Pepys hated her, because she was jealous of his patron, Lord Sandwich, and called him a coward. He calls her “ill-looking” and “a plain, homely dowdy,” and says that one day, when Monk was drunk, and sitting with Troutbeck, a disreputable fellow, the duke was wondering that Nan Hyde, a brewer’s daughter, should ever have come to be Duchess of York. “Nay,” said Troutbeck, “ne’er wonder at that, for if you will give me another bottle of wine I will tell you as great if not a greater miracle, and that was that our Dirty Bess should come to be Duchess of Albemarle.”[546] Nell Gwynn was born in Coal Yard, on the east side of Drury Lane,[547] the next turning to the infamous Lewknor Lane, which used to be inhabited by the orange-girls who attended the theatres in Charles II.’s reign. It was in this same lane that Jonathan Wild, the thief-taker, whom Fielding immortalises, afterwards lived. In a coarse and ruthless satire written by Sir George Etherege after Nell’s death, the poet calls her a “scoundrel lass,” raised from a dunghill, born in a cellar, and brought up as a cinder-wench in a coalyard.[548] Nelly was the vagabond daughter of a poor Cavalier captain and fruiterer, who is said to have died in prison at Oxford. She began life by selling fish in the street, then turned orange-girl at the theatres, was promoted to be an actress, and finally became a mistress of Charles II. Though not as savage-tempered as the infamous Lady Castlemaine, Nelly was almost as mischievous, and quite as shameless. She obtained from the king £60,000 in four years.[549] She bought a pearl necklace at Prince Rupert’s sale for £4000. She drank, swore, gambled, and squandered money as wildly as her rivals. Nelly was small, with a good-humoured face, and “eyes that winked when she laughed.”[550] She was witty, reckless, and good-natured. The portrait of her by Lely, with the lamb under her arm, shows us a very arch, pretty, dimply little actress. The present Duke of St. Alban’s is descended from her.[551] In 1667 Nell Gwynn was living in Drury Lane, for on May day of that year Pepys says--“To Westminster, in the way meeting many milkmaids with garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler between them; and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodging’s door in Drury Lane, in her smock-sleeves and boddice, looking upon one. She seemed a mighty pretty creature.” Nelly had not then been long on the stage, and Pepys had hissed her a few months before being introduced to her by dangerous Mrs. Knipp. In 1671 Evelyn saw Nelly, then living in Pall Mall, “looking out of her garden on a terrace at the top of the wall,” and talking too familiarly to the king, who stood on the green walk in the park below.[552] Poor Nell was not “allowed to starve,” but ended an ill life by dying of apoplexy. There is no authority for the name of “Nell Gwynn’s Dairy” given to a house near the Adelphi.