The story of Nell Gwyn (18 page)

1 Advertisement.—Wherezs there has been a Paper cry'd by some Hawkers, as a Sermon preached by D. T. at the funeral of M. E. Gwynn, this may Certify, that that Paper is the Forgery of some Mercinary people.— Mr. [Andrew] Pulton consider'd [in Ms sincerity . . .] ^V Tho. Tenison, D.D., 4to, 1687.

* Life of Tenison, p. 20. Lord Jersey should have recol-

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hardly add that Tenison obtained the see, and that he hved to fill with honour to himself and service to the Church the more important office of Archbishop of Canterbury. It may, however, be new to some that in his own Will he strictly forbids either funeral sermon or oration at his own interment. There is satire in this. To have praised even Tenison might by some courtier or another have been made a barrier to the promotion of an able, and perhaps better deserving person.

The son acceded to the dying requests of his mother by the following memorandum beneath the codicil :—

Dec. 5, 1687.—I doe consent that this paper of request may be made a codicil to Mrs. Gwinn's will.

St. Albans.

King James continued the mother's pension to the son, and in the same month in which his mother died gave him the colonelcy of that regiment of horse from which Lord Scarsdale had been dismissed, for his opposition to the well-known designs of King James.*

When still young he distinguished himself at the ciege of Belgrade, became in after-life a Knight of the Garter, and died the father of eight sons by his

lected that the father of his own wife was no less a person than the infamous Will. Chiffinch. [The first Earl of Jersey, then Sir Edward Villiers, married Barbara Chiffinch in Dec. 1681 (Chester's I^ndon Marriage Licences, ed. Foster). He was created Earl of Jersey Oct. 13, 1697.]

1 Letter from Atterbury, dated Covent Garden, Dec. i, 1687. Nichols's Atterbury, i. i.

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wife, the high-born and wealthy heiress, Lady Diana de Vere, a beauty included—as I have already observed—in the Kneller collection at Hampton Court. He died intestate in 1726. His widow survived till 1742. The title still exists—and has been in our own time rather conspicuously before the public from the enormous wealth of the late Harriet, Duchess of St. Albans, widow of Coutts the banker, but originally known, and favourably too, upon the comic boards. Not unlike in many points were Eleanor Gwyn and Harriet Mellon. The fathers of both were in the army, and both never knew what it was to have a father. Both rose by the stage,—both had wealthy admirers— and both were charitable and generous. Here, however, the parallel ceases. Harriet was no wit, —nor, with all respects for Mr. Coutts's taste, can we well believe that she had ever been a beauty.

There are many portraits of Nell Gwyn—few heads of her time make a more profitable traffic among dealers. Yet very few are genuine. She sat to Lely, to Cooper, and to Gascar. An " unfinished " portrait of her was sold at Sir Peter Lel/s sale to Hugh May for ^25.1 No. 306 of King James H.'s pictures was " Madam Gwyn's picture, naked, with a Cupid," done by Lely, and concealed by a "sliding piece," a copy by Danckers of the Countess of Dorset, by Van Dyck.'^ Among the

^ Accounts of Roger North, the executor of Lely. Addit. MS. in Brit. Mus. 16,174.

2 Harl. MS. 1890; compHre Walpole, edit. Dallaway, iii. 58. There is a unique print of this in the Burney Collection in the British Museum.

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pictures "of Mr. Lely's doing" which Mrs. Beale, the painter, saw at Bap. May's lodgings at Whitehall, in April 1677, was "Mrs. Gwyn, with a lamb, half-length." 1 "Some years since," says Tom Davies, writing in 1784, " I saw at Mr. Berenger's house in the Mews a picture of Nell Gwyn, said to have been drawn by Sir Peter Lely ; she appeared to have been extremely attractive." ^

With a single exception of a too grave and thoughtful picture in the Lely room at Hampton Court, there is not a single picture of Nelly in any of the royal collections. When Queen Charlotte was asked whether she recollected a famous picture of Nell Gwyn, known to have existed in the Windsor gallery, and which Her Majesty herself was suspected of having removed, she replied at once "that most assuredly since she had resided at Windsor there had been no Nell Gwyn there." ^

A full-length portrait of her, in a yellow and blue dress, and black-brown hair, fetched at the Stowe sale 100 guineas, and has been engraved. At Goodwood is a full-length of her, neither clever nor like. Other portraits of her are to be seen at Elvaston (Lord Harrington's) ; at Althorp (Lord Spencer's) ; at Welbeck (the Duke of Portland's), in water colours, with her two children; at Sudbury (Lord Vernon's); and at Oakley Grove, Cirencester (Lord Bathurst's). That curious inquirer, Sir

1 Wal pole, by Dallaway, iii. 140.

^ Davies's Dramatic Miscellanies, iii. 269.

* Mrs. Jameson's Preface to Beauties of the Court of King

harks II.

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William Musgrave, had seen portraits of her at Smeaton and at Lord Portmore's at Weybridge. At the Garrick Club is a namby-pamby and pretty small portrait called Nell Gwyn, but surely not Nelly. Marshall Grosvenor had the fine portrait with the lamb, once belonging to the St. Albans family, and since so finely engraved for Mrs. Jameson's Beauties. " The turn of the neck," says Mrs. Jameson, "and the air of the head, are full of grace and character, and the whole picture, though a little injured by time, is exquisitely painted.'' A duplicate of this is at Goodrich Court—one of the acquisitions of Sir Samuel Meyrick—the petticoat is of a pink or carmine colour. The portrait at Drayton Manor, bought by the late Sir Robert Peel, is also the same as the Grosvenor picture, except that the lamb is omitted.^ At Mr. Bernal's, in Eaton Square, is a clever copy of the time, after Lely ; and among the miniatures of the Duke of Buccleuch is her head by Cooper, for which it is said the Exchequer papers record the price paid to that painter.

Of the early engravings from her portraits, the best are by Gerard Valck, the brother-in-law of Blooteling. Valck was a contemporary of Nell Gwyn, and fine impressions of his Lely engraving realise high prices ; but the print of her which collectors are most curious about is that after Gascar, evidently engraved abroad,—it is thought by Masson—in which she is represented covered

' Mrs. Jameson's Private Picture Galleries, p. 375.

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by the famous laced chemise, lying on a bed of roses, from which her two children, as Cupids, are withdrawing the curtains—King Charles II. in the distance. She wears as well the famous Rupert necklace of pearls. The Stowe impression—the last sold—brought eight guineas. The Burney copy, now in the British Museum, cost Dr. Burney at Sir Egerton Brydges' sale ^39 i8s. In all her pictures we have what Ben Jonson so much admires—

Hair loosely flowing, robes as free.

But few—the Lely with the lamb excepted—render justice to those charms of face and figure which her contemporaries loved to admire, and which Lely alone had the skill to transfer even in part to canvas.^

Relics of Nelly are of rare occurrence. A warming-pan said to have been in her possession with, for motto, the slightly modified text, " Fear God and serve the King," was in existence at the close of the last century. A looking-glass of great elegance of form, and with a handsomely carved frame with figures, lately, if not still, in the collection of Sir Page Dicks of Port Hall, is said, on good authority, to have belonged to her. The bills of her household and other expenses, from which I have derived some particulars, are characteristic

1 For her bust or effigy at Bagnigge Wells, see Waldron's ed. oi Downes, p. 16, and Gent. Mag. for June, 1835, p. 562. I do not believe in the straight-armed portrait engraved by Van Bleeck and now in Mr. Bernal's possession.

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memorials of her in another way. Till the recent sale of the mutilated Exchequer papers her autograph was not known to exist. She could not sign her name, and was content with an E. G.—many with better opportunities could do no more—dotted at the commencement and termination of each letter, as if she was at a loss where to begin and how to leave off. Not more than ten or twelve of her signatures are known, and these when they have occurred for sale have sold at prices varying from two guineas and a half to three guineas each.

On looking back at what I have written of this Story, I see little to omit or add—unless I wander into the satires of the time, and poison my pages with the gross libels of an age of lampoons. Not to have occasioned one satire, or even more, would have been to say little for the reputation (of any kind) of a lady who lived within the atmosphere of Whitehall. Like her—

Who missed her name in a lampoon. And sigh'd—to find herself decay'd so soon—

Nelly did not escape, and, though the subject of

^ye///'Uu>-u/n^ aJ v^-uAi/jC.

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some very gross satires, she had this consolation, if she heeded them at all, that there were others who fared still worse, and perhaps deserved better.^ Yet it would be wrong to close any sketch of her life without mentioning the present of the large Bible which she made to Oliver Cromwell's porter, when a prisoner in Bedlam,—often referred to by the writers of her age ;- her paying the debt of a worthy clergyman whom, as she was going through the City, she saw bailiffs hurrying to prison ; or her present to Pat O'Bryan, so characteristically related in the following quotation :—

Afterwards Pat O'Bryan, scorning to rob on foot, he would become an absolute highway-man, by robbing on horseback. The first prey he met was Nell Gwyn ; and stopping her coach on the road to Winchester, quoth he, "Madam, I am, by my salvashion, a feiy good shentleman, and near relation to his Majesty's Giash, the Duke of Ormond ; but being in want of money, and knowing you to be a sharitable

w , I hope you will give me shomething after I've took

all you have away." Honest Nell, seeing the simplicity of the fellow, and laughing heartily at his bull, gave him ten guineas, with which Teague rid away, without doing any further damage. ^

Anecdotes of this sort, though perhaps only coloured with truth, are not to be made light of by

' Wycherley has '' A Song : upon a vain foolish Coxcomb, who was banish'd the Court, for owning a witty Libel written by another."— Poeins, 1704, p. 319.

- Granger, iv. 210 and 188. "Like Oliver's porter, but not so devout," isa lineinD'Urfey's VxoXo'gVLZX.o Sir Barnaby Whigg, 1681. [Andrew Marvell has also introduced into his verse the story of Nelly's kindness to Cromwell's tall porter. Darnel; cf. State Poems, edit. 1705, p. 447.]

^ Capt. .Alexander Smith's i!L/f«y/"/y2g"/2Ziy«ywe« (London, 1719), i. 260.

t6i m

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biographers. They show the general appreciation at the time of the individuals to whom they relate. There is not a story told of Nelly in the commonest chap-book or jest-book, published while her memory was yet fresh among the children to whose fathers and mothers she was known, but what evinces either harmless humour or a sympathising heart. No wonder, then, that there is still an odd fascination about her name, and that Granger's sentence, "Whatever she did became her," is at least as worthy of credit as Burnet's in calling her "the indiscreetest and wildest creature that ever was in a court."'

The true apology for this Story and for Nell Gwyn is to be found in Gibber's defence of his own conduct, where, when speaking of Nelly, he observes : " If the common fame of her may be believed, which in my memory was not doubted, she had less to be laid to her charge than any other of those ladies who were in the same state of preferment. She never meddled in matters of any serious moment, or was the tool of working politicians. Never broke into those amorous infidelities which others are accused of; but was as visibly distinguished by her particular personal inclination for the King as her rivals were by their titles and grandeur." ^

Another, if another is wanting, may be found in a far graver author, Sir Thomas More. " I doubt not,"—says that great and good man,—" that some