Sir Charles Sedley, 5th Baronet

By his first wife Lady Katherine Savage, daughter of John, 2nd Earl Rivers he had only one legitimate child, Catherine, Countess of Dorchester, mistress of James II.

[3] Sedley is famous as a patron[4] of literature in the Restoration period, and was the Francophile Lisideius of Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy.

[7] Sedley was reputed as a notorious rake and libertine, part of the "Merry Gang" of courtiers which included the Earl of Rochester and Lord Buckhurst.

From the balcony of Oxford Kate's Tavern he, Lord Buckhurst and Sir Thomas Ogle shocked and delighted a crowd of onlookers with their blasphemous and obscene antics.

According to Samuel Pepys, Sedley "showed his nakedness – and abusing of scripture and as it were from thence preaching a mountebank sermon from the pulpit, saying that there he had to sell such a pouder as should make all the cunts in town run after him, 1000 people standing underneath to see and hear him, and that being done he took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it and then drank it off, and then took another and drank the King's health."

This behaviour provoked a riot amongst the onlookers and condemnation in the courts, where the Lord Chief Justice gave his opinion that it was because of wretches like him "that God's anger and judgement hang over us".

A speech of his on the civil list after the Revolution is cited by Macaulay as proof that his reputation as a man of wit and ability was deserved.

More speeches and parliamentary motions followed in 1690, including discussions on the Bill for regulating trials for High Treason, which sheds light on Sedley's political commitment after the Revolution.

"[12] At the same time, Sedley translated other specimens of ancient poetry, such as Virgil's Georgics IV, the eighth Ode of the second Book of Horace and three elegies from Ovid's Amores.

[16] In 1692 Sedley wrote the birthday ode for Queen Mary, "Love’s goddess sure was blind", which was also set to music by Purcell.

While The Mulberry-Garden exuberantly praises the achievements of the Restoration, Bellamira displays a dark cynicism which has to be accounted for within a changed historical context.

His two tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra (1677) and The Tyrant King of Crete (1702), an adaptation of Henry Killigrew's Pallantus and Eudora, have little merit.