PAST
the audience like a female Artful Dodger. She caught Killigrew’s eye, and he recruited her, at 14, to join his group of actresses. He sent her to his school for young actors, where she was taught by Charles Hart, one of the finest actors of the time, and very soon her lover. In Restoration theatre, short runs and high play turnover were the norm. Nell would have to show she could learn up to 50 plays a year. Since she was illiterate, scrawling her initials (E.G.) with difficulty, this would mean learning by reciting, walking up and down, saying the lines again and again as she was told them. She made her debut in 1665, at 15, in John Dryden’s heroic drama The Indian Emperor, playing Cydaria, the daughter of Montezuma. It was a mistake. Diarist Samuel Pepys, who had already noticed her about the stage, certainly thought so. “Saw the Indian Emperor, where I find Nell come again, which I am glad of; but was most infinitely displeased with her being put to act the Emperor’s daughter; which is a great and serious part, which she do most basely.” It was no good—Nell was a funny kid, a mimic with a gift for repartee, not a tragedienne. Fortunately, the new form of Restoration comedy suited her perfectly. Two months later, she appeared with Hart in All’s Mistaken, or the Mad Couple, where they played witty, antagonistic lovers. It made Nell Gwyn a star. Not long after this, Pepys caught sight of her at home as he strolled through Covent Garden. “Saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodging door in Drury Lane in her smock sleeves and bodice. A mighty pretty creature.” He was smitten. That summer, and for over a year, the Great Plague closed most of the city. When life began again, Nell played a string of roles, her high spirits and arched brow making her perfect to deliver the risqué but fashionable prologues and epilogues of the time. Soon, the crowds came for her alone, and Dryden began to write characters especially for her, based on her audacity and airy laissez-faire. Her triumph was playing the seductive Florimell in Dryden’s Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen in 1667, when she was 17. It included scenes of Gwyn impersonating a boy and clad in tight-fitting male attire, which drove the audience wild. Poor old Pepys was among them. “To the King’s house to see The Maiden Queen. The King and the Duke of York were at the play. But so great 73 Covent Garden Journal Issue 16 Summer 2012
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.” Throwing out lines such as “Toss about my empty Noddle” and “a very janty fellow”, she was the original Dandini. Pepys saw the play on at least two further occasions. Gwyn had become immensely popular, mixing with playwrights and aristocrats (she’d had a brief affair with the cultured and dissolute court wit Lord Buckhurst). In April 1668, she attended a play at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In the next box (this is how far she’d come, at 18) sat the King, who apparently spent the evening ignoring the stage and flirting with her. Charles invited Gwyn and her escort to supper, together with his brother, the future King James II. Allegedly, the King was embarrassed to find he had no money with him; Nell had to foot the bill. “Od’s fish!” she exclaimed, imitating the King’s manner of speech, “but this is the poorest company I ever was in.” By summer, her affair with the King was well-known, though few expected it to last beyond a few months. The King of course was married, to the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza. He also had a harem of mistresses, lead by the beautiful, sharptongued Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine. But Castlemaine was aging; in her place now were Nell and Moll Davis, a young actress with the Duke’s Company. Typically, one evening just before Davis was due to entertain the King, Nell managed to slip a powerful laxative into her rival’s teatime cakes, apparently assisted in her little jape by the female playwright Aphra Behn. Nell continued to act, drawing ever larger crowds due to her royal connection. But she seems to have truly loved the King, and as her commitment grew, her ambition faltered. Her last performance was in late 1670, in another Dryden play, and just after the birth of her first son, Charles, by the King. As Charles’s mistress, Nell Gwyn became even more adored by the population. They liked her vivacity, her astonishing indiscretions, and the fact that, somehow, she seemed to remain a favourite. When the King selected a new paramour, the emptyheaded Louise de Kérouaille, a noblewoman
from Versailles, Nell nicknamed her ‘Squintabella’ and mercilessly caricatured her French accent. She entertained the King in more ways than one, and was not above kind-hearted amusements—tying a fried fish to his line when he complained of not catching anything. Though she dressed regally and was given beautiful homes, including a townhouse in Pall Mall and the stunning Burford House in Windsor, she asked for comparatively little. Having lost her second child at the age of 10, her only demands were for her remaining son. Two stories circulate as to how that child got his titles. Most popular is that, when the boy was six, on the arrival of the King, Nell said, “Come here, you little bastard, and say hello to your father.” When Charles protested, she replied, “Your Majesty has given me no other name by which to call him,” so Charles made his son the Earl of Burford. The second story is that Nell grabbed the child as a baby and hung him out of the window of Lauderdale House in Highgate, where she briefly lived, threatening to drop him unless he was granted a peerage. Desperately, the King cried, “God save the Earl of Burford!” King Charles II died on 6 February, 1685. Obeying his brother’s deathbed wish, “Let not poor Nelly starve,” James II paid off Nell Gwyn’s debts and gave her a pension of £1,500 a year. As far as we can tell, from the age of 18, when she became his mistress, to her death, Nell remained faithful to the King. She died at 37 of apoplexy (in fact, a series of strokes), almost certainly due to long-term syphilis, and was buried at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. She left a legacy to the prisoners of Newgate, and is thought to have been instrumental in the foundation of Chelsea Hospital. Nell Gwyn will probably be remembered for two key things that she said. On one occasion, seeing her coachman fighting with another who had called her a whore, she broke up the fight, saying, “I am a whore. Find something else to fight about.” A few years earlier, passing through Oxford in her coach, she was greeted with booing and insults, the mob thinking she was the Catholic mistress, Louise de Kérouille. “Good people,” she said, putting her head out of the window with a smile. “You are mistaken; I am the Protestant whore.”