before. "The bill is very dear," she says, "to boil the plate; but necessity hath no law." What was to be done? shopkeepers were pressing with their bills, and the apprentices who would at once have released "Protestant Nelly" from their own books had no control over those of their masters; so Nelly, if not actually arrested for debt in the spring of 1685, was certainly outlawed for the non-payment of certain bills, for which some of her trades-people, since the death of the King, had become perseveringly clamorous.
Nelly's resources at this period were slender enough. In the King's lifetime, and after Prince Rupert's death, she had paid to Peg Hughes the actress and her daughter Ruperta as much as 4520 l., "for the great pearl necklace" which she wears in so many of her portraits.[1] This would now probably pass to the neck of another mistress (such is the lottery of life and jewels,)—perhaps to that of Katherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester; but Nelly would not care much about this: it went more to her heart to hear that during her own outlawry for debt her old friend Otway, the tutor of her son—the poet, whose writings she must have loved—had died of starvation, without a sympathising Nelly near at
- ↑ Warburton's Prince Rupert, iii. 558.
