John Wilmot was born at 11:00 a.m. on April 1, 1647. The astrologer and almanac-maker John Gadbury, who later recorded that information, used it to cast a horoscope, which declared that the conjunction of Venus and Mercury gave the infant an inclination to poetry, while the position of the sun “bestowed a large stock of generous and active spirits, which constantly attended this excellent native’s mind, insomuch that no subject came amiss to him.”

Whatever the stars told about his talent as a poet, his birth on All Fools’ Day was more portentous. The future Earl of Rochester was a life-long trickster and wearer of disguises. The capricious April weather that characterizes its fools was reflected in his intellectual and emotional shifts: his wild swings from gaiety to despair, from insouciant skepticism to terrified faith. His birth date also symbolized the vicissitudes of the England he was born into.

John Wilmot’s parents were hardy survivors in the turbulent life of the seventeenth century. His mother, born Anne St. John on November 5, 1614, was one of the ten children of Sir John St. John of Lydiard Tregoze, in Wiltshire. As the second child and oldest daughter, Anne received as much, but no more, education than most daughters of the gentry, who were expected to marry young and begin producing male heirs. Nevertheless, she had great inborn intelligence that turned into shrewdness and iron determination during the years that ended the reign of Charles I and took the lives of three of her brothers, who died in the Royalist cause. Samuel Cooper’s watercolor portrait on vellum of her was made in the year of John Wilmot’s birth, when she was thirty-three. It shows a pretty woman, fashionably dressed in brocade and pearls with a hairdo of curls. Her full-lipped mouth and slightly overlong nose keep something of a girlish mien, but her clear, intelligent eyes are knowing and sad. She had long since experienced life’s bitterness.

As a girl, Anne St. John had disliked Lydiard Tregoze (“that dull place”) and her father’s tendency to stay there for long stretches of time.