WILMOT, John, earl of Rochester, a great wit in the reign of Charles IL, the son of Henry earl of Rochester, was born on the 10th of April 1647, at Ditchley in Oxfordshire. He was instructed in classical learning at the free-school at Burford, where he obtained a quick relish of the beauties of the Latin tongue, and afterwards became well versed in the authors of the Augustan age. In 1659, he was admitted a nobleman of Wadham College, Oxford, where he was created A. M. He afterwards travelled through France and Italy, and at his return was made one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber to the king, and comptroller of Woodstock Park. In 1665, he went to sea, and was in the Revenge, commanded by Sir Thomas Tiddiman, when an attack was made on the port of Bergen in Norway. During the whole action he shewed the greatest resolution, and gained a high reputation for courage, which he supported in a second expedition, but afterwards lost it in a private adventure with Lord Mulgrave.

Before the earl of Rochester travelled, he had indulged in the most disorderly and intemperate way of living: at his return however he seemed to have got the better of it entirely. But falling into the company of the courtiers, who continually practised these excesses, he became so sunk in debauchery that he was for five years together so addicted to drinking that during all that time he was never cool enough to be master of himself. His violent love of pleasure, and his disposition to extravagant mirth, carried him to great excesses. The first involved him in sensuality, and the other led him into many adventures and ridiculous frolics. Once disguising himself so that he could not be known by his nearest friends, he set up in Tower-street for an Italian mountebank, and there dispersed his nostrums for some weeks. He often disguised himself as a porter, or as a beggar, sometimes to follow a mean amour; at other times he would go about merely for diversion in odd shapes, and acted his part so naturally that he could not be known even by his friends. In short, by his constant excesses, he entirely wore out an excellent constitution before he was thirty years of age. In October 1679, when recovering from a violent disease which ended in a consumption, he was visited by Dr Burnet, upon an intimation that such a visit would be agreeable to him. Burnet published their conferences in “Some Passages of the Life and Death of John Earl of Rochester;” from which it appears, that though he had lived the life of a libertine and atheist, he died the death of a penitent Christian. His death happened on the 26th of July 1680. His Poems have been several times printed; but when once he obtained the character of a lewd and obscene writer, every thing in that strain was ascribed to him; and thus many pieces not of his writing have crept into the later editions of his works. The earl of Oxford observes, that he was “a man whom the Muses were fond to inspire and ashamed to avow, and who practised without the least reserve that secret which can make verses more read for their defects than their merits. Lord Rochester’s poems have much more obscenity than wit, more wit than poetry, and more poetry than politeness.” Besides three daughters, the earl left an only son, Charles, who died in 1681, and thus the title became extinct.