The King's Favorite

by Susan Holloway Scott

  “I was especially grateful that they could add the dedication,” Mr. Dryden was saying. “His Grace the Duke of Monmouth will be most pleased.”

  “Monmouth?” I asked with surprise. “I thought you were dedicating the play to Her Majesty, on account of St. Catherine.”

  “I’d considered that, yes,” Mr. Dryden said, tapping his forefinger on the page for emphasis. “But Lord Buckingham persuaded me that His Majesty’s son would be the better choice.”

  “Buckingham!” I exclaimed with dismay. I remembered how he’d tried to meddle with Monmouth before, putting wrongful ideas into his head, and I remembered, too, my promise to Charles to help watch over his son. “Why should you be persuaded in such a matter by His Grace the meddlesome Duke of Buckingham? ”

  Mr. Dryden blinked, perplexed as a startled owl. “Why should I not? His Grace has been most generous to me with his favor, and has offered to press for me to be named the poet laureate.”

  “I’ll tell you why not,” I declared. “To dedicate a play about some villainous ancient emperor to a young gentleman in the position of Lord Monmouth—why, ’tis too cruel, too cruel by half.”

  “Forgive me, madam,” Mr. Dryden said, in the gingerly way of people confronting a mad dog. “But might I ask, too cruel to whom? ”

  “Why, to His Majesty, of course,” I said, squaring my hands at my waist, “and though less so, to His Grace as well. To mention their names at once with wicked old Mr. Maximin; you can hardly call that kind, can you? ”

  “Nelly, my girl,” Killigrew said dryly. “We’re players. We’re not meant to be kind. Or have you forgotten? ”

  One of the girls behind me tittered, though whether her intent was to sweeten Killigrew or to vex me, I couldn’t tell.

  “I remember that I’m an actress, sir.” I drew myself up, proud to stand upon that stage. “I hold this company too dear for it to be otherwise.”

  “I never thought you’d forgotten us, Nell.” Killigrew smiled gently at me. The truth was, I knew now that he (who’d known Charles longer than I’d been alive) was right. Though the lines between the playhouse and the palace might soften and blur, we players must take care to keep to our roles as gadflies, else lose our treasured art.

  And as uncertain as my own place here might have become, I still wasn’t ready to abandon it, not just yet.

  “No, Killigrew, I haven’t forgotten, and I won’t,” I said, letting my voice ring out so it could be heard in the highest galleries. “Because when I’m here, I’m not Nell in the king’s company, but Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn of the King’s Company. Nothing more, nothing less, and a pox to any lying blaggard who’d dare say otherwise.”

  Killigrew’s smile spread slowly across his face. He raised his hands and began to clap them together, the sound echoing in the empty house. Behind him, Mr. Lacy began to clap, too. Another player joined him, and another, and another, until the entire company was applauding me.

  I flushed with pleasure and triumph, and emotion, too, for what more honorable prize could I ask from my peers?

  Yet another was to come. As the day of the opening for Tyrannick Love drew closer, Killigrew began to fear how my gallants in the pit would react to seeing my character die instead of triumph merrily, as I usually did. Therefore he and Mr. Dryden contrived an epilogue for me to give, tailored more to me than to the tragic martyrs elsewhere in the play.

  On our opening night, I dutifully killed myself, as was written, collapsing in a lurid heap in the last act to add to the play’s general carnage. But as the emperor’s guards began to bear away my blood-sodden corpse, I popped up in my coffin, peering over the side as I ordered them to stop:

  Halt, you damned confounded dogs!

  I am to rise, and speak the epilogue.

  Rise I did, too. I made sure that I showed a handsome length of leg as I climbed from my coffin, and I added a quick little dance to prove how happy I was to be alive. As the audience roared their approval, I skipped to the front of the stage, held up my hands for silence, and spoke the most delicious epilogue ever writ for me.

  I come, kind Gentlemen, strange news to tell ye,

  I am the Ghost of poor departed Nelly.

  Sweet ladies, be not frightened, I’ll be civil,

  I’m what I was, a harmless little Devil

  For after death, we Sprites have just such Natures

  We had, for all the World, when human Creatures.

  And therefore I that was an Actress here,

  Play all my Tricks in Hell, a Goddess there.

  Gallants, look to’t, you say there are no Sprites

  But I’ll come dance about your Beds at nights . . .

  To tell you true, I walk because I dye

  Out of my Calling, in a Tragedy.

  O Poet, damn’d dull Poet, who could prove

  So senseless! To make Nelly dye for Love.

  Nay, what’s yet worse, to kill me in the prime,

  Of Easter-Term, in Tart and Cheese-cake time!

  I’ll fit the Fop, for I’ll not one word say

  T’excuse this godly, out-of-fashion play,

  A play which if you dare but twice sit out,

  You’ll all be slander’d, and be thought devout.

  But farewell, Gentlemen, make haste to me,

  I’m sure ’ere long to have your company

  As for my epitaph when I am gone,

  I’ll trust no Poet, but will write my own:

  Here Nelly lies, who, though she lived a Slattern,

  Yet dy’d a Princess, acting in St. Catherine.

  Tyrannick Love ran for fourteen nights in a row, with the house sold through for most every performance. If what was said was true, that my epilogue alone was the reason for the play’s success, then leastways I was wise enough to keep my peace and not agree. I’d reached that most rare and perilous place in an acting career, and become more important than the play itself. Yet because I aspired to larger glory, I considered my success a sign that I was ready to shift to the bigger stage of Whitehall.

  Charles saw Tyrannick Love three times himself, declaring it to be the best the company had offered in years, and mine the best epilogue ever given. And if, as I’d warned, seeing such a religious play so many times had made him scandalously devout, why, I never saw the proof of it.

  But what I did see was Charles’s growing devotion and attachment to me, and likewise my own feelings for him increasing by the day. I saw people crowd in the street for a glimpse of me, and heard them calling my name wherever I went. I saw all London at my feet, my willing slave, a circumstance that made me laugh with amused delight. I saw my life at nineteen as being as close to perfection in this life as was possible.

  And why, really, should I ever have looked for more?

  Chapter Fifteen

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON May 1669

  “Oh, aye, more canary, you jolly fellow, more canary.” I waved my hand over my empty goblet with breezy assurance to the serving man who held the decanted wine. For all that he should have been honored to serve here at His Majesty’s table, the rogue had been slyly brushing his arm against mine every chance he’d had, and winking at me, too, as if he’d believed I could be coaxed away from the table to meet him in some kitchen garden. It was fortunate for him that he was a bold, handsome fellow, and thus I did not call him out for his impunity as I might his uglier brother. “More canary, if you please, because I please, and if pleased, I in turn please His Majesty.”

  Charles laughed and leaned closer to me. “Is this rascal insulting you, Nelly?”

  “ ’Od’s fish, no,” I said grandly, for we’d all had the exact amount to drink as to make us very grand indeed. “Rascals like him must provoke me far more to be insulting to me. So long as he keeps the wine flowing about the table, he could drop his very breeches and waggle his hinder-quarters for all I’d care.”

  “Such a model of ease!” Across the table from me, Cosimo de’Medici, the Prince of Tuscany and heir to the Grand Duke of th
at place, rose unsteadily. He lifted his own substantial, satin-covered hinder-quarters from his chair only an inch or so, but it was more than sufficient to honor me with his upraised goblet.

  “Such a woman, Your Majesty,” he said, beaming at me. “Such a jewel! In Florence, our theatre cannot approach such magnificence, such quality, such amusement as you possess here, embodied in this lovely creature. Ah, Mrs. Gwyn, Mrs. Gwyn, your wit is eclipsed only by the sublimity of your beauty.”

  I smiled and bowed my head at this pretty compliment, as I’d been instructed earlier to do. To be sure, the prince was a mighty, omnipotent nobleman in his own lands, and deserving of far more obsequious tributes from such as me. But he was traveling through our country for his own pleasure and amusement, and meant to be incognito (a fine foreign word for someone in purposeful, mysterious disguise). He’d begged no ceremony from his cousin Charles or anyone else. Of course, being a large, jolly, swarthy, foreign gentleman with a heavy accent to his words, journeying about in his own private coach with a retinue that included a secretary, an artist, a cook, and a Romish priest or two, besides the usual gaggle of servants, the prince did not exactly go unnoticed, either by plain English folk or his distant cousin Charles.

  Of this I was most wonderfully glad. For if Cosimo had not come to London, or called upon Charles, or honored Charles with so many costly gifts (including a set of carved and polished marble stairway columns!) that the king had felt obligated to fete him, and squeeze him into his box at the Theatre Royal to see Tyrannick Love, or been so taken with my performance—why, if all those things had not tumbled together and happened, then I’d not be sitting here now. Yet they had, and here I was, dressed in green and pink satin and parchment lace, at a supper of state at Whitehall, drinking fine canary wine with the Prince of Tuscany and the King of England and a slew of other highborn noblemen.

  The queen was said to be ill in her rooms, and there was no sign of Lady Castlemaine, either. I could scarce believe my good fortune. For the first time, I was the one at the king’s side, a role that surely I’d been born to play.

  “I told you my Nelly was a clever lass,” Charles said, freely doting upon me, his arm around my waist. “Her wit’s her own, too. She doesn’t need Dryden to put the words into her mouth, do you, sweet?”

  “Not a one, sir,” I said, though as I smiled at Charles’s heavy-lidded, knowing face, I could wantonly think of one or two other things I’d wish the king might slip between my lips, and my legs, too. Beneath the cover of the table, I reached for the front of his breeches and his cock within, hoping to inspire the same inclinations in him. Charles was of such a lusty temper and so desirous of my person that it usually took little to tempt him.

  But before my nimble hand could make much progress along the royal thigh, Cosimo the prince finally was able to lurch upright from his chair.

  “Your Majesty, if you’ll but excuse me, I believe I shall now engage in a brief walk,” he announced, his eyes glassy as he grinned at me. “I fear my acquaintance with this fine canary is not as felicitous as that of you English.”

  “We are prodigious drinkers, aren’t we?” Charles said, proudly standing at once to prove how unaffected his constitution was, and likewise making every other at the table lumber to their feet with him. “But come, I’ve just the manner of exercise that will cure you: a brisk walk about my garden gallery. Then I’ll take you to my cabinet, as I’d promised, and show you my curiosities.”

  “Oh, sir, not the curiosities.” I groaned. Though few would expect it of a king, Charles had leanings toward astronomy and physical science and who knows what other scholarly bents. I had been invited into his private cabinet once, and I’d no wish to return; it was that crowded with so many strange stones and skeletons and spyglasses and dried beetles that it would be better suited to some blasphemous wizard than a king. If the poor prince and his canary-filled belly were taken to the cabinet now, to confront a two-headed snake preserved and drifting for all time in foul-smelling spirits, why, I would not go along, not to witness the sad results.

  Charles knew it, too. “You’ll join us, Nelly?” he asked with more polite hope than real expectation that I’d agree.

  I shook my head, reaching again for my goblet. “Thank’ee, no,” I said, and winked, a promise for later. “You’ll have a much more agreeable time without my company, sir.”

  “That could never be, Mrs. Gwyn,” the prince said gallantly, but with a certain panic in his voice, too, as Charles swept him from the room and toward the curiosities.

  I raised the goblet in salute to their backs. “Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to the monkey bones and fool’s gold.”

  “Shakespeare, Nelly?” Lord Buckingham asked, coming to stand beside me. “And here I’d believed all you knew was Dryden’s tedious tomfoolery.”

  “There’s much you do not know of me, Your Grace,” I said, my smile guarded. I set my canary down, knowing I’d do well to keep my wits about me in any conversation with Buckingham. “You do not wish to join His Majesty and His Highness?”

  “I wish nothing remotely like that,” he said wryly, “much as you do yourself.”

  “That is true,” I admitted. “The king may love his rubbish, but to me it’s no more agreeable than the dried blood and entrails in holy relics that send Papists into such a righteous frenzy.”

  He laughed, though I suspected he’d likely laugh at anything I said now, to put me at my ease. Gallantly, he held out his crooked arm to me. “Come, Nell, walk with me, so we might talk.”

  I glanced down at his arm without taking it. “Forgive me, Your Grace, but I was planning to retire.”

  “Oh, not yet,” he said cheerfully. “The king will be so busy displaying his oddities to the poor prince that he won’t be requiring you for at least another hour. Come with me, Nell. I vow I will not bite, or even nip.”

  “Faith, Your Grace, don’t try me,” I grumbled, and reluctantly took his arm. If I were to take my place here at court, I couldn’t go on avoiding Buckingham forever. He was too close to Charles for that, and besides, it was likely better to keep my eye upon him than to turn away, and let him do his mischief behind my back.

  “I don’t know why you dislike me so, my dear,” he said with a heaving sigh as we began to walk, I guessed toward the same gallery where Charles had taken the prince for air. “We’re really much the same, you and I. A pair of wicked scamps who keep our places in the king’s heart by doing or saying what others don’t dare.”

  “ ’Od’s blood, that’s a pretty face on it,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “ ‘A pair of wicked scamps’! Why not call me a mongrel bitch and be done with it? ”

  “If you’re a bitch,” he said easily, “then I’m a cur. Not so very far from the mark.”

  “You Villiers are a snapping pack of wild dogs,” I agreed, thinking not only of him, but of his cousin Lady Castlemaine.

  He looked down his nose at me, a nose that, now that I considered it, did have a certain long and houndish cast to it. “Is that the reason you dislike me, then? ”

  “Don’t mistake distrust for dislike, Your Grace.” We stepped through the door at the end of the hall, into the gallery. This was a long stone-covered walk, open on one side. Through a row of carved arches, one could glimpse the privy garden below. Pale in the moonlight, the paths of crushed stone divided the garden into neat geometric divisions, each centered by a luminous marble statue carved in the classical style. I peered over the wall from curious interest; the garden was often the spot of moonlight trysts, and who knew whom I might glimpse in some amusingly illicit congress?

  “Distrust versus dislike,” he said, “countered by disagreeable disdain, even disgust, yet all disarmed by disavowal.”

  I winced, my face turning picklish. He could go on in this vein all night if I let him. “A distasteful display, that, Your Grace. I’m disenchanted.”

  “Why, yes, so am I,” he said wryly, “though I’d not much time to poli
sh my wit. But how clever of you to have learned the difference between distrust and dislike, and proof that you’re already mastering life here among us low, sinful creatures at Whitehall. You’ve done well for yourself, Nell, and without any help from me, either.”

  I smiled up at him, not bothering to hide my triumph. “There’s a precious fine compliment from a master like you.”

  He laughed again, this time with a ring of sly truth to it. “It’s all but a game, my dear, all but a game. Which is why I want to share with you the latest word from our friend Lord Rochester.”

  “You’ve heard from him, Your Grace?” I asked eagerly. I’d not, which was no surprise; he did not like writing to me, since he knew I’d needs share his letters with whomever I asked to read them aloud. I’d seen him last at Newmarket (for he’d a weakness for horses and racing, too), the week before he’d sailed. “How was his journey? How does he find Paris?”

  “Rochester finds Paris to his liking, for who does not?” he said. “But he finds Paris fails to return the admiration. King Louis has refused to see him, citing that regrettable contretemps before the Dutch ambassador.”

  “Oh, pish, that was nothing—nothing.” This latest misadventure of Rochester’s had seemed like nothing to me, anyway, though it had shocked a great many other folk. In February, the king had brought several of his Gentlemen of the Bedchamber to dine with him at the house of the Dutch ambassador. The party was a merry one, with much wine and mirth, as usual with these gentlemen. But during the meal, His Lordship took peculiar, violent offense at some jest by Tom Killigrew (my old friend and master from the playhouse), and struck him upon the ear. How often do such squabbles occur amongst friends in the middling and lower ranks, in taverns and ale shops every day in London, with no lasting import beyond a bruise or two to either of the parties?