Johnny Depp and the Libertines: The history behind his new role
What was it about the 17th century that made it so mucky? What in heaven’s name gave rise to the Earl of Rochester and his hellish rhymes? And what were the consequences of such unbridled obscenity? As Johnny Depp dons Rochester’s peruke in Hollywood, A C Grayling reveals the world of the original libertines
Published: 06 November 2005
It is quite something to live in an age of riotous immorality, and yet to be accounted the most dissolute individual of the time. That is the achievement of the notorious John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, who lived very fast and died very young in the reign of Charles II. He is the subject of a film to be released shortly, starring Johnny Depp as the handsome, witty, devastatingly charming and unstoppably immoral Earl. But however good the film is, and however many X-ratings it gets, it can never capture all the truth about Rochester, for, surprising as it may seem, we live in a more prudish age than he did, and not all his doings can be reprised on the cinema screen.
Rochester was a poet of great talent, a brave naval officer, a rampantly intemperate bisexual, a harvester of maidenheads, a pimp and bawd for his King, a Hooray Henry repeatedly involved in duels and brawls (at least one of which resulted in the murder of a citizen of London) – and he died a victim in 1680, aged just 33, of accumulated doses of both gonorrhoea and syphilis.
Charles II’s reign is known as the Restoration because Charles was restored to the throne in 1660 after the republican Commonwealth period of Cromwell’s rule. But it was the opposite of a restoration in moral terms. In England under Cromwell, an austere and pleasure-denying form of Puritan Christianity set the dominant standard of behaviour. The Restoration brought to England a royal court that had taught itself very different manners and morals during its exile in France. The effect on the aristocracy, which had chafed under the restraints of Cromwell’s years, was electrifying. Back on top socially and politically, enjoying revenues of estates distrained from the regicides who had toppled Charles I, and given the licence of Charles II’s own example as an energetic womaniser and reveller, the leading members of Charles’s court let themselves go – and with a vengeance.
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