Rochester’s illness worsened throughout early June. In addition to his ulcerated bladder, he was suffering sporadically from fever and sweating profusely, and was unable to eat hot food. His death was thought to be at hand, so much so that Burnet, rueful that he had failed to be present for a spectacular deathbed conversion, wrote to Halifax on 5 June that ‘he must be dead by this time’, and, with a tinge of envy at his own absence, notes that ‘he has expressed great remorse for his past ill life… [he] dies a serious penitent and professes himself a Christian’.
Burnet had heard this from, of all people, Rochester’s clown-like and malodorous acquaintance Fanshaw, himself recovering from a syphilitic attack, whose gullibility in such matters was impressively advanced. Fanshaw decided to head to Woodstock, possibly from a wish to be at his friend’s bedside, but equally possibly because he hoped for some remembrance in the will. He arrived, preceded no doubt by his foul body odour, on 8 June, intending to stay a week or so, in order to attend the funeral and the reading of the will.
Fanshaw was surprised to find, on his arrival, that Rochester was weakened but not dead, and that he was heard praying. Corroborating this with Dr Radcliffe, he headed to see his erstwhile drinking and whoring companion, and was dumbfounded to hear Rochester, in some pain, deliver what sounded like a set speech about how their former lewdness and profanity had now been superseded by ‘a judge and a future state’, and to exhort Fanshaw into a better way of life. This was reported by Radcliffe, many years after the fact, so it has the ring of truth about it, coming as it does from a disinterested party (Anne Wilmot’s version is rather more colourful ). Rochester is even reported by Dr Radcliffe to have said: ‘I am not mad, but speak the words of truth and soberness.’ A trembling Fanshaw, believing that his friend was diabolically possessed, fled Woodstock for London. When he returned to town, he had a simple answer for those who were anxiously enquiring about Rochester’s health and state of mind: ‘mad’.
Thus a dichotomy had developed. In Woodstock, there were several people gathered who had a vested interest in Rochester’s return to God, if not to health. In the wider world, his fate was met with sad shrugs and sighs. Charles’s doctor Short soon returned to court, convinced that he could not help the dying earl any more; also, as a known member of the decadent Whitehall set, his continuing presence did not meet with the approval of Rochester’s mother who, for the first time since her son’s childhood, was playing a substantial part in what little remained of his life. She dismissed Short as a ‘popish physician’ and mocked his opinions as half-heard murmurings obtained by eavesdropping at keyholes.
Anne Wilmot had spent most of her life disappointed. Her first husband, Sir Francis Henry Lee, had had his life cut short early by smallpox, while her second husband, Henry Wilmot, had been a roistering heavy-drinking hearty, more notable for his absences from his wife’s side than his presence there. Her elder children by Lee, Francis and Henry, had long since died, and now it seemed that Rochester was about to meet the same fate. A less stoic woman might have been forgiven for abandoning hope and God and giving in to a selfish instinct to mourn and wail. Anne, however, was indefatigably tough. Whether it was keeping her family’s estates together in the midst of Commonwealth rule or, as now, dealing ruthlessly with those she considered surplus to requirements, she rose to every occasion with gusto and determination.
The letters that she wrote to her sister-in-law, Joanna St John, while Rochester lay on his deathbed are undeniably affecting to read, as she charts the decline of her ‘poor son’ in his final illness. Yet, from the first sentence of her first epistle—‘It has pleased God to lay his afflictive hand upon my poor son in visiting him with a sore sickness’—it is clear that her aim is as much didactic as maternal. The difference between the language that she uses, which is suffused with references to God, Christ and heaven, and the casualness of her son’s is startling in its contrast. What it does show is that Anne Wilmot was very far from being a disinterested party in her son’s apparent penitence and conversion.
The account Fanshaw gave in town of Rochester’s condition had at least one positive consequence, as he was able to tell all and sundry that the earl was clinging onto life. He might even have exaggerated his possible recovery; Burnet notes in a letter to Halifax of 12 June, possibly on the basis of what he had heard from Fanshaw, that Rochester ‘is in a probable way of recovering, for it is thought that all ulcerous matter is cast out’. Burnet also claims that ‘all the town is full of his great penitence’, but, with a hint of sour grapes at his not being involved, notes: ‘I hope [this] flows from a better principle than the height of his fancy’. Burnet believed that Rochester, even at the height of his previous illness, retained ‘the free use of his reason... plain reason, stripped of fancy and conceit’, but he knew that he was in a far worse state now.
A weakened Rochester continued to drink asses’ milk (which Cary was attempting to procure from Ralph Verney), but it was felt by many that he had turned the corner and was over the worst. He was capable at least of shakily signing a previously unpublished letter to the Earl of Arran on 8 June, probably written by his mother, in which, apparently, he repents of his ‘wretched life’ and asserts that ‘when I remove from here, I hope it shall be to heaven, where I will stay for you, and pray for you’.
Sometimes, he was ‘disordered in the head’, murmuring incoherently but without any malice, and at other times he was heard to pray. His mother was anxious that this was not simply mocked as ‘the words of a madman’, as she had heard muttered, but ‘such as come from a better spirit than the mind of mere man’. Anne was not deaf to the rumours that she and Parsons were brainwashing Rochester, but dismissed these as nothing more than the jealous utterings of the wicked and diabolic of the world. She put it about that Rochester wished to cast off his old acquaintances, claiming that he said: ‘Let me see none of them, and I would to God I had never conversed with some of them.’ This may have been true of the likes of Fanshaw, but it beggars belief that he would have refused to receive Savile, had his jovial friend made a final pilgrimage to Woodstock. In fact, Savile did briefly return from Paris in July 1680, but it seems that he did not have an opportunity to head to Rochester’s bedside, something that would later cause him significant regret. Anne was on firmer ground with a report that Charles drank his health at court, which Rochester was said to treat with contempt. Knowing the strained, and ultimately unresolved, relationship between the two, this at least rings true.
Some were less unhappy about Rochester’s illness. A satirical lampoon did the rounds of court, entitled ‘Rochester’s Farewell’. Believed by some to have been by Rochester himself, it is a crude parody of his work, and whether it was put into circulation to damage what remained of his literary reputation or out of a sincere, if misguided, belief that it was by him, it succeeded in making him seem ridiculous and untalented. It is easy to sympathize with Anne when maternal concern breaks through and she exclaims: ‘there never was so great a malice performed as to entitle my poor son to a lampoon at this time, when, for aught they know, he lies upon his deathbed.’
As a response, a ‘Remonstrance’ soon appeared, dated 19 June and purporting to be the final declaration of Rochester’s penitence and abandonment of the wickedness of the world. It was written by Anne and signed in an unsteady hand by Rochester, who might or might not have had a clear idea what lay within the document. Comparing it with Anne’s letters and Parsons’ sermons is an interesting exercise. Its tone is formal, measured and a million miles away from anything that Rochester himself ever wrote in his poetry or letters; it talks of how ‘I detest and abhor the whole course of my wicked life’ and praises ‘the pure and excellent religion of my ever blessed redeemer, through whose merits alone, I one of the greatest of sinners, do yet hope for mercy and forgiveness’.
It does not take the world’s most thoroughgoing cynic to suspect this to be the work of Anne and Parsons in collaboration, rather than the genuine expressi
on of a desperately ill man’s repentance. To completely dismiss Rochester’s near-fanatical interest in religion at the end of his life would be a step too far; certainly, a combination of fear and sustained indoctrination by those around him played their part in directing his thoughts towards God and the afterlife. Yet the lucid, public tone of the ‘Remonstrance’ seems designed both to head off rumours of Rochester’s mental incapacity and to promote the idea of his return to God. That it could have had the opposite effect seems not to have occurred to anyone at Woodstock.
Rochester’s mind was now beginning to wander in alarmingly public directions. When he was having semi-lucid moments, he would summon to his bedroom virtually anyone on the estate, ranging from the increasingly alarmed John Cary to the domestic servants. Parsons reports that he delivered long, hysterical rants in which he would declare that he was ‘the vilest wretch and dog that the sun shined upon, or that the earth bore’, and that he wished he had been ‘a starving leper crawling in a ditch’. Parsons would later put a providential spin on these statements, claiming that they were the work of a man in extremis coming back to God; read without the religious context imposed upon them, they instead seem to bear the stamp of an ill man who was so utterly out of control that he was threatening to blow apart the entire strategy of a sane return to faith.
There was only one person of sufficient public reputation whose presence would ensure that Rochester’s penitence was not seen as the act of a noble mind overthrown, but summoning that person seemed a tacit admission that preparing Rochester’s immortal soul for death was beyond their capability. This was none other than Gilbert Burnet, who was unhappily kicking his heels in London. His motives for coming were mixed; while he was driven by a compassionate desire to visit his erstwhile friend and comfort him in his time of distress, he also wished to enhance his own public standing by a high-profile involvement in the deathbed conversion of the century. Burnet had form in this regard: a contemporary pamphlet described him as ‘the rough Scot, so remarkable for the sick’, and his enemies said of him that his desire to be present at the death of sinners was akin to the enthusiasm of the fox-hunter at the kill.
Burnet would probably have headed to Woodstock long before, had it not been for his fear of royal disapproval. After the death of Jane Roberts, he had written a letter to Charles in which he had indiscreetly put some of the blame for her death at the royal door, which resulted in a mixture of fury and horror from the king, who was all too aware that Burnet now knew where the metaphorical bodies were buried. Knowing that Charles would be highly suspicious of his motives in attending Rochester at his deathbed, he saw it as unnecessarily provocative to attend another former royal intimate who was dying in painful and horrific circumstances; he later wrote that Charles ‘fancied that [Rochester] had told me many things, of which I might make an ill use’—an elegant sideways swipe at his unloved monarch.
In the end, a letter, purportedly from Rochester, was sent to Burnet. Dated 25 June, it bears his signature, but the rest is in another hand, either Elizabeth’s or Parsons’. As with the ‘Remonstrance’, the language used is that of the penitent sinner, begging for grace. It begins ‘my spirits and body decay so equally together’, and then goes on to flatter Burnet, whom Rochester claims to esteem above all other churchmen (whom, in an abrupt volte-face from their earlier conversations, he now claims to ‘value… above all men in the world’); he then begs that, ‘if God be yet pleased to spare me longer in this world’, Burnet should come to Woodstock to converse further with Rochester. The letter skilfully plays on Burnet’s fame-seeking as well as his Christian charity, implicitly offering him the chance to spread the news of Rochester’s penitence as he (purportedly) expresses his hope that ‘the world may see how much I abhor what I so long loved, and how much I glory in repentance in God’s service’.
Burnet was touched by the letter, writing to Halifax on 3 July that ‘I have had one of the best letters from the Earl of Rochester that ever I had from any person’, and claiming that ‘he has a sedate and sincere repentance and a firm belief of the Christian religion deeply formed in his mind’. Yet self-interest stayed his hand, despite his reporting that Rochester ‘has little hopes of life’, and he remained in London. Nonetheless, he took care to promote himself as the agent of Rochester’s conversion; the letter was soon distributed across London in the form of a broadside sheet, as well as appearing in Burnet’s subsequent book about Rochester’s end.
Meanwhile, Anne continued to write to anyone who might be of some help in her predicament. A letter of 26 June, to Joanna St John, takes care to pour scorn on what was becoming the accepted belief at court, namely that Rochester was dying insane. She claims that Fanshaw’s statements of Rochester’s madness are baseless; she allows that ‘for a night and part of a day for want of rest his head was a little disordered’, but insists that this took place ‘long since Mr Fanshaw saw him’, and describes Fanshaw as both a ‘wretch’ and ‘an ungrateful man to such a friend’. The underlying impression given by her letter is an immense sorrow at her ‘poor weak son’ and his condition, which was now commonly acknowledged to be hopeless, but also a desperate desire to promote his conversion as sincere, rather than stage-managed.
Rochester, meanwhile, spent his few lucid moments talking to his wife and children, who were brought to their sick father’s bedside to hear him offer what paternal edicts he could summon. Rochester knew that his son Charles, in particular, was a sickly boy whose unfortunate inheritance was his father’s venereal disease in a form of syphilis that resulted in weakness and lethargy in one so young and undeserving. He told his son not to be a wit, but instead to grow into ‘an honest and a religious man, which could only be the support and blessing of his family’. To his other children, he extended the hope that they would grow up in honest and pious ways.
As before, his genuine love of his family sat uneasily with the knowledge that their name would forever be associated with his. Those of his actions at this time that can be ascribed to his own decision rather than to his mother’s influence—his desire that Elizabeth abandon her Catholic faith, for instance, or what was reported as his ‘tender concern’ for his servants—fit with Rochester’s essential kindness and his often overlooked care and compassion for others. The grander religious and penitential claims that were being made in his name, meanwhile, carried substantially less weight in terms of simple human decency. It took considerably greater moral strength to explain one’s imminent death to one’s small children than it did to sign letter after letter decrying oneself as a wicked sinner.
Enlisting the help of others continued. A letter was sent to Thomas Pierce, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, in July, of which no original copy survives, making it impossible to know who the author was (it was, of course, said to be by Rochester). Pierce, an outspoken critic of Catholicism and religious unorthodoxy, was a valuable ally in promoting Rochester’s conversion beyond the cloisters of Oxford, and the suspiciously articulate letter that he received has the feel of a solicitation to authority. It begins, somewhat disingenuously, with ‘Rochester’ claiming that ‘my indisposition renders my intellectuals almost as feeble as my person’, before talking unfavourably of his ‘humble and afflicted mind’ and his regret at his ‘lewd courses’ and ‘profane and unhallowed abominations’, and going on to list a series of biblical quotations apposite to his situation. The letter reads like the work of a man (or woman) who was intimately familiar with the scriptures and was minded enough to wish his (or her) repentance to be made public. Whether or not it was by Rochester himself, the statement that ‘if God shall be pleased to spare me a little longer here, I am unalterably resolved to become a new man’ feels sadly ironic; very few had any expectation that Rochester would indeed be ‘spared’.
The letter, whoever it was by, had its desired effect, and Pierce visited Rochester in Woodstock. He joined a distinguished list of visitors who included John Fell, Bishop of Oxford, who later wrote letters co
mparing Rochester’s sufferings to those of Job. Fell was a strict disciplinarian, of whom the famous lines ‘I do not love thee, Dr Fell / The reason why I cannot tell’ would be coined, and his stern presence was presumably one of the less pleasant ones at Rochester’s bedside. Burnet later referred to his ‘decent plainness’, perhaps a euphemism for straight-talking.
Mockingly, Rochester’s health appeared to recover slightly at the beginning of July, or at least to stabilize. He had been beset by violent fits and lapses into incoherence in the previous weeks, but the worst of the fever that he had suffered seemed to be behind him. A letter of his mother’s indicates that he was no longer dying violently, but instead wasting away, spending most of his days sleeping and talking little when he was awake. An anecdote concerning the continued untrustworthiness of Fanshaw, in which Rochester purportedly said that he would not have returned to his previous life amongst the likes of him for all the world, feels like a spurious addition, consistent with Anne’s other letters.
All the while, Burnet found himself torn between his inclinations, selfless and otherwise, and his fear of royal disapproval. Eventually, he decided that it was his Christian duty to visit Rochester, and on 17 July he wrote to Halifax to say: ‘I am to go next week… [Rochester] is a little better, but not so that there seems great hopes of his recovery.’ He arrived in Woodstock on 20 July, where Rochester was about to reach his own drama’s last scene.
As ever in Rochester’s life, tragedy was inexorably mixed with comedy. Belle Fasse, restored to Rochester’s service after his sojourn in France (perhaps indicating that he was not, after all, the ‘Mr P’ who had attempted to blackmail him, or that he had been forgiven), did not have a firm grasp of English, and failed to realize who Burnet was, sending him to the servants’ hall as if he were a lowly domestic. The image of a downgraded Burnet, pomp rapidly deflated (and by a Frenchman, of all people), is a deliciously comic one, even more so when considered amidst the suffering and sorrow that were taking place elsewhere in the house at the time.
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