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  John was educated to the typical standards of a young gentleman of the time. He studied Latin from the age of seven or so, as he was introduced to the major writers and philosophers whose work was an integral part of a classical education. The seeds that were sown here would come to fruition later in his life, when his dazzling satires would nod, either explicitly or implicitly, to classical authors such as Catullus and Pliny the Younger. It is likely that an innocent seven-year-old boy was not exposed to the bawdier side of the ancients’ more scatological sallies, and the chances of the God-fearing Mr Giffard having taught John Catullus’ sixteenth poem in particular (which begins pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo—​loosely translated ‘I’ll bugger you and skull-fuck you’—​before heading into even wilder areas) seem unlikely. It was not until much later in life that John encountered the more licentious side of the ancients, whether at court or at university, but their lewd insinuations would, in time, be as strong a literary influence as Mr Giffard’s more seemly instructions.

  While John learnt of great heroes and epic battles of bygone times, his father was planning his final attempt to return to England and regain the throne for his king. After Charles’s defeat in 1651, there had been little concerted effort by English Royalists to rise up against the Commonwealth, but when Cromwell dissolved Parliament in 1653 and appointed himself the quasi-monarchical ‘Lord Protector of England’—​an office that carried with it as much pomp and grandiosity as the king’s had ever done—​it became clear that some attempt had to be made to check his increasingly hubristic ambitions of absolutist rule.

  Cromwell began to turn the country into a virtual police state with the introduction of so-called ‘major generals’—​soldiers who were responsible for keeping order and discipline; in practice, this meant that a network of spies spread throughout the country, and families were encouraged to inform on apparently dissident members. Their reward, they were loftily informed, would be salvation in the next life. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most declined to do so. In the few cases that did come to court the accused were inevitably found guilty, because of the difficulty of finding lawyers willing to defend them. A particularly perverse touch of the Protectorate was that not just the guilty, but the associates of the guilty, were liable to be imprisoned, and these associates would include anyone bold enough to stand in court on behalf of their clients and claim that their obvious guilt was not so. Cromwell’s combination of religious fervour and brutality influenced dictators for centuries to come; but he was not acting merely out of paranoia, rather from justified experience. Royalist plots to topple the Commonwealth and restore Charles II to the throne were an ongoing feature of at least the first half of the Protectorate.

  In February 1655, Wilmot prepared to return to England and try to rid the country of the troublesome Protector. The plan he had hatched, which owed more to optimism than to experience, was to corral remaining Royalist support and to attempt to coordinate a successful military rising against Cromwell: a bold but deeply unlikely plan. The remaining Royalists consisted of the loyalist and secretive Sealed Knot group, which was led by the aristocrats Sir Edward Villiers (Clarendon’s ‘honest Ned’) and John Belasyse, both of whom had maintained a low profile since the death of Charles (in the case of Villiers, hiding in France until 1652); and the more vivacious ‘Action party’, whose membership was an eclectic mix of country gentlemen such as Edward Grey and John Weston, who had Presbyterian contacts and had been under Commonwealth observation since the execution of Charles I. The only thing uniting these disparate men was a loathing of Cromwell, but the uneasy relationship of these groups to each other—​the Sealed Knot favouring careful subterfuge and the Action party preferring open conflict—​should have alerted Wilmot to the implausibility of forcing a military alliance between them.

  Nonetheless, he and his comrade-in-arms Joseph Wagstaffe attempted to divide the responsibility for leading the rebellion between them. The intention was that it should spread across the country, encompassing everywhere from former Royalist strongholds in Oxford and Winchester to strategically useful places such as Newcastle and Chester. Initially, Wilmot would lead an uprising in Yorkshire, and Wagstaffe—​a man who Clarendon described as fitter ‘for execution than counsel’, and one who loved to spend his time ‘in jollity and mirth’, probably a euphemism for heavy drinking—​would take command of the West Country Royalists. The locations were chosen more in the spirit of optimism than because there was deep-rooted support in either area, but initially there seemed the ghost of a chance that the enterprise might work. Cromwell’s spies, led by John Thurloe, secretary to his council of state, were all-powerful in England, but they had failed to stretch their tentacles into Europe, and Wilmot and Wagstaffe believed that various disenfranchised exiles were preparing to return from Europe to the country to raise arms against the Protectorate. There were even rumours that the New Model Army’s commander, Fairfax, disillusioned with Cromwell, might have given his tacit support to a rising.

  Were they to be successful, no doubt many Royalists had pleasing images of Cromwell being beheaded on the same spot where, six years before, Charles I had met his end, and their being rewarded with titles, land and the undying gratitude of Charles II. Unfortunately, this vision proved to be a bold but unfounded fantasy. When Wilmot assembled a force of a couple of hundred Royalists at the strategic point of Marston Moor outside the city of York on 8 March 1655, in the hope that the gates would be opened up and the city’s support immediately bestowed upon them, it soon became hideously clear that he was mistaken. Just as the 1644 Civil War battle at the same location had seen a horrendous Royalist defeat, chaos reigned, as no assistance was forthcoming. Chivalry soon turned to farce, as Wilmot’s assembled soldiers fled in all directions, pursued by the forces of the governor of York, Sir Robert Lilburne.

  As at the Battle of Worcester, Wilmot showed as much alacrity in escape as he had done in planning the attack. This time deigning to adopt a disguise, he was nevertheless arrested at Aylesbury by a magistrate and placed under watch at an inn, to await the arrival of a military escort the next day. Continuing his giddy run of luck, Wilmot bribed the innkeeper with an extremely expensive gold chain and fled into the night with all his ‘rich apparel’. He made it to London, where he lay low amidst Royalist sympathizers and the anonymous throng of inhabitants until he took safe passage to Antwerp later in the year. His hapless servants were less fortunate, being left behind at the inn and at the mercy of the furious military escort, which was expected to arrive at any moment. Bizarrely, Wilmot’s good fortune was mirrored by that of several other high-profile Royalists such as Richard Mauleverer and Thomas Hunt, who had similarly hair’s-breadth escapes from seemingly inevitable and humiliating public executions.

  The only semi-successful part of the March campaign was the Penruddock Rising in Hampshire, led by Wilmot’s co-commander Wagstaffe and Sir John Penruddock. Ignorant of the various failures of 8 March, they occupied Salisbury on 11 March, proclaimed Charles the rightful king, released prisoners from the local jail, and arrested the high sheriff of Wiltshire and held him hostage. Had they attracted any substantial support on their journey through Somerset and Devon, they might have offered a significant threat. However, as at Marston Moor, few joined them, perhaps all too mindful of the consequences of defeat by Cromwell’s highly efficient forces. After a failed last stand in Exeter, Penruddock was arrested, condemned to death and executed on 16 May. Wagstaffe, however, managed to pull off another daring escape, leaping over a church wall on his horse and returning to Amsterdam by July that year.

  Wilmot, Wagstaffe and the others might have left with their lives—​and, in the case of Wilmot, he somehow managed to acquire replacement servants in London despite being one of the most wanted men in the country: an impressive feat under the circumstances. Nevertheless, it was clear, once they were reunited with Charles, that another uprising of this nature was impossible. Their embarrassing failure pointed to a lack of support in the
country at large, indicating that many ordinary people would rather remain with the Cromwellian devil they knew than take a risk on an uncertain new king.

  The nascent rebellion had been crushed with ease, partly because of over-optimistic incompetence, but the royal court, by now based in Cologne in an attempt to obtain more funding, also came to believe that there was a traitor in their midst. For someone without any obvious support in the European courts, Cromwell’s spymaster Thurloe was unusually well informed about the actions and plots of the Royalists in exile; he was also able to round up Royalist sympathizers in England with suspicious ease. So a mole hunt began. The eventual malefactor was revealed to be Henry Manning, an occasional drinking companion of Wilmot, who had kept Thurloe updated with a flow of information that was probably equal parts fact and self-inflating fiction. Manning was not a significant figure in Cologne, but it was clear that he had to be disposed of, so he was brutally killed in a wood in December 1655. History does not record how Thurloe dealt with the removal of his diligent informant, but perhaps it is no coincidence that the following year he took charge of the post office, enabling him to intercept mail on a grand scale.

  As his father continued to traipse around Europe soliciting donations and increasingly vain assistance for the court, John Wilmot began the next stage of his education. While it might have been traditional for the son of a nobleman to have attended one of the great English public schools such as Eton or Winchester, or studied under the leading headmaster of the day, Richard Busby, at Westminster, it was more expedient to Anne and her family to have her son educated locally—​both for reasons of convenience and because of his father’s notoriety—​so he was enrolled at Burford Grammar School at the age of nine. It is possible that he was accompanied by Francis Giffard, but equally likely that he would have lodged with the headmaster or in another local notable’s house.

  The curriculum that he followed was a traditional one. We can glean what contemporary education then consisted of from Charles Hoole’s 1660 book A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School. Hoole, who had taught at Rotherham School, indicates that a classical education was the norm, with boys being taught a mixture of Latin grammar and literature. A grammar school education was designed to broaden and deepen the student’s learning, leaving him with a wide knowledge of the likes of Ovid and Horace (Greek tuition was the preserve of the more famous public schools). There were daily prayers, psalm singing and Bible readings. It is also likely that there was a fearsome amount of corporal punishment; Hoole might have advocated sparing the rod, but his less enlightened contemporaries believed that this would merely spoil the child.

  John Wilmot advanced unspectacularly through his modest gram-mar school education, building up his slender store of knowledge. Nevertheless, there were some unpleasant basic facts about this formative stage of his life: he had been abandoned by a father he barely knew, and his distant mother was more concerned with politicking than attending to her youngest son. A young boy’s typical early education was laden with casual brutality and violence. If he endured this, it would have been against the background of a country where his family was treated with suspicion. The cumulative effect on a frightened, uncertain John Wilmot can only be imagined.

  But in truth we know little of his schooldays, other than tiny, tantalizing hints. When Rochester writes of education in his poems, the results tend to be unedifying. Two of the more notable cases are a reference to schoolboy masturbation in ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’ and his wish, in ‘An Allusion to Horace’, that the playwright Nathaniel Lee, described as a ‘hot-brained fustian fool’, should be ‘well lashed’ at the legendary Richard Busby’s hands in order to re-educate him about Hannibal and Scipio. Likewise, his letters contain no -nostalgic reminiscences of his days at Burford. No records survive of whether he was a good or a weak student; after his death, Rochester’s biographer and final confessor Gilbert Burnet reported that he had ‘perfect mastery of Latin and the masterworks found within it’, but Burnet has to be treated extremely carefully as a witness. However, there is one telling detail that Burnet notes. Upon being asked why the good felt no fear at the prospect of death, and the bad felt terror, Rochester was said to have replied that it was from ‘the impressions that they had received from their education’. If this was the case, then Rochester, by no means fearless himself on his deathbed, dwelt far more upon his experiences at school than he let on.

  As Anne Wilmot struggled to keep her estates together, her husband remained on the continent, involving himself in ever more Byzantine plots to aid the return of Charles II to the English throne. In 1656 he was instrumental in an alliance between the Spanish and the Royalists to back an invasion of England, which was planned to take place in early 1658. However, having learnt from their mistakes, others in the exiled court did not share this appetite for Charles’s restoration, and the foolhardiness of having an English king’s return sponsored by a foreign power was again narrowly averted.

  Henry Wilmot, who at the start of 1658 was based in Flanders, was still a relatively young man of forty-five. Charles had placed him in charge of the newly formed Grenadier Guards, and he was expected to be a leading figure in any military endeavour. However, it was not to be. Exhausted and worn down by nearly fifteen years of unsuccessful plotting, fighting and escaping, Wilmot’s health, resistance and good fortune were finally depleted. When sickness spread through the ranks of the army in Ghent, he was in no state to resist it. He died of fever at Sluys on 19 February 1658 and was buried in Bruges by his Royalist cousin Lord Hopton. Many years later, his heart was exhumed and buried in the family vault at Spelsbury in Oxfordshire.

  Wilmot’s death had several immediate effects. One was to deprive Charles of one of his most stalwart and loyal lieutenants—​a loss that for him was personal as well as military. There was to be no further major attempt to return Charles to the throne until after the death of Cromwell, indicating that the carpe diem spirit of Wilmot was now absent. Another consequence was that Anne was now a widow and in an even more awkward position, given that her late husband was both a notorious Royalist and a debtor, and his mortgaged estates were liable to be forfeited. And finally, while still a schoolboy of ten, John Wilmot inherited the grand-sounding titles of 2nd Earl of Rochester, Baron Wilmot of Adderbury and Viscount Wilmot of Athlone. With Cromwell’s Protectorate at the peak of its powers, this new title seemed to mean little to Rochester, as he was now known. But fate, not for the first time in his life, was about to engineer a spectacular reversal.

  * This was in stark contrast to his father Charles I, who was a mere five foot four inches tall, possibly as a result of rickets contracted as a child.

  After his father’s death, Rochester continued his education at Burford, concluding it by around the age of twelve. Had he remained under Francis Giffard’s careful tutelage, it is extremely unlikely that he would have done anything debauched or decadent. Indeed, his delicate constitution was such that Giffard had even slept in his room on occasion ‘to prevent any ill accidents’. This mild-mannered childhood seems an unlikely contrast to the swashbuckling persona that Rochester later adopted, or rather had foisted upon him, yet stranger journeys have taken place during many sentimental, or unsentimental, educations.

  As Rochester prepared to head to university, it could scarcely have escaped his notice that England was in a state of flux. After Henry Wilmot’s death, the country had gone through many reversals and changes. The all-powerful Cromwell and his Protectorate were at their most pompous and grandiose in 1657, when Cromwell had had himself declared Lord Protector in June in a ceremony at Westminster Hall. It was deliberately designed to have overtones of coronations, even if the old hypocrite made a great show of refusing a crown, presumably on the grounds that the robes of state and a gilded sceptre made the point more than adequately. Cromwell, middle-aged but not elderly at fifty-seven, appeared secure in his power, while Charles and the royal court overseas were in despair, with what little m
oney they had running out and many of their keenest supporters, such as Wilmot, dying off.

  However, the wheel of fortune soon turned, and in early 1658 Cromwell was struck down with malarial fever. His personal doctors were unable to reconcile the fact that such a godly and God-fearing man could be placed in these torments and failed to diagnose a serious but treatable kidney infection, with the result that Cromwell died, probably of septicaemia, in September 1658. There were few reports of spontaneous outbreaks of grief in the streets, save perhaps from those who had obtained preferment under Cromwell and now wondered whether his son Richard would continue the Protectorate in the same fashion.

  They were very soon disabused of any notion that Cromwell fils would be continuing the family tradition. Richard entirely lacked his father’s moral convictions and military experience, being instead possessed of a craven pragmatism that led him to various compromises and horse-trading with the New Model Army, who—​suspicious of a man they saw as weak—​ensured that the Protectorate-approved Parliament was dissolved in early 1659, to be replaced by their chosen Rump Parliament of army loyalists and Protectorate sceptics. In exchange for his personal debts being written off, Richard agreed in May 1659 to resign as Lord Protector, thereby effectively ending the last decade of Puritan government, and retired into obscurity. Royalists rejoiced, surprised but delighted at the change in their circumstances, and christened Richard with the gloriously abusive nickname ‘Tumbledown Dick’. His father’s dream of a non-monarchical England was at an end.

  College records indicate that Rochester was entered by his mother’s agent John Cary as a ‘fellow commoner’ at Wadham College, Oxford on 1 March 1659, but he did not take up his place there until 18 January 1660. This hiatus was not uncommon for young gentlemen of quality and meant that he arrived less a small frightened boy and more an adult in training, even at the age of twelve. It is likely that he spent the year or so between Burford and Oxford continuing his studies, probably in a less regimented fashion, reading the Bible and classical literature in the way that was expected of any young man.