Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset

His famous song, "To All You Ladies Now at Land", was written, according to Prior, on the night before the victory gained over foggy Opdam off Harwich (3 June 1665).

Samuel Johnson, with the remark that seldom any splendid story is wholly true, said that the Earl of Orrery had told him it was only retouched on that occasion.

Sackville concurred in the invitation to William of Orange, who made him a Privy Counsellor, Lord Chamberlain (1689), and Knight of the Garter (1692).

Prior's praise of Dorset is no doubt extravagant, but when his youthful follies were over he appears to have developed sterling qualities, and although the poems he has left are very few, none of them are devoid of merit.

[7] The Merry Gang flourished for about 15 years after 1665 and included John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester Henry Jermyn; John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave; Henry Killigrew; Sir Charles Sedley; the playwrights William Wycherley and George Etherege; and George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham.

They appear to have been acquitted, for when, in 1663, Sedley was tried for a gross breach of public decency in Covent Garden, Sackville, who had been one of the offenders, was (according to Samuel Pepys) asked by the Lord Chief Justice "whether he had so soon forgot his deliverance at that time, and that it would have more become him to have been at his prayers begging God's forgiveness than now running into such courses again.

"[2][11] In June 1675 "John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester in a frolick after a rant did ... beat downe the dyill (i.e. sundial) which stood in the middle of the Privie Garding, which was esteemed the rarest in Europ".

[12] John Aubrey learned what Rochester said on this occasion when he came in from his "revells" with Sackville, and Fleetwood Sheppard to see the object: "'What ... doest thou stand here to fuck time?'

The satires for which Pope classed him with the masters in that kind seem to have been short lampoons, with the exception of A faithful catalogue of our most eminent ninnies (reprinted in Bibliotheca Curiosa, ed.

[6] Sackville is portrayed by Johnny Vegas as the invariable companion of fellow author and wit George Etherege (Tom Hollander) in the 2004 film The Libertine, an adaptation of Stephen Jeffreys' play of the same name, which depicts the Earl of Rochester and the orbit of the "Merry Gang".