then a chaplain to the King, and a prebendary of Winchester, was required to surrender his prebendal house as a lodging for Nelly.[1] Ken properly remonstrated, and, if it be indeed true that she had taken possession of the assigned lodging, she speedily removed from it.[2] Nor was the King displeased with the firmness displayed by this exemplary man. He knew that Ken was right; appreciated his motives; and one of his last acts was to make the very person by whom he was thus so properly admonished Bishop of Bath and Wells, the see of which he chose to be conscientiously deprived, as Bancroft from Canterbury, rather than forget the oath he had taken of fealty to a former sovereign.
Unable to obtain or retain the use of the canonical apartments of the pious Ken, Nelly found quarters in a small attached room of brick at the end of the large drawing-room in the Deanery, still from tradition called "Nell Gwyn"[3] and afterwards at Avington, the seat of the Countess of Shrewsbury, notorious for the part she took in the duel in which her husband was slain by the Duke of Buckingham. Avington lies about three miles to the north-east of Winchester,
