by Janet Todd
In due course the relationship resulted in pregnancy and, in December 1677, Barry bore Rochester a child, a girl she named Hesther or Esther. Rochester was absent and Nell Gwyn was ‘not without some gentle reflexions on your Lordships want either of generosity or bowells toward a lady who had not refused you the full enjoyment of all her charmes’.3 ‘[P]issing.... blood’ in the country, Rochester apologised for sending only ‘Trifles’, since he ‘could come at no more’, and he wrote to congratulate Barry on her delivery, hoping ‘in a little while to look on you with all your beauty about you’. Obviously the ‘great-belly’ had not much excited him. He was glad ‘the child is of the soft sex I love’—it was just as well for a bastard.4
‘Anger, spleen, revenge, and shame’ followed, although Rochester still declared he loved Barry above all things.5 Perhaps she was not a good mother, perhaps, for all his unconventionality, the Earl had old-fashioned ideas of child-raising, or perhaps he feared her affairs with other men. For whatever reason, he threatened to seize the infant.6
Behn may have come to Rochester through Elizabeth Barry in the mid-1670s, although it is possible that he knew her before and helped the reception of her early plays; later, she claimed that he first praised her verses, ‘School’d’ her ‘loose Neglect’, and ‘rais’d’ her ‘fame’.7 She was enormously impressed by him, a young man of poetic gifts, Continental knowledge, glamorous alcoholic style, and aristocratic insouciance. He could afford to scorn fame and money and yet his work, even when it stung as well as mocked, won admiration from everyone of taste. To Aphra Behn he presented ease, charm, power, and effortless skill.
Although not from the major nobility or extremely rich, Rochester came of an exotic father, Lord Wilmot, who had died in exile and had accompanied the King in his escape from Worcester. Memorably he had refused to put on a disguise ‘saying that he should look frightfully in it’.8 This was the sort of panache the son emulated and then surpassed. Clarendon claimed that Lord Wilmot’s wit was inspired when ‘in the very exercise of debauchery’. The son could have said the same.
Behn was not repulsed by Rochester’s seamier side, his drunkenness, his bullying violence, the story of cowardice put about by his enemy, the Earl of Mulgrave, and his comic but menacing exploits of spying on others. Behn, too, liked gossip and scandal and the sense of people’s being looked at without their knowledge. Perhaps Killigrew had told her of Corney’s surveillance; if so, it did not wean her from fascination with the power of the unknown gaze. The stories of Rochester posting his spies disguised as sentries at the bedroom doors of those he wished to lampoon did not shock her and she appreciated that, as a sympathetic memoirist wrote, ‘never did he stab into the Wounds of fallen Virtue, with a base and cowardly Insult’.9 Nor did he with his mimicry and his practical jokes. They placed him in her world of the theatre.
More surprisingly, Behn was not deterred by Rochester’s misogyny, seeing his comic, almost manic, version as usefully moderating the more sinister sort in the general Christian culture. In this, as so often, she showed herself athwart later feminism and femininity. With Rochester, as with Ravenscroft, Behn became not so much a sex object or an asserter of feminism as one of the boys, using male language with a freedom no proper lady could have allowed herself. At the same time, she remained a woman of her time and culture, enjoying gender play and demanding and receiving the attention of gallantry. Rochester, misogynist as he so often sounded, made sex funny.
The Earl was one of a coterie who ‘reverence bottle & bold Truth’, part of what the Parliamentarian poet, Andrew Marvell, called the ‘merry gang’ and Dryden ‘men of pleasant conversation... ambitious to distinguish themselves from the herd of gentlemen’.10 They were on the whole sceptical young courtiers, like their King enjoying masquerade and frequenting brothels and the theatre. They scandalised the citizens with their pranks and crimes—as they fully intended to do.
The shifting and quarrelsome group—which at different times included Rochester, the gentlemanly playwrights, Etherege and Wycherley, the later Whig, the Earl of Dorset, Sir Charles Sedley, Henry Savile, the Earl of Mulgrave (before he became Rochester’s ferocious enemy), and Killigrew’s son, Henry—had enormous power within the theatre and inevitably attracted other playwrights to them.11 Even if they were not actual patrons, the nobles in this group could pre-engage an audience and direct response. Dorset, an elegant and witty poet whose short satirical songs were in the patrician pastoral style Behn herself sometimes affected, was a generous supporter of Dryden, Otway and Wycherley. In 1685 Behn herself wrote a pindaric for Dorset’s wedding to Mary Compton; in it she used her invented character ‘Damon’ to lament her own lack of riches. Yet she seems not to have appealed to Dorset in the 1670s. He did not like Hoyle, so perhaps that was a deterrent.
Rochester surpassed others of this glittering group, becoming almost mythological in his own time. His wit and his activities were not just idiosyncratic; rather, they appeared as an extreme form of what others might say and do. But what he said and did became definitive and fixed in the imagination, and anecdotes and sayings naturally stuck to him. His closest friend was Henry Savile, a little older, Groom of the Bedchamber and man about town, from a prominent Royalist family. Behn might have heard of him from his European tour as a young man in 1661 with the Earl of Sunderland and Henry Sidney, the younger brother of Algernon and Philip. Fat and bibulous (Pepys used him as a touchstone of lewdness), Savile juggled, as Rochester never quite did, politics and pleasure, giving up neither.
With Savile, Rochester, who famously declared his preference for ‘a sweet, soft page’ to ‘forty wenches’, may have been physically intimate, and he appears to have dispatched one or two possible lovers to his friend. One of these was James Paisible the French musician, sent as a ‘present’ from the ‘tired bugger’ Rochester. By 1677 Paisible was in favour at court and the King was hearing his compositions ‘with very great delight’.12 Aphra Behn wrote a poem to go with one of his tunes, in which a despairing lover threatens to haunt his unfaithful mistress as a ghost.13
Rochester’s fatherless and shifting background was like that of many of the witty young men at court, as well as some lawyers like Hoyle. Deracinated, they were attracted to a popular version of the individualistic and materialistic philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, bugbear of the orthodox and tutor for a time of the King himself; his Leviathan (1651) caused him to be denounced as an ‘atheist’. Hobbesianism, with its foreshadowings in the classical philosophies of Epicurus and Lucretius, dominated court culture: indeed Hobbes was said to have ‘corrupted half the gentry of the nation’.14 Even the members of the Royal Society had found his materialism too extreme to countenance and he had been refused membership.
For Thomas Hobbes, the spring of human motivation was the desire for self-gratification; the desirable was the state of ease, so action sprang from fear. In the absence of any compelling spiritual reality, reason served animal appetite. Since humanity was a mass of shifting atoms, the ‘present only has a being in nature. Things past have a being in the memory, only. But things to come have no being at all, the future being but a fiction of the mind.’15 This implied no care for an afterlife. In fact, Hobbes thought knowledge of the past could develop prudence and foresight, but Rochester reinterpreted the notion as a justification for refusing constraint and any notion of consistency or fidelity: ‘’Tis Nature’s Law to Change, / Constancy alone is strange.’16 For Rochester, brought up in a pious household, it was perhaps the shocking reversal of Christianity implied in so much of Hobbes and the old philosophers that attracted him. For Charles Blount and others of Rochester’s later circle, it was simply the thoroughgoing scepticism.
Hoyle had been a follower of Hobbes, but, in Rochester, Behn found the philosophy combined with wit and nobility more seductive. She had scanty religious grounding: her poetry reveals few echoes of liturgy or scripture and her inevitable years of churchgoing seem to have left little residue. Hobbes was not an atheist in the modern sen
se, but he did dislike doctrinal religion, and his mechanistic, materialist philosophy, if carefully cherry-picked, could be made to support libertinism and allow a freedom from shame and corruption that attracted Behn as much as it did Rochester. People were free and noble until they became wretched through concepts of law and sin, both inventions of the human mind.
One element of the libertine philosophy that amused Behn was the notion of the critical moment. If atoms were shifting, they were in conjunction only once. Translated, this became the critical sexual moment at which orgasm had to happen. In The Man of Mode, Dorimant told Harriet that they should use ‘the lucky Minute’ and Rochester’s Cloris, refusing princes, found her ‘lucky minute’ with a swain.
In his dedication to Rochester of Marriage A-la-Mode in 1672, Dryden wrote that, if the play were raised above the common rank, it was because he had been ‘admitted to your Lordship’s Conversation’. This was flattery, but it seems that easy aristocratic wit could affect the style of less privileged and more professional writers. In a curious way, the groups may slightly have envied each other. People like Dryden, and even more so Behn, coveted the status of the nobly born and gifted, while admiring their confidence and haughty disdain for mercenary scribblers. At the same time, someone like Rochester, without much political ambition, had no very clear function, and some of his manic escapades suggest a vast energy with no necessary channels such as the earning of a living would have provided.
Aphra Behn could write easily and fluently. This was just the skill for an amusing evening of the sort that the ageing expatriate French nobleman, Saint-Évremond, later described nostalgically to the Duchess of Mazarine: ‘those sprightly Hours of Lord ROCHESTER’s Life, when he fired the Breasts of Ladies with Love, and wounded those of Men with Envy’.17
Behn seems to have been part of various coteries of rhyming wits and she probably came to Rochester’s attention at this time. The atmosphere he created round him was inspiring to Behn, who liked company and sparkle. Sometimes many were too drunk to sparkle much, although alcohol tended to inspire Rochester to his greatest flights, ‘his pleasing Extravagance encreasing with his Liquor’ as Saint-Évremond elegantly expressed it.
Drink also inspired the playwright Nat Lee, although it made his face erupt in carbuncles. He, too, was wittier drunk than sober and, since he was often drunk, he was often witty. Although he had a chequered relationship with Rochester and even moved over to his arch rival, Mulgrave, when Rochester dismissed a play of his as sentimental ‘fustian’, Behn liked Lee and they became friends. He may possibly have loved her, for the writer of the ‘Memoirs’ claimed that Behn had the acquaintance and friendship of ‘the most sensible Men of the Age; and the Love of not a few of different Characters; for tho’ a Sot have a Portion of Wit of his own, he yet like Old Age, covets what he cannot enjoy’. After her death, Lee claimed, ‘I lov’d thee inward, and my Thoughts were true / ... Thou hadst my Soul in Secret, and I swear / I found it not, till though resolv’dst to Air.’18 With his wit, drunken jollity and irascibility, Lee was not an easy man to know well but Behn was used to moody, violent men. Although she did not care for his virulent anti-Catholicism, she never let difference of opinion obscure friendship or interest.
Rochester’s poems provided grim pictures of women’s sexuality, but these pictures, Behn saw, sprang from anxiety as much as hate. Sexual feelings in women were accepted and sometimes women might imitate the frankness of men. Restoration culture exploited the female body, but it allowed women to exploit the exploitation, in the process giving a space to the unfeminine female for a kind of expression not allowed before in English culture. Behn’s plays had already suggested some frankness on sexual matters, but, within the coterie of the Earl of Rochester, she saw ‘looser Songs, and Pieces, too obscene for the Ladies Eyes’. She may even have read the scandalous play, Sodom, Or, The Triumph of Debauchery; since it had an uncharacteristically awkward style, this was perhaps attributed to Rochester primarily because of his wicked reputation. In the louche atmosphere, Behn began to write poetry even more risqué than she had already done and to mitigate her own sexual grief over Hoyle by seeing sex in comic mode. Burlesque was a good weapon with which to recover self-esteem. She was not too old or too unappealing and need not despair; besides, she had not the temperament for too long aching.
Behn had already adopted a masculine, hearty voice in her poem to Ravenscroft. Now, in the sessions of drink and talk, she heard the real accent: ‘Much wine had passed, with grave discourse / Of who fucks who and who does worse...’. In one evening, the company took up Ovid; perhaps someone had read a French poem based on his famous depiction of impotence in Amores, and brought a copy along. They decided to write on the theme which had, with venereal disease so rampant, become literally a burning issue. Etherege may have proposed it, for he had, in the less explicit days of the early 1660s, already written his own ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’, where the man’s failure was laid to the door of female modesty or prudery—in this drunken gathering there was no mention of ‘brewer’s droop’. The men were interested to see what a woman would write, and urged Behn on.
The poem she wrote, perhaps collaboratively, was called ‘The Disappointment’, and it was a second translation of a French poem. It had a pastoral form and was set in the dry and sunny land of Arcadia, where the ground was never damp. The amorous Lysander surprises fair Cloris when her few defences are down. The pair repair to a lone thicket ‘made for Love’, where Cloris permits his ‘Force’ with ‘a Charming Languishment’. Soon she is taking the initiative.
At first Lysander gains fresh vigour from her desire and her muted and whispered protestations that she will cry out if he goes on. He ‘Kisses her Mouth, her Neck, her Hair’ and presses his burning and trembling hand on her ‘swelling Snowy Brest’. Cloris is now at his disposal; all her ‘Unguarded Beauties lie / The Spoils and Trophies of the Enemy’. He moves swiftly and soon reaches
That Paradice
Where Rage is calm’d, and Anger pleas’d,
That Fountain where Delight still flows,
And gives the Universal World Repose.19
‘Repose’ is not what Lysander achieves, however. They are now ‘joyn’d’ on the moss, Cloris in a swoon of desire, her bosom bare and herself ‘half dead and breathless’, when it becomes apparent that the ‘O’er-Ravish’d Shepherd’ is ‘unable to perform the Sacrifice’. Indeed, as he parts Cloris’s clothes, he realises that his pleasure has become pain, and that he now has desire but no erection. He tries a little masturbation to right matters, but ‘No motion ’twill from Motion take’ and he works away too vigorously or in vain: ‘The Insensible fell weeping in his Hand.’ Cloris is not pleased. She tries with ‘Her timerous Hand’ to feel for his penis but, finding it limp, draws back in horror. As Behn expresses it candidly, ‘The Nymph’s Resentment none but I / Can well Imagine or Condole.’ She does go on to detail the misery of Lysander as well; yet, with some irony, she portrays the swain cursing his birth, fate and stars, but most of all Cloris, whose
Charms,
Whose soft bewitching Influence
Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence.
The woman is at fault through her eagerness and desirability. Presumably Behn knew this scenario well.20
When Rochester put his Cloris in a pig sty and watched her masturbate there, he created a counter pastoral and broke the pastoral scene. Behn resists this level of polarising, but she does make Cloris run out of the pastoral world in comic parody of Daphne fleeing to safeguard her virginity from the amorous and ravishing god Apollo. After this, the euphemisms of the pastoral collapse and the word ‘impotence’ starkly appears.
Although ‘The Disappointment’ follows the French source closely at first, it veers off in the conclusion. The French poet had set his encounter in the world of domestic adultery, not pastoral love and, after Behn concluded, he proceeded for another thirty-six stanzas, of which the deficient lover used five for excited protestation. He
was then hustled out of the window before the approaching husband. There was nothing about the woman’s feelings, but a great deal about the shame and misery of Lysandre who, on the next evening, crept back to the lady, found her sleeping in appealing disarray, leapt on her ‘Like a hawk on its prey’ and recovered his manhood. Behn concludes her poem in the fourteenth stanza of the French original. The shock of her ‘Disappointment’ is that it is the woman’s.
The seventeenth century believed in female pleasure, if few thought it as important as the male’s. With a view of the body based on the four humours, the male was better than but not different from the female, being simply more hot and dry. The male semen was of course what mattered. It made the sex act complete, in many views it begot the child. But female orgasm was also thought necessary for reproduction; so the woman had to be considered and, as the famous sex manual of the time declared it, clitoral excitement ‘is that which gives a Woman Delight in Copulation: For without this a Woman hath neither a Desire to Copulation, and Delight in it...’.21
Probably ‘The Disappointment’ had to be written in a social setting; it is a leap from plays about love and intrigue to poetry about sex, and no English woman before Behn is known to have been so explicit. Still, she was restrained even here, letting the mockery inhere in what she omitted. Rochester did not follow her restraint and, like Etherege and Ovid before him, in his poem of ‘disappointment’ he displayed his man railing against his penis for its failing. For Rochester, the realisation of impotence provoked mock shame and then blind rage in his hero who, however, managed to remember that ‘This dart of love... / With virgin blood the thousand maids have dyed.’