HOROSCOPES - NELL GWYN The horoscope of Nell Gwyn is based on the data recorded by the astrologer-Mason, Elias Ashmole, given as 2 February 1650 (Old-Style), with an ascendant of 24 Capricorn, which implies a time of 06:12 am. The date, derived from Ashmole, is recorded by Peter Cunningham, The Story of Nell Gwyn: and the Sayings of Charles the Second (1891), p. 2: this source is worth recording, for Cunningham was one of the few non-astrologer biographers to pay attention to the horoscope of the subject. She is supposed to have been born in Coal Yard, off Drury Lane, in London, but some sources claim that she was born in Hereford: the present chart is cast for London. The two charts recorded in David Ovason, The Book of the Eclipse (1999), p. 176, are probably among the most accurate on record. The widely used chart in Alan Leo, Notable Nativities, though claimed to be based on Ashmole's data, is inaccurate. Nell Gwyn was not only a great beauty, but was possessed of an alert and intelligent wit, as one might expect of the satellitium in Aquarius. She is now chiefly remembered as the mistress of King Charles II, by whom she had two children. Contemporaneous astrologers might have been bemused by the relationship, for the strong communality of planets was only revealed when the new planets were discovered. The portrait of Nell Gwyn is a hand-coloured engraving by Spielmeyer (1890), based on the portrait by Sir Peter Lely. The sigillization in the present chart is typical of the seventeenth century: manuscript versions are to be found in Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars (1995): for example, p. 200.