The Dove, another historic London pub, is now a well-kept and very welcoming place, but it has a past of political intrigue and forbidden liaisons behind it. It was in one of its rooms that Charles II Stuart courted Nell Gwyn, one of his mistresses and one of the first female actresses, and it was here that the poet James Thomson composed the stanzas of Rule, Britannia, a patriotic song dating back to 1740. When you stop for a beer, think that the American writer Ernest Hemingway, a frequent visitor to the pub, may have sat at the same table.
