Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Nell Gwyn: Celebrity Mistress of King Charles II About this episode How did a working class illiterate woman become King Charles II's favourite mistress?
Nell Gwyn was an incredibly talented comedy actor who came from a working class background, and was part of a group of pioneering women who were the first allowed to take to the stage to play women's roles.
Her personality was huge, audiences loved her ability to swear, and she was described as "the wildest creature to ever be seen at court." No wonder Charles loved her!
What was the wild world of 17th century Restoration Theatre like? How did she change comedy acting? What did the general public think of her?
Joining Kate to take us back to this world is Dr. David Taylor, Associate Professor of English at Oxford University.
You can also watch both Kate and David in the History Hit documentary, Sex and Scandal: Royal Favourites https://access.historyhit.com/royal-favourites, for more about Nell's extraordinary life.
This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
If you'd like to get in touch with the show you can contact us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] .
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Transcript 8,833 words · 13 speakers
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2:43 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you are listening to Betwixtersheets. And I'm so glad that you are, because if you weren't, what is this? It's just a mad northern woman talking to herself. So, thank God you are here. But before we can go any further, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way. Coming along with adults, some things are used to be an adult, too. I think we all know the drill by now, don't we? Right, on with the show!
3:18 Kate Lister? Good evening, betwixters! I'm shouting at you because it's very noisy in here. Come and take a seat. Here we are. It's the mid-1660s, and we are in for a rollicking evening of restoration theatre. It's good to get some culture in before the great fire and the plague arrives. But this isn't the respectful, high-class event that we think about when we say we're going to the theatre today. Tonight, we are seeing history being made, with women playing women's roles onstage for their very first time. What an absolutely
4:00 Kate Lister? mad idea. My God, they'll be writing stuff next. But not only that, there is one performer in particular who has caught everybody's attention, and that is a very, very, very young Nell Gwynn, or as Samuel Pepys called her, "pretty witty Nell." And she's also managed to catch the eye of the new flamboyant king, Charles II. Do you want to know more about this remarkable woman and the ultimate rags-to-riches story? Well, so do I. So, let's get on with it.
4:42 Speaker 04 What do you look for in a man?
4:44 Speaker 05 Oh, money, of course.
4:45 Speaker 06 You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks, do you?
4:47 Speaker 05 I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning the knob and pushing the button.
5:00 Speaker 06 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
5:02 Speaker 07 Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, dary.
5:11 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Nell Gwynn, or Mama, as I like to call her, was charismatic, hilarious, super smart, and talented as hell. Her story is so compelling because she came from absolutely nothing and went on to become the favourite mistress of a king. But how did this self-proclaimed Protestant whore climb the social ladder at a time when social mobility was almost impossible for everybody, but especially for women? What made her a pioneer of comedy acting? And how did the public react to her being such a visible mistress to their king?
5:55 Kate Lister? Well, joining me today is Dr David Taylor, Associate Professor of English at Oxford University, and he is going to take us back to the rough and ready world of Restoration Theatre, where Nell rose to fame.
6:11 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only David Taylor. How are you doing?
6:18 Speaker 08 I'm very, very well indeed. Very excited to be having this chat with you.
6:22 Kate Lister? Do you know something? This is a long time coming. This episode is so overdue. We've been doing this podcast now for like two years and we haven't done a special on Nell Gwynn. That's just ridiculous, isn't it?
6:34 Speaker 08 It is, but she's worth waiting for.
6:36 Kate Lister? She is worth waiting for, and you're worth waiting for. And by way of apology to all the Nell fans, we do also have a documentary on Nell that's coming out at the same time that you and I are both in. So we've gone full force.
6:48 Speaker 08 Absolutely.
6:48 Kate Lister? For this, because we love Nell.
6:51 Speaker 08 We really do.
6:52 Kate Lister? There will be people listening to this after that amazing introduction that I've given to Nell, people going, "Who?" Let's start with a real page one beginner question. Who was Nell Gwyn?
7:04 Speaker 08 So Nell Gwyn was perhaps the most famous mistress of King Charles II. King Charles II reigned from 1660 through to 1685. And the key thing to know about King Charles II is that he's a son of King Charles I, the beheaded King Charles I. So he was only 18 when he learned that his father had been executed for treason in 1649.
7:30 Kate Lister? Yikes.
7:31 Speaker 08 Britain, of course, goes through a period of civil war in the 1640s. And then in the 1650s, we have an English republic in which ultimately Oliver Cromwell is more or less the leader, the king in all but name. But once Cromwell dies in 1658, his son succeeds him, there's a bit of a power vacuum. And ultimately, that leads, to many people's surprise, to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Back comes Charles, Charles II, onto the throne. And he's a man of many mistresses.
8:04 Kate Lister? He has a big appetite, that lad, doesn't he?
8:06 Speaker 08 Oh, he has a very big appetite. And Nell is his most famous mistress. What's interesting about Nell in comparison to really pretty much all of his other major mistresses is that she is working class and she begins her career as an actress on the stage. Now, the stage is also important because the Puritans had closed down the theatres, the public theatres in 1662. And they remained shut until the king returned in 1660. So the theatres are reopened, just as England got its monarchy back. So Nell was one of the very first actresses because the really key thing is that this new theatre, the theatre after 1660, for the first time, features women performers.
8:52 Speaker 08 I mean, as many people will know, in Shakespeare's theatre in the early 17th century, all the female parts are played by adolescent boys. All that changes in 1660. You get this pioneering group of first actresses, and Nell is among that group.
9:08 Kate Lister? So she is the ultimate, she's working class girl made good. We'll get into this of like what she actually had to do to achieve those kind of social obstacles is insane. But there's a lot of mythology that surrounds it and it's kind of mad that she's still got that reputation today. People, even if they're not history buffs or they're not theatre buffs, they might still have heard the name of a mistress of King Charles from the 17th century. Like, what is it about this woman? Like, he had loads of mistresses and several of them were actresses. Why Nell? Why is she endured?
9:44 Speaker 08 That's such a great question. Yeah, I mean, Charles has multiple mistresses. Ultimately, he has at least 14 illegitimate children. We know of 14 illegitimate children by seven different women, but he had more mistresses than that and he almost certainly had more illegitimate children than that number.
10:01 Kate Lister? And he was married?
10:02 Speaker 08 And he was married, exactly. And he was to, you know, his poor, long-suffering wife, Catherine de Braganza. And it's interesting, I mean, if you go to Drury Lane Theatre in London, right opposite Drury Lane Theatre is a pub called Nell of Drury, right? She's part of the topography of London's theatre land. I think she's endured because she was such a personality. This is a woman who really embodies the kind of rags to riches story that we all love. And she's also a woman who had no time for the formalities, for the niceties of royal courts, okay? She was known to be very funny. She was known to swear
10:42 Speaker 08 a lot. And she was known to be always informal. The Bishop of Salisbury called her "the wildest creature ever to be seen at court."
10:50 Kate Lister? Wow.
10:51 Speaker 08 So I think that has a lot to do with it. And I think, I mean, that's, I think that has a lot to do with her during appeal. I think it also has a lot to do with why she appealed to Charles so much. She was such a breath of fresh air. For many of the other mistresses he had, lots of whom were from either the aristocracy or certainly from the higher classes. He did have other actresses as mistresses. Mole Davis is the other name in particular to mention. But Nell, I mean, Nell was known on stage for her witty parts. The Restoration diarist Samuel Peeps. refers to her early on as pretty witty Nell. And I think it's that sense of wit that she has on stage, the fact that she's not going to take anything from anyone. She's not going to take any rubbish from the men around her.
11:35 Speaker 08 I think it's that that also really appeals to Charles and I think that's really key also to her enduring popularity.
11:42 Kate Lister? What do we know about her very early life? Because as I'm sure that you will explain that we'll talk about is Nell was also master of her own PR and her own spin. I think that she was very much aware of the reputation that she had and she cultivated it. But what do we know about where she was born, for example? Do we have any information about that?
12:02 Speaker 08 The information we have is not necessarily especially reliable and it's also conflicting. We have some accounts that suggests that she was born in Hereford, others that suggest she was born in Oxford or in London. We can't even be sure of the year of her birth. It's either 1650 or 1651.
12:20 Kate Lister? Right, okay.
12:21 Speaker 08 She tells Samuel Peeps, who I've already mentioned, the diarist. She tells her, or at least he he reports that she's told her that she was brought up in a bawdy house to fill strong water for the guests. That is, she was brought up in a brothel to serve liquor to those who had come to the brothel.
12:37 Kate Lister? Okay.
12:38 Speaker 08 So she has a very strange and slightly obscure and almost certainly, you know, semi kind of criminal upbringing. We know, for instance, that her sister Rose was imprisoned for theft in the early 1660s.
12:55 Kate Lister? Right.
12:56 Speaker 08 Her mother was certainly an alcoholic and we don't know much about her father. Some reports have it that he died in debtors' prison in Oxford. Others suggest that he may have worked for Christ Church, a college and cathedral in Oxford. All that he may have fought for the royalist armed forces in the civil wars. But we have all of this slightly different and contradictory information. So her upbringing, to some extent, is shrouded in obscurity, which is perhaps not surprising for someone who's from a class where there would be few written records. Okay, why would anyone be noticing someone so seemingly insignificant? It does seem to be the case that she never learned to read or write, that she was illiterate, that she was... On the letters we have, they seem to have been written by other people
13:41 Speaker 08 and then simply signed by her as E. G. Eleanor Gwynne, which makes her career in this theatre all the more remarkable. How on earth did she learn her lines?
13:51 Kate Lister? Today, if you have a very working class background, if you manage to scale the upper echelons of society, or you get a job in being an actor and it's amazing, there is a certain amount of kudos around it of like that you've got this working class grit and, you know, determination. And we look at people with a background like that with a sort of like a, yeah, like they've, they've really been there. Not that there aren't severe social obstacles still for people born in working class environments. But in the 17th century, how would somebody with Nell's background been, have been looked upon? Would they have also thought, yeah, true grit determination? Or would it have been a very different attitude?
14:30 Speaker 08 Very different.
14:31 Kate Lister? Yeah.
14:32 Speaker 08 The extent of the prejudice would be extreme, really extreme. That absolutely dogged her throughout her career, as it dogged all of the actresses who are seen as working and working class women, right?
14:45 Kate Lister? Yeah.
14:45 Speaker 08 I mean, one satire of court life describes Nell as having been raised from the dung hill.
14:51 Kate Lister? See, that's not nice, is it?
14:53 Speaker 08 It's not nice. It's not nice. Another one of Charles's mistresses, Barbara Villiers.
14:59 Kate Lister? She was a cow. She, like, wow.
15:01 Speaker 08 Exactly. And she referred to Nell as that pitiful, strolling actress. What's interesting is she's never really accepted at court. She really, really isn't.
15:09 Kate Lister? No.
15:10 Speaker 08 And, I mean, I think she leans into that in some ways. I think perhaps she has no choice but to lean into that. Goes back to what I said before about her mischievousness, her perceived wildness, the fact she didn't go in for the kind of formalities and niceties of court. But absolutely, she is looked down upon. She's looked upon by many as dirt.
15:28 Kate Lister? It's a really effective psychological tactic that is you take the thing that people are trying to shame you for and you absolutely inhabit it and use it against them. And she's very bolshy about where she's come from, but it must have been difficult for her to grow up with that and moving in those circles. I have people saying that she came from a dung hill and.
15:48 Speaker 08 Absolutely. It's also interesting that Charles ennobles a number of his mistresses. We just, I just mentioned Barbara Villiers. She was made Duchess of Cleveland or another one of Charles's perhaps most influential mistress, Louise de Kerway. She was ennobled too as a Duchess, so Duchess of Portsmouth, whereas Nell was never given a title. She was never given a title. I think that's also very telling. And she had to work very hard from what we know to secure titles and recognition for the two sons that she had with the king who were eventually given, her elder son was eventually made an Earl. But she had to work very hard on that. And I think it's really, again, very telling that she was never given a title. She never gained that kind of recognition.
16:30 Kate Lister? Probably not helped by the fact as well that she was an actress. Like today, we meet famous actors and actresses and you might well faint and pass out. It's almost like a god has walked into the room. You're, oh my God, it's a famous person. That's not how actresses were viewed when they first took to the stage, was it?
16:49 Speaker 08 Not at all. So they were very new. This is something not seen before. Okay.
16:54 Kate Lister? Whose idea was that? Who? I mean, you know, hurrah. But who said it was okay for actresses to go on the stage?
16:59 Speaker 08 That's a great question. One story has it that Charles comes, you know, back. He's restored. He's on the throne in 1660. He's irrepressibly horny and therefore he wants to see women on stage.
17:11 Kate Lister? It's losing its nobility as you're talking.
17:13 Speaker 08 I'm sure it's part of that, but the simple fact was that lots of other European countries had long permitted women to perform on the public stage. Women have performed at court, so not professional actresses, earlier in the 17th century at the courts of James and of Charles the First. So England is a bit late to the party here. And it seems just to start happening at the, very late in 1660 as these theatres reopen. And I think one reason. And it's happening is simply that they're trying to remake theatre on the hoof. That makes sense. They've not got much to work with. People haven't been writing plays for a generation. Yeah. People haven't been acting in London for a long time. So it just feels like an opportunity for something new to happen. And so we get these women performing on stage. The first
17:56 Speaker 08 recorded example is December 1660, where an actress plays Desdemona in Othello. It's not until 1662 that there's a kind of royal proclamation that actually mentions that actresses are allowed to perform on stage. By that time, they've been doing so for a very, very long time. So there are these pioneering women, but to go back to your question of how they were seen, they were seen on the one hand as novelties. Yeah. They were entrancing. There was something completely new. And the number of actresses who became mistresses of fairly notable men, that bears that out. But at the same time, at these compelling presences publicly, almost celebrities, I think you could call them some of the first celebrities in England, they were also reviled. So to give you one example,
18:39 Speaker 08 one of the first actresses, Rebecca Marshall, mid-performance in 1667, she stops on stage because a man in the audience is calling out, calling the actress's rude names, probably words like whore. Oh. And she calls him out. She stops the performance and she calls him out. Go on, Lass, right. And chastises him for insulting her and her fellow actresses in this way. That same man hires ruffians to assault Rebecca Marshall in the street. And these ruffians rub excrement into her hair and onto her face. Oh my god. So that's how vicious things could get for these actresses. That is wild. Wow.
19:23 Speaker 08 That's how much prejudice and discrimination they faced. Because they were seen, Kate, they were seen as little better than prostitutes. This misogynistic logic was that there's no real difference between paying to watch a woman perform before you're on a stage in a public theatre and paying to have a woman perform for you in a private room. That was the logic.
19:50 Speaker 08 I'll be back with David and Nell after the short break.
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23:20 Kate Lister? So it's really complex, isn't it? On one hand, you've got this, like, they are admired. People are really excited to go and see them. Samuel Peeps certainly lost his shit about it, didn't he? He was ridicu-- in that way, there's only Samuel Peeps can, when he goes to see the actresses. People are dead excited, but also, there is this kind of like, ugh, these are just nasty women. These are cheap women.
23:44 Speaker 08 That's absolutely right, that sometimes we tend to see attraction repulsion as opposites. But in lots of ways, they come together, I think, in the way that people, and I say people, rich, affluent, powerful men are responding to these actresses. And Peeps is one example of affluent men who go backstage, who feel it's their right, their entitlement to go backstage into the dressing rooms, to go and watch these actresses dress and undress, essentially. So there's a kind of erotic appeal to be able to just wander backstage. So there's no privacy for these women. Even when they're offstage, they're still performing, okay? They've got no choice but to perform.
24:26 Kate Lister? This is really the history of sex work. This is how sex workers are still to this very day are caught in this very complex. That at one hand they're eroticised and people are fascinated by them, but also attracting a lot of hate and scorn. And it's, god, you'd need a psychologist to try and pick that one apart, but you're absolutely right. It's this dual side of revulsion and also attraction.
24:48 Speaker 08 Absolutely. And I mean, some of the satires, some of the attacks directed at Nell are utterly vile. I mean, they are, they're staggering by any standards, including today's standards. I mean, I could read you one if you'll let me.
25:02 Kate Lister? Yes, do it.
25:03 Speaker 08 This is a short, four-line kind of epigram that was circulating certainly at court as lots of these kind of scurrilous satires were, circulating in manuscript. And it becomes later known as On Nellie's Picture. And it reads, "She was so exquisite a whore that in the belly of her mother, she turned her cunt right before her father fucked them both together." So in other words.
25:27 Kate Lister? Fucking hell.
25:29 Speaker 08 What this is saying is.
25:30 Kate Lister? Shit.
25:31 Speaker 08 She was a whore before she was unborn. And she was such a whore before she was unborn.
25:35 Kate Lister? Wow.
25:35 Speaker 08 This unborn child turned her own vagina so that her father, when he was having sex with her mother, was also having sex with the unborn Nell. That's how vicious, that's how misogynistic things were. I mean, that's, that's what Nell was facing and facing on a daily basis.
25:52 Kate Lister? I feel like I need to go and sniff some Detol or something. That was just horrendous.
25:57 Speaker 08 Isn't it?
25:58 Kate Lister? Like, when you said it's really bad, I thought like, oh yeah, go on then Restoration guys, bring it at me. But that's horrendous.
26:04 Speaker 08 They could be so vile and so vicious. And these things, these little poems circulated as a kind of forms of scandal and gossip.
26:12 Kate Lister? Yeah.
26:12 Speaker 08 And hand to hand. And Nell must have known about things like this. She would have absolutely. It wouldn't surprise me if people had said these things to her face, quite frankly.
26:21 Kate Lister? When did she get her first gig on the stage then? How does Nell go from possibly being born in a brothel? We're not sure, but obscure, very working class origins to being one of the first actresses on the stage? How does she even get the gig?
26:32 Speaker 08 Yeah, again, from what we know, what we do know is that she started her kind of career in the theatre, not on stage but off it. She started as an orange seller, so selling oranges.
26:41 Kate Lister? Orange, yes.
26:42 Speaker 08 To the audience. I mean, orange sellers themselves had a, had a reputation for being also sex workers.
26:48 Kate Lister? I've heard that, yes.
26:49 Speaker 08 How old is she? She's probably twelve or thirteen, depending where she's born. She's very, very young, okay? By sixteen sixty five, when she's fourteen or fifteen, she's acting on stage, probably only in small parts. It's in sixteen sixty five that she is noticed by someone like peeps. Then the theatres are shut for a period during the Great Plague. The plague hits London in sixteen sixty five, lasts into sixteen sixty six, wipes out a quarter, perhaps as much as a third of London's population. And throughout this time, the theatres are closed. When the theatres reopen again, late in sixteen sixty six, Nell suddenly becomes a star. And she's a star in comedies particularly. Comic plays are what she's best at. That's like her forte, isn't it?
27:34 Speaker 08 That's exactly, it's her forte. So at that stage, people start to write plays for her. That's when you know you've made it, I think, isn't it? Exactly, that's when you know you've made it. So that John Dryden, who will eventually become poet laureate, almost certainly writes perhaps Nell's biggest hit, a play called Secret Love for her. And in that, Nell plays this character Floramell, who is pursued by this libertine man called Celadon, a man who just isn't remotely interested in monogamy. And this is a particular character type in Restoration comedy. You see it again and again and again, these libertine men, all they want to do is pursue their own promiscuous appetites, women almost always being the collateral cost.
28:16 Speaker 08 What's wonderful about the character of Floramell, the part that not only Nell Gwynn played, but was almost certainly written for her, what's wonderful about that part is that she doesn't take any nonsense at all. And she's more than a match for Celadon. To the extent that Celadon, quite frankly, doesn't quite know whether he's coming or going towards the end of the play. In the final act of the play, she comes on stage dressed in man's clothes. Shocking. And she then proceeds more or less to impersonate the form of libertine masculinity that Celadon himself performs. And she encounters Celadon, and Celadon has two women on either arm. She outmans Celadon effectively and wins these two women off him, to his amazement.
28:59 Kate Lister? That's funny. That is funny.
29:01 Speaker 08 Before eventually revealing herself. And the play concludes with with Floramel and Celadon kind of getting together, agreeing to be a couple, but also, interestingly, not a kind of conventional couple. They say they won't use man and wife. They won't they won't use those terms. They didn't they didn't like those terms. Those terms will make a relationship go stale and that they're dull. So this is the kind of part that Nell was playing, parts that were feisty, parts that showed a kind of independence. Parts are basically in which a woman is not prepared to any take any shit from a man, or less. And Dryden, having had a success with Nell in Secret Love, wrote another play then, An Evening's Love.
29:41 Speaker 08 Again, with Nell playing the same kind of woman, again, opposite an actor called Charles Hart, who was, we also think was probably her lover, a much older man. Who also perhaps helped to train Nell as an actress. But Charles Hart and Nell became this incredible double act, a kind of box office hit of a of a double act.
29:58 Kate Lister? Okay.
29:59 Speaker 08 Hart playing these rakish men and Nell playing these independent, clever, witty women who would better those rakish men.
30:07 Kate Lister? Wow. So we think that this Charles Hart person may have been her first lover. I just have to remind ourselves, she's probably only about fourteen at this point. It's just such a mess, isn't it? But the other thing is, I'm not defending this, guys, but I would just to give a bit of context to this. Nell is in an insanely precarious situation, isn't she? Financially.
30:29 Speaker 08 Exactly, she is. And it's becoming a mistress for someone like Nell and for many of her fellow actresses. Was a means of security, a means of gaining security. Security financially, security in lots of ways, lifestyle ways, security also from attacks of the kind that I described earlier.
30:50 Kate Lister? Yeah.
30:51 Speaker 08 Of someone simply, you know, throwing excrement in your face in the street or the kind of poems that.
30:57 Kate Lister? Or just regular assaults that imagine these women would have been thought of as easy game.
31:01 Speaker 08 It provides a real level of security, a level of security and of prosperity that these women could not possibly otherwise have dreamt of. And these men. Did look after their mistresses. Nell was given a house to live in. She was given by the mid sixteen seventies. A very, very generous pension. That's pension, not in the sense that we'd use it now, but an annual allowance, an annual allowance by the court. Of four thousand and then it was increased to five thousand pounds.
31:27 Kate Lister? Fucking hell, go now.
31:29 Speaker 08 Sum of money. Okay. So she lives in a house given to her by the king in Palmael. A new house. She lives very lavishly and she's able to host these incredible soirees. Now, that is something that someone of Nell's upbringing, an alcoholic mother, perhaps a father imprisoned for debt. A sister who'd been imprisoned for theft, never seems to have learned to read or write. It's not something that someone of Nell's upbringing could have hoped for in her wildest dreams.
31:56 Kate Lister? No.
31:56 Speaker 08 So it gives her an unbelievable kind of security and prosperity.
32:00 Kate Lister? I've often thought about this. Was there any other means or career or anything open to a woman from Nell's kind of background that would mean that she could have eventually ended up? Where she did, and I can't, possibly being an actress, but even then you'd still need a man there to kind of protect. Would they ever have married her? Is a mistress as good as Nell could have got? Would they ever have married her?
32:21 Speaker 08 A mistress is as good as Nell could have got.
32:23 Kate Lister? Yeah.
32:23 Speaker 08 Absolutely. A mistress is as good as Nell could have got. The history of the actress, once you get into the eighteenth century. You do get occasions where aristocrats marry actresses.
32:32 Kate Lister? Sometimes they do, don't they?
32:33 Speaker 08 They do, exactly, but not at this stage. Absolutely not at this stage. I mean, Charles isn't going to marry Nell. He won't even give Nell a title, as I said before. So mistress is really as much as Nell could have hoped for. And the word mistress has a slightly different meaning for us today than it would there. To be a mistress of the king is to be someone who is acknowledged and recognised, who has a kind of. It is a big deal. And it comes with money, it comes with recognition, it comes with property, and indeed. Nell gained more and more property as her, her life with the king went on. It meant her children became part of a kind of aristocracy ultimately, her eldest son being a noble, as I said.
33:15 Speaker 08 So it's a kind of official position in the way that we might find peculiar to think about. It's something recognised.
33:21 Kate Lister? Do you know when she met Charlie Boy, him thirsting after actresses on the stage? When did Nell and Charles meet?
33:28 Speaker 08 Really good question. So we can't be certain. It must be by 1669. Probably not much time before that. I mean, she has a second lover after Charles Hart, Charles Sackville, the Lord Buckhurst, in 1667. But by 1669, she's definitely with Charles. It seems to be that the Duke of Buckingham, one of Charles's chief ministers, probably pushed Nell forward as a mistress. Again, these things are kind of organised and probably pushed Nell forward as a mistress for the king, precisely to try and weaken the influence of other mistresses, probably in particular Barbara Villiers. So Nell gets pushed forward as mistress. She's certainly the king's mistress by 1669 because she's pregnant.
34:10 Speaker 08 She's pregnant with the king's child, a son who will be called Charles.
34:14 Kate Lister? That's the aim really, if you're the mistress, get up the duff and get up the duff fast.
34:18 Speaker 08 Right, absolutely.
34:20 Kate Lister? Because then there's a baby and he has to care for the baby, acknowledge the baby.
34:23 Speaker 08 Well, I mean.
34:24 Kate Lister? He doesn't have to, does he actually? You hope he does.
34:26 Speaker 08 He does. In some cases with his illegitimate children, it takes him longer to recognise them. But generally by this point, so their first son is born in 1670 and is recognised. And in fact, Nell's former lover, Lord Buckhurst, is one of the godparents, along with the Duke of Buckingham, who almost certainly helped to arrange Nell's arrival as a royal mistress. So it means a lot for her to be pregnant. Also shows Charles's virility.
34:52 Kate Lister? Yeah, because his wife never had any, he's just raising this army of illegitimate children and his poor wife never actually gets pregnant, does she?
35:02 Speaker 08 She gets pregnant. She gets pregnant three times between 1666 and 1669. So just before Nell becomes mistress. All of those miscarry.
35:12 Kate Lister? Even worse.
35:13 Speaker 08 And she's been married to the king, you know, by the time Nell comes on the scene for getting on for a decade. So by that point, I think most people have accepted that she's never going to be able to give the king a legitimate heir. But obviously, Charles's virility is therefore called into question. But when Charles is impregnating his mistresses, then his virility cannot be questioned.
35:37 Kate Lister? Do we know what Charles and Nell's relationship was like? Did they get along? Was it happy times?
35:43 Speaker 08 I think it must have been happy times because otherwise, once she was the king's mistress in 1669, she stayed one of his mistresses all the way through to his death in 1685. And at least one story has it that one of the last things that Charles said on his deathbed to his brother, James, Duke of York, his heir, who would go on to become King James II, one of the last things he said to his brother was, "Take care of poor Nell." So I like to think that's true. I'd like to think that he is thinking about Nell. And that's borne out in the sense that James II, when he does become king, actually continues Nell's pensions. They're not stopped, they're continued. So he does look after Nell.
36:29 Kate Lister? I'll be back with David and Nell after the short break.
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37:47 Kate Lister? The funny thing about the situation, you've got to try and imagine it, I just can't, like, what would it have been like to exist in this environment? It's not like Charles had one mistress and just one mistress alone. He had a whole fleet of them and they would hang out together and like play cards together and move in the same circles as one another and like literally be in competition to try and like, I don't know what, shag the king, see him that night. It's such a weird setup.
38:12 Speaker 08 It's such a weird setup. It made even more weird by the fact you've got these key political players in Charles's court who are trying to make sure that one mistress is more prominent than the other because the mistresses were seen to be influencing the king. That was another major criticisms of Charles II was that ultimately he was being swayed by his mistresses. The Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot, a famous poet.
38:37 Kate Lister? That's scallywag.
38:38 Speaker 08 Well, exactly. So he, I mean, exactly, talk about men who can't keep it in their pants. He writes a satire about the king, which actually, rather hilariously, he inadvertently gives to the king and is banished from court because of it. He gives a copy to the king, but in it, Rochester says of the king, "Nor are his high desires above his strength. His scepter and his prick are of a length, and she, she may sway the one who plays with the other." The mistresses can sway the king. Okay. That's also a major concern publicly about the king's role is, well, these women who are so important to his life, exactly what influence are they having? I mean, it's especially the case, Nell actually comes off relatively well in this respect
39:23 Speaker 08 because she's English and she's Protestant.
39:26 Kate Lister? Yeah.
39:26 Speaker 08 And this is a time of real religious tensions, whereas the king's most powerful mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, is French and Catholic, which is why famously, one of the famous scenes of Nell's life is when her coach is accosted by a mob, probably during a period of history that we call the exclusion crisis, where there was real fears of a kind of the country turning Catholic and an attempt to exclude. James, Duke of York, the King's brother and heir, from the throne because he was Catholic. This mob surrounds the coach of Nell Gwynne and she leans out and she says, don't worry, I'm the Protestant whore. The idea being that I'm not the Duchess of Portsmouth, I'm not French, I'm not Catholic.
40:09 Speaker 08 Which also shows how kind of mischievously Nell would lean into the kind of aspects of the reputation that we've discussed. But she's always competing with all these other mistresses. We know of one occasion where Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, insults her, is rude to her in some way, and Nell claps her on the shoulder and turns her around and says, clearly, women of the same trade can't get along. And it's a brilliant way of taking down Barbara Villiers' several pegs by saying, look, we're no different. Why do you think you're in any way better than me?
40:47 Kate Lister? I love Nell. I love her so much. I've also read, and I'm not sure if this is true, but one of the reasons that she was so popular, because she had a great PR team. People loved her. But one of the reasons might have been because she wasn't that politically ambitious. I don't know how true that is.
41:04 Speaker 08 I think that's true. Certainly there's a truth to it in that compared to some of the other mistresses, she wasn't really acting politically.
41:12 Kate Lister? Hmm.
41:13 Speaker 08 In the way that someone like Louise de Kerway, the Duchess of Portsmouth, was certainly working politically. Or Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, she was also clearly in some ways trying to influence Charles. Or other people were trying to influence Charles through her. That doesn't seem much to have been the case with Nell. And so I think she probably would have been reassuring
41:35 Kate Lister? Yeah.
41:36 Speaker 08 in those terms, that she wasn't someone who had a kind of particular political agenda in play.
41:42 Kate Lister? You can sort of understand, I mean, it would never, ever, ever happen today, but you can see how somebody who wasn't elected and has no political background, rising to become the advisor to somebody who, you know, the rightful heir, somebody who exerts that much power and they absolutely shouldn't, they're just really there because they're their best friend, they can be very unpopular.
42:02 Speaker 08 Exactly. And this is a king also, I should add, who has a troubled relationship with parliament. His father had a terrible relationship with parliament.
42:10 Kate Lister? Yes, he's got to be very careful, doesn't he?
42:12 Speaker 08 And the son has a terrible relationship with parliament too. His biggest problem is his lack of money. He's a very poor king. You know, he looks across the English Channel to the likes of his cousin Louis XIV, staggeringly wealthy. And he could only dream of that kind of wealth and power. And in fact, then Charles is being subsidized by Louis XIV.
42:33 Kate Lister? Wow, didn't know that.
42:34 Speaker 08 There's a secret treaty in 1670 that Charles signs, and in return for a lot of money, over £200,000 a year, that's a huge sum of money at the time.
42:42 Kate Lister? Wow.
42:43 Speaker 08 Charles says that he will convert the country to Catholicism and announce his own Catholicism. Now, of course, Charles never does that. I mean, Charles converts to Catholicism on his deathbed. Had that secret treaty been known, you would have had another civil war. There's no way that Charles could possibly have survived that. So it's a time where there's still huge political and religious tensions. All of this, of course, the fact that Charles is so poor makes it still more remarkable that he's giving Nell four or five grand a year.
43:10 Kate Lister? I know. I don't, just stop shugging all these very expensive women then, you absolute maniac. They seem to have a good relationship, they seem to be on top bantering terms, and they have a few children together. And as you said, he does legitimize them. Well played, Nell. The real issue that is going to face any mistress or any side piece in history ever is when he dies. Because that is not good news for a mistress. And in most of these examples, they're not very popular because of the influence that they wield. And then as soon as the king is dead, they are out on their ear. That happens a lot. How does Nell play this?
43:46 Speaker 08 We can't say for sure how Nell plays it, but you're right that it must have been a very scary moment.
43:51 Kate Lister? Yeah.
43:52 Speaker 08 Very scary moment.
43:53 Kate Lister? Madame de Barry out on her ear as soon as the king's on his deathbed, gone.
43:57 Speaker 08 Right, but as I said, luckily, she's amassed quite a lot of property by the time Charles dies and she keeps that. She has a pension that Charles's heir, James, you know, keeps giving to her.
44:10 Kate Lister? And she's legitimised her children as well.
44:12 Speaker 08 And exactly, she's legitimised her children and particularly her eldest child, Charles, who is his Earl of Burford, okay, and who has a kind of relatively successful army career. So she's managed to kind of, sorry, embed herself. And also she's got a number of security mechanisms. Now, it's true that all of those, I suppose, the pension, the property, all of those could have been taken away away from her, but they're not taken away from her. But of course, the other, the sad thing is that she doesn't outlive Charles very much. She outlives Charles by only two years.
44:42 Kate Lister? Do we know what happened? I've, I've never been able to get much detail on this. She only made it to thirty seven.
44:47 Speaker 08 Yeah, the accounts we have say that she died of an apoplexy, sort of the word, she died of something like a stroke.
44:54 Kate Lister? At thirty seven?
44:55 Speaker 08 Yes, now, almost certainly, that was related to sexually transmitted disease.
45:00 Kate Lister? Ah, there we go, yeah, yeah.
45:02 Speaker 08 So we know, for instance, that Charles the Second has syphilis or some other sexually transmitted disease by the mid sixteen seventies and that he was passing it to his other mistresses. It seems very likely that Nell also suffered from syphilis. The chances are that the stroke that she died from was in an effect of her syphilis in some sense. So ultimately, the, the kind of, the life that she's had and had, and had to lead has a serious and an ultimately fatal impact on her health.
45:31 Kate Lister? Her will still exists, doesn't it?
45:33 Speaker 08 It does still exist. And one of the things it shows actually is that she, her reputation for charity was absolutely deserved. She gives money to various charities, to the poor, for instance. She spent very lavishly, but she also clearly did keep thinking about those who lived the life that she had expected to lead herself when she was born.
45:55 Kate Lister? She left money to get people out of debtor's prison, didn't she, and things like that?
45:59 Speaker 08 Exactly.
46:00 Kate Lister? And for people in poor houses and like the real destitute people.
46:03 Speaker 08 Exactly. And again, I wonder whether that bears out the fact that her father had indeed died in a debtor's prison. I mean, these debtor's prisons were appalling, you know, so that you've, in this period and long after, you could be arrested for debt and kept there until your creditors were satisfied. And the conditions of these debtor's jails were appalling, utterly appalling. Places that were utterly unsanitary, in which disease spread very, very fast.
46:28 Kate Lister? So as a final question then for this, I just love Nell, I just love her so much. What do you think Nell's legacy is? Because it's very easy to look at her story. Actually, why are we glamorizing this? She was a working class child, she was clearly abused. There's a lot of nastiness to this story when you actually look at it. I actually see a lot of power and agency in it, but what do you think this woman's legacy is?
46:53 Speaker 08 I think there is power and agency in it. I think you've got to think about what choices she had.
46:58 Kate Lister? Yes.
46:58 Speaker 08 I think what you can say about Nell is that she seized every opportunity given to her.
47:04 Kate Lister? Yes.
47:04 Speaker 08 She is this working class, illiterate woman, and yet she makes a wonderful career for herself in the theatre. And then she manages to become one of the king's favourite mistresses.
47:15 Kate Lister? And stay there.
47:16 Speaker 08 And stay there, exactly. And stay there and keep being appreciated and gain recognition for her children. So that she's a woman who's a brilliant, brilliant opportunist. She's also a pioneer. She's absolutely a pioneer that at the time, these first actresses such as Nell would have been considered obviously whores, but they were pioneers. They worked incredibly hard, having to learn multiple roles, having to perform in incredibly hostile environments to make sure they got paid every week to get a name for themselves. So she's a pioneer, absolutely a pioneer.
47:50 Kate Lister? Would you say as well that she's one of the first women in comedy, one of the first female comedians?
47:54 Speaker 08 Absolutely. Peep says that of her, I think it's her role in Dryden's Secret Love, which I mentioned earlier, that it's the greatest comic performance the world has ever seen. Of course, we remember her as one of the king's mistresses, but we must also remember her as an unbelievable pro at a point when it was really hard to be a pro. She was absolutely a pioneering comedian. I think you could even argue that the kind of comic part that she became famous for changed comedy and changed the way that women are represented in comedies. I think you could absolutely argue that, too.
48:24 Kate Lister? David, you have been fabulous to talk to. Thank you so much.
48:27 Speaker 08 A pleasure.
48:28 Kate Lister? If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
48:31 Speaker 08 What I would encourage people to do is to go to a website called r18collective.org. I'm one of a group of scholars who are working on this period of theatre, and that's a place to go to find out more about it, and especially the wonderful plays by women of this period that we've completely forgotten about.
48:49 Kate Lister? Amazing. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself.
48:53 Speaker 08 Pleasure. Thank you.
49:00 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to David for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. And as I mentioned in the interview, be sure to check out the two-part documentary on History Hit TV called Sex and Scandal: Royal Favourites. Episode One looks at George Villiers, who was favourite to King James I, and Episode Two, which David is on, is all about our favourite Mama Nell Gwynn. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to email us to say hello, then you can do so at [email protected] . Coming up, we have got the third episode in our mini-series on history's worst foot boys, and it's Casanova's time to be stepping into the spotlight, and we'll be learning
49:44 Kate Lister? what happens on a medieval wedding night. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again at Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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Previous History's Worst F*ckboys: Emperor Caligula Next History's Worst F*ckboys: Casanova Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated