2001 Annual Grant Issue
Leslie Cronin - Kast Grant
In Search of Nell Gwynn: A Journey to Restoration London

In July of last year, as my plane rose into the heavy summer air over Manhattan, I embarked on an unusual journey. Sure, there were a couple hundred people on my flight to London. And certainly thousands of others had flown there just that day. But I wasn't bound for the same London everyone else was; I was trying to reach Restoration London. I sought a London, just reawakening after the long nightmare of civil war; a London that looked to the return of the monarch with anxiety and hope; a London finding its will to laugh again - its people filing merrily into the newly reopened theaters; a London strafed by plague, gutted by fire and miraculously rebuilt in just ten years. It was through the streets of this London that I planned to track two people who have been dead for over three hundred years- Charles II, England's last absolute monarch and, more important to me, a beautiful young actress with a rapier wit and impossibly tiny feet, the remarkable Eleanor (Nell) Gwynn.

I first learned about Nell Gwynn in 1997, in a graduate course on Restoration drama. She was one of the first woman actresses on the English stage. During the civil war and throughout Cromwell's Protectorate, the theaters had been closed. Prior to that, men had acted all the parts of women characters. In England, strong prohibitions kept women off the stage. But Charles II, in his long exile from England, became acquainted with and then enamored with French theatrical conventions. Charles' reign was restored in May of 1660. By August of that same year, Killigrew and Davenant, the two nobles holding patents on London theater, had recruited and begun to train at least fourteen women actresses. The audiences were instantly enthralled by them, and so was the King.

In 1664, a petite and strikingly pretty young actress made her debut at the old theater in Drury Lane. Nell was then just 15 years old, but she was worldly wise from a life of poverty and hardship on the (then) mean streets surrounding Covent Garden. Nell's father had died years before in the civil war, serving with Royalist forces. Nell's mother ran a tavern and a brothel. Nell's sister, Rose, sold oranges in the theater, which meant she was most likely a prostitute. (It is known that Rose was imprisoned at least once but was suddenly and inexplicably bailed out by Thomas Killigrew, owner of the Drury Lane Theater.) Nell Gwynn was illiterate, unable to write her own name. But with the help and shelter of Charles Hart, an older actor, she learned lines, honed her craft and won critical and popular acclaim on the Restoration stage. By 1667, at the age of 18, Nell had captured King Charles II's heart, purchased a fine town house on Pall Mall, and begun to traverse London in a stylish chaise and four. She was ever after this a firmly ensconced member of the Restoration glitterati, bearing King Charles two sons, one of whom was eventually created Duke of Albany, a noble line that survives to this day.

While in London, I looked to experience firsthand some of the textures and nuances of Nell's time, in hopes that I could use them to construct an historical novel about one of the most beautiful, witty, wry and captivating women in English history. Consequently, I spent a lot of time examining Tudor architecture- the red brick building facades and their fluted chimney stacks must certainly have formed the backdrop for many scenes in Nell's life. During this period, London was immersed in a rapid aesthetic transition. Mere decades before Nell's birth, the architect and theatrical scenic designer, Inigo Jones, had toured Italy and brought home to England Palladio's Neo-classical ideals. In Nell's cityscape, Greek revival buildings and houses nestled in among the Tudor red structures. Her girlhood haunts, the slums and markets near Drury Lane, were lined with drab, largely windowless houses, whose upper floors hung out over the street, blotting out the sky. These naked wood and plaster abodes would eventually go up like tinder in the Great Fire of 1666.

In fact, few material artifacts actually remain from the mid-17^th century. Though two-thirds of London was newly built in Nell's time, most of those buildings have, by now, long been demolished. What remains to survey of this period are paintings - the lives of the royal Stuarts were well documented on canvases by the celebrated painters--Rubens, Van Dyke, and Lely. There are also national treasures to visit - the palaces and summer homes of the rich and famous. Ham House, in Surrey, is one such place. The Country home of the Countess of Dysart and the 1st Duke of Lauderdale, Hamm House served as the headquarters of an English Royalist spy ring during the 1650's, while Charles II and his court were in exile on the continent. Upon Charles' restoration, the Countess of Dysart and her husband, the Duke of Lauderdale, were richly rewarded for their loyalty to the crown. It was during this time that Ham House was decorated in the height of fashion for the period. Miraculously, subsequent generations changed nothing within the house. Today, one can tour the house and gardens and see nearly all the original textiles and furnishings. Three hundred and fifty odd years have faded the fabrics considerably, but it is nevertheless a thrill to walk through the rooms and see them much as Lady Dysart herself did.

Hamm House

Fully restored 17th-century garden on the Hamm House grounds.

The Countess of Dysart and the Duke of Lauderdale, the couple seated together, are the owners of Hamm House.

Most likely, Nell Gwynn never visited Ham House. It is speculated that the redecoration of the house was undertaken to prepare for the visit of Charles II's queen, Catherine of Braganza. Nell, like all of Charles' mistresses (and there were at least a dozen) was a creature of the London Court. Typically, when Charles would take up with a new love, he would appoint her one of Catherine of Braganza's chambermaids. This close proximity to the inner circle of Charles' household allowed him to carry on each new dalliance relatively unnoticed, except perhaps by the queen who, it is said, at first fumed and then later accepted her fate of playing second fiddle to all of Charles' new "friends." Nell Gwynn, however, wasn't about to faithfully serve the queen by day and faithlessly bed the queen's husband by night. Instead, Gwynn preferred to own her own house. She lived blocks from the King's main residence, White Hall, a palace that burned to the ground in the 1698. Nell's house on Pall Mall is long gone; in fact, all that remains of White Hall is its magnificent Banqueting House, another of Inigo Jones' Palladian creations. It is in the Banqueting House that Peter Paul Rubens' paintings of James I grace the ceiling panels. Within Banqueting House walls, three generations of Stuart monarchs received foreign dignitaries and conducted world affairs, and it was from a second story window of this building that Charles I stepped onto a scaffolding where he was minutes later publicly executed by Cromwell's loyal followers.

Whitehall

Nell was a baby in 1649 when Charles I was killed and his son, young prince Charles, forced to flee Great Britain. Though by 1667 she had risen higher in society than any girl from the London slums could reasonably expect to do, she always remembered where she had come from. She gave freely to charities, and was not ashamed to remind the highborn with whom she hobnobbed that she had once been on the streets herself. Nell Gwynn is remembered for being brazenly frank with others. One anecdote places her out in her carriage when an angry mob, mistaking her for another of the King's mistresses, Louise de Kéroualle, began to jostle the carriage quite violently. Nell, certain that the mob had been aroused by anti-Catholic sentiment directed at the King's French mistress, stuck her head out of the carriage and quipped "Gently, good people, I am the Protestant whore!"

Nell Gwynn was able to laugh at herself, but she liked laughing at the King even more. One night at a tavern, Nell, King Charles, his brother James and several others ran up an astronomical bill only to discover that no one in the party had a cent. The Royals and their friends argued for some time over who would pay for dinner. The King's momentary penury and his irresponsibility struck Nell as hilarious, and she began to mimic him.

"Odds-fish!" she exclaimed, adopting for the moment the King's idiosyncratic diction. "But this is the poorest company that ever I was in before at a tavern." Everyone in the group knew Nell had grown up in a tavern and seen the worst. For his part, Charles II was thoroughly charmed by her irreverence. Before the night was over, he suggested that she retire from the stage as soon as possible and place herself "under his protection."

Lely Portrait of Nell Gywnn		King Charles II

Few details of Nell Gwynn's life remain as concrete facts. I plan to fill in the spaces with fiction. In my tale, Nell is an unwed mother, disgraced and ruined at seventeen, but unwilling to turn her son over the church's care, which usually resulted in the death or disappearance of the orphan. Nell, instead, places her child in the home of a hired nurse and sets out to find money in the one honest profession open to women, the theater. From here she learns her craft and scales the social classes. In the end she makes it more fashionable to be a mistress than a wife. I've read about the Restoration for years; I researched Nell Gwynn for two months, and I traveled the streets of central London for two weeks. Herein lies the foundation for telling the story of this tough, funny, creative and independent beauty- the pioneering actress, Nell Gwynn.