The story of Nell Gwyn (3 page)

The wits of Charles found easier ways to fame, Nor wished for Jonson's art or Shakespeare's flame ; Themselves they studied—as they felt they writ— Intrigue was plot, obscenity was wit.

^ The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton and 'William Rowley, first played January 4, 1623, was printed in 1653 and reissued with the title given in the text in 1668. The play was revived with great success at the Restoration, when it was witnessed by Pepys (February 23, 1661).—G. G.

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The performances commenced at three.* It was usual, therefore, to dine beforehand, and when the play was over to adjourn to the Mulberry Garden, to Vauxhall, or some other place of public entertainment—

Thither run, Some to undo, and some to be undone.

The prices of admission were, boxes four shillings, pit two-and-sixpence, middle gallery eighteenpence, upper gallery one shilling. The ladies in the pit wore vizards or masks. The middle gallery was long the favourite resort of Mr. and Mrs. Pepys.

The upper gallery, as at present, was attended by the poorest and the noisiest. Servants in livery were admitted as soon as the fifth act commenced.

With the orange-girls (who stood, as we have seen, in the pit, with their back to the stage) the beaux about town were accustomed to break their jests ;^ and that the language employed was not of the most delicate description, we may gather from the dialogue of Dorimant, in Etherege's comedy of Sir Fopling Flutter.

^ Plays began at one in Shakespeare's time, at three in Dryden's, at four in Congreve's. In 1696 the hour was four. [Cunningham follows Malone {Shakespeare hy Bos7vell), hut the more recent researches of Payne Collier {Engl. Dramat. Poetry, ed. 1879, iii. 180) and Robert W. Lowe ( Thomas Betierton, p. 15) show that the time varied with the season of the year. Three o'clock was the hour according to His-triomastix (1610) and Thomas Cranley's Amanda (1635), and half-past three the time named in the prologue to Dryden's Wild Gallant, 1663.]

2 Prologue to Lord Rochester's Valentinian; T. Shad-well's Works, i. 199.

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The mistress or superior of the girls was familiarly known as Orange Moll, and filled the same sort of office in the theatre that the mother of the maids occupied at court among the maids-of-honour. Both Sir William Penn and Pepys would occasionally have " a great deal of discourse" with Orange Moll; and Mrs. Knep, the actress, when in want of Pepys, sent Moll to the Clerk of the Acts with the welcome message. To higgle about the price of the fruit was thought beneath the character of a gentleman. " The next step," says the Young Gallanfs Academy, •' is to give a turn to the China orange wench, and give her her own rate for her oranges (for 'tis below a gentleman to stand haggling like a citizen's wife), and then to present the fairest to the next vizard mask.''^ Pepys, when challenged in the pit for the price of twelve oranges which the orange-woman said he owed her, but which he says was wholly untrue, was not content with denying the debt, " but for quiet bought four shillings'-worth of oranges from her at sixpence a-piece."^ This was a high price, but the Clerk of

1 The Young Gallant's Academy, or Directions how he should behave himself in all places and company. By Sam. Overcome [or rather Vincent], 1674. [A republication of the Guls Hornebook of Thomas Dekker, 1609, with alterations adapted to the time.]

* " Half-crown my play, sixpence my orange cost."

Prologue to Mrs. Behn's Young King, 1698. " Nor furiously laid orange-wench a-board For asking what in fruit and love you'd scored. '

Butler, A Panegyric on Sir John Denham. " When trading grows scant, they join ail their forces

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the Acts was true to the direction in the Galla7it^s Acade?)!)'.

together, and make up one grand show and admit the cut-purse and ballad-singer to trade under them, as orange-women do at a playhouse."

Butler, Character of a Jitgkr.

" Mr. Vain. —I can't imagine how I first came to be of this humour, unless 'twere hearing the orange-wenches talk of ladies and their gallants. So I began to think I had no way of being in the fashion, but bragging of mistresses."

Hon. James Howard, The English Monsieur, p. 4, 4to, 1674.

" Mrs. Crafty. —This life of mine can last no longer than my beauty ; and though 'tis pleasant now, 1 want nothing whilst I am Mr. Welbred's mistress,—yet, if his mind should change, I might e'en sell oranges for my living, and he not buy one of me to relieve me."

Hon. James Howard, The English Monsieur, p. 10.

" She outdoes a playhouse orange-woman for the politick management of a bawdy intrigue."

Tunbridge Wells, a Comedy, 4to, 1678.

" In former times, a play of humour, or with a good plot, could certainly please ; but now a poet must find out a third way, and adapt his scenes and story to the genius of the critic, if he'd have it pass ; he'll have nothing to do with your dull Spanish plot, for whilst he's rallying with the orange-v;ench, the business of the act gets quite out of his head, and then 'tis ' Damme, what stuff's this? ' he sees neither head nor tail to't."

D'Urfey, Preface to The Banditti, 4to, 1686.

"The noble peer may to the play repair, Court the pert damsel with her China-ware— Nay, marry her—if he please—no one will care." D'Urfey, Prologue to ^ Foots Preferment, 4to, 1688.

"The orange-miss that here cajoles the Duke May sell her rotten ware without rebuke."

D'Urfey, Prologue to Don Quixote, Part I, 410, 1694. 18

CHAPTER II.

Pepys introduces us to Nelly— Character of Pepys—Nelly at the Duke's Theatre—Who was Duncan?—Nell's parts as Lady Wealthy, Enanthe, and Florimel—Charles Hart-Nell's lodgings in Drury Lane—Description of Drury Lane in the reign of Charles IL—The Maypole in the Strand—Nell and Lord Buckhurst—Position in society of Actors and Actresses—Character of Lord Buckhurst— Nelly at Epsom.

Our earliest introduction to Nell Gwyn we owe to Pepys. This precise and lively diarist (who makes us live in his own circle of amusements by the truth and quaintness of his descriptions) was a constant playgoer. To see and to be seen, when the work of his office was over, were the leading objects of his thoughts. Few novelties escaped him, for he never allowed his love of money to interfere with the gratification of his wishes. His situation, as Clerk of the Acts, in the Navy Office, while the Duke of York was Lord High Admiral, gave him a taste for the entertainments which his master enjoyed. He loved to be found wherever the King and his brother were. He was fond of music, could

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prick down a few notes for himself, and when his portrait was painted by Hales, was drawn holding in his hand the music which he had composed for a favourite passage in the Siege of Rhodes} He was known to many of the players, and often asked them to dinner,—now and then not much to the satisfaction, as he tells us, of his wife. Mrs. Knep, of the King's House, and Joseph Harris of the Duke's (to both of whom I have already introduced the reader) were two of his especial favourites. The gossip and scandal of the green-room of Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields were in this way known to him, and what he failed to obtain behind

1 This hitherto unengraved portrait was bought by me at the sale, in 1848, of the pictures, etc., of the family of Pepys Cockerell. It was called by the auctioneer "portrait of a Musician," but is unquestionably the picture referred to by Pepys in the following passages of his Diary :—

" 1666, March 17. With my wife out to Hales's, where I am still infinitely pleased with my wife's picture. I paid him ^14 for the picture, zxiA £x ^s. for the frame. . . . This day I began to sit, and he will make me, I think, a very fine picture. He promises it shall be as good as my wife's, and I sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder to make the posture for him to work by.

" March 30. To Hales's, and there sat till almost quite dark upon working my gowne, which I hired to be drawn in ; an Indian gowne.

" April II. To Hales's, where there was nothing found to be done more to my picture, but the musique, which now pleases me mightily, it being painted true."

See also The AthencBum for 1848. Lord Braybrooke (Pepys, iii. p. 178) doubts the likeness, but admits that the portrait answers the description. [Pepys further informs us (April 13) that the landscape was "put out." The portrait was bought for the National Portrait Gallery in February 1B66 ; a good reproduction of it is given in Mr. Wheatley's edition of Pepys's Diarv,\

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the scenes he would learn from the orange-women at both houses.

Nell was in her sixteenth, and Mr. Pepys in his thirty-fourth year, when, on Monday the 3rd of April 1665, they would appear to have seen one another for the first time. They met at the Duke's Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields during the performance of Mustapha^ a tragedy, by the Earl of Orrery, in which Betterton played the part of Solyman, Harris that of Mustapha, and Mrs. or Miss Davis that of the Queen of Hungaria. Great care had been taken to produce this now long-forgotten tragedy with the utmost magnificence. All the parts were newly clothed, and new scenes had been painted expressly for it. Yet we are told by Pepys that "all the pleasure of the play" was in the circumstance that the King and my Lady Castlemaine were there, and that he sat next to "pretty witty Nell at the King's House " and to the younger Marshall, another actress at the same theatre—a circumstance, he adds, with his usual quaint honesty of remark, " which pleased me mightily." Yet the play was a good one in Pepys's eyes. Nine months later he calls it "a most excellent play"; and when he saw it again, after an interval of more than two years, he describes it as one he liked better the more he saw it:—" a most admirable poem, and bravely acted." * His after entries, therefore, more than confirm the truth of his earlier impressions. The real pleasure of the

1 Pepys, Sept. 4, 1667.

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play, however, was that he sat by the side of " pretty witty Nell," whose foot has been described as the least of any woman's in England,^ and by Rebecca Marshall, whose handsome hand he has carefully noted in another entry in his Diary. The small feet peeping occasionally from beneath a petticoat, and the handsome hands raised now and then to check a vagrant curl, must have held the Clerk of the Acts in a continual state of torture.

There was a novelty that night which had doubtless drawn Nell and old Stephen Marshall's younger daughter to the pit of Lincoln's Inn Fields. Mrs. Betterton was playing Roxolana in place of the elder Davenport, and Moll Davis had begun to attract the notice of some of the courtiers, and, as it was whispered, of the King himself The old Roxolana had become the mistress of the twentieth and last earl of the great race of Vere ; and Nell, while she reflected on what she may have thought to have been the good fortune of her fellow-actress, might have had her envy appeased could she have foreseen that she should give birth to a son (the mother an orange-girl, the father the King of England) destined to obtain a dukedom in her own lifetime, and afterwards to marry the heiress of the very earl who had taken the old Roxolana from a rival stage—first to deceive and afterwards to desert her.

Nell was indebted, there is reason to beheve, for her introduction to the stage, or at least to another

^ Oldys, in CuiU's Hisioiy of the Siagc, p. in.

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condition in life, to a person whose name is variously written as Duncan and as Dungan. Oldys, who calls him Duncan, had heard that he was a merchant, and that he had taken a fancy to her from her smart wit, fine shape, and the smallness of her feet. The information of Oldys is confirmed by the satire of Etherege, who adds, much to the credit of Nelly, that she remembered in after years the friend of her youth, and that to her interest it was he owed his appointment in the Guards. To sift and exhibit the equal mixture of truth and error in these accounts would not repay the reader for the trouble I should occasion him. I have sifted them myself, and see reason to believe that Oldys was wrong in calling him a merchant; while I suspect that the Duncan commemorated by Etherege, in his satire upon Nelly, was the Dongan described by De Grammont as a gentleman of merit who succeeded Duras, afterwards Earl of Feversham, in the post of Lieutenant in the Duke's Life Guards. That there was a lieutenant of this name in the Duke's Life Guards I have ascertained from official documents. He was a cadet of the house of Limerick, and his Christian name was Robert. If there is truth in De Grammont's account, he died in or before 1669. A Colonel Dungan was Governor of New York in the reign of James II.*

1 Secret Service Expenses of Charles II. and James II., p. 195. There is in one of Etherege's MS. satires a very coarse allusion to Dungan and Nelly. [The lines occur in Etherege's satire called Madam Nelly s Complaint, printed in Miscellaneous Works written by George, late Duke oj Buckingham, edits. 1704 and 1715.]

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Such, then, is all that can be ascertained, after full inquiry, of this Duncan or Dungan, by whom Nelly is said to have been lifted from her very humble condition in life. Such, indeed, is the whole of the information I have been able to obtain about " pretty witty Nell" from her birth to the winter of 1666, when we again hear of her through the indefatigable Pepys. How her life was passed during the fearful Plague season of 1665, or where she was during the Great Fire of London in the following year, it is now useless to conjecture. The transition from the orange-girl to the actress may easily be imagined without the intervention of any Mr. Dungan. The pert vivacity and ready wit she exhibited in later life must have received early encouragement and cultivation from the warmth of language the men of sort and quality employed in speaking to all classes of females. This very readiness was her recommendation to Killigrew, to say nothing of her beauty or the merry laugh, which is said in after life to have pervaded her face till her eyes were almost invisible.*