Just as Rochester’s other attributes were disputed after his death, his ability as a scholar of the classics provoked disagreement. In the sermon preached at his funeral, Robert Parsons, household chaplain to the Earl’s family, asserted that John Wilmot was a man of “most rare parts, and his natural talent was excellent, much improved by learning and industry.” He was “thoroughly acquainted with all classical authors, both Greek and Latin, a thing very rare (if not peculiar to him) among those of quality.” Anthony Wood later appropriated Parsons’s evaluation, word for word, in the life of Rochester composed for the Athenae Oxoniensis.

Gilbert Burnet, spiritual counselor to him in his last months, likewise extolled Rochester’s “shining parts,” his perfect mastery of Latin and the masterworks composed in it, and his “peculiar delight which the greatest Wits have ever found in those Studies.” He had relished the beauty of the Latin language “to his dying-day.” On the other hand, Francis Giffard, Wilmot’s governor in childhood, told Thomas Hearne that Wood and Burnet had been mistaken in saying the Earl was “so great a master of classical learning,” that in fact “My Lord understood very little or no Greek, and that he had but little Latin.…”

This sharp difference of opinion shows how reports of Rochester’s life and talents were biased by those with personal concerns. Robert Parsons exaggerated the Earl’s accomplishments (“all classical authors”) to flatter as well as console his wife and mother, who sponsored the publication of the sermon, and then assured Parsons’s ecclesiastical livelihood. Burnet emphasized the Earl’s superior intellect and classical (read “pagan”) expertise to underscore the importance of his conversion into a model of Christian piety and hope. Giffard, who was “supplanted” (his word) as Wilmot’s educational supervisor, naturally felt resentment. Furthermore, his doubt that Wilmot received the same supervised training at Oxford that Giffard had provided at Ditchley and Burford was well grounded.

Nevertheless, Parsons, Burnet, and Giffard––as well as Anthony Wood and those Oxonians (Hearne, Collins) who later disparaged Rochester’s scholarship–– all agreed that mastery of ancient languages and literature, Latin in particular, was a transcendent accomplishment, and that the aristocracy in general were deficient in attaining it.