by Linda Porter
To be accepted is one thing. To be respected is quite another. The first English actresses may have been considered ladies of easy virtue by many in their audiences but it was not an easy career to follow. The companies offered a number of plays in repertory so there were constantly lines to be learned, rehearsals attended and rivalries managed. Remuneration was far from generous and women earned less than men. Elizabeth Barry, one of the most successful Restoration actresses, earned fifty shillings a week while her leading man, Thomas Betterton, earned five pounds. Actresses who were married, very often to male performers in their company, were less subject to criticism of their morals and the unwanted attentions of admirers than their single colleagues. Most were not fallen women, in the Victorian sense. In order to carry off the demands of the various roles they were required to play and learn, Restoration actresses needed to be literate and have good memories. Their backgrounds varied; some, like Moll Davis, were bastards of aristocrats, others were from families who had fallen on hard times. They were always a minority in the theatre companies and had limited input to the management of their profession. Those who tried to take a more active role, such as Elizabeth Barry, found themselves the targets of satire and ridicule, as did female playwrights such as Aphra Behn. Restoration actresses struggled with the contradiction that women’s voices had become louder as a result of the changes of the mid-seventeenth century – even to be allowed to appear on the stage itself and to be thought of as a functioning individual, distinct from a man, was an achievement – but that society was still largely patriarchal and, while men may have liked the idea of a degree of sexual liberation for women, they were not so keen on expressions of independence. Given these challenges, it is remarkable that one of the most popular comedy actresses of the period, the illiterate daughter of a brothel owner, should have overcome the difficulties of her past to become perhaps the best known of all the mistresses of Charles II.
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THERE IS NO hard and fast evidence for the date or place of birth of Eleanor (Nell) Gwyn. The city of Hereford claims her, and her most recent biographer, a descendant, believes she was born in Oxford.4 Nor can her father be identified with any certainty. A satirical poem of 1681 asserted that her father died in Oxford in a debtors’ prison. At the time of the Glorious Revolution, in 1688, it was said that he was a certain Captain Thomas Gwyn, of Welsh descent, an officer in the royalist army. These two titbits of information are not, of course, necessarily contradictory. Nell’s sister, Rose Gwyn, claimed in an application for bail, made from prison in 1663, that her father had ‘lost all in the service of the late King.’ The girls’ mother, Helena Smith, a Londoner, may never have actually married Thomas Gwyn, even if he was their father. Nell’s origins are therefore obscure and the various colourful stories about her upbringing in the Drury Lane area of London cannot themselves be substantiated. She may have found it useful and entertaining to tell people, as she apparently did Samuel Pepys, that she was ‘brought up in a bawdy-house to fill strong water to the guests’.5 The notion that her mother, who does seem to have had problems with alcohol, was also a brothel keeper has gained a great deal of credence. Given the high incidence of prostitution in London at the time, it is not improbable. By 1663, perhaps because of the proximity of her home to Thomas Killigrew’s Theatre Royal, Nell had become an orange girl there, selling fruit to theatregoers. The girls needed to be voluble, pert and confident if they were to do their job well. The date most often given for Nell’s birth is 1651, which would have made her about twelve or thirteen at the most when she first stood in front of the stage, peddling her wares. Within two years, she would be treading the boards themselves, exhibiting a natural gift as a comedienne which transformed her life.
The wit and vivacity which captivated the king are not immediately obvious in Nell’s portraits. Like her past, there is no agreement about her colouring. She has been described as having auburn hair by some writers and being fair by others. In the Lely portrait of 1675, she appears to have been a brunette. As the Restoration court favoured dark-haired women, she could, by then, have dyed it for fashion’s sake, as Frances Teresa Stuart did. Her face, with its bulbous eyes and overly rouged cheeks, is interesting but not beautiful. The secrets of her undoubted attraction must have lain in her animation and wicked sense of humour, her capacity for sending herself up as well as others. The little orange girl swiftly became a clever, exhilarating woman, at ease with her sexuality and keen to develop the acting skills that had been discovered by chance. For Nell Gwyn, the stage offered an irresistible chance to escape the grime of London life, to be admired and feted and enjoy the financial security that had eluded her family. That she could follow this path at all was made much easier by her relationship, both on and off the stage, with one of the leading actors of the day, Charles Hart.
Hart had served briefly as a cavalry lieutenant under Prince Rupert at the start of the Civil Wars but had subsequently spent most of his time with a company of exiled English actors on the continent. The theatre was in his blood (his father was an actor) and was a more natural environment for him than the battlefield. He had performed for Charles II during the first year of his exile, in Paris, in 1646. Hart had a financial share in the newly formed King’s Company after the Restoration and also helped his fellow actors manage their finances, so his abilities were not confined to pretending to be someone else. Nevertheless, by the time Nell Gwyn came into his life, he was an acknowledged star, well known for playing leading roles in serious drama. He brought such dignity to his performances in tragedy that the company’s prompter wrote of his acting ‘with such grandeur and agreeable majesty that one of the court was pleased to honour him with this commendation; that Hart might teach any king on earth how to comport himself.’6 The identity of this admiring courtier is not revealed but it is an interesting comment by a member of a court not noted for its dignity. Hart did not, however, teach Nell Gwyn how to play tragic roles. That was never her forte. Instead, he helped her develop quickly into an outstanding comedienne. Together, they created the so-called ‘gay couple’ (a term that nowadays would have very different connotations), ‘the most distinctive new contribution to comedy of the 1660s, the first new change in the comic form in the Restoration’.7
Charles Hart was more than twenty-five years older than Nell Gwyn and may well have been something of a father figure as well as a mentor and lover. Their professional collaboration began in May 1665, shortly before the Great Plague overwhelmed London. The play was James Howard’s All Mistaken. Hart and the King’s Company realized at once that they had found in Nell a leading lady of distinction and flair in comic roles. Pepys, with his characteristic weakness for hyperbole, enthused over their performances: ‘Nell’s and Hart’s mad parts are most excellently done, but especially hers’, he would later write.8 The commercial implications were obvious, especially when the duke of Buckingham offered the company an adaptation of Fletcher’s The Chances in 1667. Buckingham’s version enlarged a non-speaking part originally assigned to a drunken whore and invented a witty, worldly-wise heroine with a gift for repartee. This was precisely the sort of part that Nell Gwyn, who was barely literate when she joined the King’s Company, was born to play.9 How she learned her lines for this and the many other roles required for repertory is something of a mystery. Her fellow actors may have helped her learn to read or simply read her lines off to her so that she could memorize them.
The most successful of all the collaborations of Hart and Gwyn was John Dryden’s Secret Love, a runaway success for the company, in which the two leads played the ‘gay couple’, Celadon and Florimell. It is probable that Dryden wrote the part of Florimell especially for Nell, based on her character and acting skills. Already much admired, her performance in it made her a star. Pepys said that he believed it to be the greatest comical performance the world had ever seen. Secret Love became the model for future Restoration comedies with its assertive heroine and the couple’s reluctance to surrender to the constr
ictions of a conventional married relationship. In another play written by Dryden in 1668, An Evening’s Love, Nell’s character, Donna Jacintha, is asked by the hero, Wildblood (played again by Hart), what a gentleman might hope from her. The answer is highly revealing: ‘To be admitted to pass my time with, while a better comes: to be the lowest step in my staircase, for a Knight to mount upon him, and a Lord upon him, and a Marquess upon him, and a Duke upon him, till I get as high as I can climb.’10 Among the spectators were the duke of York and Charles II himself.
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NELL WAS ALREADY mixing in elevated company, since some of the King’s Company’s performances were performed privately at court, with costumes paid for out of the royal purse. She knew Buckingham, Sir Charles Sedley, the pudgy-faced, amiable drinking companion of the king and the rakish earl of Rochester. Sedley was noted as a wit and conversationalist, whose fondness for the bottle sometimes involved him in antisocial behaviour. He had written the comedy, The Mulberry Garden, in which Nell and Hart had acted. Yet if she harboured the intention of becoming the king’s mistress – and, given her fame and popularity, as well as Charles II’s love of theatre, why not? – Nell would also have known that there was already an actress in the king’s bed, in these years of the declining influence of Lady Castlemaine. This was Mary (Moll) Davis, rumoured to be the illegitimate daughter of Thomas Howard, earl of Berkshire, though later, near-contemporary accounts of her life gave her more prosaic origins as the daughter of a Wiltshire blacksmith. Moll was about the same age as Nell Gwyn but had appeared on stage earlier, as a singer and dancer. Her skill as a dancer was greatly admired, not least by Pepys, who wrote about her in a similar vein to his panegyrics about Nell. Moll was considerably less admired for her acting skills, however, though she does seem to have been promoted by the Duke’s Company, of which she was a member by 1662, as a rival for Nell Gwyn. But it was her singing that really made her stand out; in a revival of one of the plays of Sir William Davenant, the company’s founder, she sang ‘My lodging it is in the cold ground’ so affectingly that, as John Downes put it, ‘it raised her from a bed on the cold ground to a bed royal.’
It would be fair to say that there was no love lost between Nell Gwyn and Moll Davis. Rumour even had it that Nell sent her rival sweetmeats laced with laxatives before one tryst with the king and that the effect brought a hasty end to the royal passion for Moll. Even if Nell, who was certainly capable of such a mischievous, some would say spiteful act, hoped to sabotage the relationship, she was clearly unsuccessful. Bishop Burnet, a source of much gossip about the period, claimed that both actresses were dangled in front of Charles II by the duke of Buckingham as part of his feud with Lady Castlemaine, and that the king was initially put off by Nell’s demand for a pension of £500 a year if she was to leave the stage and become his mistress. Instead, he fell for Moll Davis, who was not especially pretty but whose elegant legs and suggestive dancing style he found irresistible. His wife was less impressed. Moll’s dancing offended Catherine of Braganza so much that she stormed out of a performance at court. Moll, who made no demands on the king, was, however, rewarded. Pepys was told by another actress friend (there is something of the male groupie about the famous diarist’s adoration of actresses) ‘how Mis [sic] Davis is for certain going away from the Duke’s house, the king being in love with her; and a house is taken for her, and furnishings; and she hath a ring given her already worth £600.’ The ‘Duke’s house’ mentioned was the lodging provided by Davenant for female members of his company. This reference to Moll becoming the king’s mistress and being given her own establishment dates from the beginning of 1668. The affair continued, spasmodically, until at least 1673, when Moll Davis gave birth to the last of Charles II’s fourteen bastard children, the rather oddly named Lady Mary Tudor. By that time, however, Nell Gwyn was playing a much greater role offstage.
In 1667, Nell found a new lover who was willing to pay her £100 a year – considerably less than she had allegedly suggested as her price to the king – in the charmingly dissolute Restoration wit and writer, Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, later sixth earl of Dorset. Buckhurst’s family had a long tradition of service to the Crown. His grandmother, Mary, had been governess to Charles I’s children, and his mother’s family, the Cranfields, were originally a mercantile family that had come to political prominence through an alliance with the first duke of Buckingham in the reign of James I.11 Buckhurst is said to have been determined to bed Nell Gwyn after she revealed a great deal of leg while rolling about on the floor of the stage in a performance of All Mistaken, the play in which she had first shone. He had, as a contemporary poem not so delicately put it, ‘through her drawers the powerful charm descried.’12
Buckhurst offered Nell a diversion from Hart as a lover and from the stage itself. His offer must have been attractive enough for her to forgo both, at least for a while. She found herself, probably some time in May 1667, in a fine house in Epsom, Surrey, with not just Buckhurst but Charles Sedley for company. Apart from receiving visits from Buckingham and Rochester, little is known about how the trio passed their time. Sedley’s reputation for profanity made a local matron invited to attend a dinner party at which he was present very nervous in anticipation, but she did not mention Nell Gwyn. This pastoral interlude did not last long. Buckhurst apparently grew tired of Nell’s acerbic wit and her considerable inroads on his purse. By August, he had had enough. Nell resumed her theatrical roles, to the evident relief of Pepys. Her absence had also damaged takings for the King’s Company and this, coupled with her treatment of Charles Hart, caused resentment among her fellow actors when she returned. Piqued, Hart took up with Lady Castlemaine, whose enthusiasm for actors matched that of Pepys for actresses. Their liaison did not last long but it drew a line under Nell’s affair with her first lover called Charles. By 1669, Nell was pregnant by the man she would refer to as ‘her Charles III’. She had got as high as she could climb.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Protestant Whore
‘Hard by Pall Mall lives a wench call’d Nell.
King Charles II he kept her.
She hath got a trick to handle his prick,
But never lays hands on his sceptre.’
From Poems on Affairs of State
IT WAS DISINGENUOUS to claim that Nell Gwyn had no interest in politics. The writer of this poem, one of many scurrilous if not downright pornographic verses inspired by the king’s cheerful promiscuity, went on to say that, ‘all matters of state from her soul she does hate’. Yet Nell’s association with Buckingham and the court wits, her rivalry with Louise de Kéroualle, Charles II’s French mistress and, indeed, her own inclinations, at least as far as protecting her children by the king were concerned, made her involvement inevitable.1 But she did not set out to be a political player, it was a by-product of her situation. Nell gave birth to her first son by Charles at the start of the 1670s, a decade that was to be every bit as turbulent as the first ten years of the Restoration.
As Charles contemplated the arrival of yet another illegitimate child, this time by a woman of a startlingly different social class and background from someone like Lady Castlemaine, who had contemptuously described Nell as ‘that pitiful strolling actress’,2 another man might have taken stock of what had been achieved in that first decade of his rule. But who was Charles II in 1670? Even the court wits, whose company Nell Gwyn frequented, did not know. Their attitude towards the king was ambivalent. They were his companions, in drinking, in whoring, yet they could – and did – undermine him in their public utterances and behaviour, just as much as they enjoyed his transitory favour. They, at least, knew his inscrutability. Topical and personal lampoons were widespread in the 1670s, a form of media that predated the vicious artistic caricatures of the eighteenth century. An anonymous writer in 1669 managed to impugn the king’s political grasp and his sexual prowess by using the metaphor of sailing, one of Charles II’s favourite pastimes:
Our ruler hath got the verti
go of state,
The world turns round in his politic pate,
He steers in a sea where his course cannot last,
And bears too much sail for the strength of his mast.3
Charles II shared his thoughts with almost no one except his sister, Minette, who had herself been powerfully affected by the condescension and sense of displacement they experienced as a result of the Civil Wars. The king disliked mulling over things in ministerial meetings, nor did he wish to revisit his past. It was only later in the reign that he carefully crafted his version of the escape from Worcester and then he put a spin on the experience of defeat which modern communicators would admire. Though much of his attitude – his instinctive dissimulation, his mistrust of political advisers, his liking for display at a safe distance from his subjects – could be ascribed to his experiences as a prince and king in exile, as a monarch he did not like to acknowledge failure. He was still on the throne and that, in itself, was no mean feat. His main preoccupations were not, of course, the string of irresistible ladies who occupied his bed, but the much more serious business of ruling. He had still not worked out, or perhaps did not care, that his lifestyle might leave him open to criticism that struck at the very heart of the concept of monarchy.
During the next ten years, religious tensions, encompassing both Protestant dissenters and Roman Catholics, multiplied to fever point and became entwined with the issue of the succession in a manner that seemed to threaten the throne. The king’s brother, James, duke of York, and his eldest son, the duke of Monmouth, were at the centre of this national crisis. Charles II’s relationship with Nell Gwyn (always a staunch supporter of young Monmouth) flourished in the year 1670–1 but, even as it did, the king was less concerned with Nell than he was with his continuing lack of funds, his testy relationship with Parliament (where the issue of money was always paramount), and foreign affairs. He had got rid of Clarendon as chief minister but had not replaced the exiled earl with a clear favourite. His advisers at this time may be largely unknown to all but specialists in seventeenth-century British history but they are certainly not without interest, and their perceptions of the influence of the king’s mistresses played a part in their personal and political calculations.
