Early in the morning of July 26, 1680, John Wilmot, Baron of Adderbury, Viscount Athlone, and Earl of Rochester, died at the age of thirty-three, ravaged by the effects of syphilis and gonorrhea. After lying on his deathbed for nine weeks of bodily torment and even worse “agonies of his Mind [that] sometimes swallowed up the sense of what he felt in his Body,” he died, according to Bishop Gilbert Burnet’s avidly read account of the final days, without a shudder or sound.

The death of the brilliant but infamous peer immediately produced a sheaf of elegies that hailed his Christian demise. Samuel Woodford devoted fourteen stanzas to describing the departed’s life and deathbed repentance, concluding, “Rochester in the LAMB’S fresh blood new dy’d / All robed in white sings Lauds to him whom he deny’d.” An anonymous elegy hailed him as “Seraphic Lord! whom Heav’n for wonders meant.…” Samuel Holland likewise proclaimed: “The Mighty Rochester a Convert Dies,/ He fell a Poet, but a Saint shall Rise.” And there were others.

The poetic efforts at sanctifying John Wilmot were soon followed by two highly influential prose treatises by notably pious men of the cloth. In A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Honorable John Earl of Rochester, Robert Parsons concluded with an exhortation to family and friends to “turn their sorrows into joys, by the comfortable consideration of his being a Penitent upon earth, and a Saint in heaven.” Subsequently, Burnet’s Some Passages in the Life and Death of John Earl of Rochester, Written by His Own Direction on His Death-bed appeared (1680), furthering the canonizing process.

Burnet went into detail about Wilmot’s last agonizing days of suffering, repentance, and joyous conversion, evoking the pattern of saints and martyrs set up by earlier vitae or saints’ legends, and declaring, “Now he is at rest, and I am very confident enjoys the Fruits of his late, but sincere Repentance.” These two prose works, authorized by Rochester and his family, were a clear attempt to recast the events of his life in such a way as to make him a moral exemplum for the ages.