on the south side, with a garden towards St. James's Park. Her neighbour on one side was Edward Griffin, Esq., Treasurer of the Chamber, and ancestor of the present Lord Braybrooke; and, on the other, the widow of Charles Weston, third Earl of Portland.[1] Nelly at first had only a lease of the house, which, as soon as she discovered, she returned the conveyance to the King, with a remark characteristic of her wit and of the monarch to whom it was addressed. The King enjoyed the joke, and perhaps admitted its truth, so the house in Pall Mall was conveyed free to Nell and her representatives forever. The truth of the story is confirmed by the fact that the house which occupies the site of the one in which Nelly lived, now No. 79, and tenanted by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, is the only freehold on the south or Park side of Pall Mall.[2]
For some months preceding the retirement of Nelly from the stage, the palace of Whitehall had hardly been a place for either the wife or the mistress—the Queen or the Countess of Castlemaine. The King, in November, 1669, when his intimacy with "Madam Gwin," as she was now called, had begun
