Lots Road—Ashburnham House—Sandford Manor—Beaufort House and a corner
of a “fayre garden”—Tudor bricks—Danvers House and the Herberts—Lord
Wharton’s scheme of silk production—Henry VIII.’s Hunting Lodge in
Glebe Place—The Manor House gardens and those who have walked there.
AS WE HAVE reached the western limit of Cheyne Walk and may not be
there again, for the uninteresting industrial district which begins
here is not likely to tempt us back, we will say a few words about some
of the old names that survive, under very altered conditions, and then
turn our backs on it.
Lots Road, which might easily suggest the dreary desert tramp of the
migrating Patriarch, is so called because it is built on the site of
four lots of pasture-land belonging to the manor, and the first of the
property to be sold. In 1740 this land surrounded Chelsea Farm, the
residence of the Methodist Lady Huntingdon, the friend of Whitfield and
inventor of a “Persuasion” all her own. Then, in sharp contrast, it
became Chelsea Gardens, later opened as Cremorne, and closed in 1875,
when its pretensions to fashion had been eclipsed in rowdyism.
Further to the north-west lay Ashburnham House, whither Master William
Ashburnham was steering on the memorable night when he was nearly
submerged in Chelsea Reach: the name has been well preserved in the
handsome church and adjacent block of mansions.
Chelsea Creek was once a much-used waterway to Kensington, and the
old lock-keeper’s cottage used to be a picturesque object; there was
perhaps a back way to Sandford Manor House, occupied first by Nell
Gwynn, later by Addison, which gallants and savants used in turn.
The remains of the little old dwelling stand in the yard of the Gas
Company, to the right of the railway, and accessible from King’s Road
at Stanley Bridge; but they are rather a deplorable relic of two
popular historic figures, and any day may see them swept away. There
are some survivals which even the keenest antiquarian must feel had
better be graciously obliterated if they cannot be restored to dignity.
Addison’s description of his home as Sandys’ End, written in 1708,
scarcely prepares us for the desolation of its present-day appearance.
Returning eastward, along Cheyne Walk, we naturally turn up Beaufort
Street, and try to realise, while the tram screams at us from the
middle of the road, that Sir Thomas More’s fair house and gardens
lay here on either hand. The Clock-house entry to the Moravian
burial-ground is perhaps the original north-west corner of these
grounds; on the east they stretch to Danvers Street. Here and there are
still to be found pieces of wall which show the unmistakable nuggets of
Tudor brickwork; and I once saw the surprising spectacle of a correctly
attired clergyman astride a twelve-foot wall at the back of the old
Pheasantry, trying to detach a brick as a memento of his visit to the
Chancellor’s domain. I regret that I failed to observe his descent, but
I met him later ruefully amused and very dirty; and he had to confess
that the sixteenth-century builders had been too clever for him, and he
had torn his hands and his clothes for no result. But the Chancellor’s
motto, “Serve God and be merrie,” was certainly his also; and the fact
that he had not been able to detach one brick seemed to convince him of
its undoubted Tudor-ness!
Those who would read of “the Greatest House in Chelsea,” and Sir Thomas
More’s life there, should get Mr, Randall Davies’ recently published
book and study its complete record; here we can only briefly relate how
after More’s execution it was granted to the Marquis of Winchester,
inherited by Lady Dacre, bequeathed by her to Lord Burleigh, and later
occupied by Sir Arthur Gorges, the Dukes of Buckingham, the Dukes of
Beaufort, and finally was bought and pulled down by Sir Hans Sloane,
who seems to have had a mania for demolishing historic great houses.
Perhaps as a physician his sanitary instincts were more alert than his
feelings of sentiment.
There is just one corner of Beaufort Street where a realisation of the
past may really be achieved in a very delightful and unexpected manner.
Turn in at the iron gateway to Argyle Mansions (at the right-hand side
of the street, where the tramlines end and the King’s Road crosses),
and you will find yourself in an undreamed of survival of a part of the
Chancellor’s garden. You will find some old trees and a mulberry-bush,
and some turf, that is Chelsea, not London, sward; you will be hard to
please or to interest if you cannot picture a garden scene here: Sir
Thomas with his arm about his “Meg’s” shoulder—Erasmus reading in the
shade—perhaps the King’s Majesty himself, swaggering condescendingly,
and as yet uncrossed in his desires and uncontradicted in his supremacy.
It is but a scrap of green, but it is genuine Chelsea history—far more
so than the intrusive Crosby Hall, which hunches its shoulder to the
garden a few hundred yards further on and whose connection with Sir
Thomas is remote and with Chelsea is nil.
Danvers Street with its tablet, “This is Danvers Street, begun in ye
year 1696 by Benjamin Stallwood,” commemorates the older Danvers House,
home of the versatile Sir John Danvers, a courtier, a regicide, and
then a courtier again as the whirligig of time carried him along. His
wife was the pious and beautiful Lady Herbert, mother by her first
marriage of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and of George Herbert, the sweet
singer; the Herbert family was constant at church, and it is pleasant
to think that some of the poet’s “Church Porch” thoughts may have come
to him in the calm seclusion of the Old Church. Lord Wharton, who later
lived at Danvers House and was the author of the famous Whig song
“Lillibulero” to which Purcell wrote the music, tried to introduce the
silk industry into Chelsea, for the employment of the French Huguenots
who had a colony hereabouts. Two thousand mulberry trees were planted
along the north of King’s Road, on the Elm Park estate, and in other
large gardens, but unluckily a mulberry was chosen which did not
approve itself to English silkworms, and after a specimen petticoat had
been presented to Queen Caroline, we hear no more of the venture.
But this doubtless accounts for the many odd-corner mulberry trees in
our various back-gardens: Queen Elizabeth has been associated with
several of them, and without hesitation we believe that she planted the
Rectory garden tree—but for the rest, we credit Lord Wharton.
A little intricate turn, opposite the new County School buildings,
into Glebe Place brings us, at the south-east corner, to Henry VIII.’s
Hunting Lodge, a tiny dwelling, with beautiful fish-scale tiling, and
so narrow a doorway that our ordinary conception of King Hal’s figure
seems to give the lie to this tradition. But Henry was doubtless of
slenderer build when he came to shoot bernagle on the riverside, and
incidentally to court Mistress Jane Seymour; it is worth asking the
present occupier of the little house for permission to see the ladder
stairway to the floor above. Again we are amazed to think how Henry
ever mounted it; the Lodge, as it is called still, must have been very
convenient in old days to that Tudor Lane which divided Upper Cheyne
Row and ran straight to the Thames side, where in the reeds of the
Battersea shore wild geese were plentiful.
The gardens at the back of the Cheyne Walk houses east of Oakley Street
are all hallowed ground, for here without a doubt stretched the lawns
and glades of the royal pleasaunce, where “Katheryn the Queene” waited
so anxiously for the Lord High Admiral—her fourth husband, it is true,
but her first love; where she bade him play with romance, at the little
gate in the fields, in the letter which he told her not to write but
which she could not resist writing.
[Illustration: _Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston._
HENRY VIII.’S HUNTING LODGE.
p. 60] ]
Presently, Elizabeth the hoyden was romping and flirting with her
stepfather in these very precincts, and poor Queen Katharine was sadly
disillusioned and crept away to Sudeley to die. Anne of Cleves may have
paced here in sedate Dutch fashion, debating whether she should invite
her whilom husband to tea, which she certainly did and found it quite
entertainment enough. Lady Jane Grey visited here, and as Guildford
Dudley lived hard by, perhaps conducted her priggish courtship under
these very trees. By-and-by Sir Hans Sloane is wheeled up in his
invalid chair and matures his practical plans for breaking up the
estate and sending a tide of new building over Chelsea.
Afterwards, when each house had its individual garden, the company
that flocked to Cheyne Walk was, in Georgian times, scarcely less
distinguished, and in our own day no less interesting: some magnet
quality in the very earth surely brings those who are dear and
delightful to rest in Chelsea by the river?
NOTES