styled 1670-80 Ld. Wilmot; suc. fa. July 1680 (a minor) as 3rd earl of ROCHESTER
Never sat.
bap. 2 Jan. 1671, o. s. of John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, and Elizabeth (d.1681), da. of John Mallett of Enmore, Som. (d.1656). educ. privately (Thomas Smith); ?Eton c.1678.1 unm. d. 12 Nov. 1681; admon. to grandmother Anne, dowager countess of Rochester, 30 May 1682.2
Associated with: Adderbury, Oxon.; Enmore, Som.3
Likenesses: oil on canvas? by Willem Wissing and Jan Van der Vaart, private collection.4
The sickly only son of the rakish poet earl of Rochester, Wilmot had early on displayed symptoms believed at the time to be the king’s evil (scrofula). He was touched for the condition by Charles II, but it seems more likely that he was in fact a victim of congenital syphilis.5 Although prone to crippling bouts of illness, by 1677 he was described by his father’s circle as ‘a fair-haired brilliant boy’ and at the time of his death though ‘scarce ten years old … of parts beyond twenty’.6 It is possible that aged eight he was sent to Eton (though no record exists of his admission in the school’s register).7
Wilmot succeeded to the earldom aged just nine, following his father’s much publicized death in the summer of 1680. Under the terms of his father’s will he was entrusted to the guardianship of his grandmother and mother.8 With the peerage he inherited interests in Oxfordshire and Somerset, though it is unlikely that he exercised any personal influence over his estates during his short life and he was too young to attend the Oxford Parliament that met in the spring of 1681.9 That summer, precisely a year after his father’s death, Rochester lost his mother to a fit of apoplexy.10 His own condition deteriorated markedly soon after and by November his life was despaired of.11 He died on 12 Nov. and was buried almost a month later in the family vault at Spelsbury.12 On his death the earldom became extinct. Inheritance of the Wilmot estates passed to his three sisters, Anne (later wife of Fulke Greville, 5th Baron Brooke), Elizabeth (later wife of Edward Montagu, 3rd earl of Sandwich) and Malet (later wife of John Vaughan‡, Viscount Lisburne [I]). Administration was granted to his grandmother Anne, dowager countess of Rochester, during his sisters’ minorities.
R.D.E.E.- 1 J.W. Johnson, A Profane Wit: The Life of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, 275, 416.
- 2 TNA, PROB 6/57, f. 69.
- 3 VCH Oxf. ix. 15.
- 4 Reproduced in Johnson, Rochester, 231.
- 5 Johnson, Rochester, 162, 180–1.
- 6 HMC Ormonde, vi. 223.
- 7 Johnson, Rochester, 275, 416.
- 8 PROB 11/365, ff. 238–9.
- 9 HMC Wells, ii. 463.
- 10 Hatton Corresp. ii. 6.
- 11 HMC Rutland, ii. 59; HMC Ormonde, vi. 223.
- 12 Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 144; Wood, Life and Times, ii. 559.