Odd this day

26 January, so it must be… yes, of course: the 353rd (or 354th) anniversary of the day the Earl of Rochester heard about a terrible injustice. His shipment of dildoes had been seized by customs.

Strictly speaking, he may have found this out the following day, but this was the date the letter was sent — although even The Ohio State University Press’s 1941 tome The Rochester-Savile letters, 1671–1680 can’t tell us for certain whether it was written in 1670 or 1671. Anyway…

He learned about this because MP, courtier, and diplomat Henry Savile wrote to tell him. Savile begins by apologising for not making Rochester’s son’s christening — “a ceremony I was sorry to misse” — before moving on to the rather more important business of the day:

It’s an interesting tone for the third son of a baronet to be taking with an actual Lord, even if he was Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke of York, but they were fast friends, apparently, united in their libertinism, so Savile continues:

In other words: “This is your fault for spending all your time in the country and not sucking up to the customs people enough. When, oh when, will our dildoes be tariff-free?”

Savile was such a dirty sod, he even stood out in the days of Charles II. Or as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography puts it:

Savile and the others consumed drink and were entertained by prostitutes on a scale that caused comment even at the Caroline court; there were also rumours of nefarious activities involving young boys.

They were part of a gang that called itself The Ballers, a name which gave rise to this marvellous aside in a 1979 academic paper entitled Sir Charles Sedley and the Ballers’ Oath (in a periodical called The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats. No, really):

They had an oath, you see, composed by Sir Charles, which began “Wee to this Order none receave / That in his Glasse a drop doth leave”, and then sets out their ideal woman: one who doesn’t say ‘no’, but also doesn’t say ‘yes’ too quickly:

Henry Savile wasn’t always a courtier, because he kept being thrown out of court for things like fighting, and insulting the Duke of York (with whose wife he also “became emotionally entangled”), and he died at 45, “his viscera gangrened and his liver parched” — although he outlasted Rochester, swept off at 33 by tertiary syphilis and alcoholism. Sedley made it to 62, but none of them lived as long as the story of their evening at Oxford Kate’s tavern in 1663, immortalised as it was by Samuel Pepys:

…and seeing as that won’t fit in alt text, here it is in all its glory:

Pepys diary, 1 July 1663: Mr. Batten telling us of a late triall of Sir Charles Sydly the other day, before my Lord Chief Justice Foster and the whole bench, for his debauchery a little while since at Oxford Kate’s; coming in open day into the Balcone and showed his nakedness — acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined, and abusing of scripture and as it were from thence preaching a mountebank sermon from the pulpit, saying that there he had to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him — a thousand people standing underneath to see and hear him. And that being done he took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it and then drank it off, and then took another and drank the King’s health.

…a story I obviously intend to tell again on its 360th anniversary on 16 June. I’m confident you’re all looking forward to it.