Rochester: the debauched poet who mocked the king

The Earl of Rochester was a libertine famous for his bawdy verses who bravely satirised Charles II’s court. Alexander Larman celebrates the life of a gloriously reckless poetic spirit

Johnny Depp as Rochester in the 2004 film The Libertine 

By Alexander Larman

On June 25 1675, Charles II held a court banquet. Allowed the crown 15 years earlier on the condition that he form a new covenant with his people that promised fairness, tolerance and openness – qualities that both his father and the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell had lacked – the King had instead frittered his time away with costly foreign expeditions and self-indulgent sexual adventuring. He enjoyed the company of hard-living, witty young men, whose ability to entertain led him to grant them titles and riches.

On the evening of June 25 this group of aristocrats, social climbers and poets – what Andrew Marvell called a “merry gang” – tore recklessly about town. They included the wit Charles Sedley and the Master of the Revels John Killegrew. They were notorious for their escapades, which included lewd pantomimes of buggery, genital exposure and violence. They had scandalised society; only royal intervention saved them from reprimand or arrest.

However, the leader of the merry gang, poet and aristocrat John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, was a man quite different from the rest. As avowed a tavern-botherer, whoremaster and libertine as any of them, there remained about him something of the angel undefaced. After Rochester had “grown debauched” while a 13-year-old student at Oxford, he had established himself as a leading figure at court. It helped that Charles saw him as a surrogate son of sorts, due both to his father Henry Wilmot’s unstinting support for the exiled royal court and Rochester’s own valiant service in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. His friendship with the King was sufficiently deep that antics other men would have been imprisoned for were readily forgiven; no wonder Samuel Pepys wrote scornfully that it was “to the King’s everlasting shame to have so idle a rogue his companion”. 
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