The greatest of gallants
John Aubrey was at his most vivacious when describing the cavaliers of his era. ‘A gallant in an age of the lewdest bawdy,’ he wrote of Lucius Carey with ill-disguised pleasure. These men were rogues like Rochester, Lovelace and Herrick – broke, drunk and invariably syphilitic. They were also royalists, a licentious contrast to their