Circulated at court in manuscript, his poetry was unpublished during his lifetime, and thanks to its obscenity a good deal of it remained so until quite recently. Much of it was lost. As he lay dying of syphilis in 1680, aged 33, Rochester repented of his many sins – thereby ensuring his posthumous career as an evangelical poster boy – and, according to an attendant priest, ordered “all his profane and lewd Writings… and all his obscene and filthy Pictures, to be burned”. And because of his fame – he was the model for the heroes of plays by George Etherege and Thomas Shadwell – all sorts of filthy rubbish by other writers was attributed to him.