John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

The Earl of Rochester:

John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester, is one of the most fascinating and notorious characters of the Restoration Age. In his brief life – he was only 33 when he died – he led a very eventful if scandalous existence that outlined as, his contemporary John Dennis put it, 'his wit, his spirit, his amorous temper, the charms that he had for the fair sex, his falsehood, and his inconstancy…' , and managed at the same time to leave a poetic output that rivals that of Dryden and is still colored by his original personality.

His friend, the playwright Sir George Etherege, based a character 'Dorimant' on him in his play 'Sir Fopling Flutter or Man of the Mode' and described him as - "I know he is a Devil, but he has something of the Angel yet defac'd in him."

Early Life:

The Earl of Rochester, known in his lifetime as Lord Rochester, was born at Ditchley in Oxfordshire on either 1 or 10 April 1647; the date is disputed, but being born on April Fool's Day seems quite an apt beginning in his regard. His parents were Henry Wilmot and Anne St. John.

It was two years after his birth that Charles I of England was beheaded. Lord Rochester's father, Henry Wilmot, who became the 1st Earl of Rochester in 1652, had been a Royalist supporter of Charles I and later aided the escape of Charles II and followed him into a long exile. He died while in exile in 1658 and so didn't see the Restoration of the Monarchy that came about just two years later in 1660. Anne St. John, formidable and strong-minded Countess of Rochester, who came from a well-known Puritan family, was to outlive her son.

Education:

As a child, Rochester both attended the Burford Grammar School and was taught by a tutor at home, and was generally considered a model, well-behaved pupil. Later he was sent up to Oxford, where, free for the first time from his mother's eagle-eye, we hear of a slightly different personality emerging. He was just 12 when he matriculated from Wadham College, but a popular, much sought after character and already a frequenter of taverns. When he was 14, the Earl of Clarendon awarded him his MA degree. Then, as was the fashion amongst the English Aristocracy, he was sent to round off his education by traveling in Italy and France.

On his return, now a polished, sophisticated young man of 18, he took his place in the brilliant new court of Charles II – he wasn't to grace the Parliament until he reached the more mature age of 21 - and soon quickly became one of its most well-known and outrageous wits. In May 1665, he created a stir by kidnapping a heiress, Elizabeth Mallet, as she left the Westminster Palace in her grandfather's coach one night. Apparently she had caught his eye both for her beauty, her wit, and her immense wealth, most especially the latter, and, as she had spurned his suit, even when put forth by the King, and he was afraid that another suitor might get his hands on her money, the young Lord Rochester thought of this original Neanderthal method of winning himself a wife. As it turned out, Elizabeth was impressed and finally married him two years later, but at the moment the King was vastly annoyed by his uncivilized conduct. Elizabeth was brought back and returned to her family. Lord Rochester was arrested and imprisoned for a few weeks in the Tower of London.

In August 1665, Lord Rochester took part in the naval Battle of Vagen against the Dutch, where he is said to have shown exceptional courage. For the last time in his life, according to his detractors.

Marriage and Mischief:

On 29 January 1667, Lord Rochester and Elizabeth Mallet were married and, despite his wildness and philandering, it was to be a happy union. They had three children that he doted on. Elizabeth and the children lived mainly at the Rochester Country Estate.

The Earl divided his time between being a comparatively sober family man in the country and a hell-raising boozer and womanizer in London.

He had numerous mistresses, notable amongst them the famous actress Elizabeth Barry, who, it is said, was a rather ordinary stage performer until he took her under his wing and personally coached her in the acting skills. Probably this tale is just a tale, but certainly Lord Rochester had no mean talent when it came to acting himself.

His Court shenanigans were plenty and ranged from drunken brawls to running naked to destroying the King's Sun-dial to writing bawdy verses that lampooned the licentious behavior of the King and the Aristocracy. He wrote about the Duchess of Cleveland -

"When she has jaded quite
Her almost boundless appetite...
She'll still drudge on in tasteless vice
As if she sinn'd for exercise."

This sort of thing more frequently than not succeeded in getting him banished from the royal presence, and in these periods he is known to have donned different disguises to both keep a low profile and mingle easily with the lower classes and, so it seems, to get a kick out of fooling everyone in the vicinity.

His most famous disguise was as Doctor Alexander Bendo, a German quack, specializing in fertility treatment. This came about after, in a moment of drunkenness, he mistakenly handed Charles II a particularly insulting poem on himself. In this, he described the King as -

"Nor are his high desires above his strength:
His scepter and his prick are of a length;
And she may sway the one who plays with th' other,
And make him little wiser than his brother."

Banned from Court for several months, he set up a stall on Tower Hill and, as the good Doctor Bendo, soon cuckolded half of London.

Lord Rochester and Charles II:

Despite his numerous offenses, Lord Rochester was invariably forgiven and allowed to return to court. Charles II had a soft soft for him as he had for all highly original and good-looking individuals and found him very entertaining to have around. He made him a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, a high honor that was only conferred upon the King's closest friends, and the Ranger of Woodstock Park.

Lord Rochester was an important member of the infamous 'Merry Gang' at the Court that included other high-spirited wits and rakes like Charles Sackville (Earl of Dorset), John Sheffield (Earl of Mulgrave), George Villiers (Duke of Buckingham), William Wycherley, and others.

Most of these people, for all their baffling antics and practical jokes, were intellectuals with several literary accomplishments to their names. Lord Rochester's lively and often sexually explicit poetry, biting satires, songs, and plays were well-known in his life-time, but most of the works were published anonymously and it was not until after his death that they were published under his own name. His play 'Sodom or the Quintessence of Debauchery' was later banned for being obscene and printed copies were destroyed.

Lord Rochester finds a somewhat censorious mention in Samuel Johnson's 'Lives of the English Poets' -

"Having an active and inquisitive mind, he never, except in his paroxysms of intemperance, was wholly negligent of study: he read what is considered as polite learning so much, that he is mentioned by Wood as the greatest scholar of all the nobility. Sometimes he retired into the country and amused himself with writing libels, in which he did not pretend to confine himself to truth."

"Thus in a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious obligation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness; till, at the age of one-and-thirty, he had exhausted the fund of life, and reduced himself to a state of weakness and decay."

Death:

The Earl's constant drinking and wenching proved to have a disastrous effect on his health. He contracted Syphilis and other venereal diseases, for which, in those days, there was no surefire cure, and probably also suffered from cirrhosis as a result of his alcoholism. After much suffering, his former good looks literally rotting away, he died on 26 July 1680.

Lord Rochester had always been an atheist in his life-time, but as his life ebbed, on his mother's insistence, he had to endure the administrations of her religious cronies. One of them, Dr. Burnet, was with him at the very end and later famously claimed to have got him to repent and return to the religious fold. Whether this really happened or not, it certainly got Dr. Burnet some righteous Christian publicity.