Blazing Star Page 6
In Steel before you; yet great SIR, approve
My manly wishes, and more vigorous Love;
In whom a cold Respect were Treason to
A Father’s Ashes, greater than to you;
Whose one Ambition ’tis for to be known,
By daring Loyalty, your Wilmot’s son.
For a thirteen-year-old, this is impressively accomplished writing, taking the traditional poetic trope of a paean of praise to a new ruler and offering a heartfelt, personal perspective on his accession. The most interesting passage is the last third, which, in its references to ‘the weight of Arms’ and ‘your Wilmot’s son’, would have served to remind Charles—hardly by then a shrine of virtue—both of his friend’s loyalty and of Rochester’s willingness to emulate his father’s military prowess, had the occasion called for it.
The other poems ascribed to Rochester from his Wadham days are a Latin elegy on the death of Mary, the Princess Royal, ‘Impia blasphemi’, and a longer poem, ‘To Her Sacred Majesty, the Queen Mother’, commiserating with her on her loss. As Mary died on Christmas Eve 1660, the poems can be confidently dated as early 1661. There is less of interest in these ambitious but rather strained poems, save an early touch of satire (possibly dictated by Whitehall) when he attacks the incompetent physicians who failed to save Mary’s life:
And the forlorn Physicians imprecate,
Say they to death new poisons add and fire;
Murder securely for reward and hire;
Art’s Basilicks, that kill whom ere they see,
And truly write bills of Mortality;
Who least the bleeding Corps should them betray,
First drain those vital speaking streams away.
If the intention behind the poems was to curry royal favour, it succeeded. Charles, whose gratitude towards all those who had helped him in his travels was at its peak, ordered in February 1661 that Rochester be granted a pension, paid retrospectively since his arrival at Oxford, of £500 a year, the equivalent of around £40,000 today and a fortune to a thirteen-year-old undergraduate. Given that Charles and Rochester had not yet met, unless their paths had crossed on a fleeting royal visit to Oxford in late 1660, this was an act of impetuous generosity rather than a carefully considered reward. However, in what would be a constant factor in Rochester and Charles’s relationship, the generous promise was seldom backed up with the arrival of the funds themselves.
On 9 September 1661, Rochester’s career at Oxford, which had lasted just over a year and a half, came to an end. At the formal ceremony of Convocation, he was awarded the degree of Master of Arts. Tellingly, the Chancellor of the university was now Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, whose appointment symbolized the way in which a role that had once been synonymous with Cromwell had now returned to Royalist hands. Clarendon’s association with Rochester, a cousin by marriage to his mother’s first husband, had been lifelong, and there was clear and obvious symbolism in the way that Rochester had the degree conferred upon him ‘very affectionately… by a kiss on the left cheek’. Although few present would have known of the bond between the two, Rochester was being welcomed into the Royalist establishment even at his young age. His final act as a student was to endow Wadham College with four splendid silver pint pots. Like many a careless young undergraduate, he left several of his bills unpaid, much to his mother’s later chagrin.
The importance of Rochester’s Oxford career has been much discussed. As he attended the university for a relatively short time (though normal by the standards of the day), his close association with Whitehall coloured his impressions of the university. No reference is ever made to his having acquired any other friends or companions there, or having been influenced by any of the leading figures there (there is no evidence, for instance, that he ever met Wren, who was at Oxford throughout 1661). Yet what his studies undoubtedly did was to place him on the road of experience. The ‘debauched’ nature of his time at university, which Burnet put down to ‘the humour of the time [that had] wrought so much upon him’, was one of sexual deviance and alcoholic overindulgence. It is also possible that the syphilis which would plague him throughout his life was first contracted from a prostitute in one of the city’s many whorehouses or alehouses, which were frequented by the students and workers of the town alike. (Their presence was so notorious that one street by Merton was known as ‘Grope Cunt Lane’, later commuted to ‘Grope Lane’.) With tertiary syphilis not appearing for over a decade after first contact, the seeds of Rochester’s later illness may have been sown here, if he lost his virginity at this young age. However, the university was also a source of intellectual excitement, and even the early poems that we have of Rochester’s hint at an emerging, questioning intelligence that would develop more fully over time.
When Rochester left Oxford, he was fourteen years old. Not quite old enough to be presented at court, he instead was able to complete his education by undertaking the traditional adventure of a young nobleman, the European grand tour. The displaced Francis Giffard was presumably not thought to be worldly enough to accompany Rochester across Europe, and, much as he might have enjoyed it, there was never any question of Whitehall leading his protégé across the taverns and brothels of the continent. It was the prerogative of Charles II to suggest a potential tutor for the grand tour for any young nobleman, and he nominated a man named Andrew Balfour. Charles had been introduced to Balfour by his own physician, Sir John Wedderburn, when he arrived at court, and was impressed by his erudition and charm.
Balfour occupies an interesting position in Rochester’s life as he was one of the very few mentors and substitute father-figures he acquired who was clearly a moral and decent person. Burnet refers to him as a ‘learned and worthy man’, and also notes, towards the end of Rochester’s life, ‘how much he was obliged to love and honour this his governor’, valuing him second only to his parents as a loved one. Even allowing for exaggeration, their relationship was a close one. Balfour came from a wealthy Scottish family, and studied philosophy and arithmetic at St Andrews, later completing his studies at Oxford and in Italy and France, where he had recently graduated from the University of Caen in 1661. Knowing something of Europe, and being, at thirty, young enough to remain energetic but old enough to act as a responsible mentor to Rochester, he accepted Charles’s request and the two men set off together in November 1661, along with Rochester’s ‘servants and trunks’. Like his father, he was unwilling to attempt the trip in anything other than luxury.
For the next three years, Rochester and Balfour travelled across Europe together. Rochester is not known to have produced any poetry during this period, and although he must have written to his mother and possibly to Verney and Clarendon, none of his letters exist. The only definite proof of his whereabouts at this time is that he was briefly enrolled as a visiting student at the University of Padua in 1664, where he signed the visitors’ book, and that earlier that year he was received by Balfour’s friend Walter Pope in Venice. For anyone interested in Rochester, this period might be frustratingly opaque, were it not for the indefatigable Balfour, who later wrote an account of his travels. Published posthumously as Letters to a Friend, the book offers what the subtitle terms ‘excellent directions and advices for travelling through France and Italy’. Given that Balfour was far from a professional grand tourer, it seems appropriate to take this account and retrospectively apply it to his journey with Rochester, even if the latter is not mentioned by name once in the story.
If one expects stories of how Rochester ‘swived more whores, more ways than Sodom’s walls’, then the reader is likely to be disappointed. Instead, Balfour offers a minutely detailed piece of social history that gives a fascinating insight into what the privileged, gilded youth of the day experienced. Certainly, the tour appears to have been designed with Balfour’s own interests and enthusiasms in mind, rather than trying to cater for Rochester’s emergent desires. Yet, despite the debaucheries of Oxford, Rochester remained an intellectually curious, self-assu
red young man, and the pleasure that he took from his journeys was that of a sophisticated young nobleman who was completing his education in style. Had he not had these three years travelling, then it is highly unlikely that he would have acquired the poise and élan that were to be such features of his later appearance at court.
Assuming for the sake of argument that Balfour’s account in his book relates to his travels with Rochester, their adventure can be reconstructed in precise detail. They left London for France in late November 1661, staying at Dieppe when they arrived. The early accounts of their travels offer some amusing details of the social world of wealthy seventeenth-century France, such as visiting the enormous bell at Rouen Cathedral and tasting the much-renowned cream at Sotteville. Their lodgings were humble but comfortable, and the young Rochester probably enjoyed his first experience of European life.
However, his arrival in Paris in early 1662 is vastly more significant. Balfour and Rochester spent most of the year together there, and the experience of la vie Parisienne was an immensely formative one for the younger man. Louis XIV, the so-called ‘Sun King’, had been ruling since 1654 and had gradually been increasing his influence to create an absolutist monarchy. After the death of his long-serving and hugely capable first minister Cardinal Mazarin in 1661, Louis decided that he was able to govern alone and set about reforming France on a scale that was barely conceived of by his predecessors. He revolutionized the tax system, saving the country from bankruptcy, introduced a countrywide series of courts, massively reduced the independence of the nobility, and improved the military, even as he brokered complex peace treaties.
For energy backed up by achievement, there was nobody like him in Europe; certainly, Charles (who had raised a much-needed five million francs, or around £250,000, by selling him Dunkirk in 1662) looks like an amateur in comparison. The greatest demonstration of his opulence was his palace at Versailles. Balfour and Rochester visited the unfinished building during their visit, and even in its embryonic state Balfour was moved to call it ‘a most delicate fine place’. Perhaps his Scottish sensibilities might have been more tested had he seen it a couple of decades later, in all its glitzy, gaudy glory.
Another aspect of Louis’ reign that might well have appealed to Rochester was his status as a patron of the arts. Molière was granted the title of Troupe de Monsieur, effectively licensing him as court playwright. His witty, socially pointed satires were influential on the licentious Restoration comedies that were about to become popular in England, and there is a good chance that Rochester and Balfour both saw his play L’École des femmes when it was first performed at the Palais Royal in December 1662. Although the play’s wry account of sexual and romantic shenanigans seemed impossibly daring when it was produced, and unthinkable to have been staged without royal approval, the cynicism that it expressed about male and female relations was an influence on Rochester, a man who would later begin a poem with the words ‘Love a woman? You’re an ass!’
It is impossible to say whether Rochester was sexually active during his travels with Balfour, but it is unlikely that his mentor was as eager to drive him towards the taverns and whorehouses of France as Whitehall would have been. It is probable, however, that Rochester encountered some of the more notorious figures at court. He visited Charles’s sister Henrietta, who was nicknamed ‘Minette’, and carried a letter of introduction from the king. As was typical for a royal sister at the time, she had been used for political marriage and had been married to her cousin, the flamboyant Philippe, Duke of Orléans, to strengthen military bonds between France and England.
Philippe was a remarkable figure by the standards of that, or any other, time. Rampantly and prodigiously homosexual, with occasional grudging forays into the marital bed, he also had a penchant for donning female attire and adopting the personae of shepherdesses and milkmaids. His inclination for buggery—what Mazarin described as ‘the Italian vice’—was tolerated as it was felt that this would distract him from taking any interest in the royal throne. However, the dissatisfied Henrietta purportedly began an affair with the uncompromisingly heterosexual King Louis, leading to an outraged Philippe becoming even more blatant in his actions. Whether the child that was eventually born to Henrietta was the result of Philippe’s sporadic carnal incursions or Louis’ bastard daughter can never be known, but either way it reinforced the idea of the French court as a licentious and potentially dangerous place, and it was to this that Rochester was exposed.
At the time, however, Rochester found himself at a court that was deeply in thrall to libertine ideas. These were espoused in comedy by Molière, but had been expressed as serious philosophy by Montaigne in the sixteenth century, who posited the idea that people should not live according to strictures laid down by society or religion, but instead should be free to follow their own inclinations. This admirably far-sighted view was quickly taken up by the wits of the court, and Rochester may have encountered the poet Nicolas Boileau (whose lengthy, topical satires would later directly influence ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’) and the aristocratic wit and memoirist François de la Rochefoucauld, as well as Molière. It is unlikely that, if they did meet him, they would have taken a great deal of notice of a fifteen-year-old boy, so any personal acquaintance would have probably been slight. It was still a fecund time, though, and an impressionable young man could have drunk deeply from the well of learned experience.
Not so Balfour, who cheerily decried France as a place in which ‘out of Paris there is little… to be seen or learned’. He gives a litany of his favourite bookshops, eulogizes Graves—the ‘best wine about Bordeaux’—and treats the various unlikely sounding holy relics at Saint-Denis with the raised eyebrow that they deserve, remarking drily upon ‘one of the nails that fixed our saviour’s body to the cross’ and ‘the lantern that was carried before Judas when he betrayed our saviour’. Eventually, by the beginning of 1663, Balfour and Rochester had seen enough of France and took a boat from Cannes to Italy, which would prove a rather different experience for them.
If France was licentious enough, with the king’s homosexual brother rampant and daring philosophical ideas being muttered around court, then Italy—the country that had produced Machiavelli, Caravaggio and the Borgias—was steeped in sin and style, in roughly equal measure. If Rochester’s sexual escapades in France consisted of avoiding (or allowing) the advances of bored noblemen, then Italy was a different and more productive experience for him. Not for nothing was Signior Dildo said to be a ‘noble Italian’ in the titular poem.
Even the honest Balfour was driven to subterfuge upon arrival, with the Italian authorities conducting a thorough search of all visitors for ‘prohibited books’ and ‘secret weapons’, but he noted, with the confidence of a worldly man, that ‘there are ways enough to convey books, or any other thing of whatsoever nature’. Whether this was a reference to bribes or the placing of forbidden items in intimate places around the body is unclear, but either way Rochester might, albeit briefly, have seen a more grubbily practical side of his governor than the idealized philosopher. It probably also pleased him that Balfour, suspicious of the quality of Italian water, forbade its consumption, indicating that they should instead refresh themselves with wine.
The two men travelled at a leisurely pace through the sites and glories of Renaissance Italy. The country was at relative peace at this time, although a heavy plague three decades earlier in Milan had caused chaos and the Counter-Reformation had increased papal power immensely. Artistically, Italy was in the midst of the seicento and was entering the Baroque era, which was beginning to dominate art and architecture, and which offered Rochester a chance to see how the tastes of the wealthy were becoming far more opulent and grandiose. If Balfour had nothing but praise for the ‘beautiful’ city of Florence and its ‘glorious’ Medici Chapel, he was sceptical about the comforts that were on offer, describing Italian bed linen as ‘very nasty’ and standards of accommodation as ‘unclean’.
Eventually, they arrived at Rome, and temptation was again thrust upon Rochester. This was partly the usual carnal attractions of a large and cosmopolitan city, especially if he diligently followed his mentor’s instructions and only drank wine, but there was also the possibility of his being wooed into the Catholic faith. No evidence exists to suggest that Rochester ever had any personal interest in popery, unlike Charles II, but for an impressionable young man the temptation of a religion where sins could simply be washed off the slate after confession was considerable. Balfour arranged various audiences and receptions with friends of his, almost certainly innocently, and the two were received at the Vatican. It is likely that the young aristocrat was both flattered and beguiled by the trappings of Catholicism, a world away from the drabness of Cromwell and Puritanism. The beautiful young man was considered enough of a notable figure to have a portrait painted by the contemporary draughtsman Lorenzo Magalotti—at least the likeness is said to be of Rochester, although it bears little resemblance to other images of him. Yet the religious orthodoxy he had encountered during his time at Burford and in Francis Giffard’s instruction was also hardwired within him, and was to remain so for the rest of his life. In a sense, Rome epitomized the two sides of him in constant conflict: the sensual pleasure-seeker and the intellectually curious orthodox. This time, it seems as if orthodoxy triumphed.
Balfour and Rochester continued to travel around the classical sites of Italy after they left Rome, visiting Mount Vesuvius and the Doge’s Palace in Venice in late 1664. The latter city, famed for its architecture and art, had also become synonymous with homosexuality, which Balfour tactfully describes as ‘people of many nations with different habits’, but also boasted many of Europe’s finest courtesans. Quite possibly Rochester, like many a cosmopolitan young man, sampled all the pleasures that the city offered.
After their incursion there, the two headed to Padua and its university, where Balfour was somewhat alarmed by the poor reputation of the students and their ‘beastly custom of carrying arms in the night’. Here, where he studied briefly, Rochester was an ultramontane, or foreign student. He was not alone; the city thronged with foreigners of all kinds, who naturally divided into subsets based on national background, and it was far from uncommon to see students fighting those from the countries of their enemies. The university had an excellent reputation for the study of law and philosophy, and Elizabeth I’s spymaster Francis Walsingham had been a student the previous century. Lectures were lengthy, deeply formal and, thanks to the thick Venetian dialect in which they were delivered, near-incomprehensible to many.