Blazing Star

by Larman, Alexander;

  Eventually, once it was realized who he was, Burnet was admitted into Rochester’s presence on 21 July. It was a less momentous encounter than their previous meetings in 1679; Rochester, who had been dosed with opiates, was barely conscious and hardly able to realize who was in the room with him. However, when he was made aware of Burnet’s presence, he reacted with some happiness, or, in Burnet’s typically modest account, with ‘the tenderest expressions concerning my kindness in coming so far to see such a one’. Burnet admits that he was ‘so low, that he could not hold up discourse long at once’, but claims that, in between his relapses into lethargy, Rochester was calm and had no fear of death. This was because of his supposed deathbed conversion; Burnet, over-egging the pudding, claims that not only did Rochester speak of this ‘as a thing now grown up in him to a settled and calm serenity’, but also that he asked the penitent for further details of ‘the circumstances and progress of his repentance’.

  Even judged by the other claims that Burnet made after Rochester’s death, this was playing to the gallery—​or, if you will, preaching to the converted. Burnet’s account of his final conversations with Rochester contains one striking and fascinating detail, which may or may not be invention. He claims that Rochester informed him that Parsons had read him the fifty-third chapter of the Book of Isaiah, which he had taken to heart. The chapter contains several details that have intense symbolic resonance for Burnet’s account of Rochester, as it deals with ‘the Man of Sorrows’, often believed to be Christ. Whether or not this was intentional on Burnet’s part, it certainly adds a further sense of grandiosity to Rochester’s final days. The key passage comes in verses 4 to 6:

  Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

  What Burnet appears to be claiming verged on sacrilege, but was theologically brilliant nonetheless; he suggests that Rochester was simultaneously the sheep that had gone astray and the servant who had suffered so that others would learn from his mistakes. Effectively, then, Rochester was painted as the sacrificial lamb, but, unlike Christ, a far from guiltless one. It is impossible to know whether Parsons had read the passage to Rochester and it had made some impression, but Burnet was canny enough to realize that, whether Parsons had introduced him to it or whether Rochester had already known it, it would be his own association with the text that would be the one that people remembered.

  Rochester was sometimes conscious and relatively lucid for a few moments at a time. Burnet notes Elizabeth’s return to Protestantism and observes that Rochester had been ‘not a little instrumental in procuring it’, going on to say that it was ‘one of the joyfullest things that befell him in his sickness’. While Rochester might have seen it in practical, rather than spiritual, terms, his actions were still a blessing, from an evangelical perspective, for Burnet and all other Protestant clergy, who, thanks to the hysteria engendered by the Popish Plot and anti-Catholic feeling, were in a state of ascendancy. If a sinner such as Rochester could not only convert himself, they reasoned, but persuade his wife to do so (even ignoring the fact that she had only become a Catholic for political reasons), it was a marvellous propaganda coup for the church.

  Discounting Burnet’s account of Rochester’s last days as mere fantasy, however, is impossible. He describes how Rochester called his children into Burnet’s presence and said: ‘See how good God has been to me, in giving me so many blessings, and I have carried myself to him like an ungracious and unthankful dog’; this rings true in spirit, if not in the letter of what was reported, given his sincere love of his young offspring. Likewise, when Rochester, even in the supposed calm of his repentance, is said to lose his temper with a servant and call him a ‘damned fellow’, Burnet notes his relapse into ‘an ill habit grown so much upon him… I mean swearing’. Perhaps this man was the unfortunate Belle Fasse, in which case his irritation was all too understandable, and the detail offers a human touch amidst the grander eschatological wrangling.

  Burnet was with Rochester for four days. Others, such as Anne, Elizabeth and the children, were anxiously watching him for any signs of recovery or even stability, but it became sadly obvious that the final hours of his life had arrived. His last torments were unpleasant in the extreme: as before, pus seeped out of his body along with his urine, and—​never a hearty or plump man—​he had wasted away to the point where he was horrifyingly thin and listless. His mind no longer engaged, he murmured faintly about how he would live his life when he was better, but all present knew that this was mere illusion.

  Satisfied that his work was done and preparing to leave on 24 July, Burnet claims that Rochester desired him to linger a while longer, although it was believed that he was stable enough to live for a few weeks. This, given the severity of the symptoms Burnet describes, seems unlikely. Eventually, Burnet left without ceremony, either because, as he claimed, ‘it was like to have given [Rochester] some trouble’ to have had a formal leave-taking, or because this worldly man was repulsed and upset by the misery and human pain of the scene at which he was present.

  Rochester’s only reported comments after Burnet’s departure (reported by Burnet, naturally) were: ‘Has my friend left me? Then I shall die shortly.’ Whether this ‘friend’ was Burnet, Savile, Christ or someone else can only be conjectured, but in any case, Rochester’s words proved to be prophetic. He spent 25 July in silence, occasionally murmuring what might have been prayers but could equally have been incoherent ramblings. Finally, the end came, at two o’clock in the morning.

  What did Rochester think about as he prepared for death? Probably he thought about his wife and mother—​the one doubtless frightened and distraught at the prospect of what would happen to her after his death, the other preparing to mourn the death of yet another male in her family. It is likely that distant memories of his life’s debauchery and carousing shot dimly across his consciousness, like fantastical images of someone else’s history. Perhaps it was a lighter recollection he contemplated, such as that of friendship or love, or darker ones, such as the scandals and outrages in which he had found himself involved.

  He could have thought of friends, of enemies, of parents, of children. He could have thought of kings, of prostitutes, of courtiers, of actors, of syphilis-racked beggars on the street, of clergymen growing fat on patronage and riches. He could have thought of poetry, of plays, of satires, of lampoons. He could have thought of the greatest heights of excess, and the lowest depths of suffering. He could have thought about God, and prayer. He could have thought about emptiness, and fear. He could have thought about any of the million things that made up his short life. He could have thought about how his name would be regarded in the years, even centuries, to follow. He could even have thought, just before the flickering light of his consciousness was extinguished for the final time, whether he would be remembered after he was gone, and he might have pictured some future biographer trying to reconstruct the final few minutes of his life in imaginative terms.

  He could have thought of all these things, and many more. But the time for thought was past. Rochester died, and his eventful life finally came to an end. Yet one door opened just as another closed. As Blount had noted earlier that year, ‘the hand that wrote [the poem] may become lumber, but sure the spirit that dictated it can never be so’. Rochester’s wasted, ruined body was now nothing more than lumber. But the animating spirit within it, freed from its fleshly cage, would live on in the most surprising and bizarre ways.

  In ‘a Satire against Reason and Mankind’, Rochester mocks the ‘vain animal’, man, who only realizes on the point of death that, ‘after a search so painful and so long’, he has been entirely wrong to search after reason, and miserabl
y accepts his end. This leads to one of Rochester’s most powerful metaphors:

  Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies,

  Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise.

  Rochester, the proud, witty and (sometimes) wise ‘reasoning engine’, himself lay dead. But there was no time for poetic simile. As his corpse lay on its deathbed, preparations had to be made, both legal and spiritual, to safeguard what the influential triumvirate of Anne Wilmot, Parsons and Burnet wished his legacy to be.

  On 27 July 1680, the day after he died, Rochester’s will was read in the presence of his wife, his mother, John Cary and a couple of servants. Unlike most of the documents that bore his name, it was uncontroversial. His daughters Anne, Elizabeth and Malet were all left a legacy of £4,000 apiece, to be paid to Anne, the eldest, when she turned eighteen, and to the others when they became sixteen. Mindful of money still owing, he gave orders that his ‘debts upon bond, book debts or otherwise whereunto I have subscribed my name’ be paid either from his estate or from arrears of £5,000 that he was owed ‘upon several grants or patents out of his Majesty’s Court of the Exchequer’. Even in death, he still made a final dig at Charles and his penny-pinching. Other beneficiaries included his valet Belle Fasse, who was given Rochester’s fine clothes and linen, his household servants, who were given a year’s wages and a mourning suit, and, intriguingly, his love child ‘Elizabeth Clark’, who was to receive an annuity of £40 a year. Thus he provided for his loved ones, his illegitimate daughter and the semi-anonymous men and women who had been dependent on their capricious master for their keep for many years. His final act was typically generous and thoughtful, rather than rash and flamboyant, even if his love child by Elizabeth Barry did receive rather less than her half-siblings.

  The two main executors of his will were ‘my dear mother and my dear wife’, who were appointed joint guardians of the sickly Charles Wilmot. This arrangement was dependent on good relations continuing between Elizabeth and Anne—​something of a trial for both parties—​and should Elizabeth remarry or otherwise offend, Anne was to take over the running of the estate. The omnipresent Parsons was awarded the parsonage of Charlinch in Somerset after its incumbent’s death or retirement—​which, as it was regarded as part of his wife’s estate at Enmore, became Rochester’s to award by default—​and his funeral expenses were to be paid out of what remained of the estate.

  After the will was read, Anne Wilmot began to take stock of the state of Woodstock Lodge. As Rochester was no longer able to pass it on to his son or other family, it was now the property of Edward, Earl of Lichfield, who would soon arrive to take possession of the house. Anne, aided by Parsons and her brother Walter St John, set about the Augean task of cleansing the walls of the various ‘obscene and filthy’ pictures that Rochester had purchased, and once again making a house of dissipation and decadence a right and proper place for a respectable member of society to inhabit. No individual record survives of what was destroyed, but no doubt a wide variety of interesting, rare and beautiful works were sacrificed on the altar of self-serving moral reform. It would not do, after all, for a penitent to be associated with the vulgar trappings of such a past life. According to Parsons’ funeral sermon, the destruction of these items had been one of Rochester’s dying wishes; whether or not this was true, it is hard to imagine Anne being anything less than zealous in her activities.

  However, the wanton destruction of Rochester’s ornaments pales into insignificance when compared with his mother’s wider project—​namely, the complete destruction of her son’s written work. Had she paused for thought, or been a more broad-minded woman, she might have considered his work to be more than ‘profane and lewd writings’, as it was later described; and far from ‘being only fit to promote vice and immorality’, she might have seen it in fact as a deeply moral condemnation of the hypocrisy and selfishness that defined the age. Her aim was to destroy everything that her son wrote, and her reasoning was that, while his name might remain infamous in the years after his death, soon his reputation as a penitent and a deathbed convert would overshadow what had occurred in his life.

  The extent of what Anne destroyed is impossible to know. That Rochester’s correspondence contains so many frustrating gaps is doubtless due to his mother’s zealous efforts at censorship, with notable absentees including everyone from Charles to Robert Whitehall. It was later suggested by Horace Walpole that Anne had also destroyed Rochester’s epistolary memoirs, ‘a history of the intrigues at the court of Charles II’, consisting of several volumes of letters to Savile. While the remaining letters between Rochester and Savile do an excellent job of outlining both men’s witty, discursive view of court and country life, the absence of any reference to literature or poetry is keenly felt, and it can only be surmised how revelatory and eye-opening the burnt letters, diaries and other Rochesteriana might have been. The surviving letters remained in the possession of their recipients, or were otherwise spared Anne’s ravages: an oversight on her part, but a fortunate one. A friend of Walpole’s, Richard Bentley, suggested that Anne’s just reward for her efforts was to spend eternity ‘burning in heaven’. Many might agree.

  After the house had been cleansed of all base and unnatural elements, it was time for Rochester to be buried, which took place at Spelsbury in Oxfordshire, not far from Woodstock. His remains were interred in the same tomb as his father Henry’s, allowing an intimacy in death that had never existed between the two in life. The service took place a fortnight after his death on 9 August 1680, an unusually long time, especially given the condition of Rochester’s body when he died. However, this was not because of neglect or carelessness on the part of his executors; instead, the delay was caused by the need for Parsons to write a sermon that was one of the first public proclamations of Rochester’s deathbed conversion. Parsons had neither the intellectual drive and conviction of Burnet, nor the fierce family loyalty of Anne, so his task was an onerous one. He had to preach a sermon that simultaneously praised Rochester as a penitent convert, decried the excesses of his life and could be disseminated subsequently as the record of Rochester’s last days.

  Aided by Anne, who later paid for the sermon to be printed and distributed, Parsons produced his defining public speech. By no means a naturally charismatic man (he claimed in the preface to the published version to be ‘unfit… to appear in public, especially upon such a nice and great subject’), he was aware that his responsibility was to legitimize the story of Rochester’s end in the most solemn and binding fashion he could. The stolid Parsons took as his text the famous verse from Luke: ‘I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance.’ He could scarcely have picked a more appropriate verse to fulfil his task.

  The eventual sermon that he preached was workmanlike and capable rather than inspired (Burnet would have done a far more impressive and oratorically remarkable job, but would have been open to greater accusations of using the occasion for his own ends). Parsons characterized himself as ‘a sad spectator, and a secret mourner for [Rochester’s] sins’, and took his evangelical task of telling the world about Rochester’s conversion as stemming directly from ‘his own express and dying commands’. Parsons was self-aware enough to describe this as requiring ‘a wit equal to that with which he lived’, but excused his plainness by likening himself, disingenuously, to an impartial historian and claiming that ‘the proper habit of repentance is not fine linen… but sack-cloth and ashes… the effects it works… are not any raptures of wit and fancy, but the most humble prostrations both of soul and spirit’.

  The Rochester that emerges from Parsons’ funeral oration is a man from a great and distinguished family, who could have been a leading light of his age but had the misfortune to be born in the wrong time. Charles, whose standing was so low that he could be openly criticized as having no understanding of the service or value of honour, is implicitly described as one of t
he many ‘miserable comforters’ who led Rochester into sin and degradation. Parsons’ description of Rochester as one who grew debauched under others’ influence is half-true, as is his praise of his remarkable wit and intelligence. The most perceptive passage comes when Parsons, having described Rochester as ‘the greatest of sinners’, tries to explain why this was the case:

  His sins were like his parts (for from them corrupted they sprang), all of them high and extraordinary. He seemed to affect something singular and paradoxical in his impieties, as well as in his writings, above the reach and thought of other men... for this was the heightening and amazing circumstance of his sins, that he was so diligent and industrious to recommend and propagate them.

  More conventional pieties about repentance, virtue and the true path follow, but Parsons inadvertently expresses Rochester’s remarkable appeal to his friends, lovers and those who have admired him ever since. Rochester was, in death as well as in life, ‘high and extraordinary’, and there is little about him that was not ‘singular and paradoxical’, even by the remarkable standards of the age in which he lived. Parsons described his intellectual bravura as impiety and sin, but many chose, instead, to regard it as something to be celebrated and endlessly disseminated—​even, perhaps, in the context of a funeral sermon.

  Yet close psychological study was not what was required. Parsons’ lengthy and exhaustive (and probably exhausting) oration offers some interesting biographical details, along with a number of likely exaggerations and wild excursions into fantasy, such as the unconvincing descriptions of the dying Rochester’s final speeches of repentance and his statement that, had he lived, Rochester would surely have been a great religious poet. Nonetheless, it fulfilled its dual purpose of acting as a fitting encomium to a great man and spreading to a wider audience the ‘official’ account of what took place in Rochester’s final days. Never mind that none of Rochester’s actual friends or court acquaintances were present at the funeral, or that the truth of what was said was doubtful; Rochester the deathbed penitent was now the dominant image in the public mind. While no record survives of Charles’s reaction to Rochester’s death, his own deathbed conversion may have been at least in part prompted by his sometime favourite’s reported actions.