Rochester and Oldham: ‘High Rants in Profaneness’

Summary

Rochester died on 26 July 1680. John Oldham's pastoral elegy ‘Bion, A Pastoral … Bewailing the Death of the Earl of Rochester’ suggests that the Earl was his poetic mentor:

If I am reckon'd not unblest in Song,

'Tis what I owe to all-teaching tongue:

Some of thy Art, some of thy tuneful breath

Thou didst by Will to worthless me bequeath:

Others thy Flocks, thy Lands, thy Riches have,

To me though didst thy Pipe and Skill vouchsafe.

The lines were written about four years after Rochester was first made aware of Oldham, when the latter was working as an assistant master at the Whitgift School in Croydon. More than one account survives of a visit from Rochester and other court wits (including the Earl of Dorset and Sir Charles Sedley, according to the DNB, which derived its information from the Memoir attached to the 1722 edition of Oldham's Works, 1. v–vi), though the venue was more likely to have been Beddington (where Oldham's patron Sir Nicholas Carew lived) than Croydon.

The immediate occasion seems to have been Oldham's socalled ‘Satyr Against Vertue’, written by July 1676. This title, under which the poem was piratically published in 1679, was repudiated by Oldham who, in the 1682 edition, settled on an epigraph from Juvenal and ‘Ode. Suppos'd to be spoken by a Court-Hector at Breaking of the Dial in Privy-Garden’. This drunken exploit of Rochester's had been mentioned in a newsletter report (26 June 1675): ‘My Lord Rochester in a frolick after a rant did yesterday beat doune the dyill which stood in the middle of the Privie [Gard]ing, which was esteemed the rarest in Europ’.