Using the admittedly convenient dates of the death of one monarch and ascension of the next, the seventeenth century has been somewhat artificially divided into its various component "ages." As Ronald Paulson notes, John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, is "the difficult transitional figure, in some ways the father of the Augustan mode of satire, in others still an Elizabethan in the tradition of the melancholy satyr-satirist." The earl is, however, more than liminal or transitional. He is an inclusive figure, both muddling the boundary-lines between the ages notably named for their relation to monarchy--the Elizabethan, Jacobean, the Interregnum and the Restoration--and blurring what has often been depicted as the clear religious/ cultural divide between Church of England and nonconformity.
    During Wilmot’s short life his elder contemporaries, Milton and Bunyan, were creating a Satanic archetype characterized by its humanity: this Satan is no longer archangelic, larger than life, no longer the embodiment of evil in the abstract, but rather embodies the evil impulses of the human. In his life and writings Rochester incorporated the Satan character as it was simultaneously being developed by Milton and Bunyan. The Speaker of Rochester’s poems, as well as the historical John Wilmot as fashioned by himself and figured by his intimates, had this Satan character as their spiritual father.

References
Wilmot, John. 1988. "Sab: Lost", The Poems of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. Keith Walker. Oxford: Blackwell, p.26.
Paulson, Ronald. 1978. "Rochester: The body politic and the body private", The author and his work: Essays on a problem in criticism, eds. Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Williams. New Haven: Yale UP, pp. 103-121 (p.104).