A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (50 page)

Charles himself said that he followed the Roos case simply because, as he put it, the revelations were as good as a play. It was partly true. And it was also true that in his current unsettled mood, plays offered the best escape from the strains of his life. And players, too, he thought, could offer such release, a freedom from any real commitment.

CHARLES’S ACTRESS MISTRESSES
linked him to the world of the theatre and the Wits, masters of street and court performance. Buckingham had dabbled with the stage since his adaptation of Fletcher’s
The Chances
in 1661, and
Sir Politic Would-Be
two years later. Among the playwrights, Etherege was slowly drawing nearer to the court, being made a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber in 1668. In February that year his new play,
She Would if She Could
, drew such a crowd at the Duke of York’s Theatre that scores of people were turned away in the rain. Buckingham, Buckhurst and Sedley sat with him in the crowded pit, and although to Etherege’s fury the play was not a success (he blamed the actors), it set a new style in the comedy of manners that would soon sweep the stage. Three months later, the same quartet took their seats to watch Sedley’s first comedy,
The Mulberry Garden
, so keenly awaited that the doors opened two hours early. A silly play, Pepys thought, noting that the king did not laugh from beginning to end.

He did not laugh either at the off-stage performances of the libertine crew – at Buckingham’s duel, at Rochester having his clothes stolen in a brothel, at the arrest of Sedley and Buckhurst for ‘running up and down all the night with their arses bare through the streets, and at last fighting and being beat by the watch and clapped up all night’.
¹
The last jape was made worse to many minds by the fact that the constable who arrested them was reprimanded and imprisoned.

Although Charles could be impatient with these rule-breakers, sometimes he joined them. Normally a temperate drinker, unlike most of his court, in this disturbed spring he got drunk with Sedley and Buckhurst in Suffolk, and was said to go incognito with them to London brothels. In an intensified form they reflected his own scepticism, his belief that God would not damn a man for taking a little pleasure. Rochester said of this period that he was completely drunk for five years (which makes sense of the comment on his courageous dash in the Four Days Battle, that no sober man would have done it). Yet there was logic, and often genius, in his self-destructive madness. To Rochester, man was a material creature, his existence bounded by birth and death. If life was a perpetual flux then change was natural and constancy was not. To deny ‘natural’ instincts went against all sense. Pleasure, seizing the moment, was an obligation. During one of his frequent banishments from court Rochester disguised himself as an Italian mountebank and set up in Tower Street, ‘where he had a Stage’, selling quack medicines: other disguises included a porter or a beggar. And when he returned from these adventures, he entertained the court with scabrous accounts of his doings, a parodic parallel to Charles’s repeated stories of his wanderings after Worcester.

The king in disguise is a trope of theatre, the good monarch walking among his people and watching their lives. With Nell Gwyn, even more than with Moll Davis, Charles could again play this role. Nell was open in her manner, but she too, in some sense, was in disguise. She kept very quiet about her origins. Actresses often liked to suggest some upper-class blood (Moll was described variously as the daughter of a blacksmith or of the Earl of Berkshire), and in Nell’s case the most common story, still often baldly stated as fact, was that she was born in Oxford, the daughter of a royalist officer, Captain Thomas Gwynn, and granddaughter of a dean of Christ Church. At the time, many people doubted this. As a cruel lampoon, ‘The Lady of Pleasure: a Satyr’, put it,

This was a dig at her mother Helena, a larger-than-life figure well known in London as a drunken, pipe-smoking, quarrelsome brothel-keeper, always bragging about her fine girls. One of Nell’s most challenging roles was playing the company whore in Lacy’s comedy
The Old Troop
(a part said to be based on Helena). This drama of corrupt royalist soldiers billeted on resentful villagers, drawn from Lacy’s own Civil War experience as a lieutenant with a troop of horse, full of bawdy jokes and ludicrous mock-French from the company chef ‘Monsieur Raggou’, was a dazzling hit – if uncomfortably close to Nell Gwyn’s own past.

All that is known for sure, apart from her mother Helena’s address in Coal Hole Lane, off Drury Lane (a place that makes Nell an irresistible type of Cinderella), is that she had a sister called Rose. This was almost certainly the ‘Rose Gwyn’ who begged Harry Killigrew to present her petition to the Duke of York in 1663 to help her get out of Newgate, where she was held for theft. Rose claimed, as so many petitioners did, that her father had lost everything in the service of Charles I. Harry Killigrew was the son of Tom Killigrew of the King’s Theatre, and by this point Rose and Nell, who was then about thirteen, were probably both working there as orange girls.
³

Nell was almost illiterate – all her life she marked, rather than signed her name – but Hart and Lacy must have taught her to read, or to learn from dictation. At fourteen she had small roles on stage, including a bit-part in Orrery’s
Mustapha
in April 1665, a play whose numbing dullness was relieved for Pepys by the presence of the king and queen and Barbara Castlemaine, ‘and pretty witty Nell’. From then on, in play after play, Nell and Hart entranced the crowds as the combative ‘mad couple’. In early 1667 Nell acted in a re-run of Buckingham’s
The Chances
, and in March Charles and James saw her play Florimell to Hart’s Celadon in Dryden’s
Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen
. After its bawdy prologue, Dryden’s serious plot, in solemn rhyme, told the story of the Queen of Sicily, whose love for her courtier threatens to tear the court and country apart (another warning to Charles about inappropriate passion). By contrast, in the ‘mad’ sub-plot, Nell and Hart played an independent-minded woman and suitor, engaged in constant, lively jousting. Pepys burst out in his diary:

…so great performance of a comical part was never, I believe, in the world before as Nell doth this, both as a mad girle, and then, most and best of all, when she comes in like a young gallant; and hath the motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her.
⁴

Charles admired her too, declaring
Secret Love
‘his play’, and commanding a court performance, for which he provided costumes.
⁵
When Davenant died the following year, he appointed Dryden as Poet Laureate.

The part of Florimell was written specially for Nell, and it conjures up her unusual good looks: ‘Ovall face, clear skin, hazle eyes, thick brown Eye-browes, and Hair.’
⁶
She stood out among the dark-haired, sloe-eyed beauties with her unfashionable tawny hair and turned-up nose, and she was petite and curvy, with tiny feet and extremely fine legs. Charles liked good legs, as the earlier incident with Frances Stuart showed, and in an age when breasts were often on display, in paintings, in deep-necked ball gowns and particularly on stage, legs had a particular charm.

In
Secret Love
Nell’s legs and her confident, breezy style were shown off to advantage when she admired herself proudly in her disguise as a French-obsessed fop:

If cloathes and a bon meen will take ’em, I shall do’t. – Save you
Monsieur Florimell
: Faith methinks you are a very
janty
Fellow,
poudré
&
adjusté
as well as the best of ’em. I can manage the little Comb – set my Hat, shake my Garniture, toss about my empty Noddle, walk with a courant slurr.
⁷

She was fun, and the witty promises of the play’s closing contract also had their appeal, implying a new kind of relationship between men and women, and certainly between a king and his mistress. Florimell and Celadon will agree to give each other their liberty and never to interfere in each other’s lives or ask awkward questions:

Nell Gwyn, painted by Simon Verelst around 1670

Celadon
Provided always, that whatever liberties we take with other people, we continue very honest to one another.

Florimell
As far as will consist with a pleasant life.

Celadon
Lastly, Whereas the names of Husband and Wife hold for nothing but clashing and cloying, and dullness and faintness in their signification; they shall be abolish’d for ever betwixt us.

Florimell
And instead of those, we will be married by the more agreeable names of Mistress and Gallant.
⁸

The summer after this success Nell briefly disappeared from London as the mistress of Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst – her second Charles she called him, Charles Hart being her first. Entranced by the sight of her legs as she tumbled across the stage, Buckhurst had promised her £100 a year, but the affair did not work out as planned. After a month or so in Epsom, where Buckhurst shared a house with Sedley, and was visited by Buckingham and Rochester, Nell was back on stage. Playing to almost empty houses in the dusty days of late August, before the season had fully begun, she fended off Buckhurst’s hints that he had dropped her because she asked for money, and ignored the lewd suggestions that all his friends had shared her favours. By autumn she was back on top form, playing in Howard’s
The Mad Couple
with all her old brio, mocking Moll’s ‘cold lodging’ song and flaunting her youthful independence. When the fiddlers arrived on stage she jumped up and declared roundly:

Moll Davis had her house and her ring, but Charles’s affair with her was no grand passion. From the start, he had his eye on Nell. In one story, in April 1668, soon after he set Moll up in Suffolk Street, Charles took a box at a performance of
She Would if She Could
. This time Nell was in the audience rather than on stage, and Charles flirted with her as she sat in the next box with a Villiers cousin of Buckingham. Afterwards he and the Duke of York, both incognito, took them to a tavern, but when the reckoning came, Charles and James turned out their empty pockets and poor Villiers had to pay. Another version has it that Nell herself paid, imitating the King’s idiom perfectly, sighing, ‘Ods fish! But this is the poorest company I ever was in!’
¹⁰

Charles watched this irreverent beauty on stage and off and soon all theatregoers knew of their flirtation. When Nell played Jacintha in Dryden’s
An Evening’s Love, or the Mock Astrologer
, she openly teased the audience with her lines about the staircase of love:

Wildblood
: Then what is a Gentleman to hope from you?

Jacintha
: To be admitted to pass my time with, while a better comes: to be the lowest step in my Stair-case, for a Knight to mount upon him, and a Lord upon him, and a Marquess upon him, and a Duke upon him, till I get as high as I can climb.
¹¹

An Evening’s Love
was an exuberant Spanish intrigue in which Wildblood and Bellamy, gallants from chilly London, wandered bewildered through Madrid in carnival time. The contrasting cultures let the Town laugh at itself, as in Bellamy’s good-natured definition of his own status: ‘I am a Gentleman, a man of the Town, one who wears good Cloathes, Eates, Drinks, and wenches abundantly; I am a damn’d ignorant, and senceless fellow.’
¹²
Pepys found the play smutty, but Nell seemed at home in this carefree world, with its happy accidents, disguises and random encounters, and its view of life as a game, where love hung on the throw of a dice.

At the end of 1668 Barbara and Nell came face to face in a curious episode. Barbara had always exploited her theatrical contacts, and still called on Charles’s backing in her many quarrels. She was currently in the middle of a row with her friend, Elizabeth, Lady Harvey, largely caused by her tense relationship with Lady Harvey’s ally Buckingham, and her new friendship with the opposing clique surrounding the Duke of York. That December Barbara denounced Elizabeth as a ‘hermaphrodite’ and claimed that she was only angry because Barbara had refused her advances. To which Elizabeth replied quickly that she was ‘amazed that Barbara, who did not refuse anyone, should say such things’.
¹³
This was followed by a full-scale feud.

There was a new fashion for Roman plays (less for the opportunity of Ciceronian eloquence than the chance to create bloodcurdling villains) and at the time of this row, Nell was playing an Amazon in a revival of Jonson’s
Catiline Conspiracy
, and delivering the prologue as a blatantly sexy Cupid. But this time it was not Nell who caused a sensation. Before the play opened, Barbara coached the actress Katherine Corey, who played the ageing courtesan and would-be stateswoman Sempronia, to mimic Elizabeth Harvey in every drawling tone and gesture. Corey’s accurate, exaggerated impersonation made the audience gasp, fall silent, then burst into loud, delighted applause. And when Cicero was asked, ‘What will you do with Sempronia?’ Barbara leapt to her feet and shrieked ‘Send her to Constantinople!’
¹⁴
There was uproar in the pit, since everyone knew that Charles had just sent Elizabeth’s husband as ambassador to Turkey, at her request, to get him out of her way.