oaths, deep drunkards, vile women and still viler men, all striving for
the royal favor and offering the filthiest lures, amid routs and balls
and noisy entertainments, of which it is recorded that more than once
some woman gave birth to a child among the crowd of dancers.

No wonder that the little Portuguese queen kept to herself and did not
let herself be drawn into this swirling, roaring, roistering
saturnalia. She had less influence even than Moll Davis, whom Charles
picked out of a coffee-house, and far less than "Madam Carwell," to
whom it is reported that a great English nobleman once presented pearls
to the value of eight thousand pounds in order to secure her influence
in a single stroke of political business.

Of all the women who surrounded Charles there was only one who cared
anything for him or for England. The rest were all either selfish or
treacherous or base. This one exception has been so greatly written of,
both in fiction and in history, as to make it seem almost unnecessary
to add another word; yet it may well be worth while to separate the
fiction from the fact and to see how much of the legend of Eleanor Gwyn
is true.

The fanciful story of her birthplace is most surely quite unfounded.
She was not the daughter of a Welsh officer, but of two petty hucksters
who had their booth in the lowest precincts of London. In those days
the Strand was partly open country, and as it neared the city it showed
the mansions of the gentry set in their green-walled parks. At one end
of the Strand, however, was Drury Lane, then the haunt of criminals and
every kind of wretch, while nearer still was the notorious Coal Yard,
where no citizen dared go unarmed.

Within this dreadful place children were kidnapped and trained to
various forms of vice. It was a school for murderers and robbers and
prostitutes; and every night when the torches flared it vomited forth
its deadly spawn. Here was the earliest home of Eleanor Gwyn, and out
of this den of iniquity she came at night to sell oranges at the
entrance to the theaters. She was stage-struck, and endeavored to get
even a minor part in a play; but Betterton, the famous actor, thrust
her aside when she ventured to apply to him.

It must be said that in everything that was external, except her
beauty, she fell short of a fastidious taste. She was intensely
ignorant even for that time. She spoke in a broad Cockney dialect. She
had lived the life of the Coal Yard, an