Decide all controversies by
Infallible artillery,
And prove their doctrine orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks;
Call fire and sword and desolation
A godly, thorough reformation,
Which always must be carried on,
And still be doing, never done;
As if religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.The Earl of Rochester
A less simple reaction to the reversal in social mores in 1660 is found in the libertine
wit of John Wilmot,Earl of Rochester (1648–1680); son of a Cavalier hero and a
Puritan mother, he was a Calvinist in religion. The libertine enjoyment of poetic sex,
found in Ovid and classical poets, and in Marlowe and Donne, was a convention of
gallant Cavalier verse. Rochester, however, is ferocious. Like other Restoration writ-
ers, he disliked righteous sentiment and sexual hypocrisy, but was also a sceptic
about human reason.
Renaissance humanists imagined that Reason would choose to go up rather than
down the scale of creation, though Erasmus, Montaigne, Jonson and Pascal had
doubts.Scepticism had been applied to the theory of the state by Thomas Hobbes.
In his Leviathan (1651), written in exile in France, the natural brutality of man needs
the control of an absolute ruler. This scepticism is the starting point of Rochester’s
Satyr against Reason and Mankind:
Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose, for my own share,
What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I’d be a dog, a monkey or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal
Who is so proud of being rational.To envy a dog is to recall the Greek Cynics, and Rochester was a cynic as well as a
sceptic. His Interregnum childhood had caused him to doubt the rational
perfectibility of man. The life of Rochester was much mythologized by his biogra-
phers. He ‘blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness’ in Johnson’s
ve rsion. He had a rake’s disrespect for love: ‘Love a woman! You’re an ass! / ’Tis a
most insipid passion / To choose out for your happiness / The silliest part of
God’s creation.’ The King, who had seventeen acknowledged bastards, fared no
better:
His sceptre and his prick are of a length,
And she may sway the one, who plays with th’other,
And make him little wiser than his brother.
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch scandalous and poor.Rochester’s outrageousness could be light as well as gross, as in ‘Song of a Young
Lady: To Her Ancient Lover’: ‘Ancient person, for whom I / All the flattering youth
THE RESTORATION 165