The story of Nell Gwyn (7 page)

Mirida. —

Lie still, my babe, lie still and sleep, It grieves me sore to see thee weep.

1 Rosciif! Anglicanits, ed. 1708, p. 24. [Downes is wrong in .statin;^ that she enacted the part of a " shepherdess mad for love," as a comparison with the printed text of the play will prove.]

so

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Wert thou but leaner I were glad ; Thy fatness makes thy dear love sad.

What a lump of love I have in my arms !

My lodging is on the cold boards,

And wonderful hard is my fare, But that which troubles me most is

The fatness of my dear. Yet still I cry, Oh melt, love.

And I pry thee now melt apace, For thou art the man I should long for

If 'twere not for thy grease.

Pinguiiier. —

Then prythee don't harden thy heart still,

And be deaf to my pitiful moan, Since I do endure the smart still.

And for my fat do groan. Then prythee now turn, my dear love,

And I prythee now turn to nie, For, alas ! I am too fat still

To roll so far to thee.

The nearer the fat man rolls towards her, the further she rolls away from him, till she at length rises and laughs her hearty Mrs. Jordan-like mirth-provoking laugh, first at the man and then towards the audience, seizes a couple of swords from a cutler passing by, disarms her fat lover, and makes him the ridicule of the whole house. It is easy to see that this would not take now, even with another Nelly to represent it; but every age has its fashion and its humour, and that of Charles II. had fashions and humours of its own, quite as diverting as any of the representations and incidents which still prove attractive to a city or a west-end audience

"Little Miss Davis" danced and sang divinely, but was not particularly beautiful, though she had fine eyes and a neat figure, both of which are

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preserved in her portrait at Cashiobury, by Sir Peter Lely.' The popular belief still lingering among the cottages surrounding the old Jacobean mansion of the Howards at Charlton in Wiltshire, that she was the daughter of a blacksmith, and was at one time a milkmaid, can only in part be true. Pepys was informed by Mrs. Pierce, wife of James Pierce, surgeon to the Duke of York, and surgeon of the regiment commanded by the Duke, that she was an illegitimate child of Colonel Howard, son of the Earl of Berkshire, and brother of James Howard, author of the play in which, as we have seen, she was held up to ridicule through the inimitable acting of Nell Gwyn. The King's affection for her was shown in a marked and open manner. The ring of rushes referred to in the song was exchanged for a ring of the value of ^700, and her lodging about Ludgate or Lincoln's Inn (the usual resorts of the players at the Duke's Theatre) for a house in Suffolk Street, Haymarket, furnished by the King expressly for her use. The Queen, before she was worn into complete indifference by the uncontrolled vices of her husband, resented them at times with the spirit of a woman. When Miss Davis was dancing one of her favourite "jigs" in a play at Court, the Queen rose and " would not stay to see it." Nor was the imperious Countess of Castle-

1 This isahalf-Iength.seated,—the same portrait, I suspect, which Mrs. Beale saw in Bap. May's lodgings at Whitehall. The curious full-length portrait of her in after-life by Kneller, and now at Audley End, barely supplies a single feature that is attractive.

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maine less incensed than the Queen herself at the unwelcome intrusion of little Miss Davis within the innermost chambers and withdrawing-rooms of Whitehall. Her revenge, however, was peculiarly her own—she ran into open infidelities ; and, as the King had set her aside for an actress at his brother's house, so, to be " even " with him (the expression is in Pepys), she extended her favours to Charles Hart, the handsome and celebrated actor, at his own house.

The Duke of Buckingham (the wit, and the second and last Duke of the Villiers family) is thought to have been the principal agent at this time in directing and confirming the predilections of the King. The Duke and Lady Castlemaine had newly quarrelled, fiercely and almost openly, and both were devising means of revenge characteristic of their natures. By the influence of the Countess the Duke was removed from his seat at the Council, and the Duke in return " studied to take the King from her by new amours," and thinking, truly enough, that a "gaiety of humour" would take with his Majesty more than beauty without humour, he encouraged his passion for little Miss Davis by all the arts and insinuations he was master of. The King, too, was readier than usual to adopt any new excess of enjoyment which Buckingham could offer him. La Belle Stewart, the only woman for whom he would seem to have entertained any sincere affection, had left his Court in secret a few months before, and worse still, had given herself in marriage to the Duke of Richmond,

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without his approbation, and even without his knowledge. Castlemaine was now past her zenith, though she retained much beauty to the last, and found admirers in the great Duke of Marlborough, when young, and in Beau Fielding, long the handsomest man about town. Yet Charles was not really unkind to her at any time. The song which he caused Will Legge to sing to her—

Poor Alinda's growing old,— Those charms are now no more,—^

must have caused her some temporary uneasiness and a disdainful curl of her handsome and imperious lip ; but she knew her influence, and managed to retain it almost unimpaired to the very last, in spite of many excesses, which Buckingham seldom failed to discover and make known to the King.

Of the King, the Countess, and pretty Miss Davis, at this period, Pepys aftords us a sketch in little—but to the point:—

"21 Dec. 1668. To the Duko's playhouse, and saw Macbeth. The King and court there; and we sat just under them and mv Lady Castlemaine, and close to the woman that comes into the pit, a kind of a loose gossip, that pretends to be like her, and is so, something. And my wife, by my troth, appeared, I think, as pretty as any of them ; I never thought so much before ; and so did Talbot and_W. Hewer, as they said, I heard, to one another. The King and Duke of York minded me, and smiled upon me, at the handsome woman near me; but it vexed me to see Moll Davis, in the box over the King's and my Lady Castlemaine's head, look down upon the King, and he up to her; and so did my Lndy Castlemaine once, to see who it was ; but when she saw her', she loolced like fire, which troubled me."

1 I,ord Dartmouth's note in Burnet, ed. 1823, i. 458. Where are these verses to be found?

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To complete the picture which Pepys has left us, we have only to turn to The True Widoiu of Shad-well, where, in the fourth act, the scene is laid in " the Playhouse," and stage directions of this character occur: "Enter women masked"; "Several young coxcombs fool with the orange-women " ; " He sits down and lolls in the orange-wench's lap" ; " Raps people on the backs and twirls their hats, and then looks demurely, as if he did not do it" ;—such were daily occurrences at both theatres in the reign of Charles II.

Such were our pleasures in tlie days of yoje, Wlien amorous Charles Britannia's sceptre bore ; The mighty scene of joy the Park was made, And Love in couples peopled every shade. But since at Court the moral taste is lost, What mighty sums have velvet couches cost! ^

We are now less barefaced in our immoralities, but are we really better? Was Whitehall ia the reign of Charles 11, worse than St. James's Palace in the reign of George II., or Carlton House in the regency of George IV.? Were Mrs. Robinson, Mary Anne Clarke, or Dora Jordan better women then Eleanor Gwyn or Mary Davis ? Will future historians prefer the old Duke of Queensberry and the late .Alarquis of Hertford to the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Rochester?

A new play of this period, in which Nelly performed the heroine, is the Black Prince^ written by the Earl of Orrery, and acted for the first time at the King's House, on the 19th of October 1667.

1 Gay to Pulteney. 53

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Nelly's part was Alizia or Alice Piers, the mistress of Edward III. ; and the following lines must have often in after-life occurred to recollection, not from their poetry, which is little enough, but from their particular applicability to her own story :

You know, dear friend, when to this court I came, My eyes did all our bravest youths inflame; And in that happy state I lived awhile, When Fortune did betray me with a smile ; Or rather Love against my peace did fight; And to revenge his power, which I did slight, Made Edward our victorious monarch be One of those many who did sigh for me. All other flame but his I did deride ; They rather made my trouble than my pride: But this, when told me, made me quickly know. Love is a god to which all hearts must bow.

The King was present at the first performance, when his own heart was acknowledging and his own eyes betraying the sense he entertained of the beauty and wit of the charming actress who played Alizia on the stage, and who was hereafter to move in the same sphere in which the original had moved —with greater honesty and much more affection.

While little Miss Davis was living in handsome lodgings in Suffolk Street, and baring her hand in public in the face of the Countess of Castlemaine, to show the 700/. ring which the King had given her, a report arose that "the King had sent for Nelly." 1 Nor was it long before this gossip of the town was followed by other rumours about her, not likely, it was thought, to be true, from her constant appearance on the stage, speaking prologues in

1 Pepys, January ii, 1667-8. S6

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fantastic hats and Amazonian habits,' playing as she did, too, at this time, Valeria in Dryden's last new tragedy of Tyrannick Love, or the Royal Martyr, and Donna Jacintha in Dryden's latest comedy, called An Evening's Love, or the Mock Astrologer. Other rumours, relating to Lord Buck-hurst, and since found to be true, were current at the same time,—that he had been made a groom of the King's bed-chamber, with a pension of a thousand pounds a year, commencing from Michaelmas, 1668; that he had received the promise of a peerage at his grandfather's death; and that he had been sent by the King on a complimentary visit to a foreign power, or, as Dryden is said to have called it, on a " sleeveless errand "- into France. In the meantime gossips in both the theatres were utterly at a loss to reconcile the stories repeated by the orange-women that Nelly was often at Whitehall with her constant attention to her theatrical engagements, and the increasing skill she exhibited in the acquirements of her art. Nor was it till the winter of 1669, or rather the spring of 1670, that the fact of the postponement of a new tragedy by

1 Before the 1669 edition Catiline is a prologue "to be merrily spoke by Mrs. Nell in an Amazonian habit." Pepys and Evelyn both saw Ca////>;« acted on the 19th of Dec. 1668. [Nell Gvvyn acted Jacintha in 1668, and Valeria in the wmter of 1668-9. The epilogue to Tyrannick Love, "spoken by Mrs. Ellen when she was to be carried off dead by the bearers," was apparently written for the express purpose of displaying the actress's comic powers after she had performed but indifferently in a part unsuitable to her.]

^ Note by Boyer in his translation of De Grammont, Svo, 1714, p. 343.

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Dryden, on account of Nelly's being away, confirmed some of the previous rumours ; and it was known even east of Temple Bar, and among- the Puritans in the Blackfriars, that Nelly had become the mistress of the King.

When this important change in her condition took place—a change that removed her from many temptations, and led to the exhibition of traits of character and good feeling which more than account for the fascination connected with her name—she was studying the part of Almahide in Dryden'snew tragedy, The Conquest of Granada. Before, however, the play could be produced, Nelly was near giving birth to the future Duke of St. Albans, and therefore unable to appear, so that Dryden was obliged to postpone the production of his piece till another season. The poet alludes to this postponement in his epilogue :

Think him not duller for the year's delay ;

He was prepared, the women were away ;

And men without their parts can hardly play.

If they through sickness seldom did appear,

Pity the virgins of each theatre ;

For at both houses 'twas a sickly year!

And pity us, your servants, to whose cost

In one such sickness nine whole months were lost.

The allusion is to Miss Davis at the Duke's, and to Nelly at the King's ; but the poet's meaning has escaped his editors.

The Conquest of Granada was first performed in the autumn of 1670,—Hart playing Almanzor to Nelly's Almahide. With what manliness and grace

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of elocution must Hart have delivered the well-known lines,—

I am as free as Nature first made mnn, Ere the base law of servitude began, Wlien wild in woods the noble savage ran.

The attraction, however, of the play rested mainly upon Nelly, who spoke the prologue "in a broad-brimmed hat and waist-belt," and apologised in the following manner for her appearance, to the renewed delight of the whole audience :

This jest was first of th' other House's makinsf, And, five times tried, has never failed of taking ; For 'twere a shame a poet should be kill'd Under the shelter of so broad a shield. This is that hat whose very sight did win ye To laugh and clap as though the devil were in ye. As then for Nokes, so now I hope you'll be So dull to laugh once more for love of me.

The jest "of the other house's making" is said to have occurred in May 1670, while the Court was at Dover to receive the King's sister, the beautiful Duchess of Orleans. The reception of her royal highness was attended with much pomp and gaiety—the Duke's company of actors playing Shadwell's SuUe?t Lovers, and Caryl's Sh- Solotnon, or the Cajitiotis Coxcomb, before the Duchess and her suite. One of the characters in Caryl's comedy is that of Sir Arthur Addle, a bawling fop, played by Nokes with a reality of action and manner then unsurpassed upon the stage. The dress of the French attending the Duchess, and present at the performance of the plays, included an excessively short laced scarlet or blue coat, with a broad waist-