The story of Nell Gwyn (16 page)

This highly characteristic letter was found by Cole, and transmitted to Walpole, who has expressed the delight he felt at its perusal. Who Madam Jennings was I am not aware ; nor have I succeeded in discovering anything of moment about Lady Williams. Potvin was an upholsterer.^ The

1 Privy Purse Expenses of the Reigns of Charles II. and James II. (printed by the Camden Society), p. i86. " Tho. Otway"and "Jhon Poieteuin" are witnesses to a power of attorney of Nelly's, now in Mr. Robert Cole's possession. [This document—a power of attorney from Nell Gwyn to James Fraizer, of Westminster, to receive her pension of ;f 5000 per annum (dated June i, 1680)—was printed in 1868 by William Henry Hart, F.S.A., with the titleof A Memorial of Nell Gwynne, the actress, and Thomas Otway, the dramist. In his Farewel Rochester speaking of the spendthrifts of his day writes: "To the more tolerable Alcaid of Alcazzer, One flies from's Creditor, t'other from Frazier." Works, ed. 1709, p. 162.]

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Duchess of Norfolk was the daughter and sole heir of Henry Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, and Nelly would appear to have been on intimate terms with her. When, on account of Her Grace's illicit intimacy with Sir John Germain, her divorce from the Duke was before a court of law, Nelly's evidence, imperfectly as it has reached us, was very characteristic of her mode of reply even to an ordinary question. Germain had sought, it appears, to seduce her from the King, and Nell is said to have replied, " she was no such sportsman as to lay the dog where the deer should lie." Sir John Germain, afterwards married to the Duchess, was a Dutch adventurer, of mean extraction, grown rich by gambling. The father of Secretary Craggs was footman to the gallant Duchess.

When the Rye House Plot had given to Charles a distaste for Newmarket and Audley End, Charles determined on building a palace at Winchester, and Wren was required to design a structure worthy of the site and the monarch. The works were commenced in earnest, and Charles was often at Winchester watching the progress of the building, and enjoying the sports of the chase in the New Forest, or his favourite relaxation of fishing in the waters of the Itchin. Nelly accompanied him to Winchester, and on one occasion the pious and learned Ken, then a chaplain to the King, and a prebendary of Winchester, was required to surrender his prebendal house as a lodging for Nelly.'

1 Hawkins's Life of Ken. 137

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Ken properly remonstrated, and, if it be indeed true that she had taken possession of the assigned lodging, she speedily removed from it.^ Nor was the King displeased with the firmness displayed by this exemplary man. He knew that Ken was right ; appreciated his motives ; and one of his last acts was to make the very person by whom he was thus so properly admonished Bishop of Bath and Wells, the see of which he chose to be conscientiously deprived, as Bancroft from Canterbury? rather than forget the oath he had taken of fealty to a former sovereign.

Unable to obtain or retain the use of the canonical apartments of the pious Ken, Nelly found quarters in a small detached room of brick at the end of the large drawing-room in the Deanery, still from tradition called " Nell Gwyn," and afterwards at Avington, the seat of a Countess of Shrewsbury, notorious for the part she took in the duel in which her husband was slain by Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Avington lies about three miles to the north-east of Winchester, and before the death of the last Duke of Chandos Nelly's dressing-room was still shown.^ Another attraction of the same house was a fine characteristic portrait, by Lely, of the Countess of Shrewsbury as Minerva, recently sold at the sale at

1 The tradition at Winchester was, that Nell refused to move, and did not move, till part of the roof was taken off.— Bowles's Life of Ken, ii. 7.

2 Bowles's Life of Ken, ii. 56.

3 Forster's Stowe Catalogue, p. 179.

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Stowe, whither it had been removed from Aving-ton with the rest of the Chandos property.

Ken's refusal occurred, I see reason to think, during the last visit which Nelly was to make to Winchester. The following winter was spent by the Court at Whitehall, amid gaieties common to that festive season ; and what these gaieties were like we may learn from the picture of a Sunday preserved by Evelyn. " I can never forget," writes the high-minded author of Sylva, " the inexpressible luxuiy and profaneness, gaming, and all dissoluteness, and. as it were, a total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening), which this day se'nnight I was witness of; the King sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, Mazarine, etc., a French boy singing love-songs in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least ^^2000 in gold before them ; upon which two gentlemen who were with me made strange reflections. Six days after all was in the dust." ^ The fatal termination of this Sunday scene was even more sudden than Evelyn has described. The revels extended over Sunday night until the next morning. At eight of that same morning the King swooned away in his chair, and lay for nearly two hours in a state of apoplexy, all his physicians despairing of his recovery. Charles rallied for a time, regained possession of his intellects, and died, on the following

^ Evelyn, Feb. 4, 1684-5. 139

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Friday, sensible of his sins, and seeking forgiveness from his Maker. His end was that of a man, never repining that it was so sudden ; and his goodnature was exhibited on his death-bed in a thousand particulars. Charles sought pardon from his Queen, forgiveness from his brother, and the excuses of those who stood about his bed. What his last words were, is, I believe, unknown ; but his dying requests made to his brother and successor concluded with, " Let not poor Nelly starve " ; ^ a recommendation, says Fox, in his famous introductory chapter, that is much to his honour.

That Charles IL was poisoned was the behef of many at the time. It was the fashion in that, as in the preceding age, to attribute the sudden death of any great person to poison, and the rumour on this occasion should, we suppose, form no exception to the rule of vulgar delusions. Yet in Charles's case the suspicions are not without support from apparently rather weighty authorities. " I am obliged to observe," says Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, "that the most knowing and the most deserving of all his physicians did not only believe him poisoned, but thought himself so too, not long after, for having declared his opinion a little too boldly." ^ Bishop Patrick strengthens the supposition, from the testimony of Sir Thomas

1 Burnet, ed. 1823, ii. 460. Evelyn, Feb. 4, 1684-5. [Some graphic letters descriptive of Charles's illness and death are in the Hatton Correspondence, Camd. Soc, vol. ii., pp. 51-

54-1

■^ Buckingham's Works, 8vo, 1729, ii. 82.

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Millington, who sat with the King for three days, and never went to bed for three nights.* The Chesterfield, who lived among many who were likely to be well informed, and was himself the grandson of the Earl of Chesterfield who was with Charles at his death, states positively that the King was poisoned.^ The Duchess of Portsmouth, when in England, in 1699, is said to have told Lord Chancellor Cowper that Charles II. was poisoned at her house by one of her footmen in a dish of chocolate,^ and Fox had heard a somewhat similar report from the family of his mother, who was great-granddaughter to the Duchess.* The supposed parallel cases of the deaths of Henry, Prince of Wales, and King James I. are supported by no testimony so strong as that advanced in the case of Charles II.

Had the King lived, Nelly was to have had a peerage for herself, and the title chosen was that of Countess of Greenwich.^ This of course she

^ Bishop Patrick's Autobiography, p. loi. ' Letters to his Son.

• Dean Cowper in Spence's Anecdotes, ed. Singer, p. 367.

• Fox, p. 67.

• This I give on the authority of the curious passage in a MS. book by Van Bossen, kindly placed at my disposal by Mr. David Laing. The whole passage is as follows :—

" Charles the 2d. naturall sone of King Charles the 2d. borne of Hellenor or Nelguine, dawghter to Thomas Guine, a capitane of ane antient family in Wales, who showld bein advanced to be Countes of Greeniez, but hindered by the king's death, and she lived not long after his Matie. Item, he was advanced to the title of Duke Stablane and Earle of Berward. He is not married."— The Royall Cedar, by Frederick Van Bossen, Ms. folio, 1688, p. 129.

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was not now likely to obtain—if indeed she would have cared so to do. Her own end was near.

One of the last acts of the antiquarian life of that curious inquirer, Mr. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, was to note down some valuable memoranda for this story of Nell Gwyn. Among other things, Mr. Sharpe directed Mr. Laing's attention to the curious entry in the volume by Van Bossen, still in Mr. Laing's possession.

[So Rochester in The Royal Atigler: "Buckingham

shall be restor'd, Nelly a Countess, Lory be a Lord." Works, ed. 1709, p. 149.]

CHAPTER VIII.

Nelly in real mourning, and outlawed for debt—Death of Otway, tutor to her son—James II. pays her debts—The King's kindness occasions a groundless rumour that she has gone to mass—Her intimacy with Dr. Tenison, then Vicar of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and Dr. Lower, the celebrated physician—She sends for Tenison in her last illness—Her death and contrite end—Her will and last request of her son—Her funeral—Tenison preaches her funeral sermon—False account of the sermon cried by hawkers in the streets—The sermon used as an argument against Tenison's promotion to the See of Lincoln— Queen Mary's defence of him and of Nelly—Her son the Duke of St. Albans—Eleanor Gwyn and Harriet Mellon —Various portraits of Nelly—Further anecdotes—Conclusion.

It was no fictitious mourning, for the Cham or Tartary or a Prince of France, which Nelly and the Duchess of Portsmouth were both wearing in the spring of 1685. Each had occasion, though on very unequal grounds, to lament the monarch so suddenly removed from his gorgeous chambers at Whitehall to the cold damp vaults of Westminster Abbey. It was at this period, if not on other

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occasions, that Nelly must have called to mind Shirley's noble song', which old Bowman used to sing to King Charles :—

The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things ;

There is no armour against fate: Death lays his icy hands on kings.

Lely should have painted Nelly in her mourning ; but the delicate hand which drew with so much grace the Beauties of King Charles the Second's Court, and Nelly with her lamb among them, was lying torpid under the church in Covent Garden, and the painters who succeeded him, Wissing, Kneller, and Verelst, had little skill in transferring from life to canvas those essential graces of expression which Lely caught so inimitably in his La Belle Hamilton and his Madame Gwyn.

While her grief was still fresh, Nelly had occasion to remember the friend she had lost. The King's mistresses, as Nelly herself informs us, were accounted but ill paymasters, for the King himself was often at a loss for money, and the ladies were, we may safely suppose, generally in advance of the allowances assigned them. The "gold stuff" was indeed scarcer than ever with her in the spring of the year in which the King died, and we know what became of at least some of her plate only a year before. " The bill is very dear," she says, " to boil the plate ; but necessity hath no law." What was to be done ? shopkeepers were pressing with their bills, and the apprentices who would at once have released " Protestant Nelly" from

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their own books had no control over those of their masters ; so Nelly, if not actually arrested for debt in the spring of 1685, was certainly outlawed for the non-payment of certain bills, for which some of her tradespeople, since the death of the King, had become perseveringly clamorous.

Nelly's resources at this period were slender enough. In the King's lifetime, and after Prince Rupert's death, she had paid to Peg Hughes the actress and her daughter Ruperta as much as ;i^4520 "for the great pearl necklace" which she wears in so many of her portraits.^ This would now probably pass to the neck of another mistress (such is the lottery of life and jewels)—perhaps to that of Katherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester ; but Nelly would not care much about this : it went more to her heart to hear that during her own outlawry for debt her old friend Otway, the tutor of her son—the poet, whose writings she must have loved —had died of starvation, without a sympathising Nelly near at hand to relieve the wants in which she herself was now participating.^

It was Nelly's good fortune, however, never to be without a friend willing and able to assist her. The new King had not forgotten the dying request of his only brother, " Let not poor Nelly starve " : above all, he had not forgotten Nelly's conduct during that hard period of his life when the Bill of Exclusion was pushed in both Houses with a warmth

^ Warburton's Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers, iii. 558. 3 Otway died April 14, 1685. He dedicated his Venice Preserved to the Duchess of Portsmouth.

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and animosity which argued indifferently for his obtaining the crown to which he was entitled. James, though in trouble himself—Monmouth had landed at Lyme, and the battle of Sedgemoor was not yet fought—found time in the midst of his anxieties to attend to his brother's last request; the secret service expenses of the King (only recently brought to light) exhibiting a payment to Richard Graham, Esq., of ^729 is. yi. " to be by him paid over to the several tradesmen, creditors of Mrs. Ellen Gwyn, in satisfaction of their debts for which the said Ellen stood outlawed." *

Nor was this the only way in which James exhibited his regard for Nelly, and his remembrance of a brother to whom he was sincerely attached. In the same year in which he relieved Nelly from her outlawry, two additional payments of ;^5oo each were made to her by way of royal bounty ; and two years afterwards the same book of accounts records a payment to Sir Stephen Fox of £,ii^(i OS. 2d. for so much by him paid to Sir Robert Clayton, the alderman and great city merchant, in full of £yjT\ 2s. 6d. for redeeming the mortgages to Sir John Musters, of Bestwood Park, for settling the same for life upon Mrs. Ellen Gwyn, " and after her death upon the Duke of St. Albans, and his issue male, with the reversion in the crown." ^ Bestwood Park is in the county of Nottingham, on the borders of merry Sherwood, and was long an