Bucks & Rocks

A RAKE AND HIS TIMES (280 pp.)--John H. Wilson--Farrar, Straus & Young ($4).

RAKE ROCHESTER (224 pp.]--Charles Norman--Crown ($3).

King Charles II believed in God, but pictured him as an easygoing fellow who would not "make a man miserable . . . for taking a little pleasure out of the way." This belief enabled Charles to 1) get a great deal of pleasure out of a multitude of mistresses, 2) swell the British peerage with royal by-blows. 3) set an example that his courtiers were happy to follow. Like crumbs from the royal table, his discarded ladies were snapped up first by noble favorites, often later by mere baronets, knights, popular actors and even acrobats. The most resourceful mistress of them all, for example, Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, ended up in the arms of a nobody named Jack Churchill, who built so wisely on her fair foundations (she gave him -L-5,000) that he became the great Duke of Marlborough.

Such was the Restoration pattern--up the ladder, down the ladder, in a maze of political and bedroom intrigues. The two latest Restoration biographies--one on George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, the other on John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester--are not merely complementary, they are like reading the same crazy story twice.

Cuckolds Grow Troublesome. "Bucks," as Author Wilson insists on calling Buckingham, was the more striking figure of the two. Born to the purple, he was so handsome, witty and intelligent that Louis XIV was maliciously pleased to describe him as "almost,the only English gentleman he had seen." Buckingham could "fix" anything, from a political treaty to a royal date: it was he, for example, who introduced King Charles to Nell Gwynn and arranged for the King to discover the Duchess of Cleveland in bed with Jack Churchill. He dabbled in chemistry, playwriting, poetry and music, and' his swordsmanship was such that peaceful men turned pale and ladies swooned when he strode into their presence. Along with his fellow rakes, Buckingham was in and out of the royal favor like a gaudy shuttle --though Charles was too indulgent to fuss when Buckingham ran his sword through the Earl of Shrewsbury, husband of Buckingham's mistress. "I am sorry to find that cuckolds in France grow so troublesome," Charles wrote to his sister, the Duchess of Orleans, shortly after. "They have been inconvenient in all countries this last year."

In his full glory as Privy Councillor, Master of the Horse, Gentleman of the Bedchamber, a Minister of State, Buckingham was so haughty that not Charles himself escaped the great duke's disdain. When he was really exasperated by the royal indolence, Buckingham could express himself excellently in light verse:

But not one lesson of the ruling art Could this dull blockhead ever get by

heart.

Look over all the universal frame, There's not one thing the will of man

can name In which this ugly, perjured rogue

delights, But ducks and loitering, buttered buns

and whites !--'

It was contempt of Charles, which rivals could easily carry to the King, that brought Buckingham down. His estates squandered, he died (1687), stripped of his honors, in a farmhouse bedroom.

Pots & Pans. John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, was a friend of Buckingham, but very different. Of what he called "the three businesses of this age--women, politics and drinking," Rochester was interested only in the first and the last, which he pursued to the point of frenzy.

Unlike Buckingham, Rochester seems close to the present age of psychoanalysis and '.'the double man." He described himself as "the wildest and most fantastical odd man alive." and spent his brief life alternately indulging and despising the follies of his day. When he was sick of making the King laugh, he would flee from Whitehall in disguise--as a trader on the Stock Exchange, or a traveling tinker crying, "Pots and pans to mend!" --"whereupon he proceeded to knock their bottoms out, furiously and with evident enjoyment, or hammered them into grotesque shapes."

"He told me," said Bishop Burnet, his confessor, "[that] for five years together he was continually drunk; not all the while under the visible effects . . . but his blood ... so enflamed that he was not in all that time . . . master of himself." Rochester's contempt for the world included himself, and he spoke with a sort of brutal regret of the strong, handsome body that he had ruined with gonorrhea and alcohol before he was out of his 205.

Rochester was only 33 when he died after a deathbed repentance. "I have carried myself to Him like an ungracious dog!"

-f I.e., mistresses and money.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.