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!”