might suggest otherwise. While many see in her a charismatic queen addressing her troops as they awaited the Spanish Armada, to others she is the evil executioner of Mary Queen of Scots, the woman who should have ruled England, rather than Elizabeth, merely the daughter of the king’s former mistress.
Of all royal mistresses down the ages, none has graced
Above (left-right):
Dubbed 'The Lady of the Lamp' Nurse Florence Nightingale; Quaker and English prison reformer Elizabeth Fry; Nell Gwyn caught the eye of Charles II and became one of history's most famous mistresses; Author Jane Austen wrote about the romantic lives of the landed gentry
26 BRITAIN
the job more joyously than “pretty witty Nell”, as Samuel Pepys called her. From an orange girl selling fruit to London theatregoers, Eleanor Gwyn rose to be an actress who caught the eye of the merry monarch, King Charles II, and ended up with a royal pension and a splendid house in Pall Mall. When Nell first made her mark on the stage, London was reveling in the return of the king and court life (in 1660, after the Commonwealth period of Puritan rule), and the spirit of Restoration London is epitomised in her ample-bosomed portrait. High spirits, low birth and earthy humour naturally made her enemies at court, especially among the king’s other mistresses. But, with Charles, she remained a favourite and tradition says that, on his deathbed, he urged his brother to take care of her; just as Lord Nelson begged others to look after his concubine Lady Emma Hamilton.
Few lives could be more different from Nell and Emma’s
than the morally upright spinsterhood of Jane Austen, our most celebrated woman novelist. The story of her life in rural Chawton and fashionable Bath has been told times over; and her subject, as every reader knows, was the “truth, universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”. But while Regency London’s high society might be led by libertines, Jane’s demure heroines know full well that even a runaway romance which ended in marriage, like Lydia Bennet’s, brought shame and destroyed her sisters’ hopes of finding husbands. From Pride and Prejudice and Emma to Persuasion, Jane’s final story, it is Jane’s genius to observe, and sometimes satirise, their attention to status, manners and reputation.
Mrs Fry may be the least familiar of our famous ladies, but
her pioneering work as a prison reformer has long been recognised and still earns her a place here. Born into the Gurney family, her marriage to Joseph Fry united two old and wealthy Quaker families, equally noted for piety and philanthropy, and Elizabeth became deeply involved in charitable work and the Quaker ministry. It was a visit to
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