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Not Just the Tudors
Nell Gwyn: Actress and Royal Mistress
00:56:01
How did a lowly orange seller become the most famous actress of her time and mistress of King Charles II?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Brilliant Rivals, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:30]
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Dr. Laura Engel
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- [02:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. The year is 1660 and King Charles II has issued an edict that all female roles on the London stage are now to be played by women, a decree that would see the rise of the so called Covent Garden goddesses as the original it Girls. At the center of this new cult of celebrity was Nell Gwyn, whose enduring mythology is one of fascinating contradiction. An orange seller who became the most famous actress of her time, a famed wit who was likely illiterate. A commoner who held the favor and interest of the king for almost two decades. Heralded as a great beauty and defamed as a whore. So how did the woman known as the wildest creature that ever was in court become one of England's great folk heroines? Today I'm joined by Dr. Laura Engel, professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. An art and theatre historian, Laura's work has shared new insight into performance theory and the construction of celebrity. She's the author of Women Performance and the Material of Memory, the Archival Tourist and the Art of the Actress Fashioning Identities, as well as co curating the exhibition Artful Nature, Fashion and Theatricality at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and you are listening to not just the Tudors. Professor Engel, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:05]
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Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.
- [04:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Let's start at the very beginning of what we know about now or the image that people have of her as an orange seller at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. When did she become that? And what do we know of her life before that?
- [04:24]
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Well, the details of Nell Gwynne's life are sketchy. At the beginning, we think she was born 1650. We think her father was Thomas Gwynne, a captain in the army who died in debtors prison, leaving her alone with her mother Eleanor and her sister Rose. Her mother owned a tavern, a brothel. We think that Nell was, she certainly was serving strong waters to the men. Apparently she was. She told us that we all pepys that. But we think she became an orange seller or a woman who was potentially selling herself in the theater by the time she was 12 years old, which is pretty extraordinary. She was discovered by Charles Hart or Thomas Killegrew probably when she was 13 or 14, and then made her debut on the stage when she was 15.
- [05:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what was the route to being on the stage? I mean, how does one go from standing in front of it to climbing up onto it?
- [05:30]
Blue Nile Advertisement
This is a really interesting question. And we can surmise that Nel was among a bunch of very attractive women, women who were trying to negotiate their way in the world, trying to find a better life for themselves. And they were. Nell was born near Covent Garden. She was a part of the neighborhood. She was a part of the theatrical scene. So taverns, brothels, theaters, all of these things were intermingled at the time. So I imagine that young girls could See that part of a route to not being just a prostitute or not having to go into some sort of domestic labor was to align themselves in some. They could go to the performances, they could work. Work as orange girls. I think they probably got selected because of their proximity and also because of their attractiveness. So Nell herself must have been very charismatic, very beautiful, but also very strong and very resilient. I don't think this was an easy life. Certainly for women of a certain status and a certain class in London at the time, there were not a lot of options available to them. So having proximity to the theater, distinguishing yourself as a favorite, potentially gave you the opportunity to try your hand on stage. Also, actresses had just been led on the stage when Nell was a young teenager. So they were a novelty. There was a need for them. But not all women had the same fate as Nell Gwent.
- [07:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
There's an important point there which is reminiscent of the words of Elizabeth Howe about Nell's sexuality becoming the central feature of her professional identity. To what extent do you think that was true?
- [07:27]
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I think it had a huge role to play, women on the stage. Charles came back from exile, declared women could go on the stage. Partially from his experience, since seeing actresses in continental Europe. His mother was also loved the theater. And there was a lot of theater around him growing up. So the novelty of women on the stage and the idea that there were authentic female bodies performing these roles was a huge, huge attraction for audiences. So plays revolved around women's bodies. They revolved around the idea of wit and romance and chemistry, but also of spectacle and suffering. So you've had comedies that celebrated women's wit and ingenuity and then tragedies that highlighted women's suffering and, you know, rape and assault and victimization. So this question of embodiment, which is still a very paradoxical question today, that it's both about women's power and agency and ability to attract the gaze and attract audiences, but also a dangerous vehicle of objectification. So, yeah, I think Nell Gwynn's sexuality was a huge part of her appeal. And it was something that she seemed to have recognized herself and tried to harness for her own ends as much as she possibly could.
- [08:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And one thing that's very striking is that within months of her acting debut, Eleanor Gwynne is being referred to in equal parts with familiarity and ownership, simply as Nell. Is this the beginning of the cult of celebrity that we're so familiar with today?
- [09:19]
Blue Nile Advertisement
Absolutely, absolutely. So Nell is referred to as Nell, as if everyone knows her and everyone Owns a part of her. And part of that was the rise of image making technology and the sort of dissemination of celebrity gossip and pictures and ways that people could actually own a part of their favorite star. So portraits, prints later on, caricatures, figurines, ballads, pamphlets, endless gossip about what was going on with actors offstage really captivated audiences in the same way that we are obsessed with celebrities, celebrities today. So because people knew a great deal about Nell's life offstage, and even more so when she became the mistress of Charles ii, people were fascinated by her rise, by her transformation, but also by her. And owning a piece of her became a way of establishing a kind of intimacy with her. So, yes, calling her now and owning a part of her was part of people's experience and also marks, I think, the beginning of the trajectory of the kind of celebrity culture that we live in today.
- [10:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And actually, it's quite striking how many portraits of unknown women have been given the title Nell Gwyn throughout the centuries.
- [10:53]
Blue Nile Advertisement
Yeah, it's amazing. It really is amazing. It's as if every lovely 17th century woman in pearls is named Nell Gwyn. And we do know that many of the portraits that are named Nell Gwyn are probably not Nell Gwyn. But she became a type, she became an archetype. She became a shorthand for the beautiful, seductive, available actress, slash mistress, which then carried on in her afterlives. If you look closely at portraits of Nell Gwyn from the period, they're quite different. It's quite difficult to sort of hone in on exactly what she looked like or exactly what her features are. And it depends on the context, it depends on the audience. So, for example, in portraits of her by Peter Lely, the court painter, she's very elaborately dressed and sometimes with her signature wardrobe malfunction where her breast is slightly exposed. In a portrait by her neighbor, the portrait painter Mary Beale, who is one of the first professional women artists, she looks like an ordinary, lovely young woman. There's nothing about the portrait that signals that she's an actress. She has very long hair that looks very natural and wearing pearls, her signature accessory.
- [12:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Can we talk about those pearls? Because is there something about the way in which the string of pearls links together that inherent paradox of female celebrity? She's sort of both seductive and pure, both artificial and authentic.
- [12:28]
Blue Nile Advertisement
Exactly. Well, I've been working a lot on this idea of the paradox of pearls, especially in the restoration through the 18th century. And pearls appear in images of very different kinds of women. So you have pearls on prostitutes and mistresses, but you also have pearls on aristocrats and you have pearls on queens and princesses. You have pearls in images adorning enslaved individuals. So the idea that pearls are an accessory that emphasize the very fluid and multiple meanings of identities in the 18th century is something that I think is fascinating for actresses in particular, who are often playing fine ladies on stage, that accessory going from on stage to offstage, creating a sense of their legitimacy and potentially economic agency and their ties to royalty and aristocrats sort of blurs the boundaries between again, that age old question of the actress, who's the actress and who's the lady. It makes it very difficult to discern.
- [13:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you mentioned the sense of availability as well with Nell and these early actresses. Is it because of that that we see this association between acting in prostitution?
- [13:47]
Blue Nile Advertisement
Oh, absolutely. I mean, there certainly was a very real association between acting and prostitution. And with the earliest actresses, we can't know for sure how young some of them were when they started having to participate in this kind of dual identity. But we do know that as the century went on, actresses really worked very hard to craft their public images so that they were not seen as available sexually to the public offstage. And there became an interesting dichotomy between actresses who were known for their chastity or their virginity or their honor or their legitimate relationships and marriages, and actresses who are known for their liaisons with princes and aristocrats. So, for example, later on in the century you have Mary Robinson who has many, many public affairs and then has an affair with the Prince of Wales. And you have Sarah Siddons, who is unhappily married, but married and often talking about her domestic life and bringing her children on stage. So there's a real conscious effort and attempt to move away from this actress prostitute conflation. Even the generation after Nell Gwynne, you have Elizabeth Barry and Aunt Bracegirdle, the same kind of situation. Very known more for her affairs and liaisons, and Brace Girdle for her morality.
- [15:18]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Can I ask you about how these first female performers on the public stage at least were received? I mean, there'd been a long history of boys playing in female roles. So what did people make of them?
- [15:30]
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I think people were absolutely inspired and amazed by women on stage. It really did transformed the whole enterprise of playwriting, of play going, and also gave opportunities for women that didn't exist before. So the rise of professional playwrights and actresses did go, and also women writers in general and critics did coincide with this introduction of actresses onto the stage. So the idea that a woman could have a public profession in the arts. Not that women were not attacked or questioned for these roles, but the possibility of them became even more apparent when women became part of the stage. I also think that a lot of the celebrity tropes or things that we are fascinated by with celebrities today can be traced back to Nel Gwyn and Charles Hart being the witty, happy couple and that sort of the bantering couple. So, you know, you can think of, you know, Lauren McCall and Humphrey Bogart or Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy or, you know, all the sort of Hollywood elite, those couples and the ways in which Hollywood tried to manufacture couples, as, you know, Nell Gwynn and Charles Hart being a kind of legacy of that. So actresses on the stage made that kind of celebrity possible.
- [16:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What effect did it have on the style of performance? I mean, for Nell, was there a kind of signature acting style that she was up, or was it available to be developed entirely from scratch?
- [17:09]
Blue Nile Advertisement
That's a really great question. I often wonder how Nell, who had no formal training and was illiterate, no education, managed to inhabit these very wordy, very tricky roles in different ways. So think, you know, Dryden is a very verbose playwright. He was mostly the playwright who was crafting roles for Nell. And her ability to be witty and effervescent and her timing, her diction, her ability to move on stage. Many of these plays involve singing and dancing and her ability to communicate a kind of authentic personality and arc to an audience. That's something that requires innate talent, but it also requires a great deal of skill and smarts and memorization. So she must have been a great mimic. She must have had an incredible ear. And it's amazing to me that scholars talk about her not being able to read and write. She certainly could sign her name, and towards the end of her life, she certainly had to read contracts, you know, send letters, do communication. So she must have picked up an enormous amount by doing. But I do think that plays were crafted for the actors and the actresses so that her style, her ability to have this, like, very charismatic banter with Trous Hart did shape the ways in which Restoration comedies were produced and written after her. Certainly they drew from Shakespeare, Certainly they drew from earlier models. These rules didn't sort of come up out of nowhere. But women having their own agendas, women having a sense of their own sexuality, women having a sense that they can manipulate people, often through disguise. Big thing on the Restoration stage was breeches roles, women disguising themselves as men, which was partially so that the Audience could see them in tights and know that they were actually female. This shaped a kind of fascinating agency that then became a little bit more complicated as the style of plays and theater and literature became more sentimental and a little bit more moralizing towards the end of the century.
- [19:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I mean, would it be going too far to suggest that the genre of Restoration comedy is being shaped by Nails personality and her popularity?
- [19:49]
Blue Nile Advertisement
Absolutely. Absolutely, yes. I would absolutely say that, certainly.
- [19:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I know in this period we see a revival, a reinvigoration of the public interest in play going. And perhaps these Covent Garden Goddesses, as they're so called, had something to do with that.
- [20:07]
Blue Nile Advertisement
Oh, they certainly had something to do with that. Absolutely. To think about being in a world where young men, teenage boys, are playing women, so there are teenage boys playing Juliet and Lady Macbeth and, you know, roles that we associate with women. And to transform that into a space where you have live female bodies in front of you, it really does change the atmosphere. It changes the tenor, it changes one's experience in the theater. And it's not to say that some of these boy actors were extraordinary, but Restoration Theatre definitely did have a series of gestures and codes and sort of codified movements, but the kind of thrust of the play was more naturalistic. So if we were to transport ourselves back in time in the Restoration Theater, I don't think that we would have experienced it as the sort of natural acting that we're used to seeing on stage today or in movies or television. However, it was different from these very sort of codified gestures, movements, voice modulations that young boys had to learn in order to play with it. So there's a wonderful movie stage beauty. I don't know if you've seen it with Billy Crudup and Claire Danes. I highly recommend. It talks about that moment where men can no longer play women and have to play men. And it centers around the story of Ned Kiniston. It was one of the most famous actors who played women and then had to play men. And there's actually a really pretty hilarious portrayal of Nell Gwynn in that movie, who is a kind of a champion for women going on the stage and befriends some of the actresses. But the reason why that movie is really interesting is because it does a nice job of. Of thinking through some of the ways in which those transitions happened, thinking about how potentially lousy actresses were on the stage when they first got on stage, because they didn't really have any precedent. They didn't really know what they were doing and thinking about how a woman playing a woman changes the whole game of theater. But also, what does that mean in terms of the fluidity of gender identity?
- [22:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, it would be impossible to talk about Nael Gwynne without talking about her most famous relationship. So how did London's most celebrated actress become a royal mistress?
- [22:46]
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Well, the story is that Charles saw her in. Charles was obviously a great proponent of going to the theater. That he saw her in a production of Dryden's secret love in 1667, fell madly in love with her, and she became his mistress. She was obviously one of many. So his relationship with her is both similar and different from his relationship with his other mistresses. He apparently has showered a lot of attention on her. He set her up in a beautiful house in Pall Mall. Apparently there was a secret passage between Whitehall and. And her house that he used to visit her in the evenings occasionally. We don't know a lot about the specifics of what was said or how their first encounters went, but we do know that it was very intense. It was very intense. And that he was captivated by her and remained captivated by her until the end of his life.
- [24:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And do you think something of that was based on her wider desirability? I'm struck by Samuel Pepys famously writing about Nell's wit and beauty and saying he kept a portrait of her in which she is bare breasted and winged. Is it something about the desirability of somebody who cannot be caught, who's available to all at some level?
- [24:26]
Blue Nile Advertisement
That's a great point. Yes. She's available to everyone and no one at the same time. I think that is the interesting paradox of the actress. There's a mystery about women on stage. They somehow are, yeah, accessible and part of your life and potentially an extension of you, but they are also. They also have their own individual people. To address your question, I do think that the idea that Nell was such a hot commodity and so celebrated by peeps and audiences and others and the main draw at the box office absolutely must have inspired Charles. And the fact that she was available and also valuable entity only added to Charles's potentially, Charles's sense of his own allure, his sense of his own power, his sense of his own ability to direct. It was another thread of being in power to be able to take an actress from the stage, immediately, make her his mistress, immediately publicly install her in his life. It was a. An assertion of power, but also, you know, I think an assertion of his libertine agency. The idea that a king could publicly, I Mean kings had obviously taken mistresses and consorts forever. But this was different because this was an actress, a very public actress. So I think it was also a statement of individuality. And Esteban Os, this is the kind of power that I can wield, and this is what I'm gonna do with it.
- [26:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm struck by what you say, that she fascinated him and continued to fascinate him. That sense of it being a relationship that is both intensely visible and also surprisingly long lived. And that must be about Nell herself as well as being a hot commodity. What is it about her character that retains Charles's interest for so long?
- [26:38]
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I like to think it was because she had a wonderful sense of humor and a wonderful sense of humor about herself. There are all kinds of fantastic stories about her relationship to the public. The wonderful story about her being in Oxford in a carriage and being beset because the mob thinks that she's the Duchess of Fort St. Smith and she says, you know, hold good people. I am the president whore. Which is a wonderful anecdote. We actually don't know whether it's true as a wonderful anecdote. And it illustrates Nel's awareness of herself, her awareness of her role, her ability to capitalize on her humor. A bit of self deprecation, but also a connection to her audiences. She appears to be both divine and goddess like because of her beauty, but also a real person. She's connected to people through her wit. And I can imagine that one probably would have had to have had a fabulous sense of humor and sense of resilience and sense of oneself in order to survive, negotiating the life of a royal mistress and always being in the public eye. There's a lot of speculation that Nelgland was not interested in politics and she was not bringing a kind of national concerns with her into her relationship with Charles, unlike the Dutch supportsman. So that potentially could have been part of the longevity of the relationship. But I also don't want to undersell the idea that maybe we don't know how much of an influence she was on him. Maybe we don't know things about the conversations that they might have had about many different things, things that have not been transcribed or written down, that she may have influenced him in ways that we can't even imagine.
- [28:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. I'm always struck by the fact that we do not have evidence of conversations that happened behind closed doors between people. We can't trace influence, especially often women's influence, which is done in those most informal ways.
- [28:54]
Blue Nile Advertisement
Absolutely, absolutely. And she must have influenced him. She must have.
- [29:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yeah, probably helped him become the merry monarch we have in mind. I'll be talking to Dr. Laura Engel again shortly, but coming up I talk to Charles Beauclerk.
- [29:19]
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- [31:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Charles Beauclerk is direct descendant of Nell Gwyn and King Charles ii. He's the author of Shakespeare's Lost the True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth and Piano man, about the Life of John Ogden and in his book A Biography, he examines the life of of his ancestor and the ultimate humanity behind the myth. Charles, welcome to the podcast.
- [31:48]
Charles Beauclerk
Nice to be here.
- [31:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What made you first decide to write a biography about your ancestor?
- [31:54]
Charles Beauclerk
Well, it seemed an obvious choice. She was, I suppose, the mother of our family and it was through her union with Charles II that we got the name that we did. And I just felt that maybe she'd been neglected a little bit. She'd become a figure of folklore as the king's mistress, but not so much understood as an actress and an artist generally. So yes, I just thought it was long overdue.
- [32:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So was there a feeling of wanting to fill in the gaps then in terms of the sort of lesser known moments of her life?
- [32:28]
Charles Beauclerk
Definitely, yes. And we were fortunate in that we had a couple of family scrapbooks where there were old newspaper articles, but also accounts from her household and things like that, which gave us more of an individual picture of her on a day to day level. So again, it seemed stupid not to go back and use that kind of material.
- [32:51]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's amazing material to have. Tell me a bit more about it.
- [32:55]
Charles Beauclerk
I think it had been collected in the 18th century, not by one of her descendants, but by someone interested in the theater. And then I think it had been bought by the family and had remained there since. And it had other things in it, like old prints, you know, of her and her and things like that. But yes, the household accounts are particularly interesting. It showed that she had a great penchant for shoes. She was well known for her small, beautiful feet. She was very proud of them. So she had hundreds of pairs of shoes ordered regularly. I suppose they wore out very quickly in those days.
- [33:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's a fascinating detail. And I suppose as she was a sort of family character, a legend almost. Did you have an image of her in your head, what you thought she was like before you began? And how did it compare with the woman you discovered through your research?
- [33:49]
Charles Beauclerk
It's a good question. I think always, throughout the process, you realize that she was always will be as much a mythical as a historical figure. And the two kind of blend with her. It's difficult sometimes to separate them out. But yes, the picture I had in my mind of this feisty cockney girl who made her way in the court at that time really by just being herself in a sense. She didn't pretend to be someone that she wasn't. So she was outspoken, she was humorous, she played the fool. And I guess it was a real tonic for the king who was used to flattery and all the court toadies. She was something completely different. I guess she might have played up some of what people would have considered disadvantages. She would have spoken differently to other people. She swore a lot, we know that. And that shocked a lot of the other ladies at the court. But they probably ended up copying her, as these things usually work out. So, yes, she was very unusual. And that picture of her, if anything, was reinforced by the research that I did, that people didn't really know how to deal with her. Even someone like Pepys in his diary admires her as an actress, but he's also exasperated by her as well, and feels the need to let everyone know that he slightly looks down on her as well. So I think she must have been quite a confusing presence for people because she broke so many of the shibboleths of the time or just ignored them.
- [35:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And she seems, from what you're saying, like quite a character. But you particularly wanted to think about her as an actress as well as someone who appealed to Charles ii. What did you learn about her talent?
- [35:36]
Charles Beauclerk
Well, she and her sister Rose began as Orange Girl, so selling oranges in the theatre. This was, you know, a delicacy usually imported from abroad. Expensive it was too. And they would stand with their back to the stage, calling out their wares, and, of course, that's where she would have developed her repartee with people. She would have also got to see the plays, this is the important thing, and got a sense of how people acted. And she obviously felt at home in that world. And it wasn't a huge step from bantering with the gallants and so on down in the pit, to stepping up onto the stage. When the theatre opened in 1663, the King's House as it was known, Theatre Royal Drury Lane as we know it now, women were allowed on the stage for the first time, and that was obviously a big change, and that's something that would have made a deep impression on her. But she was noticed by the manager of the theatre, Tom Killigrew, and he obviously realized that she had a talent for mimicry, and I guess that must have been obvious in her banter. And he decided to give her a go on the stage and obviously she took to it. When I say she took to it, she took to comic roles. Her genius was for comedy. But if peeps is to believe, she made a complete hash of tragic roles, I mean, she hated them and she was no good at it. I guess the thing about comedy is there was a lot of License for ad libbing. And she obviously had that spontaneous humour. So it worked very well because this was at an age when, I guess, actresses for the first time and actors were seen as stars in their own right. So instead of coming to see a particular play, someone might come to the theatre to see their favorite actor or actress and so they would be presenting a particular Persona. And of course, if you were a comedian at the same time, then you could play up to that, you could develop your Persona as you were speaking to the audience. There was an opportunity before and after the play with the prologue and the epilogue, to ad lib and to address the audience directly. So I think she was in her element there. I mean, today she probably would have been a stand up comedian. She had that kind of talent, I think.
- [37:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And it's such an interesting opportunity, such a powerful position for a woman to be in. You can imagine from the late 16th century onwards through your work on Shakespeare, of course, the fall and the opportunity for male actors to ad lib, to add their opinions. But suddenly we've got a woman in that position speaking to the great and good of society.
- [38:20]
Charles Beauclerk
Yes. And really all her. The major relationships of her life grew out of the theatre. So first with Charles Hart, who is the leading actor of the day and a great Shakespearean actor, and then with Charles Buckhurst, who was also. He was a minor poet, but he again fell in love with her when he saw her acting a particular role. And then of course, the king himself really first got to know her through the theater. So, yes, when you're standing on that stage, then you know you are the king or you are the queen. And for that moment all the social hierarchy and the class system and so on, that is of no concern at all. I think it probably gave her the confidence actually socially, the theatre was that kind of alchemical still in which she was transformed.
- [39:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I think that's so interesting because it explains the leveling and possibly even, as you say, the inverse power relations that took place so that a king would court a commoner in that way. That's very clear. How about a sense of her humanity beyond mistress and actress? Was it easy to get at that?
- [39:35]
Charles Beauclerk
I think so, yes. I mean, she'd had a very tough upbringing. Her mother was an alcoholic and as far as we know, worked in a brothel. Really? And Nell and her sister worked there serving liquor to the gentleman. That's one of the earliest avocations we have for her. And her father died in a debtor's prison when she was a girl. So it was incredibly tough in those days and, you know, merely to have survived was quite an achievement. I think she was a tough woman. I don't think she had much self pity and she had a remarkable ability, which one sees also at court, just to shake off any criticism or mockery that comes her way. She just thinks, well, that comes with the territory and she's not going to waste any time thinking about it. So I think she was also a very kind person. We know that from the gifts that she gave people, the money that she gave to charity, even though she was never particularly wealthy herself. So I think she never lost sight of where she had come from that journey. Of course she couldn't because she had her mother around. I mean, her mother only died eight years before her and managed to disgrace herself wherever she went.
- [40:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In other words, it's a sense that she's not sentimental, even though she could be compassionate. I mean, if you think about not being able to play a tragic role and not pitying herself, there's a resilience there. Perhaps that is something that's forged in having an alcoholic mother and losing a father at a young age. But that gives her a kind of a chutzpah.
- [41:08]
Charles Beauclerk
Yes, I think so. And of course, the tragic drama was this heroic drama at the time, which I think she found rather false. It was a bit of forced chivalry growing again after the Puritan times. It was a kind of nostalgia show for the upper classes. It was artificial, rather awkward, almost impossible to read today, those plays. The comedy obviously reflects everyday life more, and to her it was real. But also I think just that after the puritan years, the 1650s, people wanted to be entertained and she realized that she had a gift for making people laugh.
- [41:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Was there anything you were surprised to learn about her?
- [41:49]
Charles Beauclerk
Yes, the thing that did surprise me was just how loyal she was. So I think uniquely among the mistresses of Charles ii, when she became his mistress, and she was his mistress for 17 years until he died, she was completely faithful to him. So she, as far as we know, didn't even look at anyone else. And that's extraordinary given how many mistresses he had and how many other relationships he was in. So that devotion towards him, that constancy, I think, was again a strong and commendable element of her character and very unusual for the times, especially for the court as well.
- [42:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What struck me most from what you've written about now was this essential charisma and intelligence. I mean, here's a woman that most of us would want to sit down and have a chat with. If you were in that position, what would you ask?
- [42:47]
Charles Beauclerk
I think it's always very revealing if you ask someone what the real sorrow of their life is, I think you learn a lot about them. And I would want to know that from her, I mean. Yes. One of her children died when he was only 8 or 9. Her youngest son, James. She obviously had a difficult upbringing, but I don't get a real sense of what it was. What was the real weak spot there, or when she was sitting on her own, what might she become melancholy about? We know she didn't take politics that seriously at all. Her politics consisted of being loyal to the king and encouraging other people to. And also encouraging him to be loyal to himself and to trust himself. So. Yes, what was it?
- [43:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What a brilliant question. We can now ditch all small talk in future, and we shall not ask anyone what they do ever again. We'll just ask them what their greatest sorrow is. It's fantastic. And were there things that you learned that challenged the perceptions of your own family history?
- [43:51]
Charles Beauclerk
I suppose it got me thinking a little bit about the inheritance from this very unusual union of the king and Mel Gwyn. And it was unusual, of course, when he died, he said, let not poor Nelly starve. But of course, compared to the other mistresses, she had very little. And when James came to the throne, she had less. Yes, she was comfortable for the two years that she survived the king. Actually less than two years. But when you're thinking in terms of. Her son was created the Duke of St Albans. But there weren't the landed properties or the wealth that you associate with a ducal family, and in fact, that often dwindled to almost nothing through the generations, and then suddenly a marriage would be made and it would flourish again. But it's almost as if that relationship, which for them was something blessed, you know, CS Lewis says in the Four Loves that every true friendship creates equals. So as such, it's a kind of rebellion. So this was a sort of rebellion at the heart of England at that time, and you would have thought then blessings would have flowed from that, but almost, you could say there was a kind of curse involved as well. There was a kind of emotional instability in a lot of her descendants and just sort of a sense that there wasn't this rootedness in the social system whereby there was a patrimony and it was handed down, etc. So people were looking for other paths, other messages, and meant there were a lot of, I would say, lost souls and wanderers and creatures of that Kind. So, yes, I think it was quite a troubled inheritance in many ways, because you've got that status, if you like, in name, but it's in name only.
- [45:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Finally, then, Charles, why do you think that Nell continues to fascinate us so many centuries later?
- [45:49]
Charles Beauclerk
I think it's because we have a very negative view of mistresses, and especially royal mistresses. And she's often been described as the only royal mistress who has increased the popularity of her monarch. And I think that's part of the secret that fascinates us. So you've got the excitement of that relationship of the mistress and the monarch, but you have the constancy as well. I mean, Charles, remember he was married. He married Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese princess. They didn't have any children, unfortunately. She had many miscarriages. He had 14 bastard children whom he acknowledged. And he may have had very many others who he did not acknowledge. His wife was a remarkable character because she never really became demoralized by the situation. And she too was loyal to him, even though he treated her very badly. But maybe there's this kind of fantasy that people have that this was the union that would have satisfied him most. Of course, it was impossible because of the social difference and so on and where she came from and the fact she'd been an actress and so on. But I think people are left wondering, if he had married Nell Gwynne, how would things have been different, you know, in the history of the country? We don't know. I mean, we know Charles got himself into all sorts of trouble by the promises he made to Louis XIV about converting to Catholicism. And he took a lot of money in return for that promise. And of course, he did convert or acknowledged his Catholicism on his deathbed. Nell Gwynne, of course, was a Protestant and she supported the Whig party, which I suppose flew the Protestant flag more than the court party at that time. I think the fascination is simply because her life is so strongly stamped with that patina of myth. So she seems almost like a fairy tale figure. And we expect fairy tale figures to transform others. And again, one can't help being disappointed. It doesn't matter who the king or queen happens to be. When you dig down, those reigns are always rather disappointing.
- [48:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I am struck by the fact that one reason why she may be particularly of interest to us today is that we have a King Charles who married his mistress and the sense of constancy, of love there. Somebody he couldn't marry because she wasn't sufficiently aristocratic. In the 1970s, it seems an interesting parallel.
- [48:25]
Charles Beauclerk
That is interesting. Of course, Camilla is not a Nell Gwyn figure in the sense of having that charisma and that ability to entertain and be a public figure in the way that Nell Gwyn was. I mean, I think she loved being out among the people, as it were. One thing she was not was shy. And there are many stories about her repartee among the people. But of course, when there were, I guess, official court occasions, we don't really know, but they may not have brought her to the fore. She may have been kept a little bit in the background.
- [48:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. Not glad handing and smiling as Camilla must do. Well, thank you, Charles, so much for your time. It's been really fascinating to talk to you.
- [49:05]
Charles Beauclerk
Not at all. Thank you very much.
- [49:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Coming up, I return to Dr. Laura Engel to talk about Nell as royal mistress and IT girl. Professor Engel, one thing I want to ask you about is about social disruption. Here we have a woman who's a commoner who becomes the king's mistress and is by his side for a long time despite other mistresses, other relationships, and becomes a subject of satire and pornography, polemic. How disruptive do you think she was? How subversive was this relationship?
- [49:50]
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That's a very good question. She didn't have two illegitimate children with him, one of whom lived to be an adult and the other one died as a child, which must have been very difficult for her. She was very canny in trying to secure titles for them. There's a really interesting story where one of Nell's children comes to visit his, wants to greet his father and Nell says, you know, here's your bastard. And Charles replies, you know, let's not call him that. And she says, well, I don't have another title to call him by. And then Charles makes him an earl. So she clearly was very interested in her children's future. She never asked for a title herself, but the idea that she was the mother of his children was complicated. He did not have any legitimate offspring. It was very anxiety provoking, the idea that he was somehow having children with all these other women but not really producing anything that was potentially stabilizing for the nation. So that coupled with the idea that her charisma, her sexuality, her hold on him might potentially influence him to do something beyond his control. That's, of course always the fear with women that somehow their quote unquote seductiveness went all the way back to Eve. So their seductiveness will somehow lead mankind astray. And I think that on the one hand, the celebration of nel Gwyn's sort of Cinderella rise from rags to riches is idealized. The flip side of that is that to threaten hierarchies and class divisions is to create havoc in society. So we see those two kind of competing ideologies happening throughout history, throughout the 18th century in particular. So I'm sure there were many camps of people who. Who believed many different things about Nelgwyn, and there were certainly attacks on her. There is a incredible miniature of her that surfaced in 2011 of her in that kind of interior domestic space making sausages. Which is clear. Yeah. Which is very. It's obscene and beautiful at the same time because she's dressed in this kind of beautiful sort of negligee underdress. She's wearing her signature pearls. She has a black attendant figure behind her, and she's baking sausage. It's a very complicated image, and I think echoes a lot of the anxieties about her ability to infiltrate domestic spaces that may not be her own, maybe the king's, her ability to literally produce offspring with the king and her relationship to her own power. So is she a slave? Is she too enslaved? She clearly has more power than the enslaved individual in the picture, and her whiteness is juxtaposed with his blackness. But there is an idea that it is possible to be enslaved by her body or enslaved by her sexuality, which is dangerous. This was a miniature meth for private use. So there were a lot of images circulating around Nelgwen that were both positive and negative.
- [53:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
How does her relationship with the king change that public image, not just as a pictorial form, but what people think of her? And how does she navigate that, this sort of court of public opinion?
- [53:41]
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She's out in public. She attends the theater. Aphra Behn writes a beautiful dedication to her for her play the Feigned Courtesans, which was a public thing. So she had to have solicited Nell's approval to write this dedication to her. But in the dedication, she talks about how famous Nell Gwyn is and how admired she is. She uses this phrase, beauties peculiar to yourself in the dedication. And I think that's really interesting because it illustrates how much of a appreciated public figure she was at the time. It illustrates how much it would have benefited Aphraban to say something very positive about Charles II's mistress. So obviously, she's trying to please the king. She's a Tory, She's a royalist. She's trying to please the king. So I think that that dedication is a really important artifact that we have of Nelgwyn's public recognition and her power as an idea. So she's risen from, you know, orange girl and young actress slash mistress, to a recognizable figure, not only because she's the adored mistress of the king, but also, I think, because she's a legendary actress. At that point, Quinn had retired from the stage. Gwyn didn't act in any of Ben's plays, but she went to see them and admired them. But the fact that Ben uses her as a kind of icon indicates to me that she navigated the public quite well. Other mistresses of kings did not fare as well. One can only think later on in the century about she wasn't a mistress of the king, but Dorothy Jordan and the Duke of Clarence. You know, 12 children ended up dying penniless and alone. So the fact that Nelgwen was able to keep her relationship with the king that his apparently, on his deathbed, he said to his advisors, don't let Nellie starve, means that she was able to negotiate that public, private divide, which isn't easy by any means.
- [56:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And may I ask you a little bit more about this balance between public admiration and public spectacle and private adoration. Is this why we see her immortalized as the first celebrity It Girl?
- [56:25]
Blue Nile Advertisement
Yes. I love this idea of the celebrity It Girl. I'm currently teaching a class on Taylor Swift and celebrity. We could potentially argue that Taylor Swift is the contemporary version of the It Girl, although there were many other It Girls. And it is something that obviously is ephemeral and hard to define. Joseph Roach does a wonderful job of it in his book is this often indescribable feeling of effervescence and attraction to an individual. And some of it is about beauty, and some of it is just about this kind of thing. You know, you know it when you see it. And I do think that Nell certainly has been mythologized as the original It Girl. She has a lot in common with Clara Bow, who was sort of reinvented as the It Girl in the early days of Hollywood. Clara Bow, too, had a very complicated childhood and rose to fame. But Clara Bow, unlike Nell Gwynn, had a much more difficult time negotiating her public and private, private Personas. And this is certainly a kind of enduring question, especially for female celebrities. How do you maintain your cool, your calm, your professionalism in a world that is ready to judge you, that is ready to objectify you, that is very, very interested in all aspects of your life? We've been talking a lot about that in the Taylor Swift course. The ways in which she negotiates her public and private Personas, but also creates a kind of intimacy with her fans by sharing much of her feelings in her private life in different ways in her songs and certainly in her manner, in her ways of relating to the audience on stage, but also in her documentary Ms. Americana. She's very clear about the ways in which the public has been often very unkind and caused her to retreat and then to reappear. So I do think that potentially Nel's protection from the King, the idea that she had a legitimate residence, that she had money, that she was comfortable, these were the things that allowed her to exist. Had he not offered her those kinds of comforts and amenities, we'd probably be telling a different story about Nelgor.
- [59:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, Dr. Engel, thank you so much for this fascinating idea of now, both as we've inherited her as a kind of immortalized legacy and we see her counterpart with Taylor Swift, though not the King's mistress as far as we're aware exactly, but also just this sense of her as a woman and what it took at that time in order to maintain that favor for so long. It's been deeply fascinating.
- [59:40]
Blue Nile Advertisement
Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
- [59:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tutors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors from History hit.
- [60:12]
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Dr. Laura Engel
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- [61:46]
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