So, unhappy 373rd anniversary of the night the first poet laureate John Dryden got the shit kicked out of him up a dark Covent Garden alley because he’d written a satirical poem.
Nobody’s quite sure who duffed him up because the poem in question, An Essay upon Satire (which he denied writing), had offended so many different people: the king, the king’s mistresses, and a great many courtiers.
The prime suspect was thought to be John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who the satirist “despise[s] for’s mere want of wit / Tho’ thought to have a tail and cloven feet”.
Rochester was a writer himself, whose works include a play called Sodom (with characters have names like Buggeranthus and Fuckadilla) and a poem called Fair Cloris in a Pigsty Lay.
Being a shameless libertine and composer of filth himself, you’d think he wouldn’t mind a bit of gentle ribbing, but the bit about him in the Essay upon Satire includes this couplet, so you can see why he might have been a bit tetchy.
Someone, anyway, hired some thugs to carry out what became known as the Rose Alley Ambuscade, in which Dryden was brutally beaten and cudgelled outside the Lamb and Flag pub, which now displays a sign telling the story.
As you can see, the sign reckons (one of) Charles II’s mistress(es) hired the muggers, but they also have a plaque saying it happened on the 19th, so we may need to fact-check this.
The historian Edward L Saslow says Louise De Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, was not only the king’s mistress, but also French and Catholic, and that blaming her was the result of “contemporary prejudice”.
Rochester had fantasised about violence inflicted on Dryden, but only in a letter written almost four years earlier, and another suspect, the duchess’ brother-in-law, the Earl of Pembroke, was apparently the sort of man who would have beaten Dryden himself rather than hiring someone.
Most likely, apparently, is the earl of Dorset, whose wife was described in the poem as ‘barren’, when in fact she’d died ten weeks earlier giving birth to a stillborn son. Given how unnecessarily cruel that is, I think it could be said to constitute motive.
Even if Dorset didn’t order the beating, he became lord chamberlain after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and stripped Dryden of his laureateship — the poet died 12 years later in rather less elevated circumstances than he’d become used to.
The earl of Rochester, what with his tertiary syphilis, gonorrhea and alcoholism, had predeceased his fellow poet 20 years earlier at the age of 33.
The Lamb & Flag, now a Fuller’s pub, lives on.
