PAST
HEAD MISTRESS
The thing that surprises me most about Nell Gwyn is that there’s so little out there about her. A few books, but mostly out of print. A few bits on Google, but you need to trawl. The reason, no doubt, is that we understand the lady to have been a whore, the shameless mistress of Charles II—but Gwyn was also an actress and, if reports are to be believed, was extremely accomplished at her craft. Added to this, she manoeuvred her way from guttersnipe to the mother of landed gentry, and did so by keeping her royal patron’s attention by her spark and wit—even when past her prime, when the King had better-looking, younger girls to hand. And through it all, she seems to have been a genuinely kind and loving woman. It’s a rags to riches tale that rivals Cinderella’s; if Cinderella had actually done something. Three cities make a claim to be the birthplace of Eleanor ‘Nell’ Gwyn (or Gwynn or Gwynne, but let’s keep it simple). These are Oxford, Hereford and London, with London the favourite, since it’s where her mother was born and where our heroine grew up. Place of birth is generally held to be Coal Yard Alley, a slum off Drury Lane, and a horoscope later cast for her puts the date at Saturday 2 February 1650, at six 72 Covent Garden Journal Issue 16 Summer 2012
o’clock in the morning. Nell’s father, Thomas Gwyn, is believed to have been a captain in the Cavalier army during the English civil war, but he’s out of the picture by the time of his daughter’s London childhood. Her mother, Helena or Eleanor, better known as ‘Old Ma Gwyn’, was by most accounts a brandy-swigging alcoholic whose business was running a bawdy-house, or brothel. There, or in the bawdy-house of a nearby Madam Ross, Nell spent most of her early life. It’s likely she and her handsome older sister, the ‘notorious’ Rose, worked as child prostitutes, but additional childhood occupations include street hawker of herring, oysters or turnips, and cinder-girl. Around 1662, when Gwyn was almost 13, she’s said to have taken a lover, Robert Duncan, a guards officer who set her up with rooms at a tavern in Maypole Alley, which ran from Drury Lane to the Strand. One significant thing about Duncan: he had an interest in the management of a brand new theatre being built nearby. During the previous decade of Puritan rule by the Cromwells, ‘frivolous’ pastimes, including the theatre, had been banned. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, he quickly changed all that. Early acts passed by the King included the licensing of two acting companies and, astonishingly, the legalisation of acting as a profession for women. In 1663 the King’s Company, lead by Charles’s waggish friend Thomas Killigrew, opened a playhouse in Drury Lane, known as the Theatre in Bridges Street and later named the Theatre Royal. Mary Meggs, a former prostitute nicknamed ‘Orange Moll’, had been granted a license to “vend, utter and sell oranges, lemons, fruit, sweetmeats and all manner of fruiterer’s and confectioner’s wares” at the theatre. Perhaps with a word from Duncan, Moll hired Gwyn and her sister Rose as scantily-clad ‘orange girls’, selling small, sweet oranges for sixpence each. The work introduced her to London’s higher society— this was “the King’s playhouse”, and Charles often attended performances. So here’s Nell: short and very slim, with a dainty figure and exquisite legs. Extremely pretty, not so much beautiful as a fulllipped minx. Long auburn hair. What draws attention to all this is her candid wit and strong, clear voice, as she strides amongst
She was greeted with booing and insults, the mob thinking she was the Catholic mistress, Louise de Kérouille. “Good people,” she said with a smile. “You are mistaken; I am the Protestant whore.”