Blazing Star

by Larman, Alexander;

  That Rochester loathed Dryden by this point is certain. The relationship between the two men, never entirely easy, had long since disintegrated, turning to distrust and contempt. Rochester was never given to the excessive personal violence of, say, the Earl of Pembroke—​the unhinged brother-in-law of Louise de Kérouaille, who was probably responsible for the unsolved murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Nevertheless, he was certainly capable of rash and hasty actions, as the destruction of Charles’s sundial and the fatal affray at Epsom demonstrated. He had threatened Dryden with cudgelling in the past, and now might have followed through on his boasts. It would have been a step too far for Rochester himself—​still a peer of the realm, and ill to boot—​to have attacked Dryden, but it can easily be imagined that in a moment of vitriol he had hired some anonymous thugs and, knowing Dryden’s likely movements, told them to lay in wait for him on a dark alley. The resulting punishment would have been swift, violent and highly satisfactory to a bruised poetic ego.

  The major problem with this theory is that Rochester, much weakened and in a poor state of health by this time, is unlikely to have had the energy to conduct a clandestine operation that would have involved hiring efficient batterers. The discretion of Dryden’s assailants, even when a large sum was on offer for a confession, indicates that the men who performed the beating had a greater reason to remain silent than mere money. The trail therefore leads to far higher places than Rochester, namely to Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth.

  She, along with Charles, had been insulted in ‘An Essay upon Satire’, and while the king might have been blasé in the extreme about another rain of vitriol being poured upon his periwig, Louise was unlikely to have taken the insult so calmly. As Rochester had found a few years previously, she was an implacable enemy, and doubtless reacted angrily to being described as ‘false, foolish, old, ill-natured and ill-bred’. If she had suspected Mulgrave of the insult, then his status as an aristocrat placed him above normal recriminations. Dryden, however, was a mere poet, and so could be assaulted with impunity—​and by royal bodyguards. These men were strong, discreet and probably happy to perform an act of revenge on behalf of their wronged king and his mistress.

  A likely solution, then, is that Rochester rejoiced at Dryden’s comeuppance, but had not taken any active part in arranging it himself. Instead, this cowardly act of violence against a physically harmless writer was justified by some of the highest in the land as a means of maintaining the status quo. It is impossible to say whether Charles knew of the planned assault or condoned it if he did; the final irony, of course, is that Dryden was and remained Poet Laureate, which he was unlikely to have done if he had offended the king. It seems an act of severe literary criticism, in the case of one’s court poet, to tacitly support having him brutally beaten, and Charles, for all his wild outbreaks of temper, was not a man who typically engaged in underhand pursuits and skulduggery of this kind. Yet, during the wild abandon of the Popish Plot, many otherwise sane people found themselves acting out of character.

  Describing Rochester at this point—​in the final stages of tertiary syphilis—​as sane would be mistaken. He was confused, vulnerable and desperate to provide a substantial legacy beyond the libels and tittle-tattle that were invariably associated with his name. To help him do this, he needed someone more substantial in philosophical matters than Blount; someone who could be even more of a confidant than Savile; and, finally, a substitute father figure who might be a source of comfort at the end of his days.

  The cost would be higher than he could ever have imagined.

  *1 The irony of this being passed with royal assent only became fully clear after Charles’s death.

  *2 It was, for instance, seriously proposed by the Exclusionists, led by Shaftesbury, to put about the story that Charles’s early mistress, Lucy Walter, had been married to him, and thereby to legitimize the Duke of Monmouth.

  *3 The ‘OB’ perhaps stands for ‘Old Bays’​—​an allusion to the laurel wreaths with which the young Rochester once crowned his monkey as it tore up poetry.

  When Rochester first encountered the clergyman Gilbert Burnet, neither had any inkling it would become a life-changing friendship for both men. They possibly first met in 1673, when Burnet travelled to London for a short visit in order to obtain a licence to publish a book and, being in favour with Charles at the time, was subsequently made a royal chaplain. However, the wheel of fortune soon turned, and Burnet was exiled from his native Scotland in 1674 after falling out with the influential John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale, over what the jealous duke saw as Burnet’s overstated influence at court.

  Estranged from Charles because of Lauderdale’s innuendo and unable to return to Scotland because he faced likely imprisonment, Burnet spent the following years quietly establishing himself as a theological and philosophical man of substance. An excellent orator, charismatic and full of his own self-importance, Burnet was never short of admirers, who helped him to obtain such sinecures as Chaplain of the Rolls Chapel. He never wanted for money or influence. Evelyn calls him ‘a person of extraordinary parts’, and he made a great impression on all those he encountered.

  What the legendarily dissipated Rochester and Burnet might have made of one another in the mid-1670s can only be imagined. Burnet was only four years older than Rochester, but for the most part the two men were poles apart. Burnet was a man of conservative theological instincts who was canny in his choice of friends and supporters, and whose stern upbringing at the hands of his father, a puritanical Scottish lawyer, had instilled within him a vigorous belief in right and wrong. Rochester was in most respects the opposite; his mother may have been equally stern, but she had failed to impose any great moral understanding upon him. If they did meet in 1673, it was not an important encounter. It is just possible that Burnet was guyed within ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’, but much more likely that the figure Rochester had in mind was his greater nemesis Isaac Barrow.

  While Rochester’s health declined, Burnet researched and wrote the first book of his History of the Reformation of the Church of England. The first volume was published in early 1679 and dealt with the age of Henry VIII, with enough coded allusions to the present day to appeal to those critical of the increasing chaos in Restoration England. Thus, the chaos of the Inquisition, with witches, wizards and sodomites being condemned to the ever-burning fires of hell, was a subtle reference to the similar turmoil of the Popish Plot, just as the moral and spiritual failures of Henry VIII’s court could be compared to the lax standards of Charles’s.

  Rochester read the book, something of a cause célèbre on its release, and was impressed, even recommending it to Charles, whose response was allegedly that Burnet would be better off keeping his mouth shut while the king lived—​or he would suffer the consequences. (Burnet noted that he had ‘very strange impressions’ of Charles as a result.) This endeared Burnet to Rochester, as did his compassionate counselling of Rochester’s former mistress, the unfortunate Jane Roberts, who spent the last part of the year dying of syphilis in hideous agony. Word spread to Rochester that Roberts, with whom he had had ‘an ill concern’, had been treated by Burnet ‘neither with a slack indulgence nor an affrighting severity’, but with unjudgemental and robust Christian charity. Intrigued and grateful, Rochester suggested a meeting with Burnet in October 1679 via a mutual acquaintance, possibly George Savile, Marquess of Halifax and elder brother to Henry. The invitation was duly accepted, and they began a series of weekly conversations about religion and morality that lasted for the next six months.

  Rochester had always been a polarizing figure. Those who liked him, such as Savile, Etherege and Aphra Behn, were unswervingly loyal to him, even after his death. His enemies, such as Scrope, Mulgrave and latterly Dryden, expressed little other than censure and contempt. What he had lacked was a figure of the middle ground: someone detached from the narrow, hysterical world of court with whom he could talk on an equal level and discuss h
is spiritual interests and ideas. This was what Burnet provided. Rochester saw in him something of the uncorrupted prelate of ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’—​‘a meek, humble man of honest sense’, who led a pious and godly life.

  Nonetheless, their first meeting was a tempestuous one. According to Burnet’s subsequent account of their conversations, The Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester—​a somewhat self-promoting work, first published as a book in 1680 by the leading printer Richard Chiswel and intended as a didactic account of sin—​Rochester opened their discussions by airily saying that he would use Burnet in a more free and open manner than he had done with other clergymen, speaking candidly, straightforwardly and without prejudice. He also offered Burnet the tempting possibility that he might be willing to change his mind about religion; by doing this, he presented himself as potentially a great prize for the would-be reformer—​a soul within reach of penitence and salvation. All the same, Burnet ‘saw into the depths of Satan’ in Rochester, and he knew that the devil had the power to assume a pleasing shape. If he failed in his task, humiliation and the end of a growing reputation as a leading theologian would follow. Work had to be done.

  Burnet’s presence in Rochester’s life smacked of genuine reforming zeal, but it also reflected a cynical realization that a successful and high-profile conversion would cement the clergyman’s place within English national life forever. Although he was by no means unsuccessful, he was ambitious and had his eye on a lucrative and influential bishopric. In this game of political chess, Rochester was as much a pawn to be taken as he was a source of interest, albeit a rather more independent-minded and turbulent pawn than Burnet was used to.

  Rochester offered Burnet what he termed ‘a full view’ of his life and career up until that point, from which Burnet quotes frustratingly brief and redacted extracts, especially when other people are involved. Some of it—​the account of his naval service at Bergen, for instance, and his friend Montagu’s premonition of his death there—​feels entirely of a piece with his poetic and epistolary concerns of the period, not to mention his intimations of his own mortality. However, there are already hints of Burnet’s own editorializing and subjective recollection, something acknowledged when he states: ‘I am not so sure... of all said by him to me.’ This is understandable; his aim was to celebrate his own achievement, rather than present an objective account of Rochester’s life and, in particular, the concerns of his last months.

  Burnet refers to Rochester’s drinking as something that made him ‘extravagantly pleasant’ and led him ‘deeper and deeper in intemperance’, and builds up to the shocking revelation that ‘he told me for five years together he was continually drunk... not all the while under the visible effect of it, but his blood was so inflamed that he was not in all that time cool enough to be perfectly master of himself’. The sly note of knowing exaggeration ever present in Rochester’s letters is here dropped for the moral outrage of a man for whom five years spent drunk was among the greatest of sins. This is mirrored in his description of Rochester’s love of disguise and theatricality being put to the service of mere ‘mean amours’ or ‘diversion’, a reductive way of describing his intense engagement with illusion and personae.

  Nonetheless, the picture Burnet presents of Rochester is accurate enough in its specific details to feel coherent, especially in his musings on death. Burnet notes that Rochester said to him, when he was ill shortly before they met: ‘he did not think to live an hour… his reason and judgement were so clear and strong… that he was fully persuaded that death was not the spending and dissolution of the soul, but only the separation of it from matter.’ Rochester apparently admitted to a feeling of ‘great remorse for his past life’, which was meat and drink to Burnet, but this was soon qualified as being merely ‘general and dark horrors’ rather than ‘any convictions of sinning against God’. Any conversion would not be easily won; an ill Rochester had complied reluctantly with his friends sending in men of God to minister to him, but ‘he had no great mind to it’, and only joined in their prayers in the most perfunctory fashion.

  So their conversations continued, while the hysteria of the Popish Plot played out in the background. Rochester’s health was still shaky, and he relapsed into fits, but he seemed better than he had done for some time, revived by the intellectual excitement of charged debate and the opportunity to cause some mischief. He was engaged, physically and intellectually, by the substantial Burnet, whose significant charisma and physical presence charmed many others (Dryden wrote a poem-cum-love letter, with all the passion of a schoolboy crush, calling him ‘a portly prince and goodly to the sight’, before sighingly comparing him to Homer’s Jupiter).

  Whether or not the reports of their discussions are accurate, they offer a compelling insight into post-Restoration ideas of morality and religion. Burnet presents himself as a liberal theologian, and Rochester as a sceptic and humanist. The tenor of Burnet’s account of their conversations is less antagonistic than might have been the case at the time, with Burnet skilfully synthesizing their differing viewpoints to emphasize the areas of agreement between them. Both concurred that scrupulous observance of doctrine was less important than living a decent life amongst one’s fellow men, with Burnet appearing to define ‘religion’ as no less a social entity than a divine one. Neither disputed the existence of God, with Rochester claiming that he had never known ‘an entire atheist, who fully believed that there was no God’.

  Entering into the spirit of intellectual glasnost, Rochester describes his former immorality as stemming from carnal desires, with Burnet claiming ‘he had made himself a beast, and had brought pain and sickness on his body’. This stands in apparent contrast to Rochester’s other statements that he believes in ‘the gratification of natural appetites’, especially ‘the free use of wine and women’, as long as nobody is hurt by such sensual indulgence. However, this is where the two differ. Burnet, using the themes of Rochester’s own poetry against him, argues that mere sensual indulgence should remain subservient to human wisdom, which in turn leads to ‘higher and more lasting pleasure’. It is a new spin on conventionally Puritan ideas; Burnet does not reject the body’s natural appetites out of hand, but instead claims that they must be subjugated to ‘a law within [Man] himself’. Rochester is unenthused; he describes this as ‘enthusiasm or canting’, and claims not to understand such an idea. Touché.

  Throughout Burnet’s report of their conversations, he skilfully presents Rochester as intelligent, witty and engaged, but also curiously naïve and easily persuaded of the folly of his arguments. Burnet claims to have ‘reason and experience’ on his side throughout, in contrast to Rochester’s passion and heat; over and over again, his theme is that religion and its application in everyday life are as concrete and easily proved as the existence of a favourite tavern or a beloved playhouse. Rochester, under his tutelage, acknowledges that there is a ‘supreme being’, whether nature or God, and that ‘the soul did not dissolve’ after death. Nonetheless, he remains an iconoclast, rejecting the concept of heaven and hell as mere ‘rewards or punishments’, and claiming that religious worship is nothing more than the self-serving ‘inventions of priests’.

  Burnet’s rebuttals of Rochester’s arguments acknowledge his contempt for priests, whom Rochester compares to the ‘mountebanks who corrupt physic’ (perhaps like Dr Bendo), and for the scriptures, which Rochester criticizes for their ‘strange stories’ and ‘seeming contradictions, chiefly about the order of time’. Like many a rationalist since, Rochester had an unarguable point, and one that Burnet was unable to rebut in any satisfactory manner. Instead, he is reduced to talking weakly of ‘evidence’ and reading scripture as an allegorical exercise in spirituality rather than as literal truth. Rochester, unconvinced, notes that ‘all this might be fancy’ and calls it ‘the showing of [a] trick’, which Burnet castigates him for, calling it an ‘ill use of his wit’.

  In Burnet’s account of their conversations, Roche
ster frequently appears more enlightened and open-minded than his sparring partner. He ridicules the way in which conventional Christian teaching is loaded against women, ‘except one in the way of marriage’, and its failure to allow them ‘the remedy of divorce’ (perhaps he was considering how Elizabeth could have taken such a remedy against him at the height of his profligacy). Burnet, on the other hand, refers to women simply as man’s property. Rochester’s loathing of corrupt clergymen, meanwhile, is expressed simply but beautifully in his statement: ‘Why must a man tell me I cannot be saved, unless I believe things against my reason, and then I must pay him for telling me of them?’

  It is unlikely that any money changed hands between Rochester and Burnet for their conversations—​Burnet’s greater reward would lie elsewhere and Rochester was impecunious, as ever. Nevertheless, the theme of salvation is never far from their thoughts, whether expressed as a ‘high reward’, in Burnet’s words, or, from Rochester’s perspective, in the ‘difficult terms’ (presumably those ecclesiastically imposed) of arriving at such a point. On and on their arguments run, sometimes with the two reaching agreement about what Burnet terms the ‘mistakes and calumnies’ that have beset religious observance, but more often coming to a stalemate.

  Thus it is a surprise to find, at the end of Burnet’s account of their conversations, that Rochester appears to be, if not entirely converted, then mostly convinced by what Burnet has said. He is said to wish to ‘change the whole method of his life; to become strictly just and true, to be chaste and temperate, and to forbear swearing and irreligious discourse, to worship and pray to his maker’. While refusing to call himself a truly religious man—​he has yet to arrive ‘at a full persuasion of Christianity’—​Rochester announces that he will ‘never employ his wit to run [religion] down, or to corrupt others’. Burnet concludes their debates by admonishing Rochester to clear himself of the ‘distempers, which vice brought on’ and the ‘flights of wit, that do feed atheism and irreligion’.