A Profane Wit: The Life of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester by James William Johnson (review)

308 JAMES WILLIAM JOHNSON. A Profane Wit: The Life of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester. Rochester: Rochester, 2004. Pp. x ⫹ 467. $34.95. Mr. Johnson seeks to make the ‘‘highly complex man’’who was John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, ‘‘comprehensible ’’and ‘‘more accessible to twenty-firstcentury readers.’’ Drawing upon modern historical and psychiatric theorists and an encyclopedic knowledge of Rochester ’s life and times, Mr. Johnson has done just that. His has been no easy task. Half of Rochester’s poems and letters remain undated; the authorship of key works—‘‘Timon,’’ ‘‘Signor Dildo,’’ and the notorious play, Sodom—is in dispute . Historical evidence must be disentangled from the biased accounts, past and present, of biographers who have mistaken the legend for the life. In the poems, moreover, Rochester assumes a multiplicity of identities, and the real life Rochester often donned disguises ‘‘so that his nearest Friends could not have known him. . . .’’ As Harold Love points out, ‘‘Rochester studies is not and has never been a field of safety-first scholarship .’’ The Rochester who kidnapped Elizabeth Mallet, boxed Tom Killigrew’s ears, had mistresses (Mr. Johnson makes the case for five), was involved in duels (probably four), presented mistakenly ‘‘into the King’s hands a terrible lampoon of his own making against the King,’’ masqueraded as the quack doctor Alexander Bendo, participated in the murder of Captain Downs, and who on his death bed repented—that Rochester is all here. But so is the Rochester who had a ‘‘Christian Upbringing’’ and received a ‘‘Classical Education,’’who had a happy, though often contentious, marriage and loved being a father. This Rochester was Keeper of Woodstock Park. He ‘‘had game, timber, and a crew of woodsmen to oversee.’’He supervised estates, bred and raced horses, examined accounts, talked with agents and tenants, bought and sold livestock. This Rochester attended the House of Lords and delighted in arranging and presiding over the marriage between ‘‘[t]he King’s favorite bastard-daughter, the Lady Charlotte Fitzroy’’ and his half-nephew, Edward Henry Lee, a marriage that healed a rift among the Wilmots and Lees and assuaged Charles II’s anger over the disastrous marriage of Anne Lee to Thomas Wharton. Mr. Johnson is particularly good at reconstructing domestic and court life and provides the most complete account and understanding that we are likely to have of Rochester’s formidable mother, the Dowager Countess of Rochester. Vivian de Sola Pinto found it curious that ‘‘the most profligate of English poets , is also one of the most domestic.’’ For Mr. Johnson, the two are bound together . In the Rochester who participated in smashing ‘‘The King’s Sun Dial,’’ which ‘‘featured glass portraits of King Charles, Queen Catherine, the Duke of York, the Queen Mother, and Prince Rupert,’’ we glimpse the anger of the domestic Rochester’s thwarted expectations . Rochester, born to little inheritance , tried to make his way in the world drawing upon the only resource he had, the King’s gratitude for Baron Wilmot’s years of loyal service. Rochester spent much of his adult life courting royal favor and riches, going so far, Mr. Johnson convincingly shows, to conspire ‘‘to destroy Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon , the man who befriended his grandfather and father, who was sheltered by his mother during the Civil Wars and 309 who protected her in France, who enriched the estates of his family, and secured sinecures and promotion— possibly even a rich wife—for Rochester himself in his first years at Court.’’Royal preferment, however, came sporadically and often not at all, and thus we have the anger that fed Rochester’s escapades and his verse. Mr. Johnson illuminates well-known conundrums. The enigmatic fragment entitled ‘‘Sab: Lost’’ almost surely arose from a collaboration between Rochester and Lee on The Tragedy of Nero. David Vieth intuited that ‘‘A Ramble in St. James’s Parke’’ is ‘‘a crucial work biographically .’’ Mr. Johnson shows that it is, the poem in part arising from Rochester ’s fury at discovering ‘‘that his mistress , Foster, had been betraying him with others and that she had passed on more deadly forms of the pox to him.’’ Mr. Johnson also corroborates Love’s insight that...