The King's City

by Don Jordan

  get Engines made, and apply them to the Stars; Recipients made, and try Conclusions; but they are never the more Philosophers for all this . . . not every one that brings from beyond Seas a new Cun, or other jaunty device, is therefore a philosopher. For if you reckon that way, not only Apothecaries and Gardeners, but many other sorts of Workmen, will put in for, and get the Prize.18

  There was little doubt that class played some part in the debate; the genteel classes were liable to sneer at those who made or operated any kind of apparatus. And so the man without a machine was a superior thinker to the man with one. This distinction would remain an impediment to the advancement of the Royal Society for some years to come.

  There was another field of exploration in which the past overlapped with the new thinking. This was the discipline of alchemy, the meeting place of mysticism and chemistry.

  In the seventeenth century, the terms alchemy and chemistry (alchemia and chemid) were interchangeable. Many important figures practised alchemy in some form – Charles II, his cousin Prince Rupert, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle and Nicholas Culpeper the herbalist. Alchemy was not only about the attempt to achieve the transmutation of metals – lead into gold and so on – but had a spiritual side. Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, thought that the fabulous material known as the philosophers stone, famed for its ability to transmute metals, was also an elixir of life which could enable men to talk to angels. When Boyle moved from Oxford to live with his sister, Katherine Jones, Countess Ranelagh, in her house in Pall Mall, she had a laboratory built for them to work together on alchemical experiments.

  Another devoted alchemist was Isaac Newton. Newton had taken the premise of vitalism and expanded it until it became a theory of a central animating spirit of the universe that had little to do with the Christian Holy Trinity. He wisely kept some of his more heretical ideas under his hat. Unknown to the Stuarts, he was not only a heretic, denying the existence of the Trinity, but rejected the idea of a God-anointed king. To him, such notions stood in the way of his own theories on the central animating spirit that controlled the cosmos. Newton stated in public that his ideas on planetary orbits, gravity and the rest were a rediscovery of the known works of the ancients, the Babylonians and Pythagoreans. He was therefore not given to orthodox Christian views.

  Newton’s writings on alchemy, meanwhile, were more voluminous than those on his scientific observations or on mathematics. John Maynard Keynes said of Newton that ‘he was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.’ During the height of his alchemical researches, Newton suffered some form of mental breakdown. At the time this was put down as a manifestation of the physical and psychological changes alchemy was supposed to induce. One wonders whether the breakdown might instead have been caused by a physiological reaction to some of the materials he was using, such as lead and mercury.

  This interest in the spiritual among proto-scientists grew from a belief that their researches were inquiries into the working of God’s universe, and as such were a form of ordained or godly-works. Newton and his friends were for the most part deeply religious men; either they had taken holy orders, or like Newton and Hooke, they had almost done so. Newton believed himself chosen by God to interpret Holy Scripture. Indeed, during his lifetime, he was known as a major theologian, corresponding widely on matters of biblical interpretation.

  At least some of the virtuosi, among them Newton and Joseph Glanvill, believed in the existence of witchcraft. Glanvill argued that the world could not be understood by pure reason alone. Though cxpcrinrentalism was required to examine the true nature of natural phenomena, among these phenomena, according to Glanvill, were those of the supernatural; he considered reports of supernatural activity to be sufficient evidence of their existence, as long as interviews with witnesses were carried out with sufficient rigour and the circumstances carefully examined. He thought the existence of supernatural spirits was documented in the Bible and w’rote at length on how to deny the existence of spirits and witches was to fly in the face of evidence.19 Glanvill’s waitings were later cited by the New England Puritan minister Cotton Mather as a justification of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692–3, as a result of which twenty people were executed for witchcraft.

  The city in winch this fervour of debate and experimentation took place was still a building site. It would remain so for many years. Rebuilding the city took many heroic feats of labour arrd instances of hard-headed acumen. No contributions were greater than the efforts of Robert Hooke and Peter Mills, the city-surveyor, who together organised the surveying and staking out of the new, wider streets. In little more than two months they measured out and put down stakes and ropes that effectively laid out the new city. With a team of labourers they covered eleven miles of streets, encompassing an area of 436 acres – an astonishing achievement.20 Not only that, but Hooke spent the next five years tramping out every morning to view the plots of new foundations so they could be signed off and building begin. It would take six years for the city to be restored to a working entity with a reasonable number of businesses and residences replacing those that had been lost.

  Even then there remained major projects such as the Mansion House, the parish churches and the hall of the Mercers’ Company, the most venerable of the city’s guilds. When Charles ordered a monument to be erected in memory of the fire, Wren and Hooke collaborated to design a column to stand in Fish Street near London Bridge, barely two hundred yards from where the fire started in Pudding Lane. The old experimentalists could not resist adding a special feature of their own. In its lower levels they designed a high room with an aperture in its domed ceiling from which a shaft went all the way to the top of the tower, and around which wound the staircase. T’he shaft was designed for the conduct of experiments involving gravity and pendulums, as well as allowing an observer to see the stars.

  Before London was completely rebuilt thirty years or more would elapse. But that city would be nothing like the one it replaced. The classically inspired architecture of Wren, Hooke and others would announce London as a modern city.

  * Any reader who wishes to understand the repetitive grid patterns of so many American cities need look no further than Nerve cm rt’s Roman folly of a design, preserved at the London Metropolitan Archives, 40 Northampton Road, London ECIR OHB.

  CHAPTER 14

  A STAR IS BORN

  On 2 March 1667 Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys went to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. It was the first night of a new play and both the King and his brother the Duke of York were present. What they saw that night was the creation of a new star of the London stage. Pepys recorded his reaction in his diary:

  After dinner, with my wife to the King’s House to see ‘Tire Mayden Queene’, a new play of Dryden’s, mightily commended for the regularity of it, and the strain and wit; and, the truth is, there is a comical part done by Nell which is Florimell, that I never can hope ever to see the like done again, by man or woman.

  The play was a smash hit and Nell was its shining star. One of the attractions of her role was that in some scenes she had to roll about the stage in a flurry of petticoats. There was also a scene for which she was required to don male breeches. This was always popular with male audiences, as Pepys recorded:

  But so great performance of a comical part was never, I believe, in the world before as Nell do this, both as a mad girle, then most and best of all when she comes in like a young gallant; and hath the notions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her.

  The Maiden Queen was the biggest hit either the playwright or the actress ever enjoyed. It propelled Nell to the level of a true theatrical star in the eyes of fashionable London – and especially in those of Charles II, who, according to Dryden, graced it with the title ‘His Play’. Given the nature of the characters portrayed, the play’s subject matter was, as Sir Walter Scott was subsequently laconically to remark, something in which t
he King had considerable expertise.1

  Pepys developed quite a crush on Nell, just as he previously had on the King’s mistress, Barbara Palmer. Unknown to him, the King would also develop a crush on the actress. Within a year he would make her his mistress.

  Three weeks after its premiere the play was still being performed. Pepys went again, this time accompanied by Sir William Penn, a Commissioner of the Navy. Pepys’s pleasure was unabated: ‘saw’ “The Queene” again; which indeed the more I see the more I like, and is an excellent play, and so done by Nell, her merry part, as cannot be better done in nature, I think.’

  For such an acclaimed star, Nell’s early life had not augured well. There are many mysteries: where she was born and when, the identity’ of her father and, not least, since she was possibly illiterate, how she managed to become a successful actress. All we know is that she succeeded to overcome the problems arising from an obscure, impoverished background to become a star.

  Her only advantage early on seems to have been that the brothel kept by her mother in Coal Yard Alley was close to Killigrew’s new theatre, the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. This was the first purpose-built theatre in the fashionable West End. At its opening in May 1663, Nell Gwyn had been an orange girl, one of the theatre’s sexily dressed teenagers who sold fruit, interacted coquettishly with the male audience and acted as messengers, carrying billets-doux between flirting young bloods and ladies of the audience. Nell’s good looks and ebullient character brought her to the attention of Charles Hart, the theatre’s most established actor.

  Thanks to collaboration between Killigrcw and Davenant, London’s first theatre school had also opened in 1663* Nell was an early pupil, enrolled at the age of fourteen, probably by Hart who tutored her in theatrical craft with the aid of comedian and dancer John Lacy. Not only had Nell to learn the skills necessary for the stage, she had to learn an ever-changing repertoire. With a small audience base, the London stage depended upon novelty. A theatre would perform sometimes two, or even three, plays a week. If the theory is true that Nell was illiterate, she must have depended upon learning her roles by rote, repeating them after a prompter.2

  In all this, Nell – or Nelly as she was invariably known – had the help not only of the much older Hart, who became her lover, but also, it has been suggested, of the literary libertine John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. In his biography of Gwyn, her descendant Charles Beauelerk argues persuasively that Rochester became Gwyn’s lover before she was fifteen. If that were so, he suggests, might not Rochester have given her acting lessons? Rochester, after all, possibly tutored the initially unpromising Elizabeth Barry, helping to turn her into one of the finest actors of her time.3

  Nell graduated to become a member of the repertory company of the King’s Men sometime in 1665. Her career was very uneven. Thanks to the lowly circumstances of her upbringing, she had a ready and bawdy wit that audiences liked.4 She had a narrow professional range, unable to cope with dramatic or tragic roles, but in playing herself she had no equal. The place of women on the Restoration stage allowed theatre managers to give a new depth to the rendering of past classics, but also allowed new writers to reflect London’s sexual temptations and the amoral behaviour of many well-born men and women. In such a milieu, Nell’s earthy sexuality was bound to appeal.

  Whatever advantages the young actress had, in her first recorded appearance all did not go well. She was meant to be in what was intended to be an unabashed crowd-pleaser with an all-female cast due to open in November 1664. This was Killigrew’s own play Thomaso, or The Wanderer, written ten years before while he was in exile in Madrid. Thomaso was semi-autobiographical and partially based on earlier sources. The cast included the ingénue Nelly Gwyn, and the more established Mrs Knepp and Anne Marshall, the latter one of the most accomplished actresses of the time.†

  Killigrew had successfully produced an all-female play, his own Parson’s Wedding, in October 1664. The production of Thomaso was meant to follow a few weeks later. All-female ensembles were cast purely for box office receipts. The use of women on the Restoration stage was not a sign of a sudden flowering of feelings of emancipation or liberalism towards the female sex; it was, rather, exactly the opposite. Women were mainly cast in roles in which their sexuality could be exploited. They would be the tragic heroines of plays set in exotic lands so that their clothing could be as revealing as decency allowed; or they would be cast in ‘breeches’ roles in which they were required to wear men’s trousers, so allowing them to show as much leg as possible. The popularity of the latter was strongly referred to in the epilogue to Dryden’s Maiden Queen when acted by an all-female cast:

  Here we presume, our Legs are no ill Sight,

  And they will give you no ill Dreams at Night.5

  Excepting the most accomplished of them, such as Elizabeth Barry or Mary Saunderson, actresses were not expected to have a great deal of skill in acting. They were more in the line of comediennes or song-and-dance girls, delivering prologues and epilogues frequently quite unrelated to the plays to which they were attached, during which they were expected to play up the most engaging side of their personalities. They would regularly be required to sing songs and dance numbers equally at odds with the action or subject of the play – these were even, as with Davenant’s Macbeth, placed in the middle of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Actresses were used unabashedly to get the punters in.

  Rehearsals of Thomaso were troubled. For a start, the play had been written not to be performed but to be read – what was then known as a closet drama. Its extraordinary number of scenes (seventy-three in ten acts) was daunting even for the most accomplished modern company. Before the play could be performed it was abandoned.

  Nell’s first appearance, therefore, was postponed to March 1665, when she was cast in the strong, dramatic role of Aztec princess Cydaria, the daughter of Moctezuma, in Dryderis The Indian Emperor, Among Drydens sources for the play was a masque by the owner of the Theatre Royal’s rival playhouse, Devenant This work, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, had been staged publicly in 1658 and encouraged by Oliver Cromwell as a piece of anti-Spanish propaganda. There is no record of Nell’s first performance, but we do know what the inveterate theatregoer Pepys thought of her performance in the same role two years later, when he wrote that he was ‘most infinitely displeased with her being pot to act the Empereurs daughter; which is a great and serious part which she do most basely’.6

  The play’s theme was the conflict between love and honour, a subject much admired by the members of the royal court, with Cydaria involved in a love triangle witli the Spanish invader Cortez. Hart, by then Nell’s real-life lover, had doubtless schooled her in the part, but it made no difference; Nell was temperamentally unsuited to intense or tragic roles.

  Rochester’s fellow theatre lover and rake the Duke of Richmond wrote an epilogue for Nell to speak at the end of a play by his friend Robert Howard: ‘I know you in your hearts/ Hate serious plays as I do serious parts.’ Moments such as this, when the player addressed the audience, or let the audience into their feelings not as characters but as their real selves, were a regular trope in Restoration plays, Thus Nell’s character in James Howard’s The English Monsieur could say, This life of mine can last no longer than my beauty . . . 1 might e’en sell oranges for my living.’ Those connected to Nell were obviously paying close attention to the young actress’s ability. That they did so indicates that whatever her shortcomings as a dramatic actress, her good-natured, freewheeling character, allied to a most engaging personality, had already marked her out as having star quality. Such quality was good not only for the star but for those around her.

  Accordingly, a close political, personal, theatrical and even financial’ connection was forged between Gwyn, Killigrew, Buckingham and Robert Howard.7 Soon, the faith of Killigrew and others would be rewarded. In the spring of 1665 Nell played opposite Hart in All Mistaken, or the Mad Couple by Robert Howard’s brother James.

  The play
was a tragicomedy, composed of two plots, one a tragedy, the other a comedy, By most assessments, the tragic part was not fully developed, and. had many lumpen lines. However, the comic part was a triumph of sparky dialogue of the type London audiences loved. Among the first-night audience were the King, the Duke of York and Samuel Pepys. Nell and Hart shone as the ‘gay couple’ a standard conceit London’s theatre audiences had come to expect; it entailed a witty rake or man about town and the beautiful female object of his desire engaging in verbal sparring before finally admitting their mutual attraction. Ultimately, the role would become Nell’s speciality.

  As a device, the sparring couple owed quite a lot to Shakespeare’s characters Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. As a result of the fashion for what the Duke of Richmond, with his cynics ear for weakness, called prize fight’ repartee, the momentum of a play often ground to a halt while the warring couple engaged in a long display of verbal fisticuffs.

  Two years later, in Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen, Dryden got the balance right, placing the battle of the sexes at the centre of the action. The work was the quintessence of Restoration theatre. From the play’s beginning, Dryden wasted no time in introducing the sparring partners, together with their bawdy conversation. After a brief first scene in which the courtier Celadon chats to his sister and we learn that he is a philanderer, we cut to the second scene in which he encounters two women he has not met before, Flavia and Florimel, both maids of honour to the queen. They wear masks and refuse to allow Celadon to see their faces. Celadon can only judge them by their wit.