Sweet Lady of Misrule

To my shame, back in the 1980s, I wrote a less than charitable obituary for the Daily Telegraph of the 13th Duke of St Albans, which dwelt unnecessarily on his unfortunate City directorships. This provoked a volley of letters from his grandson, Lord Vere of Hanworth, couched in intemperate terms. I seem to recall demands of satisfaction, challenges to a duel and the ominous question of whether my club had steps. Later this remarkable young man, by then styling himself Earl of Burford, caused a memorable scene in the House of Lords when he bounced on the Woolsack as if it were a trampoline — or, as he puts it himself, ‘an impromptu soapbox to defend the golden principle of sovereignty’.

Now, having set aside his courtesy title, Charles Beauclerk, heir to the dukedom of St Albans, has produced this full-dress (as it were, though the sumptuous illustrations favour scant attire) biography of his ancestress, the golden-hearted companion of the Merry Monarch. If the author should be fingering his horsewhip as he reads this review, he can safely put it away now, for I am delighted to report that he has brought great honour to the surname of Beauclerk which Charles II chose for his two sons by ‘Pretty Nelly’ (as Pepys called her) and which among other things connotes fine penmanship. As well as being a cracking good read, this is both a scholarly, sympathetic, mature and thought-provoking biography of our finest folk heroine and a well-rounded portrait of Restoration England.

Nell Gwyn was born in 1650, probably, Beauclerk believes, in Oxford, where her supposed father, Captain Thomas Gwyn of the Royalist army, may well have died in a debtors’ jail. Nell’s widowed mother, ‘Madam’ Gwyn, a Falstaffian figure fond of brandy, was reduced to running a bawdy house in Covent Garden.