Never were politics, power, and punch lines more intertwined than in the very strange case of John Wilmot. The second Earl of Rochester was a poet and playwright whose mischief-making lifestyle and caustic satirical writing got him banished from court (and invited back) on what seems to have been a routine basis. This was a man who lived as he wrote. Sired by a boozy Cavalier and a previously widowed aristocrat, Wilmot was, according Horace Walpole, “a man whom the muses were fond to inspire, but ashamed to avow.” David Hume judged that his “very name” was “offensive to modest ears.” And while Samuel Johnson wrote that he “lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness,” Andrew Marvell said that he was “the only man in England that had the true vein of satire.”

Nicknamed the “mad Earl,” Wilmot earned a reputation for unparalleled profanity that persisted for over three and a half centuries. (He was described by his own chaplain to possess a wickedness “as remarkable as any place or age can produce.”) It wasn’t until the 1920s that Rochester became the subject of academic study. Graham Greene’s biography of Wilmot, written between 1931 and 1934, wasn’t published until 1974, so obscene were the primary sources that he quoted. But who was the Earl of Rochester, and how do we square his rakish reputation with the accolades as a philosophic poet he’s posthumously acquired?

1647 wasn’t the most hilarious year in British history. The English Civil War bloodied the island’s soil. Oliver Cromwell was preparing to sign the death warrant of Charles I, all but guaranteeing yet another sequel to the carnage. It was into this pandemonium that, on All Fool’s Day, John Wilmot was born.

Wilmot came of age under Cromwell’s puritanical rule, in an England of hard work and limited pleasure. Cromwell shuttered inns and theaters, prohibited sports and disallowed dancing. Game-playing young boys were whipped, and cursing was met with prison sentences. A woman caught working on a Sunday was sent to the stocks, and if she was wearing makeup, on that day or any other, she could expect a soldier to scour it off. Celebratory feasts were replaced with fasts, and Christmas was leeched of all its jolly traditions—no more holly, no more roast goose.

Upon Cromwell’s death in 1658, though, the monarchy was restored and the somber nation made room for the libertine. The executed king’s son, Charles II, returned from exile in France, and a mere two years later it was almost as if Cromwell had never created the Commonwealth. With the grinch gone, it was a time to eat, drink, and be merry—at least for those who had the money to afford the time. If Wilmot’s boyhood had been spent in a brutally solemn political climate, his adolescence was matched with a cathartic excess.

The young Earl spent three teenage years traversing Europe with his erudite tutor, visiting, among the great cities of the Grand Tour, a series of superlative, lowbrow destinations more characteristic of contemporary Oklahoma than the seventeenth-century Continent: the biggest bell in the world, the largest pair of hart’s horns in France. Rochester’s most mind-altering travels occurred in Italy, where, wandering unsupervised, he familiarized himself with commedia dell’arte puppet shows and leather dildos. These new pleasures—parodic comedy and sex toys—would prove to be leitmotifs of the Earl’s later life.

In 1666, as John Milton neared completion of Paradise Lost and the London plague was at its height, nineteen-year-old Wilmot returned to England and received a warm welcome from King Charles II, who bestowed upon him a generous pension—mostly, it seems, for his ability to rhyme extemporaneously—and a formal Christmas Day debut.

Rochester’s latent deviousness blossomed in the hedonistic court of the “Merry Monarch,” whose permissive rule—a time of costumes, reopened playhouses, and loose morals—encouraged dirty wit and political sarcasm. The scatological quips, graphic sexual description, and profusion of four-letter words makeLenny Bruce sound like Mickey Mouse. Rochester’s self-reported schedule—rising at eleven, dining at two, getting drunk before seven, and then ejaculating upon the lap of a whore—was not atypical among his fellow courtiers.

At the age of twenty, Rochester married the aristocrat Elizabeth Mallet. It was a curious courtship, Rochester having kidnapped her from her carriage at Charing Cross, a crime for which he was only briefly punished. Rochester wrote a formal apology—to the king, not his hostage—and attempted to win back royal favor by volunteering in the Second Dutch War. He became something of a hero, intercepting Dutch ships off the coast of Norway and delivering official messages across the English Channel under heavy fire.

Upon his return from battle, Rochester was promoted to Gentleman of the King’s Bedchamber, a position that entailed the dressing and private feeding of His Majesty, as well as sleeping in a nearby cot. Although seemingly menial, the job’s duties were intimate, and so reserved only for members of the “Merry Gang” comprised of the king’s noble friends. Soon Rochester was acting as royal pimp, training His Majesty’s would-be mistresses in the erotic arts so they’d be skilled practitioners by the time they entered the monarchial boudoir. Such demands did not preclude serious activity: In the fall of 1667, an underage Rochester was granted permission by the king to enter the House of Lords. The honor was an odd one to bestow upon a man who never before, and would never again, appear to have any political ambitions. Rochester, it seems, was content to remain a power-adjacent jester.

Neither professional responsibility nor upwardly mobile matrimony tamed his anarchic spirit, and Rochester continued to misbehave, reporting to one friend, with probable accuracy, that he spent five years continuously drunk. During this period of the 1670s, writes Rochester’s biographer James Johnson, “his literary output was slight, his attendance in parliament was sporadic, and scandalized stories about his drinking, wrenching, and brawling proliferated.” With his rowdier friends, Rochester founded The Ballers, a sexual society devoted mostly to polyamory and capering about Woodstock Park in the nude. Occasionally their hijinks grew mean spirited: Rochester once pushed a hunchback off a bridge for sport. Diarist Samuel Pepys lamented that The Ballers’ “mad bawdy talk did make my heart ake.”

Other instances of the Earl’s indiscretions include boxing the king’s manager’s ears at an ambassadorial dinner, taking a teenage boy as a lover and stage actresses as mistresses, destroying His Majesty’s prized glass sundial, infecting both men and women with venereal diseases, and siring a syphilitic son. Throughout these mutinous years, Rochester was banished repeatedly for illicit dueling, but he remained, in the words of the Scottish theologian Gilbert Burnet, “extravagantly pleasant.”

Charles II had lifted Cromwell’s ban on fun in 1661, reopening theaters and granting them license to allow actual women to play female roles. From this indulgent atmosphere come the dirty verse and smutty productions we now associate with the Restoration. William Wycherley’s play The Country Wife, one of the epitomes of the era, follows the untoward tricks of a wealthy rake feigning impotence to gain access to married women. It is rumored that the womanizing libertine at the center of George Etherege’s 1676 play The Man of Mode is explicitly about Rochester.

Sexual innuendo, libidinous celebration, and creative obscenities littered the stages of England. Rochester was the era’s patron saint, a superlative example of living by one’s pen. In “Upon Nothing”, his maniac diatribe against almost everything, Rochester takes to task not only the false authorities of the day but also reason itself. The poem ends with five increasingly skeptical stanzas that conflate targets of vastly different scale:

But Nothing,—why does Something still permit
That sacred Monarchs should at Council sit,
With Persons highly thought at best for Nothing fit?
Whilst weighty Something modestly abstains
From Princes’ Coffers and from Statemen’s Brains,
And Nothing there, like stately Nothing, reigns.

Nothing who dwell’st with Fools in grave disguise
For whom they reverend Shapes and Forms devise.
Lawn Sleeves, and Furs, and Gowns, when they, like thee, look wise.

French Truth, Dutch Prowess, British Policy,
Hibernian Learning, Scotch Civility,
Spaniards’ Dispatch, Danes’ Wit, are mainly seen in thee.

The great Man’s Gratitude to his best Friend,
Kings’ Promises, Whores’ vows, towards thee may bend,
How swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end.
 

The king’s affection for a handsome, drunken genius dismissing politicians and prostitutes as equal entities is sympathetic in a way. Teasing, after all, comes from a place of intimacy. Until it doesn’t. The king’s affection for a rollicking and rhyming nobleman is about as understandable as that nobleman’s inevitable offense.

Rochester received favors in the form of land, money, and women from Charles II, but the symmetry of the friendship is hard to parse. Considering the constant humiliation, disrespect, and ridicule the king endured at Rochester’s hand, one is forced to conclude that there was some sort of inconspicuous symbiosis between the two. In this light, the friendship begins to resemble one of those inscrutable wingmanships that occur at Manhattan nightclubs, wherein a socially incompetent millionaire buy drinks for a charming (but unemployed) young man. Each benefits by association, exchanging seemingly incompatible currencies that in the end ensure the presence of beautiful women. This is barely an analogy: Rochester’s charming banter is what led prostitutes to the royal bedroom.

But all the while, Rochester was growing increasingly suspect of the king and his amoral entourage, of which he himself was a leading member: “We have a pretty witty king,/ Whose word no man relies on;/ He never said a foolish thing,/ Nor ever did a wise one.” The pandering, the cuckolding, the nymphomania—all these vices, par for the course at court, were beginning to wear on the rake. Rochester objected in particular to painters’ renderings of royal prostitutes as haloed angels. And despite his own outrageous antics, Rochester resented that the king forsook political duties for wenches and wine.

In 1673, Rochester wrote the poem for which he earned the most infamy. "A Satyr Upon Charles II” is, even by today’s standard, almost impossibly insulting. Nor are his high desires above his strength:

His scepter 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.
Poor Prince! thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court,
Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.
‘Tis sure the sauciest prick that e'er did swive,
The proudest, peremptoriest prick alive.
Though safety, law, religion, life lay on 't,
‘Twould break through all to make its way to cunt.
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.

Despite the references to the king’s genitalia and the role it plays in his governance, the real trouble—and notoriety—was due less to the poem’s content than to its delivery, which was accidental and in-person. King Charles had commissioned different verse, but when Rochester went to deliver the poem, he presented the “Satyr” in lieu of “Signior Dildo,” a lighter work ("This signior is sound, safe, ready, and dumb / As ever was candle, carrot, or thumb.") Although it seems likely that the mistake was a drunken one, the Earl was once again banished.

By his early thirties, Rochester’s health was deteriorating, and in later verse Rochester addresses his declining health directly. In “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” which British biographer Jeremy Treglown calls "the best poem ever written about premature ejaculation," Rochester repeatedly damns his own failing organ, calling it a “treacherous, base deserter of my flame" and hoping that "ten thousand abler pricks agree / To do the wronged Corinna right for thee." At one point, he sadly refers to “melt[ing] into sperm.” According to a written account by Gilbert Burnet, Rochester, upon his deathbed, renounced both his atheism and his libertine ways, converting at the eleventh hour to Christianity. The deathbed reformation of the age’s most derelict figure made for a good moral tale, whether or not it was accurate.

Rochester’s dubious end-of-life moral turnaround had little effect on his legacy. It is not his eventual goodness he’s remembered for, but the wicked satire. His lampoons of the king are said to be an attempt to, in the words of scholar David Farley-Hills, “triumph over the threatening chaos by means of laughter.”

“Rochester remained an idealist,” writes Graham Greene. “He loved morality, others, and there was an ideal of Kingship to which Charles did not attain.”

Satire, in this light, begins to look like a perverted form of optimism, and its practitioners like boosters of a better tomorrow.