Cheyne Walk—The King’s Road and the Queen’s—George Eliot—Dr.
Dominiceti’s baths—A French author’s cleverness—“The Yorkshire
Grey”—Cecil Lawson’s pictures—Rossetti, Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Haweis, and
their guests—The Don Saltero—“The Magpie”—Remains of Shrewsbury House
and Mary Queen of Scots—The Children’s Hospital—Crosby Hall, Lindsey
House, Turner’s House—The way between the Pales.
CHEYNE WALK is beautiful at all seasons and under all aspects; each
time that I regard it from a fresh point, or return to it after a
temporary absence, I think, “Never has it looked so lovely before!”
But for the purposes of historical interest it is well to walk it from
end to end, or rather, to loiter in it, and, for choice, in early
autumn, when the sunshine is as mellow as the tones of the old brick,
and the trees and creepers are not too heavily green to obscure its
gracious lines.
So, if you will see this riverside row of storied houses aright, turn
with me down Flood Street—when you leave your motor-bus at the Town
Hall—and begin at the beginning of the Walk that will lead you through
the drama, tragic and comic, of at least five centuries.
Until a few years ago the two main thoroughfares from London to Chelsea
were the King’s Road and the Queen’s Road. In that their juxtaposition
recalled an interesting tradition, I am sorry that Queen’s Road has
lately been altered to Royal Hospital Road.
For in the days of Charles II. the King had a private road for his
coach through the fields to Chelsea, where dwelt Mistress Elinor Gwynn
(at Sandford Manor when she received the King’s visits, but, report
says, in a squalid little riverside hovel, not far from Chelsea
Barracks, in her previous chrysalis stage), and Queen Catharine of
Braganza, who also visited at Chelsea, paying less lively duty calls,
as wives must, objected to using her husband’s route lest a domestic
matter, which she preferred to ignore, should be forced on her
attention.
So the King came his road and the Queen hers, following parallel
paths, and poor, stupid Catharine tried to keep her eyes shut to her
consort’s “merry” ways. Had she tried to make her own a little less
stiff, bigoted, and unintelligent, she might have been happier, for she
was young and pretty enough to charm Charles at first; her determined
adherence to Portuguese manners, dress, and language was as much to
blame for Charles’s neglect, as his own inconstant nature.
The first two houses in Cheyne Walk are modern, but then begins the
row of beautiful mansions which forms the Walk, as distinguished from
the previous frontage of great buildings standing detached, in the
gardens of the Manor House. These buildings were pulled down and the
gardens surrendered to the builders in 1717, and housebuilding on the
riverside began apace. In No. 4 George Eliot (Mrs. Cross) lived for a
few weeks only, and died from the result of a chill in 1880, just as
she had begun to find pleasure in her beautiful view. At No. 5 James
Camden Nield lived a miser’s life, and left a fortune of half a million
pounds to Queen Victoria, whose Uncle Leopold congratulates her in
one of his letters “on having a little money of her own” in her early
married life. At No. 6 Dr. Dominiceti had his famous medicinal baths,
a wonder-working quackery of the eighteenth century of which in heated
argument Dr. Johnson said to an opponent of differing views:
“Well, sir, go to Dominiceti and get fumigated, and be sure that the
steam be directed to thy head, for that is the peccant part!”
Between No. 6 and Manor Street some modern houses have been
interpolated. No. 11, I think, is the number which has been omitted
from the sequence in numbering them, and a clever French novelist has
taken advantage of this peculiarity to lay the scene of his story in
the nonexistent house, which he can consequently describe with all the
exuberance of his fancy. I have met French visitors walking round this
end of Cheyne Walk in great perplexity trying to locate their author’s
plot: the fact that larger buildings took the place of humbler ones,
and that the numbers beyond could not be disturbed, account for the
omission.
Some thirty years ago, when the old houses were demolished, a
considerable portion of an underground passage was laid bare to the
right of Manor Street. It was obviously a section of that subterranean
passage which connected the Chelsea Palace with Kensington. I crept
down it for the space of a yard or two, and rejoiced to think that the
Princess Elizabeth might have done the same, in one of those romping
games with her stepfather, the Lord High Admiral Seymour, which
“Katheryn the Queene” found too hoydenish for the young lady’s age and
dignity. Nos. 13 and 14, formerly one house, were the well-known inn
“The Yorkshire Grey,” with its own stairs at the riverside, dear to
country visitors from the north of England.
No. 15, now in the possession of Lord Courtney of Penwith, was in
the seventies the home of the artist family of William Lawson. Cecil
Lawson’s pictures of Chelsea before the Embankment was built, were
exhibited in a one-man show at Burlington House a few years back, and
gave an exquisite idea of the waterside in its rural days, Queen’s
House, No. 16, was once called Tudor House, and its basement is said
to contain remains of the original Tudor workmanship of Henry VIII.’s
Palace. Whether this is so or not, it is unquestionably on the site of
some of the old Manor House buildings; the name was changed by the Rev.
H. R. Haweis, who favoured the idea that many Queens—Katharine Parr,
Elizabeth, Anne of Cleves, Catharine of Braganza—must have occupied
the position, though not the actual mansion.
Mr. Haweis’ tenancy followed on that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who
lived here from 1863 to 1882. William Rossetti, George Meredith,
Algernon Swinburne, and others of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
joined at first in the _ménage_; then came Dante Rossetti’s short and
sad married life, and later he lived secluded, spending much of his
time in his garden at the back, where he tried to acclimatise strange
animals, of whose wild ways exaggerated reports were spread abroad,
perhaps to ensure the poet’s privacy.
Of Rossetti’s later life, I who write can speak as an eye-witness, for
in 1878 we went to live next door, at No. 17, and found him a quiet,
very retiring, but most polite and obliging neighbour. As our gardens
at the back adjoined we often saw him pacing under his trees dressed in
an old brown dressing-gown like a friar’s habit. He went nowhere and
received little company. Once we had lost a pet tortoise, which came up
from under the dividing wall on Mr. Rossetti’s side of the boundary:
the poet lifted it gently back and dropped it over without a word, then
scurried away indoors, lest we might be moved to overwhelm him with
thanks. He died while at Margate for his health, and I remember we had
hardly heard the news, when we saw people (certainly unauthorised)
removing all sorts of parcels and pieces of furniture from the house to
a cab, which was loaded outside and in, and driven rapidly away.
When his effects came to be examined much of value had disappeared, but
who were the culprits was never known.
Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Haweis’ tenancy of Queen’s House was very different.
They entertained half London at their big crushes, which always had a
character and a “go” which made them eagerly sought after and vastly
amusing. Nearly always the party was built round some lion of the
literary or scientific world. Ernest Renan and Oliver Wendell Holmes
happen to be two guests whom I particularly recall. Renan was big,
overblown, with the rolling gait and merry, round face of Southern
France: Oliver Wendell Holmes was tiny, silver-haired, fragile as a
bright-eyed little field mouse. Mr. Haweis, who did not know what
shyness meant, exploited his visitors with the utmost vivacity and good
nature; he had the social instinct in a high degree, and enjoyed his
own parties so heartily that few of his guests could fail to do the
same.
Nos. 17 and 18 were in 1718 the celebrated Don Saltero Museum and
Coffee-house, removed from Danvers Street to this more eligible
situation; the old site is now occupied by the baker’s shop, 77, Cheyne
Walk. “James Salter, the coffee man,” was at one time valet to Sir
Hans Sloane, and may have formed the idea of his museum from pickings,
let us hope discarded, by this eminent collector. He was an Irishman
who could mix punch, and draw teeth, play a little on the fiddle, and
keep his patrons amused, though his wonderful curios read like simple
rubbish to-day, and strongly remind us of the bogus collections which
used to be a sideshow at bazaars in the country. Still, “Forget me
not at Salter’s, in thy next bowl!” said the wits, and a galaxy of
wonderful men must have met at “the Don’s” of an afternoon as Richard
Steele describes it in the _Tatler_. The famous collection was sold
in 1799, and the coffee-house became a public-house; in 1867 it was
divided into two private residences.
The houses Nos. 19 to 26 were built about sixty years later than those
we have been considering, when the last part of the Manor frontage
was taken down; the difference in style is easy to trace—there is
a uniformity of style, which has evidently been aimed at, and the
magnificent ironwork of the earlier date is wanting.
At No. 24 there are vaults which undoubtedly date from Tudor times,
and tradition says that the gnarled old wisteria embracing No. 20
is a creeper of the Manor House garden. All these houses have fine
panelling, staircases and fireplaces, and handrails—some of earlier
fashion than the buildings themselves, which points at their adaptation
from previous mansions.
Modern houses intervene in the curve where stood Winchester House, the
Bishop’s Palace: at No. 27 Mr. and Mrs. Bram Stoker lived, in the palmy
days of the Lyceum Theatre under Sir Henry Irving’s management, and
dispensed delightful Irish hospitality.
Across Oakley Street, we come to a lately restored house which bears
the old sign of the Magpie and Stump. The “Magpie Inn,” one of the
oldest houses in Chelsea, was a rendezvous for the supporters of
the Stuart cause in 1715 and 1745; they could slip away by water
if in danger of discovery. Next come, alas! some lamentable gaps,
interspersed with a few odd walls and gables still remaining, parts of
old Shrewsbury House, where Mary Queen of Scots was held in custody by
the Earl of Shrewsbury. The form of the house cannot be traced, though
an old print gives it as a hollow square standing back from the present
roadway; it was broken up in 1813, but without doubt parts of it have
been built into the present small houses.
By the by, the Earl of Shrewsbury who had charge of Queen Mary was also
fourth husband of the notorious Bess of Hardwick, and Queen Elizabeth
is reported to have pitied him for having such intimate acquaintance
with “two she devils.”
No. 48 was once a Quakers’ Meeting House. The Hospital for Incurable
Children, of which Queen Alexandra is President, nobly fills the site
of some very old, tall houses, in one of which Holman Hunt painted
his “Light of the World”; the old vine was preserved, and still bears
small, sweet grapes in a hot season; the children’s voices sound
merrily as you pass their open windows, and the saddest inmates are
those who, having been sent here as incurable, are told that they are
nearly healed and must shortly return to their homes.
Beyond Lombards’ Row, already noticed, where the old Archway House
stood to shelter Jacobite plotters, are some new houses which are
surely an anachronism in our Queen Anne Walk (the original dates
hereabouts are 1710-11), but the Copper Door is a fine piece of work,
and a splendid reflector of sunshine.
Across Danvers Street lies the waste land surrounding the lately
erected Crosby Hall, of which I do not suffer myself to write, so
keenly do I resent its importation into the hallowed precincts of Sir
Thomas More’s whilom garden. Those who wish to inspect it can do so by
inquiring for the custodian and the keys at More’s Gardens Mansions
(entrance corner of Beaufort Street).
[Illustration: _Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd._
LINDSEY HOUSE.
p. 52] ]
Crossing Beaufort Street, all the houses are gracious and of good
report, and the entire proportions of Lindsey House can be made out
from the pavement on the riverside, sub-divided as it now is into five
or six different dwellings, and at one gabled end slightly extended.
This was the great house of Sir Theodore de Mayerne, Court Physician,
1639; of Robert, Earl of Lindsey, Lord High Chamberlain, 1671; of
Count Zinzendorf, the Moravian Leader, 1750: it occupied a part of the
grounds of Beaufort House, and rose to importance as that great mansion
declined. The Moravian fraternity had their colony and chapel and
burying-ground behind Millman Street, where members of their persuasion
were buried upright, under small square headstones, with the object,
tradition says, of rising more quickly at the General Resurrection than
other people. Finally, after passing many picturesque houses and some
squalid modern interpolations, we come to Turner’s house, with the
balcony where he watched the sunrise, and with the south-west window
where he died with the sunset flooding his face in 1851.
Cheyne Walk ends at World’s End Passage, “the way between the Pales,”
as the map of 1717 has it, which led across the fields and marshes to
Kensington.
NOTES