Blazing Star

by Larman, Alexander;

  While his aged mother hoped for this, save the memory of his deathbed ‘repentance’, it was not to be. Before very long, Rochester’s life and death became a folk tale, whispered in taverns in Woodstock, Whitehall and elsewhere. Just as his poems were conflated with others in pirated editions made up from manuscript copies of dubious origin that were then passed off as authentic, so local legends and apocryphal stories were cited as fact, despite there being little or no evidence for their veracity. It was said, for instance, that when he had been loitering in Adderbury, he had relieved his boredom by dressing up as an itinerant tinker, who had then destroyed the various pots and pans of his would-be clients. This anecdote, although probably embroidered and exaggerated, has at least the ring of truth; Rochester, always fond of disguise and role-playing, relished the chance to play new parts.

  There were, of course, stories that played on the darker side of his reputation. The most disturbing, and bizarre, of these was an account that began to circulate towards the end of the seventeenth century, shortly after the death of Buckingham in 1687. It was said that Rochester and Buckingham, during one of their many expulsions from court, amused themselves by renting a disused country inn, where they pretended to be tavern-keepers in an attempt to get the local gentry drunk while they seduced their wives. If there is a possibility that something like this occurred, as a quasi-reprise of Bendo, the tale’s doubtfulness increases with the subsequent detail that there was, somewhat inevitably in this sort of tale, an old miser with a beautiful young wife, and Rochester was said, with Buckingham’s connivance, to have distracted the miser in the tavern while he seduced the wife in her home, robbing the husband in the process. One of the few details that rings even slightly true is that he was said to have donned female attire for such a seduction; memories of the virtuous Mrs Bendo are never far away. After this, the usual misanthropy that accompanies such prurient cautionary tales becomes clear. Rochester allegedly abandoned the now ruined wife after she had been seduced by Buckingham, encouraging her to become a prostitute, ‘the only trade for which you are now suited’. The husband, upon learning of his wife’s ruin and the loss of his fortune, hanged himself in grief. Rochester and Buckingham, far from being moved by this, apparently found it hilarious, and regaled many a dinner table with this boisterous anecdote.

  Were this story true, in whole or in part, then it would be difficult to think well of Rochester. The times when he behaved conspicuously badly in his life—​such as his near-abandonment of his wife and children, his cowardice at Epsom and the arrogant destruction of Charles’s sundial—​are hard to defend, but his actions stemmed from carelessness, drunkenness or panic, rather than from calculated malice. If one believes the Bendo episode to have been bad behaviour, then it stemmed less from a desire to hurt than from his fascination with theatricality and the creation of a deliberately satiric persona, designed to mock the society he inhabited. Similarly, it is unlikely that two figures of the public reputation of Buckingham and Rochester had the time, patience and interest to go to the trouble of styling themselves as innkeepers for some casual seduction and theft. While the story has a certain fictitious interest, its occasional inclusion in biographies of Rochester as fact is a depressing testament to widespread credulity when it comes to his notorious reputation.

  However, in the decades after Rochester’s death, most of the comments on his reputation were at least partially accurate, and tended to be flattering. Anthony à Wood’s 1692 description of him as ‘a person of most rare parts’, with ‘delightfully adventurous and frolicsome’ enthusiasms, is typical, as is his moralizing comment that ‘the affections of the dissolute... heightened his spirits (enflamed by wine) into one almost uninterrupted fit of wantonness and intemperance’. Wood also notes that Rochester’s supposed deathbed conversion had been big business ever since his death, commenting that a pamphlet had been published entitled The Two Noble Converts; or The Earl of Marlborough and the Earl of Rochester: Their Dying Requests to the Atheists and Debauchees of the Age, but that ‘this was feigned and merely written by a scribbler to get a little money’. There was a good deal of residual warmth for Rochester; Aubrey approvingly cites Marvell’s comment that Rochester was ‘the best English satirist and had the right vein’ and laments, ‘’Twas pity death took him off so soon.’ An anonymous 1695 squib nailed his enduring popularity:

  Let this describe the nation’s character

  One man reads Milton, forty, Rochester.

  This adulation continued into the first half of the eighteenth century, aided by Anthony Hamilton’s ghostwritten memoirs of Philibert, Comte de Gramont. Gramont was a French nobleman who had been at the Restoration court at various times in the 1670s, and Hamilton, his brother-in-law, wrote a highly embellished account of the life and times of Charles and his courtiers, including Rochester. Memoirs of the Comte de Gramont, first published in England in 1714, flatters most of the characters depicted in it, showing the age as an enlightened (and Enlightened) one, with Charles as a wise and regal king. While its publication was partly designed to embarrass the new Hanoverian king, George I, by praising the Stuart dynasty that he had supplanted, it was a huge popular success, and the stories within it were quickly accepted as fact, despite the length of time that had elapsed between the events described and the composition of the book.

  Rochester’s presence in the book is comparatively benign, although his poetry is all but ignored. Instead, he is presented as an arch (in both senses) seducer; he is described as ‘the man in England who has least honour and most wit’, one whose ready determination to bed as many women as possible leads him into amusing scrapes with the queen’s maid of honour, Goditha Price, and her rival for Rochester’s affections, a Miss Hobart. The book, replete with much hammy dialogue and tongue-in-cheek authorial moralizing, is an entertaining enough read as a work of fiction revolving around real people—​a kind of Restoration comedy redux—​but the flowery tone and somewhat clichéd presentation of Rochester mean that this can be safely disregarded as fantasy. Again, some biographers have decided that Gramont and Hamilton’s work is a valuable source of otherwise unknown material about Rochester and regurgitated it without qualm. A more discerning reader might hesitate to swallow it so blithely.

  The literary aristocracy of the time varied in its appreciation of Rochester’s work, ever mindful of the life that it stemmed from. Daniel Defoe was an admirer, comparing him to Virgil, Horace and Milton, and openly wished that the genius of satire and wit that Rochester and some of his contemporaries possessed were alive in the Augustan age. Pope, however, was always ambivalent about Rochester. On the one hand, unwilling to acknowledge him as a fellow satirist and decrier of society, he publicly described him as nothing more than ‘a holiday writer’, a gentlemen amateur rather than a poet, and, taking a moral line, called him ‘of a very bad turn of mind, as well as debauched’. Set against this, he compares him favourably with the likes of John Oldham, saying that he has ‘much more delicacy’ and (a double-edged compliment, this) ‘more knowledge of mankind’. His private views were more nuanced. His poem ‘On Silence’ is a clear homage to ‘Upon Nothing’, and his late poem ‘Imitations of Horace’ alludes to Rochester, indicating that the latter’s poetry grew on him throughout his life.

  Rochester’s popularity continued until at least the middle of the eighteenth century. He is referred to in passing in Fielding’s Tom Jones, albeit in an obscene context,* and the titular character of the same author’s Shamela is supposed to be reading his poems, and is therefore referred to as a ‘damned, impudent, stinking, cursed, confounded Jade’. Rochester would have been delighted to have heard such trenchant and informed literary criticism. However, his fame (or infamy) stemmed as much from his life as from his verse.

  Rochester’s work was taken more seriously in Enlightenment France. In the late 1720s Voltaire alluded to his reputation as nothing more than that of ‘the man of pleasure’, but writes ‘with regard to myself, I would willingly descri
be in him the man of genius, the great poet’. He even compares ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’ favourably with the original by Boileau, praising its ‘licentious impetuosity and fire’. A later judgement was more balanced. Voltaire praises him for the extremity of everything from his ideas to his dissipation; but he also alludes to his dilettantism, saying that he was ‘attracted to nothing unless it was extraordinary, which he very soon got tired of’, and commented that, although he was ‘wiser and more eloquent than any other young man of his period’, he never gave ‘himself the trouble of going into anything deeply’. This is more accurate, and fair, than most English criticism of Rochester. Over and over again, his poems begin brilliantly, with a first third, or first half, of thrilling wit and invention, only to be followed by a gradual decline as the initial impetus of writing seems visibly to wane. In his best work, the momentum lasts throughout, but Voltaire’s point is infinitely more useful than yet another lazy description of Rochester as ‘a smutty poet’.

  Unfortunately, laziness and moralizing went hand in hand in Britain for the mid-eighteenth century’s literary critics and writers. As Rochester’s poetry was difficult to get hold of even in an expurgated and muddled form, most judgements were made on his reputation. David Hume sneered in 1757 that ‘the very name of Rochester is offensive to modern ears’, and while he praises ‘such energy of style and such poignancy of satire’, he makes the damning comparison that the ancient satirists ‘no more resemble the licence of Rochester than the nakedness of an Indian does that of a common prostitute’. The following year Horace Walpole claimed that the poems contained ‘more obscenity than wit’, and openly denounces Marvell’s view that Rochester was a satirical master, saying ‘indelicacy does not spoil flattery more than it does satire’.

  Even when the poetry did appear, it was in a compromised version. A typical example is a 1761 forgery, which came with a tortuously convoluted preface explaining how the poems were given by Rochester on his deathbed to a manservant:

  [He] was commanded to have them destroyed, but... disobeyed his master’s wishes, and dying many years after, left the manuscripts to his daughter. She, believing herself to be in possession of her father’s will, visited a young advocate who told her what the papers were, and knowing her to be poor, received them instead of a fee.

  This was, of course, an obvious lie, but gives a telling depiction of how Rochester was regarded then. Still, the preface was accurate enough, extolling the work to those who had ‘youth, fire, wit and discernment’, as well as hoping it might not be ‘distasteful to those cool readers who have lived ’til pleasure lost its relish’.

  One reader who had perhaps lost relish in pleasure by the late eighteenth century was Samuel Johnson, whose verdict on Rochester in his 1779 biographical work Lives of the English Poets would be one of the major sources for subsequent criticism of him, in both senses. Johnson offers a potted account of his life, with undue emphasis placed on his cowardice and wickedness; it contains this treasurable paragraph:

  Thus, in a course of drunken gaiety, and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, and a resolute denial of every religious obligation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness.

  Johnson wrote his book in an enormous hurry, which meant that his comments on his subjects tended to be black and white, rather than nuanced. He has a few words of praise for Rochester’s poetry—​it ‘still retains some splendour beyond that which genius has bestowed’—​and singles out ‘Upon Nothing’ as his strongest work. Yet he also criticizes his poems for being ‘commonly short, such as one fit of resolution would produce’ and having ‘no particular character... [they] are commonly smooth and easy, but have little nature, and little sentiment’. He ends by bemoaning ‘a life spent in ostentatious contempt of regularity’, and, in what was to become a common refrain, asks rhetorically what Rochester might have been capable of had he lived. That what Rochester did achieve was far ahead of most of his contemporaries (and successors) was not something that occurred to Johnson, whose moral view of him as an idle debauchee overshadows everything else. The deathbed conversion is mentioned in passing, and Burnet’s account of it commended for its piety.

  The first half of the nineteenth century continued this trend. Rochester’s coruscating social satires and bawdy lyrics were miles away from the concerns of the Romantic poets, and so he was dismissed as, variously, ‘a melancholy proof of the final effects of genius perverted and talents misapplied’ (Charles Cooke, 1800); one upon whom ‘the mark of the beast is set visibly on [his] forehead’ (Thomas Moore, 1806); and a man who ‘displayed considerable talent without producing any one poem of distinguished merit’ (Robert Chambers, 1836). As a man and as a poet, he is found wanting, with some writers even openly questioning why his name had remained in discussion for the past century, hinting that it might have been kinder to allow him to descend into obscurity.

  There are two noticeable exceptions to this, one explicit and one implicit. William Hazlitt, never afraid to offer an iconoclastic view, praised Rochester in an 1818 lecture, saying: ‘Rochester’s poetry is the poetry of wit combined with the love of pleasure, of thought with licentiousness.’ Unlike many others, he does not dismiss him as merely a holiday or part-time poet, claiming that ‘his extravagant heedless levity has a sort of passionate enthusiasm in it; his contempt for everything that others respect almost amounts to sublimity’. Like Johnson, he praises ‘Upon Nothing’, but also says, with just a touch of hyperbole, that ‘his epigrams were the bitterest, the least laboured and the truest that were ever written’. This appreciation was something that he was consistent about; in his 1824 book Select British Poets, he praises Rochester’s wit for being ‘keen and caustic’, and makes the telling comment that ‘his verses cut and sparkle like diamonds’. A diamond is a dazzling decorative object, but is famously hard as well; the comparison was an apt one.

  However, there was one figure who would be compared with Rochester, both favourably and otherwise, from the moment that, as he put it, ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous’. This was George Gordon Byron—​Lord Byron—​a man who was, as his sometime paramour Lady Caroline Lamb described him, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. The similarities between the two, in terms of both their lives and their poetry, are striking. Both inherited titles while still children after the premature deaths of their hard-drinking fathers, and both subsequently had difficult relationships with their mothers. Both went on to scandalize society with their sexual libertinism and bitingly satirical verse. Both were repeatedly unfaithful to their wives, and were believed to enjoy sex with men and women. Both were constantly in debt thanks to their financial profligacy. Both were notorious figures who nevertheless represented the complexities and contradictions of their time in miniature, and both died young, Rochester at thiry-three and Byron at thirty-six, with their memoirs posthumously destroyed for fear of the scandal contained within.

  Of course, there are also crucial differences. Byron travelled throughout Europe, eventually dying in Greece in 1824. After his grand tour, Rochester only made it as far as France later in his life, and then infrequently. Byron appalled society by allegedly having an incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, which led him to leave England; Rochester’s most notable extra-marital sexual dalliance was with Elizabeth Barry, although rumours persisted that he had had an incestuous affair with Anne Wharton, his niece. Rochester’s circle was that of the court and its aristocratic milieu; Byron, although lumped by posterity into the exclusive gang of the Romantic poets, had few wishes to befriend Georgian royalty, instead preferring the company of fellow devil-may-care adventurers. Perhaps in this he was not so very different from his precursor, after all.

  The two also differed in their poetry. While both wrote in an accessible, conversational register that makes their work immediately appealing, Rochester tended to
concentrate on shorter, more pointed satires and lyrics, with none of his poems stretching to more than a couple of hundred lines. Byron, meanwhile, thrived on length and discursiveness. His greatest work, Don Juan, runs to 16,000 lines, and remained unfinished even then. It offers lines worthy of Rochester, especially in the opening Dedication, with its dismissal of his nemesis Southey building to a fine piece of ribaldry:

  You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know,

  At being disappointed in your wish

  To supersede all warblers here below,

  And be the only blackbird in the dish.

  And then you overstrain yourself, or so,

  And tumble downward like the flying fish

  Gasping on deck, because you soar too high,

  Bob, and fall for lack of moisture quite a dry Bob.

  A Byron and Rochester aficionado might therefore reasonably expect there to be some confluence between the two, some letter of Byron’s in which he praises his spiritual forefather, some poem dedicated to ‘the great John, Earl of R’. Unfortunately, no such document exists. The Romantic poets are suspiciously quiet about Rochester; Coleridge never mentions him, and Byron’s allusions to him are limited, and give little impression other than a vague lack of interest. He certainly knew of his work, but—​perhaps fearing that the similarities were too great and might be used against him by his many enemies—​chose not to comment on it in any great detail. Thus a promising literary association is mostly rejected.