roadway of Cheyne Walk, stood, until within a few months, another old
sign, at which I was wont to look in delight, unshamed by the mute
mockery of the passing Briton, who wondered what the sentimental prowler
could see to attract him in this rusty relic. It stood in front of the
little public-house lately burned to the ground—“The Magpie and Stump:”
two solid posts carrying a wide cross-piece, all bristling with spikes
for the impalement of the climbing boy of the period; “MAGPIE AND STUMP,
QUOIT GROUNDS,” in dingy letters on the outer side, once plain for all
rowing men to read from the river; above was an iron Magpie on an iron
Stump, both decrepid with age, and a rusty old weathercock, too stiff to
turn even the letter _E_—alone left of the four points of the compass.
Between these posts might still be traced the top stone of an old
water-staircase, embedded now in the new-made ground which forms the
embankment garden here; just as you might have seen, only the other day,
the water-stairs of Whitehall Palace, which have now been carted away.
Up this staircase Queen Elizabeth has often stepped, on her frequent
visits to the rich and powerful Earl of Shrewsbury, her devoted subject
and friend. For, on the river slope, just back of Cheyne Walk here,
stood, until the second decade of this century, Shrewsbury House, another
one of Chelsea’s grand mansions. It was an irregular brick structure,
much gabled, built about a quadrangle; although but one storey in height
it was sufficiently spacious, its great room being one hundred and twenty
feet in length, wainscotted in finely carved oak, and its oratory painted
to resemble marble. In a circular room there was concealed a trap-door,
giving entrance to a winding stairway, which led to an underground
passage; believed to have opened on the river wall at low tide, and to
have twisted inland to the “Black Horse” in Chelsea, and thence to
Holland House, Kensington. Local gossip claims that it was used by the
Jacobites of 1745, and perhaps of 1715, too; for they made their
rendezvous by the river at this tavern, and here drank to their “King
over the water.” In the grounds of the “Magpie and Stump” is a wooden
trapdoor, through which I once descended by stone steps into a paved
stone passage, sufficiently wide and high for two to pass, standing
erect. This bit is all that remains of the old tunnel—the river portion
being used as a coal-hole, the inland end soon stopped up and lost in
neighbouring cellars.
[Picture: Cheyne Walk, with the Magpie and Stump]
The wife of this Earl of Shrewsbury is well worth our attention for a
moment, by reason of her beauty, her character, her romantic career, her
many marriages. Elizabeth Hardwick of Derby became Mrs. Barley at the
age of fourteen, and was a wealthy widow when only sixteen; she soon
married Sir William Cavendish, ancestor of the Duke of Devonshire; to be
widowed soon again, and soon to become the wife of Sir William St. Loo,
Captain of Queen Elizabeth’s Guard. His death left her still so lovely,
witty, attractive, as to captivate the greatest subject in the land; and
she became the Countess of Shrewsbury; having risen regularly in riches,
position, power, with each of her marriages. After the death of her
fourth husband she consented to remain a widow. At her death, seventeen
years later, she bequeathed this Chelsea mansion to her son William,
afterward the first Duke of Devonshire; together with the three grandest
seats in England—Hardwick, Oldcoates, Chatsworth—all builded by her at
successive stages of her eventful career.
Hard by here we trace the site of another notable mansion—the ancient
palace of the Bishops of Winchester—which stood a little back from the
river bank, just where broad Oakley Street runs up from opposite the
Albert Suspension Bridge. It was only two storeys high and of humble
exterior, yet it contained many grand rooms, lavishly decorated. On the
wall of one of the chambers, there was found, when the building was torn
down early in the century, a group of nine life-size figures, admirably
done in black on the white plaster; believed to have been drawn by
Hogarth in one of his visits to his friend Bishop Hoadley, here.
A step farther westward along Cheyne Walk and we turn into Lawrence
Street; at the upper end of which, at the corner of Justice Walk, we
shall find, in the cellars of “The Prince of Wales” tavern and of the
adjoining houses, the remains of the ovens and baking-rooms of the famous
Chelsea China factory. For it stood just here during the short forty
years of its existence, having been established in 1745. Why it failed
and why the factory was torn down, no one seems to know; for its work was
extremely fine, and its best ware—turned out from 1750 to 1765—was equal
to that of Sèvres. Skilled foreign artizans had been brought over, and
an extraordinary specimen of unskilled native workman appeared in Dr.
Samuel Johnson. The old scholar conceived the idea that he could make
china as admirably as he could make a dictionary; but he never mastered
the secret of mixing, and each piece of his cracked in the baking! He
used to come out here twice a week, his old housekeeper carrying his
basket of food for the day; and was made free of the whole factory,
except the mixing-room. They presented him with a full service of their
own make, properly baked, however; which he gave or bequeathed to Mrs.
Piozzo, and which, at the sale of her effects, was bought by Lord
Holland. In “Holland House by Kensington”—to use its good old title—I
have seen it, carefully preserved among the other famed _curios_.
[Picture: A Chelsea corner]
“This is Danvers Street, begun in ye Yeare 1696,” says the quaint old
lettering in a corner house of Cheyne Walk; and this street marks the
site of Danvers House, which had formed part of More’s property—perhaps
the “new buildinge”—and which had gone to his son-in-law, Roper. It came
afterward to be owned by Sir John Danvers, a gentleman-usher of Charles
I., and he made a superb place of it; of which the deep foundations and
the fallen columns now lie under Paultons Square, at the upper end of the
street. Sir John Danvers was the second husband of Magdalen Herbert, a
woman notable for her famous family of boys: her first son was that
strong and strange original, Lord Herbert of Cherbury; her fifth son was
George Herbert, of undying memory. The poet lived here for a while.
Donne, the preacher, then at Oxford, used to stop at her house on his
visits to London; and when he became Vicar of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West,
in the Strand, near Isaac Walton’s old shop in Chancery Lane, and had
converted the Gentle Angler, these two certainly strolled often out here
together. Donne preached Lady Danvers’ funeral sermon in Old Chelsea
Church in 1627; notable as one of his most touching discourses.
* * * * *
In the embankment gardens we have passed a statue recently placed there;
a man seated in a chair, uncouth of figure, with bent brow and rugged
face. And in the wall of the corner house behind we stop to look at a
small memorial tablet, still more recently placed; a medallion portrait
of the same face, and beneath, this inscription: “Thomas Carlyle lived at
24, Cheyne Row, 1834–81.” For this is not the house in which he lived,
and the tablet was fixed on this one with queer common sense, his own
being in Chancery at that time! It is to be found farther up in this
little dull street running from Cheyne Walk just here; in which there is
nothing that is not commonplace, save the little cottage covered with
vines, in the wall above which is a stone with odd old-fashioned
lettering—“This is Gt. Cheyne Row, 1708.” About the middle of the row of
small dreary brick houses, the one once numbered 5, now 24, is that in
which he dwelt for nearly fifty years, and wherein he wrote his
commination service large on all mankind; talking more eloquently, and
more loquaciously withal, in praise of silence, than any man who ever
scolded all through life that he might do honour to the strong arm and
the still tongue!
[Picture: Statue of Thomas Carlyle, by Boehm]
The look-out across the narrow street from his front windows—“mainly into
trees,” he wrote to Sir William Hamilton, on moving here—shows now
nothing but a long, low, depressing wall, above which rises a
many-windowed model dwelling-house; and it is surely one of the least
inspiring prospects in all London: while from the back he could see
nothing of interest except the westernmost end of the old wall of Henry
VIII.’s Manor House garden, which still stands here. It gave him a hint
in his pamphlet, “Shooting Niagara;” wherein, sneering at modern bricks
and bricklayers, he says: “Bricks, burn them rightly, build them
faithfully with mortar faithfully tempered, _they_ will stand. . . . We
have them here at the head of this garden, which are in their third or
fourth century.”
Long before his day, there had lived, almost on this same spot, another
“Hermit of Chelsea,” in the person of Dr. Tobias Smollett; who came here
to live in retirement in 1750, fresh from the fame of his “Roderick
Random;” seeking such seclusion partly on account of his daughter’s
health and his own, and partly for the sake of his work. Here he wrote
“Ferdinand Count Fathom,” finished Hume’s “History of England,” and began
his translation of “Don Quixote;” and here took place those Sunday
dinners, the delicious description of which, and of the guests, he has
put into the mouth of young Jerry Melford, in “Humphrey Clinker.” Here
were spent some of his happiest days, with his work and with his friends
from town; Johnson, Garrick, Sterne, John Wilkes, John Hunter: the latter
probably coming from Earl’s Court, Kensington, where his place—mansion,
museum, and menagerie in one—stood till very lately. Smollett was as
well known in the streets of Chelsea, in his day, as Carlyle in ours—“a
good-sized, strongly-made man, graceful, dignified, and pleasant.”
[Picture: Carlyle’s house, Great Cheyne Row]
It was a fine old place, with extensive grounds, which Smollett took;
being the ancient Manor House of the Lawrences, once owned by Henry
VIII., as we have seen. The house stood exactly on the site of this
block of two-storied brick cottages called “Little Cheyne Row,” between
Great Cheyne Row and Lawrence Street. Its early history has little that
need detain us, until, in 1714, it came to be called Monmouth House, from
its new owner, the Duchess of Monmouth and Buccleuch; who came here with
John Gay as her domestic steward or secretary, and who here lived to the
age of ninety. She had been an ornament of Charles II.’s court, a real
jewel amidst all the pinchbeck and paste of his setting. She was the
widow of his son, the hapless Duke of Monmouth; “who began life with no
legal right to his being, and ended it by forfeiting all similar right to
his head.” It is to this gracious and gentle _chatelaine_ that Sir
Walter Scott sings his “Lay of the Last Minstrel”:
“For she had known adversity,
Though born in such a high degree;
In pride of power, in beauty’s bloom,
Had wept o’er Monmouth’s bloody tomb.”
Smollett left the place for ever, in 1769, and a little later, went to
die in Spain; a brave, silent, sad man, for all the fun in his books, and
already broken in health by the untimely death of his daughter. The
Chelsea historian, Faulkner, writing in 1829, says that Monmouth House
was then “a melancholy scene of desolation and ruin.” It was finally
torn down and carted away in 1834.
[Picture: The Chelsea Rectory]
The grounds of Monmouth House—now built over by a great
board-school—stretched back to those of the Rectory of St. Luke’s, a step
to the northward. The Rectory is an irregular brick building, delightful
to the eye, set in an old-fashioned lawn with great trees; its
tranquillity assured by a high brick wall. It is a very old house, was
built by the Marquis of Winchester, and granted by him to the parish on
May 6th, 1566, at the request of Queen Elizabeth. Glebe Place, just at
hand, shows the site of the glebe land given in her time, in exchange for
the older parsonage, which stood still farther west, behind Millman’s
Row, now Millman’s Street.
The historic interest of this Chelsea Rectory, however, is dwarfed by its
personal appeal to all of us, for that it was the home of three notable
boys; named, in the order of their ages, Charles, George, and Henry
Kingsley. They came here in the year 1836; their father, the Rev.
Charles Kingsley, having received the living of St. Luke’s, Chelsea, from
Lord Cadogan. So their beloved west-country life was exchanged for the
prim, parochial prosiness, which made such a doleful difference to them
all. For these boys were born, it seems to me, with the instant love of
life and movement in their blood. Charles has shown it in almost
everything he wrote; Henry gave utterance to it in his books only in a
less degree, because it found vent in his years of wandering; while
George—better known as “The Doctor”—appears for a little while at
spasmodic intervals at his home on Highgate Hill, then plunges into space
again, and is vaguely heard of, now yachting in the South Seas, now
chatting delightfully in a Colorado mining-camp. Henry, the youngest,
was a sensitive, shy lad, delicate in health; and the old dames in this
neighbourhood tell of his quiet manner and modest bearing. Many of the
poor old women about here have a vivid remembrance of “the boys,” and
speak of the whole family with respect and affection. Henry was born in
1830, studied at King’s College, London, for a little over two years,
1844–6; his name was entered at Worcester College, Oxford, March 6th,
1850; where he kept ten terms, leaving at Easter, 1853, without taking
his degree. The Australian “gold-digging fever” was then raging, and he
started for that country with two friends. There he did all sorts of
things: tried mining, tried herding, became a stockman, was in the
mounted police; and after about five years of these varied vocations,
returned to England with no gold in his pockets. It was all in his
brain; a precious possession of experience of life and of men, to be
coined into the characters and the scenes which have passed current all
over the globe. All his Australian stories are admirable, and “Geoffrey
Hamlyn”—his first work, produced soon after his return, in 1859—is the
best tale of colonial life ever written. His parents had intended that
he should take holy orders, hoping perhaps that he should succeed his
father in the living of old St. Luke’s; but he felt himself utterly
unfitted for this profession, as he also, although with less reason,
believed himself unfitted for that of the journalist. This latter he
tried for a while when he came back to England; and indeed, as a
correspondent he displayed dash enough, and after the surrender of Sedan,
was the first man to enter within the French lines. He found at length
his proper place as an essayist and a novelist. In all his works, there
is to me a strange and nameless charm—a quaint humour, a genuine
sentiment, an atmosphere all his own, breezy, buoyant, boyish; seeming to
show a personality behind all his creations—that of their creator—a fair,
frank, fresh-hearted man. He had true artistic talent in another
direction, too, inherited from his grandfather; and he may have been just
in judging himself capable of gaining far greater reputation as a painter
than as a novelist, even. His skill in drawing was amazing, and the few
water-colours and oils left to his family—and unknown outside of its
members—are masterpieces. On his return from Australia, he lived for a
while with his mother at “The Cottage,” at Eversleigh; never caring for
Chelsea after the death of his father. He was married in 1864 by Charles
Kingsley and Gerald Blunt, the present Rector of Chelsea. On May 24th,
1876, “on the vigil of the Ascension,” only forty-six years of age, he
died at Cuckfield, Sussex, which quiet retreat he had chosen twelve
months before.
Henry Kingsley especially appeals to us, just here, for that he has given
us, in “The Hillyars and Burtons,” so vivid a picture of modern
Chelsea—its streets and by-ways, its old houses and its venerable church,
in delightful detail, as he saw them when a boy. The Hillyar family is a
romantic reproduction of that ancient Chelsea family, the Lawrences; in
“The Burtons” he gives us his reminiscence of the Wyatt household, living
at Wargrave, Henley-on-Thames. The brave girl, Emma Burton, is a
portrait of Emma Wyatt. The old home of the Burtons—“the very large
house which stood by itself, as it were, fronting the buildings opposite
our forge; which contained twenty-five rooms, some of them very large,
and which was called by us, indifferently, Church Place, or Queen
Elizabeth’s Place”—_this_ was the only one of the grand mansions just
here in Chelsea left standing when the Kingsleys came here. “It had been
in reality the palace of the young Earl of Essex; a very large
three-storied house of old brick, with stone-mullioned windows and
doorways.” You may see a print of it in “kind old Mr. Faulkner’s” book,
as he found it in 1830, dilapidated then, and let out to many tenants.
Later, it sunk lower still; and finally the grand old fabric—“which had
been trodden often enough by the statesmen and dandies of Queen
Elizabeth’s court, and most certainly by that mighty woman herself”—was
demolished between 1840–42. The boy of ten or twelve then, Henry
Kingsley, must have had the same feelings of wonder and regret, which he
puts into the speech of Jim Burton, as he looked on this historic pile,
roofless, dis-windowed, pickaxed to pieces. He is not quite correct in
letting Jim Burton fix its site on the south side of Paultons Square; it
stood between that square and Church Street, exactly where now stands a
block of poor little one-storied houses, “Paulton Terrace, 1843,” painted
on its pediment; and at the back, built in with some still more wretched
little dwellings, you shall still see part of the palace wall of Thomas
Cromwell, Earl of Essex, the son of the Putney blacksmith.
From this ancient site I often walk, in company with the Burton brothers,
Joe and Jim, their sister Emma and Erne Hillyar behind, down old Church
Lane, now Church Street, haunted by historic shades, to where, at its
foot, stands “Chelsea Old Church.”
“Four hundred years of memory are crowded into that dark old church, and
the great flood of change beats round the walls, and shakes the door in
vain, but never enters. The dead stand thick together there, as if to
make a brave resistance to the moving world outside, which jars upon
their slumber. It is a church of the dead. I cannot fancy any one being
married in that church—its air would chill the boldest bride that ever
walked to the altar.” So Joe Burton well says, sitting in his “old
place”—the bench which stood in front of Sir Thomas More’s monument,
close to the altar-rails. But for all that, it is not a depressing but
rather a delightful old church, if you sit here of a summer afternoon;
the sun streaming in from the south-west, slanting on the stone effigies,
and the breeze breathing in through the little door beside More’s
monument, shaking the grass outside, and the noble river sparkling beyond
the embankment garden. To me it has more of fascination than any church
in London. Its entire absence of architectural effect in its varying
styles; its retention to this day of the simplicity of the village
church, even as when built; its many monuments and mural tablets, each
one a page of English history; its family escutcheons; its tattered
battle flags hung above; the living memories that are built in with every
dead stone: all these combine to make it the quaintest, the most
impressive, the most lovable of churches. Dean Stanley was fond of
calling it one of the Chapters of his Abbey. This is not the place for a
description of the monuments, nor for details of their inscriptions;
which make us think, as they did the boy Jim Burton, that these buried
here “were the best people who ever lived.” Only the tenant of one plain
stone coffin is modest in his simple request cut thereon: “Of your
Charitie pray for the soul of Edmund Bray, Knight.” As for most of the
others, I quite agree with Jim, that the Latin, in which their long
epitaphs are written, was the only language appropriate; the English
tongue being “utterly unfit to express the various virtues of these
wonderful Chelsea people;” among whom, it strikes me, too, that “Sir
Thomas More was the most obstinately determined that posterity should
hear his own account of himself.” His black marble slab, set deep under
a plain grey Gothic arch, is placed on the chancel wall, just where he
used to stand in his “surplisse;” above it is his punning crest, a Moor’s
head on a shield; and on it is cut his own long Latin inscription, sent
by him to his friend Erasmus, who thought it worth printing in his
collection of “Tracts and Letters” (Antwerp, 1534). Twice have the
characters been recut; and each time has care been taken, for his
memory’s sake, to leave blank the last word of the line, which describes
him as “troublesome to thieves, murderers and _heretics_.” To the sturdy
old Catholic these were all equal—all criminals to be put out of the way.
The irony of chance has placed, on the wall close beside his tomb, a
tablet which keeps alive the name of one of the Tyndale family, a
descendant of that one whose books More burnt, and whose body he would
probably have liked to burn, also! More’s two wives are buried here, as
well as others of his family; but whether his body lies here, or in a
Tower grave, no one knows.
[Picture: A Corner in Chelsea Old Church]
Three of Chelsea’s grandest ladies lie under monuments in the church.
Lady Dacre, with her husband Gregory—“their dogs at their feet”—rests
under a Gothic canopy, richly wrought with flowers; tomb and canopy all
of superb white marble. Its sumptuousness is all the more striking in
that it contrasts so strongly with the simplicity ordered by her dying
injunctions, as she wrote them on December 20, 1594, when decreeing the
establishment of her almshouses—venerable cottages still standing in
Tothill Street, Westminster, not far from the little street named for
her. In her will she says: “And I earnestly desire that I may be buried
in one tombe with my lord at Chelsey, without all earthlie pompe, but
with some privat freindes, and nott to be ripped, and towling for me, but
no ringing, after service ys done.”
Opposite where she lies, reposes in white marble of the size of life,
under a pillared arch on a black marble pedestal, another noted Chelsea
dame, Lady Jane Cheyne; and on the marble her worthy husband Charles,
transformed here into Carolus, records in sounding Latin the good she did
in her life. Notably did she benefit this church, towards the
re-building of which she gave largely.
The great Duchess of Northumberland—mother of Elizabeth’s Leicester,
grandmother of Sir Philip Sidney—was laid to rest under a magnificent
tomb; of which there now is left, to keep alive her memory, here against
the wall, only a slab beneath a noble arch, and faded gilt escutcheons
beautifully wrought.
And now, glancing about at the monumental marble and brass of these
soldiers, statesmen, citizens, simple and stately, we are ready to agree
with straight-thinking Jim Burton: “But, on the whole, give me the
Hillyars, kneeling humbly, with nothing to say for themselves.” It is
the Lawrence family, as I have explained, who are called “The Hillyars”
by Henry Kingsley; and his preference—a memory, no doubt, of the Sunday
visits of his boyhood to the rector’s pew, which directly faces these
tombs—refers to that quaint monument in the Lawrence chapel; where, under
a little arch, supported by columns, kneel wife and husband face to face,
he in his armour, his three simple-seeming sons in ruffs kneeling behind
him; she in her heavy stiff dress, her six daughters on their knees
behind in a dutiful row, decreasing in size to the two dead while yet
babies on the cushion before her. Says Jim: “I gave them names in my own
head. I loved two of them. On the female side I loved the little wee
child, for whom there was very small room, and who was crowded against
the pillar, kneeling on the skirts of the last of her big sisters. And I
loved the big lad, who knelt directly behind his father; between the
Knight himself and the two little brothers, dressed so very like
blue-coat boys, such quaint little fellows as they were.”