Born in a Covent Garden brothel and unable to write her own name, Nell Gwyn became the only mistress of King Charles II the English public ever loved and outlived him by barely two years, dying penniless at 37.On the morning of February 2, 1650, in a lodging near Drury Lane, Helena Gwyn gave birth to her second daughter. There was no midwife’s record, no parish register entry anyone can now produce, no way of even confirming the city London, Oxford, and Hereford would all later claim her. What survives instead is a horoscope, cast years afterward at the girl’s own request, giving the date and hour of her birth but nothing else. She would grow up to be the most beloved mistress a King of England ever kept. She would also grow up unable to write her own name
A Bawdy House Off Coal Yard Alley Raises an Illiterate Child
Nell’s father, reportedly a Royalist army captain named Thomas Gwyn, died in debtor’s prison in Oxford a casualty, like so many Royalist families, of the Civil War that had ended the family’s fortune before it ended his life. Helena took her two daughters, Rose and Nell, back to London and settled near Coal Yard Alley in Covent Garden, where she ran a bawdy house and drank heavily. Neither girl was ever taught to read or write. Both poured drinks for their mother’s customers, and it is likely that both, at points, were sold to them.
Nell sold oysters and cinders in the streets before she sold anything else. By the time Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660 and reopened the theatres Oliver Cromwell had shuttered, she was already a fixture of Covent Garden’s rougher trades a child of the gutter with no education and no prospects, in a city that had just decided, for the first time, that women were allowed to act women’s parts on an English stage.
Killigrew Notices the Orange-Girl With the Wicked Tongue
In 1662, a merchant named John Duncan took Nell as his mistress and installed her at the Cock and Pie tavern. She tired of him quickly, but not before he secured her a job selling oranges to the crowd at Thomas Killigrew’s new Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. For roughly a year she worked the aisles, watching the actors, mimicking them, making the other orange-girls laugh.Killigrew noticed. He introduced her to two of his company’s actors, Charles Hart and John Lacy, who began training her for the stage. An affair with Hart followed, closely watched by London gossip. By 1665 some accounts say as early as November 1664 Nell was performing, and within months she was a name Londoners recognized.
She had red hair and hazel eyes in a company of dark-eyed actresses, dainty feet she was proud to show off, and a gift for comedy that the diarist Samuel Pepys returned to again and again in his diary, calling her “pretty, witty Nell.” She had no patience for tragedy. She was, by every surviving account, born to play comic parts, and she knew it.The plague closed the theatres in June 1665, scattering the company to Oxford with the King’s court. What Nell did during the eighteen months that followed is not recorded. The Great Fire tore through London the following September; the theatre reopened that October, and Nell went back to work.
A King Notices an Orange-Girl Turned Actress
In March 1667, Charles II watched Nell make her debut in Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen. The Duke of Buckingham, calculating as ever, saw an opportunity: dangle the delightful Nell in front of the King to loosen the grip of his dominant mistress, Barbara Castlemaine, Duchess of Cleveland. Buckingham appointed himself her manager. The King asked for her. Nell reportedly demanded £500 for the privilege of becoming his mistress. Charles refused to pay it.
She became his mistress anyway though not immediately, and not entirely on his terms. She stayed on stage for three more years, choosing friendship before intimacy, and Charles let her. By 1669 she had settled into the role of his “country mistress,” teaching the King of England how to fish and joining him at Newmarket for the horse races, a ritual the two of them kept up for the next fourteen years. Christopher Wren built Charles a grand house there and Nell a modest one beside it.
Her first son, Charles, was born May 8, 1670. From Castlemaine’s fall until the arrival of Louise de Kéroualle later that same year, Nell held the King’s affections largely alone a window that closed almost as soon as it opened. Kéroualle, formerly in the household of Charles’s sister Minette, came to England after the Secret Treaty of Dover and the sister’s sudden death. She was aristocratic, easily irritated, and Nell’s opposite in every register. Nell took open delight in humiliating her.
Even motherhood bought Nell little. Castlemaine received titles and fortunes from the King; Nell, for years, received neither. She kept a small rented house in Pall Mall regardless, close enough to Whitehall to remain visible, and returned to the stage four months after giving birth closing her performances, as she always had, with a recited epilogue and a jig. She retired from acting in 1671, at 21, having never once played the tragic heroine the era expected of a rising actress.
A Silver Bed Becomes the Talk of Whitehall
On Christmas Day 1671, Nell gave birth to a second son, James, named for the King’s brother. Around this time she moved into a house at 79 Pall Mall leasehold at first, though she later persuaded Charles to grant it to her outright. It backed onto St James’s Park, close enough to Whitehall that the King could see it in the distance. She filled it with music, cards, and supper parties for guests she actually liked, having no interest in the political maneuvering that occupied most of the court. Her bed, cast in silver and carved with figures representing herself and the King, became one of the more talked-about objects in Restoration London. Crowds left flowers at her door.
Her coach was recognized on sight.None of it came with a title. In the summer of 1673, Charles made Louise de Kéroualle Duchess of Portsmouth. Nell had nothing to match it, and neither did her sons. By December 1675 a new rival, Hortense Mancini, had arrived and eclipsed Kéroualle in turn driving her from the King’s immediate favor without ever restoring Nell’s position above her.It was not until December 1676 that Charles gave Nell’s eldest son a title of his own: Baron Headington and Earl of Burford, surnamed Beauclerk. Nell herself would wait far longer, and would die still waiting.
A King’s Slow Decline Becomes Nell’s Own
The last decade of Nell’s life reads as a ledger of small losses accumulating toward a large one. In January 1678, her Pall Mall house was burgled and much of her silver taken. That June she sent James to Paris for his education. The following year, her mother drowned in a brook near Chelsea, reportedly overcome by brandy the same drink that had defined the household Nell grew up in. Charles suffered his first attack of ague around the same time, an early sign of the decline that would eventually kill him. Nell fell from a horse at Newmarket that spring, and by 30, London’s satirists had already begun writing about the loss of her looks.
In May 1680, Nell fell seriously ill reportedly with syphilis or gonorrhea in the same stretch that Charles suffered another attack of ague. About a month later, word reached her that James had died in Paris; he was eight years old. Charles gave her Burford House near Windsor not long after, and from 1681 until his death Nell lived quietly in the country, following the court’s movements from a comfortable distance rather than a central place in it.The King’s health kept failing. Mercury, the standard treatment for the venereal disease slowly killing him, did nothing to reverse it. In January 1684 he finally made Nell’s surviving son Duke of St Albans. He is said to have intended to make Nell herself Countess of Greenwich. He never signed the paperwork.
Charles II died on February 6, 1685, at 54. Nell was, by every account, at a complete loss emotionally and financially both. What saved her was a single sentence, reportedly the King’s dying instruction to his brother and successor: “Let not poor Nelly starve.” James II honored it, granting her enough income to clear most of her debts.She did not have long to enjoy the relief. About a year later she suffered two strokes that left her paralyzed on one side.
She died on November 14, 1687, at 37 from complications of the same venereal disease that had killed the man who had loved her for seventeen years. Her funeral drew a packed crowd to St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 17. Most of her estate went to her surviving son. But her will held one more detail worth keeping: £100 for the poor of St Martin’s and Westminster, and £50 set aside every Christmas, for the rest of time her money would allow it, to release debtors from prison.It was the same prison, in another city, that had once taken her father and never given him back.
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