‘I abhorr what I Soe long lov'd’: An Exploration of Rochester's ‘death bed repentance’

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)On 25 June 1680, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, aged only thirty-three years but the most dissolute member of the dissolute court of Charles II, lay dying at his country retreat in Oxfordshire. Two years earlier, his fellow poet Samuel Butler had penned a not unaffectionate portrait of him in his satire The Court Burlesqued:This Noble Peer, so fam'd for writingSatyrs, so Bawdy and so Biting,Who for lampooning Church and Crown,Usurps the Bays from all the Town,May boast himself, we must allow it,Lord, Atheist, Mountebank and Poet,Rake, Coward, Libertine, but yetA Man of Learning and of Wit.1Satirist, atheist, rake, libertine, and poet with a reputation for ridiculing Church and State: Rochester's life and writings fully justify all these attributes. Yet on that day in late June, apparently without any warning, and too weak to write himself, he dictated 'at Twelve at Night' a remarkable letter to a former chaplain to the King, Gilbert Burnet:I beginn To value Churchmen above all men in the World: & you above all the Churchmen I know in itt ... I hope ... that The World may See how much I abhorr what I Soe long lov'd, & how much I Glory in repentance in Gods Service. bestow your prayers upon mee that God would spare me, (if itt bee his Good Will) To shew a True repentance, & amendment of life for the Time to come, or els ... that hee would mercifully except of my death bed repentance ...2Within five weeks, Rochester was dead, and the news of his self-styled 'death bed repentance' swiftly reverberated through the Court, the City and the Church. This was achieved initially by astounded word of mouth, and then reinforced through the rapid publication of both Rochester's letter to Burnet and the funeral sermon delivered by his mother's chaplain, Robert Parsons; three months later, Burnet issued a biography largely fashioned out of conversations he had held with the earl during the previous winter and latterly over a period of four days during Rochester's final illness. Parsons and Burnet had no doubt as to the genuineness of the earl's volte face, but their shared conviction has been tarnished by suspicions of ecclesial selfinterest; many contemporaries found it simply incredible to accept that Rochester had repented of 'the commissions of some sins extraordinary'. Some may have rejected out of hand the whole notion of repentance, sharing the sentiments expressed by Sulpitius in Otway's The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1680), 'A Curse on all Repentance! How I hate it! / I'd rather hear a Dog howl than a Man whine!' (p. 66), and one of Rochester's regular companions, William Fanshaw, is representative in attributing his conversion simply to delirium, 'for to [my] knowledge', he commented at the time, '[my Lord] believed neither in God nor Jesus Christ'. Nonetheless, the Earl of Halifax, the unamiable Earl of Mulgrave (Rochester's bitter enemy) and John Tillotson, the Dean (later Archbishop) of Canterbury, were amongst those who seem to have accepted the conversion at face value, and during the next 150 years, the accounts by Parsons and Burnet of Rochester's 'death bed repentance', passing through over thirty reissues and editions, would provide a staple of the popular devotional diet. 3This paper seeks to explore the context and validity of Rochester's profession of faith. After a review of his family background and the contemporary political situation, Rochester's letters and poetry will be examined for any evidence of his religious views and, finally, the conclusions drawn by Burnet and Parsons will be sifted and assessed.The social and political backgroundRochester was born on 1 April 1647, just under two years before the lawful monarch, Charles I, was publicly executed outside the Banqueting Hall, Whitehall Palace. His father, Baron Wilmot of Adderbury (he would be created Earl of Rochester in 1652), was one of Charles I's principal cavalry commanders during the Civil War, but falling into disgrace in 1644 he had joined the Queen's court which had removed to France. …