The perils of being a royal mistress 3
We have spoken about ladies-in-waiting and the ease of their transition to the role of royal mistress. Sometimes, however, a woman is just so gosh-darn attractive that the king plucks her from the lower orders and keeps her as a pet. For a while.
Say hello then to Nell Gwynn, prostitute and actress (then, as now, the two professions were often considered one and the same), born in London in 1650 in the midst of the revolutionary Puritan rule of England. She seems to have grown up in a brothel but was attracted to the life of the stage where, since the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, for the first time in English history women were allowed to take women’s parts. By her mid-teens she had moved from being an orange-seller in the theatre to increasingly large roles in plays, especially comedies. Her reputation as “pretty, witty, Nell” attracted a series of noble lovers and by 1668 she had captured the attention of dissolute King Charles II.
Charles II kept a string of mistresses, often juggling more than one at a time, so there was no reason to think that Nell’s tenure would be a long one. In 1670 she gave birth to a royal bastard, whom she named Charles. The king had so many illegitimate children that he was known as “The Father of his Country” but he was uncommonly good to them, handing out royal titles and pensions with an open hand; in fact many of today’s English upper crust owe their noble status to these episodes. Nell’s son became the Duke of St. Albans.
Charles was a secret Catholic who was receiving bribes from French king Louis XIV to openly proclaim himself a member of the Church of Rome and to bring the country into obedience to the pope but by this time anti-Catholicism had become the English popular religion. Thinking Nell’s coach to be that of the king’s Catholic mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, an Oxford mob created a disturbance — to quell it, she stepped out and cried “Good people you are mistaken; I am the Protestant whore.”
Nell was a gambler and big spender, leaving her frequently in debt. On Charles’s deathbed he asked of his brother and heir James II, “Let not poor Nelly starve.” She died in 1687, probably of syphillis. She requested that her funeral sermon be preached on the text from Luke 15: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”