appear,
The wretched texts deserve no comments here;
Where one poor thought sometimes, left all alone,
For a whole page of dullness must atone.
Dryden and Mulgrave here unwittingly provide the first existing example of literary criticism of Rochester’s writing. Calling it forgettable, soporific, full of unpleasantness and lewdness, and, finally, dull, they prefigure what countless others were to say over the next three centuries. By this stage, with a couple of exceptions, Rochester had written his canon of poetry, so there is no way of discounting this as a reference to his earlier, unformed work. Did they have a point?
Dryden and Mulgrave’s comments can be taken at face value. Rochester’s writing can sometimes be called ‘nasty rubbish’, though it is usually intentionally so, and some of this material is occasionally ‘lewdly dull’. Much of a poem such as ‘Signior Dildo’, whether or not Rochester was its sole author, feels devoid of genuine wit, preferring bawdy scatological humour instead. Likewise, there are moments in his poetry that are redolent of a young man whose desire to reach for greatness overwhelms his grasp; even ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’, his most significant and lasting achievement, and one that Mulgrave and Dryden reference throughout their own satire, struggles with its own structure of paradox upon paradox. Elsewhere, there are jokes that do not work; obscure ideas inadequately explained; duff rhymes, lines, verses and even entire poems that many readers will find less than compelling—not to mention an unashamed use of four-letter words that means that Rochester’s poetry is never going to be found on the standard school syllabus. At least not officially.
Set against this, Rochester’s greatest poems, humorous or serious, offer something entirely different from the run-of-the-mill, would-be metaphysical writing that was prevalent at the time. At his best, Rochester was responsible for some of the wittiest, most bitingly satirical and scatologically sexual poetry ever written, in which, even today, some of the more extreme sexual material is both funny and shocking. Balancing high classical art and social allusion with low tavern humour and hilariously vitriolic attacks on his enemies, he stands poles apart from his contemporaries, with his work offering a thrillingly theatrical range of personae, all commenting on the vagaries of the time in which he lived. It would be overstating the case to regard him as significant a lyric poet as a Marvell or a Donne; however, he did epitomize the age in which he lived in all its conflicted, squalid glory. Therefore, Dryden and Mulgrave’s final sneer—‘learn to write well, or not to write at all’—might have been noted by a more temperate Rochester, rejected, and batted back at them with all the anger, charm and wit that he was capable of.
Unfortunately, this did not happen. Rochester’s response, ‘An Epistolary Essay from MG to OB upon their Mutual Poems’, can be viewed either as a satirical account of Mulgrave, the MG of the title, writing to his fellow poet Dryden, or OB;*3 or alternatively as a late example of Rochesterian autobiography. The arguments in favour of the first viewpoint are that MG is mocked and made to look ridiculous throughout. Claiming early on that ‘I’d be content t’have written The British Prince’—a notoriously dreadful verse epic by Edward Howard—MG is shown to be variously pedestrian (‘I’m none of those who think themselves inspired’); arrogant (‘I, who am of sprightly vigour full’); and hilariously misguided (‘Thus I resolve of my own poetry
/ That ’tis the best, and that’s a fame for me’). MG might appear to cast off something ‘so foolish and so false as common fame’, but he has a distinctly coquettish stance towards that coy mistress. The ending of the poem has an amusingly ironic charge:
These things considered make me, in despite
Of idle rumour, keep at home and write.
Rochester in late 1679 would have been best served by taking his own advice, even if the words are put into the mouth of a pompous idiot.
It was Dryden whom Rochester thought mainly responsible for ‘An Essay upon Satire’, albeit in association with his patron Mulgrave, as Rochester mentions in his letter of 21 November to Savile. While Rochester delivers no explicit invective against Dryden in the letter, his name was soon associated in town gossip with an ugly and cowardly act of revenge.
On 18 December Dryden was walking home to his lodgings in Long Acre, Holborn, through Rose Lane in Covent Garden, after an evening spent at Will’s coffee-house in nearby Bow Street, the informal club of the various city wits. He had been visiting the coffee-house for around fifteen years, and enjoyed the opportunity to converse there with the likes of Etherege and Wycherley. However, his night was soon to be ruined as he was set upon by three anonymous men, armed with cudgels, and beaten senseless before they fled into the night, disturbed by the arrival of others. Even by the often casually violent standards of the time, this was a brutal attack.
Dryden was severely injured, so much so that it was initially thought his life might be in danger (in his later years he often complained of lingering pains, dating from the assault). As he had not been robbed, despite being well dressed and a figure of note, speculation soon led to the suspicion that the attack had been conducted by hired thugs acting on behalf of an anonymous patron. Upon his recovery, Dryden offered a £50 reward in the Gazette newspaper for information, but nobody ever came forward. Who injured him, and why, remains one of the mysteries of the age. However, it is Rochester’s name that has often been linked to the attack, both at the time and subsequently, on the grounds that a man with as low a reputation as he had was capable of anything.
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