The Sexual History of London (12 page)

This lax philosophy soon spread by example to all walks of life, and a climate of tolerance prevailed, as illustrated in this extraordinary anecdote from Samuel Pepys concerning the behaviour of Sir Charles Sedley MP, courtier and wit, who appeared naked on the balcony of ‘Oxford Kate's' in broad daylight ‘acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined', and claiming, like a quack doctor, that he could make a potion ‘as should make all the cunts in town run after him'. As the crowd beneath swelled to over a thousand, Sedley ‘took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it and then drank it off; and then took another and drank the King's health'.
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While such an outrageous episode from an MP today would lead to instant resignation and questions in the House, Sedley had nothing more to fear than a few weeks' banishment from court, enabling him to sober up in the country in time for his next bender.

 

Londoners were more than robust enough to tolerate such antics with good humour. The ‘City', in our modern understanding of the word, had arrived, in the form of an affluent merchant class to whom the government was forced to turn in times of crisis. This class made its own contribution to London, with gracious new houses filled with beautiful furniture; carpet, not rushes, covered the floor, and beds replaced straw mattresses. This class also required an army of domestic servants to tend it, consisting of women who were eternally at the mercy of their master, their master's sons and the male servants.

Following a hard day's trading, the new City men required relaxation and recreation, which they found at the theatre, revived after the long sleep of the Protectorate. The Theatre Royal Drury Lane and the Duke's Theatre opened, and for the first time, nubile young women replaced boy actors on the stage. With the arrival of actresses, the theatres once again developed a reputation for wanton behaviour, as every aspiring young thespian set out to secure a rich husband or lover to elevate her to the ranks of the aristocracy. ‘Actress' became synonymous with ‘whore', an inevitable development according to the satirist Tom Browne: ‘'Tis as hard a matter for a pretty Woman to keep herself honest in a Theatre, as 'tis for an Apothecary to keep his Treacle from the Flies in Hot Weather; for every Libertine in the Audience will be buzzing about her Honey-Pot.'
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The theatre auditorium was divided along traditional class lines, as were the girls. In the orchestra stalls sat the fashionable and the aristocratic men, alongside the most upmarket prostitutes. (Conventional married women were discouraged from attending, as both the drama and its location were considered far too disreputable.) The top theatre prostitutes were known as ‘vizards' after the black masks they wore. One evening the diarist Samuel Pepys sat next to one, and concluded in his entry for that night that ‘She is a whore, I believe, for she is acquainted with every fine fellow and called them by their name, Jack and Tom, and before the end of the play frisked to another place.'
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The dress circle was home to the professional middle class, with a suitable grade of harlots. The upper circle, or the gods, was for hoi polloi, and the common rub 'n' tug whores also referred to as ‘punks' and ‘trugs'. Dryden summed up the scene admirably:

These theatres were noisy, sensational places with as much action off stage as on: actors were heckled, fist fights broke out, and the audience was uninhibited in its criticism if the play was not to its liking. This all added to the entertainment and a good time was had by all – apart from the playwrights, of course, who were understandably dismayed by such anarchic scenes. ‘Some there are,' observed one writer, bitterly,

Among the turmoil, the ‘orange girls' roamed with their baskets of fruit. The ‘china' oranges were sixpence each, the girls a little dearer. They were organized, in a haphazard fashion, by an old bawd called ‘Orange Moll', who sent them to trawl the new theatre at Drury Lane. Samuel Pepys had a weakness for orange girls, and one afternoon in January 1667 his actress friend Mrs Knipp introduced him to ‘a most pretty woman'. Her name was Nell Gwyn. Nell's story provides one of the happier accounts of a whore's life, the rags-to-riches tale of an archetypal tart with a heart of gold, the original Pretty Woman.

The celebrated Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II (1777).

Nell was born in a brothel in Covent Garden in 1650. Her mother, Eleanor Smith, was a bawd, and her father, Thomas Gwyn, had been a captain in the Cavalier army. Nell's father disappeared early from their lives, and Mrs Smith took to drink. Nell herself may have been a child prostitute; she certainly grew up in ‘the life', serving brandy to the customers in her mother's house when still just a little girl. The Theatre Royal was just around the corner in Drury Lane, and by the age of thirteen she was working as an orange girl. Her good looks, charm and witty tongue were quickly spotted by the actors, and by the time she was fifteen, Nell had taken stage roles and her first lover, the actor-manager Charles Hart. Nell was a natural comedienne, and the sex comedies of the Restoration theatre provided the ideal vehicle for her talents. She was invariably cast as the attractive, sex-starved young wife of an impotent old man, romanced by a handsome young lawyer or parson, in productions such as
The City Lady, or Folly Reclaim'd
,
An Evening's Love, or The Mock Astrologer
,
The Husband his Own Cuckold
or
The City Bride
.
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Samuel Pepys raved over Nell's performance as ‘the Mad Girl' in
The Maiden Queen
in March 1667:

Playing a masculine role gave young actresses the ideal opportunity to show off their figures in tight breeches. Since Nell had excellent legs, this proved to be a brilliant career move. King Charles had heard the rumours of her beauty and sex appeal, and soon he ordered her to give a private performance at the palace. After brief liaisons with Lord Buckhurst and his brother, the Earl of Dorset, Nell finally embraced her destiny in the form of the king and was installed as his chief mistress, regardless of the fact that, according to Bishop Burnet, she was ‘the indiscreetest and wildest creature that ever was in court'.
²⁵

Despite this, Nell remained Charles's favourite until his dying day, and was maintained at great expense, receiving over £60,000 from the king. Valued for her high spirits and humour, Nell was ‘such a constant diversion to the king, that even a new mistress could not drive her away'. All this despite the fact that she called her lover ‘Charles the Third' because she had had two lovers named Charles previously.
²⁶

Nell even saw off her chief rival, Louise de Kéroualle, who had been created Duchess of Portsmouth by Charles II. On one occasion, when Louise cattily remarked that Nell was dressed richly enough to be a queen, Nell shot back, ‘You are entirely right, Madam, and I am whore enough to be a duchess!' The two women eventually became friends, when Louise was ousted by a new love, Hortense Mancin. They met regularly for tea and cards, although Nell was exasperated with Louise's histrionic fits of despair, referring to her as ‘the weeping willow'. Nell's wisecracks were legendary. When her coachman got into a fight with another man who had called her a whore, Nell broke up the fracas, saying, ‘I
am
a whore. Find something else to fight about!' Nell's most famous remark came about when she was passing through the streets of Oxford one day in her coach and the mob, mistaking her for her rival, the Catholic Louise de Kéroualle, started hooting and shouting at her. Nell put her head out of her window, smiled at the crowd and declared: ‘Good people, you are mistaken; I am the
Protestant
whore.'

Nell's relationship with the king lasted until his death, seventeen years after their first encounter, and they had one son, Charles, later created Duke of St Albans. Charles himself was eager to provide for her, entreating his dour brother, James II, ‘let not poor Nelly starve'. Despite the fact that James had frequently been the butt of Nell's jokes, he oversaw the provision of a pension of £1500 a year for life, as well as paying off all her debts. She also retained the estates and incomes which Charles had granted her during their relationship, including houses in Pall Mall and Windsor. By the age of fifty, this whore's daughter from the backstreets of Covent Garden was worth £100,000.

Charles II's infatuation with Nell did not make her a favourite with everyone. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647–80), took against her and characterized her as a Cinderella on the make in a vicious satire. But Rochester, who saw all Charles's mistresses as potential rivals for his affection, offended every one of them, bribing palace officials to dish the dirt on Charles's love life. To her great credit, ‘pretty, witty Nell' proved admirably tolerant towards Rochester, who eventually befriended her, taking her side against the dreadful Louise.

Rochester had become the embodiment of Charles II's court, and it is to Rochester that one must return for further insights into this extraordinary period. Tall, elegant and witty, he was wild even by contemporary standards. He graduated from Oxford at the age of fourteen, with a classical education that provided good training for his excoriating satires. Rochester served as a Royalist spy before the Restoration, and proved heroic in the war against the Dutch, when he rowed under heavy fire to deliver orders from the commander of the fleet after the latter was shot dead in his arms, an action which was ‘commended by all who saw it'. Rochester's evident physical courage was as great as his wit; but, like many men of action, he missed the excitement of war in the dull days afterwards and compensated for it with a riotous lifestyle, drinking, quarrelling and fighting.
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Writing with ‘passionate colloquialism',
²⁸
Rochester gives us a vivid picture of London and sex in the 1660s, as the following lines illustrate. It will come as no surprise to the reader that Rochester was an unregenerate bisexual whose play
Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery
(1684) was censored by the government on the grounds of obscenity, primarily because of its homosexual nature. ‘There's a sweet, soft page of mine, Does the trick worth forty wenches,' he comments:

‘Link boys', or torch bearers, ostensibly earned a crust by conducting the wealthy about the murky streets of London with flaming torches; an early form of rent boy, these lads frequently subsidized their meagre incomes by selling their sexual favours – and Rochester quite clearly enjoyed their attentions.

Rochester's vivid poem ‘A Ramble in St James's Park', meanwhile, shows London in all its seedy glory; the author reflects on the action in this ‘all-sin-sheltering grove', from buggeries to rape and incest, as Londoners of all conditions arrive looking for sex. Whores, great ladies, chambermaids, heiresses and drudges trudge towards the park to encounter ‘divines, great lords and tailors, prentices, poets, pimps and jailors, footmen and fops'. Rochester is there stalking his mistress, ‘Corinna' (a nod to Ovid's
Ars Amatoria
), who is being paid court by three men – a well-connected ‘Whitehall Blade', a theatre critic and a young lad, enticed by ‘the savoury scent of salt-swollen cunt'. As Corinna disappears in a hackney coach with all three of them, Rochester reflects that she will come home later that evening, with her ‘lewd cunt drenched with the seed of half the town'.
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If this appears to be the embodiment of aristocratic misogyny, it is worth considering that these lines represent the shadow side of Rochester's extraordinary talent. He could also prove sympathetic and insightful as in this observation of Corinna's fate after he has discarded her: