The story of Nell Gwyn (5 page)

THE STORY OF NELL GWYN

look-out afforded a peep into a part of Wych Street, and while standing at the doorway you could see the far-famed Maypole in the Strand, at the bottom of the alley to which it had lent its name.

This Maypole, long a conspicuous ornament to the west-end of London, rose to a great height above the surrounding houses, and was surmounted by a crown and vane, with the royal arms richly gilded. It had been set up again immediately after the Restoration. Great ceremonies attended its erection : twelve picked seamen superintending the tackle, and ancient people clapping their hands, and exclaiming, "Golden days begin to appear ! " Nelly must have remembered the erection of the Maypole at the bottom of the lane in which she was born ; but there is little save some gable-ends and old timber-fronts near her " lodgings door " to assist in carrying the mind back to the days of the Maypole and the merry monarch whose recall it was designed to commemorate.

Among the many little domestic incidents perpetuated by Pepys, there are few to which I would sooner have been a witness than the picture he has left us of Nelly standing at her door watching the milkmaids on May-day. The Clerk of the Acts on his way from Seething Lane in the City met, he tells us, "many milkmaids with garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddle before them," and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings door in Drury Lane in her smock sleeves and bodice looking upon one. " She seemed," he adds, " a mighty

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pretty creature.'' This was in 1667, while her recent triumphs on the stage were still fresh at Court, and the obscurity of her birth was a common topie of talk and banter among the less fortunate inhabitants of the lane she lived in. The scene so lightly sketched by Pepys might furnish no unfitting subject for the pencil of Leslie or Maclise—a subject, indeed, which would shine in their hands. That absence of all false pride, that innate love of unaffected nature, and that fondness for the simple sports of the people which the incident exhibits, are characteristics of Nelly from the first moment to the last—following her naturally, and sitting alike easily and gracefully upon her, whether at her humble lodgings in Drury Lane, at her handsome house in Pall Mall, or even under the gorgeous cornices of Whitehall.

But I have no intention of finding a model heroine in a coal-yard, or any wish either to palliate or condemn too severely the frailties of the woman whose story I have attempted to relate. It was, therefore, within a very few months of the May-day scene I have just described, that whispers asserted, and the news was soon published in every coffee-house in London, how little Miss Davis of the Duke's House had become the mistress of the King, and Nell Gwyn at the other theatre the mistress of Lord Buckhurst. Whoever is at all conversant with the manners and customs of London life in the reign of Charles II. will confirm me in the statement that two such announcements, even at the same time, would cause but

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little surprise, or indeed any other feeling than that of envy at their good luck. With the single exception of Mrs. Betterton, there was not, I believe, an actress at either theatre who had not been, or was not then the mistress of some person about the Court. Actors were looked upon as little better than shopmen or servants. When the Honourable Edward Howard was struck by Lacy of the King's House, a very general feeling prevailed that Howard should have run his sword thi-ough the menial body of the actor. Nor was this feeling altogether extinguished till the period of the Kembles. It was entirely owing to the exertions of the great Lord Mansfield, that Arthur Murphy, less than a century ago, was allowed to enter his name on the books of Lincohvs Inn. He had been previously refused by the Benchers of the Middle Temple, for no other reason than that he had been an actor.* Nay, George Selwyn, it is well known, excluded Richard Brinsley Sheridan from Brooks's on three occasions because his father had been upon the stage.

Nor did actresses fare better than actors. If anything, indeed, they were still worse treated. They were looked upon as women of the worst character, possessed of no inclination or inducement to virtue. Few, indeed, were found to share the sentiment expressed by one of Shad well's manliest characters, " 1 love the stage too well to keep

1 Dr. Johnson is thoii£;ht to have objected to Garrick becoming a member of " the Club " for a like reason. Bos-well's Johnson, ed. 1848, p. 164.—G. G.

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any of their women, to make 'em proud and insolent, and despise that calling to take up a worse." The frailty of " playhouse flesh and blood " ^ afforded a common topic for the poet in his prologue or his epilogue, and other writers than Lee might be found who complain of the practice of "keeping "as a grievance to the stage.^ Davenant, foreseeing their fate from an absence of any control, boarded his four principal actresses in his own house ; but, with one exception (that of Mrs. Betterton before referred to), the precaution was altogether without effect. The King, Prince Rupert, the Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Oxford, Lord Buckhurst, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir Philip Howard, his brother. Sir Robert Howard, were all successful in the arts of seduction or inducement. So bad indeed was the moral discipline of the times, that even Mrs. Knep, loose as were her notions of virtue, could see the necessity of parting with a pretty servant-girl, as the tiring-room was no place for the preservation of her innocence.^ The virtuous life of Mrs. Bracegirdle, and her spirited rebuke to the Earl of Burlington, stand out in noble relief from the conduct of her fellow-actresses. The Earl had sent her a letter and a present of a handsome set of china. The charming actress retained the letter and informed the servant of the mistake. The letter, she said, was for her, but the china was for Lady Burlington. When the Earl returned home

* Dryden's Prologue to Marriage-d.-la-Mode.

^ Epilogue to 7he Rival Queens.

2 Pepys, April 7, i663.

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he found his Countess all happiness at the unexpected present from her husband.^

Times, however, changed after Nelly had gone, and the Stuarts had ceased to reign, for ennobled actresses are now common enough in the English peerage. Other changes too took place. Mrs. Barry walked home in her clogs, and Mrs. Brace-girdle in her pattens ; but Mrs. Oldfield went away in her chair,- and Lavinia Fenton (the original Polly Peachum) rolled westward in her coroneted carriage as Duchess of Bolton.^

It says little for the morality of London in the reign of Charles II., but something for the taste of the humble orange-girl, that the lover who had attracted her, and with whom she was now living in the lovely neighbourhood of Epsom, was long looked up to as the best bred man of his age:

None ever had so strange an art

His passion to convey Into a list'ning virgin's heart,

And steal her soul away.*

But Buckhurst had other qualities to recommend him than his youth (he was thirty at this time), his rank, his good heart, and his good breeding. He had already distinguished himself by his personal

1 Walpole to Mann {Mann Letters), iii. 254.

' Walpole, May 26, 1742.

3 Mr. Murray, of Albemarle Street, possesses Hogarth's interesting picture of the first representation of the Beggar's Opera, in its original frame. Here his Grace of Bolton is gazing upon Polly from one stage-box—while in the other, Bolingbroke is seated by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

* Song by Sir C. S. [Sir Carr Scrope or Sir Charles Sedley] in Etherege's hlaii 0/ Mode; or. Sir Fopling Flutter.

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intrepidity in the war against the Dutch ; had written the best song of its kind in the English language, and some of the severest and most refined satires we ix)ssess ; was the friend of all the poets of eminence in his time, as he was afterwards the most munificent patron of men of genius that this country has yet seen. The most eminent masters in their several lines asked and abided by his judgment, and afterwards dedicated their works to him in grateful acknowledgment of his taste and favours. Butler owed to him that the Court 'tasted" his Hudibms; Wycherley that the town "liked" his Plain Dealer; and the Duke of Buckingham deferred to publish his Rehearsal till he was sure, as he expressed it, that my Lord Buckhurst would not " reheai'se " upon him again. Nor was this all. His table was one of the last that gave us an example of the old housekeeping of an English nobleman. A freedom reigned about it which made every one of the guests think himself at home, and an abundance which showed that the master's hospitality extended to many more than those who had the honour to sit at table with himself.* Nor has he been less happy after death. Pope wrote his epitaph and Prior his panegyric— while Walpole and Macaulay (two men with so little apparently in common) have drawn his character with a warmth of approbation rather to have been expected from those who had shared his bounty or enjoyed his friendship, than from the

1 Prior's Dedication of his Poems to Lord Buckhurst's son, Lionel, first Duke of Dorset.

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colder judgments of historians looking back calmly upon personages who had long ceased to influence or affect society.

With such a man, and with Sedley's resistless wit to add fresh vigour to the conversation, it is easy to understand what Pepys had heard, that Lord Buckhurst and Nelly kept " merry house " at Epsom,—

All hearts fall a-le;)ping wherever she comes,

And beat day and night hke my Lord Craven's drums, i

What this Epsom life was like shall be the subject of another chapter.

1 Song by Lord Buckhurst [on "bonny black Bess," who, according to Horace Walpole, was Mrs. Barnes. See Mr. A. H. Bullen's Musa Prctei-va, p. 35].

Epsom in the reign of Charles II.—England in 1667—Nelly resumes her Ene^agement at the King's Theatre—Inferior in Tragedy to Comedy—Plays Mirida in All Mistaken — Miss l3avis of the Duke's Theatre—Her song, "My Lodging it is on the Cold Ground," parodied by Nell— Influence of the Duke of Buckingham in controlling the predilections of the King^Charles II. at the Duke's Theatre—Nelly has leading parts in three of Dryden's new Plays—Biickhurst is made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, promised a peerage, and sent on a sleeveless errand into France—Nell becomes the Mistress of the King—Plays Almaliide in The Conquest of Granada — The King more than ever enamoured—Parallel case of " Perdita" Robinson and George IV.

Nelly was now at Epsom, then and long after the fashionable resort of the richer citizens of London. " The foolish world is never to be mended," is the remark of "a gentleman of wit and sense" in Shadwell's comedy of The Virtuoso. " Your glass coach," he says, "will to Hyde Park for air; the suburb fools trudge to Lamb's Conduit or Tottenham ; your sprucer sort of citizens gallop to Epsom; your mechanic gross fellows, shewing much con-

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jugal affection, strut before their wives, each with a child in his arms, to Ishngton or Hogsden." The same agreeable writer, whose plays supply truer and happier illustrations of the manners and customs of the time than any other contemporary dramatist, has left us a comedy called Epso)n Wells^ in which, notwithstanding the sneer of Dryden about his "hungry Epsom-prose," he has contrived to interest us by peopling the place with the usual frequenters out of term-time ; men of wit and pleasure ; young ladies of wit, beauty, and fortune ; with a parson and a country justice ; with two cheating, sharking, cowardly bullies; with two rich citizens of London and their wives, one a comfit-maker, the other a haberdasher, and both cuckolds (" Epsom water-drinking " with other ladies of pleasure) ; with hectors from Covent Garden, a constable, a Dogberry-like watch, and two country fiddlers—in short, by picturing "the freedom of Epsom " as it existed in an age of easy virtue.

The Derby and the Oaks, the races which have rendered Epsom so famous, and our not less celebrated Tattenham Corner, were then unknown ; but the King's Head and the New Inn, Clay Hill and Mawse's Garden, were favourite names, full of attractions to London apprentices, sighing to see their indentures at an end, and Epsom no longer excluded from their places of resort. The waters were considered efficacious, and the citizens east of Temple Bar were supposed to receive as much benefit from their use, as the courtiers west of the

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Bar were presumed to receive from the waters of Tunbridge Wells. The alderman or his deputy, on their way to this somewhat inaccessible suburb of the reign of Charles II., were met at Tooting by lodging-house-keepers, tradesmen, and quack-doctors, with so many clamorous importunities for patronage, that the very expressive English word touting derives its origin from the village where this plying for trade was carried to so importune an extent.

There is now at Epsom, or was to be seen there till very lately, a small inn with the sign of the King's Head, lying somewhat out of the present town, on the way to the wells. It was at "the next house " to this inn, or to an inn with the same name, that Nelly and Lord Buckhurst put up, keeping " merry house," with Sedley to assist them in laughing at the " Bow-bell suckers" who resorted to the Epsom waters.^ Nelly would contribute her share to the merriment of the scene around them. The citizens of London were hated by the players. They had successfully opposed them in all their early attempts in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. to erect a theatre within the jurisdiction of the City ; and at no time had they ever encouraged the drama by their presence. The poets and actors lived by the King and Court, while they repaid their opponents and gratified the courtiers by holding up every citizen as a cuckold and a fool. So long was this feeling perpetuated on the stage (it still lives in