Nell Gwyn

Nell Gwynn was one of the first English actresses and the mistress of King Charles II.

Nell Gwyn (or Gwynn or Gwynne), born Eleanor, (2 February 1650 - 14 November 1687), was one of the earliest English actresses to receive prominent recognition, and a long-time mistress of King Charles II. Called "pretty, witty Nell" by Samuel Pepys, she has been called a living embodiment of the spirit of Restoration England and has come to be considered a folk heroine, with a story echoing the rags-to-royalty tale of Cinderella. Elizabeth Howe, in The First English Actresses, says she was "the most famous Restoration actress of all time, possessed of an extraordinary comic talent."

Early life

Very little is reliably known about Nell Gwyn's background. Her mother was Helena (or perhaps Eleanor) Gwyn, nee Smith; contemporaries referred to her as "Old Madam Gwyn" or simply "Madam Gwyn". Madam Gwyn was born within the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, and is thought to have lived most of her life in the city. She is believed by most Gwyn biographers to have been low-born; Beauclerk calls this conjecture, based solely on what is known of her later life. Nell Gwyn's father was, according to most sources, Thomas Gwyn, a Captain in the Royalist army during the English Civil War.

Three cities make the claim to be Nell Gwyn's birthplace: Hereford, London (specifically Covent Garden), and Oxford. Evidence for any one of the three is scarce. That "Gwyn" is a name of Welsh origin might support Hereford, on the border with Wales; The Dictionary of National Biography notes a traditional belief that she was born there in Pipe Well Lane, renamed to Gwyn Street in the 19th century. London is the simplest choice, perhaps, since Nell's mother was born there and there is where she raised her children. Alexander Smith's 1715 Lives of the Court Beauties says she was born in Coal Yard Alley in Covent Garden and other biographies, including Wilson's, have followed suit. Beauclerk pieces together circumstantial evidence to favor an Oxford birth. The location may remain a mystery, but the time does not: a horoscope cast for Nell Gwyn pinpoints it as Saturday 2 February 1650, at six o'clock in the morning.

One way or another Nell's father seems to have been out of the picture by the time of her childhood in Covent Garden, and her mother left in a low situation. Old Madam Gwyn was by most accounts an obese brandy-swigging alcoholic whose business was running a bawdy house (a brothel). There, or in the bawdy house of one Madam Ross, Nell would spend at least some time. It is possible she worked herself as a child prostitute; Peter Thomson, in the Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, says it is "probable". A rare mention of her upbringing from the source herself might be seen to contradict the idea: A 1667 entry in Samuel Pepys' diary records, second-hand,

Here Mrs. Pierce tells me [...] that Nelly and Beck Marshall, falling out the other day, the latter called the other my Lord Buckhurst's whore. Nell answered then, "I was but one man's whore, though I was brought up in a bawdy-house to fill strong waters to the guests; and you are a whore to three or four, though a Presbyter's praying daughter!" which was very pretty.

It is not out of the question that Gwyn was merely echoing the satirists of the day, if she said this at all. Various anonymous verses are the only other sources describing her childhood occupations: bawdyhouse servant, street hawker of herring, oysters or turnips, and cinder-girl have all been put forth. Tradition has her growing up in Coal Yard Alley, a poor slum off Drury Lane. Around 1662, Nell is said to have taken a lover by the name of Duncan or Dungan. Their relationship lasted perhaps two years and was reported with obscenity-laced acidity in several later satires. ("For either with expense of purse or p---k, / At length the weary fool grew Nelly-sick".) Duncan provided Gwyn with rooms at a tavern in Maypole Alley, and the satires also say he was involved in securing Nell a job at the theatre being built nearby.

Charles II had been restored to the English throne in 1660, after a decade of Puritan rule, when pastimes regarded as frivolous, including theatre, had been banned. One of Charles' early acts as King was to license the formation of two acting companies, and in 1663 the King's Company, led by Thomas Killigrew, opened a new playhouse, the Theatre in Bridges Street (later rebuilt and renamed the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane). Mary Meggs, a former prostitute nicknamed "Orange Moll" and a friend of Madam Gwyn's, had been granted the licence to "vend, utter and sell oranges, lemons, fruit, sweetmeats and all manner of fruiterers and confectioners wares" within the theatre. Orange Moll hired Nell and her older sister Rose as "orange-girls", selling the small, sweet "china" oranges to the audience inside the theatre for a sixpence each.

The work exposed her to multiple aspects of theatre life and to London's higher society: this was after all the "King's playhouse" and Charles frequently enough attended the performances. The orange-girls would also serve as messengers between men in the audience and actresses backstage; they received monetary tips for this role and certainly some of these messages would end in sexual assignations. Whether this activity rose to the level of pimping may be a matter of semantics. Some sources think it also likely that Gwyn prostituted herself during her time as an orange-girl.

Actress

An 1851 depiction of Nell Gwyn in front of her Drury Lane lodgings.

The new theatres were the first in the England to feature actresses; earlier, women's parts were played by men. Gwyn joined the rank of actresses at Bridges Street when she was fourteen, less than a year after becoming an orange-girl. If her good looks, strong clear voice, and lively wit were responsible for cathing the eye of Killigrew, she still had to prove herself clever enough to succeed as an actress. This was no mean task in the Restoration theatre; the limited pool of audience members meant that very short runs were the norm for plays and fifty different productions might be mounted in the nine-month season lasting from September to June. Gwyn was illiterate her entire life (signing her initials "E.G." would the extent of her ability to read or write), adding an extra complication to the memorisation of her lines.

She was taught her craft by one of the fine male actors of the time, Charles Hart, and learned dancing from another, John Lacy; both were rumored by satirists of the time to be her lovers, but if she had such a relationship with Lacy (Beauclerk thinks it unlikely), it was kept much more discreet than her well-known affair with Hart.

Gwyn was slated to play a part in Killigrew's Thomaso, or The Wanderer in November 1664, but the play seems to have been cancelled. Instead, she made her first recorded appearance on-stage in March 1665, in John Dryden's heroic drama The Indian Emperor, playing Cydaria, daughter of Montezuma and love interest to Cortez, played by her real-life lover Charles Hart. Pepys, whose diary usually has great things to say about Gwyn, was displeased with her performance in this same part two years later: "...to the King's playhouse, and there saw 'The Indian Emperour;' where I find Nell come again, which I am glad of; but was most infinitely displeased with her being put to act the Emperour's daughter; which is a great and serious part, which she do most basely."

Gwyn herself seems to agree that drama did not suit her, to judge from the lines she was later made to say in the epilogue to a Robert Howard drama:

We have been all ill-us'd, by this day's poet.
'Tis our joint cause; I know you in your hearts
Hate serious plays, as I do serious parts.

It was in the new form of restoration comedy that Nell Gwyn would become a star. In May 1665, she appeared opposite Hart in James Howard's comedy All Mistaken, or the Mad Couple. This was the first of many appearances in which Gwyn and Hart played the "gay couple", a form that would become a frequent theme in restoration comedies. The gay couple, broadly defined, is a pair of witty, antagonistic lovers, he generally a rake fearing the entrapment of marriage and she feigning to do the same in order to keep her lover at arm's length. Howe credits the enduring success of the gay couple on the Restoration stage entirely to "the talent and popularity of a single actress, Nell Gwyn".

The Great Plague of London shut down the Bridges Street theatre, along with most of the city, from the summer of 1665 through the autumn of 1666. Gwyn and her mother spent some of this time in Oxford, following the King and his court. The King's Company is presumed to have mounted some private theatrical entertainments for the court during this time away from the virulent capital. Gwyn and the other ten "women comedians in His Majesty's Theatre" were issued the right (and the cloth) to wear the King's livery at the start of this exile, proclaiming them official servants of the King.

After the theatres reopened, Gwyn and Hart returned to play role after role that fit the mold of the gay couple, including in James Howard's The English Monsieur (December 1666), Richard Rhodes' Flora's Vagaries, an adaptation of John Fletcher's The Chances by George Villiers, and then in their greatest success, Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen. This play, a tragicomedy written by the theatre's house dramatist, John Dryden, was performed in March 1667. It was a great success: King Charles "graced it with the Title of His Play" and Pepys' praise was effusive:

... to the King's house to see 'The Maiden Queen', a new play of Dryden's, mightily commended for the regularity of it, and the strain and wit; and the truth is, there is a comical part done by Nell, which is Florimell, that I never can hope ever to see the like done again, by man or woman. The King and Duke of York were at the play. But so great performance of a comical part was never, I believe, in the world before as Nell do this, both as a mad girl, then most and best of all when she comes in like a young gallant; and hath the notions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her.

Many comedies of the day, like The Maiden Queen, featured breeches roles, where the actresses appeared in men's clothes under one pretense or another; if nothing else this could draw an audience eager to see the women show off their figures in the more form-fitting male attire. The attraction had another dynamic: the theatres sometimes had a hard time holding onto their actresses, as they were swept up to become the kept mistresses of the aristocracy. In 1667, Nell Gwyn made such a match with Charles Sackville, titled Lord Buckhurst at that time. She supposedly caught his eye during an April perfomance of All Mistaken, or The Mad Couple, especially in one scene in which, to escape a hugely fat suitor able to move only by rolling, she rolls across the stage herself, her feet toward the audience and her petticoats flying about. A satire of the time describes this and also Hart's position now, in the face of competition from the upper echelons of society:

Yet Hart more manners had, then not to tender
When noble Buckhurst beg'd him to surrender.
He saw her roll the stage from side to side
And, through her drawers the powerful charm descry'd.

Life as a courtesan

Nell Gwyn as Cupid c. 1672; engraving by Richard Thomson, of a painting by Peter Cross. Pepys owned a copy of this engraving and displayed it over his desk at the Admiralty.

When she was 19 she became the king's mistress. Previously having been the mistress of Charles Hart and Charles Sackville, she jokingly titled the King "her Charles III". Her reputation as discreet, and being pleasing company quickly moved through wealthy circles.

Though she was often caricatured as an empty-headed woman, John Dryden said that her greatest attribute was her native wit, and she certainly became a hostess who was able to keep the friendship of Dryden, the playwright Aphra Behn, William Ley, 4th Earl of Marlborough (another lover), John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester and the king's other mistresses, who included her fellow-actress Mary 'Moll' Davis (she is said to have slipped a diuretic into Moll's drink on an evening when she was expected in the king's bed).

Nell is especially remembered for one particularly apt witticism, which was recounted in the memoirs of the Comte de Gramont, remembering the events of 1681:

Nell Gwynn was one day passing through the streets of Oxford, in her coach, when the mob mistaking her for her rival, the Duchess of Portsmouth, commenced hooting and loading her with every opprobrious epithet. Putting her head out of the coach window, "Good people", she said, smiling, "you are mistaken; I am the Protestant whore."

This appeal to British bigotry made her immensely popular. The particular Catholic whore (of the moment) was the Frenchwoman Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth.

Nell is also famous for another remark made to her coachman, who was fighting with another man who had called her a whore. She broke up the fight, saying, "I am a whore. Find something else to fight about."

By Charles, Nell had two sons, Charles Beauclerk (1670-1726) and James Beauclerk (1671-1680). Charles was the first Earl of Burford, later Duke of St. Albans.

The peerage for her son

There are two variations about the former of how he was given the Earldom of Burford, both of which are unverifiable.

The first (and most popular) is that when Charles was six years old, on the arrival of the King, Nell said, "Come here, you little bastard, and say hello to your father." When the King protested her calling Charles that, she replied, "Your Majesty has given me no other name by which to call him." In response, Charles made him the Earl of Burford, and later Duke of St. Albans.

Another is that Nell grabbed Charles and hung him out of a window (or over a river) and threatened to drop him unless Charles was granted a peerage. The King cried out "God save the Earl of Burford!" and subsequently officially created the peerage, saving his son's life.

Popularity

Nell was the only one of Charles II's many mistresses to be genuinely popular with the English public. It is thought to have been Nell who persuaded the king to build the Royal Hospital, Chelsea in London for ex-servicemen. Nell, however, accumulated enormous debts.

James II, obeying his brother's deathbed wish, "Let not poor Nelly starve," paid most of them off and gave her a pension of 1500 pounds a year, a huge sum in 1685.

She died, two years later, of apoplexy, aged 37, at 79 Pall Mall, in London.

She was buried in the Church of St Martin's in the Fields, at the corner of Trafalgar Square, London, after a funeral in which Thomas Tenison, the Archbishop of Canterbury, preached a sermon on the text of Luke 15:7 "Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance."

Two recent biographies are by Derek Parker (London, Sutton, 2000) and Charles Beauclerk (Macmillan, 2005), a direct descendant.

Author Graham Hopkins also wrote about her, in the book titled Nell Gwynne: A Passionate Life.

References

• Beauclerk, Charles (2005). Nell Gwyn: Mistress to a King. Atlantic Monthly Press. ISBN 0-87113-926-X.
• Howe, Elizabeth (1992). The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660-1700. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521422108.
• HRH Princess Michael of Kent (2006). Cupid and the King. Simon & Schuster UK. Chapter one, "Nell Gwyn" available online.
• Williams, Hugh Noel (1915). Rival Sultanas: Nell Gwyn, Louise de Kéroualle, and Hortense Mancini. Dodd, Mead and company. Entire book available from Google Books.
• Wilson, John H. (1952). Nell Gwyn: Royal Mistress. Dell Publishing.

External Links

• History of number 79 Pall Mall, Nell Gwyn's house.