Adolescent Nell

I watched a programme about the history of Covent Garden and also listened to a BBC history podcast earlier this year about the life of Nell Gwyn, who lived there in the 17th century.  Most people know something of Nell's story, how she started off as an orange-seller in a London theatre, how she transitioned to the stage, as an actress achieved fame and caught the eye of noblemen and eventually King Charles II, became the king's mistress, bore him a child and soon thereafter 'retired'. 

What struck me most forcibly listening to the podcast was that she achieved all of this in her supposedly adolescent years! She was only just into her teens when she started as an orange-seller and she had only just turned twenty when she became a mother and gave up her acting career. That's extraordinary, isn't it, by today's standards? Not so unusual perhaps when one considers that in the previous century, both Catherine of Aragon and Catherine Howard were only sixteen when they made their Tudor marriages. 

Maybe  adolescence  (from the Latin adolescere , to mature) was much more aligned to physical rather than emotional maturity prior to the 20th century. It must be fairly obvious that nowadays, certainly in the more affluent and enlightened West (since the education and welfare reforms of the last hundred years) youngsters can enjoy the luxury of an extended childhood.

Anyway, historical comparisons aside, I decided to head off into the bountiful worldwide web to find out more concerning the  remarkable adolescent years of  mistress Nell Gwyn. 

Eleanor 'Nell' Gwyn, 1650-1687

Information about her early life is both somewhat patchy and conflicting. It's believed she was born in 1650, a year into the country's short flirtation with puritan Republicanism (1649-1660). Her birthplace may have been Hereford, or Oxford, or London (they all lay claim), though the latter has the strongest case, given that's where we know Nell (given name Eleanor) grew up, in Covent Garden. She was "low-born", a euphemistic description of her working-class origins, the younger daughter of a mostly absent and sometime convict father and a mother who was proprietor of a bawdy-house.

It's also almost certain that she was illiterate, for there was no schooling available to poor girls of her day. She would have grown up in her mother's brothel in Coal Yard Alley, just off Drury Lane, and along with her "notorious" sister Rose she would have served "strong waters" to the clientele. There is a suggestion she may have taken a lover of her own when she was twelve years old.

Her first break (if you can call it that) was to be recruited by one Mary Meggs (aka Orange Moll) who had a licence to "vend oranges, lemons, sweetmeats" within the King's Theatre off Drury Lane - for by 1663 the dour days of the Republic were gone, the monarchy had been restored with fun-loving King Charles II on the throne and the theatres had re-opened. Mary Meggs' scantily-clad "orange girls" sold fruit to the patrons of the shows and were often tipped to take messages from high-society men in the audience to the actresses backstage. 

Nell soaked it all up, the atmosphere, how the theatre worked, and being both pretty, precocious and with a comic talent had soon managed to persuade the management to enrol her in the theatre's acting school in 1664, aged fourteen, where she was given small parts to begin with in plays and revues. Note that she was among the first wave of female actors, for prior to the Restoration of 1660 women's parts had always been played by boys and men. Not that Nell herself was averse to cross-dressing either. From time to time she dressed as a man with a false beard and called herself William Nell. Because she couldn't read, she learned her lines by rote from listening to others reading them and on top of that she improvised. She was a natural performer and by her mid-teens had become something of a sensation for playing in John Dryden's heroic drama 'The Indian Emperor ' as the love interest of the main actor Charles Hart, who was at the same time her real-life lover. 

By 1667 she had secured her acting reputation and offstage she numbered actors and earls among her paramours. In fact during that year the Duke of Buckingham took on the role of unofficial manager of Nell's love affairs and through that connection she came to the notice and soon to the bed of the King of England. Charles II made no secret of his mistresses. His Queen, Catherine of Braganza, could not bear him any children but he already had six from four separate mistresses by the time he took up with Nell. She rather archly called him Charles the Third because she'd already had two previous lovers with that name. He is said to have adored her for her quick wit and forthrightness as well as for her other charms.

Nell portrayed as Venus with her son as Cupid

Nell continued to appear regularly on the stage in tandem with being the King's favourite mistress through to the end of the decade when she fell pregnant with his son. Baby Charles was born early in 1670 and soon afterwards Nell made a triumphant return to acting and was the talk of the town again. However, she chose to retire aged just twenty when she became pregnant with a second royal bastard, after which the King installed her in a town house on Pall Mall within sight of the royal palace. He also gave her Burford House on the edge of his Windsor estate and for the next fifteen years Nell would be a sometime companion to the King, dividing her time between London and Windsor according to the King's movements. Not bad going for the illiterate little orange-seller who'd grown up in a brothel. She was apparently very tolerant, if sometimes scornful, of his other mistresses.

She'd never expected that her royal affair would last, but she made it work for her and she was always in the King's affections. Charles II kept that portrait of Nell as Venus hidden behind a landscape painting, but he would reveal it occasionally to guests who he though might find it of interest. And when he died in 1685, he left instructions for his brother (James II) that Nell Gwyn was to be well cared for, and so she was, living on in the Pall Mall house until her own death (from a stroke) two years later, aged just thirty-seven. She lives on in social and theatrical folklore, and various streets and buildings named in her memory.

I've been sorting through some old photographs recently and was struck by a similarity between the paintings of Nell Gwyn above (both painted by Sir Peter Lely when she was twenty) and that of a girl I knew fleetingly back in my own adolescence in Cambridge. I think it's the bosoms! Linda was the sister of a schoolfriend of mine, she was a student and part-time photographer's model, lived life to the full and barely made it into her twenties. I kept her picture (admittedly rather creased by the years) for sentimental reasons that you may care to guess at.

Linda Martin, 1952-1972 

As for my own adolescent years, I suspect they were fairly typical for a middle-class boy in the 1960s into early 1970s. There was embarrassment about one's conservative (i.e. 'square') parents, concern that the world might go up in an atomic fireball, worry about passing exams, about acne, the size of one's cock, making out with girls, being caught masturbating or using drugs, finding part-time jobs to fund buying clothes/records/books/beer, taking girls out (it was expected the boy would pay) and going to the football (those last two being mutually exclusive back then). It was a struggle but it was fun, And I left home as soon as I could.

I also wrote poetry, mostly for its own sake, sometimes for the school magazine, occasionally for girlfriends. I didn't keep much of it, as I didn't think it would stand the test of time, but I do have a couple of poems dating from those teenage years. I've shared this one before in an early Dead Good Blog back in 2014, but I'll reproduce it here in lieu of anything new this week:

Saturday

I open the window

into a cold and rainy morning.

The grey streets

are full of grey people

with frowns on their faces

and water in their shoes

cursing the day they were born.

So I turn back to Friday night

for you are smiling and warm.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)