Abstract
During the Restoration era the post-Puritan hungry-for-fun England appeared to be a carnival realm where so much was mixed and turned upside down. Catholics turned Protestant, republicans became monarchists and vice versa.
The sovereign was the rakish Supreme Governor of the Church, and court debauchees acted as state servants. In the Merry Monarch Charles II's entourage of dissipated court jesters, who diverted the sovereign and his retinue with stories of their drunken frolics and sexual accomplishments, there was a figure who did stand out and whose controversial legacy has stood the test of time: John Wilmot, the most notorious Restoration troubadour of pleasure-seeking, a libertine sophist, an inimitable wit and Hobbes's professed apostle.
Based on Rochester's works and some accounts of his life, this paper tries to reveal the complexity and intellectualism of his personality and to demonstrate that the radical freethinker's self-indulgence and sensualism had a sound philosophico-theoretical basis, on which he built his godless universe and which inspired him to pursue pleasure in the here and now.