Transcribed from the 1889 T. Fisher Unwin edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

              [Picture: Statue of Thomas Carlyle, by Boehm]





                               OLD CHELSEA
                         _A SUMMER-DAY’S STROLL_


                                    BY
                          BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN

                      ILLUSTRATED BY JOSEPH PENNELL

                [Picture: Gateway of Rossetti’s old house]

                                  London
                              T FISHER UNWIN
                          26 PATERNOSTER SQUARE
                                   1889




NOTE.


THE stroll described in these pages may be imagined to be taken during
the summer of 1888: all the dates, descriptions, and references herein
having been brought down to the present moment.

The specimen of Old Chelsea ware on the cover is an accurate copy—reduced
in size, naturally—of one of the plates of the set belonging once to Dr.
Johnson, now in Holland House.  For the privilege of this unique
reproduction I am indebted to the courtesy of Lady Holland.

                                                                  B. E. M.

LONDON, _August_, 1888




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

                                                                  PAGE
STATUE OF THOMAS CARLYLE, BY BOEHM                      _Frontispiece_
THE EMBANKMENT MANSIONS FROM BATTERSEA                              16
A VIEW OF CHELSEA                                                   21
STEAMBOAT PIER AT OLD BATTERSEA BRIDGE, AND THE                     26
RIVER FRONT, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO
THE EMBANKMENT AND OLD BATTERSEA BRIDGE                             29
MAP OF CHELSEA                                                      35
THE HOUSES AT CHELSEA                                               56
LINDSEY HOUSE AND BATTERSEA BRIDGE                                  59
SANDFORD MANOR HOUSE, SAND’S END                                    64
CHELSEA HOSPITAL, RIVER FRONT                                       72
PARADISE ROW                                                        88
TITE STREET                                                         99
STATUE OF SIR HANS SLOANE IN THE BOTANIC GARDENS                   103
NO. 4, CHEYNE WALK                                                 107
GATEWAY OF ROSSETTI’S OLD HOUSE                                    110
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI’S GARDEN                                    114
DON SALTERO’S                                                      123
CHEYNE WALK, WITH THE MAGPIE AND STUMP                             127
A CHELSEA CORNER                                                   133
STATUE OF THOMAS CARLYLE, BY BOEHM                                 136
CARLYLE’S HOUSE, GREAT CHEYNE ROW                                  139
THE CHELSEA RECTORY                                                144
A CORNER IN CHELSEA OLD CHURCH                                     154
OLD BATTERSEA CHURCH, WHERE BLAKE WAS MARRIED,                     164
SHOWING THE WINDOW FROM WHICH TURNER SKETCHED
THE WESTERN END OF CHEYNE WALK                                     167
TURNER’S LAST DWELLING-PLACE                                       171
BATTERSEA BRIDGE AND CHURCH FROM TURNER’S HOUSE                    176

                                * * * * *

    “OUT of monuments, names, wordes, proverbs, traditions, private
    recordes and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of bookes, and
    the like, we doe save and re-cover somewhat from the deluge of
    Time.”—_Bacon_, “_Advancement of Learning_”, _Book II_.

    “I have always loved to wander over the scenes inhabited by men I
    have known, admired, loved, or revered, as well amongst the living as
    the dead.  The spots inhabited and preferred by a great man during
    his passage on the earth have always appeared to me the surest and
    most speaking relic of himself: a kind of material manifestation of
    his genius—a mute revelation of a portion of his soul—a living and
    sensible commentary on his life, actions, and thoughts.”—_Lamartine_,
    “_Pilgrimage to the Holy Land_.”

    “The man that is tired of London is tired of existence.”—_Samuel
    Johnson_.




_Old Chelsea_.


            [Picture: The embankment mansions from Battersea]

I HAD strolled, on a summer day, from Apsley House towards the then
residence of Charles Reade at Knightsbridge, when I came upon one of
those surprises of which London is still so full to me, even after more
than a dozen years of fond familiarity with its streets and with all that
they mean to the true lover of the Town.  For, as I watched the ceaseless
traffic of the turbulent turnings from the great thoroughfare down
towards Chelsea, there came to my mind a phrase in the pages of its local
historian: who, writing but a little earlier than the year 1830, points
with pride to a project just then formed for the laying out of the latest
of these very streets—at that day it was a new rural road cut through
fields and swamps—and by it, he says, “Chelsea will obtain direct
connection with London; and henceforth must be considered an integral
part of the Great Metropolis of the British Empire”!  It is hard to
realise that only fifty years ago Chelsea was a rustic and retired
village, far from London: even as was Islington, fifty years ago, when
Charles Lamb, pensioned and set free from his desk in the India House,
retired to that secluded spot with his sister to live “in a cottage, with
a spacious garden,” as he wrote; with “the New River, rather elderly by
this time, running in front (if a moderate walking pace can be so
termed)”: even as was Kensington—“the old court suburb pleasantly
situated on the great Western road”—just fifty years ago, when wits and
statesmen drove between fields and market gardens to the rival courts of
Gore House and of Holland House; and N. P. Willis delighted the feminine
readers of the _New York Mirror_ with his gossip about his visits to Lady
Blessington and about the celebrities who bowed before her.  To-day all
these villages, along with many even more remote, are one with London.
Yet, more than any of them, has Chelsea kept its old village
character—albeit preserving but few of its old village features.  Of the
many magnificent mansions which gave it the name of “The Village of
Palaces” five alone still stand—Blacklands, Gough, Lindsey, Stanley and
Walpole Houses—and these are greatly altered.  I shall show you all of
them in our stroll to-day.  In between them, and away beyond them,
streets have been cut, new quarters built: made up in part of “genteel”
villas and rows of respectable residences; but in great part, also, of
cheap dwellings, of small and shabby shops.  These extremes render much
of modern Chelsea utterly uninteresting, except mayhap to the collector
of rents or to the inspector of nuisances.  Yet much of that which is
truly ancient and honourable has been fondly kept untouched, and not
ignobly cleaned, as in next-door Kensington.  Alongside this artistic
squalor we have the curious contrast of artistic splendour in a blazing,
brand-new quarter, of which the sacred centre is Tite Street.  Here, amid
much that is good and genuine in our modern manner, there is an
aggressive affectation of antiquity shown by the little houses and
studios obtruding on the street, by the grandiose piles of mansions
towering on the embankment: all in raging red brick, and in the so-called
Queen Anne style.  The original article, deadly dull and decorous as it
may be, has yet a decent dignity of its own as a real relic, not found in
this painful pretence of ancient quaintness.  This is a quarter, however,
much in vogue; mighty swells dwell here, and here pose some famous
_farceurs_ in art and literature; here, too, work many earnest men and
women in all pursuits of life.  These latter plentifully people every
part of Chelsea, for the sake of the seclusion and the stillness they
seek and here find: just as there settled here for the same reasons, two
centuries ago and earlier, men of learning and of wealth, scholars and
nobles, who kept themselves exclusive by virtue of their birth or their
brains.  And so this privileged suburb,

    “Where fruitful Thames salutes the learned shore,”

came to be in time a place of polite resort: while yet, in the words of
Macaulay, it was but “a quiet country village of about one thousand
inhabitants, the baptisms therein averaging a little more than forty in
the year.”  On the slope which rises from the river—as we see it in our
print of those days—stand, in trim gardens, the grand mansions which
first made the little village famous.  Back from these isolated houses
and between them stretch fair fields, and fertile meadows, and wooded
slopes; and along the river bank runs a row of fishermen’s thatched
cottages.  Here and there on the shore, are nestled noted taverns and
pleasure-gardens, much frequented by town visitors, reputable or not,
coming up the river on excursions—as does Pepys, “to make merry at the
Swan.”  Gay sings of the place and the period:

    “Then Chelsey’s meads o’erhear perfidious vows,
    And the press’d grass defrauds the grazing cows.”

The low river shore, planted with lime and plane trees, is protected by a
slight embankment: first built by the Romans on the banks above their
walled town of London: improved later by the Norman conquerors; and kept
in repair afterward either by landlord or by tenant, as might be decided
in the incessant disputes between them, still shown on the parish records
of that day.  This little embankment is broken here and there by carved
gateways, giving entrance to the grand houses; and by water
staircases—called, in our print, Ranelagh, Bishop’s, Old Magpye, Beaufort
Stairs—from which a few country lanes—such as Pound and Church Lanes and
Cheyne Row—lead from the river front to the King’s Road.  This road had
been first a foot-path following the windings of the river a little
inland—worn perhaps by the feet of the wandering tribes of
Trinobantes—and had gradually enlarged itself as the country around
became cultivated.  It led from the village of Whitehall through the
woods and fields, across the tidal swamps and the marsh lands west of
Westminster—partly filled in by the great Cubitt with the earth dug out
in the excavations of St. Katherine’s docks, early in this century: where
now stretches graceful St. James’s Park, where now Belgravia is built so
bravely—and so the road ran to the slopes of Chelsea, to the first good
land close alongside the river which rose fairly above it.

                       [Picture: A view of Chelsea]

Such was the secret of the speedy settlement of this secluded suburb.  It
was high and healthy, and had easy access to town by the safe, swift,
silent highway of the river; when few cared to go by the land road, bad
enough at its best, unsafe even in daylight by reason of the foot-pads;
but at last made wide and smooth for his coach by Charles II., recently
restored.  He used it as the royal route to Hampton Palace, and called it
the King’s Private Road.  Even that exclusive name did not serve to make
it safe; and long after Chelsea Hospital was built, a guard of its
pensioners nightly patrolled, as an escort for honest travellers, from
where Buckingham Palace now stands, across Bloody Bridge,—at the edge of
present Pimlico,—and so away through the Five Fields, “where robbers lie
in wait,” as the _Tatler_ puts it.  For Mr. Dick Steele often went by
this road to Chelsea, where he had a little house somewhere near the
river bank: whereto he was fond of taking “a friend to supper,” leaving
word at home that he should not be able to return until the next morning,
the roads being so unsafe by night!  Sometimes his friend Addison was
with him; sometimes the latter walked this way alone to his own home, at
the farther end of Chelsea; and once on a moonlight night, he strolled
out here with Colonel Esmond, as you may remember.  A few years later,
this same walk was frequently taken by Mr. Jonathan Swift, from Mrs.
Vanhomrigh’s house in Suffolk Street, Pall Mall—where he used to leave
his “best gown and periwig,” as he tells Stella—“and so to Chelsea, a
little beyond the Church.”  And still later, in December, 1754, Smollett
was robbed of his watch and purse—there was but little in the latter, for
he was then in poor case—as he went by coach from London to his residence
out in Chelsea.

  [Picture: Steamboat Pier at Old Battersea Bridge, and the river front,
                       twenty-five years ago] {26}

“King’s Road,” as we see it to-day, in dingy letters on the old brick or
plaster-fronted houses, makes us almost look for the Merry Monarch—as
history has mis-named one of her saddest figures—driving past, on his way
to Hampton Court, in company with a bevy of those beauties who still lure
our senses from out their canvasses on the walls of the old palace.  We
see, at intervals along the road, behind its rusty iron railings and
flagged front-yard and old-time porch, a long low brick house,

    . . .  “whose ancient casements stare
    Like sad, dim eyes, at the retreating years,”

as if weary of waiting for their owner to come home from the Dutch wars.
Through narrow archways we catch glimpses of trees and of gardens.
Turning down a rural lane we stroll into “The Vale,” and find a clump of
cottages, covered with vines, grown about with greenery; flowers blow,
cocks crow, an air of country unconcern covers the enclosure.  The French
gardeners who came here in crowds in 1685, after the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, and set Chelsea all a-bloom with their nurseries, have
left to their heirs but a diminished domain; yet although Butterfly
Alley, sought by sauntering swells, has gone, King’s Road is still
countrified by its florists: their famous wistarias grow on the Hospital
walls and climb the houses of Cheyne Walk: you still find their fig-trees
in private gardens, their vines on old-fashioned trellises: they make
Chelsea streets all green and golden with their massed creepers through
summer and through autumn.  In unexpected corners you will stumble on a
collection of cosy cottages, like Camera Square; there are a few rural
nooks still left; here and there a woodland walk; and in dairies hid
behind stone streets the cow is milked for you while you wait to drink
the warm milk.

And on the river bank, although the old Roman and the old Norman wall and
walk are replaced by the broad new Embankment and its smug gardens;
although the insolent affectations of the Queen Anne mania stare stonily
down on Cheyne Walk; all these have not been able to vulgarise this most
delightful of promenades.  Starting from Chelsea Barracks we can still
walk under the old plane trees:—on our right the ancient Dutch-fronted
houses, so prim, so secluded, so reserved; on our left the placid flow of
the storied Thames, broadened here into Chelsea Reach:—to dingy, dear old
Battersea Bridge, and so on to Sand’s End.  At each end of our walk are
the two small rivulets which bounded the old parish east and west; one is
now arched over and flows unseen beneath the tread of busy feet; the
other serves as a railway cutting and carries rattling trains: so the
old-time memories of the place now either flow underground, or are
modernised and become part of its daily life.

            [Picture: The Embankment and Old Battersea Bridge]

In the extreme north-eastern corner as we enter Chelsea we find Hans
Place, a secluded green oval, built about with old-time two-storied brick
houses.  In No. 25 was born in 1802 the poetess, Letitia E. Landon, known
as “L. E. L.”; and at No. 22 she went to school. {31}  At the farthest
south-western point of the parish, just over on the border of Fulham,
stands the old house once tenanted by Nell Gwynne.  At the northern end
of Church Street, opposite the Jewish burial ground, is a public-house,
“The Queen’s Elm,” perpetuating the memory of the tree, there standing
until very lately, under which Elizabeth sought shelter from a shower,
when strolling in the fields with Burleigh on one of her frequent visits
to Chelsea.  On the southern, the river, border of the parish, lived
George Eliot; and here, at No. 4, Cheyne Walk, she died.  Between these
spots, marked by the memories of these four women, so far apart in time,
rank, and character, how much of history and romance do we traverse!

In taking you for a stroll to-day through Old Chelsea we will not stop to
puzzle over the etymology of the name; whether it came from the Saxon,
_Chelchythe_, or from _Chesel_, meaning gravel, and _ea_, meaning a bank:
nor trace it back to its earliest appearance in Saxon chronicles, in 745,
as the Hundred of Ossulston, Middlesex.  You may see, if you choose, in
the British Museum, the Charter of Edward the Confessor giving the “Manor
of Chelsey to the Abbot and brothers of the Ministers of the West,” by
whom it was rented for four pounds yearly.  But it will not add to the
interest of our stroll to learn that when it was a residence of Offa,
King of the Mercians, there was a “Geflit-fullic” held here; nor that
they had “a contentious synod.”  Nor shall we altogether partake of the
joy of one Maitland, sounding for many a day up and down the river, and
at last finding, on the eighteenth of September, 1732, the very ford
between Chelsea and Battersea, traversed by Cæsar’s army in pursuit of
the flying Britons.  For several centuries after the Conquest, the names
Chelcheth or Chelchith were used indifferently; in the sixteenth century
it began to be written Chelsey; and it is only since about 1795 that the
modern spelling has prevailed.

Among the archives of Chelsea may be seen the will, dated in 1369, of the
Earl of Warwick; and we know that long before that year he had come here
with the prestige of his prowess at Poictiers, his courage at Cressy, and
had built himself a house—the first great nobleman’s house erected here.
But we do not know where it stood, nor anything more of it, than that it
was afterwards leased by Richard III. to the widowed Duchess of Norfolk
for the yearly rental of one red rose.

Sir Thomas More’s is the first house, as well as the fullest of human
interest, of which we have any authentic record in Chelsea; and it was he
who laid the foundations of the prosperity of the place.  He built it for
himself in 1520: glad to go from narrow Bucklersbury in the City to sweet
sights and sounds and air for his young children.  For more than two
centuries his house stood here, tenanted by many families, famous and
infamous, until 1740, when it was pulled down.  It is a labour of love,
and no difficult one, to reconstruct it as Bowack saw it: “This house is
between 200 and 300 feet in length, has a stately ancient front towards
the Thames, also two spacious courtyards, and behind it are _very fine
gardens_.  It is so pleasantly situated that the late Queen Mary had a
great desire to purchase it before King William built Kensington Palace,
but was prevented by some secret obstacles.”  An old view signed “L.
Knyff del: 1699,” shows us a projecting porch in the centre, a dozen or
more generous windows on each floor, four of them oriel; and above, many
gables, turrets, and a small tower.  The back view crowds together, in
picturesque confusion, a mass of casements, close packed gables, and
jutting pent-houses.  Such was “this pore howse in Chelchith” from which
More dated one of his letters; and Erasmus wrote of it that it was
“neither mean nor invidiously grand, and so subject to envy, yet
commodious enough.”  It stood on the slope a little back from the river,
half-way up to the King’s Road, about where Beaufort Street now runs.  A
spacious garden lay in front, too, wherein the great Chancellor was wont
to walk, as well as on the gate-house, which, in the words of Aubrey,
“was flatt on the top, leaded, from whence is a most pleasant prospect of
the Thames and the fields beyond.”  Sometimes he walked with his guest
Holbein; sometimes with his friend Ellis Heywood, poet and playwright,
who wrote warmly about “this enchanting spot”; sometimes with his King,
Henry VIII., who, still posing as a good Catholic and Defender of the
Faith, used to come up the river, drop into dinner, and saunter afterward
in the garden, his arm about More’s neck.  The son-in-law, Roper, records
this with delight, “never having seen the King so familiar with any one
else, except Wolsey.”  More knew just what all this was worth, and that
his head would count, with the king, for nothing against “say a French
city or a citadel.”  Wolsey’s fate—the fate of so many others—howbeit
warned none of the rest; else could they not have forgotten that to every
neck on which had hung that royal ruffian’s arm the axe soon came; and
that to be his friend was only a little less dangerous than to be his
wife.

                        [Picture: Map of Chelsea]

In this garden were the stocks for heretics, and the “Jesus tree,” or
tree of troth, whereat they were flogged; for More was fond of
suppressing heresy, and failing that, he used to suppress the heretics,
by flinging them into prison.  The resolute old Catholic denied that he
had ever laid hands on a dissident, but it is certain that some one did
so by his orders.  Near his house he had put up the “newe buildinge, for
the entertainment of distressed old men and women;” and therein was a
small chapel, where he spent much time, praying, and scourging himself
with a knotted cord; wearing next his skin the hair shirt which is still
preserved in the convent of Spilsberg.  He was fond of assisting in the
service at the old church, carrying the cross in the procession, and
doing divers duties “like a parish clerk.”  One day the Duke of Norfolk,
coming out to dine with him, “fortuned to finde him in the quier with a
surplisse on his backe, singinge:” at the sight of which servile service,
the good worldly duke was moved to wrathful remonstrance.

All this rigidity in religion was but the natural stand of a strong
character against the drift of the times and the current that was
carrying crowds down with the king; and it narrowed none in the least
this man’s broad spirit, nor touched for the worse his quaint, gentle
humour, his fine wit, his sweet and wholesome nature.  It was he who had
said, in better balanced days:—“A man may live for the next world, yet be
merry withal:” his was the dainty description of Jane Shore in her
youth:—“Proper she was and fair; nothing in hir body that you would have
changed, but if you would have wished hir somewhat higher;” and his that
pitiful picture of her old age and misery.  It was of him that Erasmus
wrote these beautiful words: “There was not any man living who was so
affectionate to his children as he; and he loveth his old wife as well as
if she were a young maid.”  Nor was she only “old,” but, in the words of
More’s grandson, “of good yeares, of no good favour nor complexion, nor
very rich; her disposition very near and worldly.”  Moreover, she was his
second wife; and to her—selfish, grasping, hard, nagging—this man grandly
gave unswerving devotion to the very last.  His was, indeed, an ideal
household into which I like to look; all dwelling together in
affectionate amity; father, mother, the son and his wife, the three
daughters—“the Moricæ”—and their husbands, with all the grandchildren;
and the orphan girl, Margery Giggs, adopted as a daughter by More, “and
as dear to him as if she were his own.”  There is work for all, and “no
wrangling, no idle word was heard; no one was idle,” Erasmus tells us.
All the female folk study too—a rare thing then, for More was centuries
ahead of his time in his larger views of woman’s education, as he—the
greatest minister of Humanism—was in political and in mightier matters.
Pithily he put it: “It mattereth not, in harvest time, whether the corn
were sown by a man or a woman.”  At his table—his dining-hour was
doubtless late, for he urges this boon among the other wise innovations
of his “Utopia”—met the “best society” of England, and famous foreign
guests.  Perhaps it was here that Erasmus sat, greatest of scholars and
divines, himself easily first of all that notable band; admiring, as he
owns, Grocyn’s vast range of knowledge, and Linacre’s subtle, deep, fine
judgment; seeming to hear Plato speak, as he listens to Colet—him who
founded St. Paul’s School—and wondering “did nature ever frame a
disposition more gentle, more sweet, more happy,” than that of his host!

From this home, More was taken to a prison, by his good King.  He had
refused, by countenancing Henry’s divorce, to debase himself and his
great office, and had stepped down from it on May 16, 1533, with even
greater joy than he had stepped up to it on Wolsey’s disgrace, four years
previously.  So he retired to this Chelsea mansion with but one hundred
pounds a year income left to him; after so many years of high and of
lucrative office.  Here he bothered no more about public concerns, but
busied himself with the welfare of his household, preparing his family
and himself for the end which he saw coming.  It came soon enough; and
when he refused to violate his conscience by acknowledging Henry’s
supremacy over that of the Pope as the head of the Church, and by taking
the oath of succession (under which Anne Boleyn’s children were to be
acknowledged the lawful heirs to the crown), he was carried down the
river to the Tower; and there imprisoned for a whole year, in the very
cell, it is said, wherein he had sat as grand inquisitor, aforetime
racking heretics.  “Very nigh Heaven,” he said it was, looking up
contentedly from this narrow tenement.  At nine o’clock of the morning of
July 16, 1535, he was led to the block on Tower Hill and there beheaded.
You may walk there and look on the place to-day: but lately found and
fixed on, railed in and paved.  His courage and his constancy had never
once failed him, save as he was being brought back to his cell after his
trial in Westminster Hall; when his favourite daughter, Margaret Roper,
waiting among the crowd on Tower Wharf—learning his sentence by the token
of the blade of the headsman’s axe turned towards him—broke through the
guards, and clung to his neck, kissing him and sobbing, “Oh, my father!”
with no other words uttered.  Then for a moment the father in him was
unmanned, as he moaned, “My Meg!” and kissed her for the last time.  On
the morning of his execution he was cheerful and even jocular: “I pray
you, master Lieutenant,” said he at the scaffold-steps, “see me safe up,
and for my coming down I can shift for myself.”  He put aside his beard
out of the axe’s reach—“for _it_ has never committed treason”—and so laid
his reverend head on the block; too noble a head to drop in so worthless
a cause.

“A dauntless soul erect, who smiled at death,” is Thomson’s fitting
phrase.  And Erasmus wrote: “All lament his death as the loss of their
own father or brother.  I myself have seen tears come from those men who
never saw More. . . .  How many souls hath that axe wounded which cut off
More’s head!”

Where they buried his body has always been matter of conjecture.  In a
record, printed in 1726, his great-grandson says: “His trunke was
interred in Chelsey Church, near the middle of the south wall;” but other
records tell us that it was inhumed beneath the Tower Chapel; and it
seems certain that no one will ever really know the truth about this.  We
do know, however, that his head was exposed on a spike above London
Bridge, “where as traytors’ heads are sett upon poles; having remained
some moneths there, being to be cast into the Thames, because roome
should be made for diverse others, who in plentiful sorte suffered
martyrdome for the same supremacie.”  It was taken away by Margaret
Roper, by bribery or stealth; “least—as she stoutly affirmed before the
Councell, being called before them for the same matter—it should be foode
for fishes; which she buried where she thought fittest.”  This spot was
found—in 1835, after just three centuries of doubt—to be in the vault of
the Roper family in St. Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury: and there his head
remains to-day “in a leaden box something in the shape of a bee-hive,
open in the front, and with an iron grating before it.”

In my visits to Canterbury, as I stroll down its delightful old street to
St. Dunstan’s, I pause always in front of the ancient carved stone
gateway—all that is left of the Roper mansion—fancying I see that devoted
daughter hurrying home, secretly and by night, carrying her beloved
burden in a silver casket: carrying it all the way in her own hands,
fearful of entrusting it to those of any other.  Most lovable as well as
most learned among women—“her humility equal to her learning,” “no woman,
that could speak so well, did speak so little,” says old Fuller in his
“Worthies”—Margaret Roper holds her high place among the Fair Women of
England, and her story is very near the first in the Legend of Good
Women.

    “Morn broadened on the borders of the dark,
    Ere I saw her, who clasped in the last trance
    Her murder’d father’s head.”

And, amid all the thronging shadows which people Chelsea’s shore, there
walks no more vivid personality than his, as it moves before us through
all his characteristic career; from the day he was taken from his school
in Threadneedle Street, and made page-boy to Cardinal Morten, who said of
him, seeing already his promise of wit and of worth: “This child here,
waiting at table, whosoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous
man;” then to Oxford on his scanty allowance; thence to New Inn and to
Lincoln’s Inn, studying law by his father’s desire, albeit longing
himself for the pulpit; then law-reader of Furnivall’s Inn, whence he was
called to the bar at the age of twenty-one, and so going to live
“religiously yet without vow” in the Charter-House; lecturing in St.
Lawrence, Old Jewry, on Augustine’s “City of God,” listened to by “all
the chief learned of London”; patiently practising his profession, taking
“no fee of Widow, Orphane, or poor person”; becoming famous, near and
far, for his capacity, learning, integrity; and thus elected to the House
of Commons when only twenty-three, and soon made Speaker; rapidly rising
to the highest place in the realm, that of Lord High Chancellor; and
then, as he passed daily to his seat on the woolsack, stopping always
before his aged father, who sat, as judge of the court of the King’s
Bench, in William Rufus’s Hall at Westminster, and “reverently kneeling
down in the sight of all, ask his blessing.”

In the gallery of Old Masters at Brussels, I found lately, after long
searching, a diminutive dark canvas set in a black frame, with a small
gilt column on each side; its tiny tablet bears the inscription: “Holbein
le jeune, 1497–1543.  Thomas Morus.”  This most attractive painting shows
a table on which lies a small dog, peering at his master who sits behind;
in More’s right hand, one finger between the leaves, he holds a book; his
left hand grips his dark gown at the neck; a flat cap is on his head; a
short curling beard, steadfast honest eyes, a plain, resolute, shrewd,
strong face:—this is the man “in his habit as he lived” in the later
years of his good life.

This portrait—as well as the more famous group of More and his family,
now in Nostell Priory—was painted by Hans Holbein, {48} while he was
living with More.  He had grown tired of his dissipated life in Basle and
of his wife, and had come to England with a letter of introduction to
More, from Erasmus, whose portrait Holbein had just finished in Basle;
and More was so pleased with the man that he gave him a home with
himself.  Here were passed three of the happiest years of the great
painter’s life, during which he did much good work.  Some of this was
shown to the king on one of his visits, More having hung several of the
portraits in a fine light for that purpose; and they so charmed the
delicate-minded monarch that he asked, “if such an artist were still
alive, and to be had for money?”  So it came to pass that Holbein, on
losing his good friend, entered the king’s service, and there remained
until his own death.

                                * * * * *

After More’s execution, and the confiscation of his property—which is a
tautological way of speaking of any of Henry’s murders—the house passed
through many hands, noble and base, clean and dirty; and while everything
is of interest concerning walls which, in Cicero’s words, “could give
such good reason for their fame,” it would be but dry detail to follow
their forlorn fortunes fully.  Of the noblemen and courtiers who dwelt
here, few are worthy our notice: but I may mention that as early as 1586
Lord and Lady Dacre had bought the house and estate; and here her
brother, Thomas Sackville, often visited her, and from here many of his
letters are dated.  Here he may have written his “Gorbudic,” the first
English Tragedy.  It was Sackville who was sent to tell Queen Mary of
Scots that her sentence was signed, and he it was who saw it executed.
Lady Dacre, surviving her husband, willed the place to the great Lord
Burleigh; and so it came to his son, Lord Robert Cecil, afterwards Earl
of Salisbury.  He rebuilt the house and improved the place in 1619, so
that even then it was “the greatest house in Chelsey.”  So great that,
later, James I. found it just the place he wanted for his favourite “dear
Steenie,” first Duke of Buckingham; giving its owner, then Craufield,
Earl of Middlesex, snug lodgings in the Tower, in exchange.  Charles I.,
as deeply infatuated with the Duke as his royal father had been, gave the
estate out and out to him, in 1627; and his it remained until the
Commonwealth seized on it.

His son, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham—a man worthy of, and
worse even than his sire—regained the property by his shifty marriage
with the daughter of Fairfax, and it was confirmed to him on the
Restoration; but in 1664 it was sold, along with all the other estates of
this poor and profligate scoundrel—the last and the lowest of the
Villiers.  He was the Zimri of Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel”:

    . . . “everything by starts and nothing long;
    But, in the course of one revolving moon,
    Was Chymist, Fidler, Statesman, and Buffoon.

                                   * * * *

    Beggar’d by fools, when still he found too late
    He had his jest and they had his estate.”

And Pope tells us, in his stinging verse, how “this lord of useless
thousands ends” his ignoble life, deserted and despised:

    “In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half hung,
    The floor of plaister and the walls of dung,
    On once a flock bed, but repair’d with straw,
    With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw;
    The George and Garter dangling from that bed
    Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red;
    Great Villiers lies!”

It was the Earl of Bristol who bought the place from Buckingham, and it
is at this time that we meet with a notice of it in Evelyn’s diary under
the date 15th January, 1678–9: “Went with my Lady Sunderland to Chelsey
and dined with the Countesse of Bristol in the greate house, formerly the
Duke of Buckingham’s, a spacious and excellent place, for the extent of
ground and situation in good aire.  The house is large but
ill-contrived.”

In 1682 the Marquis of Worcester, afterwards Duke of Beaufort, became the
owner of the mansion; and from him it was named Beaufort House,
thereafter always called so.  He selected this place that he might live,
says Strype, “in an air he thought much healthier, and near enough to the
town for business.”  In 1738 Sir Hans Sloane bought the house and soon
after pulled it down; giving the famous Inigo Jones-gateway to the Earl
of Burlington, who removed it to Chiswick, where it stands to-day in the
gardens of the Duke of Devonshire’s Chiswick House, not far from the
statue of the architect.  It was on meeting its disjointed stones, as
they were being carted away, that Alexander Pope wrote the well-known
lines:

    _Passenger_: “O Gate, how com’st thou here?”

    _Gate_: “I was brought from Chelsea last year,
       Batter’d with wind and weather;
       Inigo Jones put me together;
    Sir Hans Sloane
    Let me alone;
       Burlington brought me hither.”

Do not think, however, that this gateway is the only relic of More’s
mansion; for the persevering prowler may find still another, well worth
the search.  Where King’s Road curves about to Millman’s Street—known on
the old maps of those days as the Lovers’ Walk, “A Way to Little
Chelsea”—an ancient gateway gave entrance to More’s back garden and
stables, and through it we may now pass into the Moravian Burial Ground.
Here, in the peacefullest spot in all London, lie in rows, men and women
on opposite sides, our Moravian brothers and sisters, “departed,” as
their little headstones, in their touching simplicity, tell us.  Grass
grows above them, great trees guard them; trees perhaps planted by More
himself.  For this was part of the “very fine gardens” which Bowack
speaks of; and that massive wall at the farther end was built in the
century which saw the Armada.  In among the gardens of the houses beyond,
may be found other bits of wall; all built of very narrow bricks, such as
we trace in More’s chapel in Chelsea Old Church; bricks made only then,
peculiar to that period, not seen since.  This largest piece we are
looking at is still solid enough, though bulging here and there with its
weight of over three hundred years, its bricks black with age and smoke;
here are the traces of beams once set in it, here is a bit of an archway,
there the remains of a fireplace.  Thomas More’s arm rested on this wall:
it is part of him, and he mutely bequeaths it to our care.  It is well
that we should claim salvage for this bit of wreckage thrown upon the
beach of Time, with his mark upon it.

The little brick cottage of the keeper of the graveyard is overrun with
vines, and answers to the assurance of the antiquity of all within the
enclosure.  The long low building of one room formerly serving as the
Moravian Chapel is now used for a Sunday School.  As I glance through the
windows in this Sunday sunset I see boys wriggling on board benches,
struggling with big Bible names, and mad for the fresh air and the
freedom outside; one belated boy, trying at the locked gate, does not
look unhappy at being refused entrance.  There are memorial tablets on
the chapel walls; one of them bears the name of “Christian Renatus, Count
of Zinzendorf”; another that of “Maria Justina, Countess Reuss.”  These
were the son and daughter of the great Zinzendorf; and to tell how these
came here I must give you the story of another great Chelsea mansion,
Lindsey House. {57}

                     [Picture: The Houses at Chelsea]

It still stands slightly slant-wise to the river road, just west of the
quaint group of houses on the corner of Cheyne Walk and Beaufort Street.
Its front has been stuccoed, and it has been otherwise modernized; but it
has not been entirely robbed of its old-fashioned stateliness.  The five
separate dwellings into which it was long ago divided have harboured some
famous tenants; Martin the painter lived in that one which still inherits
the old name, “Lindsey House.”  Here, too, lived Brunel, the great
engineer; Bramah, famous for his locks, in another.  It was the Earl of
Lindsey, who, about 1674, built this grand new mansion on the site of a
former house: between Beaufort House, you see, and the river.  It
remained in his family until 1750, when it was bought by Count Zinzendorf
as a residence for himself and the Moravian Brethren of whom he was the
head: and at the same time he bought from Sir Hans Sloane the stables of
More’s mansion to be used as a chapel, and his garden for a graveyard.
Zinzendorf was a man of a rare nature, lifted above all that is petty and
paltry in ordinary life: a spiritual knight, he had founded in his youth,
at Halle, a sort of knighthood, “The Slaves of Virtue” and also the
“Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed;” teaching his disciples there,
teaching the Dutchmen in Holland, and the negroes in Pennsylvania, {58}
later—teaching and preaching all his life—the brotherhood of man, the
essential unity of all forms of religion.  A true Catholic, his aim in
life was to unite all sects.  As head and guardian of his little body of
Herrnhuters, he had used his own fortune to buy 100,000 acres of land in
North Carolina, from Lord Granville, in 1749; and in the following year
he bought this property at Chelsea.  But no part of it now belongs to the
Moravians, except this burial-ground; still in use, as we have seen,
having been exempted by special provision from the Act of 1855, which
closed the other intramural graveyards of London, by reason of this one
burying but one body in each grave, and that so deeply.

              [Picture: Lindsey House and Battersea Bridge]

The name of Pennsylvania just mentioned comes to us again as we walk a
little further west; for its famous founder, William Penn, is oddly
enough associated with the notorious Cremorne Gardens, which lay just
here.  The very name of this haunt of feasting and flirting by a peculiar
irony was derived from the Viscount Cremorne, its former owner, “this
most excellent man,” known, even when plain Thomas Dawson, before his
peerage, as a model of all that was steady and sedate.  His second wife,
the great-granddaughter of William Penn, was named Philadelphia, from the
city of her birth—a good woman, whose character, her funeral sermon
assures us, “it was difficult to delineate.”  She, becoming Lady
Cremorne, and outliving her husband, inherited this charming villa and
grounds, called Chelsea Farm; and left it at her death, in 1825, to her
nephew, Granville Penn, “one of the Hereditary Governors and
Proprietaries of the late Province of Pennsylvania.”  He soon sold it,
and it became a den of drinking, dancing, devilry.  The ancient gilded
barge, “The Folly,” moored on its river front, was once more the scene of
just such orgies as it had known in its youth, during the roystering days
of the Restoration.

Past the prim and proper brick cottages, past the innocent nursery
garden, which cover wicked old Cremorne: through new streets and
crescents built on the site of the famous Ashburnham estate—where, in old
days, stretched the great gardens of the learned Dr. Cadogan, filled with
rarest medicinal plants: out beyond the high brick wall, massive with
reserve and respectability, behind which hides old Stanley House—built by
Sir Arthur Gorges, who was embalmed in his friend Spenser’s verse as
Alcyon, for his talents and his conjugal affection, and who was here
visited once by Queen Elizabeth; her thrifty-minded majesty accepting, as
was her wont, the customary gift of greeting, “a faire jewell,” from her
host:—so we come to the westernmost edge of Chelsea.  Here, standing on
the little bridge which carries King’s Road across the deep railway
cutting into Sand’s End, Fulham, we look over to an old plaster-fronted
house, once known as Sandford Manor House.  This was one of the many
residences of Mistress Eleanor Gwynne; and in it, a hundred years after
her, lived Joseph Addison.  It has been newly plastered, the sloping roof
raised a little, and the wings long since torn down; but it has been very
slightly modernized otherwise; and Mr. McMinn, its occupant, with rare
and real reverence has preserved its antique features; all the more
marked by their contrast with the great modern gasometers beyond.
Within, its square hall retains the old wainscotting, and the staircase
remains as when Charles II. rode up it on his pony, for a freak.  The
delightful little back garden is perhaps hardly altered since those days,
except that the four walnut trees which Charles is said to have planted
in the front garden have gone to decay and have recently been uprooted.
At its foot, where now the railway cuts through, once ran “the creek with
barges gliding deep, beside the long grass,” on the banks of which
Addison went bird-nesting, in search of eggs for the young Earl of
Warwick.  This was when he was thinking of marrying the lad’s mother, and
the letters—still in existence—which he wrote from here to the little
ten-year-old earl, are as genuine and charming as anything which ever
came from his pen.  One of them begins: “The business of this is to
invite you to a concert of music, which I have found out in the
neighbouring wood.”  I wish space allowed me to quote more of these
letters.  Although they are dated simply at Sand’s End, none other than
Sandford House has ever stood which can make entirely good the
descriptions of that country retreat, “whereto Mr. Addison often retires
in summer.”  What would one not give to have been invited out there, on
such an evening as Thackeray tells us of?

    “When the time came to leave, Esmond marched homeward to his
    lodgings, and met Mr. Addison on the road, walking to a cottage which
    he had at Fulham, the moon shining on his handsome serene face.
    ‘What cheer, brother?’ says Addison, laughing: ‘I thought it was a
    foot-pad advancing in the dark, and behold, it is an old friend.  We
    may shake hands, Colonel, in the dark; ’tis better than fighting by
    daylight.  Why should we quarrel because thou art a Whig and I am a
    Tory?  Turn thy steps and walk with me to Fulham, where there is a
    nightingale still singing in the garden, and a cool bottle in a cave
    I know of.  You shall drink to the Pretender, if you like.  I will
    drink my liquor in my own way.’”

               [Picture: Sandford Manor House, Sand’s End]

On the corner of the little turning which leads to this house there
stands a tavern called “The Nell Gwynne;” this, at the extreme western
end of the parish, is matched by another of the same name on its
easternmost edge; and between these two public-houses we may track many
other footprints of this fair lady, “with whom, for all her frailties,
the English people can never be angry,” as Peter Cunningham well says.
She has left her trace on Chelsea, as she left it in her time on the
light-minded monarch: both shown even yet in Chelsea Hospital, according
to that tradition and popular belief which credit her with its founding.
To this day the old pensioners worship her as their patron saint!  It is
true that Louis XIV. had probably given the notion to the English King by
his foundation a few years before of the _Invalides_ as a retreat for
French veterans; it is true that as early as 1666 Evelyn had sent to
Pepys, as Clerk of the Admiralty, a scheme for an Infirmary for Disabled
English Sailors.  In his diary, January 27, 1681–82, Evelyn says: “This
evening Sir Stephen Fox acquainted me again with his Majesty’s resolution
of proceeding in the erection of a Royal Hospital for emerited soldiers;”
and it is a matter of record that Sir Stephen Fox, first
Paymaster-General of the Forces, was the potent factor in the founding.
This may well be, but it is at least plausible, and certainly pleasant,
to believe that this good-hearted woman, by a judicious and timely
movement, brought about a sudden solution of the question, which had been
only in suspension in the King’s mind.  The general destitution of the
discharged soldiers after the Restoration had become a scandal to the
King and to the country.  In olden times such men had found bread and ale
and a night’s rest in monastic houses; but all this had been done away
with by the Dissolution.  Now, the poor old fellows, who have known
nothing all their lives but wars and camps, wander about, lame, hungry,
helpless, in these dismal times of peace.  Even when able to work, there
is no work for them.  Old John Hill, serving in the ranks all his life,
and now turned adrift to carry the weight of eighty-two years, succeeds
after long suing in being appointed to the poor post of beadsman at
Gloucester, only to find that the King had just given it to another old
soldier, and had forgotten it.  So it was all over the kingdom.  Nell
Gwynne, seeing daily these warriors hobbling about,—the younger ones
wounded for her lover at Dunbar and Worcester, the elder ones for her
lover’s father at Naseby and Marston Moor,—was touched by the sight: she
had been poor herself, yet strangely enough in her prosperity she was
always prone to pity poverty.  They say that one day, a shabby soldier
just escaped from Tangiers—probably an impostor—begged at her carriage
door; and she drove home, and urged the King to do something for these
disabled servants of the State.  And they say, too, that the shifty
monarch, in giving the land for the hospital, made a pretty good thing of
it for himself!

There had been already a building on the ground, then nearly in ruins,
the foundation walls of which may still be seen in the cellar of the
chaplain’s house.  This was King James’s aborted College for polemic
divinity—“A Colledge of Divines and other Learned Men at
Chelsey”—nicknamed “Controversy College,” and intended to be “a spiritual
garrison, with a magazine of all books.”  It was a failure.  Nobody would
subscribe, for every man was giving his money, at this time, to repair
St. Paul’s, and to help Sir Hugh Myddleton bring the New River into
London; and only one-eighth of the plan was ever carried out.  The Royal
Society used the building for a while; in one of its out-houses Prince
Rupert invented the drops, which, in Macaulay’s words, “have long amused
children and puzzled philosophers”; and by which, absurdly enough, his
name is still kept alive; albeit his is a memorable figure, gallant in
battle, ardent in love, devoted in science.  When he laid down the rapier
for the retort, the broadsword for the blowpipe, he pursued chemistry
even as he had pursued the flying Roundheads at Edge Hill, with equal
ardour here on the quiet shore at Chelsea, far from the court and the
crowd.  Later, the buildings, falling to pieces, were used even in 1653,
along with barges moored on the river front, as a prison for the Dutch
taken in the war.  Grave John Evelyn, one of the four Commissioners in
control of all prisoners of war—he had rode with Rupert as a
volunteer—comes to visit his charges on Ash Wednesday, 1665, and notes:
“They only complained that their bread was too fine!”

This was the site fixed on for the new infirmary; and in the _Monthly
Recorder_ of February 17, 1682, you may read: “His Majesty went to
Chelsey Colledge to lay the first stone, with several of the nobility,
which is a place designed to be built and endowed by His Majesty for the
relief of Indigent Officers, and Incouragement to serve His Majesty.”
William and Mary finished the edifice; and it stands—an impressive
monument of that union of proportion and of fitness by which Christopher
Wren gave beauty to his plainest designs—in stately solidity in the midst
of its thirty acres of ground.  It is handsomely supported, not only by
government aid, but by valuable donations.  There are nearly eighty
thousand out-pensioners and over five hundred inmates; these latter
divided into companies, and doing mimic garrison duty in memory of their
active days.  Prints of their popular commanders hang all round the walls
of the great hall west of the grand entrance, once a dining-room, now
used for reading and smoking.  In glass cases are the war medals left by
veterans dying with no surviving relatives to claim them: on one we find
nearly a dozen battles of the Peninsular campaigns; on another Badajos
and Lucknow figure in curious conjunction; and rarest of all is one whose
owner fought at Inkerman, Balaclava, and the Alma.  In this hall the body
of the great Duke lay in state amid the memorials of his victories,
guarded by his own veterans: successors of those other veterans exultant
over the news of Waterloo, whom Wilkie had painted, years before, for the
Duke himself.

                 [Picture: Chelsea Hospital, River Front]

Framed on the wall is a record of the battles, sieges, marches of the
Coldstream Guards; which tells us that this famous body is the sole
surviving representative of the force which placed Charles II. on the
throne, and thus became the nucleus of the standing army of England.  The
corps had been formed in 1650 by General George Monk, who made drafts of
picked men from the various Cromwellian regiments, and led them on that
famous march on the first day of the year 1660, from Coldstream to
London, which saved the monarchy and gave the guard its historic name.
In the chapel, beneath Sebastian Ricci’s great altar-piece, and under the
tattered battle-flags, drooping faded and forlorn, you may see, on any
Sunday, Hubert Herkomer’s picture in real life.  It is a touching scene,
this entry of the veterans into their chapel, preceded by their fife and
drum: still more touching, the funeral of one of their dead, as they
parade painfully from the infirmary, the lone drummer and fife playing
the Dead March in Saul.  In the quiet old burying-ground hard by, they
lie compactly enough, the dead soldiers; and among them, women who have
fought and died in men’s attire, their sex unsuspected until their death.

Not only in this burial-ground, but in the quadrangles and courts, and
everywhere about, there rests an air of repose, of forgetfulness of the
turbulent world without.  Here, about the spacious central quadrangle, on
massive wooden benches, loaf and smoke and chat the contented old boys;
and growl, withal, in their content.  They decorate Grinling Gibbons’
bronze statue of Charles II., posing as a Roman in the centre, with oak
garlands on “Oak-Apple-Day,” May 29th, the anniversary of the
Restoration; on that day they wear oak branches in their caps, and eat
much plum-pudding at dinner.  Open towards the river, this quadrangle
looks out on gracious gardens; just beyond is the great cross, set there
to honour the victims of the Sepoy mutiny: “Some died in battle, some of
wounds, some of disease, ALL in the devoted performance of Duty.”  A
little farther out rises the obelisk commemorating those who fell on that
dark and doubtful day at Chillian-wallah, January 13th, 1849.  As we
stand here, beside a quiet Quaker cannon, these memorials to the devoted
dead lift themselves directly in front; the terraced gardens slope to the
river bank, their “carpet-beds” yellow with the tints of approaching
autumn; the graceful towers and swaying chains of Chelsea Suspension
Bridge seem floating in the air yonder; above the drooping limes and elms
of the embankment the slim spars of lazy sloops slip slowly by; the
gleaming river glides beneath, and away over beyond it the feathery
masses of the trees of Battersea Park stand solidly against the sky.  The
opulent summer sun floods the scene, and an enchanting stillness broods
above all, broken only by the rare rumble of trains on the farther
railway-bridge.  All things are half hid in the exquisite English haze:
it softens every sharpness, harmonizes every harshness, rounds every
shape to grace.

                                * * * * *

The Old Soldiers have their own gardens near at hand, and as we stroll
there we pass College Fields, perpetuating the name of King James’s
College; and so on between double rows of lime trees, gnarled and bent,
under which the amorous veterans flirt sedately with the demure
nursemaids, whose neglected charges meanwhile play with the sheep.
Through the gate we enter a small but well-arranged domain, divided into
tiny squares; each planted by its owner in flowers or in vegetables as
may suit him, so giving him a little more tobacco money by his sales.
They seem fond of those plants which put themselves most in evidence; and
their little gardens are all aglow with gorgeous hollyhocks, dahlias,
sunflowers, of the most gigantic and highly coloured kinds.  It is a
delight to watch the old fellows of a summer afternoon, bending intent on
their toil in shirt-sleeves; or stalking stiffly about in their long red
coats, senilely chaffing and cackling!

You will be pleased, I hope, to learn that this little piece of ground is
called Ranelagh Gardens, and is the sole surviving remnant of that famous
resort so dear to an older generation.  “The R:t Hon:ble Richard Earle of
Ranelagh,” as he is styled on the original “Ground Plot of the Royal
Hospital” in the British Museum, being made one of the three
commissioners appointed in the beginning to manage the young asylum,
leases to himself seven acres of its grounds on the east, lying along the
river, and there builds a grand mansion, in 1691; the gardens of which
are “curiously kept and elegantly designed: so esteemed the best in
England.”  This first Earl of Ranelagh has been one of the pupils of a
certain schoolmaster named John Milton, probably at his house in Barbican
in the City, so recently torn down.  The Earl becomes a famous man, in a
different line from his teacher, and dying in 1712, leaves Ranelagh House
and its gardens to his son; who sells the place in 1733 to Lacy,
Garrick’s partner in the Drury Lane theatre patent; to be made by him a
place of open-air amusement, after the manner of the favourite Vauxhall.
But “it has totally beat Vauxhall,” writes Horace Walpole.  “Nobody goes
anywhere else, everybody goes there.  My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of
it, that he says he has ordered all his letters to be directed thither.”
Of course, he has his sneer at the “rival mobs” of the two places; but he
does not disdain to show himself a very swell mob’s man, in his famous
carouse at Ranelagh, with Miss Ashe and Lady Caroline Petersham.  His
father, Sir Robert, was proud to parade here his lovely mistress, Miss
Chudleigh; “not over clothed,” as Leigh Hunt delicately puts it.  The
manners and morals of this place and this time have never been so pithily
presented as in George Selwyn’s _mot_, on hearing that one of the waiters
had been convicted of robbery: “What a horrid idea he’ll give of us to
those fellows in Newgate!”

At this distance, however, the fêtes, frolics, fire-works and all the
fashionable frivolity of the place look bright and bewildering.  Nor did
grave and reverend men disdain to spend their evenings at Ranelagh—“to
give expansion and gay sensation to the mind,” as staid old Dr. Johnson
asserted!  Goldsmith felt its gaiety, when he came here to forget the
misery of his lodging in Green Arbour Court, where now stands the Holborn
Viaduct station.  Laurence Sterne, fresh to the town from his Yorkshire
parsonage, finding himself in great vogue—his portrait much stared at, in
Spring Gardens, one of the four sent there, selected by Sir Joshua as his
choicest works—plunged forthwith into all sorts of frivolities, and was
seen in Ranelagh more often than was considered seemly.  Smollett
sometimes emerged from out his Chelsea solitude for a sight of this
festive world; Fielding came here to study the scenes for his “Amelia”;
and Addison, too, who chats about the place in his _Spectator_. {80}  It
is spoken of in the _Connoisseur_ and the _Citizen of the World_; the
poet Bloomfield introduced it, and Fanny Burney placed here a scene in
her “Evelina.”  At this time—just one hundred years ago—she was a little
past twenty-six, and was living with her father, Dr. Burney, recently
made organist of the hospital chapel, next door.  Ranelagh had then begun
to “decline and fall off,” in Silas Wegg’s immortal phrase: having been
open since 1742, it was finally closed at the beginning of this century,
its artificial oil-moon paling before the rising radiance of gas-lighted
new Cremorne.

                                * * * * *

On an old tracing of the Hospital boundaries kept in its archives, I
found this inscription: “To answer the Earl of Ranelagh’s house on the
east side of the College, an house was builded in the Earl of Orford’s
garden on the west side.”  This was the house into which Sir Robert
Walpole moved from his lodgings near by, where now Walpole Street runs;
the same lodgings in which the Earl of Sandwich had lived long before.
The Edward Montague, who, as Commander of the fleet, brought Charles II.
back to England, was made Earl of Sandwich for this service, and in 1663
he came to live in Chelsea, “to take the ayre.”  But there was a “Mrs.
Betty Becke,” his landlady’s daughter, who seems to have been the real
reason for this retirement, and at whom the moral Pepys sneers as “a
slut.”  He writes under date of September 9, 1663: “I am ashamed to see
my lord so grossly play the fool, to the flinging off of all honour,
friends, and servants, and everything and person that is good, with his
carrying her abroad, and playing on the lute under her window, and forty
other poor sordid things, which I am grieved to hear.”  Having occasion
to visit his chief here, on naval business, the Clerk of the Admiralty
finds him “all alone, with one joynte of meat, mightily extolling the
manner of his retirement, and the goodness of his diet;” and was so
perturbed, and so loyal withal, as to dare to write him, “that her
wantonness occasioned much scandal, though unjustly, to his Lordship.”
Nor was his Lordship offended by this frankness, but remained friendly to
his Secretary.

Crossing through court and quadrangle and garden, to the western side of
the Hospital, we are allowed to enter its infirmary, and to pass into
ward No. 7.  Here we stand in Sir Robert Walpole’s dining-room, unchanged
since he left it, except that the array of fine Italian pictures has gone
from the walls, and that decrepid soldiers lie about on cots, coughing
and drinking gruel from mugs.  But for all this, perhaps by reason of all
this, this room, with its heavily moulded ceiling, its stately marble
mantle—in severe white throughout—is one of the most impressive relics of
by-gone grandeur in all London.  The house, grand in its day, grand still
in its mutilation, was built by Sir John Vanbrugh, whose
architecture—florid and faulty, but with a dignity of its own, such as
strikes one in his masterpiece, Blenheim, called by Thackeray “a piece of
splendid barbarism”—was as heavy as his comedies were light; and served
to bring on him Swift’s epitaph:

    “Lie heavy on him earth, for he
    Hath laid many a heavy load on thee.”

This one end—all that remains of the old red-brick mansion—has been
raised a storey, but otherwise stands almost as when Walpole lived here
from 1723 to 1746, and from its chambers ruled England through his
subjects George I. and George II., whom he allowed to reign.  It was from
this room that he rushed out on the arrival of the express with the news
of the death of the first George.  He left his dinner-table at three p.m.
on the 14th June, 1727, and took horse at once:—so riding that he “killed
two horses under him,” says his son Horace:—and was the first to reach
the Prince of Wales at Richmond with the news.  To Walpole House used to
drive, from her palace at Kensington, the wife of this same Prince of
Wales; who, now become George II., cheered her solitude by writing to her
long letters from his residence at Hanover, filled with praises of his
latest lady-love.  These epistles the fair-haired, blue-eyed,
sweet-voiced woman would bring weeping to Walpole, in search of the
comfort which he graciously gave, by assuring her that now that she was
growing old she must expect this sort of thing!  A little later Walpole
drove from here to Kensington, and stood beside the King at her deathbed;
Caroline commending to Walpole’s protection her husband and his monarch!
Here came Bolingbroke on his return from his exile in France, to dine at
the invitation of his great rival, whom he hated and envied.  It was not
a joyful dinner for him, and Horace Walpole tells us that “the first
morsel he put into his mouth was near choking him, and he was reduced to
rise from the table and leave the room for some minutes.  I never heard
of their meeting more.”  Here Swift used to stride into dinner, studying
his host for the _rôle_ of Flimnap in his “Gulliver,” which he was then
writing.  Here fat John Gay, then secretary or steward to Lady Monmouth,
a little farther on in Chelsea, swaggered in his fine clothes, and being
snubbed by his cynical host, put him on the stage as “Macheath” in his
“Beggar’s Opera.”  Pope used to drive over in his little trap from
Twickenham, before his friend Bolingbroke’s return, to entertain Sir
Robert with the details of his row about Lady Mary Wortley Montague with
Lord Hervey; that be-rouged fop whom he pilloried in his rage, as

    “This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings.”

The famous gardens, on which the gay and extravagant Lady Walpole spent
her time and money, have been built over by the successive additions to
the Infirmary; and we no longer can see the conservatory and grotto,
without which in those days no garden was considered complete.  The bit
of ground left serves now for the convalescent soldiers, and the graceful
tree in the centre, its branches growing horizontally out from the top of
the trunk, forms a natural arbour, which they mightily enjoy upon a sunny
afternoon.  Down at the lower end of the garden, a bit of rotting wooden
fence set above a sunken wall marks the line of the river-bank as it ran
before the building of the embankment.  Just here, on a pleasant terrace
and in its summer-house, that royal scamp, George IV., was fond of
philandering with his fair friends; this scene suggesting a curious
contrast with the group once surely sitting or strolling here—a group
made up of no less august personages than Charles II. and the Earl of
Sandwich with the Duchess of Mazarin, followed by “her adoring old
friend” St. Evremond.  For that lovely and luckless lady lived just
across the road, outside these grounds; and to her house in Paradise Row
I wish now to take you.

                                * * * * *

All that is now left of old Paradise Row is half a dozen small brick
cottages, with tiny gardens in front, and vines climbing above.  Once,
when all about here was country, these dwellings must have been really
delightful, and have justified the suggestion of their name, looking out
as they did on pleasant parterres, terraced to the river.  Unpretending
as they are, they have harboured many historic personages.  In Paradise
Row—it is now partly Queen’s Road West—lived the first Duke of St.
Albans, Nell Gwynne’s son, not far from the more modest mansion of his
venerated grandmother, among the “neat-houses” at Millbank.  Her garden
sloped down to the river, and therein she fell one day, and was drowned;
and they wrote a most woeful ballad “Upon that never-to-be-forgotten
matron, old Madame Gwynn, who died in her own fish-pond;” and it would
seem from these ribald rhymes that the lamented lady was fat and fond of
brandy!  This latter weakness is also the theme of Rochester’s muse, in
his “Panegyric upon Nelly,” when he commends her scorn of cost in the
funeral rites—

          “To celebrate this martyr of the ditch.
    Burnt Brandy did in flaming Brimmers flow,
    Drunk at her Fun’ral: while her well-pleased Shade
    Rejoic’d, e’en in the sober Fields below,
    At all the Drunkenness her Death had made!”

In old Paradise Row also lived the Earls of Pelham and of Sandwich, and
the Duchess of Hamilton.  At the corner of Robinson’s Lane—now Flood
Street—stood Lord Robarte’s house, wherein he gave the famous supper to
Charles II. on the 4th of September, 1660, and was soon after made Earl
of Radnor: whence the street of that name hard by.  On April 19, 1665,
Pepys visited him here, and “found it to be the prettiest contrived house
that ever I saw in my life.”  It stood there until within a few weeks, a
venerable tavern known as “The Duke’s Head”: now gone the way of so much
historic brick and mortar!  Latest of all our Chelsea celebrities,
Faulkner, the historian of Chelsea, lived on the corner of Paradise Row,
and what was then Ormond Row, now commonplace Smith Street.  A quiet,
quaint old public-house, “The Chelsea Pensioner,” stands where Faulkner
worked with such pains, on his driest of records; yet to them we are all
glad to go for many of our facts about modern Chelsea.  These poor little
plaster-fronted cottages, stretching from this corner to Christchurch
Street, now represent the once stately Ormond Row; and the swinging sign
of the “Ormond Dairy” is all we have to commemorate old Ormond House,
which stood just here.  In its gardens, sloping to the river bank,
Walpole’s later house was built, as we have seen it to-day.

                         [Picture: Paradise Row]

Let us stop again before the little two-storied house, the easternmost of
Paradise Row, standing discreetly back from the street behind a prim plot
of grass; well-wrought-iron gates are swung on square gate-posts, a-top
of each of which is an old-fashioned stone globe, of the sort seldom seen
nowadays.  A queer little sounding-board projects over the small door;
and above the little windows we read “School of Discipline, Instituted
A.D. 1825.”  It is the oldest school of the kind in London, was founded
by Elizabeth Fry, and in it young girls, forty-two at a time, each
staying two years, “are reformed for five shillings a week,” and fitted
for domestic service.  They wear very queer aprons, their hair is
plastered properly, their shoes are clumsy; and no queerer contrast was
ever imagined than that between them and the perfumed, curled,
high-heeled dame, who once lived here.  She is well worth looking back
at, as we sit here in her low-ceilinged drawing-room, darkly panelled, as
are hall and staircase by which we have passed in entering.

Hortensia Mancini, the daughter of Cardinal Mazarin’s sister, had been
married while very young to some Duke, who was allowed to assume the name
of Mazarin on his marriage.  A religious fanatic, he soon shut her up in
a convent, from which she took her flight and found her way to England in
boy’s costume.  There, as the handsomest woman in Europe, her coming
caused commotion among her rivals, all remembering the flutter she had
excited in Charles II. during his exile in France.  Ruvigny {91} writes:
“She has entered the English court as Armida entered the camp of
Godfrey.”  Indeed, this one soon showed that she, too, was a sorceress;
and Rochester, in his famous “Farewell,” acclaims her the “renowned
Mazarine, first in the glorious Roll of Infamy.”  Living luxuriously and
lavishly for a while, until by the death of her royal lover she lost her
pension of £4000 yearly, she came at length to this little house as her
last dwelling-place; and even here, reduced to real poverty, unable to
pay her butcher or her baker, written down on the Parish books of 1695,
“A Defaulter of the Parish Rates:” she yet persisted in giving grand
dinners—the cost of which (so old Lysons heard) was met by each guest
leaving monies under his napkin!  For all that, this modest mansion was
the favourite resort of famous men of her day; who lounged in of an
evening to discuss and speculate, to play at her basset-tables, to listen
to her music, mostly dramatic, the forerunner of Italian opera in this
country.  Here came Sydney Godolphin, that rare man who was “never in the
way, and yet never out of the way;” here the king was frequently found;
here Saint Evremond was always found!  How real to us is the figure of
this gallant old Frenchman, as we see him in the National Portrait
Gallery: his white hair flowing below his black cap; his large forehead;
his dark blue eyes; the great wen that grew in his later years between
them, just at the top of his nose: a shrewd, kindly, epicurean face.  He
came of a noble Norman family from Denis le Guast, this Charles de Saint
Denys, Seigneur de Saint Evremond.  Entering the army at an early age, he
rose rapidly to a captaincy; his bravery and his wit—a little less than
that of Voltaire, whom he helped to form, says Hallam—making him the
friend of Turenne, of the great Condè, and of others of that brilliant
band.  Satirizing Mazarin, he was locked in the Bastille for three
months; and when free, he finally fled from the cardinal’s fury, and came
to England: here to end his days, waiting on this still fascinating
woman, worshipping her, advising her, writing plays for her, and poetry
to her.  He held the rank of Governor of Duck Island, in the ornamental
water of St. James’s Park—an office invented for him by Charles II., and
having a fine title, a large salary, and no duties.  You may throw bread
to-day to the lineal descendants of those ducks of which the King was so
fond.  Saint Evremond died in 1703, and lies in the Poet’s Corner of
Westminster Abbey, near to Chaucer and Beaumont and Dryden; his adored
lady having died in 1699 in this very house.  She was not buried; for
after all these years of self-effacement her devoted husband again
appears, has her body embalmed, and carries it with him wherever he
journeys.

Mary Astell lived and died in her little house in Paradise Row; a near
neighbour of, and a curious contrast to, the Duchess of Mazarin, whom she
pointed at in her writings as a warning of the doom decreed to beauty and
to wit, when shackled in slavery to Man, and so dis-weaponed in the fight
against fate and forgetfulness.  _She_ devoted herself to celibacy and
“to the propagation of virtue,” as Smollett slily put it.  Congreve
satirized her, too; Swift stained her with his sneers as “Madonella;”
Addison and Steele made fun of her in their gentler way.  Doubtless there
was something of _la Précieuse Ridicule_ to that generation in the aspect
of this most learned lady, who wrote pamphlets and essays; in which,
following More’s lead, she urged the higher education of her sex; and
preached as well as practised persistent protests against the folly of
those pretty women, “who think more of their glasses than of their
reflections.”  She inveighed much—this in our modern manner—against
marriage, and woman’s devotion to man; putting it with point and pith,
that Woman owes a duty to Man “only by the way, just as it may be any
man’s duty to keep hogs; he was not made for this, but if he hires
himself out for this employment, he is bound to perform it
conscientiously.”  One good work of hers still survives.  Failing to
found among her female friends a College or Community for Celibacy and
Study, she induced Lady Elizabeth Hastings—her immortalized as the
Aspasia of the _Tatler_ by Congreve and by Steele, and to whom the latter
applied his exquisite words, “to love her is a liberal education”—and
other noble ladies to endow in 1729 a school for the daughters of old
pensioners of the Royal Hospital; and this little child’s charity was the
precursor and harbinger of the present grand asylum at Hampstead, which
clothes, educates, and cares for these girls.

                                * * * * *

It is but a step to the spacious, many-windowed brick building in the
King’s Road; on the pediment of which, in Cheltenham Terrace, we read:
“The Royal Military Asylum for the Children of Soldiers of the Regular
Army.”  It is popularly known as the “Duke of York’s School,” and is
devoted to the training of the orphan boys of poor soldiers.  It is a
pleasant sight to watch them going through their manœuvres in their
gravel ground; or, off duty, playing football and leap-frog.  They bear
themselves right martially in their red jackets and queer caps, a few
proudly carrying their corporal’s yellow chevrons, a fewer still prouder
of their “good conduct stripes.”  It was “B 65,” big with the double
dignity of both badges of honour, who unbent to my questioning; and
explained that the lads are entered at the age of ten, can remain until
fourteen, can then become drummers if fitted for that vocation, or can
give up their army career and take their chances in civilians’ pursuits.

We may not pause long before the iron gates which let us look in on the
mansion named Blacklands; now a private mad-house, and the only remnant
of the great estate once owned by Lord Cheyne, and which covered more
than the extent of Sloane Street and Square, Cadogan and Hans Place: all
these laid out and built by Holland in 1777, and by him called Hans Town.
We might have stopped, a while ago, in front of the vast Chelsea
barracks, just to the south, to look at the faded plaster-fronted shop,
opposite.  “The Old Chelsea Bun-House,” its sign assured us it was,
before its demolition last year; yet it was only the descendant of the
original house, which stood a little farther east up Pimlico Road,
formerly Jews’ Road.  That once mal-odorous street is yet fragrant with
the buns baked there in the last century, when the little shop was
crowded with dainty damsels in hoops and furbelows, with gallants in wigs
and three-cornered hats, while stately flunkies strode in the street
below.  “Pray, are not the fine buns sold here in our town as the rare
Chelsea buns?  I bought one to-day in my walk”—Swift tells Stella in his
journal for 1712.  Half-mad George III. and Queen Charlotte—she popularly
known as “Old Snuffy”—were fond of driving out to Chelsea Bun-House, to
sit on its verandah munching buns, much stared at by the curious crowd.
The old building was torn down in 1839, “to the general regret in London
and its environs,” its crazy collection of poor pictures, bogus antiques,
and genuine Chelsea ware being sold by auction; all of which is duly
chronicled in “The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction” of
April 6, 1839.

Turning back again to Paradise Row, we glance across the road at a great
square mansion standing in spacious grounds, used as the Victoria
Hospital for Children, a beneficent institution.  This is Gough House,
built by that profane Earl of Carberry, who diced and drank and dallied
in company with Buckingham and Rochester and Sedley.  Early in the last
century it came into possession of Sir John Gough, whence the name it
still retains.  Nearly two centuries of odd doings and of queer social
history tenant these walls; but we can pause no longer than to glance at
the little cots standing against the ancient wainscotting of the stately
rooms, and the infant patients toddling up the massive oak staircases.

                          [Picture: Tite street]

We turn the corner, and pass through Tite Street, and so come, in
refreshing contrast with its ambitious artificiality, to a bit of genuine
nature—a great garden stretching from Swan Walk and the Queen’s Road, and
fronting just here on the Embankment.  On one of the great stone posts of
this entrance—once the water-gate—we read: “The Botanic Garden of the
Society of Apothecaries of London, A.D. 1673;” on the other: “Granted to
the Society in Perpetuity by Sir Hans Sloane, Bart., A.D. 1723.”  These
grounds remain intact as when in this last-named year four acres of Lord
Cheyne’s former domain were made over to the Society of Apothecaries for
“The Chelsea Physick Garden;” with permission to build thereon a
barge-house and offices, for their convenience when they came up the
river.  The buildings were demolished in 1853, but the gardens have
bravely held out against the Vandal hordes of bricklayers and builders;
and in them all the herbs of Materia Medica which can grow in the open
air are cultivated to this very day for the instruction of medical
students, just as when Dr. Johnson’s Polyphilus—the universal genius of
the _Rambler_—started to come out here from London streets to see a new
plant in flower.  The trees are no longer so vigorous as when Evelyn, so
fond of fine trees, praised them; and of the twelve noble Cedars of
Lebanon planted by the hand of Sir Hans, but one still stands; and this
one, even in its decrepitude, is nearly as notable, it seems to me, as
that glorious unequalled one in the private garden of Monseigneur the
Archbishop of Tours.  In the centre stands the statue of Sir Hans Sloane,
put up in 1733, chipped and stained by wind and weather.  For, in this
garden Hans Sloane studied, and when he became rich and famous and bought
the manor of Chelsea, he gave the freehold of this place to the
Apothecaries’ Company on condition that it should be devoted for ever to
the use of all students of nature.

Westward a little way, we come to “Swan House.”  This modern-antique
mansion stands on the site of, and gets its name from, the “Old Swan
Tavern,” which has been gone these fifteen years now, and which stood
right over the river, with projecting wooden balconies, and a land
entrance from Queen’s Road.  It and its predecessor—a little lower down
the river—were historic public-houses resorted to by parties pleasuring
from town; and this was always a house of call for watermen with their
wherries, as we find so well pictured in Marryat’s “Jacob Faithful.”
Here Pepys turned back on the 9th of April, 1666; having come out for a
holiday, and “thinking to have been merry at Chelsey; but being come
almost to the house by coach near the waterside, a house alone, I think
the Swan,” he learned from a passer-by that the plague had broken out in
this suburb, and that the “house was shut up of the sickness.  So we with
great affright . . . went away for Kensington.”  The old fellow—he was
young then—was fond of taking boat or coach, “to be merry at Chelsey”;
often with Mrs. Knipp, the pretty actress; sometimes with both her and
his wife, and then he drily complains to his diary—“and my wife out of
humour, as she always is when this woman is by.”  Yet the critics claim
that he had no sense of fun!  Until the “Old Swan” was torn down, it
served as the goal for the annual race which is still rowed on the first
day of every August from the “Old Swan Tavern” at London Bridge, by the
young Thames watermen, for the prize instituted in 1715 by Doggett—that
fine low comedian of Queen Anne’s day: a silver medal stamped with the
white horse of Hanover (in commemoration of the First George’s
coronation), and a waterman’s orange-coloured coat full of pockets, each
pocket holding a golden guinea.

       [Picture: Statue of Sir Han’s Sloane in the Botanic Gardens]

Just beyond, at Flood Street, begins Cheyne Walk; still, despite almost
daily despoiling, despite embankments and gas and cabs, the most
old-fashioned, dignified, and impressive spot in all London.  Those of
its modest brick houses which remain have not been ruined by too many
modern improvements; they are prim and respectable, clad in a sedate
secluded sobriety, not at all of this day.  Their little front gardens
are unpretending and almost sad.  Between them and the street are fine
specimens of old wrought iron in railings and in gates, in last century
brackets for lamps, in iron extinguishers for the links they used to
carry.  The name “Hans Sloane House” is wrought in open iron letters, in
the gate of No. 17; in others, the numbers alone are thus worked in the
antique pattern.  “Manor House” has an attractive old plaster front; on
another a shining brass plate, dimly marked “Gothic House” in well-worn
letters, is just what we want to find there.  In No. 4 died, on the night
of the 22nd December, 1880, Mrs. John Walter Cross, more widely known as
George Eliot.  And in this same house lived for many years Daniel
Maclise, the painter of the two grandest national pictures yet produced
in England; “the gentlest and most modest of men,” said his friend
Charles Dickens.  Here he died on the 25th of April, 1870, and from here
he was carried to Kensal Green.

                      [Picture: No. 4, Cheyne Walk]

In No. 15 lived for a long time that youthful genius, Cecil Lawson; whose
admirable works, rejected at one time by the Royal Academy, have been
hung in places of honour, since.  One would be glad to have stepped from
his studio into that next door, No. 16, and to have seen Dante Gabriel
Rossetti at work there. {109}  His house—now again known by its ancient
and proper title, “Queen’s House”—stands back between court and garden,
its stately double front bowed out by a spacious central bay, the famous
drawing-room on the first floor taking the whole width.  This great bay,
as high as the house, is not so old, however; and must be an addition of
more recent years; for the house itself plainly dates from the days of
the Stuarts.  Indeed, it shows the influence, if not the very hand, of
the admirable Wren; not only in the external architecture, but in the
perfect proportion to all its parts of the panelling, the windows, the
doorways within.  All the hall-ways and the rooms, even to the kitchen,
are heavily wainscotted; and there mounts, up through the whole height of
the interior, a spiral staircase, its balustrade of finest hand-wrought
iron.  So, too, are the railings and the gateway of the front courtyard,
as you see them in our sketch; and, while much of their dainty detail has
been gnawed away by the tooth of time, they still show the skill, the
patience, and the conscience of the workers of that earlier day.  The
iron crown which once topped this gate has long since been taken away;
but we may still trace in twisted iron the initials “C. R.,” and we may
still see these same initials in larger iron lettering within the pattern
of the back-garden railings.  Catherine of Braganza, Queen of England, is
the name they are believed to commemorate; and legend says that this
house was once tenanted by, and perhaps built for, that long-suffering
consort of Charles II.  I like to fancy her within these walls—the
brilliant brunette stepping down from Lely’s canvas at Hampton Court or
at Versailles; whose superb black eyes were celebrated by the court poet,
Edmund Waller, in an ode on her birthday, and were characterized by
sedate John Evelyn as “languishing and excellent”; and who was pronounced
to be “mighty pretty” by that erudite and studious critic of female
beauty, Samuel Pepys.  She wears the black velvet costume so becoming to
her, and divides her days between pious rites and frisky dances—devoted
equally to both!  A narrow, bigoted, good woman, this: yet, withal,
simple, confiding, affectionate, modest, patient under neglect from her
husband, and under insult from his mistresses; deserving a little longer
devotion than the six weeks Charles vouchsafed to her after their
marriage, never deserving the lampoons with which Andrew Marvel befouled
her.

                [Picture: Gateway of Rossetti’s old house]

When this front courtyard of “Queen’s House” happened to be dug up, not
long ago, three sorts of bricks were unearthed: those of modern make,
those of the Stuart time, those of the Tudor type.  These latter were the
same narrow flat ones spoken of as being found in More’s chapel and wall;
and were evidently the wreckage of the water-gate once standing here,
giving entrance, together with the water stairway, from the river—running
close alongside then—to the palace of Henry VIII.  And in the foundations
of “Queen’s House” are to be seen remains of that Tudor stone-work;
while, in the cellars of the adjacent houses are heavy nail-studded doors
and windows, and similar survivals of that old Palace.  It was built just
here by the King, who had learned to like Chelsea, in his visits to More.
He had bartered land elsewhere—presumably stolen by him—for the old Manor
House standing farther west, near the Church, which belonged to the
Lawrence family.  That not suiting him, he built this new Manor House—a
little back from the river bank, and a little east of where Oakley Street
now runs—its gardens reaching nearly to the present Flood Street, Manor
Street having been cut through their midst.  It was of brick, its front
and its gateway much like that of St. James’s Palace, as it looks up St.
James’s Street; that built just before this, by Wolsey, and “conveyed” to
himself by the King.  An old document describes the Manor House, as the
“said capital messuage, containing on the first floor, 3 cellars, 3
halls, 3 kitchens, 3 parlours, 9 other rooms and larders; on the second
floor, 3 drawing rooms and 17 chambers, and above, Summer-rooms, closets
and garrets; 1 stable and 1 coach-house.”  That seems not so very grand
in the eyes of our modern magnificence.

I have been able to trace the great grounds of the palace, covered in
part with streets and houses as they now are, and in part forming the
rear gardens of this end of Cheyne Walk.   And in these gardens are still
standing here and there remnants of the ancient encircling walls.  The
fine garden of Queen’s House was originally a portion of the palace
grounds, and stood intact even to Rossetti’s time; something of its
extent then being shown in our sketch.  The noble lime trees still stand
there, and among them two strange exotic trees, their leaves unknown to
the local gardeners.  This garden is now partly built on by new mansions,
partly usurped by their gardens.  In two of the latter—spreading out into
both—stands the mulberry tree planted by the hand of the Princess
Elizabeth, still sturdy in its hale old age.  At the back of other houses
a little farther west, notably in the garden of Mr. Druse, stand some
very ancient trees; and I saw there, not very long ago—but gone, for ever
now—a bit of crumbling wall, and an arch, within which were the old
hinges whereon a gate was once hung.  That gate gave entrance from the
land side, by a path leading across the fields from the King’s Road, to
the palace grounds; and through it, Seymour slipped on his secret visits
to Katherine Parr, as we know by a letter of hers: “I pray you let me
have knowledge over night, at what hour ye will come, that your portress
may wait at the gate to the fields for you.”  And she and Seymour had
their historic romps under these very trees with the Princess Elizabeth,
then a girl of thirteen.  Within doors, too, there were strange pranks
“betwixt the Lord Admiral, and the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace,” as was later
confessed by Katherine Aschyly, her maid.  When the young lady learned
that Miss Aschyly and Her Cofferer were under examination in the Tower,
says the old chronicler, “She was marvelous abashede, and ded weype very
tenderly a long Time, demandyng of my Lady Browne wether they had
confessed anything!”  Katherine Parr did not enjoy these frolics, and
sometimes was furious with jealousy on finding them out; but for all
that, she patiently returned to her persistent pious writing, too kindly
a nature to harbour malice or suspicion.

                [Picture: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s garden]

Elizabeth had come to live in the Manor House, at the age of four, that
she might grow up in that healthful air: her father placing, with his
customary delicacy, the daughter of Anne Boleyn under the care and
tuition and example of his latest wife, the staid and studious Katherine
Parr.  To this latter, the King had given, on their marriage, the Manor
House as her jointure; and there she lived in great state, after Henry’s
death.  Already before their marriage, even then a wistful widow, she had
been bewitched by Seymour; and had meant to marry him, but for being
forced to submit to the King’s will to make her his queen.  Once queen,
she seemed to subdue her passion for Seymour; says the naïve ancient
chronicler, “it does not appear that any interruption to connubial
comforts arose out of that particular source.”  The estimable monarch
rotted to death at the end of January, 1546–7, and the month of May was
made merry to his widow—but thirty-five years old—by her secret marriage
with Seymour.  He was a turbulent, unscrupulous, handsome rascal, a
greedy gambler, an insane intriguer; brother of the Protector Somerset,
maternal uncle of King Edward VII., brother-in-law of the King; and he
had tried to marry the Princess Elizabeth, then a girl of thirteen or
fourteen, even while coquetting with the Queen-Dowager Katherine Parr.
The girl with her Boleyn blood doubtless delighted in the mystery of the
secret visits, which she knew of, and in the secret marriage later, which
she surely suspected.  The Queen-Dowager must have found it a trying and
turbulent task to train her, and had more comfort in her other pupil,
little Lady Jane Grey; who came here often for a visit, and for sympathy
in the studies in which she was already a prodigy, even then at the age
of eleven.  She is a pure and perfect picture, this lovely and gentle
girl, amid all these cruel and crafty creatures; but we cannot follow her
farther in the touching tragedy, in which she played the innocent
usurper, the blameless martyr.  Nor can we say more of Katherine
Parr—probably poisoned by her husband—nor of his death on the block, nor
of the rascally and wretched record of the future owners of this Manor
House; but let us come directly down to the year 1712, when it was sold
by Lord William Cheyne, lord of the manor, widely known as “Lady Jane’s
husband,” to Sir Hans Sloane.  It was looked on then as a grand place,
and Evelyn, visiting Lord Cheyne and Lady Jane, notes in his diary that
the gardens are fine, the fountains “very surprising and extraordinary.”
These had been designed by Winstanley, him who built Eddystone
Lighthouse, and who perished therein.

Hans Sloane had come up to London, a young Irish student of medicine;
and, frequenting the Botanical Gardens in Chelsea, just in view of this
Manor House, he must often have looked at and perhaps longed to live in
the roomy old mansion.  After his return from Jamaica, he pursued his
studies with such success that he was made President of the Royal Society
on the death of Sir Isaac Newton, in 1727.  He became a famous physician,
was doctor to the Queens Anne and Caroline, as well as to George I., who
made him a baronet in 1716; the first physician so ennobled in England.
As he grew in wealth he bought much property in Chelsea, first this Manor
House—wherein he lived for fourteen years, and wherein he died—then
More’s house, then land in other quarters of this suburb.  His name is
perpetuated in Sloane Square and in Hans Place, and his property now
forms the estate of the Earl of Cadogan, whose ancestor, the famous
General Cadogan, a Colonel of the Horse Guards in Marlborough’s wars,
married Elizabeth, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Hans Sloane; so that
the present Earl of Cadogan is “Lord of the Manor and Viscount Chelsey.”

But greater than his riches, better than all his other services, is the
fact that Sir Hans Sloane was the founder of the British Museum.  The
extraordinary collection in Natural History, of books and of manuscripts,
with which his house in Bloomsbury was filled, and which then overflowed
into his Chelsea house, was left by him to the Nation, on the payment to
his estate of only £20,000; it having cost him not less than £50,000.
Parliament passed the appropriation, the purchase was perfected, and this
little pond has now grown into the great ocean of the British Museum; on
the shores of which, we who come to scoop up our small spoonfuls of
knowledge are cared for so courteously by its guardians.

                                * * * * *

There was an Irish servant of Sir Hans Sloane, one Salter, who
established himself in 1695 as a barber in a little house in Cheyne Walk
which stood on the site of the present Nos. 17 and 18: “six doors beyond
Manor Street,” contemporary papers say, and I have no doubt this is the
correct site.  Salter was a thin little man, with a hungry look as of one
fond of philosophy or of fretting; and Vice-Admiral Munden, just home
from years of service on the Spanish coast, dubbed him, in a freak, Don
Saltero, a title he carried to his death.  He took in all the papers, and
had musical instruments lying about—he himself twanged Don-like the
guitar—that his customers might divert themselves while awaiting their
turns.  His master had given him a lot of rubbish, for which his own
house had no more room, as well as duplicates of curiosities of real
value in the Museum in Bloomsbury.  To these he added others of his own
invention: the inevitable bit of the Holy Cross, the pillar to which
Jesus was tied when scourged, a necklace of Job’s tears; and, as the
little barber rhymed in his advertisements in 1723, just after De Foe had
set the town talking with his new book—

    “Monsters of all sorts here are seen,
    Strange things in Nature as they grew so;
    Some relics of the Sheba Queen,
    And fragments of the famed Bob Crusoe.”

So that “my eye was diverted by ten thousand gimcracks on the walls and
ceiling,” as Steele puts it in the _Tatler_, describing a Voyage to
Chelsea.  For Don Saltero’s museum, barber’s shop, reading-room,
coffee-house had become quite the vogue, and a favourite lounge for men
of quality.  Old St. Evremond was probably among the first to be shaved
here; Richard Cromwell used to come often and sit silently—“a little, and
very neat old man, with a most placid countenance, the effect of his
innocent and unambitious life.”  Steele and Addison and their friends
were frequent visitors “to the Coffee House where the Literati sit in
council.”  And there came here one day about 1724 or 1725, a young man of
eighteen or twenty years, out for a holiday from the printing-press at
which he worked in Bartholomew Close—Benjamin Franklin by name, recently
arrived from the loyal Colonies of North America, and lodging in Little
Britain.  He had brought with him to London a purse of asbestos, which
Sir Hans Sloane, hearing of, bought at a handsome price, and added to his
museum.  To this museum he gave the young printer an invitation, and
probably told him about Don Saltero’s.  It was on Franklin’s return from
there—the party went by river, of course—that he undressed and leapt into
the water, and, as he wrote in his letters, “swam from near Chelsea the
whole way to Blackfriars Bridge, exhibiting during the course a variety
of feats of activity and address, both upon the surface of the water, as
well as under it.  This sight occasioned much astonishment and pleasure
to those to whom it was new.”

                         [Picture: Don Saltero’s]

It is a far cry from Dick Steele to Charles Lamb, yet the latter too
makes mention of the “Don Saltero Tavern” in one of his letters; saying
that he had had offered to him, by a fellow clerk in the India House, all
the ornaments of its smoking-room, at the time of the auction-sale, when
the collection was dispersed.

This was in 1807, and the place was then turned into a tavern; its
original sign—“Don Saltero’s, 1695,” in gold letters on a green
board—swinging between beams in front, until the demolition of the old
house only twenty years ago. {125}

                                * * * * *

A little farther on, just west of Oakley Street, on the outer edge of the
roadway of Cheyne Walk, stood, until within a few months, another old
sign, at which I was wont to look in delight, unshamed by the mute
mockery of the passing Briton, who wondered what the sentimental prowler
could see to attract him in this rusty relic.  It stood in front of the
little public-house lately burned to the ground—“The Magpie and Stump:”
two solid posts carrying a wide cross-piece, all bristling with spikes
for the impalement of the climbing boy of the period; “MAGPIE AND STUMP,
QUOIT GROUNDS,” in dingy letters on the outer side, once plain for all
rowing men to read from the river; above was an iron Magpie on an iron
Stump, both decrepid with age, and a rusty old weathercock, too stiff to
turn even the letter _E_—alone left of the four points of the compass.
Between these posts might still be traced the top stone of an old
water-staircase, embedded now in the new-made ground which forms the
embankment garden here; just as you might have seen, only the other day,
the water-stairs of Whitehall Palace, which have now been carted away.
Up this staircase Queen Elizabeth has often stepped, on her frequent
visits to the rich and powerful Earl of Shrewsbury, her devoted subject
and friend.  For, on the river slope, just back of Cheyne Walk here,
stood, until the second decade of this century, Shrewsbury House, another
one of Chelsea’s grand mansions.  It was an irregular brick structure,
much gabled, built about a quadrangle; although but one storey in height
it was sufficiently spacious, its great room being one hundred and twenty
feet in length, wainscotted in finely carved oak, and its oratory painted
to resemble marble.  In a circular room there was concealed a trap-door,
giving entrance to a winding stairway, which led to an underground
passage; believed to have opened on the river wall at low tide, and to
have twisted inland to the “Black Horse” in Chelsea, and thence to
Holland House, Kensington.  Local gossip claims that it was used by the
Jacobites of 1745, and perhaps of 1715, too; for they made their
rendezvous by the river at this tavern, and here drank to their “King
over the water.”  In the grounds of the “Magpie and Stump” is a wooden
trapdoor, through which I once descended by stone steps into a paved
stone passage, sufficiently wide and high for two to pass, standing
erect.  This bit is all that remains of the old tunnel—the river portion
being used as a coal-hole, the inland end soon stopped up and lost in
neighbouring cellars.

            [Picture: Cheyne Walk, with the Magpie and Stump]

The wife of this Earl of Shrewsbury is well worth our attention for a
moment, by reason of her beauty, her character, her romantic career, her
many marriages.  Elizabeth Hardwick of Derby became Mrs. Barley at the
age of fourteen, and was a wealthy widow when only sixteen; she soon
married Sir William Cavendish, ancestor of the Duke of Devonshire; to be
widowed soon again, and soon to become the wife of Sir William St. Loo,
Captain of Queen Elizabeth’s Guard.  His death left her still so lovely,
witty, attractive, as to captivate the greatest subject in the land; and
she became the Countess of Shrewsbury; having risen regularly in riches,
position, power, with each of her marriages.  After the death of her
fourth husband she consented to remain a widow.  At her death, seventeen
years later, she bequeathed this Chelsea mansion to her son William,
afterward the first Duke of Devonshire; together with the three grandest
seats in England—Hardwick, Oldcoates, Chatsworth—all builded by her at
successive stages of her eventful career.

Hard by here we trace the site of another notable mansion—the ancient
palace of the Bishops of Winchester—which stood a little back from the
river bank, just where broad Oakley Street runs up from opposite the
Albert Suspension Bridge.  It was only two storeys high and of humble
exterior, yet it contained many grand rooms, lavishly decorated.  On the
wall of one of the chambers, there was found, when the building was torn
down early in the century, a group of nine life-size figures, admirably
done in black on the white plaster; believed to have been drawn by
Hogarth in one of his visits to his friend Bishop Hoadley, here.

A step farther westward along Cheyne Walk and we turn into Lawrence
Street; at the upper end of which, at the corner of Justice Walk, we
shall find, in the cellars of “The Prince of Wales” tavern and of the
adjoining houses, the remains of the ovens and baking-rooms of the famous
Chelsea China factory.  For it stood just here during the short forty
years of its existence, having been established in 1745.  Why it failed
and why the factory was torn down, no one seems to know; for its work was
extremely fine, and its best ware—turned out from 1750 to 1765—was equal
to that of Sèvres.  Skilled foreign artizans had been brought over, and
an extraordinary specimen of unskilled native workman appeared in Dr.
Samuel Johnson.  The old scholar conceived the idea that he could make
china as admirably as he could make a dictionary; but he never mastered
the secret of mixing, and each piece of his cracked in the baking!  He
used to come out here twice a week, his old housekeeper carrying his
basket of food for the day; and was made free of the whole factory,
except the mixing-room.  They presented him with a full service of their
own make, properly baked, however; which he gave or bequeathed to Mrs.
Piozzo, and which, at the sale of her effects, was bought by Lord
Holland.  In “Holland House by Kensington”—to use its good old title—I
have seen it, carefully preserved among the other famed _curios_.

                       [Picture: A Chelsea corner]

“This is Danvers Street, begun in ye Yeare 1696,” says the quaint old
lettering in a corner house of Cheyne Walk; and this street marks the
site of Danvers House, which had formed part of More’s property—perhaps
the “new buildinge”—and which had gone to his son-in-law, Roper.  It came
afterward to be owned by Sir John Danvers, a gentleman-usher of Charles
I., and he made a superb place of it; of which the deep foundations and
the fallen columns now lie under Paultons Square, at the upper end of the
street.  Sir John Danvers was the second husband of Magdalen Herbert, a
woman notable for her famous family of boys: her first son was that
strong and strange original, Lord Herbert of Cherbury; her fifth son was
George Herbert, of undying memory.  The poet lived here for a while.
Donne, the preacher, then at Oxford, used to stop at her house on his
visits to London; and when he became Vicar of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West,
in the Strand, near Isaac Walton’s old shop in Chancery Lane, and had
converted the Gentle Angler, these two certainly strolled often out here
together.  Donne preached Lady Danvers’ funeral sermon in Old Chelsea
Church in 1627; notable as one of his most touching discourses.

                                * * * * *

In the embankment gardens we have passed a statue recently placed there;
a man seated in a chair, uncouth of figure, with bent brow and rugged
face.  And in the wall of the corner house behind we stop to look at a
small memorial tablet, still more recently placed; a medallion portrait
of the same face, and beneath, this inscription: “Thomas Carlyle lived at
24, Cheyne Row, 1834–81.”  For this is not the house in which he lived,
and the tablet was fixed on this one with queer common sense, his own
being in Chancery at that time!  It is to be found farther up in this
little dull street running from Cheyne Walk just here; in which there is
nothing that is not commonplace, save the little cottage covered with
vines, in the wall above which is a stone with odd old-fashioned
lettering—“This is Gt. Cheyne Row, 1708.”  About the middle of the row of
small dreary brick houses, the one once numbered 5, now 24, is that in
which he dwelt for nearly fifty years, and wherein he wrote his
commination service large on all mankind; talking more eloquently, and
more loquaciously withal, in praise of silence, than any man who ever
scolded all through life that he might do honour to the strong arm and
the still tongue!

              [Picture: Statue of Thomas Carlyle, by Boehm]

The look-out across the narrow street from his front windows—“mainly into
trees,” he wrote to Sir William Hamilton, on moving here—shows now
nothing but a long, low, depressing wall, above which rises a
many-windowed model dwelling-house; and it is surely one of the least
inspiring prospects in all London: while from the back he could see
nothing of interest except the westernmost end of the old wall of Henry
VIII.’s Manor House garden, which still stands here.  It gave him a hint
in his pamphlet, “Shooting Niagara;” wherein, sneering at modern bricks
and bricklayers, he says: “Bricks, burn them rightly, build them
faithfully with mortar faithfully tempered, _they_ will stand. . . .  We
have them here at the head of this garden, which are in their third or
fourth century.”

Long before his day, there had lived, almost on this same spot, another
“Hermit of Chelsea,” in the person of Dr. Tobias Smollett; who came here
to live in retirement in 1750, fresh from the fame of his “Roderick
Random;” seeking such seclusion partly on account of his daughter’s
health and his own, and partly for the sake of his work.  Here he wrote
“Ferdinand Count Fathom,” finished Hume’s “History of England,” and began
his translation of “Don Quixote;” and here took place those Sunday
dinners, the delicious description of which, and of the guests, he has
put into the mouth of young Jerry Melford, in “Humphrey Clinker.”  Here
were spent some of his happiest days, with his work and with his friends
from town; Johnson, Garrick, Sterne, John Wilkes, John Hunter: the latter
probably coming from Earl’s Court, Kensington, where his place—mansion,
museum, and menagerie in one—stood till very lately.  Smollett was as
well known in the streets of Chelsea, in his day, as Carlyle in ours—“a
good-sized, strongly-made man, graceful, dignified, and pleasant.”

               [Picture: Carlyle’s house, Great Cheyne Row]

It was a fine old place, with extensive grounds, which Smollett took;
being the ancient Manor House of the Lawrences, once owned by Henry
VIII., as we have seen.  The house stood exactly on the site of this
block of two-storied brick cottages called “Little Cheyne Row,” between
Great Cheyne Row and Lawrence Street.  Its early history has little that
need detain us, until, in 1714, it came to be called Monmouth House, from
its new owner, the Duchess of Monmouth and Buccleuch; who came here with
John Gay as her domestic steward or secretary, and who here lived to the
age of ninety.  She had been an ornament of Charles II.’s court, a real
jewel amidst all the pinchbeck and paste of his setting.  She was the
widow of his son, the hapless Duke of Monmouth; “who began life with no
legal right to his being, and ended it by forfeiting all similar right to
his head.”  It is to this gracious and gentle _chatelaine_ that Sir
Walter Scott sings his “Lay of the Last Minstrel”:

    “For she had known adversity,
    Though born in such a high degree;
    In pride of power, in beauty’s bloom,
    Had wept o’er Monmouth’s bloody tomb.”

Smollett left the place for ever, in 1769, and a little later, went to
die in Spain; a brave, silent, sad man, for all the fun in his books, and
already broken in health by the untimely death of his daughter.  The
Chelsea historian, Faulkner, writing in 1829, says that Monmouth House
was then “a melancholy scene of desolation and ruin.”  It was finally
torn down and carted away in 1834.

                      [Picture: The Chelsea Rectory]

The grounds of Monmouth House—now built over by a great
board-school—stretched back to those of the Rectory of St. Luke’s, a step
to the northward.  The Rectory is an irregular brick building, delightful
to the eye, set in an old-fashioned lawn with great trees; its
tranquillity assured by a high brick wall.  It is a very old house, was
built by the Marquis of Winchester, and granted by him to the parish on
May 6th, 1566, at the request of Queen Elizabeth.  Glebe Place, just at
hand, shows the site of the glebe land given in her time, in exchange for
the older parsonage, which stood still farther west, behind Millman’s
Row, now Millman’s Street.

The historic interest of this Chelsea Rectory, however, is dwarfed by its
personal appeal to all of us, for that it was the home of three notable
boys; named, in the order of their ages, Charles, George, and Henry
Kingsley.  They came here in the year 1836; their father, the Rev.
Charles Kingsley, having received the living of St. Luke’s, Chelsea, from
Lord Cadogan.  So their beloved west-country life was exchanged for the
prim, parochial prosiness, which made such a doleful difference to them
all.  For these boys were born, it seems to me, with the instant love of
life and movement in their blood.  Charles has shown it in almost
everything he wrote; Henry gave utterance to it in his books only in a
less degree, because it found vent in his years of wandering; while
George—better known as “The Doctor”—appears for a little while at
spasmodic intervals at his home on Highgate Hill, then plunges into space
again, and is vaguely heard of, now yachting in the South Seas, now
chatting delightfully in a Colorado mining-camp.  Henry, the youngest,
was a sensitive, shy lad, delicate in health; and the old dames in this
neighbourhood tell of his quiet manner and modest bearing.  Many of the
poor old women about here have a vivid remembrance of “the boys,” and
speak of the whole family with respect and affection.  Henry was born in
1830, studied at King’s College, London, for a little over two years,
1844–6; his name was entered at Worcester College, Oxford, March 6th,
1850; where he kept ten terms, leaving at Easter, 1853, without taking
his degree.  The Australian “gold-digging fever” was then raging, and he
started for that country with two friends.  There he did all sorts of
things: tried mining, tried herding, became a stockman, was in the
mounted police; and after about five years of these varied vocations,
returned to England with no gold in his pockets.  It was all in his
brain; a precious possession of experience of life and of men, to be
coined into the characters and the scenes which have passed current all
over the globe.  All his Australian stories are admirable, and “Geoffrey
Hamlyn”—his first work, produced soon after his return, in 1859—is the
best tale of colonial life ever written.  His parents had intended that
he should take holy orders, hoping perhaps that he should succeed his
father in the living of old St. Luke’s; but he felt himself utterly
unfitted for this profession, as he also, although with less reason,
believed himself unfitted for that of the journalist.  This latter he
tried for a while when he came back to England; and indeed, as a
correspondent he displayed dash enough, and after the surrender of Sedan,
was the first man to enter within the French lines.  He found at length
his proper place as an essayist and a novelist.  In all his works, there
is to me a strange and nameless charm—a quaint humour, a genuine
sentiment, an atmosphere all his own, breezy, buoyant, boyish; seeming to
show a personality behind all his creations—that of their creator—a fair,
frank, fresh-hearted man.  He had true artistic talent in another
direction, too, inherited from his grandfather; and he may have been just
in judging himself capable of gaining far greater reputation as a painter
than as a novelist, even.  His skill in drawing was amazing, and the few
water-colours and oils left to his family—and unknown outside of its
members—are masterpieces.  On his return from Australia, he lived for a
while with his mother at “The Cottage,” at Eversleigh; never caring for
Chelsea after the death of his father.  He was married in 1864 by Charles
Kingsley and Gerald Blunt, the present Rector of Chelsea.  On May 24th,
1876, “on the vigil of the Ascension,” only forty-six years of age, he
died at Cuckfield, Sussex, which quiet retreat he had chosen twelve
months before.

Henry Kingsley especially appeals to us, just here, for that he has given
us, in “The Hillyars and Burtons,” so vivid a picture of modern
Chelsea—its streets and by-ways, its old houses and its venerable church,
in delightful detail, as he saw them when a boy.  The Hillyar family is a
romantic reproduction of that ancient Chelsea family, the Lawrences; in
“The Burtons” he gives us his reminiscence of the Wyatt household, living
at Wargrave, Henley-on-Thames.  The brave girl, Emma Burton, is a
portrait of Emma Wyatt.  The old home of the Burtons—“the very large
house which stood by itself, as it were, fronting the buildings opposite
our forge; which contained twenty-five rooms, some of them very large,
and which was called by us, indifferently, Church Place, or Queen
Elizabeth’s Place”—_this_ was the only one of the grand mansions just
here in Chelsea left standing when the Kingsleys came here.  “It had been
in reality the palace of the young Earl of Essex; a very large
three-storied house of old brick, with stone-mullioned windows and
doorways.”  You may see a print of it in “kind old Mr. Faulkner’s” book,
as he found it in 1830, dilapidated then, and let out to many tenants.
Later, it sunk lower still; and finally the grand old fabric—“which had
been trodden often enough by the statesmen and dandies of Queen
Elizabeth’s court, and most certainly by that mighty woman herself”—was
demolished between 1840–42.  The boy of ten or twelve then, Henry
Kingsley, must have had the same feelings of wonder and regret, which he
puts into the speech of Jim Burton, as he looked on this historic pile,
roofless, dis-windowed, pickaxed to pieces.  He is not quite correct in
letting Jim Burton fix its site on the south side of Paultons Square; it
stood between that square and Church Street, exactly where now stands a
block of poor little one-storied houses, “Paulton Terrace, 1843,” painted
on its pediment; and at the back, built in with some still more wretched
little dwellings, you shall still see part of the palace wall of Thomas
Cromwell, Earl of Essex, the son of the Putney blacksmith.

From this ancient site I often walk, in company with the Burton brothers,
Joe and Jim, their sister Emma and Erne Hillyar behind, down old Church
Lane, now Church Street, haunted by historic shades, to where, at its
foot, stands “Chelsea Old Church.”

“Four hundred years of memory are crowded into that dark old church, and
the great flood of change beats round the walls, and shakes the door in
vain, but never enters.  The dead stand thick together there, as if to
make a brave resistance to the moving world outside, which jars upon
their slumber.  It is a church of the dead.  I cannot fancy any one being
married in that church—its air would chill the boldest bride that ever
walked to the altar.”  So Joe Burton well says, sitting in his “old
place”—the bench which stood in front of Sir Thomas More’s monument,
close to the altar-rails.  But for all that, it is not a depressing but
rather a delightful old church, if you sit here of a summer afternoon;
the sun streaming in from the south-west, slanting on the stone effigies,
and the breeze breathing in through the little door beside More’s
monument, shaking the grass outside, and the noble river sparkling beyond
the embankment garden.  To me it has more of fascination than any church
in London.  Its entire absence of architectural effect in its varying
styles; its retention to this day of the simplicity of the village
church, even as when built; its many monuments and mural tablets, each
one a page of English history; its family escutcheons; its tattered
battle flags hung above; the living memories that are built in with every
dead stone: all these combine to make it the quaintest, the most
impressive, the most lovable of churches.  Dean Stanley was fond of
calling it one of the Chapters of his Abbey.  This is not the place for a
description of the monuments, nor for details of their inscriptions;
which make us think, as they did the boy Jim Burton, that these buried
here “were the best people who ever lived.”  Only the tenant of one plain
stone coffin is modest in his simple request cut thereon: “Of your
Charitie pray for the soul of Edmund Bray, Knight.”  As for most of the
others, I quite agree with Jim, that the Latin, in which their long
epitaphs are written, was the only language appropriate; the English
tongue being “utterly unfit to express the various virtues of these
wonderful Chelsea people;” among whom, it strikes me, too, that “Sir
Thomas More was the most obstinately determined that posterity should
hear his own account of himself.”  His black marble slab, set deep under
a plain grey Gothic arch, is placed on the chancel wall, just where he
used to stand in his “surplisse;” above it is his punning crest, a Moor’s
head on a shield; and on it is cut his own long Latin inscription, sent
by him to his friend Erasmus, who thought it worth printing in his
collection of “Tracts and Letters” (Antwerp, 1534).  Twice have the
characters been recut; and each time has care been taken, for his
memory’s sake, to leave blank the last word of the line, which describes
him as “troublesome to thieves, murderers and _heretics_.”  To the sturdy
old Catholic these were all equal—all criminals to be put out of the way.
The irony of chance has placed, on the wall close beside his tomb, a
tablet which keeps alive the name of one of the Tyndale family, a
descendant of that one whose books More burnt, and whose body he would
probably have liked to burn, also!  More’s two wives are buried here, as
well as others of his family; but whether his body lies here, or in a
Tower grave, no one knows.

                [Picture: A Corner in Chelsea Old Church]

Three of Chelsea’s grandest ladies lie under monuments in the church.
Lady Dacre, with her husband Gregory—“their dogs at their feet”—rests
under a Gothic canopy, richly wrought with flowers; tomb and canopy all
of superb white marble.  Its sumptuousness is all the more striking in
that it contrasts so strongly with the simplicity ordered by her dying
injunctions, as she wrote them on December 20, 1594, when decreeing the
establishment of her almshouses—venerable cottages still standing in
Tothill Street, Westminster, not far from the little street named for
her.  In her will she says: “And I earnestly desire that I may be buried
in one tombe with my lord at Chelsey, without all earthlie pompe, but
with some privat freindes, and nott to be ripped, and towling for me, but
no ringing, after service ys done.”

Opposite where she lies, reposes in white marble of the size of life,
under a pillared arch on a black marble pedestal, another noted Chelsea
dame, Lady Jane Cheyne; and on the marble her worthy husband Charles,
transformed here into Carolus, records in sounding Latin the good she did
in her life.  Notably did she benefit this church, towards the
re-building of which she gave largely.

The great Duchess of Northumberland—mother of Elizabeth’s Leicester,
grandmother of Sir Philip Sidney—was laid to rest under a magnificent
tomb; of which there now is left, to keep alive her memory, here against
the wall, only a slab beneath a noble arch, and faded gilt escutcheons
beautifully wrought.

And now, glancing about at the monumental marble and brass of these
soldiers, statesmen, citizens, simple and stately, we are ready to agree
with straight-thinking Jim Burton: “But, on the whole, give me the
Hillyars, kneeling humbly, with nothing to say for themselves.”  It is
the Lawrence family, as I have explained, who are called “The Hillyars”
by Henry Kingsley; and his preference—a memory, no doubt, of the Sunday
visits of his boyhood to the rector’s pew, which directly faces these
tombs—refers to that quaint monument in the Lawrence chapel; where, under
a little arch, supported by columns, kneel wife and husband face to face,
he in his armour, his three simple-seeming sons in ruffs kneeling behind
him; she in her heavy stiff dress, her six daughters on their knees
behind in a dutiful row, decreasing in size to the two dead while yet
babies on the cushion before her.  Says Jim: “I gave them names in my own
head.  I loved two of them.  On the female side I loved the little wee
child, for whom there was very small room, and who was crowded against
the pillar, kneeling on the skirts of the last of her big sisters.  And I
loved the big lad, who knelt directly behind his father; between the
Knight himself and the two little brothers, dressed so very like
blue-coat boys, such quaint little fellows as they were.”

In this Lawrence chapel we see a strange survival of a common custom of
the pre-Reformation times; when a great family was wont to build and own
its private chapel in the parish church; using it for worship during
life, for burial in death, and deeding or bequeathing it, as they did any
other real estate.  When Sir Thomas Lawrence became Lord of the Manor, he
partly bought, and partly built, this chapel; and now, although it forms
the entire east end of the north aisle, it has not been modernized like
the rest of the church, but retains its high-backed pews and other
ancient peculiarities unchanged since the church was repaired in 1667;
for it is still private property, belonging to the family to whom it has
descended from the Lawrences, and to them goes the income derived from
its pews.

Before going out through the main door we stop to look at the wooden rack
to which the old books are chained, and underneath, at the little
mahogany shelf, for convenience in reading them: these bring back to us
the monkish days.  Here is the Bible, kept since that time when it was so
costly a volume; here the Prayer-book, the Church Homilies, Foxe’s
Martyrology: this latter then nearly as sacred as the Scriptures.  In the
porch now stands the bell which hung for nearly two hundred years in the
tower, given to the church by “the Honourable William Ashburnham,
Esquire, Cofferer to His Majesty’s Household, 1679;” so its lettering
tells us.

Going, one foggy night of that winter, perhaps from that Ashburnham House
of which we have seen the site, he lost his way, slipped, and fell into
the river; and would have been lost, good swimmer though he was, unable
to see the shore, but that he heard this church clock strike nine, and so
guided, swam safely toward it.  He gave to the church, just then being
rebuilt with Lady Cheyne’s funds, this bell, with a sum sufficient to
have it rung for five minutes every night at nine.  So was done for many
years—the ringer receiving “a penny each night and a penny for his
candle”—until about half a century ago the fund vanished, somehow,
somewhere; and this bell has never been rung since!

Outside, the tiny graveyard is crowded with slabs and monuments, many of
them ugly, some curious, a few fine: from the stately stone tomb of Sir
Hans Sloane and his wife—a marble urn entwisted with Æsculapian serpents,
under a marble canopy—to the simple slab, worn with wind and weather, of
Dr. Chamberlayne and his family; of whom the daughter, Anne, more famous
than any of the others, “long declining wedlock, and aspiring above her
sex and age, fought under her brother with arms and manly attire, in a
fire-ship against the French, on the 30th June, 1690: a maiden heroine!”
This “Casta Virago” was then but twenty-three, and did not grow in
courage with her years; for she soon after consented to marry one John
Spraggs, and then died!  Here and there, amid unknown graves, we may find
those of Magdalen Herbert; Mrs. Fletcher, wife of the Bishop of London,
mother of the Fletcher of the famous firm “Beaumont and Fletcher”;
Shadwell, the poet-laureate; Woodfall, the publisher of “Junius”; Sir
John Fielding, the blind magistrate of Bow Street, half-brother of the
novelist.

Amid these English names is written the name of an historic Frenchman;
and his historic grave is hid somewhere in a corner of this churchyard,
past finding out. {160}  The church record reads: “Burial—A.D. 1740, May
18, Brigadier John Cavallier”; and this dry detail of the interment of
“only an old officer, who had always behaved very bravely,” is all that
is told there of Jean Antoine Cavallier, the Camissard, the leader of the
French Huguenots in their long, fierce fight against the cruel and
lawless enforcement of Louis XIV.’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes;
refusing to be apostatized, expatriated, or exterminated.  They became
the Covenanters of France, and Cavallier—a baker’s apprentice, with a
genuine genius for war, the soul of the strife, elected their leader
before he was twenty—was their Black Douglas: one even more furious and
more ferocious.  After fire and slaughter and pillage for two years;
affronting the daylight, blazing up the night; amazing the whole world
and horrifying their enemies; banded like bandits in the hills of Le Puy,
singly like guerillas along the range of the Cevennes; praying,
prophesying, slaying:—they were in the end circled about by the Grand
Monarque’s soldiery under Villars, shut out from Dutch and English aid,
from escape by sea, forced to capitulate.  Cavallier was let go to
Jersey, was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the island, and finally
closed his stormy career peacefully in London.  Here he lies, in an
unknown grave, in this alien soil; and the Cévenols, up in their hills,
still talk of him and of his war two hundred years ago, to-day as if it
were yesterday.

                                * * * * *

As we stand here, the broad embankment, with its dainty gardens,
stretches between us and the river; spanned just above by old Battersea
Bridge, the only wooden bridge left to the Thames, since that of Putney
has gone.  For centuries there had been a ferry just here, granted by
James I. to some of his “dear relations” for £40.  In 1771 this bridge
was built for foot-passengers only, was enlarged later, and is soon to be
pulled down; its rude and reverend timbers are already propped up here
and there.  Stand midway on it with me, while the ceaseless stream of men
flows by, caring nothing for that at which you and I are looking.

On our right, along the southern shore, stretches Battersea Park, fringed
with its great masses of cool foliage; where not long ago were marshes
and meadows, and the barren, bleak, Battersea Fields.  In those fields
was fought the famous duel in 1829, between the Duke of Wellington and
Lord Winchelsea.  And long before that, in the reeds along that shore was
hid Colonel Blood, intending to shoot Charles II. while bathing, as was
the King’s custom, “in the Thames over against Chelsey; but his arm was
checked by an awe of Majesty.”  So, at least, Blood had the impudence to
narrate, when on his trial for his audacious and almost successful
attempt to steal the royal regalia from the Tower in May, 1671.  Whether
the King was touched by the narrative, or whether, as has been hinted,
his impecunious Majesty was implicated in the plot to rob the crown; it
is certain that he pardoned the daring adventurer, and gave him a yearly
pension of £500.

   [Picture: Old Battersea Church, where Blake was married, showing the
                    window from which Turner sketched]

Beyond the Bridge, back of us, rises the square, squat tower of St.
Mary’s, Battersea, builded in the worst churchwarden style; and otherwise
only notable for that therein was married Blake the madman; that there
Turner loved to sit at the vestry window and sketch; and that there lie
the remains and stand the magnificent monument of St. John Bolingbroke,
and of his second wife, niece of Madame de Maintenon: both their epitaphs
written by him.  Not far from the church, on the river bank next to the
mill, still stands one wing of the great seventy-roomed Bolingbroke
House; in which St. John was born, to which he returned from his stormy
exile, there to pass his remaining days in study, and there to die.
Through its many old-time chambers with the famous “sprawling Verrio’s”
ceiling paintings, I will lead you into the historic cedar-room, on the
river front—Bolingbroke’s favourite retreat, whose four walls, panelled
with cedar from floor to ceiling, are still as redolent as when
Pope—Bolingbroke’s guest—began in it his “Essay on Man,” inspired thereto
by his host; whose wit, scholarship, philosophy had, during his exile,
inspired also Voltaire and made him own his master.  Here in this room
were wont to meet Bolingbroke and Pope, Chesterfield and Swift—that
brilliant quartette who hated, plotted against, and attacked Walpole.
His house—Sir Robert’s—forms part of the great mass of Chelsea Hospital,
dim in the distance before us; between, stretches the old Dutch front of
Cheyne Walk, near at hand resolving itself into most ancient houses, with
quaint windows in their sloping roofs; their red tiles and
chocolate-brown bricks showing dark behind the green of the old
lime-trees.  The setting sun lingers lovingly on the square church tower,
venerable with the mellow tints of time; and presently the moon comes up,
washing out all these tints, except that of the white wall-tablets; and
from out the grey mass shines the clock-face, even now striking nine, as
it did for the “Hon. William,” just then soused in the river, more than
two hundred years ago.  Farther beyond the bridge are two buildings,
which also bring the old and the new close together; the “World’s End
Tavern,” at the end of the passage of that name, famous three centuries
ago as a rendezvous for improper pleasure parties, and introduced in
Congreve’s “Love for Love,” in that connection.  Just west of the sedate
little “public,” “The Aquatic Stores,” are two tiny houses set back from
the embankment; stone steps lead down to their minute front gardens;
vines clamber up the front of the westernmost house to an iron balcony on
its roof.  That balcony was put there for his own convenience by Joseph
Mallord William Turner, the painter; in that house, No. 119, Cheyne Walk,
he lived for many years, and in that front room he died, on the 18th
December, 1851.  To that upper window, no longer able to paint, too
feeble to walk, he was wheeled every morning during his last days that he
might lose no light of the winter sun on his beloved Thames.  In
Battersea Church you may sit in the little vestry window wherein he was
wont to sketch.  The story of his escape from his grand and gloomy
mansion in Queen Anne Street, is well known; he never returned to it, but
made his home here with the burly Mrs. Booth.  After long hunting, his
aged housekeeper, in company with another decrepid dame, found him in
hiding, only the day before his death.  The barber’s son of Maiden Lane
lies in the great cathedral of St. Paul’s, and the evil that he did is
buried with him—his eccentricity, his madness if you will—but he lives
for all time, as the greatest landscape painter England has known.

                [Picture: The Western End of Cheyne Walk]

The long summer afternoon is waning, and the western sky, flaming with
fading fires, floods broad Chelsea Reach with waves of dusky gold.  The
evening mist rises slowly, as yet hiding nothing, but transforming even
commonplace objects in a weird unwonted way.  Those pretentious blocks of
new mansions loom almost lordly now; that distant railway bridge is only
a ghost of graceful glimmering arches; money-making factory chimneys and
commercial wharves pretend to picturesque possibilities; clumpish barges,
sprawling on the mud, are no longer ugly; and a broad-bottomed coasting
schooner, unloading stone at a dock, is just what we would choose to see
there.  And here at the end of this bridge is a fragment of “real old
Chelsea,” left intact for our delectation—a cluster of drooping trees on
the bank, an unaccountable boat-house, stone steps leading down to the
bit of beach, whereon are skiffs drawn up, and cordage lying about, and
sail-wrapped spars.  Out on the placid Reach there is but little
movement; the river steamboats are anchored in a dark mass near the
shore, and the last belated one edges up to its mooring beside them for
the night; a burly barge drifts slowly by under its dusky brown sails, or
a “dumb-barge” floats with the tide, its crew of one man busied with his
long sculls and his not-dumb blasphemy; a puffing tug with a red light in
its nose drags tortuously a long line of tarpaulin-covered canal boats.
As each of these moving objects breaks the burnished waves into bits of
golden gloom, the whole still surface of the stream becomes alive for us
with a fairy flotilla, born of the brain, yet real enough to our vision.
There float ancient barges, six and eight-oared, gorgeous with gilding or
severely simple; those of brilliant noblemen, of the City guilds, of
Royalty itself.  We seem to see Henry VIII. rowing up, on a visit to
More; Elizabeth coming to call on Lord Charles Howard of Effingham, him
who scattered the “Spanyard’s Invinsable Navye” for her; the first
Charles, impatient to dote on his “dear Steenie.”  Even the commonest of
these curious craft is freighted, for our fancy, with a nameless cargo,
not on its bills of lading.  So do we gaze across the river of Time that
flows between us and the group of famous men and historic women, moving
in the twilight of the past on Chelsea’s shore.  And we ask, with Marcus
Piso, friend of the younger Cicero: “Is it by some mutual instinct, or
through some delusion, that when we see the very spots where famous men
have lived, we are far more touched than when we hear of the things that
they have done, or read something that they have written?  It is thus
that I am affected at this moment.”

                 [Picture: Turner’s last dwelling-place]

Here walks Sir Thomas More with his wife and daughters; here George
Herbert muses “with a far look in his immortal eyes;” here come Donne and
Isaac Walton to visit his mother, Magdalen Herbert.  Swift strolls here,
alone as he likes best; he has been looking at the hay-makers, just
inshore above, in the hot summer day, and is about to bathe in the
river—the “more than Oriental scrupulosity” of his bodily care
contrasting so keenly with his fondness for moral filth.  Here come his
friend Atterbury, the learned theologian, from his great garden in Church
Lane; and Dr. Arbuthnott, Queen Anne’s famous physician; and another
noted doctor, Sir John Shadwell, father of the poet laureate.  Locke
leaves the summer-house in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s garden, just above
where now is St. George’s Workhouse: he has just begun his great essay,
while living here as tutor for the son.  Pym, Charles’ enemy, who lives
on the waterside, stops to look at learned Sir Joseph Banks, who, after a
stormy voyage around the world with Captain Cook, now tranquilly sits
fishing here; Samuel Johnson strides buoyantly by to his china-making or
plods pensively back, downcast with his failure; Hans Sloane walks
arm-in-arm with his friend Sir Isaac Newton, who has come out here from
his house in Leicester Square; behind them saunter Addison and Dick
Steele, and a more queerly-consorted couple, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas
Carlyle.  St. Evremonde goes with one strangely resembling him
superficially—Leigh Hunt, who lived at the present No. 10, Upper Cheyne
Row; and who, “with his delicate, worn, but keenly intellectual face, his
large luminous eyes, his thick shock of wiry grey hair, and little cape
of faded black silk over his shoulders, looks like an old French abbé.”
Shelley is near them, having come a long way from his lodgings in Hans
Place; where he has for a neighbour a certain Joseph Balsamo, calling
himself the Count Cagliostro, living in Sloane Street.  The Dandy D’Orsay
cautiously threads his way, for he is in hiding from his creditors.
Turner passes, gazing on his river; and Maclise, who lives here on the
bank and dies here too, painting the Thames.  Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
his near neighbour George Eliot go by; and, last of all, Henry Kingsley
with the boy Joe Burton, whom he loves, and whom we love, too.

The puffing tug shrieks, and puts to flight these vagrant fancies of an
American, sentimentalizing in Chelsea; and so ends his stroll, his
returning footsteps echoing the words of Goethe, and reminding him that,
after all, “You find in Rome only what you take there.”

        [Picture: Battersea bridge and Church from Turner’s house]

                                 THE END.




INDEX.


ABBEY, Westminster, 33, 152

“Absalom and Achitophel,” 50

Addison, Joseph, 23, 63, 65, 66, 80, 94, 122, 178

Albert Suspension Bridge, 131

“Alcyon,” 63

Alma, Battle of the, 73

Almshouses, Lady Dacre’s, 155

Anne, Queen, 105, 119, 177

Apsley House, 13

Aquatic Shores, 169

Arbuthnot, Dr., 177

Armada, 53, 174

Armida, 91

Aschyly, Katherine, 116

Ashburnham, Hon. Wm., 158, 166

„ House, 63, 158

Ashe, Miss, 79

Aspasia, 93

Astell, Mary, 93

Atterbury, 177

Aubrey, John, 38

Augustine, 47

Australia, 147, 148

                                * * * * *

BADAJOS, 73

Balaclava, 73

Balsamo, Joseph, 178

Banks, Sir Joseph, 177

Barbican, 78

Barley, Mrs., 130

Bartholomew Close, 122

Basle, 48

Bastille, 93

Battersea Bridge, 31, 57, 161, 165

,, Church, 165, 169

,, Fields, 33, 162

„ Park, 76, 162

Beaufort, Duke of, 52

,, House, 52, 58

„ Stairs, 20

,, Street, 37, 57

Beaumont, Francis, 93

„ and Fletcher, 159

Becke, Mrs. Betty, 81

“Beggar’s Opera,” The, 85

Belgravia, 20

Bishop’s Stairs, 20

“Black House,” The, 129

Blackfriars Bridge, 125

Blacklands, 17, 96

Blake, 165

Blenheim, 83

Blessington, Lady, 14

Blood, Colonel, 162

Bloody Bridge, 23

Bloomfield, Robert, 80

Bloomsbury, 120, 121

Blunt, Rev. Gerald, 148

Boleyn, Anne, 42, 116

Bolingbroke House, 165

,, St. John, 84, 85, 165, 166

Booth, Mrs., 170

Botanic Gardens, 101, 119

Bow Street, 160

Bowack, 37, 53

Braganza, Catherine of, 111

Bramah, 58

Bray, Edmund, Knight, 152

Bristol, Earl of, 51

Britons, 33

Brown, Ford Madox, 109

Browne, Lady, 116

Brunel, 58

Brussels, 47

Buckingham, 1st Duke of, 50

,, 2nd „ 50, 51, 98

,, Palace, 23

Bucklersbury, 34

Bulwer, Lady, 32

Bun House, The, 97

Burleigh, Lord, 32, 50

Burlington, Earl of, 52

Burney, Dr., 80

„ Fanny, 80

Burton, Emma, 149, 151

,, “Jim,” 150, 151, 152, 156

„ “Joe,” 151, 178

Butterfly Alley, 28

Byron, Lord, 31

                                * * * * *

CADOGAN, Doctor, 63

,, Earl of, 119, 146

„ Place, 96

Cæsar, 33

Cagliostro, Count, 178

Camden House, 57

Camera Square, 28

Camissards, The, 160

Canterbury, 45

Carberry, Earl of, 98

Carlyle, Thomas, 137, 141, 178

Caroline, Queen, 84, 119

Carolina, North, 61

Catherine of Braganza, 111

Cavallier, Jean Antoine, 160, 161

Cavendish, Sir Wm., 130

Cecil, Lord Robert, 50

Cedars of Lebanon, 101

Cevennes, 161

Cévenols, 161

Chamberlayne, Anne, 159

Chamberlayne, Doctor, 159

Chancery Lane, 134

Charles I., 50, 134, 174, 177

„ II., 23, 64, 70, 75, 81, 86, 88, 91, 93, 111, 112, 142, 162

Charlotte, Queen, 97

Charterhouse, The, 46

Chatsworth, 131

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 93

Chelsea, “direct connection with London,” 13; “Village of Palaces,” 17;
“A quiet country village,” 18; ancient aspect, 19–23; causes of its early
settlement, 20; earliest history, 33; etymology of name, 33; present
appearance, 24–31; mentioned, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31–34,
42, 46, 57, 61, 63, 67, 70, 80, 81, 85, 89, 102, 113, 119, 120, 122, 125,
126, 129, 130, 131, 141, 142, 146, 148, 149, 153, 154, 173, 174, 179

Chelsea Barracks, 28, 96

„ Bun House, 97

„ China Factory, 132

,, Church, Old, 24, 44, 53, 113, 134, 151

„ „ St. Luke’s, 145, 146

„ Farm, 62

„ Hermit of, 138

,, Historian of, 89, 142, 150

„ Hospital, 23, 28, 67, 81, 82, 95, 166

,, Little, 53, 57

,, Manor House, 106, 113, 116, 118, 119, 138

„ Pensioner, 89

„ “Physick Garden,” 101

„ Reach, 31, 170, 173

,, Rectory, 145

„ Suspension Bridge, 76

Chelsey, 19, 33, 34, 44, 50, 51, 69, 105, 155, 162

„ Colledge, 70, 81

„ Viscount, 120

Cheltenham Terrace, 95

Cherbury, Lord Herbert of, 134

Chesterfield, Lord, 78, 166

Cheyne, Lady Jane, 118, 155, 158

„ Lord, 96, 101, 118

„ Row, Great, 20, 137

„ ,, Little, 141

,, ,, Upper, 178

„ Walk, 28, 32, 57, 106, 114, 120, 126, 129, 132, 133, 137, 141, 166, 169

Chillianwallah, Battle of, 76

China Factory, 132

Chiswick, 52

Christchurch Street, 89

Chudleigh, Miss, 79

Church Lane, 20, 151, 177

Church, Old Chelsea, 24, 44, 53, 113, 134, 151

„ Place, 149

,, Street, 32, 150, 151

Cicero, 49, 174

“Citizen of the World,” 80

Coldstream Guards, 74

Colet, Dean, 41

College, King James’s, 69, 77

„ Fields, 76

Colorado, 146

Commonwealth, The, 50

Condé, 93

Congreve, William, 94, 95, 169

“Connoisseur,” The, 80

Cook, Captain, 178

Covenanters, 160

Craufield, Earl of Middlesex, 50

Cremorne, Lady, 62

„ Gardens, 62, 63, 81

„ Viscount, 62

Cressy, 34

Cromwell, Richard, 122

„ Thomas, 150

Cross, Mrs. John Walter, 106

Cubitt, 20

Cuckfield, 148

Cummings, Polly, 126

Cunningham, Peter, 67

                                * * * * *

DACRE, Lady, 49, 50, 154

Dacre’s, Lady, Almshouses, 155

Danvers House, 133, 134

,, Sir John, 134

,, Street, 133

Davies, Rev. R. H., 160

Dawson, Thomas, 62

Dead March, The, 74

De Foe, Daniel, 121

Devonshire, Duke of, 52, 130, 131

Dickens, Charles, 109

Dissolution, The, 68

Doggett, 105

Don Quixote, 141

Don Saltero, 121

Donne, Dr. John, 134, 177

D’Orsay, 178

Douglas, Black, The, 161

Drury Lane Theatre, 78

Druse, Mr., 115

Dryden, John, 50, 93

Duck Island, 93

Dutch War, 27, 70

Duke of York’s School, 95

“Duke’s Head,” The, 89

Dunbar, Battle of, 68

                                * * * * *

EARL’S Court, 141

Eddystone Lighthouse, 118

Edge Hill, 70

Edict of Nantes, 27, 91, 160

Edward the Confessor, 33

,, VII., 117

Eliot, George, 32, 106, 178

Elizabeth, Princess, 115, 116, 117

,, Queen, 32, 63, 129, 145, 150, 155, 174

Elizabeth’s, Queen, Guard, 130

,, Place, 149

Embankment, The, 17, 28, 86, 98, 109, 134, 161

Erasmus, 37, 40, 41, 44, 48, 153

Esmond, Harry, Colonel, 24, 65

“Essay on Man,” The, 166

Essex, Earl of, 149, 150

“Evelina,” 80

Evelyn, John, 51, 67, 70, 101, 111, 118

Eversleigh, 148

Evremond, St., 86, 92, 93, 122, 178

                                * * * * *

FAIRFAX, General, 50

Faulkner, 89, 142, 150

“Ferdinand Count Fathom,” 138

Fetter Lane, 58

Fielding, Henry, 80

„ Sir John, 159

Fire Fields, 23

Fletcher, Mrs., 159

,, John, 159

Flimnap, 85

Flood Street, 88, 106, 113

“Folly,” The, 62

Fox, Sir Stephen, 67

Foxe’s “Martyrology,” 158

Franklin, Benjamin, 122, 125, 178

French Gardeners, 27

Fry, Elizabeth, 90

Fulham, 32, 63, 66

Fuller’s “Worthies,” 45

Furnivall’s Inn, 46

                                * * * * *

GALLOWAY, Count, 91

Garrick, David, 78, 141

Gay, John, 19, 85, 142

Geflitfullic, 33

“Geoffrey Hamlyn,” 147

George I., 83, 105, 119

„ II., 83, 84

,, III., 97

„ IV., 86

George and Garter, The, 51

Gibbons, Grinling, 75

Giggs, Margery, 41

Glebe Place, 145

Gloucester, 68

Godfrey, 91

Godolphin, Sydney, 92

Goethe, 179

Goldsmith, Oliver, 79

“Gorbudic,” 49

Gore House, 14

Gorges, Sir Arthur, 63

Gothic House, 106

Gough House, 17, 98

„ Sir John, 98

Grand Monarque, The, 161

Granville, Lord, 61

Great Cheyne Row, 20, 137

Green Arbour Court, 79

Grey, Lady Jane, 118

Grocyn, 41

Guilds, City, 174

Gwynne, Nell, 32, 63, 67, 68, 87

“Gwynne, Nell,” The, 66

                                * * * * *

HALL, Mrs. S. C., 32

Hallam, Henry, 92

Halle, 58

Hamilton, Duchess of, 88

„ Sir William, 138

Hampstead, 95

Hampton Court, 23, 24, 111

Hanover, 84, 105

Hans Place, 31, 32, 96, 119, 178

„ Town, 96

Hardwick, Elizabeth, 130

„ House, 131

Hastings, Lady Elizabeth, 95

Hedderly, J., the photographer, 27

Henry VIII., 38, 42, 49, 112, 117, 138, 141, 174

„ „ Palace, 112

Herbert, George, 134, 174

„ Lord of Cherbury, 134

,, Magdalen, 134, 159, 178

Herkomer, Hubert, 74

Hermit of Chelsea, 138

Herrnhuters, The, 61

Hervey, Lord, 85

Heywood, Ellis, 38

Hill, John, 68

“Hillyars and Burtons,” 149, 156

Hoadley, Bishop, 131

Hogarth, 131

Holbein, 38, 44, 47, 48

Holborn Viaduct Station, 79

Holland, 58, 96

,, House, 14, 57, 130, 133

„ Lord, 133

House of Commons, 47, 48

Howard of Effingham, Lord, 174

Huguenots, The, 160

Hume’s “History of England,” 141

“Humphrey Clinker,” 141

Hundred of Ossulston, The, 33

Hunt, Leigh, 79, 178

Hunter, John, 141

                                * * * * *

INDIA House, 14, 125

Infirmary, The, 67, 70, 82, 85

Inkerman, 73

Invalides, The, 67

Islington, 14

                                * * * * *

“JACOB FAITHFUL,” 102

Jacobites, The, 130

Jacobs, Mrs. Mary, 125

Jamaica, 119

James I., 50, 162

Jersey, 161

Jewish Burial Ground, 52

Jew’s Road, 97

Jones, Inigo, 52, 57

Johnson, Samuel, 79, 101, 132, 141, 177

“Junius,” 159

Justice Walk, 132

Justina, Maria, 57

                                * * * * *

KENSAL Green, 109

Kensington, 14, 17, 37, 84, 105, 133, 141

,, House, 57

King’s Bench, 47

„ College, 146

,, Road, 20, 23, 24, 28, 37, 53, 57, 63, 95, 115

King James’s College, 69, 77

Kingsley, Charles, 145, 146, 148

,, George, 145, 146

,, Henry, 145–150, 156, 178

,, Rev. Charles, 146

Knightsbridge, 13

Knipp, Mrs., 105

Knyff, L., 37

                                * * * * *

LACY, 78

Lamb, Charles, 14, 125

„ Lady Caroline, 31

Landon, Letitia E., 31

Lawrence family, 113, 141, 149, 156

„ Sir Thomas, 157

„ Manor House, 113, 141

„ Chapel, 156, 157

,, Street, 132, 141

Lawson, Cecil, 109

“Lay of the Last Minstrel,” 142

Le Puy, 161

Leicester, Earl of, 155

,, Square, 178

Lely, Sir Peter, 111

Linacre, 41

Lincoln’s Inn, 46

Lindsey, Earl of, 58

„ House, 17, 57, 58

Little Britain, 122

„ Cheyne Row, 141

Locke, John, 177

London, 13, 14, 19, 24, 31, 47, 53, 61, 69, 74, 90, 97, 101, 106, 122,
134, 138, 146, 152, 159, 161

London Bridge, 44, 105

Louis XIV., 67, 160

“Love for Love,” 169

Lover’s Walk, 53

Lucknow, 73

Lysons, Samuel, 92

                                * * * * *

MACAULAY, T. B., 18, 70

Maclise, Daniel, 106, 178

“Magpie and Stump,” 126, 130

Maiden Lane, 170

Maintenon, Madame de, 165

Mancini, Hortensia, 90

Manor House, 106, 113, 116, 118, 119, 138

„ Lawrence, 113, 141

,, Street, 113, 121

Marryat, 102

Martyrology, 158

Marvell, Andrew, 112

Mary Queen of Scots, 49

Mazarin, Cardinal, 90, 93

,, Duchess of, 86, 91, 94

Melford, Jerry, 141

Mercians, The, 33

Millbank, 87

Millman’s Row, 145

,, Street, 53, 145

Milton, John, 78

_Mirror_, _New York_, The, 14

“Mirror of Literature,” 98

Mitford, Mary Russell, 32

Monk, General, 74

Monmouth, Duchess of, 85, 142

„ Duke of, 142

,, House, 142, 145

Montague, Edward, 81

,, “Lady Mary Wortley, 85

“Monthly Recorder,” 70

Moravian Burial Ground, 53

,, Chapel, 54, 58

Moravians, The, 58, 61

More, Sir Thomas: his house, 34; its site, 37; its gardens, 37; its
gatehouse, 38, 52; the “newe buildinge,” 39, 133; his religious zeal, 39;
his wit, 40; his “Utopia,” 41; his family and friends, 40, 41; his
career, 46, 47; his downfall, 42; death, 43; grave, 44; monument, 151,
153; existing relics of, 52–54, 112; portraits of, 47, 48; quotations
from, 37, 38, 40; mentioned, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 47–49, 53, 54, 57, 58,
94, 112, 113, 119, 133, 151, 153, 174

Moricæ, The, 41

Morten, Cardinal, 46

Munden, Vice-Admiral, 121

Museum, British, 33, 57, 78, 120

Myddleton, Sir Hugh, 69

                                * * * * *

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 48, 92

New England, 125, 126

„ Inn, 46

„ River, 14, 69

Newgate, 79

Newton, Sir Isaac, 119, 177

“Niagara, Shooting,” 138

Norfolk, Duchess of, 34

Norfolk, Duke of, 39

Normans, The, 19, 28

North American Colonies, 122

Northumberland, Duchess of, 155

Nostell Priory, 48

                                * * * * *

OAKLEY Street, 113, 126, 131

Oak-Apple Day, 75

Offa, King, 33

Old Church, Chelsea, 24, 44, 53, 113, 134, 151

Old Magpye Stairs, 20

Oldcoates, 131

Orford, Earl of, 81

Ormond Row, 89

Ossulston, Hundred of, 33

Oxford, 46, 134, 146

                                * * * * *

PARADISE ROW, 86–89, 93, 98

Parr, Catherine, 115–118

Paulton Terrace, 150

Paultons Square, 134, 150

Pelham, Earl of, 88

Penn, Granville, 62

,, William, 62

Pennsylvania, 58, 61, 62

Pepys, Samuel, 19, 67, 81, 88, 102, 111

Petersham, Lady Caroline, 79

Pimlico, 23

,, Road, 97

Piozzi, Mrs., 133

Poet’s Corner, 93

Poictiers, 34

Polyphilus, 101

Pope, Alexander, 51, 52, 85, 166

Pound Lane, 20

Pretender, The, 66

Prince Rupert, 69, 70

“Prince of Wales,” The, 132

Putney, 150, 162

Pym, 177

                                * * * * *

QUEEN Anne Architecture, 18, 28

,, „ Street, 170

„ Elizabeth’s Place, 149

Queen’s Elm, 32

„ House, 109, 112, 114

„ Road, 87, 98, 102

                                * * * * *

RADNOR, Earl of, 88

„ Street, 88

“Rambler,” The, 101

Ranelagh, Earl of, 77, 78, 81

„ Gardens, 77, 79, 80

„ House, 78, 80, 81

„ Stairs, 20

Reade, Charles, 13

Rectory, Chelsea, 145

Red Lion Passage, 80

Reformation, The, 157

Renatus, Christian, 54

Restoration, The, 50, 62, 68, 75

Reuss, Countess, 57

Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 27, 91, 160

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 79

Ricci, Sebastian, 74

Richard III., 34

Richmond, 84

Robarte, Lord, 88

Roberts, Miss, 31

Robinson’s Lane, 88

Rochester, Earl of, 87, 91, 98

“Roderick Random,” 138

Romans, The, 19, 28

Roper, Margaret, 43, 45, 46

„ William, 38, 133

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 109, 114, 178

„ House, The, 109, 112

Royal Academy, 109

„ Hospital, 78

„ Society, 69, 119

Rupert, Prince, 69, 70

                                * * * * *

ST. ALBANS, Duke of, 87

„ Dunstan’s, Canterbury, 45

„ ,, in the West, 134

„ Evremond, 86, 92, 93, 122, 178

„ George’s Workhouse, 177

„ James’s Palace, 113

,, ,, Park, 20, 93

,, ,, Street, 113

„ Katherine’s Docks, 20

St. Lawrence, Old Jewry, 46

„ Loo, Sir William, 130

„ Luke’s, Chelsea, 145, 146

„ Mary’s, Battersea, 165

„ Paul’s, 69, 170

,, ,, School, 41

Sackville, Thomas, 49

Salisbury, Earl of, 50

Saltero, Don, 121

“Saltero’s, Don,” 122, 125, 126

Sandford Manor House, 63, 65

Sand’s End, 31, 63, 65

Sandwich, Earl of, 81, 86, 88

School of Discipline, 90

„ Duke of York’s, 95

Scott, Sir Walter, 142

Seddon, John P., 109

Selwyn, George, 79

Sepoy Mutiny, 75

Sèvres, 132

Seymour, Admiral, 115–117

Shadwell, Sir John, 177

,, Thomas, 159

Shaftesbury, Earl of, 177

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 32, 178

Shore, Jane, 34

Shrewsbury, Countess of, 131

,, Earl of, 129, 130

„ House, 129, 131

Sidney, Sir Philip, 155

“Slaves of Virtue,” 58

Sloane, Elizabeth, 120

„ Hans, House, 106

,, ,, Sir, 52, 58, 101, 102, 118–120, 122, 159, 177

„ Square, 96, 119

,, Street, 96, 178

Smith Street, 89

Smollett, Tobias, 24, 80, 94, 138, 141, 142

Society of Apothecaries, 101

,, Royal, 69, 119

Somerset, the Protector, 117

_Spectator_, The, 80

Spenser, Edmund, 63

Spilsberg, Convent of, 39

Spraggs, John, 159

Spring Gardens, 79

Stanley, Dean, 152

,, House, 17, 63

“Steenie,” 50, 174

“Stella,” 24, 97

Steele, Sir Richard, 23, 94, 95, 122, 125, 178

Sterne, Laurence, 79, 141

Strype, John, 52

Suffolk Street, Pall Mall, 24

Sunderland, Lady, 51

Swan House, 102

„ “Walk,” 98

“Swan, Old,” 102, 105

“Swan,” The, 19, 105

Swift, Jonathan, 24, 83, 84, 97, 166, 177

                                * * * * *

TANGIERS, 69

_Tatler_, The, 23, 95, 122

Taverns:

  Aquatic Stores, 169

  Black Horse, 129

  Chelsea Pensioner, 89

  Don Saltero’s, 122, 125, 126

  Duke’s Head, 89

  Magpie and Stump, 126, 130

  Nell Gwynne, 66

  Prince of Wales, 132

  Swan, 19, 105

  „ Old, 102, 105

  World’s End, 169

Thackeray, 65, 83

Thames, The, 18, 31, 37, 38, 44, 162, 169, 178

Thames Watermen, 105

Thomson, James, 44

Threadneedle Street, 46

Tite Street, 17, 98

Tothill Street, 155

Tours, Archbishop of, 102

Tower, 42, 50, 116, 154, 165

„ Chapel, 44

„ Hill, 43

,, Wharf, 43

“Tracts and Letters,” 153

Trinobantes, 20

Turenne, 93

Turner, 165, 169, 170, 178

Twickenham, 85

Tyndale, 153

                                * * * * *

VALE, The, 27

Vanbrugh, Sir John, 83

Vanhomrigh, Mrs., 24

Vauxhall, 78

Verrio, 165

Versailles, 111

Victoria Hospital for Children, 98

Village of Palaces, 17

Villars, Marshall, 161

Villiers, George, 50, 51

Voltaire, 92, 166

                                * * * * *

WALLER, Edmund, 111

Walpole, Horace, 78, 84

„ House, 17, 81, 84, 166

,, Lady, 85

„ Sir Robert, 79, 81–85, 89, 166

„ Street, 81

Walton, Isaac, 134, 178

Wargrave, Henley-on-Thames, 149

Warwick, Earl of, 34, 65

Waterloo, 74

Wellington, Duke of, 73, 162

Westminster, 20, 33, 47, 155

,, Hall, 43

Whitehall, 20, 129

William and Mary, 37, 73

William Rufus’s Hall, 47

Willis, N. P., 14

Wilkes, John, 141

Wilkie, the Painter, 74

Winchelsea, Lord, 162

Winchester, Bishop of, 131

,, Marquis of, 145

Windsor Castle, 48

Winstanley, 118

Wolsey, Cardinal, 38, 42, 113

Woodfall, 159

Worcester, Battle of, 68

,, College, Oxford, 146

,, Marquis of, 52

“World’s End,” The, 169

Wren, Sir Christopher, 73, 110

Wyatt family, The, 149

                                * * * * *

YORKSHIRE, 79

                                * * * * *

ZIMRI, 50

Zinzendorf, Count, 54, 57, 58

                                * * * * *

         UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON.




FOOTNOTES.


{26}  This illustration and those on pages 114 and 123, have been made
from photographs by J. Hedderly, and are admirable specimens of the many
taken by him during a long and laborious life, and which have genuine
artistic merit as well as historic value in their preservation of the
features of Old Chelsea.  Hedderly’s was the curious case of a man living
for fifty years in daily contact with the ancient and the odd, and yet
always keen to appreciate it and accurate in seizing it.  On his death,
in 1885, his plates went to his daughter, and the photographs can be
bought from George White, Printer, 396, King’s Road, just at the end of
Park Walk: by whose permission these photographs have been re-drawn.

{31}  One of her school-mates here, by the way, was that Miss Roberts who
wrote so well about India; another was Lady Caroline Lamb, heroine of the
scissors-stabbing scene for Byron’s sake.  And among other scholars here
at other times we find names famous in later life, as that of Lady
Bulwer, of Mrs. S. C. Hall, of Miss Mary Russell Mitford.  The latter
lady lived for several years after her school days at No. 33, Hans Place.
In No. 41 lodged Percy Bysshe Shelley, at one time.  These two last-named
houses have been raised two stories, and renewed; while Nos. 22 and 25
have been recently torn down and rebuilt.  Thus every house in Hans Place
having historic association has been ruined for us, and others of no
interest from our point of view in this stroll are left intact in their
age—a queer fatality which I find to have pursued too many buildings of
old London!

{48}  The painting in the National Portrait Gallery is a copy by an
unknown—withal a skilful—hand, of Holbein’s crayon sketch, now in Windsor
Castle.  Its most striking feature is More’s mouth: these lips seem to
speak to us at once with sweetness and with sternness.

{57}  In our reproduction of this rare print in the British Museum of
about the year 1682, Lindsey House is seen on the river bank at the
extreme left; behind it is a building in the Dutch style, concerning
which I can find no record anywhere; More’s mansion stands on the slope
half-way up to King’s Road, in the midst of its “great extent of
profitable garden and pleasure ground;” behind and to its left are the
stables and out-buildings.  Just beyond King’s Road, on the left, may be
seen the small settlement named then and known now as “Little Chelsea.”
In the far distance, rise, on their wooded slopes, Holland, Camden, and
Kensington Houses.  The gate-house of Inigo Jones shows plainly towards
the front, and from it the broad walk—now Beaufort Street—leads to the
river and the ferry, just at the spot where now springs Battersea Bridge.

{58}  You may see a picture of such a scene—the sermon to a group of
negroes—in the old Moravian chapel in Fetter Lane.  Here, too, are many
relics of interest of the man: his chair, with claw feet and curious
carvings; his queer old-German Hymn-book, printed in 1566, with metal
clasps and corners; and his portrait, life-size and in oil.

{80}  There lies on my desk, as I write, a copper token, which I lately
picked up in a shabby shop of Red Lion Passage, High Holborn.  It is
about the size of a penny piece, and on it is stamped “RANELAGH HOUSE,
1745:” these raised letters as clearly cut as on the day when coined.  It
pleases me to wonder which and how many of the men I mention above may
have handed in this piece at the entrance gate.

{91}  Henri, Marquis of Ruvigny, fled from France on the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes, came to England, was here naturalized, and received
the title of Count of Galloway.

{109}  In the embankment garden, just in front, has lately been placed a
memorial to the poet and painter: his bust in bronze modelled by Ford
Madox Brown, the painter, surmounting a graceful drinking fountain
designed by John P. Seddon, the architect; both life-long friends of
Rossetti.

{125}  This house was kept, in 1790, by a Mrs. Mary Jacob, a New England
woman, and I have seen a letter from her to her brother in America, in
which she says, in her old-fashioned spelling: “I keap a Coffe Hous,
which I can Scarcely macke a bit of Bred for myself, but it Ennabels me
to keep a home for my Sons.”  This letter is prized as a relic by the
family, none of whom have any notion of how “Polly Cummings”—her maiden
name in New England—found her way to Chelsea and to Don Saltero’s!

{160}  I quote this sentence from a letter sent to me by the Reverend R.
H. Davies, Incumbent of the Old Church, Chelsea, to whom I am indebted
for courtesies in this connection: “To my mind, there is no doubt that
his grave is somewhere in the open part of the churchyard; but, as the
grave-stone has disappeared, it would be too great a work to excavate the
whole with the hope of finding the coffin-plate.”