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.
* * * * *