Tunbridge Wells’ more recent reputation as a place of placidity and letter-writing colonels satirised in magazines like `Private Eye’ for their fury at the ill directions the world has taken sits uncomfortably with the accounts of it from its hey-day as a spa town, a place where people could go to rest and enjoy their leisure a few hundred years ago. Anthony Hamilton captures this era by describing the town in the 17th century thus:
`Here, at the place where the Wells are, the visitors gather every morning. This is a spacious avenue, bordered by shady trees under which they stroll while taking the waters. Along one side of it runs a lengthy range of booths, garnished with all kinds of jewellery, laces, stockings, and gloves, and at which gambling goes on as at a fair; along the other the market is established, and, as everybody comes to choose and bargain for his own provisions, nothing offensive is ever displayed. But little village-girls, fresh-skinned and yellow-haired, with fair while linen, small straw hats and neat shoes, sell poultry, vegetables, fruit and flowers. You may live at Tunbridge as highly as you please; large sums are staked at play, and the tender commerce flourishes.’ (`Memoirs of the Comte de Gramont, quoted in Tr Peter Quennell, 1930, 270-1)
The delicate suggestion in the final sentences to a not so delicate reality (prostitution) is more than brought to the fore by the piece, `Tunbridge Wells: A Satyr’ written around the middle of the 1670s, and published first in 1675, by the infamous John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester (1647-1680). A literary history of Kent has to include writers who were born or lived in Kent, but also works that are directly linked to the place by people who fall into neither category above – pieces like Eliot’s `The Wasteland’, or Matthew Arnold’s `Dover Beach.’ Wilmot’s single work belongs to the second category. He was never resident in Kent, was not born there, and did not spend much time there. But he has linked own of his works to a place in the country.
Wilmot is the poet par excellence of the free-wheeling Restoration period from 1660 onwards. Son of a hero of the Civil War on the Royalist side, who was ennobled for his role in helping Charles the Second to flee Britain, the family had no links to Rochester proper. John Wilmot, the Second Earl, was in fact born in the splendid Ditchley House, which serves today as a think tank under the Ditchley Foundation title. And Wilmot lived the dissolute life he did mostly in London, and from almost as early as a person possibly could – his entry to Wadham College, Oxford, was described as leading to him becoming `debauched’, at the impressive age of 13. With the return of Charles the Second after 1660, Wilmot became familiar at court from his late teens, but managed to be effectively exiled twice for offending the monarch with his writings. Despite this, he was rehabilitated both times. He died at the age of 32, reportedly of syphilis.
Wilmot’s poetry is witty, learned, extremely funny, but also vibrantly obscene. His oeuvre includes works like `Signior Dildo’ and `Against Constancy.’ This meant that wide dissemination of his work did not prove possible until the 20th century. Since then, he had gained an appreciative audience.
Tunbridge Wells would have been a natural sphere for his talents. As the slightly later work of Daniel Defoe, with more puritanical bent, made clear, Tunbridge Wells was a place of some scandal and darkness at this time. Wilmot’s poem is therefore unvarnished in its treatment of this, even though the piece itself is disjointed, incomplete, and perhaps in modern versions contains additions by hands other than the poet’s. It begins as it intends to carry on:
`At Five this Morne, when Phoebus raisd her head,
From Thetis Lapp, I rais’d my self from Bed;
And mounting Steed, I trotted to the Waters,
The Rendezvouz of Fooles, Buffoones, and Praters,
Cuckolds, Whores, Citizens, their Wives and Daughters.
(`The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’, Ed Keith Walker, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984, 69)
Wilmot’s description of the carnival of human folly that he witnesses at the Waters which follows from this is grimly comic:
`I silently sunke downe, to th’ lower Walke:
But often, when one wou’d Caridbis shun,
Down upon Scilla, ‘tis ones Fate to run:
For here, it was my cursed luck to find,
As great a Fopp, tho’ of another kind.’
The poem is dense with double meanings and heavy ambiguity. Asking one woman with her husband why they had come to the Wells, the poet gets the reply `Wee have a good Estate, but have noe Child;/And I’m inform’d these Wells, will make a Barren/Woman, as fruitful as a Coney-Warren.’ Though whether this fertility derives from her husband’s efforts or the other possibilities available in the town is not spelled out.
Wilmot’s ribaldry, even in a poem as riotous as this, is underlain by a darker purpose – an almost morally censorious, and deeply pessimistic, view of human nature:
`Blesse me thought I, what thing is Man that thus
In all his shapes, he is so ridiculous?
Our selves, with noyse of Reason wee doe please
In vaine: Humanity is our worst Disease.’