Blazing Star

by Larman, Alexander;

  If their conversations, which ended in March 1680, really did conclude in the way that Burnet describes, he might have considered his efforts well spent. A penitent, chastened Rochester, if not the full convert that he had hoped for, was a significant success—​something that would do no harm whatsoever to his reputation. Whether Rochester knew that Burnet planned to publish an account of their conversations or not cannot be known, but it is likely that, if Burnet did mention it, Rochester would have given him his blessing with a certain wry approval. Besides, Rochester seemed to be in remission from the worst of his illness; there would be every chance, it appeared, for the two to have further discussions and for this particular prodigal to be returned to the fold once more.

  Burnet was mistaken in two regards. First, Rochester was far closer to death than either of them guessed. And second, far from convincing Rochester of the glories of heaven and the immortality of the soul, he had only served to make him even more sceptical.

  While Rochester met with Burnet, he continued to correspond with Charles Blount, with whom he discussed the topics that he was speaking to Burnet about. While Burnet offered a theological orthodoxy that was by turns reassuring, frustrating and doggedly old-fashioned, Blount rejected ‘the harangues of the parsons [and the] sophistry of the schoolmen’ in favour of a philosophical perspective that stretched back to Pliny and Philostratus. He expressed theologically dangerous sentiments carefully, allowing Rochester to consider the image of a ‘humdrum deity chewing his own nature, a droning God sit hugging of himself’ even as he made a great show of contradicting it.

  Had Blount been writing to a man who was convinced by the substance of Burnet’s arguments, then he would have been wasting his time, or worse. However, one of his letters to Rochester dates from 7 February 1680—​towards the end of the latter’s Burnetian conversations—​and responds to a poem that he had been sent. Blount describes it as ‘your most incomparable version of that passage of Seneca’s’, which, even allowing for his typically florid exaggeration, was accurate. Rochester’s last poem, ‘A Translation from Seneca’s Troades’, takes its inspiration from the second act of Troades, but is entirely original in the despairing, weary language and sentiments contained within it. It is possible that the poem does not date from early 1680 but instead was written years before. Certainly, the intellectual vitality and bleak wit that are displayed throughout are at odds with Rochester’s ill health at the time, although it is likely that the cut and thrust of his conversations with Burnet had temporarily rejuvenated him. What matters most is that he was sufficiently engaged with Blount to send him the poem as his own contribution to their discussion, indicating that, whether it was newly minted or an older piece, he was excited by the matters they were discussing and saw this poem as a relevant statement of his thoughts.

  Not that he was especially optimistic—​on the basis of this evidence—​about the undiscovered country that awaited him:

  After death nothing is, and nothing, death:

  The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.

  Let the ambitious zealot lay aside

  His hopes of heaven, whose faith is but his pride;

  Let slavish souls lay by their fear,

  Nor be concerned which way nor where

  After this life they shall be hurled.

  Dead, we become the lumber of the world,

  And to that mass of matter shall be swept

  Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.

  Devouring time swallows us whole;

  Impartial death confounds body and soul.

  For Hell and the foul fiend that rules

  God’s everlasting fiery jails

  (Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),

  With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,

  Are senseless stories, idle tales,

  Dreams, whimseys and no more.

  Lacking the passion and vituperation of his earlier satires, even those of the previous year against Dryden and Mulgrave, it has an elegiac, haunted quality that suggests that Rochester knew that the end of his life was near. It rejects the comparative optimism of earlier metaphysical writing, such as Donne’s tenth Holy Sonnet, ‘Death be not proud’, in favour of a bleaker set of conclusions; perhaps thinking of Hamlet’s musings on fate as much as Seneca, Rochester rejects the ‘senseless stories’ of hellfire and damnation in favour of endless emptiness, with ‘impartial death’ failing to make any distinction between anyone whose time has come.

  If ‘A Translation’ was written in late 1679 or early 1680, it is conceivable that ‘the ambitious zealot... whose faith is but his pride’ refers to Gilbert Burnet, either directly or unconsciously, although the continued presence of Burnet in Rochester’s life even after their formal conversations had finished indicates that a degree of amity existed between the two men. Of course, Rochester seldom let personal friendship get in the way of a telling phrase or a good joke.

  In any case, the poem impressed Blount a great deal, which led to that verbose deist delivering his most telling judgement on Rochester’s philosophy. He praised Rochester’s ‘divine and immortal mind’, and grandly declared that ‘the hand that wrote it may become lumber, but sure the spirit that dictated it can never be so’. Unwittingly, Blount was delivering the counter-argument to Mulgrave’s rejection of Rochester’s writing. Rochester’s hand, and the rest of his body, would inevitably become lumber, and he would never write another poem. His questioning spirit would live on.

  Occasional bursts of animation aside, Rochester remained unwell. A letter from his mother’s agent, old John Cary, to Rochester’s de facto guardian, the politician Ralph Verney, dated 4 January 1680, states that ‘my Lord Rochester’s health has been, and is like to be very troublesome’. Nonetheless, either from ignorance of the extremity of his illness or from bravado, he continued to make sporadic appearances at court when he was in London, painfully dragging himself to the House of Lords to involve himself in intrigues and government business. One especially ill-conceived piece of activity involved his support of a young aristocrat and fellow Gentleman of the Bed Chamber, James Douglas, Earl of Arran. The hot-headed Scot wanted to woo a young lady of fortune, Miss Pawlet, but she was promised to the far more suitable (and much older) Edward Conway, and this match, which was coordinated by the Speaker of the Commons, Sir Edward Seymour, was given royal approval.

  Arran, who had been led to believe by Pawlet’s family (rather than the bride-to-be) that he was the preferred match, was incensed, and Rochester, who was bored and nostalgic for his own days of frustrated wooing, took his part. When Arran insulted Seymour on 9 March by spitting at him in the House of Commons, Seymour took the opportunity of defusing a politically awkward row by challenging Rochester to a duel on the pretext that Arran’s rash actions had been on his instruction. Seymour knew that Rochester was in poor health, and so when the latter agreed to fight the duel on horseback because of a supposed ‘weakness in his limbs’, both men knew that it was mere foreplay to the inevitable cancellation of the duel; this duly came about when Charles commanded both parties not to take part, shortly before issuing a proclamation that duels were to be abandoned between all persons of quality. Therefore, honour was satisfied for everyone save the unfortunate Arran, who had a warrant issued for his arrest and fled to Scotland to lie low. He never did marry Miss Pawlet; instead, after inheriting his father’s title of Duke of Hamilton, he continued to lead a violent and hot-headed existence. He would eventually die in 1712 in a duel over a disputed inheritance, although not before killing his opponent Charles Mohun (Charles’s proclamation, it appears, did not survive his reign).

  Rochester was in good enough favour with Charles to be one of the party who headed to the Newmarket races in late March 1680, although their stay there was brought to a premature end on 31 March, when fresh rumours of an Irish plot against Charles’s life led to their swift return to town. The Popish Plot, in all its fantastical details, continued to poison every part of Eng
lish life. Rochester, however, was confronted with some more banal, though equally distressing, news. Rather than returning to London with the rest of the court, he headed to Enmore to visit his wife’s estates. En route, he lodged for a few days at the small town of Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire, where he was made aware, by Savile, of a blackmail attempt that had been lodged by a ‘Mr P’.

  Who the mysterious Mr P was, and what he was blackmailing Rochester about, can only be surmised. Rochester’s reputation was such that he was unlikely to have been alarmed by an accusation of anything other than involvement in the Popish Plot, or, conceivably, of sodomy, itself closely connected with ‘Catholic practices’. It is possible that ‘Mr P’ is an (intentional?) misprint for ‘Mr B’, and that this is an allusion to Jean-Baptiste de Belle Fasse of beautiful buttocks fame, Rochester’s valet-cum-sexual plaything, whom Savile had had the pleasure of encountering when he was sent to Paris. In his reply, Rochester is shocked, remarking on ‘the indirectness of Mr P’s proceeding’ and commenting that ‘misery makes all men less or more dishonest’. He is ‘not surprised to see villainy industrious for bread’, especially as he lives ‘in a place where it is often so de gaieté de coeur’—​for the fun of it, the use of French perhaps a reference both to Savile’s Parisian sojourn and (if Belle Fasse was the culprit) to the blackmailer’s nationality.

  Like Wilde two centuries later, Rochester’s attitude towards potential exposure was a mixture of bluster and arrogance. He knew that the witch-hunts that were tearing the country apart were looking for any excuse to pounce on anyone displaying signs of popish behaviour, and sodomy with a Frenchman and presumed Catholic would have seen him immediately arrested and incarcerated in the Tower. If his concern for his own safety was negligible, he was aware that his behaviour, and his wife’s Catholicism, plunged his whole family into danger. Nonetheless, his letter to Savile alternates between thanking him for the ‘kindness and care’ that he had shown in alerting him to the blackmail attempt and for his continued friendship, and bravado: ‘I give him leave to prove what he can against me.’

  It is the last surviving letter that Rochester sent Savile. He does not refer to his health, either because he thought that he was better, or because he considered that more important matters were at hand. The two men did not meet again before Rochester’s death, and thus a great friendship died as well. Savile was a tirelessly loyal and devoted figure in Rochester’s life, and it is fitting that in the last letter that we have by Rochester he calls himself Savile’s ‘faithful, obliged, humble servant’, thereby emphasizing the debt that he owed to his true friend.

  Rochester attempted to shrug off the blackmail threat, but he was frightened and depressed by the sense of the end approaching, with respect to both his reputation and his health. A fragment of a letter that he wrote to his wife around this time talks of ‘so great a disproportion between our desires and what has been ordained to content them’, and—​perhaps thinking of Belle Fasse’s treachery—​he suggests that ‘were [a] man’s soul placed in a body fit for it, he were a dog, that count anything a benefit obtained with flattery, fear and service’. He pleads with Elizabeth not to mislay his letter—​‘it is not fit for everybody to find’—​and, typically, ends with a remark about drinking: ‘your wine was bought last week, but neglected to be sent.’ Perhaps Rochester took solace in it himself.

  For the next month, an uneasy sense of calm existed. Rochester’s illness appeared to have abated enough for him to travel between Woodstock and Adderbury, albeit probably with the help of his servants, and he thought, rashly, that he was in a state of improved health. This led him to undertake another visit to Enmore to see his wife in mid-May, in blazing heat. The exertion of the swift ride proved to be his undoing, as he inflamed an ulcer in his bladder, causing him agonizing pain and discomfort. Suffering hideously, he had to be brought back to Woodstock by coach, along treacherous, bumpy roads, arriving at the lodge on 20 May 1680.

  When he returned to Woodstock, he must have known that his drama had reached its final act. There would be no more fortunate remissions, no more drinking, wenching and mischief-making. Instead, Rochester was going to die. Yet, even as he prepared to accept the inevitable, racked with pain, new twists and turns would illuminate his final days. He had never lived a conventional life, and it was fitting that the circumstances of his death would be equally unusual and theatrical.

  On 1 April 1680 Rochester turned thirty-three. It was a significant number: Christ died at thirty-three, and the Muslim cleric Al-Ghazali claimed that the inhabitants of heaven would remain ‘youths of thirty-three years of age’. Whether Rochester was still entertained by these coincidences and moments of serendipity while he was lying, a month later, in Woodstock Lodge on what would become his deathbed—​an elaborate and Gothic construction of Elizabethan origin made of carved black oak—​can only be guessed at.

  When Rochester returned from his abortive trip to Somerset, his death looked imminent. His stomach ulcer had ruptured, leading to ‘vast quantities of purulent matter in his urine’. As he oozed pus, the pain was agonizing. His mother, Elizabeth and his children were sent for, and arrived at Woodstock along with the family doctor Alexander Radcliffe, who confirmed the seriousness of Rochester’s condition. Word soon spread to court that Rochester was on his deathbed, and Charles, disturbed by reports of his erstwhile protégé’s suffering, dispatched his own physician, Thomas Short, who could do little other than prescribe asses’ milk, which was believed to help with the body’s inflammation.

  A letter that his mother’s agent John Cary sent to his guardian Ralph Verney on 1 June 1680 gives a bleak account of his health. Cary states that ‘I much fear my Lord Rochester hath not long to live’, and talks of his weakness and illness. He is more optimistic about his spiritual condition; he writes how ‘he is grown to be the most altered person, the most devout and pious person as I generally ever knew, and certainly would make a most worthy brave man, if it would please God to spare his life’.

  Thus Cary was the first to articulate what would be one of the most commonly accepted stories about Rochester—​namely that, in the face of death, he repented of all his sins and his former wickedness, accepted God, and became a credit to his family in his final days. This became central to Rochester’s reputation as a penitent and was repeated for centuries as fact; indeed, many believe it to be the case today.

  It is a stirring, dramatically satisfying story, with a pleasing circularity to it, and it is not hard to see why it has been so beloved by everyone from clerics to critics. There is only one problem: the evidence that it occurred stems entirely from a few interested parties, all of whom had their own reasons to put about the tale of Rochester’s final conversion.

  Rochester’s mother’s chaplain, Robert Parsons, arrived to visit Rochester on 26 May 1680, preparing to administer the last rites. Parsons was the same age as Rochester and had studied at Oxford at the same time, where the two became friends. Rochester arranged for Parsons to receive the lucrative academic post of esquire bedel, a junior ceremonial officer responsible for conferring degrees, in 1670, and he introduced him to his mother when he became curate at Adderbury shortly after his ordination in 1671. Thus Parsons came as much in the guise of a comrade-in-arms as in that of a man of God.

  Rochester was enfeebled, but his brain was still active, whirling between exhaustion and terror. When Parsons arrived, he greeted him with joy and relief, but told him that, meditating upon his conversations with Burnet, he had become disenchanted with God and religion, vowing, in Parsons’ account, ‘to run them down with all the argument and spite in the world’. Parsons goes on to say that ‘like the great convert St Paul, he found it hard to kick against the pricks’; the unfortunate choice of word in the allusion seems fitting when used of Rochester. Parsons’ account tells how Rochester developed an ‘extraordinary respect’ for his status as a clergyman, and how he talked animatedly about his former unworthiness and his new-found love of Go
d. Parsons puts this down to ‘divine grace’ having entered into his soul after his earlier scepticism. The more cynical might doubt the likelihood of a desperately ill man communicating in as lucid a manner as this. At best panicking and desperate, and at worst insensible, Rochester was not the most reliable of communicants.

  It is certain that, by this time, Rochester had a far greater interest in religion and God than he had shown before, partly as a result of his conversations with Burnet, and partly out of a desperate fear that was creeping up on him along with his death, as can be seen by his referring to mortality throughout his writings. He was also compos mentis enough to beg Elizabeth, successfully, to abandon the Catholic faith that she had been practising for the past decade and to return to what Cary describes as ‘her first love, the Protestant religion’. This was heralded as a sign of Rochester’s keen identification with his spiritual side, and it might have been. It is altogether more likely, however, that, knowing his end was imminent, he wanted to be sure that his wife would be safe from the worst of the Popish Plot. Being the widow of a man as notorious as he would inevitably arouse suspicion, especially as she did not enjoy the royal favour that her husband did, and abandoning a faith that she had only ever adopted for the sake of expedience was the logical course. As before, spiritual needs took second place to earthly ones.