The Swinging Sixties, Seventeenth-Century Style: Wine and Excess in Restoration England, c. 1660–85

A Drunken Parliament

One might have assumed that such excess as there was, only extended to the king and a feckless group of aristocrats surrounding him. But this was not the case. While alcohol consumption on an almost daily basis in lieu of clean drinking water was common in the seventeenth century, the amount of wine being drunk by members of parliament was striking. It was central to elections and to the day-to-day operations of both the House of Commons and the Lords. Much of this was undertaken in three taverns which lay within the complex of buildings around Westminster named ironically as Heaven, Purgatory and Hell, though Purgatory also went by the name Alice’s after its proprietor.

There was legendary drinking sessions at these celestial taverns, principally led by members of the House of Lords. James, third Baron Lovelace, was a frequenter of the Westminster watering holes and was said in the 1670s to have been perpetually drunk since his days as a student at Oxford, an admirable feat given that he had left Oxford in 1661. Philip Herbert, seventh earl of Pembroke, was acquitted of murder in 1678, and is said to have celebrated his newfound freedom by drinking 22 large glasses of wine in a tour of Westminster’s taverns.

This was also the period in which the first stirrings of a parliamentary party system began to emerge in England, with the supporters of a strong parliament forming one group known as the Whigs, and the supporters of a strong monarchy becoming pejoratively known as the Tories after the name for an Irish wild woodsman. These could be identified in Heaven, Purgatory and Hell by their tipple of choice. The Tories drank claret imported from Bordeaux, while the Whigs were partial to port.[5]

The Greatest Rake of the Seventeenth Century

As notorious as the carryings on of Lovelace, Pembroke and others might have been at Westminster, no one was as infamous in Restoration England for his excessive drinking and carousing as John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester. Yet his prodigious consumption of wine was matched by his abilities as a poet. Andrew Marvell, one of the great metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century Europe, deemed Rochester to be the greatest satirist of the age.

Wilmot’s poems reflected his lifestyle and wine was paramount to them. Thus, ‘Upon Drinking a Bowl’ begins “Cupid and Bacchus my saints are, May drink and love still reign,

With wine I wash away my cares.” In ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’ Rochester begins with the solemn line, “Much wine had passed, with grave discourse”, before relating his drunken conversations about lechery and fornication at the Bear tavern in London, followed by a stroll through St James’s Park to clear his head. Such poems would have scandalised much of society and in Victorians times Rochester’s poems were banned.[6]

Yet it would be wrong to suggest that Wilmot’s writings were solely about drunken excess. His best known work, A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind, is a learned critique of rational inquiry in favour of the senses, one which drew on the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and poets, Epicurus and Lucretius. It was written though in 1674 as Rochester’s abilities were beginning to wane. By the end of the decade he was suffering from alcoholism and a range of sexual transmitted diseases, the latter eventually killing him in 1680 at just 33 years of age.[7]

Wine the World of Samuel Pepys

An altogether more sober individual in Restoration London was Samuel Pepys, whose famous diary spanning the length of the 1660s provides a fascinating insight into the world of wine in Restoration England. Pepys was a senior administrator with the British Royal Navy and also a long-serving member of parliament. His detailed diary, which he assiduously kept, is one of the foremost sources for the political and social history of London in the 1660s.[8]

We have already seen that Pepys noted that London’s fountains were made to flow with wine on the day of King Charles’s coronation in 1661. Later that evening Pepys and his wife were accosted by a bunch of drunken strangers in the city and for a time they all stood around and drank numerous toasts to the king and others in the realm. Pepys was struck by the level of ‘frolique’ and also that men and women were drinking together so openly, something which had been a rare sight in public spaces during the Puritanical 1650s.

This was just one of the earliest references to wine in Pepys’s lengthy diary. A search of the online version of the diary today returns 335 entries for wine in the nine years Pepys kept his diary for. The scale of drinking was impressive. Early on in his prodigious journaling Pepys recorded that on the 16th of January 1660 he had a beer for breakfast, but this was rather tame compared with his nightcap which consisted of a pint of wine at the Golden Lion by Charing Cross in central London.[9]

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Pints of wine were not unusual in Pepys’s world. Three weeks later he met his cousin Roger Pepys and they headed to a Rhenish wine-house called Priors, not far from Whitehall, where Pepys worked for the government. There they had a ‘pint or two’ of wine with a dish of anchovies and purchased three or four dozen bottles of wine in preparation for Roger’s wedding.[10]

And so it continues through Pepys’s diary. But he was not a rake on the scale of Rochester. Pepys’s drinking was just standard for the most part during the seventeenth century. Moreover, there are signs of his connoisseur-like qualities. For instance, an entry for the 7th of July 1665 reveals Pepys’s pride in his growing cellar, which featured claret from France, wines from the Canary Islands and Malaga in Spain, sack wine (an early modern name for white port) and unnamed other white wines.

As a naval administrator Pepys traded in wine by the mid-1660s and there are references to him tasting wines from around Western Europe to deliberate on whether to import some into England. As such, we have in his diary reflections on the wine trade, along with the nature of socialising and drinking in Restoration London.[11]

Also read: The History of the Napa Valley Wine Train

Conclusion

The cases of John Wilmot and Samuel Pepys are just two of the more well-known examples of Restoration figures who left behind considerable evidence of their drinking, profligate in Rochester’s case and considerable in Pepys’s. But it was ultimately not to last. A new sobriety arrived to the English royal court in the 1690s following the deposition of King James II, Charles’s brother who succeeded him in 1685, and the succession of William of Orange as William III. By the early eighteenth century the taste for coffee and tea was growing and there was a world to be conquered by Britain’s now unchallenged navy. Sore heads like those found in the 1660s and 1670s would not be seen again for quite some time at the royal court.[12]

Charles II, ‘The Merry Monarch’ 

Much of the excess and libertinism of the Restoration period was driven by the character of King Charles II himself. Charles became King of England, Scotland and Ireland on his thirtieth birthday, having spent many years in exile in France and the Dutch Republic. He was fond of wine, drinking and socialising, and these mixed well with his notorious womanising. Charles had a string of mistresses who were prominent at his court throughout the 1660s and 1670s, on top of which he engaged in casual flings and was known to visit London’s high-end brothels.

As a result, while he never produced a legitimate heir, his wife, Catherine of Braganza most likely being barren, he had upwards of twenty illegitimate children (the exact number is unclear and Charles probably wasn’t sure himself). Somewhat confusingly, four of these were all called Charles as they were sired with four different women. His court reflected his sexual and social libertinism. No surprise then that he became known as ‘The Merry Monarch’. Yet he was not be trifled with either.

Charles was restored in 1660 on the promise that he would not seek vengeance against those who had killed his father, the infamous ‘regicides’ who signed his death warrant in the late 1640s. But despite this vow, Charles had these same men hunted down and killed in the years following his accession, in some instances sending out agents to find them as far away as North America. ‘The Merry Monarch’ indeed, but one who was not to be considered a soft touch as king.[13]