Nell Gwyn at the Bear Garden in 1677

Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Carte 79 offers new evidence of Nell Gwyn having been attacked by a hostile ‘rabble’ at the Bear Garden in Southwark in October 1677. This article reads this new evidence against the often-repeated anecdote, dated and located to Oxford in 1681 by the first writer to report it, James Granger, nearly a century later (1774), in which Gwyn was said to have defused a similar situation by identifying herself as ‘the Protestant Whore’. Mapping points of fit between Granger’s received anecdote and the new manuscript reports, this article also draws on newly reported manuscript evidence for the presence of ‘Protestant whore’ phrases in manuscript verse of the 1670s, which, significantly antedating 1681, may also provide reasons to reconsider what, if anything, happened in Oxford that year. Reading the new reports of an assault on Gwyn in 1677, especially against concern about the marriage of William of Orange to Princess Mary, this article argues that the attack instead indicates rising political tension earlier in Charles II’s reign, here focused on Gwyn.