5 - The Court Wits and Their King

Summary

Kings and Princes are only so Incomprehensible as what they pretend to represent; but apparently as Frail as those they Govern.

Few could have summarized Charles II's kingship with the instinct, wit and incisiveness of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. In this one sentence he alluded to the king's elusiveness, the questionable divinity of kingship and recognition of royal weakness, whether spiritual, sexual or physical. Rochester and his libertine companions penned and distributed, in manuscript and print, a plethora of meditations on Restoration kingship. These meditations were coloured by the wits’ experiences of civil war and Restoration, their easy familiarity with the king, their complex and slippery political allegiances and their penchant for cutting satire. This chapter shows how the wits were concerned with: the king's vulnerability to mistresses and the concomitant danger, through such mistresses, of the influence of Louis XIV; the threat to the law potentially posed by the king's easily swayed ‘sceptre’, undermining the carefully constructed language of a restored Stuart monarchy based on legality; the pragmatic nature of Charles's rule; the dangers posed by his self-serving courtiers; and, especially pertinent after the regicide of January 1649, the restored king's mortality. The chapter places the wits’ cultural output in the Restoration public sphere and suggests that the contents of their court-based literary miscellanies contributed to the erosion of royal authority. It identifies in particular Sir Charles Sedley's insinuation that Charles's rule was reliant on his subjects rather than on God. But it also investigates attacks made at court which targeted both the wits and their king – the former for the libertines’ disloyalty and the latter for indulgently allowing it to happen. Yet while the court wits looked disloyal (that is, Whiggish) during the Exclusion Crisis, it is argued that we should not see such simplistic connection between membership of the Country party in the 1670s and Whiggism in the early 1680s, even if contemporaries thought they saw it.

The relationship between the king and the court wits could be described in a number of ways. Some of the wits were intimates of the king; some were Gentlemen of his Bedchamber.