Nell Gwyn

Nell Gwyn was an English actress and mistress of Charles II. Her career from the Restoration stage to the royal court made her one of the best-known women of the period and linked theatre, celebrity and patronage.

Gwyn began as an orange-seller before becoming one of the first generation of professional actresses on the Restoration stage, where she was especially admired in comedy. By the late 1660s she had become a long-term mistress of Charles II and bore him two sons, including Charles Beauclerk, later Duke of St Albans. Her wit, theatrical career and relatively modest origins helped distinguish her in popular memory from the king’s more aristocratic and politically connected mistresses.

In Linda Porter’s Mistresses, Lucy Walter, Barbara Villiers, Frances Teresa Stuart, Nell Gwyn, Louise de Kérouaille, Moll Davis and Hortense Mancini entered royal life from very different social and national backgrounds. In Deborah Swift’s Entertaining Mr Pepys, A clandestine visit to the theatre reveals a new professional world just as women are beginning to establish themselves on the English public stage. Bird’s determination to perform brings her into the orbit of Samuel Pepys and other figures of Restoration theatrical life, including Nell Gwyn. Nell Gwyn is treated fictionally in Antonia Fraser’s King Charles II.