Hitherto Propertied : Rochester's Aristocratic Alienation and the Paradox of Class Formation in Restoration England

ANTONIO:	You must disrobe anon, and don your Native habiliaments
	and in the Equipage give that fair Viscountess to understand
	the true quality of her Husband.
GUILLOM:	Hum—I'm afraid, 'tis a harder task to leap from a Lord to
	a Rogue, than tis from a Rogue to a Lord.
ANTONIO:	Not at all, we have Examples of both dayly.

—Aphra Behn, The False Count (1681) ¹

On the evening of 26 May 1665, John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, abducted the much sought after heiress Elizabeth Malet in a coach-and-six, thereby inaugurating what would be an infamous reputation for aristocratic bravado. After dining in Whitehall with a Maid of Honor of Charles II's, Malet was returning home with her grandfather, the ex-Cavalier Lord Hawley, when their coach was stopped at Charing Cross by a party of armed men. Malet was captured and spirited into the night. ² Pepys described the scandal in his diary a few days later:

she was seized on by both horse and foot-men and forcibly taken from [her grandfather] 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. ³

Pepys, himself "carried away" by the romance and excess of the exploit, leaves to a terse parenthetical comment what most deserves attention: "the King had spoke [of Rochester] to the Lady often, but with no success." Why the lack of success?

The Lady's affections, it appeared, were with Rochester, and in keeping with the scandal and intrigue which the incident precipitated, the couple eloped without the permission of Malet's guardians two years later. ⁴ In an overdetermined culmination to the drama, Pepys spotted the newlyweds at the theater, six days after the marriage, and his comment goes far to answer the above question: "Here I saw my Lord Rochester and his Lady, Mrs. Mallet, who hath after all this ado married him; and, as I hear some say in the pit, it is a great act of charity, for he hath no estate." ⁵ The Parliamentarians had seized the royalist Wilmots' land at Adderbury during the Interregnum, and as Gilbert Burnet astutely remarked, Rochester's father, the celebrated Cavalier general, Henry Wilmot, "left his son little other inheritance but the honour and title derived to him." At Henry Wilmot's death in 1657, the ten-year-old John Wilmot became the second Earl of Rochester, Baron Wilmot of Adderbury, and Viscount Wilmot of Athlone in Ireland, but the series of titles, though markers of glorified status, were of negligible economic value. In debt and propertyless, with no income except a small perpetually-in-arrears pension from the king, Rochester was far from an attractive suitor in the eyes of Malet's guardians. Even the king's favor could not make up for his lack of "cash and acres." ⁶

For Rochester's biographers, the Malet abduction represents a chivalric effort to rescue a Lady from the mercenary manipulations of her guardians. For Daniel Defoe writing in 1727, however, the abductor "within the Times of our Memory" was hardly a gallant Cavalier:

The Arts and Tricks made use of to Trapan, and as it were, Kidnap young Women . . . were very scandalous . . . the young Lady . . . was watch'd, laid in wait for, and, as it were, besieged by a continual Gang of Rogues, Cheats, Gamesters, and such like starving Crew. ⁷

Defoe's commentary is suggestive of the way in which the reckless excesses of the post-Restoration aristocrat point more to his abasement and degradation than to his honor and elevation. Indeed, just as Malet...