Sir Hans Sloane—His houses and bequests—The gates of Beaufort House
living in Piccadilly—The clock—The restoration of 1910—Church
Lane—The Petyt House—Queen Elizabeth’s Cofferer—Church Lane and its
residents—The Rectory—The King’s Theatre and the stocks—Upper Church
Street and the Queen’s Elm.
THE tomb of Sir Hans Sloane is the chief object of interest in the
little strip of churchyard which remains to the Old Church. It shows
the urn and serpents of Esculapius, and its epitaph is pleasant
reading; we fancy we see the courtly, kindly, pompous old physician
who lived at Beaufort House and must have been a familiar figure on
the riverside, pacing with dignity, or being carried in his chair to
the Physic Garden which he presented to the Apothecaries Company and
to Chelsea. His name has been repeated in a score of ways; throughout
the district his daughters and co-heiresses, in their turn, have stood
sponsor to many of our streets. Their marriages link the Past and
Present with names that are, literally, part of Chelsea. Sir Hans, an
Ulsterman by birth, first lived in Sir Thomas More’s “Great House,”
which he caused to be pulled down—it had fallen into disrepair, and
was overweighted by its grounds and expensive gardens.[1] He later
removed to the Manor House, once Henry VIII.’s Palace, which occupied
the space now filled by the houses of Cheyne Walk stretching westward
from the corner of Oakley Street to Manor Street.
Sir Hans’ collection of natural curiosities and works of art formed the
nucleus of the British Museum: he had wished that his rarities could
have remained and have been exhibited in the Manor House itself, and
that the adjoining gardens should be opened to the public, but this was
found impracticable; the estate was divided and sold after Sir Hans’
death, and Cheyne Walk’s separate houses were built. Many of these show
in their basements the solid remains of Tudor masonry.
Of the thousands who daily pass Devonshire House, Piccadilly, we wonder
how many persons know the history of the great iron gates which adorn
the Duke’s otherwise forbidding wall? They are the gateway designed by
Inigo Jones for Beaufort House when occupied by the Earl of Middlesex.
Sir Hans, when he demolished the Chancellor’s beautiful home, gave the
gates to the Earl of Burlington and they were set up for a time at
Chiswick; the late Duke of Devonshire recovered them, and set them up
once more, in front of a great town house. Pope’s funny little verse to
the gates, which he met on the road to Chiswick in an ignominious cart,
is well known—
“O Gate, how cam’st thou hither?”
“I was brought from Chelsea last year
Battered by Wind and Weather!”
and often quoted, but few inquire whose gate it was and where it has
gone to.
If time and space allowed, there are a hundred more points of interest
about the Old Church over which we might linger, but it is impossible
to do more than indicate its chief features in a guide-book of our
present dimensions. Suffice to mention that the tower, replacing an
earlier steeple, was built in 1679; that the clock, made and presented
by Sir Hans Sloane’s gardener, a Quaker and amateur mechanic, is still
keeping good time after more than 150 years’ work; that the new vestry
is built as a memorial to Mr. Davies’ long incumbency.
The latest restoration of the church in 1910 owes its origin to the
short but vigorous rule of Mr. Prideaux, who recognised the necessity
and did not allow himself to be daunted by the immense difficulties
of the work required. Some of our conservative Chelsea hearts dreaded
it, as though the Huns and Vandals were at our church gates, but the
sympathetic manner in which it was carried out reconciled even the most
fearful to the unavoidable changes.
As we remember the Rev. R. H. Davies very gratefully for freeing the
two chapels from the thrall of private ownership, so we thank the Rev.
S. P. T. Prideaux for so bravely carrying through the immense work of
the restoration and re-beautifying of 1910.
To his successor, the Rev. M. S. Farmer, we owe the completion of the
organ and the careful and reverent re-arrangement of the surrounding
church garden.
As we leave the church, Cheyne Walk stretches stately and placid
to either side of us, and the river beyond, which used to lap the
churchyard wall when Henry VIII. was rowed up in his royal barge to
visit the beloved Chancellor (whose head he presently cut off), shows
like silver between the bounds of its magnificent embankment; all this
must have a chapter to itself, and as we are at Church Street corner,
we will take the opportunity of turning due north and following it, the
“Church Lane” of older days, to its end at Queen’s Elm.
Just above the church lies the Petyt House, erected in 1706 by William
Petyt; it has been rebuilt, but its Queen Anne character has been kept.
A grim-faced portrait of its founder hangs inside, and the house is
still used for Sunday-school and parish purposes, “Church purposes”
being strictly prescribed. It was originally the parish school,
succeeding a parochial school built somewhere near the same site by
Rector Ward, “Cofferer to Queen Elizabeth,” in 1595. “Cofferer” is a
delightful title, and suggests comfortable resources in the background.
Church Street is now a squalid thoroughfare leading from Fulham and
King’s Road straight to the Embankment by a short cut that is narrow,
crowded, and always swarming with children. But in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries it was dignified and residential, and even
now if you obliterate in your mind’s eye the ugly, cheap shop fronts
you will find Queen Anne brickwork behind; generous windows, warmly
tiled roofs, and panelled rooms within. Here in the good Queen’s days
lived the _élite_ of the literary world: Bishop Atterbury schemed
for the Stuarts in a “house on the waterside,” probably opposite the
church; Dean Swift had his lodging a little further up the lane, where
he deplored “confounded coarse sheets and an awkward bed”; Addison
came across the fields from Sandford Manor House to meet the wits at
Don Saltero’s coffee-house; Dr. Arbuthnot and Sir John Shadwell, the
Queen’s physicians, and many others, scientists and men of letters,
lived in the Church Street houses which to-day are stables, laundries,
offices, and small shops.
Trelawny, Bishop of Winchester, was a force in this coterie’s earlier
days; later Dr. Johnson visited here. Possibly the existence of great
houses and influential owners of property in and about our Village of
Palaces brought the wits and writers to Chelsea: Shrewsbury House,
Winchester House, Lindsey House, Essex House, and others were in the
possession of noblemen who might happily count as patrons to launch
a new book or a new enterprise if the authors knew how to play their
cards well and politely.
A few hundred yards above the Petyt House the rectory wall begins,
and one of the most delightful houses and gardens in London is seen
behind it. An older rectory house existed on much the same site from
the early sixteenth century, and the roll of Chelsea rectors being
complete since 1289, it may well have been earlier still. But in 1694
we read that Rector John King found the rectory house so dilapidated
that he removed to lodgings in Church Lane, and it was probably rebuilt
shortly afterwards. Rector Blunt, and our present rector, Archdeacon
Bevan, have done much to beautify and improve it, and though they have
generously given part of its surrounding land for necessary parish
purposes, the garden, with Queen Elizabeth’s mulberry-tree, still
remains a joy and refreshment to many—an oasis of flowers, and trees,
and lovely age-old turf in the midst of the busiest commercial quarter
of the parish.
The General Omnibus Company has its office where once the stage
coaches used to rumble in from the Great North Road; and the King’s
House, an unrivalled cinematograph theatre, faces the corner where,
tradition says, the stocks used to stand for the wholesome punishment
of miscreants and disturbers of the peace. If only the cinema could
reproduce some of the scenes which were enacted on this spot two
hundred years ago, how interesting would be the revival, and how
Suffragettes would tremble!
Upper Church Street, across the King’s Road, was till recently a pretty
countrified street, irregularly set with charming houses small and big.
Here lived Felix Moscheles, the painter, Mr. De Morgan, the novelist,
Mr. Bernard Partridge, the _Punch_ cartoonist, reflecting and adding to
the effulgence of the Chelsea Arts Club. But the newly planned Avenue
of the Vale, with its antennæ of new streets in every direction, has
cost us Church Street as we have loved it since childhood; “_c’est
magnifique_,” this new tasteful suburb of old Chelsea, but it is not
the homely purlieu that we, and Dean Swift, used to know.
Even as I write the hammers of the housebreakers are busy on the walls
of “The Queen’s Elm” public-house, an ugly structure enough which no
one can regret for itself, though with the passing of its existence as
a house of refreshment one fears its Elizabethan legend may disappear
also. Here under an elm the Queen “stood up” for shelter in a storm of
rain with Lord Burleigh, who inherited the Dacre property in Chelsea
and Brompton, and was probably conducting her Majesty to one or other
of his newly acquired properties. Elizabeth was fond of paying surprise
visits to her subjects, and on one occasion when she went to Beaufort
House unexpectedly, in its owner’s absence, she was unrecognised, and
refused admittance. Under the elm at the corner of Church Street and
Fulham Road legend says she and her great minister talked of umbrellas,
which about this time were first introduced from the East, but were not
yet in general—even in royal—use.
As I passed the old public-house, the stucco frontage of which was
falling in clouds of dust to the ground, I saw for the first time a
beautifully pitched and red-tiled roof disclosed at the back of the
building. It, too, may be gone to-morrow, but I like to think I have
just caught a farewell glimpse of the roof that sheltered Queen Bess.
NOTES