Stuart Walton on the short but tumultuous life of the Restoration poet and libertine, Lord Rochester, whose love of satirical verses and caustic repartee was matched by his appetite for wine.
The unbridled celebrations that took place in London on May 29, 1660, as King Charles II entered the city on his 30th birthday to reclaim the throne, were lubricated by drunkenness so sedulous that it might have been mistaken for patriotic duty. Not only were the 11 years of the Protectorate at an end, but with them the puritanical temper that had cautioned sobriety on the English people, and drained even the merry out of Christmases.
Nor did festivity spend itself in the events of a mild spring day. Instead, the Restoration ushered in a period of libertinism and licence, a great unbuttoning that would last at least a generation, and continue with greater or less abandon to the end of the Stuart dynasty with Queen Anne. Around the young King gathered a group of poets and essayists known as the Wits, more colloquially “the merry gang,” who, like the court jesters of Tudor times, but far less disingenuously, enjoyed the privilege of speaking insolence to power.
Among this coterie, none was more assiduous in both his satirical verses and caustic repartee, or indeed in his fealty to the wine bottle, than John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester. The scion of an impoverished gentry family of Oxfordshire, Rochester went up to Wadham College, Oxford, at 13, was awarded the Masters degree at 14, and, to set himself on as prudent a course as might befit a young gentleman, went to sea, distinguishing himself in service against the Dutch when still only 18.
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Lord Rochester’s infamous life of dissolution
It was when he returned to London that, for want of both occupation and maturity, he hurtled himself into the life of dissolution for which he would become infamous. The indispensable fuel was wine. Wherever there was wine to be had, Rochester had it. The problem was that his wit flowed forth most brilliantly when he was in his cups, so that his friends could hardly bear to let him turn sober.
“The natural heat of his fancy,” wrote his lifelong associate Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, “being inflamed by wine, made him so extravagantly pleasant, that many, to be more diverted by that humour, studied to engage him deeper and deeper in intemperance, which at length did so entirely subdue him, that … for five years together he was continually drunk.”1
Philosophically, the explanation was child’s play. “With wine I wash away my cares,” he wrote, as might many a sighing Horatian swain. With Rochester, though, there was more than solace in the cup, but an invitation to the appetite of Gargantua. “Upon Drinking in a Bowl” calls for a massive vessel to be wrought especially for the poet, and then charged with Sherry and the sops of burnt bread that gave their name to the practice of drinking health:
Content from our partners
Make it so large that, fill’d with sack
Up to the swelling brim,
Vast toasts, on the delicious lake,
Like ships at sea may swim.
Reflecting on a career of raising hell with his good friend, the corpulent Harry Savile, he claimed that drinking wine “is the only exercise at which you and I have not prov’d ourselves arrant fumblers.”2
Rochester would undergo a deathbed conversion at the family seat in Woodstock so fulsomely sincere that many at the London Court forbore to credit it. And yet his life was very much of a piece with the spiritual climate. The appearance in 1651 of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan had set many on to doubt the old religious certitudes—the vengeful God, the rewards or punishments of eternity—and Rochester himself had experienced the loosing of the Church’s fetters as liberation. Even at the last penitence, he reflected that drinking wine gratified what was only a natural appetite, and that it seemed unreasonable that God could have instilled such an inclination in humanity, only to demand that they ferociously constrict it. “This he applied to the free use of wine and women.”3
If his lyrical self-portrait “The Debauchee” makes free play with defiance—“I rise at eleven, I dine about two, / I get drunk before seven…” – its later pendant, “The Maim’d Debauchee,” reflects that the only solace of impotence and the liverish raddlement of old age will be the tepid wisdom that comes with them. Plucking a metaphor from the naval career of his teens, he sees himself “Driv’n from the pleasing billows of debauch / On the dull shore of lazy temperance.”
The dull shore was reached all too soon. Run aground at 33, having already lived three lifetimes, he wasted to condign piety in the four-poster bed at the High Lodge in Woodstock Park, purulent, ulcerous, halfway to blind, covered in bed sores, engulfed in pain, his end brought about by venereal infection, almost certainly syphilis, that had been treated with nothing better than toxic mercury vapour at Madame Fourcard’s Hatton Garden bathhouse. His chief medical superintendent, Dr John Radcliffe, then an emergent talent of 30, summoned from London, had the reputation of being more steadfastly devoted to the bottle than he was to the cure of patients. Providence could scarcely have decreed it otherwise.
Notes
1. Cited in Graham Greene (1976), Lord Rochester’s Monkey, being the Life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, London: Futura, 69. Greene had written his biography of the poet in the early 1930s, though it languished for want of a publisher for 40 years.
2. Ibid, 122.
3. Ibid, 208.
