Here Lies Our Sovereign Lord Read online

  Each day there came fresh rumors. They heard that the people had thrown the furniture from their houses and packed it into barges; that the flames had spanned the river; how the wooden houses on London Bridge had blazed; how the King and his brother the Duke had worked together to prevent the fire from spreading; that it had been necessary to use gunpowder and blow gaps in the rows of highly inflammable wooden houses.

  And at length came good news.

  It came from a gentleman riding through Oxford from London, a prelate who mourned the restoration of the King and looked yearningly back at the puritanism of the Protectorate.

  Riding to Banbury, he stopped at Oxford and, seeing that he was a traveller who had doubtless come from London, Nell approached him, not to ask him to buy her herrings, but for news.

  He looked at her with disapproval. No woman of virtue, he was sure, could look like this one. That luxuriant hair allowed to flow in riotous disorder, those hazel eyes adorned with the darkest of lashes and brows—such a contrast to the reddish tints in her hair—those plump cheeks and pretty teeth, those dimples and, above all, that pert nose, could not belong to a virtuous woman.

  Nell dipped in a charming curtsy which would have become a lady of high rank and which Charles Hart had taught her.

  “I see, fair sir, that you hie from London,” she addressed him. “I would fain have news of that town.”

  “Ask me not for news of Babylon!” cried the good man.

  “Nay, sir, I will not,” answered Nell. “’Tis of London I ask.”

  “They are one and the same.”

  Nell dropped her eyes demurely. “I hie from London, fair sir. Is it in your opinion a fit place for a poor woman to go home to?”

  “I tell ye, ’tis Babylon itself. ’Tis full of whores and cutthroats.”

  “More so than Oxford, sir … or Banbury?”

  He looked at her suspiciously. “You mock me, woman,” he said. “You should go to London. Clearly ’tis where you belong. In that cesspool everywhere one looks one sees rubble in the streets—the evidence of God’s vengeance … and these people of London, what do they do? They make merry with their taverns and their playhouses….”

  “You said playhouses!” cried Nell.

  “God forgive them, I did.”

  “And may He preserve you, sir, for such good news.”

  A few days later she, with Rose and her mother, caught the stage wagon and, after a slow and tedious journey travelling two miles to the hour and sitting uncomfortably on the floor of the wagon as the wagoner led the horses over the rough roads, they were jolted to London.

  Nell could scarcely help weeping when she saw the old city again. She had heard that old St. Paul’s, the Guildhall, and the Exchange, among many other well-known landmarks, had gone; she had heard that more than thirteen thousand dwelling houses and four hundred streets had been destroyed, and that two-thirds of the city lay in ruins—from the Tower, all along the river to the Temple Church, and from the northeast gate along the city wall to Holborn Bridge. Nevertheless she was not prepared for the sight which met her eyes.

  But she was by nature an optimist and when she remembered her last sight of the city, with the grass growing between the cobbles, with its red crosses on the doors and its pest-carts in the streets, she cried: “Well, ’tis a better sight than we left.”

  Moreover the King’s Servants were back at the playhouse.

  Nell lost no time in presenting herself at the playhouse, miraculously preserved; and indeed Thomas Killigrew had, during the time it had not been used, enlarged his stage.

  London was glad to see Nell back. She had changed in her two years’ absence. She was no longer a child. At seventeen she was a poised young woman; her charms had by no means diminished; she was as slender and as dainty as ever; her tongue was as quick; but all who saw her declared that her beauty was more striking than ever.

  She scored an immediate success as Lady Wealthy in James Howard’s The English Monsieur, and later she played Celia in Fletcher’s Humorous Lieutenant.

  There was still great anxiety throughout the country; the plague and the fire had crippled trade, and the Dutch were threatening. In her lodgings in Drury Lane which she had taken again Nell thought little of these things. She gave supper parties and entertained her friends with her singing and dancing. These friends talked of the scandals of the Court, of the theater, and the roles they had played; it never occurred to them to give a thought to state affairs or to imagine that such matters could concern them.

  To these parties came men and women of the Court; even the great Duke of Buckingham came. He was something of a mimic, and he declared he wished to pit his skill against Mrs. Nelly’s. With him came Lady Castlemaine, who was graciously pleased to commend the little comedienne on her playing. She asked questions about Charles Hart, her great blue eyes rapaciously aglitter. Charles Hart was a very handsome man, and Nell had heard of the lady’s insatiable hunger for handsome men.

  One of the lampoons which was being quoted throughout the city concerned the King’s chief mistress. It was:

  “Full forty men a day provided for the whore

  Yet like a bitch she wags her tail for more.”

  This was said to have been composed by the Earl of Rochester—who was Lady Castlemaine’s own cousin and one of the wildest rakes at Court. He had recently been imprisoned for abducting an heiress; he was so daring that he cared not what he said even to the King; yet he remained in favor.

  Henry Killigrew was there; he had been her friend since the days when she had begged him to help her obtain a pardon for Rose. Now she knew that he had been Lady Castlemaine’s lover as well as Rose’s and was the greatest liar in England. There was Sir George Etherege, lazy and good humored, known to them all as “Gentle George.” Another who came to her rooms was John Dryden, a fresh-complexioned little poet who had written several plays and promised to write another especially for Nell.

  This he did and, very soon after her return to London, Nell was playing in Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen, and the part of Florimel, which had been specially written for her, was the greatest success of her career.

  All the town was going to see Mrs. Nelly as Florimel, for in Florimel Dryden had created a madcap creature, witty, pretty, full of mischief, expert in mimicry; in other words Florimel was Nell, and Florimel enchanted all London.

  She could now forget the terrible time of plague; she could forget poverty in Oxford, just as in the beginning she had forgotten the bawdy-house in Cole-yard and her life as orange-girl in the pit. Nell knew how to live gloriously in the joyous moment, and to remember from the past only that which made pleasant remembering.

  She had lost Charles Hart. He had never forgiven her for choosing her family instead of him. Nell shrugged elegant shoulders. She had loved him when she had known little of love; her love had been trusting, experimental. She was grateful to Mr. Charles Hart, and she did not grudge him the pleasure he was said to be taking with my lady Castlemaine.

  What she enjoyed now was swaggering across the stage, wearing an enormous periwig which made her seem smaller than ever—a grotesque yet enchanting figure, full of vitality, full of love of life, full of gamin charm which set the pit bouncing in its seats, and every little vizard mask trying to ape Nell Gwyn.

  And at the end of the play she danced her jig.

  “You must dance a jig,” Lacy had said. “Moll Davies is drawing them at the Duke’s with her dancing. By God, Nelly, she’s a pretty creature, Moll Davies; but you’re prettier.”

  Nell turned away from his flattering glances; she did not want to seem ungrateful to one who had done so much for her, but she wanted no more lovers at this time.

  She wanted no man unless she loved him, and there was so much else in life to love apart from men. She might have reminded him that Thomas Killigrew paid a woman twenty shillings a week to remain at the theater and keep his actors happy in their amorous moments. But being grateful to Lacy, she turned away as sh
e had learned to turn away from so many who sought her.

  And there were many seeking her. She was the most discussed actress of the day. There might have been better actresses on the stage but none was possessed of Nell’s charm; though some admitted that that mighty pretty creature, Moll Davies, at the Duke’s Theater, was the better dancer.

  In the town they were quoting Flecknoe’s verses to a very pretty person:

  “She is pretty and she knows it;

  She is witty and she shows it;

  And besides that she’s so witty,

  And so little and so pretty,

  Sh’ has a hundred other parts

  For to take and conquer hearts …”

  The gallants quoted it to her; in the pit they chanted it. And they roared the last two lines:

  “But for that, suffice to tell ye,

  ’Tis the little pretty Nelly.”

  And, although the times were bad and it was hard to fill a theater, those who could tear themselves from state matters came to see Nell Gwyn play Florimel and dance her jig.

  The King was melancholy. Frances Stuart, whom he had been pursuing for so long, had run away with the Duke of Richmond; and matters of greater moment gave him cause for anxiety. His kingdom, well-nigh ruined by the disastrous events of the last two years, was facing a serious threat from the Dutch. He had no money to refit his ships, so he negotiated for a secret peace; the French were joining the Dutch against him; but the Dutch, who had suffered no such hardships, had no wish for peace.

  The King rarely came to the play; he did not even come for John Howard’s new piece All Mistaken or The Mad Couple, in which Nelly had a comic part.

  As Mirida she had two suitors—one fat, one thin—and she promised to marry the one if he could grow fatter, the other if he could lose his bulk. This gave her many opportunities for the sort of buffoonery in which she reveled. Lacy, stuffed with cushions, was the fat lover, and Nell and he had the audience hysterical with laughter. An additional attraction was Nell’s parody of Moll Davies in her role in The Rivals at The Duke’s; and with her fat lover she rolled about on the stage, displaying so much of her person that the gentlemen in the pit stood on their seats to see the better, so displeasing those behind them that this gave rise to much dissension.

  There was one in his box who watched the scene with an avid interest. This was Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, a wit and poet, and he was filled with a great desire to make Nell his mistress.

  Consequently after the play the first person to reach the tiring room to beg Mrs. Nelly to dine with him was Charles Sackville.

  They dined at the Rose Tavern in Russell Street, and the innkeeper, recognizing his patrons, was filled with the desire to please them.

  Nell had refused to ask the gentleman to her lodgings, as she had refused to go to his. She knew him for a rake and, although he was an extremely handsome one as well as a wit, she had no intention of giving way to his desires. Some of these Court gentlemen stopped at little. My lord Rochester and some of his boon companions, it was said, were beginning to consider seduction tame and were developing a taste for rape. She was not going to make matters easy for this noble lord.

  He leaned his elbows on the table and bade her drink more wine.

  “There’s not an actress in the town to touch you, Nelly,” he said.

  “Nor shall any touch me—actress or noble lord—unless I wish it.”

  “You are prickly, Nell! Wherefore?”

  “I’m like a hedgehog, my lord. I know when to be on my guard.”

  “Let us not talk of guards.”

  “Then what should we talk of, the Dutch war?”

  “I can think of happier subjects.”

  “Such as what, my lord?”

  “You … myself … alone somewhere together.”

  “Would that be so happy? You would be demanding, I should be refusing. If you need my refusal to make you happier, sir, you can have it here and now.”

  “Nelly, you’re a mad thing, but a little beauty like you should have better lodgings than those in Old Drury!”

  “Is it a gentleman’s custom to sneer at the lodgings of his friends?”

  “If he is prepared to provide a better.”

  “My lodging is on cold boards,

  And wonderful hard is my fare.

  But that which troubles me most

  Is the impertinence of my host …”

  sang Nell, parodying the song in The Rivals.

  “I pray thee, Nell, be serious. I offer you a beautiful apartment, a hundred pounds a year … all the jewels and good company you could wish for.”

  “I do not wish for jewels,” she said, “and I doubt you could provide me with better company than that which I now enjoy.”

  “An actress’s life! How long does that go on?”

  “A little longer than that of a kept woman of a noble lord, I imagine.”

  “I would love you forever.”

  “Forever, forsooth! For ever is until you decide to pay court to Moll Davies or Beck Marshall.”

  “Do you imagine that I shall lightly abandon this….”

  “Nay, I do not. It is after seduction that such as you, my lord, concern themselves with the abandonment of a poor female.”

  “Nell, your tongue’s too sharp for such a little person.”

  “My lord, we all have our weapons. Some have jewels and a hundred a year with which to tempt the needy; others have a love of straight speaking with which to parry such thrusts.”

  “One of these days,” said Charles Sackville, “you will come to me, Nell.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Who knows, my lord? Who knows? Now, if you would prove to me that you are a good host, let me enjoy my food, I beg of you. And let me hear a piece of that wit for which I hear you are famous. For the man from whom I would accept jewels and an apartment and a hundred a year must needs be a witty man, a man who knows how to play the perfect host, and that—so my brief spell in high society tells me—is to talk, not of the host’s own inclinations, but of those of his guest.”

  “I am reproved,” said Sackville.

  He was exasperated, as he and his friends always were by the refusal of those they wished to fall immediate victims to their desires, but after that meal he was even more determined to make Nell his mistress.

  The King was furious with his players. It was unlike the King to lose his temper; he was, it was said by many, the sweetest tempered man at Court. But there was a great deal to make him melancholy at this time.

  A terrible disaster had overtaken the country. The Dutch fleet had sailed up the Medway as far as Chatham. They had taken temporary possession of Sheerness; they had burned the Great James, the Royal Oak, and the Loyal London (that ship which London had so recently had built to ennoble the Navy). They had sent up in smoke a magazine of stores worth £40,000 and, afraid lest they should reach London Bridge and inflict further damage, the English had sunk four ships at Blackwall and thirteen at Woolwich.

  The sight of the triumphant and arrogant Dutchmen sailing up the Medway, towing the Royal Charles, was, many sober Englishmen declared, the greatest humiliation the English had ever suffered.

  So the King, who loved his ships and had done more than any to promote the power of his Navy, was melancholy indeed; this melancholy was aggravated by those who went about the country declaring that this was God’s vengeance on England because of the vices of the Court. There came to him news that a Quaker, naked except for a loincloth, had run through Westminster Hall carrying burning coals in a dish on his head and calling on the people of the Court to repent of their lascivious ways which had clearly found disfavor in the eyes of the Lord.

  Charles, the cynic and astute statesman, said to those about him that the disfavor of the Lord might have been averted by cash to repair his ships and make them ready to face the Dutchmen. But he was grieved. He could not see that the fire and the plague which had preceded it—and which in the crippling effects they had had o
n the country’s trade were the reasons for this humiliating defeat—had any connection with the merry lives he and his followers led. In his opinion God would not wish to deny a gentleman his pleasure.

  The plague came on average twice a year to London, and had done so for many years; he knew this was due to the crowded hovels and the filthy conditions of the streets, rather than to his licentiousness; the fire had been so disastrous because those same houses were built of wood and huddled so close together that there was no means—except by making gaps in the buildings—of stopping the fire once it had started on such a gusty night.

  But he knew it was useless to tell a superstitious people these things, for they counted it Divine vengeance when aught went wrong and Divine approval when things went right.

  But even a man of the sweetest nature could feel exasperated at times and, when he heard that in the Change of Crowns which was being done at his own playhouse John Lacy was pouring further ridicule on the Court, Charles was really angry. At any other time he would have laughed and shrugged his shoulders; he had never been a man to turn from the truth; but now, with London prostrate from the effects of plague and fire, with the Dutch inflicting the most humiliating defeat in the country’s history and rebelion hanging in the air as patently as that miasma of haze and stench which came from the breweries, soap-boilers and tanneries ranged about the city, this ridicule of Lacy’s was more than indiscreet; it was criminal.

  The King decided that Lacy should suffer a stern reprimand and the playhouse be closed down for a while. It was incongruous, to say the least, that the mummers should be acting at such a time; and the very existence of the playhouse gave those who were condemning the idle life of the Court more sticks with which to beat it.

  So, during those hot months, Lacy went to prison and the King’s Theater was closed.

  Once more Nell was an actress without a theater to act in.