Rochester, JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF, the wittiest reprobate at the court of Charles II., was born at Ditchley in Oxfordshire, 10th April 1647, and was educated at Burford school and Wadham College, Oxford. He next travelled in France and Italy, and on his return repaired to court, where his handsome person and lively wit quickly made him a prominent figure. In 1665 he showed conspicuous courage serving under Sandwich against the Dutch, as well as the summer after under Sir Edward Spragge—facts which agree but ill with the stories that he would slink away in street quarrels and evade duels which he had himself provoked. With a friend, Mr Windham, he had entered into a formal engagement that, 'if either of them died, he should appear and give the other notice of the future state, if there was any.' Windham was killed in an attack upon Bergen, but did not afterwards disturb the rest of his friend, who now plunged into a life of the grossest debauchery, was for five years together continually drunk, and diverted himself constantly with extravagant frolics and buffoonery, such as the pursuit of low amours in mean disguises, and the acting of assumed characters, as a mountebank, a quack doctor, and the like. In the scarce intervals of intemperance he wrote excellent letters to his wife and son, and devoted himself to letters, writing personal satires, bacchanalian and amatory songs, and too often obscene and licentious verses, many of which, however, were doubtless fathered on him after his day. In these wild excesses he blazed out his youth and his health, till at the age of one and thirty he had exhausted the fund of life. On his death-bed he was convinced of the necessity of repentance by the arguments of Bishop Burnet, who writes: 'I do verily believe he was so entirely changed, that if he had recovered he would have made good all his resolutions.' He died 26th July 1680. His last conversations are touchingly described by Burnet in Some passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester (1680; in vol. iv. of Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Biography), a book, says Dr Johnson, 'which the critic ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety. It were an injury to the reader to offer him an abridgment.'
Rochester's verses show more wit than poetry, but he possessed in rich measure the gift of satire. An excellent example of this is his memorable epitaph on Charles II.:
Here lies our sovereign lord the king,
Whose word no man relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.
Equally well known is the description—'a merry monarch, scandalous and poor,' the line rhyming with which it is characteristically impossible to quote. Horace Walpole's judgment of his work is thus expressed in Royal and Noble Authors: 'Lord Rochester's poems have much more obscenity than wit, more wit than poetry, more poetry than politeness.' Before his death he expressed a wish that his indecent verses should be suppressed, but that very year these, and much more, were published ostensibly at Antwerp, really at London. Among the best of his poems known to be genuine are an Imitation of Horace on Lucilius, Verses to Lord Mulgrave, a Satire against Man, and Verses upon Nothing.