Page:The Story of Nell Gwyn.djvu/150

134 to the earldom of Middlesex; that of the King's son by Katharine Pegg to be Earl of Plymouth; and that of the Duchess of Portsmouth's son to be Duke of Richmond.

Some of these creations, both natal and heraldic, were little to the liking of Nelly, who took her own way of showing her dissatisfaction. "Come hither, you little bastard," she cried to her son Charles in the hearing of his father. The King remonstrated, and Nelly, with a snappish and yet good-natured laugh, replied—"I have no better name to call him by." Never was a peerage sought in so witty and abrupt a manner, and never was a plea for one so immediately admitted, the King creating his eldest son by Nell Gwyn, on the 27th December, 1676, Baron of Headington and Earl of Burford. Nelly had now another name to give to her child. But this was not all that was done, and, as I see reason to believe, at this time. The heiress of the Veres, the daughter of the twentieth and last Earl of Oxford of that illustrious family, was betrothed by the King to the young Earl of Burford; and, though the lively orange-girl was not spared to witness the marriage, yet she lived to see the future wife of her son in the infancy of those charms which