Background
Eleanor Gwyn was born on February 2, 1650 in Hereford, Herefordshire, United Kingdom.
1672
Nell Gwyn as Cupid c. 1672; engraving by Richard Thomson, of a painting by Peter Cross. Pepys owned a copy of this engraving and displayed it over his desk at the Admiralty.
1680
Portrait of Nell Gwyn by Simon Verelst
Portrait of Nell Gwyn as Venus, by Peter Lely. Charles II had this hung behind a landscape, which he swung back to allow favoured guests to peer at.
Eleanor Gwyn was born on February 2, 1650 in Hereford, Herefordshire, United Kingdom.
Various anonymous verses are the only other sources describing her childhood occupations: bawdyhouse servant, street hawker of herring, oysters, or turnips, and cinder-girl have all been put forth. Tradition has her growing up in Coal Yard Alley, a poor slum off Drury Lane.
Around 1662, Nell is said to have taken a lover by the name of "Duncan" or "Dungan". Their relationship lasted perhaps two years and was reported with obscenity-laced acidity in several later satires. Duncan provided Gwyn with rooms at a tavern in Maypole Alley, and the satires also say he was involved in securing Nell a job at the theatre being built nearby.
During the decade of protectorate rule by the Cromwells, pastimes regarded as frivolous, including theatre, had been banned. Charles II had been restored to the English throne in 1660, and quickly reinstated the theatre. One of Charles' early acts as king was to license the formation of two acting companies and to legalise acting as a profession for women. In 1663 the King's Company, led by Thomas Killigrew, opened a new playhouse, the Theatre in Bridges/Brydges Street, which was later rebuilt and renamed the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
Mary Meggs, a former prostitute nicknamed "Orange Moll" and a friend of Madam Gwyn's, had been granted the licence to "vend, utter and sell oranges, lemons, fruit, sweetmeats and all manner of fruiterers and confectioners wares," within the theatre. Orange Moll hired Nell and her older sister Rose as scantily clad "orange-girls", selling the small, sweet "china" oranges to the audience inside the theatre for a sixpence each. The work exposed her to multiple aspects of theatre life and to London's higher society: this was after all "the King's playhouse", and Charles frequently attended performances. The orange-girls would also serve as messengers between men in the audience and actresses backstage; they received monetary tips for this role and some of these messages would end in sexual assignations.
The new theatres were the first in England to feature actresses; earlier, women's parts had been played by boys or men. Gwyn joined the rank of actresses at Bridges Street when she was fourteen, less than a year after becoming an orange-girl.
If her good looks, strong clear voice, and lively wit were responsible for catching the eye of Killigrew, she still had to prove herself clever enough to succeed as an actress. She was reputed to have been illiterate. She was taught her craft of performing at a school for young actors developed by Killigrew and one of the fine male actors of the time, Charles Hart, and learned dancing from another, John Lacy. It is possible that she first appeared in smaller parts during the 1664-1665 season.
The Great Plague of London shut down the Bridges Street theatre, along with most of the city, from mid-1665 until late 1666. Gwyn and her mother spent some of this time in Oxford, following the King and his court. The King's Company is presumed to have mounted some private theatrical entertainments for the court during this time away from the virulent capital. Gwyn and the other ten "women comedians in His Majesty's Theatre" were issued the right (and the cloth) to wear the King's livery.
After the theatres reopened, Gwyn and Hart returned to play role after role that fit the mould of the gay couple, including in James Howard's The English Monsieur (December 1666), Richard Rhodes' Flora's Vagaries, an adaptation of John Fletcher's The Chances by George Villiers, and then in their greatest success, Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen.
Eleanor Gwyn returned to the stage again in late 1670. Her return was in Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, a two-part epic produced in December 1670 and January 1671. This may have been her last play; 1671 was almost certainly her last season. Nell Gwyn's theatrical career spanned seven years and ended at the age of 21.
In March 1687, Eleanor Gwyn suffered a stroke that left her paralysed on one side. In May, a second stroke left her confined to the bed in her Pall Mall house. Nell Gwyn died from apoplexy "almost certainly due to the acquired variety of syphilis" on 14 November 1687, at ten in the evening, less than three years after the King's death. She was 37 years old. She was buried in the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, on 17 November 1687.
Quotes from others about the person
Comte de Gramont, remembering the events of 1681: "Nell Gwynn was one day passing through the streets of Oxford, in her coach, when the mob mistaking her for her rival, the Duchess of Portsmouth, commenced hooting and loading her with every opprobrious epithet. Putting her head out of the coach window, "Good people", she said, smiling, "you are mistaken; I am the Protestant whore."
The love affair between the King and Gwyn allegedly began in April 1668. Gwyn was attending a performance of George Etherege's She Wou'd if She Cou'd at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. In the next box was the King, who from accounts was more interested in flirting with Nell than watching the play. Charles invited Nell and her escort to supper, along with his brother the Duke of York.
By mid-1668, Gwyn's affair with the King was well-known, though there was little reason to believe it would last for long. She continued to act at the King's House, her new notoriety drawing larger crowds and encouraging the playwrights to craft more roles specifically for her. June 1668 found her in Dryden's An Evening's Love, or The Mock Astrologer, and in July she played in Lacy's The Old Troop. As her commitment to the King increased, though, her acting career slowed, and she had no recorded parts between January and June 1669, when she played Valeria in Dryden's very successful tragedy Tyrannick Love.
King Charles II had a considerable number of mistresses through his life, both short affairs and committed arrangements. He also had a wife, Portuguese Queen consort Catherine of Braganza, whose pregnancies all ended in miscarriages, and she had little or no say over Charles's choice to have mistresses. This had come to a head shortly after their marriage in 1662, in a confrontation between Catherine and Barbara Palmer which became known as the "Bedchamber crisis". Ostracised at Court and with most of her retinue sent back to Portugal, Catherine had been left with little choice but to acquiesce to Charles's mistresses being granted semi-official standing.
During Gwyn's first years with Charles, there was little competition in the way of other mistresses. Nell gave birth to her first son, Charles, on 8 May 1670. This was the King's seventh son - by five separate mistresses. Several months later, Louise de Kérouaille came to England from France, ostensibly to serve as a maid of honour to Queen Catherine, but also to become another mistress to King Charles, probably by design on both the French and English sides. She and Gwyn would prove rivals for many years to come.
In February 1671, Nell moved into a brick townhouse at 79 Pall Mall. The property was owned by the crown and its current resident was instructed to transfer the lease to Gwyn. It would be her main residence for the rest of her life.
Eleanor Gwyn gave birth to her second child by the King, christened James, on 25 December 1671. Sent to school in Paris when he was six, he died there in 1681. The circumstances of the child's life in Paris and the cause of his death are both unknown, one of the few clues being that he died "of a sore leg".