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}
* * * * *