From Terry Eagleton on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Bored by his country residence and deaf to his wife’s pleas for his company, [Rochester] spent his time in London brawling, drinking and whoring along with fellow members of a secret club known as the Ballers, which imported leather dildos to use in their entertainments. Impeccably egalitarian in his sexual favours, Rochester slept with everyone from court ladies to prostitutes in the cheapest brothels in town. He probably had affairs with men as well; few courtiers of the time did not. Homosexuality was intensely fashionable, despite being a capital crime on a level with treason. The socially inept John Dryden, in a feeble attempt to keep abreast of a group of fast-living companions, once blurted out: ‘Let’s bugger one another now, by God.’ At one point Rochester took as his valet a young Frenchman called Belle Fasse (possibly a pun on ‘belles fesses’ or ‘beautiful buttocks’), and probably bedded him – a reckless dalliance, given that Belle Fasse was a Catholic.
Though he was rapidly moving from sprightly young blade to raddled old lecher, his reputation as a wit, poet, daredevil lover and brilliant conversationalist was riding high. He lived in theatrical style, delighting in masks and flamboyant costumes, and now the theatre began to imitate his life. He became the model for a number of raffish characters, most notably Dorimant in George Etherege’s The Man of Mode. No Restoration comedy was complete without its Rochester lookalike. He also fell in love with another would-be actor, Elizabeth Barry, and soon found himself at sea in an ocean of Elizabeths. Barry had a daughter by him to whom she gave her own first name, and Rochester gave the same name to one of his daughters with his wife Elizabeth, perhaps as a sly joke at her expense.
There was a streak of madness about Rochester, a perverse, Wilde-like impulse to self-destruction. Rather as Wilde appeared to be courting disaster, so Rochester seemed to do his best to enrage the monarch on whom his fortunes depended. When Charles asked to see a satirical poem that was circulating around the court, Rochester handed him instead a vituperative lampoon of the king he had written himself. Whether he did this by accident or design is unclear. Perhaps it was a Freudian parapraxis, consciously accidental but unconsciously intended. In any case, Charles was furious, Rochester was banished from the court yet again and his various pensions and salaries suspended. He was reinstated some time later, only to be pitched out once more when in another bout of insanity he threw himself in a drunken rage on a phallic-shaped sundial dear to the king’s heart crying, ‘What! Do you stand here to fuck time?’ and slashed it to pieces with his rapier. It was said to be the most elaborate and expensive instrument of its kind in Western Europe.
As the syphilis addled his brain he grew odder and odder. Extraordinarily, he disguised himself for a few months as a gorgeously attired Italian physician, Alexander Bendo, and set up shop in a London street offering cures for scurvy, back pain, bad teeth, obesity, consumption, kidney stones and a number of other afflictions. His work required him on occasion to see his female patients naked, and if his more respectable women clients were shy of being intimately examined by him, he would sometimes do so disguised as Mrs Bendo. In his own person, he would also occasionally offer a cure for infertility by a strikingly simple technique.
