3 - The Poet at Court

Summary

The court of Charles II was modelled in part on that of Louis XIV at the Louvre where Henrietta Maria had lived in exile. Like his uncle, Charles kept an ensemble of twenty-four violinists to accompany French dances and a company of French players to perform French plays. The court ladies wore French fashions. Charles, less concerned with pomp and ceremony than Louis and far less tolerant of boredom, required from the inner circle of his courtiers not French formality and adulation but entertainment, grace and a well-bred easiness of carriage. Rochester responded as any clever teenager would, by showing off the readiness and extravagance of his wit, which at first the King appreciated even when the joke went against him.

Most important among Rochester's rivals for the King's attention was the King's childhood playfellow, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham. As a new Gentleman of the Bedchamber 19-year-old Rochester must have been impressed by the elegance and panache of 38-year-old Buckingham, who had been a legend ever since he danced the Element of Fire in Benserade's Masque Royale de la Nuit at the court of Louis XIV in 1658. Years after Buckingham's death Burnet, no admirer of courtiers, remembered that he had ‘a flame in his wit ’ that was inimitable. Amid his multifarious involvements as politician, military commander, courtier, privy councillor and minister of state, Buckingham cared passionately about literature and spent what leisure he had discussing problems of literary taste and working on literary projects. Rochester can have seen little of him in his early months at Whitehall, but they were soon friends, as may be seen by Buckingham's letter asking Rochester to wait on the King and lie in the royal bedchamber in his place:

I am very perticular in ths matter that your Lordship may see I am a man of businesse, and take the liberty of troubling you upon this occasion becawse I had rather bee oblidged to you then any body else.

Though Buckingham was the best-known wit of the generation before Rochester ‘s, very few works can be ascribed to him with any confidence. His role seems to have been that of instigator, suggesting topics that his fellow wits might extemporize upon, judging, classifying and improving their efforts. In 1667 he completed his adaptation of The Chances, which was played in a double bill with Dryden's Secret Love.