Lord Rochester’s Monkey

Published 1974

Although I still have 13 Greene books to go this year, I think I can safely say that this book is least like any of the others. This is an academic work, a history of Lord Rochester as a man and an author. Reading it has taken me out on a limb whose foliage I can barely recognize. Most of the names casually mentioned in this book, familiar to any aficionado of the Restoration Era I’m sure, mean nothing to me, including Lord Rochester himself. But, as my knowledge of that era was close to zero, I have learned several things from this book. For example, I now understand why it’s called the Restoration Era.

I admit that I am prejudiced against royal courts and the courtiers that infest them. In fact, the concept of nobility, of people who possess superiority due to heritage alone, is to me so monstrous that I welcome the invention of the guillotine. (Just remember to remove the periwig first.) Thus it is with that hatred in mind that I read this book about one of the courtiers during the reign of Charles II, the primary king of the Restoration.

La-di-dah what a useless twit John, Earl of Rochester was. Of course, he was no more useless and twittish than the other courtiers or the king. But Rochester was also a wit and wrote some verse, much of it filled with spite, some of it erotic, some of it genius. And, from time to time, he attempted murder, rape, thievery, and more subtle humbuggeries. Thus, one might say that he is a conflicted character.

His poetry is largely satiric and takes almost anyone or any topic as its target. Early in his career as a courtier he was renowned for his entertaining conversation. Even as his poetry’s barbs caught the king, the king’s mistresses, and other grand personages, Rochester got away with it because he was funny. But over time, as he angered more and more within the court and as he became more sickly due to excesses of wine and women, his wit began to create him only enemies. (It’s funny that syphilis will lead to insanity and the primary cure back in the day involved consuming lots of mercury, which also leads to insanity.) In the end, Rochester was despised by most of the court, including by some his erstwhile proteges.

Rochester’s end is particularly sordid. He was dying of ulcers that started in his urinary tract and were spreading across his lower body. Various clerics made him their pet project to convert back to the faith, such an infamous sinner. He countered the first with his cutting and clear-sighted wit. But as he good and truly lay dying (a false report of his death having already made the rounds once before), he supposedly quite suddenly believed and became a devout Christian. (Some of those that knew him best assumed that the mind that he was losing had finally just gone.) Various accounts of the conversion of Rochester were published as encouragements to other rogues.

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I can see why Greene chose Rochester as subject. Unhappy characters, especially those who see that they are moral failures, fascinate Greene. Greene originally wrote this book in the early 1930s but, due to the commercial failure of his second and third books, could not find a publisher. He published it with minor (I believe: it’s not quite clear) changes in 1974, in an edition lavishly illustrated with photographs and drawings. From the preface and the bibliography, it seems that only a couple of biographies on Rochester had been written and Greene felt that his book presents some different takes on Rochester.

The final conversion of Rochester and his posthumous use as a moral exemplar for others, despite the sinfulness of his life, seems similar to how the deaths of characters in several of Greene’s novels lead to effects on others that would have been unintelligible to the characters themselves. Most analogous to Rochester is the priest in The Power and the Glory who became a holy martyr through his death, an example for others, despite how despised he was in life.

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Finally, I am disappointed that the monkey was only mentioned once. The book’s title promised a more interesting book than this.