In 1676, a character named Dr Alexander Benbo appeared on the streets of London. Dr Benbo was an Italian Mountebank, an apothecary and physician who wore exotic furs and an antique cap. He offered the sick and superstitious cures for their ills, while predicting the future from physical marks on their bodies. He was scrupulously careful with his female patients: when a physical examination was required, he retired and allowed his wife, the matronly Mrs Benbo, to perform the necessary tasks. A number of details about Dr Benbo might well have interested his patients greatly. His cures, his lotions, ointments, pills and potions, contained, among other things, urine, soot, ash, lime, soap, lead and pieces of old walls. His wife, who performed intimate examinations on his female patients, was Dr Benbo in disguise. The good doctor's knowledge of medicine was probably limited to the cures for the clap he had himself received. Finally, he was not Italian, but English, with an Irish connection. His name was John Wilmot and he was the Viscount of Athlone, the Earl of Rochester and the Gentleman of the Bedchamber of King Charles II.
Rochester was one of a number of courtiers at the Restoration Court of Charles II who earned themselves the title of ["]the Ballers["] for their wit - which was frequently obscene - and their hedonistic attitude to life. The head of the Court wits was George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, a man who once went on a dirty underwear strike when Charles denied him command of the army at the Battle of Worcester in 1651.
Talent as a poet
He was joined by others, including Rochester himself, the playwright George Etherege and Sir Charles Sedley, who had once stood completely naked before 1,000 people at the appropriately-named Cock Tavern. He claimed to possess a potion which would make every woman desire him, drank a toast to the King and was then forced to retreat under a hail of stones. What distinguished Rochester from the others was a combination of intelligence, a considerable talent as a poet and a recognition of the emptiness of the life he was leading, which tortured him even as he led it. It is not entirely clear why he was reduced to disguising himself as Dr Benbo at the age of 29, while his fame at Court was at its peak. What is certain is that the King's guards were seeking him for his latest offence against His Majesty's honour, but they failed entirely to link him to the latest notorious arrival on the crowded streets of the capital.
Born, appropriately, on April Fool's Day, 1647, Rochester was, quite simply, an extraordinary man, the son of one of Charles I's generals who had himself incurred the King's wrath and had been exiled to Paris during the English Civil War.
Abducted heiress
Young Rochester appears to have inherited some of his father's characteristics. At the age of 18, he fell in love with the heiress Elizabeth Mallet. Charles II recommended Rochester to her guardians as a responsible and mature young man, although his assessment was undermined when Rochester abducted her from her coach. Charles immediately issued a warrant for his imprisonment and he was duly locked up in the Tower of London for three weeks, while Elizabeth was eventually restored to safety. But Rochester's actions had succeeded in impressing Elizabeth sufficiently for her to disregard, insofar as she could, the advice of her elders, and she married Rochester in 1667. He remained unfaithfully devoted to her ever after, recognising his own inability to remain faithful to her in the poem Love and Life:
Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows,
If I by miracle can be
This livelong minute true to thee,
'Tis all that heaven allows.
Much of his poetry, it should be said, is unlikely to appear on the Leaving Certificate syllabus and is unprintable in a family newspaper. He wrote of adultery and fornication, of the artificial means of sexual satisfaction used by the women of Court (in Signor Dildo) and of the practice of morophilia (the use of lower class, sometimes retarded, men for sexual gratification by upper-class women) in Quoth the Duchess of Cleveland to Counsellor Knight. Even the King was not immune: in On King Charles, Rochester describes the King as one who ["]rolls about from whore to whore,/ A merry monarch, scandalous and poor["]. Charles appears to have had a remarkable degree of tolerance for Rochester, although it was probably due as much to a shared natural cynicism as a love for the courtier. Even when, in a fit of drunkeness, Rochester destroyed one of the King's most prized possessions, the rarest sundial in Europe, the King forgave him. When set beside such actions, poetic descriptions of his sexual liaisons were unlikely to trouble Charles too much.
In fact, Rochester employed spies and footmen to listen at the doors of couples known to be engaged in fornication or adulterous relationships in order to provide the substance of his poems. For example, the Duchess of Cleveland, Barbara Palmer, quoted in the titular poem above, was a former mistress of the King and was regarded as sexually ravenous by the males at Court, a case of the kettles calling the pot black. Her conquests included most of her footmen and Jacob Hall, a particularly athletic rope-dancer. They also included, it should be noted, Rochester himself.
Aware of his failings
Yet if Rochester could be scathing about the frailties of others, fuelled by a genuine sense of outrage at the ways of the world and, in particular, of the King, he was no less aware of his own failings. The poem To the Postboy begins with one of the great forgotten first lines of English poetry: ["]Son of a whore, God damn you, can you tell/ A peerless peer the readiest way to Hell?["] The poet goes on to claim that he has ["]swived more whores more ways than Sodom's walls/ E'er knew, or the college of Rome's cardinals["], which was more than an idle boast in Rochester's case. It ends with him demanding once again of the titular postboy the "readiest way" to Hell. The postboy answers, simply: ["]The readiest way, my lord's by Rochester.["]
When he died, on July 26th, 1680, aged only 34, he had been reduced to a shell by a lifetime of excess. He had earned himself the title of "the Hound of Heaven," yet at the end he turned to God. But one of his final acts on his deathbed symbolises his bitterness towards the world and its values. When told by one of his physicians that the King had recently drunk his health, Rochester, according to his mother, ["]never said a word, but turned his face from him["].