The story of Nell Gwyn (2 page)

She was ten years of age at the Restoration of King Charles IL, in 1660. She was old enough, therefore, to have noticed the extraordinary change which the return of royalty effected in the manners, customs, feelings, and even conversation of the bulk of the people. The strict observance of the Sabbath was no longer rigidly enforced. Sir Charles Sedley and the Duke of Buckingham rode in their coaches on a Sunday, and the barber and the shoeblack shaved beards and cleaned boots on the same day, without the overseers of the poor of the parish inflictmg fines on them for such

1 T. Shadwell's Works, iii. 173. " Davies's Dramatic Miscellanies, iii. 464. 6

Another view of the Hereford house.

\Tofacep. 6.

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(as they were then thought) unseemly breaches of the Sabbath. Maypoles were once more erected on spots endeared by old associations, and the people again danced their old dances around them. The Cavalier restored the royal insignia on his fireplace to its old position ; the King's Head, the Duke's Head, and the Crown were once more favourite signs by which taverns were distinguished ; drinking of healths and deep potations, with all their Low-Country honours and observances, were again in vogue. Oughtred, the mathematician, died of joy, and Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, of laughter, at hearing of the enthusiasm of the English to " welcome home old Rowley." ^ The King's health-Here's a health unto his Majesty, with a fa, la, la— was made a pretext for the worst excesses, and irreligion and indecency were thought to secure conversation against a suspicion of disloyalty and fanaticism. Even the common people took to gay-coloured dresses as before; and a freedom of spirits, rendered familiar by early recollection, and only half subdued by Presbyterian persecution, was confirmed by a licence of tongue which the young men about court had acquired while in exile with their sovereign.

Not the least striking effect of the Restoration of the King was the revival of the English theatres. They had been closed and the players silenced for

1 " Welcome home, old Rowley," is the name of the well-known Scottish tune called " Haud awa'frae me, Donald." See Johnson's Sco/s Musical Museum, iv. 318.

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three-and-twenty years, and in that space a new generation had'arisen, to whom the entertainments of the stage were known but by name. The theatres were now re-opened, and with every advantage which stage properties, new and improved scenery, and the costliest dresses could lend to help them forward. But there were other advantages equally new, and of still greater importance, but for which the name of Eleanor Gwyn would in all likelihood never have reached us.

From the earliest epoch of the stage in England till the theatres were silenced at the outbreak of the Civil War, female characters had invariably been played by men, and during the same brilliant period of our dramatic history there is but one instance of a sovereign witnessing a performance at a public theatre. Henrietta Maria, though so great a favourer of theatrical exhibitions, was present once, and once only, at the theatre in the Black-friars. The plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Which so did take Eliza and our James,

were invariably seen by those sovereigns, as afterwards by Charles I., in the halls, banqueting-houses, and cockpits attached to their palaces. With the Restoration,

When Love was all an easy Monarch's care, Seldom at council, never in a war,

came women on the stage, and the King and Queen, the Dukes of York and Buckingham, the chief courtiers, and the maids-of-honour, were among the constant frequenters of the public theatres.

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Great interest was used at the Restoration for the erection of new theatres in London, but the King, acting it is thought on the advice of Clarendon, who wished to stem at all points the flood of idle gaiety and dissipation, would not allow of more than two—the King's Theatre, under the control of Thomas Killigrew, and the Duke's Theatre (so called in compliment to his brother, the Duke of York), under the direction of Sir WiUiam Davenant. Better men for the purpose could not have been chosen. Killigrew was one of the Grooms of the Bedchamber to the King, a well-known wit at court and a dramatist himself; and Davenant, who filled the office of Poet Laureate in the household of the King, as he had done before to his father, King Charles L, had been a successful writer for the stage, while Ben Jonson and Massinger were still alive. The royal brothers patronised both houses with equal earnestness, and the patentees vied with each other in catering successfully for the public amusement.

The King's Theatre, or " The Theatre," as it was commonly called, stood in Drury Lane, on the site of the present building, and was the first theatre, as the present is the fourth, erected on the site. It was small, with few pretensions to architectural beauty, and was first opened on the 8th of April 1663, when Nell was a girl of thirteen. The chief entrance was in Little Russell Street, not as now in Brydges Street. The stage was lighted with wax candles, on brass censers or cressets. The pit lay open to the weather for the sake of light,

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but was subsequently covered in with a glazed cupola, which, however, only imperfectly protected the audience, so that in stormy weather the house was thrown into disorder, and the people in the pit were fain to rise.

The Duke's Theatre, commonly called "The Opera," from the nature of its performances, stood at the back of what is now the Royal College of Surgeons, in Portugal Row, on the south side of Lincoln's Inn Fields. It was originally a tennis-court, and, like its rival, was run up hurriedly to meet the wants of the age. The interior arrangements and accommodation were much the same as at Killigrew's house.

The company at the King's Theatre included among the actors, at the first opening of the house, Theophilus Bird, Charles Hart, Michael Mohun, John Lacy, Nicholas Burt, William Cartwright, William Wintershall, Walter Clun, Robert Shat-terell, and Edward Kynaston ; and Mrs. Corey, Mrs. Ann Marshall, Mrs. Rebecca Marshall, Mrs. Eastland, Mrs. Weaver, Mrs. Uphill, Mrs. Knep, and Mrs. Hughes were among the female performers. Joe Haines, the low comedian, and Cardell Goodman, the lover of the Duchess of Cleveland, were subsequent accessions to the troop ; and so also were Mrs. Boutell and " Mrs. Ellen Gwyn."

Bird belonged to the former race of actors, and did not long survive the Restoration. Hart and Clun had been bred up as boys at the Blackfriars to act women's parts. Hart, who had served as a

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captain in the King's army, rose to the summit of his profession, but Clun was unfortunately killed while his reputation was still on the increase. Mohun had played at the Cockpit before the Civil Wars, and had served as a captain under the King, and afterwards in the same capacity in Flanders, where he received the pay of a major; he was famous in lago and Cassius. Lacy, a native of Yorkshire, was the Irish Johnstone and Tyrone Power of his time. Burt, who had been a boy first under Shank at the Blackfriars, and then under Beeston at the Cockpit, was famous before the Civil Wars for the part of Clariana in Shirley's play of Love's Crtielty^ and after the Restoration equally famous as Othello. Cartwright and Winter-shall had belonged to the private house in Salisbury Court. Cartwright won great renown in FalstafF, and as one of the two kings of Brentford in the farce of the Rehearsal. Wintershall played Master Slender, for which Dennis the critic commends him highly, and was celebrated for his Cokes in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair. Shatterell had been quartermaster in Sir Robert Dallison's regiment of horse,—the same in which Hart had been a lieutenant and Burt a cornet. Kynaston acquired especial favour in female parts, for which, indeed, he continued celebrated long after the introduction of women on the stage. Such were the actors at the King's House when Nell Gwyn joined the company

Mrs. Corey (the name Miss had then an improper meaning, and the women though single were called

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Mistresses)' played Abigail, in the Scornful Lady of Beaumont and Fletcher ; Sempronia, in Jonson's Catiline; and was the original Widow Blackacre in Wycherley's Plain Dealerj —Pepys calls her Doll Common. The two Marshalls, Ann and Rebecca (to whom I have already had occasion to refer), were the younger daughters of the well-known Stephen Marshall, the Presbyterian divine, who preached the sermon at the funeral of John Pym. Mrs. Uphill was first the mistress and then the wife of Sir Robert Howard, the poet. Mrs. Knep was the wife of a Smithfield horsedealer, and the mistress of Pepys. Mrs. Hughes, better known as Peg, was the mistress of Prince Rupert, by whom she had a daughter ; and Mrs. Boutell was famous for playing Statira to Mrs. Barry's Roxana, in Lee's impressive tragedy of Alexander the Great. Such were the actresses when Nell came among them.

Among the actors at the Duke's were Thomas Betterton, the rival of Burbage and Garrick in the

1 The first unmarried actress who had Miss before her name on a playbill was Miss Cross, the original Miss Hoyden in Vanbrugh's Relapse [which was given at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on Boxing-day 1697]. [In Epigrams of All Sorts made at Divers Times, by Richard Flecknoe, London, 1670, p. 43, is an epigram to Mrs. Davis (the famous " Moll ") on her excellent dancing, which begins :

" Dear Mis, delight of all the nobler sort. Pride of the stage, and darling of the Court,"

and " furnishes," says Mr. Joseph Knight, art. Davis or Davies (Mary) in Diet. Nat. Biog. , an exceptionally early instance of an unmarried woman being addressed, with no uncomplimentary intention, as Miss." Still, in this case, " Miss " may have come in (like Saint Peter) for the sake of the metre.]

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well-earned greatness of his reputation, and the last survivor of the old school of actors ; Joseph Harris, the friend of Pepys, originally a seal-cutter, and famous for acting Romeo, Wolsey, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek ; William Smith, a barrister of Gray's Inn, celebrated as Zanga in Lord Orrery's Mustapha; Samuel Sandford, called by King Charles II. the best representative of a villain in the world, and praised both by Langbaine and Steele for his excellence in his art ; James Nokes, originally a toyman in Cornhill, famous for playing Sir Nicholas Cully in Etherege's Love in a Tub, for his bawling fops,i and for his "good company"; Cave Underbill, clever as Cutter in Cowley's comedy, and as the grave-digger in Hamlet, called by Steele "honest Cave Underbill" ; and Matthew Medbourne, a useful actor in parts not requiring any great excellence. The women were, Elizabeth Davenport, the first Roxolana in the Siege of Rhodes, snatched from the stage to become the mistress of the twentieth and last Earl of Oxford of the noble family of Vere ; Mary Saunderson, famous as Queen Katherine and Juliet, afterwards the wife of the great Betterton ; Mary or Moll Davis, excellent in singing and dancing,—afterwards the mistress of Charles II. ; Mrs. Long, the mistress of the Duke of Richmond,^ celebrated for

1 In Tunbridi^e Wells a Satyr Rochester, after alluding to the Cully part, writes: "A Bawling Fop, a Natural Nokes." Works, ed. 1709, p. 58.—G. G.

2 MS. note by Isaac Reed, in his copy of Downes's Roscius Anglicanus.

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the elegance of her appearance in men's clothes ; Mrs. Norris, the mother of Jubilee Dicky; Mrs. Holden, daughter of a bookseller to whom Betterton had been bound apprentice ; and Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Johnson, both taken from the stage by gallants of the town,—the former but little known as an actress, the latter celebrated as a dancer and for her Carolina in Shadwell's comedy of Epsom Wells.

Such were the performers at the Duke's House. Anthony Leigh and Mrs. Barry, both brought out at the same theatre, were accessions after Davenant's death, and, as I see reason to believe, after Nell Gwyn had ceased to be connected with the stage.

The dresses at both houses were magnificent and costly, but little or no attention was paid to costume. The King, the Queen, the Duke, and several of the richer nobility, gave their coronation suits to the actors, and on extraordinary occasions a play was equipped at the expense of the King. Old court dresses were contributed by the gentry, and birthday suits continued to be presented as late as the reign of George II. The scenery at the Duke's House was superior to the King's, for Davenant, who introduced the opera among us, introduced us at the same time to local and expensive scenery. Battles were no longer represented

With four or five most vile and ragged foils,

or coronations by a crown taken from a deal table by a single attendant.

The old stock plays were divided by the two

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companies. Killigrew had Othello, Julius Ccrsar, Henry the Fourth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer-Nighfs Dream; fourof Ben Jonson's plays— The Alchemist, The Fox; The Silent Woman, and Catiline J and the best of Beaumont and Fletcher's— A King and no King, The Humorous Lieutenant, Rule a Wife aiid have a Wife, The Maid's Tragedy, Rollo, The Elder BrotJier, Phil-aster, and The Scornful Lady; with Massinger's Virgin Martyr, and Shirley's Traitor. Davenant played Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Henry the Eighth, Twelfth Night, and The Tempestj Webster's Duchess of Malfi and Mad Lover; Middleton's Young Chafigelingj ^ Fletcher's Loya^ Subject diXi.^ Mad Lover; and yidiSsmgtr's Bondman. The new plays at the King's House were contributed by Sir Robert Howard, Sir Charles Sedley, Major Porter, Killigrew himself, Dryden, and Nat Lee; at the Duke's House by Davenant, Cowley, Etherege, Lord Orrery, and others. The new tragedies were principally in rhyme. At the first performance of a new comedy ladies seldom attended, or, if at all, in masks—such was the studied indecency of the art of that period.