The devil is an Englishman.(John Wilmot beliefs)(Biography)

HE IS ONE of the rudest and most debauched poets ever to write in English, and also one of the most privileged. Restoration poet and satirist John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, was a more accomplished writer than Lord Byron or the Marquis de Sade but his posthumous fame does not match that of his fellow decadent literary aristocrats.

Byron, the first modern literary celebrity, has appeared as a character in several films, including a sinister portrayal by Gabriel Byrne in Ken Russell's Gothic. Sade is played with frenzied gusto by Geoffrey Rush in Quills, but Rochester has been ignored by filmmakers. Until now, that is.

Rochester's relative obscurity is set to end with The Libertine, a new feature film starring Johnny Depp as the errant Earl and John Malkovich as his equally profligate royal patron, King Charles II. Period debauchery is not a new task for either actor, though it remains to be seen what weight the film, which at the time of writing awaits a local release, gives to Rochester's literary achievements.

Biographically, there is no shortage of sensational material for the film-makers to work with. It was said of Byron that he was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know", and it is an apt description for Rochester. By the time he died in 1680 at the age of thirty-three, Rochester had caused enough scandal to last several lifetimes, as might be expected from a writer whose collected works include a poem entitled "Signor Dildo" and a play called Sodom.

No other major writer prior to the twentieth century used the f-word and especially the c-word with such freedom in his work, much of which circulated privately in handwritten form.

Rochester became an earl at the age often. His father had been given land and an hereditary peerage in return for assisting Charles II while the King was on the run after the overthrow of his father, Charles I, though not always helpfully. Charles told Samuel Pepys that though Rochester's father was good company, he refused to wear a peasant disguise, and thus made the fugitive royal party conspicuous and vulnerable to capture.

The King was similarly indulgent towards the second Earl, who occupied a position akin to that of jester in the newly restored court, though the licence he was granted did not always stop him from getting into trouble. In 1665, the nineteen-year-old Rochester was imprisoned in the Tower of London for a few weeks after an attempt to kidnap Elisabeth Mallet, an heiress he wanted to be his wife. Two years later he did succeed in marrying her and the couple produced four children.