Blazing Star
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Songs & Verses Mannerly Obscene
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For my father, who loved books
No glorious thing was ever made to stay
My Blazing-Star but visits, and away
LORD ROCHESTER,
‘A Very Heroical Epistle
in Answer to Ephelia’
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Dedication
Introduction
A note on sources
Chapter 1: ‘A dispute ’twixt heaven and earth’: 1647–1658
Chapter 2: ‘I all the flattering youth defy’: 1658–1664
Chapter 3: ‘The easiest King and best-bred man alive’: 1660–1664
Chapter 4: ‘His boasted honour and dear-born fame’: 1665–1667
Chapter 5: ‘A new scene of foppery began’: 1667–1671
Chapter 6: ‘The loving drunkard or the drunken lover’: 1671–1673
Chapter 7: ‘Leave this gaudy, gilded stage’: 1673–1674
Chapter 8: ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’: 1674
Chapter 9: ‘Something of the angel yet undefaced in him’: 1675–1676
Chapter 10: ‘This famous pathologist Doctor Bendo’: 1676–1677
Chapter 11: ‘Past joys have more than paid what I endure’: 1677–1678
Chapter 12: ‘Nor can weak truth your reputation save’: 1678–1679
Chapter 13: ‘Some formal band and beard takes me to task’: 1679–1680
Chapter 14: ‘A man half in the grave’: May–July 1680
Chapter 15: ‘Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies’: 1680–1685
Chapter 16: ‘All my past life is mine no more’: 1685–
Songs & Verses Mannerly Obscene
Cover
Welcome Page
Introduction
The Discovery
‘’Twas a Dispute ’Twixt Heaven and Earth’
‘Fair Chloris in a Pigsty Lay’
The Imperfect Enjoyment
Against Constancy
A Ramble in St James’s Park
Love and Life
‘Leave this Gaudy, Gilded Stage’
Upon his Drinking a Bowl
Signior Dildo
A Satire on Charles II
‘Love a Woman? You’re an Ass!’
A Satire Against Reason and Mankind
A Letter from Artemisia in Town to Chloe in the Country
To the Postboy
The Disabled Debauchee
Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover
Upon Nothing
An Epistolary Essay from MG to OB Upon their Mutual Poems
A Translation from Seneca’s Troades
Picture section
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Picture credits
Index
About this Book
Reviews
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Introduction
When the ill-fated film of Lord Rochester’s life, The Libertine, first screened at the Toronto Film Festival in 2004, early word was not good. While there was no screaming on the non-existent social media by disappointed Johnny Depp fans desperate to vent their spleen—something along the lines, perhaps, of ‘what is this cr8p who cares about sum dead poet lol where is capn jack’—wild rumours began to circulate that the powerful distributor, Harvey Weinstein, was shocked at the film’s apparently lurid and provocative content, which was said to include everything from necrophilia and graphically depicted orgies to a scene in which Rochester advances on a young page boy and declaims, in a poetic style unfortunately akin to that of Pam Ayres briefly possessed by the spirit of Jean Genet, ‘You’ve cut me down, I must confess/But in my mouth your balls must rest.’
As usual, the rumours proved to be false. I discuss later on why The Libertine is both a disappointingly muddled account of Rochester’s life and times and an artistic mishap on its own terms, but it is somewhat regrettable from an entertainment perspective that the film didn’t go further in its sensationalistic and lurid mythologizing. An on-form Ken Russell in his 1970s heyday might have worked wonders with the short but spectacular life of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester.
Indeed, Russell’s trademark bombast and flamboyance might—for once—have seemed almost sedate in comparison with what really happened in Rochester’s thirty-three-year span on the planet between 1647 and 1680. John Wilmot’s adventures embraced tempestuous feuds with the great and good of the age (including the Poet Laureate, John Dryden); annual banishment from Charles II’s court for his outrageous behaviour; the abduction of his future wife and subsequent imprisonment in the Tower of London; posing as an Italian doctor (and his wife) for the purpose of defrauding the gullible; and—of course—a very great deal of sex. When he wrote in a late poem that he had ‘swived more whores more ways than Sodom’s walls’, it seemed less like a boast than a mere statement of fact. It was little wonder that he died, agonizingly, of syphilis.
As for his poetry, it was synonymous with the man, full of obscene humour, four-letter words and outrageous sexual detail, but displaying little obvious literary worth. Samuel Johnson huffed in a posthumous account of Rochester’s life that he had ‘blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness’ and accepted wisdom for centuries has been that the wicked Wilmot was one of the most notorious and dastardly men who ever set foot upon the earth. His name has become a byword for licentiousness; when Russell Brand was first building his reputation as a louche bon vivant, comparisons with his Restoration predecessor were often made.
But there is also another Rochester, who has not received his due. This man was a heroic naval officer, who served his country with much credit in the Anglo-Dutch War. He was an Oxford graduate of enormous intellectual and artistic curiosity who spent his formative years on the continent where he encountered many of the leading thinkers of the day, before returning to the social upheaval of the Restoration court where, unusually for one of the period’s fops on the make, he never lost the common touch, even as he walked with the king. He was a fond (if capricious) husband and lover, a loving father and a faithful and loyal friend to many. Many of the more violent and cruel antics ascribed to him were either falsely attributed, or simply never occurred. His poetry explored the preoccupations of the age with a mixture of witty sophistication and original thought, and some of his love lyrics are amongst the most beautiful of the time. Hazlitt called his writing ‘the poetry of wit combined with the love of pleasure’, praised his ‘passionate enthusiasm’ and called his epigrams ‘the truest that were ever written’. Dying cruelly young, he deprived England, and English literature, of one of its brightest lights, but even as he lingered on his deathbed, a lifelong interest in religion came to his consciousness once more.
So there are two sides of Rochester, neatly encapsulated in his fictional representation as Dorimant in his friend George Etherege’s The Man Of Mode, of whom it is said ‘I know he is a devil, but he has something of the angel yet undefaced in him.’ It would be a misreading of his character to attempt either to dismiss Rochester as merely a diabolic rake, or to rehabilitate him as a decent and kindly man who has had a remarkably unfair posthumous reputation. What makes him such a fascinating figure, as both a man and a writer, is that the two sides of him were in constant opposition throughout his life, and remained so until his death. While this frustrates easy attempts at analysis, it makes for a fascinating and complex story.
Yet this boo
k is more than just the story of John Wilmot. He stood at the centre of an era of social mobility the like of which England had never seen before. He was born at a time when every accepted idea, from hereditary monarchy to the role of Parliament, was being challenged, and where the resulting vacuum allowed first Cromwell and the Commonwealth and then Charles II to mould the country in their own image. As Rochester’s fortunes and reputation rose, he found himself, a soldier’s son, in a position where he became one of the leading men at court. It was an era where casual street violence was as likely to end your life as any plague or war, and where if you sold your body, you could prosper and rise to the top of court, just as easily as you might find yourself dead from disease before you reached adulthood. Everything was literally up for grabs.
The thirty-three years that Rochester lived were some of the most remarkable in the history of England. The age was rich in hard living and strong wine, but also in architectural innovation, literary achievement, philosophical investigation and scientific advance. It was a time of plague, and of fire. It was a time of uncertainty, as few knew whether this new age of libertine royalty would last, or whether it would be as short-lived as Cromwell’s rule had been. It was a time of carpe diem, and of rebirth. Rochester, and those around him, turned the accepted orthodoxies that had lasted for centuries before on their heads in a brief, bawdy, brilliant historical moment. With their thoughts, words and actions, the ‘merry gang’ redefined society, for good or for ill, as the old certainties were swept away and a new world was explored, full of dangerous but thrilling contradictions—between piety and debauchery, obedience and free-thinking.
In this, as in many ways, he is a man who speaks to our own time as much as he did to his. Writing this while listening to the stultifying drone of Prime Minister’s Questions in the background, I am reminded that we still need a man, or woman, who can stand up, expose the bland and cynical hypocrisies of politicians and self-appointed opinion-formers for what they are and refuse to place them-selves on a pedestal of virtue, and instead argue that it is by embracing our flaws, contradictions and baser desires that we are set free from the dull and oppressive orthodoxies of everyday life. If Rochester epitomizes anything, it is free thought, free speech and free love—freedom, in fact, in all its forms.
Yet it is not for me to influence your reaction to Rochester, a polarizing figure if ever there was one. The opening lines of The Libertine promise, or threaten, ‘You will not like me now, and you will like me a good deal less as we go on,’ before announcing that he is ‘up for it, all the time’. Whether you find yourself seduced or repelled by the Earl, boredom is never an option with him as your guide to Restoration England, in all its opulence and licence, baseness and cruelty.
And with that, as Rochester writes, ‘Come on sir, I’m pre-pared...’
A note on sources
In Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novel, Death Is Now My Neighbour, Morse and Lewis at one point find a piece of evidence that purports to be a poem by John Wilmot. Supposedly dated 1672, it reads at first glance as being nothing like Rochester’s work:
Ten Times I beg, dear Heart, let’s Wed!
(Thereafter long may Cupid reigne)
Let’s tread the Aisle, where thou hast led
The fifteen Bridesmaides in thy Traine.
Then spend our honeyed Moon a-bed,
With Springs that creake againe—againe!
The poem is a forgery,* something easily deduced by the ever capable Morse, who instead realizes that it contains a code that leads to the murder’s subsequent solution. However, whether intention-ally or not, Dexter makes the point that the authenticity of Rochester’s writing, more so than most other writers of his era, presents a problematic challenge for anyone reading his works, whether a scholar, biographer or casual enthusiast. Therefore, it is worth outlining the assumptions, decisions and speculations that I have made in the course of this book, and seeking to justify why they needed to be made at all.
The normal means of ‘publication’ for an aristocratic or courtier writer, such as Rochester, was for a fair copy of a poem to be made and then circulated in manuscript form. There was even some precise etiquette in how it was circulated, with most existing manuscripts showing where the poem would have been folded when it was passed between its readers. The outside bore either the work’s title or its contents, and often the name and address of its recipient. The work was not made public in any published form during the writer’s life unless he (or she, in the case of Aphra Behn) wished it to be, so printed publication should be viewed as an accident rather than a deliberate intention on the part of the poet. This was, of course, different in the case of a professional writer such as Dryden, who explicitly wrote for publication and to earn a living by his pen.
During his lifetime, only three poems of Rochester’s were published, namely his juvenile university works, and none of the others acquired a wider readership beyond the court. Instead, his reputation was entirely based on his actions, whether those he actually performed or those with which he was associated. The first time that any of his poems appeared, in 1680, they were explicitly derived from a variety of manuscripts, some of which were poems by him and others of which were merely attributed to him. His public reputation was such that certain, generally obscene, things were expected from him. Without an editor, or anyone with first-hand knowledge of his canon, there was no internal discipline or any definitive collection of his work, and so a confusion began that has persisted ever since. As the literary critic Keith Walker says in his 1984 edition of his work, ‘the case of the texts of Rochester’s poems is, I think, unique.’
As a result of his mother’s destruction of his own manuscript verses posthumously, prompted by her horror and disgust at their contents, remarkably few poems in Rochester’s own hand (a fairly identifiable hand, at that) still survive in so-called ‘holograph manuscripts’. Rochester is not known to have made any explicit public statements linking himself to specific poems, whether in letters or by proclamation, although there are passages in some of his letters where the language directly echoes his poetry, especially in his epistles to Henry Savile, which implies that his readers, and friends, would have been familiar with them. Certainly, his enemies were, as can be seen by Mulgrave and Dryden’s 1679 poetic attack, ‘An Essay upon Satire’. Nonetheless, making a case that a given work purportedly by Rochester is actually his on the basis of internal evidence alone is tricky.
The major early editions that most editors have chosen (reluctantly) to use are the pirated and unreliable 1680 ‘Antwerp’ edition, which has around thirty-four (of sixty-one) poems which are now believed to be by Rochester himself; a 1691 version edited and published by the bookseller Jacob Tonson, who adds another eight works while omitting many of the bawdier satires and editing stanzas from others (he writes that he has ‘taken exceeding care that every block of offence should be removed’); and the so-called ‘Portland Manuscript’, currently residing in Nottingham University, which gathers together another twenty-eight poems, ten of which are in Rochester’s hand. This makeshift canon of around seventy or so poems was to be the basis on which Rochester scholarship proceeded for the next two-and-a-half centuries.
Probably the foremost Rochester editor of the twentieth century, David Vieth, has also proved the most controversial. Assessing the Rochester canon at seventy-six poems in his edition of 1968, along with seven dubious ones which he includes in an appendix, Vieth made several decisions that have rankled with other scholars since, not least his dating of the poetry in chronological categories that include ‘Prentice Work’, ‘Tragic Maturity’ and ‘Disillusionment and Death’. While I have broadly agreed with the attribution of the Rochester canon Vieth proposes, dating has proved to be a trickier subject. There is the occasional instance when a poem of Rochester’s can be both authenticated and dated, as is the case with the February 1680 letter from Charles Blount responding to Rochester’s translation of Seneca’s Troades. These
instances, unfortunately, are fewer than might be desired.
Instead, Vieth has based many of his dates on those found within or upon manuscript copies. If these do contain a date, this does not necessarily corroborate the year that a particular poem was written—it is possible that it might be wrong by at least a year in either direction, although probably not more than two. In the case of many poets this would be an irritation, but in Rochester’s case such a question of dating is central. If, for instance, ‘The Disabled Debauchee’ first appeared in 1673, it reads as a light-hearted account of an imagined series of routs, somewhat akin to a dramatic monologue. If it is dated 1675 (and it is probably more likely to have appeared then), when Rochester’s life had altered drastically, the temptation to see a greater autobiographical focus in the work is stronger.
The biographer, therefore, is forced to attribute and date the majority of the poems according to a mixture of internal information, reasonable circumstantial and historical evidence, and some literary detective work. I have tried to indicate, wherever appropriate, where definite fact ends and informed supposition begins, but it is a central question in assessing Rochester’s life to determine which of the poems that he ‘wrote’ were really by him, and which have been falsely ascribed to him. It is a task that is simultaneously frustrating and fascinating.
The letters, meanwhile, are less problematic. First, Rochester’s distinctive (and blessedly legible) handwriting means that questions of attribution only become an issue later in his life, when the letters written by amanuenses while he lay on his deathbed might or might not represent his genuine beliefs at the time (although most bear his signature). And secondly, although Rochester seldom dated his letters, many of the replies from such correspondents as Henry Savile, his wife and Buckingham are dated, often making it possible to determine Rochester’s location as well as his actions at a specific time between 1665 and 1680. Occasionally, however, it has been necessary to speculate on the time of undated letters as well. On the whole, I have agreed with the conclusions of the critic Jeremy Treglown, whose excellent 1980 edition of Rochester’s letters offers an impressive range of biographical and allusive material that makes a fascinating counterpoint to the contents of the correspondence. I have also included some previously unpublished letters found in the course of my research, most notably a collection in the National Archives of Scotland, which further our understanding of his relationship both with his mistress Elizabeth Barry and with his protégé the Earl of Arran.