Horner, Dorimant, and the other "rake heroes" of these "hard comedies" of the Restoration period reflect the atmosphere and characters of the court of Charles II--as the mirror imagery in the prologue to the play suggests.
Take note of the language and the content in the samples here from the poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who was the Horniest Horner of the entire Restoration world--to the extent of having a reputation for bestiality. The philosophy embodied by Rochester, Horner, Dorimant, and the other heroes, dramatic and historical, of late seventeenth-century England is Hobbesian: the idea that man (man and woman, but especially man) is driven by appetite and no higher in the hierarchy of being than any other creature.
There are a number of studies now about the impact on young people of the ubiquity of online porn. Given the behavior of men like Rochester (see below--and women like Lady Fidget and Bellinda in MM) can you think of contemporary parallels to--or do you have any observations on--the likely response of the average theatre goer to a play like the Man of Mode, in the heightened sexual atmosphere of the 1670s playhouse?
Some scenes to consider in The Man of Mode:
2.2.72-305 (end of 2.2) (pp. 171-174)
* Consider Bellinda's "plot" against her friend Mrs. Loveit and look closely at the language in which it is orchestrated. Note too the use of asides as Mrs L shows her discomfort and Bel comments on the scene she has created in upsetting Mrs. Loveit. There is a lot of metatheatricality going on as the scene reflects an age of spectacle: there is more than one scene being played out on stage and the depths of acting reflect the artificiality of society that Etherege is deeply conscious of.
+
Why is Bellinda manipulating Mrs L like this? So she can have Dormant, to be sure, but what does it say about her and her society? IS she a reflection of human compulsion to deceive? Is this a "natural" behavior on her part as a woman and a member of this society? Does she reflect the Hobbesian element of competition?
+ How do you feel about Dorimant in this scene? He declares, honestly, that "Constancy at my years" is unnatural (199-200). This is another Hobbesian belief: that the most honest men follow the drives that nature hgave them. Do you think that Etherege has a deeper message here? Something that suggests that society is a completely unnatural construct in its laws so that the play is simply experimenting in putting on stage characters (reflecting those of society) that act outside of social contraints?
+ Note the language too at ll. 212-213 where Loveit calls Dor a "false" man and he calls her a "true" woman. What is going on there?
+ What do you make of Bel's comment right at the end of this scene "I wish I hadn't seen him treat her like that ...."? How, as the audience, do we feel toward Bellinda?
* ACT 3 (pp. 174-75)
Note that this is the first time we see Harriet who was anticipated (in a sexual way) at the beginning of the play. By this point we are half way thru. Those who didn't stay beyond the free acts would have missed her appearance--maybe E's way of keeping audience members int he theatre.
+ Remember what Dor was doing at the start of the play when we saw his man Handy dressing him? Here we have Harriet being dressed by her maid. It's like the play has started over with mirroring scenes. Consider the difference between Dor's attitude toward his dress and Harriet's. What does that say about the hero and heroine?
+ In 3.3 we are at the heart of the play. Here is where Harriet and Dorimant meet for the first time. Notice the language used in their theatricality toward one another and the asides they use to show their mutual attraction.
Given that the audience only sees the two together in this scene, and given their behavior toward one another, and considering Dorimant's continued pursuit of Bellinda after this scene, how convincing is Dorimant's declaration of love and commitment to Harriet at the end of the play?
What is Etherege saying about humans and their relationships with one another?
Notice too that Dor is forced to woo Harriet later in the play in disguise because her mother is suspicious of his reputation.
Look at the final scene (ACT 5) and think about our discussion of the openendedness of
The Country Wife. Is this play any more satisfying?
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Pepys'
Diary, 28 May 1665: "Thence to my Lady Sandwich's, where, to my shame, I
had not been a great while before. Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord
Rochester's running away on Friday night last with Mrs Mallet, the great beauty
and fortune of the North, who had supped at Whitehall with Mrs Stewart, and was
going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and
was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and footmen, and forcibly taken
from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to
receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester
(for whom the King had spoke to the lady often, but with no success) was taken
at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry and
the Lord sent to the Tower.".
As they
rampaged after the banquet into the Privy Garden at Whitehall, fired with wine,
Rochester and his companions came across a new piece of ostentation by Charles.
The King was a keen collector of astronomical items, and the crown jewel in his
collection was a large, ornate sundial set with a complex design of glass
spheres, on which portraits of the royal family were engraved. It had been
constructed a few years earlier by Francis Hall, professor of mathematics at
the University of Liège, and was the most expensive and elaborate instrument of
its kind in Europe. The King’s pride and joy, the sundial took up a prominent
position in the garden. A sensible or moderate man admired it from a distance
and steered well clear. Neither sensible nor moderate, Rochester had no
intention of doing any such thing. To the horror of his companions, he drew his
sword and threw himself at the sundial, taking exception to its phallic shape.
According to one source, he was heard to yell: “What! Dost thou stand here to
f--- time?” (Another, more restrained account had him say: “Kings and kingdoms
will tumble down, and so shall you.”) He attacked the elaborate structure with
mad slashes. The priceless object lay in ruins over the garden. Returning to
their drink-sodden senses, the terrified rakes ran away from the roused guards,
in desperate hope that they would not be found out. Most avoided detection;
Rochester, the ringleader, did not. –Telegraph
article Feb 2017
Sample Poetry
[Excerpt]
The Imperfect Enjoyment
Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms;
Both equally inspired with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.
With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace,
She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.
Her nimble tongue, love’s lesser lightning, played
Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed
Swift orders that I should prepare to throw
The all-dissolving thunderbolt below.
My fluttering soul, sprung with the pointed kiss,
Hangs hovering o’er her balmy brinks of bliss.
But whilst her busy hand would guide that part
Which should convey my soul up to her heart,
In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,
Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.
A touch from any part of her had done ’t:
Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt.
Smiling, she chides in a kind
murmuring noise,
And from her body wipes the clammy joys,
When, with a thousand kisses wandering o’er
My panting bosom, “Is there then no more?”
She cries. “All this to love and rapture’s due;
Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?”
But I, the most forlorn, lost man
alive,
To show my wished obedience vainly strive:
I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.
Eager desires confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame does more success prevent,
A Ramble in St
James Park
Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see
|
|
Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Weent out into St. James's Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.
But though St. James has th' honor on 't,
'Tis consecrate to prick and cunt.
|
|
There, by a most incestuous birth,
Strange woods spring from the teeming earth;
For they relate how heretofore,
When ancient Pict behan to whore,
Deluded of his assignation
|
15
|
(Jilting, it seems, was then in fashion),
Poor pensive lover, in this place
Would frig upon his mother's face;
Whence rows of mandrakes tall did rise
Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies.
|
20
|
Each imitative branch does twine
In some loved fold of Aretine,
And nightly now beneath their shade
Are buggeries, rapes, and incests made.
Unto this all-sin-sheltering grove
|
25
|
Whores of the bulk and the alcove,
Great ladies, chambermaids, and drudges,
The ragpicker, and heiress trudges.
Carmen, divines, great lords, and tailors,
Prentices, poets, pimps, and jailers,
|
30
|
Footmen, fine fops do here arrive,
And here promiscuously they swive.
brkAlong these hallowed
walks it was
That I beheld Corinna pass.
Whoever had been by to see
|
35
|
The proud disdain she cast on me
Through charming eyes, he would have swore
She dropped from heaven that very hour,
Forsaking the divine abode
In scorn of some despairing god.
|
40
|
But mark what creatures women are:
How infinitely vile, when fair!
brkThree knights o' the'
elbow and the slur
With wriggling tails made up to her.
brkThe first was of your
Whitehall baldes,
|
45
|
Near kin t' th' Mother of the Maids;
Graced by whose favor he was able
To bring a friend t' th' Waiters' table,
Where he had heard Sir Edward Sutton
Say how the King loved Banstead mutton;
|
50
|
Since when he'd ne'er be brought to eat
By 's good will any other meat.
In this, as well as allthe rest,
He ventures to do like the best,
But wanting common sense, th' ingredient
|
55
|
In choosing well not least expedient,
Converts abortive imitation
To universal affectation.
Thus he not only eats and talks
But feels and smells, sits down and walks,
|
60
|
Nay looks, and lives, and loves by rote,
In an old tawdry birthday coat.
brkThe second was a Grays
Inn wit,
A great inhabiter of the pit,
Where critic-like he sits and squints,
|
65
|
Steals pocket handkerchiefs, and hints
From 's neighbor, and the comedy,
To court, and pay, his landlady.
brkThe third, a lady's
eldest son
Within few years of twenty-one
|
70
|
bWho hopes from his propitious fate,
Against he comes to his estate,
By these two worthies to be made
A most accomplished tearing blade.
brkOne, in a strain 'twixt
tune and nonsense,
|
75
|
Cries, "Madam, I have loved you long since.
Permit me your fair hand to kiss";
When at her mouth her cunt cries,
"Yes!"
In short, without much more ado,
Joyful and pleased, away she flew,
|
80
|
And with these three confounded asses
From park to hackney coach she passes.
brkSo a proud bitch does
lead about
Of humble curs the amorous rout,
Who most obsequiously do hunt
|
85
|
The savory scent of salt-swoln cunt.
Some power more patient now relate
The sense of this surprising fate.
Gods! that a thing admired by me
Should fall to so much infamy.
|
90
|
Had she picked out, to rub her arse on,
Some stiff-pricked clown or well-hung parson,
Each job of whose spermatic sluice
Had filled her cunt with wholesome juice,
I the proceeding should have praised
|
95
|
In hope sh' had quenched a fire I raised.
Such natural freedoms are but just:
There's something generous in mere lust.
But to turn a damned abandoned jade
When neither head nor tail persuade;
|
100
|
To be a whore in understanding,
A passive pot for fools to spend in!
The devil played booty, sure, with thee
To bring a blot on infamy.
brkBut why am I, of all
mankind,
|
105
|
To so severe a fate designed?
Ungrateful! Why this treachery
To humble fond, believing me,
Who gave you privilege above
The nice allowances of love?
|
110
|
Did ever I refuse to bear
The meanest part your lust could spare?
When your lewd cunt came spewing home
Drenched with the seed of half the town,
My dram of sperm was supped up after
|
115
|
For the digestive surfeit water.
Full gorged at another time
With a vast meal of slime
Which your devouring cunt had drawn
From porters' backs and footmen's brawn,
|
120
|
I was content to serve you up
My ballock-full for your grace cup,
Nor ever thought it an abuse
While you had pleasure for excuse -
You tht could make my heart away
|
125
|
For noise and color, and betray
The secrets of my tender hours
To such knight-errant paramours,
When, leaning on your faithless breast,
Wrapped in security and rest,
|
130
|
Soft kindness all my powers did move,
And reason lay dissolved in love!
brkMay stinking vapors
choke your womb
Such as the men you dote upon
May your depraved appetite,
|
135
|
That could in whiffling fools delight,
Beget such frenzies in your mind
You may go mad for the north wind,
And fixing all your hopes upon't
To have him bluster in your cunt,
|
140
|
Turn up your longing arse t' th' air
And perish in a wild despair!
But cowards shall forget to rant,
Schoolboys to frig, old whores to paint;
The Jesuits' fraternity
|
145
|
Shall leave the use of buggery;
Crab-louse, inspired with grace divine,
From earthly cod to heaven shall climb;
Physicians shall believe in Jesus,
And disobedience cease to please us,
|
150
|
Ere I desist with all my power
To plague this woman and undo her.
But my revenge will best be timed
When she is married that is limed.
In that most lamentable state
|
155
|
I'll make her feel my scorn and hate:
Pelt her with scandals, truth or lies,
And her poor cur with jealousied,
Till I have torn him from her breech,
While she whines like a dog-drawn bitch;
|
160
|
Loathed and despised, kicked out o' th' Town
Into some dirty hole alone,
To chew the cud of misery
And know she owes it all to me.
brkAnd may no woman better
thrive
|
|
brkThat dares prophane the
cunt I swive!
|
165
|
|
|
OXFORD
DICTIONARY NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE
Wilmot, John, second earl of
Rochester (1647–1680), poet and courtier, was born on 10 April 1647, probably
at Ditchley, Oxfordshire, the second but only surviving son of Henry Wilmot, first
earl of Rochester (bap. 1613, d. 1658), royalist army officer, and
his second wife, Anne Wilmot (1614–1696), widow of Sir Francis Henry Lee,
second baronet, of Ditchley, and daughter of Sir John St John, first baronet,
of Lydiard Tregoze, Wiltshire.
Early life, education, grand tour
John Wilmot was soon moved to Paris when Lady
Wilmot followed her husband into exile and settled in the Louvre at the court
of Henrietta Maria, Charles I's queen. But Lord Wilmot was frequently away from
Paris, from May 1650 to October 1652 in Scotland and England, from December
1652 to December 1654 in Regensburg. During the former years Wilmot accompanied
Charles II on his disastrous trip to Scotland to be crowned at Scone, fought by
his side at Worcester, escaped with him through the North Gate, and in an act
of ‘suicidal loyalty’ (Hutton, 65) remained with Charles through the forty days
and forty nights in the wilderness until they embarked together for Fécamp on
14 October 1651. He was rewarded by being created earl of Rochester in December
1652.
In August 1653 Edward Hyde wrote to Rochester
from Paris that his son is ‘always anxious for letters from him; he is an
excellent youth, and Rochester cannot be too fond of him’ (Clarendon State
Papers, 2.240). Nothing is known of John Wilmot's early education, but his
half-brothers, Sir Henry Lee, third baronet, and Francis Lee, were brought to
Paris in 1653 and attended the Académie du Veaux (ibid., 2.278). The
half-brothers, however, were not playmates. When John Wilmot was six Sir Henry
was sixteen and Francis was ten.
By May 1654 Wilmot's mother, now the countess of
Rochester, was ‘heartily weary of Paris’ (Clarendon State Papers, 2.357)
and by April 1655 she was back at Ditchley. There she retained Francis Giffard
to be her chaplain and to tutor Wilmot. He also probably attended the free
school at Burford. Wilmot would have known Ditchley, a royal hunting lodge, as
a low, half-timbered house near the site of a Roman villa, with stag horns in
the great hall, a pretty bowling green, and a gallery of Elizabethan portraits
by Dutch masters, ‘in itself a liberal education’ as Sir Ralph Verney wrote
(Verney, Memoirs … during the Commonwealth, 3.310). Wilmot may have seen
his father once more, in June 1655 during Rochester's miraculous escape from
York back to the continent in disguise.
Early in 1658 came bad news. Henry Wilmot, only
forty-five years old, had died in Ghent on 19 February and was buried in Sluys
(later reburied at Spelsbury). Thus, at the age of ten John Wilmot succeeded as
second earl of Rochester, Baron Wilmot of Adderbury, and Viscount Wilmot of
Athlone in the Irish peerage. Since his father was a malignant his heavily mortgaged
estates were forfeited. His mother, however, was able to save her jointure
estates, including Ditchley. ‘A Rochester portion, two torn smocks and what
nature gave’ (Tilley, 550) has passed into folklore, but in truth Rochester's
inheritance included titles and privileges that were restored to the nobility
in 1660 and the pretensions to the king's favour derived from his father's
distinguished services to the Stuarts, which Charles II, who made Rochester his
foster son, most generously fulfilled.
On 18 January 1660 Rochester was admitted to
Wadham College, Oxford. As a fellow-commoner he wore a different gown from
other undergraduates, took his commons at the high table, and was a member of
the fellows' common room. There he ‘heard talk that sounded very strange and
fascinating after the pietism that prevailed in his mother's house and at
Burford’ (Pinto, 6). Under Cromwell's brother-in-law, John Wilkins, Wadham had
become the most flourishing of the Oxford colleges. The ‘experimentall
philosophicall clubbe’ that Wilkins had organized in 1645 in London moved into
his lodgings at Wadham when he became warden in 1648 (Brief Lives,
2.301). After the Restoration and with the patronage of Charles II these
meetings, dedicated to experimental science, became the Royal Society at
Gresham College.
It was amid all the excitement of the Restoration
that Rochester, in the ineffable prose of Robert Parsons ‘suck'd from the
breasts of his Mother the University … perfections of Wit, and Eloquence, and
Poetry’ (Parsons, 6). In January 1660 Rochester was ‘a very hopefull Youth,
very virtuous and good natur'd (as he was always) and willing & ready to
follow good Advice’ (Remarks, 3.263). His tutor, Phineas Bury, a Hebrew
scholar, was ‘a Gentleman of good Parts’, ‘a very learned and good natured man’
(Remarks, 1.327; Burnet, Some Passages, 4), who would have made a
good academic role model for Rochester. But ‘the humour of that time wrought so
much on him, that he broke off the Course of his Studies’ (Burnet, Some
Passages, 4). Francis Giffard said he was ‘debauch'd’ (Remarks,
3.263), a very elastic term.
Oxford was a hard drinking university and
Rochester had the misfortune to be patronized by Robert Whitehall, that
‘useless member’ of Merton College (Wood, Ath. Oxon., 4.178) who, by
‘following the trade of drinking as he was wont, procured himself a red face’
(ibid., 1.144). ‘There is something pathetic’, Professor Pinto says, ‘in the
spectacle of the slender, bright-cheeked boy becoming “debauched” at the age of
fourteen [in fact, thirteen] under Whitehall's expert tuition’ (Pinto, 8–9).
But Whitehall was also a buffoon, a wit, a physician, and a poet. He undertook
to instruct the boy, ‘on whom he absolutely doted’, in the art of poetry, and
this must have proved irresistible to Rochester (Wood, Ath. Oxon.,
3.1232). While at Oxford, Rochester contributed a poem in Latin, ‘In obitum
serenissimae Mariae principis Arausionensis’, to a collection of verse
published to celebrate the Restoration.
Rochester was created MA filius nobilis on
9 September 1661. ‘Presented in scarlet robes belonging to doctors’ (Life
and Times of Anthony Wood, 1.414), he received a kiss on his left cheek
from his cousin Edward Hyde, now earl of Clarendon, and the new chancellor of
the university. On 21 November 1661 he set out on his travels with a governor,
Dr Andrew Balfour, a physician and herbalist presumably chosen by the king, and
two servants, with all expenses paid by the crown. The next three years are a
blank, but Rochester told Gilbert Burnet that Balfour ‘drew him to read such
Books, as were most likely to bring him back to love Learning and Study’
(Burnet, Some Passages, 5). No sighting of the party occurred until 1
October 1664, when Dr Walter Pope reported seeing Rochester in Venice. Then, on
26 October 1664, Rochester signed the Registro dei viaggiatori Inglesi in
Italia at the University of Padua. By November 1664 the party had reached
Paris, where Rochester paid a courtesy call on ‘the fair princess’ of his
undergraduate poem (Complete Works, 301–2), Henrietta Anne Stuart, now
duchess of Orléans, who entrusted him with a letter to her brother Charles II.
Marriage, Second Anglo-Dutch War, life at court
On 26 December 1664 Charles wrote to Henrietta,
‘I have receaved yours by my Lord Rochester but yesterday’ (My Dearest
Minette, 105). Even before Rochester arrived at court the king had chosen a
bride for him. He was ‘encouraged by the king to make his [addresses] to Mrs.
Mallet’ (Cooper, 5). She was the ‘great beauty and fortune of the North’ (Diary
of Samuel Pepys, 6.110). Elizabeth (d. 1681) was the only child of
John Malet of Enmore, Somerset, who died in 1656, and Untia, née Hawley.
It was said that ‘She is worth … 2500l. per annum’ (ibid., 6.110).
Elizabeth's grandfather, Francis Hawley, Baron Hawley of Duncannon in the
peerage of Ireland, raised a troop of horse for the king in 1642 and came to be
something of a ‘Court-Buffoon’ (Cobbett, Parl. hist., 4.appx, xxiv). Her
mother was married again, to Sir John Warre, justice of the peace, commissioner
for sewers, and knight of the shire for Somerset.
Elizabeth's grandfather brought her to court in
1664 to find a husband for her. In November 1666 Pepys was told how the lady
herself ranked her suitors: ‘my Lord Herbert would have had her—my Lord
Hinchingbrooke was indifferent to have her—my Lord Jo. Butler might not have
her—my Lord of Rochester would have forced her; and Sir [Francis] Popham (who
nevertheless is likely to have her) would kiss her breech to have her’ (Diary
of Samuel Pepys, 7.385). Rochester would indeed have forced her. On 28 May
1665 Pepys recounted the
story of my Lord of Rochester's running away on
Friday night last [26 May] with Mrs. Mallet … who had supped at White-hall with
Mrs. [Frances] Stewart [one of the maids of honour] and was going home to her
lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Ha[w]l[e]y, by coach, and was at
Charing-cross seized on by both horse and foot-men and forcibly taken from him,
and put into a coach with six horses and two women provided to receive her, and
carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord Rochester (for whom the King had
spoke to the lady often, but with no success) was taken at Uxbridge; but the
lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry and the Lord sent to the
Tower. (ibid., 6.110)
It can be guessed that Rochester's object in this
caper was matrimony and that his very elaborate stage setting included
somewhere in the wings—at Uxbridge, for example—a marrying parson, who for a
consideration would waive consent of parents, publication of banns, and
marriage licence. Some time in June 1665, in a rush of adolescent contrition,
Rochester addressed a petition to the king from the Tower:
Sheweth That noe misfortune on earth could bee so
sensible [painful] to your Petitioner as the losse of your Majesties favour.
That Inadvertency, Ignorance in the Law, and Passion were the occasions of his
offence. That had hee reflected on the fatall consequence of incurring your
Majesties displeasure, he would rather have chosen death ten thousand times
then done it. That your Petitioner in all humility & sence of his fault
casts himself at your Majesties feet, beseeching you to pardon his first error,
& not suffer one offence to bee his Ruine. And hee most humbly prayes, that
your Majesty would bee pleased to restore him once more to your favour, &
that he may kisse your hand. (Letters, ed. Treglown, 247)
To this conceivably ironic, comico-pathetic
appeal Charles responded on 19 June by ordering Rochester to be discharged from
the Tower. On 6 July Rochester set off with a note to Lord Sandwich,
commander-in-chief of the fleet, ‘to recommend this bearer … to your care, who
desires to go a voluntere with you’ and Sandwich wrote back on 17 July, ‘In
obedience to your Majesties Commands … I have accommodated [Lord Rochester] the
best I can & shall serve him in all Things that I can’ (TNA: PRO, SP
29/127, fol. 14).
In a letter of 3 August 1665 to his mother
Rochester describes his subsequent service on the Revenge, the flagship
of Captain Sir Thomas Teddiman in the disastrous Bergen campaign:
it was not fitt for mee to see any occasion of
service to the King without offering my self, soe I desired & obtained
leave of my Lord Sandwich to goe with [Teddiman]. … [W]ee … sailed to Bergen
[Norway] full of hopes and expectations, having allready shared amongst us the
rich lading of the [Dutch] Eastindia merchants [,] some for diamonds some for
spices others for rich silkes & I for shirts and gould which I had most
neede of … Mr. Mountegue and Thom: Windhams brother were both killed with one
shott just by mee … Your most obedient son Rochester[.] I have binn as good a
husband as I could, but in spight of my teeth have binn faine to borrow mony. (Letters,
ed. Treglown, 46–9)
Lord Sandwich reported to the king that Rochester
‘showed himself brave, industrious, and of useful parts’ (CSP dom., 1664–5,
562). The ‘gould’ that Rochester never found at Bergen was made up for by the
king's ‘free gift’ of £750 (CSP dom., 1665–6, 35). In the long
list of Charles's benefactions to Rochester, the most important were the
appointment in March 1666 as a gentleman of the bedchamber with lodgings in
Whitehall and £1000 a year for life and the appointment in May 1674 as ranger
and keeper of the royal hunting park at Woodstock with residence in the High
Lodge.
In 1666, without any orders from the king and
‘without communicating his design to his nearest Relations’ (Burnet, Some
Passages, 10), Rochester went aboard the Dreadnought, the flagship
of Sir Edward Spragge, as a volunteer, the day before the carnage called the
Four Days' Battle (1–4 June 1666). Almost all of the volunteers were killed,
the brother of Sir Hugh Myddleton dying in Rochester's arms. At the height of
the battle ‘Spragge not being satisfied with the behaviour of one of the
Captains, could not easily find a Person that would chearfully venture through
so much danger, to carry his Commands to that Captain’ (ibid.). Indeed it was
remarked that ‘No sober man … would … venture into a crazy Cock-boat out of a
sound Ship, when tis but barely possible he may be saved’ (Parsons, 20). But
Rochester volunteered and ‘went in a little Boat through all the shot, and
delivered his Message, and returned back to Sir Edward’ (Burnet, Some
Passages, 11), thus fulfilling his ambition, as he told the king in his
undergraduate poem, ‘to be known / By daring loyalty your Wilmot's son’ (Complete
Works, 1).
In August 1666 Elizabeth Malet told Lord
Hinchingbrooke, who had followed her to Tunbridge Wells, that ‘her affections
[were] settled’ on another (Diary of Samuel Pepys, 7.260), not
necessarily Rochester. On 29 January 1667, however, she married Rochester (Le
Fleming MSS, 44). In July 1667 Rochester was summoned to his seat in the
House of Lords.
When she became pregnant in 1668 Lady Rochester
retired to Adderbury, the Wilmot estate in Oxfordshire, near Ditchley, where
Anne Wilmot, named for Rochester's mother, was born on 30 April 1669. For
twelve years, from 1667 to 1679, Rochester's life followed the familiar pattern
of London during sessions of parliament and Adderbury and High Lodge during
recesses. ‘He was wont to say that when he came to Brentford [on the London
road] the devill entred into him and never left him till he came into the
country again’ (Brief Lives, 2.304).
With Charles as his father in vice, it is not
surprising that Rochester's life at court revolved around wine and women.
‘Cupid and Bacchus my saints are’, says the speaker in ‘Upon his drinking a
bowl’ (Complete Works, 38). ‘The court … not only debauched him but made
him a perfect Hobbist’ (Wood, Ath. Oxon., 3.1229). ‘One day at an
Atheistical Meeting’, Rochester recalled, ‘I undertook to manage the Cause, and
was the principal Disputant against God and Piety, and … received the applause
of the whole company’ (Parsons, 23). On his deathbed Rochester explained to
Burnet that ‘it seemed unreasonable to imagine that [the natural appetites]
were put into a man only to be restrained’ (Burnet, Some Passages, 38).
In Rochester they were indulged. But the record is difficult to reconstruct.
According to Anthony Hamilton's Memoirs of the
comte de Grammont, Rochester seduced Sarah Cooke, who became ‘the
prettiest, but also the worst actress in the realm’ (Hamilton, 248, 239). She
was followed by others, including the actress Elizabeth Barry (d.
1713). The grand affair with Elizabeth Barry probably began in 1675 when
she was seventeen. According to Anthony Aston she was not beautiful, but she
had an imposing presence and a crooked smile (Aston, 7). Her first recorded
role was that of Draxilla in Otway's Alcibiades, which opened at Dorset
Garden, the new state-of-the-art playhouse of the duke of York's company, about
the end of September 1675. Later reports stated that Rochester took over her
training as an actress and ‘taught her not only the proper cadence or sounding
of the voice, but to seize also the passions, and adapt her whole behaviour to
the situations of the character’ (Davies, 3.199). He apparently ‘made her
rehearse near 30 times off the Stage, and about twelve in the Dress she was to
act … in’ (Betterton, 16), presumably for her role as Leonora in Aphra Behn's
tragedy, Abdelazer, or, The Moor's revenge, that opened at Dorset Garden
about 3 July 1676 (Van Lennep and others, 1.245). If such coaching did take
place it must have occurred in the months before July 1676 for Rochester spent
the winter of 1675–6 at Adderbury. Thereafter Barry's success was assured.
In April 1677 Barry left ‘this gaudy, gilded
stage’ (Complete Works, 194) because she was pregnant. Rochester's
daughter, named Elizabeth Clerke, was born in December 1677. But Barry was ‘no
more monogamous than Rochester’ (Letters, ed. Treglown, 29), and the
relationship was stormy. According to one of Rochester's letters Elizabeth
‘made it … absolutely necessary’ (ibid., 216–17) for Rochester to remove his
daughter temporarily from her care. In his will he left the child £40 a year.
‘For five years together’, Rochester said, ‘he
was continually Drunk … [and] not … perfectly Master of himself … [which] led
him to … do many wild and unaccountable things’ (Burnet, Some Passages,
12). He presented himself to Barry as ‘the wildest and most fantastical odd man
alive’ (Letters, ed. Treglown, 99). One night in February 1669 at the
Dutch embassy:
after dinner they drank and were pretty merry;
and among the rest of the King's company, there was that worthy fellow my Lord
of Rochester and T[homas] Killigrew, whose mirth and raillery offended the
former so much, that he did give T. Killigrew a box on the ear in the King's
presence. (Diary of Samuel Pepys, 9.451)
This constituted the crime of lèse-majesté,
or treason. Killigrew had rallied Rochester about keeping his wife in the
country. The next day the king ‘did publicly walk up and down, and Rochester …
with him, as free as ever’ (ibid., 9.451–2), but he required Rochester to
withdraw to Paris with a letter to his sister, ‘You will find him not to want
witt’, he wrote, ‘and did behave him selfe, in all the duch warr, as well as
anybody, as a volunteer’ (My Dearest Minette, 172).
In June 1675 ‘Lord Rochester in a frolick after a
rant did … beat downe the dyill [glass chronometer] which stood in the middle
of the Privie Garding, which was esteemed the rarest in Europ’ (Laing MSS,
1.405). Aubrey learned what Rochester said on this occasion when he came in
from his ‘revells’ with Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, and Fleetwood
Sheppard: ‘“What … doest thou stand here to fuck time?” Dash they fell to
worke’ (Brief Lives, 2.34).
An even more disgraceful episode took place at
Epsom on 18 June 1676. Rochester, Etherege, Captain [Richard?] Bridges, William
Jephson, and [Quartermaster Samuel?] Downs
were tossing some fiddlers in a blanket for
refusing to play, and a barber, upon the noise, going to see what [was] the
matter, they seized upon him, and, to free himself from them, he offered to
carry them to the handsomest woman in Epsom, and directed them to the
constables house, who demanding what they came for, they told him a whore, and,
he refusing to let them in, they broke open his doores and … beate him very
severely. At last, he made his escape, called his watch, and Etheridge made a
submissive oration to them and soe far appeased them that the constable
dismissed his watch. But presently after, the Ld Rochester drew upon the
constable. Mr Downs, to prevent his pass seized on him [Rochester], the
constable cryed out murther, and, the watch returning, one came behind Mr Downs
and with a sprittle staff cleft his scull. The Ld Rochester and the rest run
away. (Thompson, 1.133)
Downs died before 27 June and it was rumoured
that Rochester ‘is to be tryed’ (Pike, 59), but he was not charged.
Theatre
Rochester's main interest after wine and women
was not song but theatre. Even a summary of his involvement is impressive. In
summer 1670 he moved into Arbor House next door to the Lincoln's Inn playhouse
on Portugal Row. He patronized playwrights such as John Dryden, Elkanah Settle,
Nathaniel Lee, John Crowne, Sir Francis Fane, and Thomas Otway. He was a
theatre critic who savaged the London audiences. He wrote prologues and
epilogues, a comedy, with Dryden as Squab, of which only a fragment survives
(1674–5), a tragedy in blank verse, Valentinian (1675–6), and a scene
for Sir Robert Howard's hero play, The conquest of China by the Tartars
(1676). He translated the second act chorus of Seneca's Troas. He was
represented on the stage in Etherege's The man of mode (March 1676),
D'Urfey's Madame Fickle (November 1676), Aphra Behn's The second part
of ‘The rover’ (1681), Lee's The princess of Cleve (1682), Crowne's The
city politiques (1683). His social position prevented him from going on the
stage himself, so ‘meerly for diversion, he would go about in odd shapes, in
which he acted his part so naturally, that even those who were [in] on the
secret … could perceive nothing by which he might be discovered’ (Burnet, Some
Passages, 28). His most famous impersonation was that of the German quack,
Hans Buling. Calling himself Dr Alexander Bendo he appeared on a mountebank
stage in Tower Street, complete with zany, monkey, handbill, and a line of
‘rare secrets … for help, conservation, and augmentation of beauty’ (Complete
Works, 97). He also played Bendo's wife (in the habit of a grave matron)
for evening consultations in ‘the Bed Chamber’ (Famous Pathologist,
26–7).
Two of these episodes, however, Rochester's
abortive duel with John Sheffield, earl of Mulgrave, and the poet John Dryden's
beating in Rose Alley on 18 December 1679, are so encrusted with misinformation
that more than a summary is required. On 22 November 1669, for some rumoured
slight that Mulgrave knew immediately to be false, he challenged Rochester.
Rochester chose to fight on horseback. Both combatants chose seconds and agreed
to fight the next morning in Hyde Park. Rochester and his second appeared on
the field of honour ‘extreamly well … mounted’, while Mulgrave and
Lieutenant-Colonel Edmond Ashton ‘had only a couple of pads’ (Works of …
Buckingham, 2.9). Mulgrave, pleading the inequality of their mounts,
proposed that they fight on foot. By the laws of the duello Rochester did not
need to comply: ‘Whoever giveth the Challenge, is in Honour obliged to Answer
the other with whatever Weapons he shall propose’ (Hope, 91). And in fact
Rochester ‘was so weak with a certain distemper, that he found himself unfit to
fight at all’ (Works of … Buckingham, 2.9). If Mulgrave had not been
eager to take advantage of Rochester he could have postponed the encounter.
Instead he seized upon this as an act of cowardice and ‘intirely ruined
[Rochester's] reputation as to courage, (of which I was really sorry to be the
occasion)’ (ibid., 2.10). Mulgrave's refusal to fight on horseback was the real
act of cowardice. Rochester's illness was not feigned. A letter which reveals
that he was undergoing mercury therapy at M. Fourcade's establishment, previously
dated to 1672, seems more likely to have been written in 1669.
The ‘evidence’ that Rochester ordered the beating
of Dryden, thinking that the latter had written ‘An essay upon satyr’, which
attacked various courtiers (including Rochester) and circulated in 1679, is
another misdated letter, from Rochester to Henry Savile: ‘You write me word
that I'm out of favour with a certain poet … If he falls upon me at the blunt,
which is his very good weapon in wit, I will forgive him if you please and leave
the repartee to Black Will with a cudgel’ (Letters, ed. Treglown,
119–20). First published, undated, in 1697, the manuscript has not survived.
From its apparent reference to the Rose Alley fracas Prinz dated it 1 November
1679. It is now agreed that the letter was written in spring 1676, nearly four
years before the incident, which effectively exonerates Rochester. In his
letter to Savile of 21 November 1679, moreover, Rochester carelessly attributed
the poem to Dryden, as did others (it was in fact written by Mulgrave), but
showed no concern about his ‘share’ in the ‘libel’ (Letters, ed.
Treglown, 232).
For Rochester, Dryden was a cadet, ‘Damned to the
stint of thirty pound a year’ (Complete Works, 48), son of a younger
son, ineluctably a commoner. But an educated commoner and deservedly the poet
laureate, a rara avis, an owl that could sing and worse yet an owl with
social ambitions. Dryden had married the daughter of an earl, and taken a
mistress from the stage exactly as the king, Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst,
and John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, had done. For Dryden, Rochester was
obviously a dilettante: he dabbled in verse which circulated in manuscript,
‘needlesly expos[ing his] nakedness to publick view’ (Works of John Dryden,
ed. Hooker, Swedenborg, and Roper, 13.14), but published nothing.
Poet
It has been difficult to obtain a proper
understanding, much less a proper evaluation, of Rochester's poetry. The
obstacle has been its repeated disparagement. This, beginning with Dryden and
Samuel Johnson, reached its apogee in Sir Edmund Gosse. It is based on several
misconceptions: the autobiographical fallacy and the charges of plagiarism,
blasphemy, and obscurity.
The autobiographical fallacy assumes that every
poem is an autobiographical document. Graham Greene quotes ten lines of a
speech of Lucina's in Valentinian (that has no counterpart in John
Fletcher's The tragedies of Valentinian and Maximus (1610), on which
Rochester's work is based):
[to] these murmuring floods
… When … I came distressed,
… seeking peace and rest,
Why would you not protect …
A sleeping wretch from such wild, dismal dreams?
(Complete Works, 133)
Greene pronounces these lines ‘clearly autobiographical’
(Greene, 143), missing the point that Rochester is reinforcing Lucina's
nightmare of impending rape with Daphne's horror upon receiving the addresses
of the god Apollo: ‘“fer, pater” [Daphne is the daughter of a river god],
inquit “opem! Si flumina numen habetis”’ (‘“Oh!, help”, she cried, “in this
extremest need, / If water-gods are deities indeed”’; Ovid, 1.545; Works of
John Dryden, ed. Scott and Saintsbury, 12.92).
Sidney Lee's complaint that Rochester was
‘something of a plagiarist’ (DNB) misses the point that Rochester, as in
the case of Valentinian, habitually worked from models, ‘which yet he
used not, as other Poets have done, to translate or steal from them, but rather
to better and improve them by his own natural fancy’ (Parsons, 8). This gives
his poems an intertextuality lacking, for example, in Abraham Cowley,
Rochester's favourite English poet. He knew the risks he ran in mixing ‘other
mens thoughts … with his Composures’ (Burnet, Some Passages, 8), but the
effect could be brilliant. In To the postboy, for example, Rochester
seems to have confessed that he was an accessory before the fact to Downs's
murder:
Frighted at my own mischiefs I have fled
And bravely left my life's defender dead.
(Complete Works, 195)
This is the way the poem has been read, as a
straightforward confession of guilt. But it is much more complicated than this.
And ‘the beauty of the Poem’ (Burnet, Some Passages, 26) lies
precisely in the ‘plagiarism’ (ibid.).
To the postboy is a satire on
aristocracy, on privilege based on genealogy, like Seneca's epistle 4: ‘We have
all had the same number of forefathers; there is no man whose first beginning
does not transcend memory. Plato says, “Every king springs from a race of
slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors”’ (Seneca, 1.289).
The model for To the postboy is a speech by Malevole in John Marston's The
Malcontent (1604):
Why, sure my blood gives me I am noble, sure I am
of noble kind; for I find myself possessed with all their qualities;—love dogs,
dice, and drabs, scorn wit in stuff-clothes; have beat my shoemaker, knocked
[up] my semstress, cuckold my pothecary, and undone my tailor. Noble! why not?
(John Marston: Works, 1.265)
In place of Marston's conventional aristocratic
misdmeanours, Rochester, in a moment of breathtaking daring, substituted
felonious episodes from his own life:
I've swived more whores more ways than Sodom's
walls
E'er knew, or the college of Rome's cardinals …
I have blasphemed my God and libelled kings.
(Complete Works, 195–6)
‘To make a Satyre without Resentments’, Rochester
said, ‘was as if a man would in cold blood, cut mens throats who had never
offended him’ (Burnet, Some Passages, 26). In To the postboy the
resentments are directed against himself, a drunken, syphilitic brawler,
cowardly, blasphemous, libellous, and still a ‘peerless peer’, which creates a
powerful animus against aristocracy, exactly the effect that Rochester wanted.
Dismissing Rochester's verse as blasphemous and
obscene misses the most important point. Impelled by the new science,
institutionalized in the Royal Society, all the major Augustans were engaged in
the ‘endeavour to see things as they are’ (Boswell, Life, 1.339). With
Rochester this was both a personal commitment and a political statement. ‘Because
the Presbyterians … had affected to call every thing by a Scripture-name, the
new Court [of Charles II] affected to call every thing by its own name’
(Walpole, Catalogue, 2.38). This produced an ‘appalling realism’ in
Rochester's verse (Prinz, Wilmot, 245). But Rochester knew and defended
what he was doing: ‘Expressions must descend to the nature of things
expressed’, he told Savile (Letters, ed. Treglown, 232). Rochester's
friend, Sue Willis, was a complicated woman:
Bawdy in thoughts, precise in words,
Ill-natured, though a whore,
Her belly is a bag of turds,
And her cunt a common shore [sewer].
(Complete Works, 200)
This exactly descends to the nature of the thing
expressed. As late as 1953 it was impossible to publish Rochester's ‘The
Imperfect Enjoyment’ and ‘A ramble in St. James's Park’ (Poems, xlix).
And even after Judge John W. Woolsey's landmark decision in the Ulysses
case in December 1933 ‘A ramble in St. James's Park’ could still be called
‘this unprintable poem’ (Berman, 362) in 1964.
Parliamentary career
Rochester's parliamentary career was not
distinguished. There is no evidence that he initiated a bill or sat as a
chairman of the committee of the whole house. The record of his attendance is
poor. Of the 831 meetings of parliament from 10 October 1667, when Rochester
took his seat in the House of Lords, until 26 January 1680, the last meeting he
attended, Rochester was present at only 220, or 26 per cent of the total. By
comparison during this same period the king attended 65 per cent of the
meetings, Mulgrave 50 per cent, Buckingham 46 per cent.
Rochester was not appointed to many committees of
the house. The first, on 9 November 1667, was to consider a bill to prevent the
importation of Irish cattle that he later recalled in a satire to prevent the
importation of pocky Irish beauties (Complete Works, 35, 334). He was
not appointed to the important standing committees of the house, for privileges
and to receive petitions, until October 1673, but then he was reappointed in
October 1675, February 1677, and March 1679. In December 1678 he was appointed
to manage a free conference with the lower house about a bill to disband the
army, that the king strongly opposed.
Rochester's record of inactivity is confirmed by
the Lords division lists and protests. Of twenty one surviving division lists
for the period Rochester's name appears on only one, voting for the attainder
of Danby (the king wanted banishment). Of the thirty-two protests, whereby a
peer signed his name on the manuscript journal below the vote from which he
dissented, Rochester signed five. By voting for the attainder of Danby on 14
April 1677 and by writing his name under Buckingham's to protest against two
resolutions of the house that the king very badly wanted it appeared that Rochester
was going to follow Buckingham into opposition. But he did not. On 21 November
1679, while parliament was prorogued during the height of the Popish Plot
madness, Rochester wrote to Henry Savile in Paris:
Mr. O[ates] was tried two days ago for buggery
and cleared. The next day he brought his action to the King's Bench against his
accuser, being attended by the Earl of Shaftesbury and other peers to the
number of seven [including the Duke of Buckingham], for the honour of the
Protestant cause. (Letters, ed. Treglown, 232)
By this bitter sarcasm Rochester separated
himself from the opposition and on his deathbed he praised not Buckingham but
George Savile, Viscount Halifax, one of the king's friends, who had been
instrumental in defeating the opposition's bills for excluding the duke of York
from the throne.
The last act
In summer 1679 Rochester learned that Jane
Roberts, a former mistress, was dead. The summer before, Savile had reported
that what she had suffered undergoing mercury therapy is ‘so farr beyond
description or beleefe that till shee tells it you herselfe I will not spoyle
her story’. What Savile wrote was, ‘what shee has endured would make a damd
soule fall a laughing att his lesser paines’ (Letters, ed. Treglown,
198), which can stand as a surrogate for what Rochester suffered in the last
nine weeks of his life.
In October 1679, when Rochester learned that
Gilbert Burnet had attended Roberts in her last illness, he told Halifax that
he would like to meet him (Burnet, Some Passages, A5r). Their
meeting went on every week until March 1680, when Rochester went to the races
at Newmarket with the king. When the court was unexpectedly called back to
Whitehall and parliament was prorogued Rochester retired to Woodstock Park.
Early in April
he thought he was so well, that being to go to
his Estate in Somersetshire he rode thither Post. This heat and violent motion
did so inflame an Ulcer, that was in his Bladder, that it raised a very great
pain in those parts: Yet he with much difficulty came back to … Woodstock-Park.
He was then wounded both in Body and Mind: He understood Physick and his own
Constitution and Distemper so well, that he concluded he could hardly recover.
(Burnet, Some Passages, 127–8)
On 26 May 1680 Rochester was visited by his mother's
chaplain, Robert Parsons. Parsons read to him the suffering servant passage in
Isaiah 53: ‘as he heard it read’, he told Burnet, ‘he felt an inward force upon
him, which did so enlighten his Mind, and convince him, that he could resist it
no longer’ (Burnet, Some Passages, 141). So ‘the greatest of sinners’
became ‘the greatest penitent’ (Parsons, 8; Some Unpublished Letters of
Gilbert Burnet, 41).
Rochester threw himself into his final role: ‘he
begg'd his Mother and Lady to read the same to him frequently, and was
unsatisfied … till he had learn'd … the 53. of Isaiah without book’. He
‘wish'd he had been a starving Leper crawling in a ditch’ (Parsons, 24–5). ‘“Mr
Hobbes and the philosophers have been my ruin”, he said, He then put his hand
on a Bible, and, with great rapture, said, “This, this is the true philosophy”’
(Seward, 2.509). He spoke marvellous things, which ‘God alone must teach him’,
his mother said, ‘for no man could put into him such things as he says’ (Letters,
ed. Treglown, 249). More brilliantly theatrical was his calling to his bedside
his entire family on 19 June 1680, to witness his ‘dying Remonstrance’: ‘from
the bottom of my soul I detest and abhor the whole course of my former wicked
life … I one of the Greatest Sinners, do yet hope for Mercy and Forgiveness.
Amen’ (Parsons, 32). ‘Though … signed by Rochester, it is the language of
Robert Parsons, M.A.’ (Norman, 200).
He ordered ‘all his profane and lewd Writings …
and all his obscene and filthy Pictures, to be burned’ (Parsons, 28–9). In
addition his aunt Johanna, ‘an old devout Lady St. John … burnt a whole trunk’
of his letters, ‘for which’, said Richard Bentley in ‘a most admirable bon
mot … her soul is now burning in heaven’ (Walpole, Corr.,
28.239–40). Rochester's colourful swearing at his servants had entertained his
friends, but on his deathbed he thought he had overcome this habit. He
relapsed, however, and asked Burnet to call ‘that damned Fellow’ back so he
might apologize, ‘but such mots de théâtre were too melodramatic for the
… sober priest’ (Burnet, Some Passages, 153; Williams, 260).
The penitent became an evangelist. He persuaded
his wife, whom he is said to have previously converted to Roman Catholicism
(perhaps in the hope of gaining favour at court), to rejoin the English church.
He startled his friend William Fanshaw, one of the king's masters of requests
(and a witness to Rochester's will), by fixing him with his gaze and crying
‘Fanshaw … there is a God, and a powerful God, and he is a terrible God to
unrepenting sinners’ (Letters, ed. Treglown, 252). Poor Fanshaw, who was
disfigured by venereal disease, concluded that Rochester was mad, and he may
have been right. Rochester was ‘certainly delirious’, Fanshaw said, ‘for to my
knowledge he believed neither in God nor Jesus Christ’ (Prinz, Rochesteriana,
57). His mother reported to her sister-in-law, Lady St John of Battersea, that
‘one night … he was disordered in his head’ and talked ‘ribble rabble’ and that
on another occasion ‘his head was a little disordered’ (Letters, ed.
Treglown, 250, 253). It seems unlikely that his mother, her chaplain, and
Gilbert Burnet, three intelligent people with vested interests in the matter,
should later spend so much effort denying that Rochester was mad, unless he
was.
In the end there was nothing left but ‘Skin and
Bone’ (Burnet, Some Passages, 155). Rochester died at High Lodge about 2
a.m. on 26 July 1680 ‘without … so much as a groan’ (ibid., 158), was buried on
9 August ‘without any memorial in the vault beneath Spelsbury Church’ (Corbett,
124), and, in a scene of dantesco horror, was left to sin and repent, to
sin and repent, for 200 years in the chapbooks of evangelical Christians, with
titles like A mirror for atheists and The libertine overthrown.
Frank H. Ellis
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Likenesses attrib.
J. Huysmans, portrait, c.1665–1670, Warwick Castle [see illus.] ·
oils, c.1665–1670 (after J. Huysmans?), NPG · D.
Loggan, drawing, 1671, BM ·
attrib. P. Lely, oils, c.1677, V&A · R.
White, line engraving, 1681 (after oil painting, attrib. P. Lely), BM, NPG · oils, Knole, Kent
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Frank
H. Ellis, ‘Wilmot, John, second earl of Rochester (1647–1680)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online
edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29623, accessed 12 Feb
2017]
John
Wilmot (1647–1680): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/29623
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