Blazing Star

by Larman, Alexander;

  When Parsons’ sermon was printed in Oxford in 1680 by the booksellers Richard Davis and Thomas Bowman, it proved to be a wildly popular bestseller, skilfully combining an improving moral message with hints of salaciousness. Funeral sermons for the notable were often published, but normally sold no more than a couple of hundred copies; Rochester’s funeral sermon, which was distributed throughout the country by Davis and Bowman, sold thousands, making it hugely lucrative. It went through no fewer than twenty-four editions in the course of the following century, and became one of the standard texts of repentance and forgiveness. Parsons was rewarded with an array of benefices and honours, being appointed to a canonship in Glamorgan in 1681 and a rectorate in Buckinghamshire in 1682. For his complicity, he was well rewarded by society and, indirectly, by a satisfied Anne Wilmot, who wished that this would be the final word on her son’s turbulent life and legacy. Unfortunately for her, it was not to be.

  If Rochester’s death was greeted by those immediately around him as a sad and pitiable occasion that should nevertheless be used as an enlightening moral message, his friends and fellow poets were less equivocal. Amidst the general woe and grief that the brightest star of their generation had been extinguished, at least seven poets wrote elegies to Rochester, including Aphra Behn, Anne ‘Nan’ Wharton and his most talented disciple, John Oldham. They vary in literary merit, but all contain sincerity and affection that belies the later fiction that Rochester died unmourned and unloved by his contemporaries. Some lines of Behn’s are typical in their mixture of poetic artifice and genuine regret, as well as their acute awareness of Rochester’s genius as a satirist and commentator on the age:

  His name’s a genius that would wit dispense,

  And give the theme a soul, the words a sense.

  But all fine thought that ravished when it spoke,

  With the soft youth eternal leave has took;

  Uncommon wit that did the soul o’ercome,

  Is buried all in Strephon’s worshipp’d tomb;

  Satyr has lost its art, its sting is gone,

  The fop and cully now may be undone;

  The dear instructing rage is now allay’d,

  And no sharp pen dares tell ’em how they’ve stray’d.

  The most popular elegy, meanwhile, was Anne Wharton’s, which was much praised by contemporary poets such as Robert Waller and Robert Wolseley. Wharton, the 21-year-old niece of Rochester (and rumoured to be a lover), wrote a less artful but more heartfelt account of her uncle’s death, which eschews ornate verbiage in favour of what feels like genuine sentiment. The opening is typical:

  Deep waters silent roll; so grief like mine

  Tears never can relieve, nor words define.

  Stop then, stop your vain source, weak springs of grief,

  Let tears flow from their eyes whom tears relieve.

  They from their hearts show the light trouble there,

  Could my heart weep, its sorrows ’twould declare:

  Weep drops of blood, my heart, thou’st lost thy pride,

  The cause of all thy hopes and fears, thy guide!

  Wharton writes in a style that, deliberately or not, brings popular hymns of the age to mind, most notably Samuel Crossman’s ‘My Song Is Love Unknown’. Written under the pseudonym ‘Urania’, a metaphysical allusion to the muse of astronomy, the confidence and style of the elegy hints at what might been a promising writing career, which was cut short by her untimely death in 1685, when she was attended by Robert Parsons. An occasional correspondent of Gilbert Burnet, she was castigated by him for her supposed bad temper and unchristian attitudes; unlike her uncle, there was to be no yielding, real or imagined, to ‘the yoke of God’ that Burnet proposed.

  Anne Wilmot might have thought that she had done her Christian duty by destroying Rochester’s writings, but her efforts were doomed to be in vain. His poems had circulated too widely, and were too well known, for a simple act of book-burning to expunge his memory from the national consciousness. As Anthony à Wood noted: ‘no sooner was [Rochester’s] breath out of his body, but some person or persons, who had made a collection of his poetry in manuscript, did, merely for lucre’s sake... publish them under this title, Poems on Several Occasions.’ Claiming to be from Antwerp, the book was actually published in October 1680 by an anonymous hack London publisher, and was surreptitiously purchased by many of the great and the good of the day, including Pepys, who kept it locked in a drawer, on the grounds that, ‘written before [Rochester’s] penitence’, it was composed ‘in a style I thought unfit to mix with my other books’. Unwittingly, he was the first recorded progenitor of what would be a centuries-long attitude to Rochester: public dismissal, private fascination.

  The book itself was a poor representation of Rochester’s poetry, being an amalgamation of sixty-one half-remembered jottings, erotica and pornography by other hands, and works floating around by others that were lazily ascribed to the notorious late earl. Those who knew him were outraged, and placed an advertisement in the London Gazette of 22 November 1680, decrying the ‘libel of lewd scandalous poems lately printed, under the name of the Earl of Rochester’ and offering a substantial reward of £5 for information on who the printer and publisher of the book were. It is not recorded whether the attempted discovery was successful. Unfortunately, this confused little volume has the distinction of constituting the first edition of Rochester’s collected poems, and warrants a certain grubby footnote in publishing history as a result.

  A more lasting testimony to Rochester’s memory came in September 1681, when Nathaniel Lee’s play The Princess Of Cleve was first performed at the Dorset Garden Theatre. The work itself, an adaptation of a popular French melodramatic novel, was less notable than the eulogy paid to the character Count Rosidore, another stand-in for Rochester. Rosidore is memorably described by the character Count Nemours:

  [he possessed]the spirit of wit... [he] had such an art in gilding his failures, that it was hard not to love his faults: he never spoke a witty thing twice... his imperfections were catching, and his genius was so luxuriant, that he was forced to tame it... how awkward, how insipid, how poor and how wretchedly dull is the imitation of those that have all the affectation of his verse and none of his wit.

  There is also an allusion made to his translation of Seneca’s Troades (‘I saw the mighty thing a nothing made / Huddled with worms’), implying that the audience by then was just as familiar with Rochester’s last, despairing work as it was with the stories of his deathbed conversion.

  Another testament, of sorts, was the publication of Burnet’s Some Passages in the Life and Death of John Earl Rochester in 1680. A more measured and intellectually satisfying work than Parsons’ sermon, it shares the same intent—​namely, offering an unapologetically Christian perspective on Rochester’s life and death. It is self-serving in the extreme, acting as much as a spur to Burnet’s career and reputation as Parsons’ pamphlet was to his; in the same year he was awarded the prestigious doctorship of divinity at Oxford, and in 1682 he published the acclaimed second volume of his History of the Reformation of the Church of England.

  Burnet’s open contempt for Charles was expressed by a ‘Sermon’ at the end of his book that castigates his court for its immorality and vice, but he was less interested in the patronage of the Stuarts than he was in the Anglo-Dutch duo of William and Mary. Seldom a man who picked the wrong side in these matters, Burnet was made William’s chaplain in 1688, and was eventually rewarded for his intriguing and his zealotry with the prestigious appointment as Bishop of Salisbury at Easter 1689. In his final book, A History of My Own Time, published posthumously in 1753, he still praises Rochester, saying ‘his wit had in it a peculiar brightness’, and refers to Bendo, indicating some knowledge of the affair that he had received from his conversations with him, his strained relationship with Charles and his ‘great immoralities’. His final comment on his sometime friend, sparring partner and conversion project was to say, of Rochester on his deathbed: �
�I do verily believe... he was then so entirely changed that, if he had recovered, he would have made good all his resolutions.’ Whether this was wishful thinking, the boastings of an egotist or sincere belief, it sums up Burnet’s attitude to Rochester perfectly; he understood the letter of the man, but little of the spirit.

  After Rochester’s death, the light passed out of Elizabeth Wilmot’s world. Still only thirty years old, she was worn out, first by the loss of her husband in the most stressful circumstances imaginable, and secondly by the continued worry and stress of the ongoing Popish Plot. Despite her reconversion to Protestantism, which she took care to advertise by constantly speaking against the ‘perversion’ of papism, she found little comfort or sympathy from those around her, least of all Anne Wilmot, whose distrust and suspicion of her daughter-in-law was now compounded by her ability to manage the estate in its entirety, should she so wish. It is impossible not to feel enormous sympathy for Elizabeth, a witty young woman whose natural gaiety and joie de vivre were slowly and painfully worn down over the course of her short and increasingly unhappy life. Even her own property at Enmore had been ravaged by her husband’s profligacy, leaving her with virtually nothing.

  On 27 July 1681, close to the anniversary of Rochester’s death, she finally succumbed to what was described as ‘an apoplexy’, and died suddenly, leaving behind four young orphans. She was buried at Spelsbury, next to her husband and father-in-law. This was not to be the last sorrow visited upon the Wilmot dynasty that year; her son Charles, always sickly and delicate, was never to be given the chance, as the next Earl of Rochester, to live up to his father’s instruction that he be ‘happy or unhappy forever’, as he died on 12 November 1681. His death led to the end of the Wilmot dynasty. The title ‘Earl of Rochester’ was later resurrected for Laurence Hyde, a staunch supporter of Charles II, perhaps as a tribute to the former holder of the title, or simply as a piece of revisionism. Ironically, Hyde was the son of the Earl of Clarendon, whose rivalry with Buckingham and his supporters, including Rochester, had led to his downfall and exile. And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

  Rochester’s daughters led more successful lives. Anne Wilmot, realizing that her family’s reputation could only partially be maintained by carefully massaged accounts of deathbed conversions, set about marrying off her grand-daughters to various high-born worthies. The eldest, Anne, who had inherited her father’s good looks and was described as possessing ‘a tall handsome body’, married a wealthy country gentleman, Henry Baynton, in 1685, a match that met with her grandmother’s approval. An occasional poet whose spirited attitude reminded others that she was every bit her father’s daughter, it is thanks to her that we have Rochester’s servant Thomas Alcock’s invaluable account of the Alexander Bendo saga, as it was at her request that he wrote it down. Rochester’s similarly pulchritudinous second daughter, Elizabeth, married Edward Montagu, 3rd Earl of Sandwich, whose father had been one of her mother’s unsuccessful suitors, in 1689. Finally, the youngest, Malet, was married off to the son of one of her father’s friends, John Vaughan, Viscount Lisburne, in 1692.

  As for Rochester’s mother, Anne Wilmot lived to the extraordinarily old age of eighty-two. After seeing all her grand-daughters gainfully married, she left Ditchley for the final time in 1692 and headed to Soho in London, where she lived in the parish of St Anne’s. She eventually died in 1696, little guessing that the place where she had made her last home would become notorious centuries later as a home of vice, alcoholic debauchery and sexual freedom—​qualities that her son valued a great deal more than she ever did.

  As Rochester’s family mourned and arranged their affairs, national matters continued. Light relief, of sorts, was offered by the Popish Plot reaching its final, ridiculous climax. Calamitously for the plotters, Chief Justice William Scroggs openly doubted the basis on which the entire plot was supposed to exist, and acquitted the royal physician Sir George Wakeman on a fabricated charge of attempting to poison the king. This was a severe blow to Titus Oates’s credibility, and the schemer was soon undone, even as he attempted to denounce Charles (with more accuracy than he realized) and the Duke of York as Catholic sympathizers and papist stooges. The next few years would see Oates lose all standing at court, as well as his pensions and his grand state rooms, and following his arrest for perjury in 1684, he would eventually be convicted of that offence in 1685. Satisfyingly, his punishment consisted of imprisonment, his (dubiously acquired) priestly attire being stripped from him and, best of all, his enduring the humiliation of being pelted in the pillory in Palace Yard, Westminster, before being whipped through the streets from Aldgate to Newgate. It was reported that the unfortunate Oates reacted to this ‘with hideous bellowings’, and that he suffered ‘thousands of stripes’. His own fortunes underwent some peculiar ups and downs over the coming years, including an extremely unlikely marriage, eventually ending with his unlamented death in poverty and obscurity in 1705.

  The year 1685 proved a watershed for many of those who had been prominent in Rochester’s life. In addition to his daughter Anne’s marriage and his niece Anne Wharton’s death, it saw Robert Whitehall, Rochester’s unlikely mentor and former tutor, raise his final pint pot in Oxford in July. Rochester’s former protégé and romantic rival Thomas Otway had already died in dire poverty in April, reputedly choking on a piece of bread that he had begged from a passing stranger. And, most importantly, the year marked the death of Charles II.

  By the beginning of 1685, Charles, middle-aged at fifty-four but physically run-down, was a shadow of the dashing young man who had fled across England with Henry Wilmot thirty-five years before. His reign, which had started so glamorously and excitingly with the Restoration, had descended into a bitter and sordid mixture of grubby sexual intrigues (and resulting illnesses) with wildly unsuitable mistresses, ill-considered foreign adventures, shameless profligacy and his own idleness. He might have been the greatest king who ever ruled England—​a constant reminder of why the comparative intellectual poverty and social barbarity of the Commonwealth should never have existed, let alone stood any chance of being repeated. Instead, Rochester’s caustic dismissal of him as a ‘merry monarch, scandalous and poor’ seems all too fitting.

  And yet it is hard to dislike Charles. Partly this is because of the lasting good that he did in his reign, such as the promotion of the theatre, of great architects such as Wren and Hawksmoor, and of free-thinkers and philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke. His treatment of Rochester was capricious and, in instances such as depriving his family of Woodstock Lodge, petty, but he also showed remarkable forbearance and tolerance in indulging his surrogate son’s far from inconsiderable bad behaviour. Many monarchs would have stripped him of all his titles and allowances forever, but, under Charles, Rochester was able to thrive. It seems unlikely that he would have risen to similar fame, or infamy, in the reign of a non-entity like James II, or even under Charles I. Rochester needed the chaos, dirt and occasional gleaming beauty of the Restoration court to be the poet and social commentator that he became. Without them, he would have been little more than a second Robert Whitehall.

  The final reason to have at least a grudging affection for Charles was his considerable personal charm. After suffering a sudden apoplectic fit on 2 February 1685, he died four days later. Although the speed of his demise led some to suspect poisoning, it is more likely to have been caused by a mixture of kidney dysfunction, due to the excessive eating and drinking in which he had indulged, and lingering venereal disease. His final act of any significance was to be received into the Catholic Church, possibly prompted by his brother James, but two remarks he made on his deathbed sum up his character even more clearly than his conversion. Speaking of his mistresses, he asked James to ‘be well to Portsmouth [Louise de Kérouaille], and let not poor Nelly starve’. While James had no love for Louise, who eventually returned to France, he granted Nell Gwyn a pension of £1,500 and paid her debts. And, as Charles prepared to meet his own en
d, he looked around at the royal physicians, the hangers-on, and all those who had some interest in his life or death, and summoned up his final vestige of wit. ‘You must pardon me, gentlemen,’ he croaked just before midday on 6 February 1685, ‘for being so long a-dying.’

  His funeral took place the following week, ironically enough on Valentine’s Day. It was a low-key, inglorious event, without glamour or expense, so much so that Burnet noted in his later History of My Own Time that ‘the expense of it was not equal to what an ordinary nobleman’s funeral will rise to’. If a symbolic point was being made by those who buried Charles, it was clear what it was. The Restoration, in all its conflicted, strange and hideous glory, was at an end, and would never be repeated.

  In the years after Rochester’s death, the mourning of his friends and family began to give way to the appearance of a new emotion. Neither regret nor scorn, it could be categorized as the gradual emergence of a legend. It was aided by the disappearance of everything attached to Rochester. First, his friends, wife and king slipped away one after another, taking with them all their memories of the private man, as opposed to the public rakehell. Buckingham, in and out of favour with James Stuart, died in 1687, as did Savile, who moved smoothly from a debauched youth into a respectable middle age as Commissioner of the Admiralty and Vice-Chamberlain to James, inconveniently interrupted by terminal poor health. Then, in a series of unfortunate events, virtually everywhere that Rochester had lived ceased to exist. His homes in Adderbury and Ditchley were demolished by their new owners, the Earls of Lichfield, with only the rear wall of the main block of Adderbury still remaining today. Woodstock Lodge was trampled beneath the vast behemoth that would eventually become Vanbrugh’s Blenheim Palace. It still survives today but in much reduced and altered form, standing, as if ashamed, by the latter’s Combe Gate. Even his home in Whitehall would soon become lumber, destroyed by a fire in 1691. It was as if a deity, whether spurned or accepted, was taking care to erase any vestige of Rochester’s life in the hope that he might be forgotten.