Blazing Star Page 5

  When Rochester finally arrived at Oxford, the pendulum was swinging firmly back to Royalist sympathy. It was still several months before Charles II would be actually restored to the throne, with the former Parliamentarian George Monck playing a clever game to negotiate the bloodless return of the king across the water. Oxford had been strongly Royalist in the early years of the Civil War, with Charles I making his court there, and this had led to both the city and the university being regarded with much suspicion by Cromwell. He realized that the hub of intellectual discord that intelligent minds together bred could well lead to dissent, especially when set against his own straightforwardly brutish strain of thought (his own university, Cambridge, was where the Parliamentary movement made its eastern headquarters, and it produced most of the pro-Commonwealth writers of the day, such as Marvell and Milton). Cromwell made various attempts to control the university; Hobbes wrote of undesirable figures—​‘all who were not of their faction [and] divers scandalous ministers and scholars’—​being purged. Cynically, Cromwell had himself made Chancellor of the university in 1650, presumably to keep an eye on any outbreaks of potential sedition.

  The result of this was that Oxford began to head into a moral and intellectual decline that did not abate fully until centuries later. By Cromwell’s death in 1658, many of the university’s leading academics had been removed, and the emphasis was firmly on more Puritan interests. One toadying student, George Trosse, wrote that he was delighted that ‘there were so many sermons preached, and so many excellent orthodox and practical divines to preach them’. As with the rest of England, discipline was strict; gambling and fornication were punished extremely severely by the university proctors, an elected group of senior men responsible for discipline, and malefactors could expect expulsion, a heavy fine or even imprisonment. Drinking, whether alcohol or coffee, was forbidden on Sundays, and sermons and overt displays of religiosity were the norm. College tutors were expected to be men of God who prayed daily with their pupils, and it was stated that ‘no person may live idly in this University’. Had Rochester been a student a decade earlier, things might have been very different.

  The contrast between the old and new orders was epitomized by Rochester’s choice of institution. Wadham, Oxford’s newest college, had been founded in 1613 by the wealthy landowner Nicholas Wadham’s widow Dorothy. It was the former Warden of the college, John Wilkins, who had been largely responsible for its rise to eminence. Wilkins supported religious and social tolerance and founded the ‘experimental philosophical club’, which later became the Royal Society, during his tenure.

  Unlike his predecessor Warden Pitts, who was expelled in 1648 for refusing to submit to the authority of Parliament, Wilkins took a broadly non-partisan approach to politics, with the result that even during the Protectorate Wadham continued to attract Royalist students, provided that they were able to keep their views to themselves. One especially notable student was Christopher Wren, who entered the college in 1650 and was closely associated with Wilkins throughout his time. Wilkins’s successor as Warden, Walter Blandford, was a similarly skilful politician, eventually serving on the commission that restored Royalists to their previous places in society. He was approved of by the new royal court, as can be seen by his remaining in post until 1665.

  By the time of Rochester’s arrival, the college was self-governing and tolerant to all. The idea of Wadham having an unorthodox spirit at its heart persisted and has lasted to this day. This spirit, however, was set against the rigours of academic life. As an MA (Master of Arts) scholar, Rochester, who wore a more distinguished gown to mark him out from non-aristocratic undergraduates, had to attend theological discussions for two hours every other week. He was expected to attend chapel regularly, albeit one now with a restored Anglican, rather than Puritan, ethos, and sometimes the services began as early as 5 a.m. He then had a short break for breakfast before spending the time until lunch at lectures, or preparing for these lectures with his college tutor. Lunch itself—​a plain meal of bread and cheese, washed down with weak beer—​was a strict affair in which only Latin and Greek were allowed to be spoken; then the afternoon was spent at a mixture of lectures and university events, before the evening saw the presumably exhausted Rochester attend chapel and then see his tutor for private prayers and to discuss the activities of the day. It was a hard, demanding existence, and those responsible for enforcing it prided themselves on creating young men who were ready for whatever the world would throw at them.

  At least, this was the theory. In reality, the wealthier students, who regarded Oxford as a sort of exotic finishing school and had little interest in the rigours of work, rebelled in style, aided by the new air of freedom that the Restoration brought with it. The ‘strange effeminate age’, as Anthony à Wood later called it, saw men, from aristocrats to poor students, dress in affected style, and the women who fraternized with the undergraduates don breeches. Unsurprisingly, in this place of cross-dressing lewdness, bisexuality and sodomy were rumoured to be rife,* as was drunkenness.

  Colleges vied with one another to see which was the most debauched. The students of St John’s made it their mission to attend chapel drunk, while Balliol men were made ‘perfect sots’ by their ‘perpetual bubbling’. It was said that three MA students of All Souls, an especially notorious college, were so drunk at the Mitre tavern that they frightened the hostess to death. It was far from uncommon for students to die of alcohol poisoning; one bishop’s son was found dead with a brandy bottle held tight within his grasp. Students welcomed the new spirit of freedom with relish; when, shortly after Rochester began his studies, it was announced on 13 February 1660 that a free Parliament had been declared, the news was celebrated with bonfires all over the city into which animals’ rumps were thrown, symbolizing the contempt and hatred with which the Rump Parliament had been regarded.

  The fellows were no better. Magdalen and New College were notorious for their buying and selling of places, and at least one university ceremony had to be postponed because the Vice-Chancellor was too hungover to officiate. Proctors, allegedly responsible for discipline, made it their business to be ‘known boon blades’ of the town, famous for their sexual and alcoholic prowess. Syphilis and disease were rife. Cromwell’s carefully nurtured home of Puritanism and religious observation had become the perfect cradle for a young Rochester—​as the antiquarian and scholar Thomas Hearne later put it—​to ‘become debauched’. Like other students, Rochester was free for the first time to drink, whore and gamble with abandon, for which he needed a seasoned Virgil to guide his fresh-faced Dante. This came in the red-faced, corpulent form of a don named Robert Whitehall: scholar, poet and drunkard.

  Initially, Rochester had no mentor at university. Although his perennial tutor Francis Giffard had accompanied him to Oxford, he had soon reluctantly left him in the hands of a new tutor, Phineas Berry; Giffard later said to Hearne, with more than a hint of sour grapes, that he had been ‘supplanted’. Gilbert Burnet described Berry as ‘a very learned and good-natured man’, whom Rochester ‘ever used with much respect, and rewarded him as became a great man.’ The truth was that Berry was a ridiculous and ineffectual figure, more interested in drinking coffee in the newly founded coffee shops than he was in ministering to his students or keeping discipline. It was noted a few years later that Berry, by then a senior proctor, flattered a group of undergraduates by describing them as ‘men that are examples rather than to be made examples of’, and was then mocked and baited by these ‘examples’ as they kicked a barrel up the street and disrupted an academic procession.

  Such a figure was hardly likely to inspire Rochester. Indeed, when he later wrote in ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’ about ‘frantic crowds of thinking fools’, it is tempting to think that he had Berry in mind, flapping about ineffectually as he tried to keep order. Although the young boy would presumably have proceeded in his studies for the first few months with some semblance of decorum, it is likely that he and hi
s contemporaries were swept up in the excitements of what Burnet cattily terms ‘the general joy that overran the whole nation upon his Majesty’s Restoration’, and that the study of Latin and Greek would have been less compelling than the opportunity to run amok for the first time in his life. The man who transformed Rochester, for better or for worse, from an innocent, rather nervous boy into a self-assured young adult was Whitehall. Although this man has hitherto existed as a shadowy footnote in Rochester’s life, he should be given far greater credit—​or blame—​for the emergence of Rochester’s spectacular character.

  Whitehall, the son of a clergyman, was born in 1624 and had a glittering academic career at first, being a King’s Scholar under Richard Busby at Westminster and then studying at Christ Church at Oxford. An avowed Royalist, he fell foul of the Parliamentary regime in 1647 for refusing to submit to Cromwell, saying ‘I can acknowledge no visitation but King Charles’ and, to add insult to injury, putting his thoughts into a glib little couplet:

  My name’s Whitehall, God bless the Poet,

  If I submit, the King shall know it.

  He was duly expelled in July 1648, for his arrogant defiance (to say nothing of his terrible versifying), and his life at Oxford looked like it was over before it had started. However, it was a time when even the most apparently committed Royalist had friends in unlikely places, and Whitehall, who was always entertaining company, was a familiar of the MP and regicide Richard Ingoldsby, a cousin of Cromwell. After a good deal of nodding and winking, Whitehall returned to Oxford in 1650 and was elected to a fellowship at Merton, then as now one of the university’s most academically prestigious colleges.

  Whitehall’s movements over the next decade are mainly shadowy. He was awarded his MA in 1652, wrote sycophantic verse addresses to both Oliver and Richard Cromwell, when the latter was installed as Chancellor of Oxford in 1657, and was apparently given a licence to teach at the University of Dublin, although there is little evidence that, in a climate where Anglo-Irish relations reached their nadir as a result of Cromwell’s violent incursions, he ever took himself away from his familiar haunts. Whitehall was moderately far-sighted as an academic, preferring the study of geography and mathematics to scholasticism, and in one of his poems he rails against ‘the common foe, church discipline’. Anthony à Wood dismissed him as ‘a pot poet’, and, had it not been for the arrival of Rochester at the university in 1660, Whitehall would have been lost to history, another shambling red-faced disappointment of a man. However, his presence in the younger man’s spiritual and physical upbringing proved to be a decisive one.

  Although there is no record of when Rochester and Whitehall met for the first time, it was around Rochester’s thirteenth birthday—​although Wood, in his definitive 1691 history of Oxford University and the writers it produced, Athenae Oxonienses, mentions the two of them meeting when Rochester was still twelve. Rochester, as an aristocrat, was allowed to mix with the dons in their common room, and it was here, almost certainly, that he and Whitehall came across one another and their unorthodox friendship began. It was an auspicious and formative occasion in both of their lives. Whitehall, by then ‘loined with sack and faced with claret’, was a rambunctious, Falstaffian figure, not especially witty in himself but certainly the cause of wit in others. For Rochester, who had only ever known virtuous, worthy men such as Giffard and Ralph Verney, Whitehall was a revelatory figure. The concept of a young boy learning from another, older man had its roots in Greece and antiquity, and few would have found anything strange in the idea of Rochester being taken up in this fashion by Whitehall, even if some of their subsequent actions were unusual, even by the standards of the time.

  What he learnt from Whitehall can be conjectured. Although Wood sneers that Whitehall ‘pretended to instruct [Rochester] in the art of poetry’, it is likely that the older man introduced him to the previously Puritan-forbidden delights of Elizabethan drama, such as the works of Shakespeare and Marlowe, which were considered a decadent relic of debauched times in the Protectorate. Philip Massinger’s comedy The Guardian was performed in Oxford in July 1660, the first time that a play was publicly staged since the Civil War, and it is perfectly possible that Rochester and Whitehall saw it together. The latter would perhaps have especially enjoyed the titular character of Durazzo, who is described in the play both as ‘jovial and good’, possibly ironically, and ‘an angry old ruffian’.

  That Whitehall and Rochester had a close relationship is clear. Wood notes that Whitehall ‘absolutely doted’ on the boy. Although no portraits of Rochester at university exist, there is little doubt that he was a good-looking, even beautiful young man, and one who attracted the attention of all those around him. Whitehall, himself no beauty, cheerfully wrote of himself that he lived in ‘Bachelor’s Row’, and added, meaningfully, ‘maybe he is overwhelmed in love that he dares not reveal and was minded… to remove all suspicion by palliating it with a contrary guise’. This is not so far from ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ of Wilde’s day, and it is possible to see his friendship with Rochester in Platonic terms, with Whitehall the older, experienced man and Rochester the eager boy.

  It was certainly under Whitehall’s influence that Rochester ‘grew debauched’ and took to drinking heavily. Taverns such as The Three Tuns and The Mermaid catered to the ‘good fellows’ of the university, and with the Puritan edicts against drinking and drunkenness lifted, many took full licence of the opportunities presented to them. Whitehall, thoughtful as ever when it came to debauchery, lent Rochester his academic gown for ‘night rambles’ of this sort, enabling the boy to make his way through the streets after an evening’s libation unmolested by proctors. Had they all been as inefficient as the hapless Phineas Berry or one of the ‘known boon blades’, the subterfuge would probably have been unnecessary. This was the young Rochester’s first taste of disguise and dissimulation, something that his father had been familiar with but then still an alien concept to the boy.

  Yet intoxication on its own lacks the sense of subversion that the term ‘debauched’ implies, so the idea of Rochester as a catamite, willing or coerced, has to be considered. Sodomy was widespread but illegal in the seventeenth century in all walks of society, punishable by a sentence of hanging. Although this was seldom carried out, the lesser charge of attempted buggery still carried the penalty of imprisonment and time on the pillory, where the convict would be both verbally and physically abused. For someone in a position of authority such as Whitehall, it would have been catastrophic, the more so because his former sponsor Ingoldsby, although not out of royal favour, lacked the influence that he had previously possessed.

  However, institutional pederasty was rife at this time. Wood wrote that the fellows of All Souls elected a good-looking boy with the intent of ‘kissing and slobbering’ on him, and a poem by John Marston refers to the possibility of a ‘pedant tutor’ using a child like ‘Phrygian Ganymede’. Wadham later became notorious for homo-sexual activity, revelling in its nickname of ‘Sodom’, and had White-hall wished to have a sexual relationship with Rochester, he could have done so unbothered in the prevailing moral culture of the college.

  What Rochester made of this can only be guessed at. Interestingly, there is no reference to Whitehall made in Burnet’s Life, which might indicate that, twenty years later, Rochester felt ashamed or regretful of his involvement with the older man. However, Burnet’s heavy editorializing of anything that did not fit in with his grand plan might have led him to omit any fond recollection of Rochester’s former mentor. Certainly, Rochester retained enough affection for Whitehall to correspond with him for the rest of their lives. Whitehall sent him his portrait and a ‘Hudibrastic verse epistle’ in 1667, stating, in a reference to his flushed face in the picture, that ‘that red letter in each cheek/Speaks Holyday, not Ember Week/So incorporeal, so airy/This Christmas ’twill be ta’en for fairy’, and Rochester was given one of only a dozen copies of Whitehall’s 1677 work Hexastichon hieron. Wood suggests
that this work, a collection of biblical verses, was ‘chiefly composed’ for Rochester, indicating that Whitehall still felt great affection for his protégé nearly two decades after he had left his charge. Had it been a relationship merely based on carnal gratification and exploitation, it is unlikely to have endured, although it is possible to see Whitehall as ever the Falstaffian schemer, keen to maintain influence within court. Another recipient of the book was Charles II, implying that Whitehall was reluctant to give up his jockeying for position.

  Something that Whitehall was highly likely to have been involved with, however, was Rochester’s poetic development. The first poem attributed to Rochester is a piece of laudatory verse addressed to Charles II upon his return to England, dated around May 1660 and signed ‘Rochester, Wadham College’. As Rochester’s first work, it bears reprinting in full:

  Virtue’s triumphant shrine! who dost engage

  At once three Kingdoms in a Pilgrimage;

  Which in ecstatic duty strive to come

  Out of themselves as well as from their home:

  Whilst England grows one Camp, and London is

  Itself the Nation, not Metropolis;

  And loyal Kent renews her Arts again,

  Fencing her ways with moving Groves of Men,

  Forgive this distant homage, which does meet

  Your blest approach on sedentary feet:

  And though my youth, not patient yet to bear

  The weight of Arms, denies me to appear