A ROAD-BOOK TOOLD CHELSEA

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.A ROAD-BOOK TO OLD CHELSEATHE ROADS THAT LEAD TO CHELSEA.Frontispiece.A ROAD-BOOK TOOLD CHELSEABYG. B. STUART“By what means the time is so well-abbreviated I know not,except weeks be shorter in Chelsey, than in other places!”KATHERYN THE QUEENE.Extract from a letter of Queen Katharine Parr to theLord High Admiral Seymour, written from Chelsea, 1547WITH SKETCH MAP AND FIVE ILLUSTRATIONSLONDONHUGH REES, LTD.5 REGENT STREET, PALL MALL, S.W.1914PREFACEOF the making of books about Chelsea, may there never be an end, so rich and unexhausted is our history, so inspiring to those who labour in its service! Every year, as fresh records become accessible, Chelsea is presented to us from some different standpoint, historical, architectural, or frankly human, and there is ever a welcome and a place for each volume as it appears.They are books full of research and of suggestion, illustrated by portraits and maps from rare sources, and clinching hitherto unsolved problems. They quickly become our library friends and companions, because, though some of their matter may be familiar, each has, for its own individual charm, that personal outlook of its author which expresses, with wider and more resourceful knowledge than ours, the love we all bear to our home by the river.It is because in love of our subject we and the greater writers are equal, that I dare to put forth a new Guide to Chelsea; a little foot-page, a link-boy, a caddy if you will, just to show the way to strangers, to disembarrass them of unnecessary impedimenta, to point out special places of interest which may be visited in a summer afternoon, within that charmed circle of our parish, where every inch is enchanted ground.G. B. S.CONTENTSCHAPTERPAGEI.THE ROAD TO THE CHURCH9II.THE OLD CHURCH: NORTH SIDE AND CHANCEL15III.THE OLD CHURCH: SOUTH SIDE AND THE MORE CHAPEL23IV.THE OLD CHURCH: THE NAVE AND ITS MONUMENTS31V.CHURCH STREET TO QUEEN’S ELM39VI.CHEYNE WALK FROM EAST TO WEST47VII.SIDE STREETS AND BACK GARDENS57VIII.THE ROAD TO THE ROYAL HOSPITAL65L’ENVOI73A ROAD-BOOK TO OLD CHELSEACHAPTER IOmnibuses for Chelsea—The Mystery House—Dr. Phéné’s garden—Cheyne House and Tudor Lane—Leigh Hunt’s home—Cheyne Row and Carlyle—The Tollsey Cottage and James II.—The Lawrences and Lombards’ Row—The Fieldings and Justice Walk.PRESUMING, O stranger, that you will reach Chelsea by motor-bus—either from Kensington by No. 49, from Piccadilly by No. 19, or from the Strand by No. 11—I will ask you to alight at Chelsea Town Hall and turn with me down Oakley Street. As we face the river, there is always fresh air to meet us, and in summer time, above the road smell of asphalt and petrol, there floats a soft, keen savour of growing things and green bushes, hidden away behind walls; if an old door opens, we catch a glimpse of gardens and sometimes of a “mulberry-bush,” grown to forest size, which, planted by the men who fled from the terror of St. Bartholomew, still fruits and flourishes to repay Chelsea hospitality.On the right-hand side, where we turn into Upper Cheyne Row, stands the much-talked-about “Mystery House” of the late eccentric Dr. Phéné. It has never been much of a mystery to its neighbours. Dr. Phéné built it as a storehouse for his collections—some valuable, others worthless—and plastered it with the discarded ornamentsof the old Horticultural Gardens. The old gentleman was vastly proud of his design, and loved to plant himself at the street corner and encourage the remarks of passers-by: that the work was chaotic, and dropping to pieces before it was finished, troubled him not at all, and Chelsea forgave him the architectural monstrosity for the sake of the garden, which his leisurely building methods preserved. The wall which encloses it is one of Dr. Phéné’s happiest “finds,” and is said to be a part of old St. Paul’s—it certainly bears the carven arms of several London boroughs, and is not incongruous to its surroundings; behind it blackbirds, thrushes, and wood-pigeons fancy themselves in the country, and birds and men alike rejoice that the complications of the Phéné property still preserve their shade and shelter untouched.Cheyne House, which also belonged to Dr. Phéné, was less highly esteemed by him than his Renaissance effort, and has been allowed to drop into grievous ruin: it is the house “of ancient gravity and beauty” of which Mr. E. V. Lucas writes so affectionately in hisWanderer in London. It sits back, with its eyes closed, wrapped in its ancient vine, and no one will ever know its three-hundred-year-old secrets. For in the old maps it shows bravely in the centre of its park, and a little narrow walk, called Tudor Lane, led from it to the river, where possibly it had its own landing-stage; a beautiful state reception room at the back had seven windows giving on the terrace. It is sad and strange that so little is known of its inhabitants in the past.No. 4 Upper Cheyne Row is a modern interpolation, filling up the Tudor Lane aperture; but No. 6 is another really old house, dating by its leases from 1665, and having a splendid mulberry tree, which in a document of 1702 is mentioned as “unalienable from the property.”No. 10 (at that time No. 4) was Leigh Hunt’s home for seven years from 1833 to 1840, where, as Carlyle wrote, “the noble Hunt will receive you into his Tinkerdom, in the spirit of a King.” He was often in absolute want during this period, yet his belief in the human and the divine was never shaken by poverty, illness, or distress of mind, and the beautiful quality of his work was maintained in spite of perpetual difficulties.Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston.THOMAS CARLYLE.p.10]The date 1708 on the side wall above Cheyne Cottage fixes the building of Cheyne Row and the west end of Upper Cheyne Row; a beautiful old house which was cleared away in 1894 to make room for the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Redeemer was called Orange House, in political compliment, and its next-door neighbour, York House, was named after James II. These two were probably older than the others, and Lord Cheyne, who formed the Row, built his newer houses into line with those already existing. Some of the iron work of the balconies, etc., and the porticoes, are worth noting.Carlyle’s House (now No. 24) can be visited every week-day, between the hours of 10 a.m. and sunset—admission 1s., Saturdays 6d.—and it speaks for itself. I will only add a reference to Mrs. N., the old servant who spent years in Carlyle’s service, and finished her honoured days in ours—her descriptions of “the Master” writing hisFrederick the Greatwere about the most intimate revelations that have yet been made of the Carlyleménage!The Master would be so immersed in his subject—maps and books being spread all over the floor of his room “in his wrestle with Frederick”—that his lunch would remain unheeded until, stretching up a vague hand, he plunged it into the dish of hashed mutton or rice pudding, as the case might be—regardless of plate, spoon, or decorum. “It was no cook’s credit to cook for him,” was Mrs. N.’s verdict, “a cook that respected herself simply couldn’t do it,” and though she adored Mrs. Carlyle, she left her service to restore her own self-respect.Cheyne Cottage was once the Toll Gate for entering Chelsea Parish at the south-west angle—there was another Toll Gate, I think, at the Fulham end of Church Street, but it was probably to this one on the river bank that James Duke of York, afterwards James II., came one winter night a few minutes later than the recognised closing time, eight o’clock. James was unpopular, and the old woman who kept the gate a staunch Protestant, so that to the outriders’ challenge, “Open to the Duke of York!” sheshrilled back defiance from her bedroom window, “Be ye Duke or devil, ye don’t enter by this gate after eight of the clock!” and so left James and his coach to lumber on to Whitehall through the bankside mud, as best he might.When I first knew Chelsea, the old board with the toll prices and distances under the Royal arms of Charles II. was preserved at the cottage, but this has, I believe, been surrendered to the London Museum.Lawrence Street, between Cheyne Row and the Old Church, boasts the sponsorship of the Lawrence family, goldsmiths and bankers, whose mansion adjoined the church, and whose business premises leave their name to the group of very old houses immediately west of Church Street. These houses, though actually standing in Cheyne Walk, are called Lombards’ Row in commemoration of the Lawrences’ banking business.Fielding, the novelist, and his brother the Justice lived in the big eighteenth-century house facing Justice Walk, and Tobias Smollett lived close by, in a house now pulled down. In the big garden at the back, impecunious “Sunday men,” whose debts kept them at home on other days, were entertained every week at a “rare good Sunday dinner, all being welcome whatever the state of their coats.”And the Chelsea China Factory existed also at the upper end of Lawrence Street for nearly forty years. Dr. Johnson used to experiment there, having an ambition to excel in a porcelain paste of his own invention, but his composition would not stand the baking process—perhaps he had too weighty a hand in the mixing!—and he gave up the work in disgust. Chelsea china commands enormous prices, as its supply was so limited.So by Justice Walk and a turn to the left down Church Street, we reach the Old Church, the heart of Old Chelsea; a still living, warmly beating heart, after eight centuries.NOTESCHAPTER IIThe Old Church—Its origin—The new St. Luke’s—Old dedication revived—Henry VIII.’s Marriage to Jane Seymour in the Lawrence Chapel—Princess Elizabeth—The squint and lepers—The plague at Chelsea—The Hungerford memorial—The Bray tomb—Anecdotes of the Rev. R. H. Davies’ incumbency.THE Old Church is first mentioned as the Parish Church of Chelsea in 1290, when the Pope granted “relaxation” to penitents visiting it on All Saints’ Day. It was then, as now, dedicated to All Saints, though for 300 years in between it has been known as St. Luke’s (like the modern Parish Church in Sydney Street). The late Rev. R. H. Davies, for nearly sixty years known and loved at the Old Church, has suggested that the nucleus of the building may have been the Lawrence Chapel, belonging as library and chapel to the Manor House; it is obviously the oldest part of the church, and the chancel and nave have been later added, as the growth of the parish demanded more church room. Many distinct enlargements are recorded, and that of 1670 almost doubled its size and gave it the present square tower.At that date our riverside village was a fashionable country place. Mr. Pepys writes of taking boat up to Chelsea of a Sunday to see the pretty young ladies who flocked to the church and made very sweet singing. But presently the tide of fashion ebbed away from the Thames side, and building and population congregated further north: in 1824 St. Luke’s, Sydney Street, was consecrated as the Parish Church, and the mother by the river became the daughter of the new building.In 1910, after the latest and most sympathetic of restorations, the dedication to All Saints was revived; I always regret that the Saxon form, All Hallows’ found in some old documents, was not chosen, to denote that a church—if not this actual building—existed here frombeforeNorman times.Let us begin our survey at the Lawrence Chapel, on the north side. Here, tradition says, Henry VIII. was married to Jane Seymour, in haste and secrecy to secure the bride’s position, three days after the execution of Anne Boleyn. The marriage was openly repeated with great ceremony ten days later: Jane Seymour is said to have been a damsel who loved delicate eating, and to have been wooed by Henry with many presents of game and venison from the King’s Larder, a house for the preparation of royal dainties on the riverside now demolished.The altar, before which they were married, stood under the east window of the Lawrence Chapel, now occupied by the tomb of Sir John Lawrence; it is good to remember that of this rather questionable marriage was born Edward VI., who gave us our prayer book.Under the little window in the north wall (filled lately with quite unnecessary modern glass), is the seat assigned by tradition to Elizabeth, when, as a somewhat neglected Princess, she lived with her step-mother, “Katheryn the Queene,” at Chelsea Place.Some of the original oak pews remain in the Lawrence Chapel, and a panel with a mitre on it recalls the residence of the Bishops of Winchester in Chelsea; some queer little benches for two persons, very narrow and high-backed, tell of a time and a rule when lounging in church was unknown!The north wall is dated 1350, and the fact that its roofing differs entirely from that of the chancel and other chapels, supports the suggestion that it had been the Manor library.Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.LOMBARDS’ ROW.p.16]The Lawrence monuments are interesting. Thomas Lawrence, the banker and goldsmith of Lombards’ Row, appears with all his Elizabethan family about him. His epitaph is often quoted:Thus Thomas Lawrence spekes to Tymes ensuing:That Death is sure, and Tyme is past renuing!He was the father of Mrs. Sara Colvile, whose rising figure blocks a beautifully carved window—worth seeing from the vestry side—and of Sir John Lawrence, whose epitaph begins with the trenchant lines:When bad men dy, and turn to their last Sleepe,What Stir, the Poets and Ingravers keepe!The Italian triumphal arch, for which the chancel arch was cut, and the symmetry of the church for ever dislocated, is to the memory of one Richard Gervaise, 1563, son of a mercer and sheriff of London, who may have been a business partner or relative of the Lawrences; the brasses of Sir Henry and Lady Christina Waver, 1460, have been stolen from the pavement, where many other Lawrence names are recorded.The Lawrence Chapel subsequently became the property of the Rawlings family, whose crest appears on several of the pew doors, and in 1894 the Rev. R. H. Davies succeeded in securing it for the church.The squint, or hagioscope, shows a glimpse of the altar in the chancel, and tradition has it that lepers used to assemble at the little north door (now leading into the new vestry) or at the north windows to witness the elevation of the Host, without contaminating the congregation; for lepers, I hope we may read, sufferers from ague and marsh-fever, which was a prevailing scourge of the low lands about the river.By the by, it is outside the north wall that the plague victims were buried in a long grave, when the plague visited Chelsea in 1626, and Lady Danvers, mother of George Herbert, nursed her stricken neighbours so bravely. The Chelsea plague-fosse has never been disturbed. A provincial plague-pit known to me was opened in the course of new road-making a few years ago, and four labourers died of a strange, malignant fever. Whether this was the result of coincidence, or of superstitious fear,or of real infection, I cannot say, but we do well, I think, to leave our Chelsea plague-pit unmeddled with!The chancel of the Old Church was built in the thirteenth century, and the nave added much later: the magnificent roof of oak arched beams, like the ribs of a ship, was discovered under the plaster in 1910. The altar, a fine Jacobean table, and the enclosing rails are of Charles I.’s time, when Archbishop Laud decreed that rails should encircle the altar; the east window put in, in 1857, to lessen the glare of light at morning service is fairly harmless, and harmonises with the shadowy church better than more brilliant glass would do. The very beautiful cross and candlesticks were given in 1910, in memory of Charles Kelly, Esq.The aumbry, now used as a credence table, was discovered plastered over in 1855; it was originally intended for a safe, in which the church plate could be kept, and the bar and hinge settings can be traced.To the left of the altar is the Hungerford Memorial slab. Thomas Hungerford, a knight of Wiltshire, married a Chelsea heiress, Drusilla Maidenhead, daughter of Lord Sandys. Hungerford served under four sovereigns; he was present at the “wining of Bologne,” as he calls the Siege of Boulogne in Henry VIII.’s reign, and died “at the adge of seventy yeres.” He was obviously a prophet of reformed spelling!The Bray tomb, now crammed under the chancel wall to clear the approach to the altar, is the oldest of our monuments. Its brasses have been torn away and its carving obscured by plaster. The Brays were Lords of the Manor previous to the Lawrences, and probably the Lawrence Chapel was originally their property. This tomb commemorates four generations of Brays, the last being Sir John Bray, 1557, the order of whose funeral has been preserved at the College of Arms, and has been reproduced in modern pageantry. Lately the Bray family, residing in Surrey, have restored this ancestral tomb. Sir Reginald Bray, of this family, was the architect of Henry VII. Chapel at Westminster.A tiny door in the wall used to lead to the old vestry.Here Mr, Davies, for so many years incumbent of the Old Church, spent much of his time, which was always at the service of inquiring visitors. He had many excellent stories to tell of his adventures in the vestry. Once he was “held up” there for many hours by a bogus photographer who, pretending to take pictures of the church, plugged up the vestry door and broke open the alms boxes. The incumbent sat quietly reading and writing, secure in the knowledge that he had cleared the boxes that morning, until he was presently retrieved by his family, who supposed that he had forgotten the dinner-hour! Had the thief known where to look, the real parish funds were at the moment in the vestry itself.Another time Mr. Davies showed a pair of visitors round the church and was about to receive a small tip for his trouble, when he hastened to explain that he was the parson, not the caretaker, and was delighted to have been available as guide. A sovereign was substituted for the intended gratuity, which he gratefully accepted for the poor of his parish. Later, after the visitors had left, one of them came hurrying back and explained that they had inadvertently run short of money for a return journey. Might they borrow back the sovereign, which should be posted to Mr. Davies in the course of a few hours? Of course the money was relinquished—and never heard of again!Mr. Davies himself told me these anecdotes, as delightfully as he always told a story; they seem to have become part of the history of the church he so dearly loved. A third—the appearance of Sir Thomas More’s ghost—belongs to the next chapter, with other More gossip.NOTESCHAPTER IIIThe More Chapel—Holbein—Erasmus—Sir Thomas More’s arrest—Mistress More—The Duchess of Northumberland—The Gorges—The Stanley tomb—“The Bird and the Baby”—The Dacre helmet—Sir Thomas More’s ghost.THE More Chapel was built in 1528 (date on the east pillar) to accommodate the family and retainers of Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, living in great state at Beaufort House, but not too proud to act as “server” at the altar of his Parish Church. The two pillars evidently guarding the front seat of this family pew are worth careful inspection; the west pillar is said to have been carved by Holbein while on a visit to More’s house—a visit which lasted several years. The east pillar is less well executed and may be by another hand, but both bear the symbolic ornament, dear to the spirit of the time, introducing coats of arms, crest, punning references to family names and signs, which develop in hieroglyphics the career of the great Chancellor. More’s tomb, designed by himself during his imprisonment in the Tower, is in the south wall of the church, and here we find a curious surviving reference to his friendship with another celebrated visitor to Chelsea, Erasmus. In the Latin epitaph cut in slate, which Sir Thomas prepared for his tomb, a word has been omitted and a space left. The word is “Hereticks,” whom he declared he hated implacably, along with “thieves and murderers”; Erasmus found this too sweeping and begged him to cross out the word. He took his friend’s advice but forgot to insert a substitute word, and the spaceremains, a witness to the tolerance of Erasmus and the sweet reasonableness of the Chancellor.Sir Thomas’s favourite motto, “Serve God and be merrie,” is better known than his pompous Latin inscription, as it deserves to be.Tradition makes the More Chapel the scene of Sir Thomas’s farewell message to his wife. On the morning of his arrest, she was waiting for him after Mass in the family pew; he had been acting as “server” at the altar, and had been hurried from thence straight to the river and the Tower.A young groom, by the Chancellor’s orders, went to his wife with this message, which the varlet was bidden to repeat exactly in his master’s words:“Bid Mistress More wait no longer for Master More, for he hath been led away by the King’s command.” A smart box on the ear from the insulted lady rewarded the servant for his literal fulfilment of his lord’s mandate. “What do you mean, sirrah, to speak of Mistress and Master More when you name the Chancellor of England and his lady?” but when the boy persisted in his orders, she began to perceive her husband’s hidden design and realise that he had fallen from his high estate, and in this fashion would break it to her. She was his second wife, and neither beautiful nor very sweet-tempered, but Sir Thomas ever treated her with the most courteous consideration, joked at her shrewishness, and complimented her whenever he could. Still we cannot help suspecting that on this occasion he was a little relieved to send the message of his downfall by the young groom instead of having to deliver it in person.The next tomb of interest in the More Chapel is that of the Duchess of Northumberland, 1555, mother of thirteen children, of whom Robert Earl of Leicester, Guildford Dudley, husband of Lady Jane Grey, and Mary, mother of Sir Philip Sydney, were the most celebrated.This lovely monument has been barbarously treated: the spirals were broken off in 1832 to make room for seats and increase the letting value of the chapel, and its awkward position suggests that it has been pushed out ofits original setting. Several of the brasses have been wrenched away. Chaucer’s tomb in Westminster Abbey is almost a replica of what it must have been when whole, and is probably by the same designer.The Duke and Duchess of Northumberland succeeded Queen Katharine Parr as tenants of the Manor House, the Tudor palace in Cheyne Walk: the Duke and his son Guildford both died on Tower Hill, with the “nine days’ Queen,” and it is greatly to the credit of Queen Mary I. that she interested herself in the bereaved Duchess, and restored to her part of her confiscated possessions. In Elizabeth’s reign the family flourished again, and there is a minute description extant of the Duchess’s gorgeous funeral at the Old Church.But the fact that the More Chapel continued to be the family pew pertaining to Beaufort House suggests that the Northumberland tomb was originally in a far more conspicuous position, and was presently pushed aside to make way for territorial claims. Sir Arthur and Lady Gorges were at Beaufort House in 1620. He is Spenser’s “Alcyon,” and the poet’sDaphnaidawas an elegy on Lady Gorges’ death. The younger Arthur, grandson of this pair of Spenser’s friends, isHe who had all the Gorges’ soules in one.His epitaph is worth spelling out, though it is rather a back-breaking business, and it is noteworthy that his wife, who perhaps was much older than himself, and was certainly very much married, prepared the inscriptions, but omitted to leave orders for the insertion of her own death-date, which, after considerable preamble, is left out altogether.Under the east window lies the splendidly ornate monument of the Stanleys. Sir Robert, whose medallion portrait is supported by the figures of Justice and Fortitude, married a daughter of Sir Arthur Gorges. The children, Ferdinand and Henrietta, are dear little people in stiff Stuart dresses.Their epitaph beginning,The Eagle death, greedy of such sweete prey,With nimble eyes marked where these children lay—refers to the Stanley family legend of “The Bird and the Baby,” of which two children-ancestors were the heroes. An eagle hovers over the tomb.The helmet hanging incongruously in mid-air has the Dacre crest, and is not in its proper place here; a helmet exhibited in church often implies that the wearer fought in the Crusades, but this probably is part of the heraldic ornament of the great Dacre memorial in the nave.The inscription to Sir Robert Stanley is really beautiful in the stately wording and measured metre of the seventeenth century, and is worth quoting entire:To say a Stanley lies here, that aloneWere epitaph enough; noe brass, nor stone,No glorious Tomb, nor Monumental Hearse,Noe gilded trophy, nor Lamp-laboured VerseCan dignify this grave, nor sett it forth,Like the immortal fame of his owne Worth.So, Reader, fixe not here, but quit this RoomAnd fly to Abram’s bosom—there’s his tombe,There rests his Soule, and for his other partsThey are embalmed and shrined in good men’s hearts—A nobler Monument of Stone or LimeNoe Art could raise, for this shall outlast Tyme!“Lamp-laboured verse” is first-rate.We cannot leave the More Chapel without referring to the controversy, dear to the antiquarian papers, as to whether the Chancellor’s body were ever brought from Tower Hill after the fatal July 6, 1535, to be interred in the church he loved. All tradition and probability point to this belief; though his head, exposed on London Bridge, and rescued by his devoted daughter Margaret Roper, was consigned by her to the keeping of St. Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury.Now for another of Mr. Davies’ anecdotes of the Old Church.Some twenty years ago, a marvellous story ran round Chelsea that Sir Thomas More’s ghost had been seen to emerge from the south wall monument and, crossing the sanctuary, disappear into the opposite wall. The figure was unquestionably that of the Chancellor, for besides being quaintly dressed, it was without a head—which clinched the matter. Lady artists, painting in the body of the church, had seen the apparition steal across the chancel, in the gloaming, and spreading the news abroad, soon brought half London to inquire into the marvel.Unluckily Mr. Davies was on guard in his beloved church, and his explanation was crushingly disappointing. He stationed all would-be ghost seekers halfway down the middle aisle, and then produced the ghost—himself—passing from the tiny south door behind the tomb to the vestry opposite, a shawl drawn over his head and wrapped about his shoulders, giving the required appearance of headlessness.Both south door and vestry door within the chancel are now done away with, and even newspaper reporters have heard no more of the ghost.NOTESCHAPTER IVThe Dacre tomb and charities—Lady Jane Cheyne, who gave her name to Cheyne Walk—The churchwarden’s official seat—The pulpit where Wesley preached—Dr. Baldwin Hamey and his servant Fletcher—Church burials and the More descendants—The chained books—Public Bible-reading in the eighteenth century—The font and organ—The Queen’s Royal Volunteers—The Ashburnham bell—Books of authority on Chelsea history.THE most beautiful monument in the church is the great Dacre tomb. Lady Dacre was a Sackville and an heiress, and succeeded to the possession of Sir Thomas More’s Beaufort House. She married Lord Dacre of the South—a magnificent Elizabethan title—and their name is still venerated year by year in Chelsea and Westminster for the gifts and charities to which they devoted their fortune. They left no family—the poor stiff little daughter in the very uncomfortably designed cradle beside them having been their only child—and their estates in Chelsea, Kensington, and Brompton passed to Lord Burleigh, with numberless bequests attached for local objects. Emanuel Hospital, Westminster, is their foundation, and Chelsea has the right to two annual presentations conditionally on the tomb being kept clean and in repair. One is tempted to ask whether the conditions are being fulfilled, for the colouring of the wonderful canopy could surely be very much improved by a little knowledgeable wiping and polishing, and the Elizabethan pair themselves—he in late heavy armour, she in “French hood,” Mary, Queen of Scots’ introduction, and ruff—might be reverently dusted with advantage to their beautiful Renaissance detail. The tomb originally stood in the More Chapel, which LadyDacre inherited with Beaufort House, and was moved to its present position in 1667. It is unfortunately placed very much askew to the window and the water-gate which it completely blocks—and this is the more to be regretted because the south side is deficient in exits, and the restoration of the water-gate, as seen in an old print, would add to the beauty and convenience of the church.In the north wall, and almost opposite the Dacre tomb (if anything in the Old Church can be accounted to pair with anything else!), reclines Lady Jane Cheyne, a very heroically proportioned lady, daughter of the first Duke of Newcastle, and, like her father, an ardent royalist. As quite a girl she held Welbeck House, with a slender garrison, for King Charles, and all her life she devoted her fortune to the maintenance of the royal cause and support of her father in exile. She married Lord Cheyne, of a Buckinghamshire family, and bought the Manor House and Palace which had been the scene of so much Tudor history-making, where she lived to see the Restoration of King Charles II. and to benefit Chelsea by her good deeds for fourteen years. Cheyne Walk is named after her, to commemorate her benevolence and exemplary life at the great house which had sheltered many less admirable characters; she was a special patroness of the church, where she directed the renovations of 1667, and possibly it is to her taste that we owe the unfortunate prominence of two magnificent monuments which would have gained so much by being more discreetly located. Lady Jane’s figure and surroundings are scarcely in proportion, but she is an aristocrat to her finger tips—those wonderful finger tips, which seem to have been assured to the royalists of Vandyke’s day!—and one can imagine her holding a fortress, or later, writing a manual of elegant devotions, with equal distinction.The little three-cornered pew, to the right of Lady Jane’s tomb, is the dignified sitting intended for the churchwarden; the mitre which is still found on a panel here and there tells of the Bishop of Winchester’s residence in Chelsea during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Standing in the middle aisle, the beauty of the pulpitcarving must strike every lover of oak, and it is inspiring to think that a broad-minded Chelsea rector, the Hon. and Rev. W. B. Cadogan, invited John Wesley and Whitfield to occupy it. The canopy of the pulpit has been lost, but from wood once part of the “three-decker” structure, the chairs have been fashioned which stand by the altar; the font-cover of oak was found in 1910 in a neglected corner of the tower, and with it two handsome Georgian pewter alms dishes dated 1754; these have been restored to use for Sunday collections. Among the hatchments, many of which remain unidentified, that of Rector Cadogan has been recognised with its motto “Christ, the Hope of Glory”; he died in 1797.On the pillar north of the pulpit hangs the tablet of the clever and eccentric Dr. Baldwin Hamey, who retired from medical practice in 1665 and came to live at Chelsea. He gave liberally to the church restoration fund—perhaps influenced by Lady Jane Cheyne’s enthusiasm—but as a scientist he was intolerant of dogma, and used to carry a leather-bound Virgil to church with him, which passed for a Testament, and saved him from the tedium of listening to doctrine to which he did not conform. He was buried, uncoffined and merely wrapped in a sheet, in the chancel, and his epitaph is a hopeless one, “When the breath goeth out of a Man, he returneth to his Earth,” but later, in 1880, the Royal College of Physicians restored his tablet “in grateful remembrance of their benefactor,” and in spite of the declared pessimism of his creed, his good work is not “interred with his bones,” but lives in the kindly worded remembrance of his scientific brotherhood.On the opposite pillar (south side) a tiny figure of St. Luke, “the doctor’s saint,” stands on a bracket; it formerly decorated the canopy of the pulpit. It was contributed by John Fletcher—Dr. Hamey’s servant and assistant—to the ornamentation of the church at its restoration in 1667, when the “beloved physician” was still patron of the parish. No one has ever satisfactorily explained why, for 300 years, the old dedication to All Saints was in abeyance, and St. Luke was substituted; perhaps at the Reformation St. Luke, the manof science, was considered a more suitable patron for the Church of the New Learning.The stones and inscriptions on the floor of the church show that many Chelsea people lie beneath. Sometimes the scrutiny of names leads to considerable enlightenment of family and local history, but for Chelsea’s visitors this study has no special attraction, so we will not burden them with pavement inscriptions. From a corner between the More Chapel and the nave, nine leaden coffins were removed about forty years ago, when the heating of the church necessitated new stove-pipes. These coffins were supposed to belong to the More family, and may have enclosed the bodies of Will and Margaret Roper, of “Mistress More,” the Chancellor’s second wife, and of Bishop Fisher, but their identification was uncertain. They were removed to the Parish Church in Sydney Street and privately re-interred.The chained books under the south window are a more cheerful reminder of Tudor times, and of Henry VIII.’s decree of a Parish Church Bible, though these are not the original sixteenth-century volumes, but a later set presented by Sir Hans Sloane. They consist of:A “Vinegar” Bible (Baskett’s edition, dated 1717).The Book of Common Prayer, 1723.The Book of Homilies (2 volumes) formerly belonging to Trelawny, the great Bishop of Winchester, 1683.Two volumes (Nos. I. and III.) of Foxe’sBook of Martyrs. A very fine edition dated 1684.Tradition connects these two volumes of Foxe with Charles II., who died in the year 1685. It is possible, though no history of the books records the fact as certain, that they were the King’s property, given or lent to his physician; we love royal tradition in Chelsea, and there is nothing against our adopting this one.The volumes themselves are splendidly bound, printed, and illustrated, but during a careless or too confiding period, when the oak book-case was open to all comers, several illustrations and some of the brass clasps and hinges were carried off as souvenirs, and the case is now strictly locked. It, and the chains, are comparatively modern.I knew an old Chelsea lady who told me that her grandmother was in the habit of repairing to the church every Tuesday and reading aloud from the Bible to as many hearers as cared to listen for an hour, and that the school children regularly attended the reading. While this links us curiously with a past when the Bible was still a rarity, not to be found in everybody’s hands, it makes a suggestion of supplementary education from which our own century might profitably learn a lesson.The font dates from about 1673; the gilding on the cover is the original work. The ship’s bucket in oak standing beside it was presented by members of the choir in 1910. The organ, a very sweet-toned instrument, has been recently beautifully repaired and enlarged by the Rev. Malcolm and Mrs. Farmer.The Colours of the Chelsea Volunteers are the only two flags remaining of a considerable number which adorned the church in 1814. The King’s Colour is said to have been worked by Queen Charlotte and her daughters, and an old print depicts her presenting it to the regiment of the “Queen’s Royal Volunteers”; the picture is chiefly remarkable for the immense amount of cumbrous clothing worn by the Volunteers, and the very scanty draperies of Queen Charlotte and her ladies. The corps was raised in 1804, when Bonaparte threatened invasion, and the Regimental Colour bears a medallion portrait of St. Luke, and the inscription, “St. Luke, Chelsea.” A board in the porch chronicles this presentation, but beyond a loyal willingness to serve, I do not know that the Chelsea Volunteers were ever called upon to show further fight. Opposite this board the Ashburnham Bell reposes, a witness to the legend of 1679, when the Hon. William Ashburnham, swamped in the mud of Chelsea Reach, regained his bearings by hearing the church clock strike nine, and made for the shore by the sound, instead of plunging further into the tideway.In gratitude, he presented this bell to be rung at nine every night from Michaelmas to Lady Day, and left a sum of money to endow it The bell-ringing ceased in 1822, when the peal of the old church was broken up to providenew bells for St. Luke’s in Sydney Street, but in memory of the Ashburnham deliverance and bequest the clock is illuminated every evening at sunset, and by oil lantern, by candle, by gas, and now by electricity, tells the story of the rescue to all who pass by.I have, for want of space, omitted many smaller tablets and inscriptions, which, curious enough in their way, and important in the mosaic of our parish history, are yet little interesting to the passing visitor, unless he is bent on following up some special clue of family or local weight. Should such be his study, I would counsel him to refer to Mr. Reginald’s Blunt’sHistorical Handbook, to Mr. Randall Davies’ splendidHistory of the Old Church, or to the Rev. S. P. T. Prideaux’sShort Account of Chelsea Old Church, to all of which I am infinitely beholden.NOTESCHAPTER VSir 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 yearBattered 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 itsorigin 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 andeighteenth 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 theéliteof 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 lovelyage-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, thePunchcartoonist, 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

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.

A ROAD-BOOK TO OLD CHELSEATHE ROADS THAT LEAD TO CHELSEA.Frontispiece.A ROAD-BOOK TOOLD CHELSEABYG. B. STUART“By what means the time is so well-abbreviated I know not,except weeks be shorter in Chelsey, than in other places!”KATHERYN THE QUEENE.Extract from a letter of Queen Katharine Parr to theLord High Admiral Seymour, written from Chelsea, 1547WITH SKETCH MAP AND FIVE ILLUSTRATIONSLONDONHUGH REES, LTD.5 REGENT STREET, PALL MALL, S.W.1914

A ROAD-BOOK TO OLD CHELSEA

THE ROADS THAT LEAD TO CHELSEA.Frontispiece.

THE ROADS THAT LEAD TO CHELSEA.

Frontispiece.

G. B. STUART

“By what means the time is so well-abbreviated I know not,except weeks be shorter in Chelsey, than in other places!”

KATHERYN THE QUEENE.

Extract from a letter of Queen Katharine Parr to theLord High Admiral Seymour, written from Chelsea, 1547

WITH SKETCH MAP AND FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON

HUGH REES, LTD.

5 REGENT STREET, PALL MALL, S.W.

1914

PREFACEOF the making of books about Chelsea, may there never be an end, so rich and unexhausted is our history, so inspiring to those who labour in its service! Every year, as fresh records become accessible, Chelsea is presented to us from some different standpoint, historical, architectural, or frankly human, and there is ever a welcome and a place for each volume as it appears.They are books full of research and of suggestion, illustrated by portraits and maps from rare sources, and clinching hitherto unsolved problems. They quickly become our library friends and companions, because, though some of their matter may be familiar, each has, for its own individual charm, that personal outlook of its author which expresses, with wider and more resourceful knowledge than ours, the love we all bear to our home by the river.It is because in love of our subject we and the greater writers are equal, that I dare to put forth a new Guide to Chelsea; a little foot-page, a link-boy, a caddy if you will, just to show the way to strangers, to disembarrass them of unnecessary impedimenta, to point out special places of interest which may be visited in a summer afternoon, within that charmed circle of our parish, where every inch is enchanted ground.G. B. S.

OF the making of books about Chelsea, may there never be an end, so rich and unexhausted is our history, so inspiring to those who labour in its service! Every year, as fresh records become accessible, Chelsea is presented to us from some different standpoint, historical, architectural, or frankly human, and there is ever a welcome and a place for each volume as it appears.

They are books full of research and of suggestion, illustrated by portraits and maps from rare sources, and clinching hitherto unsolved problems. They quickly become our library friends and companions, because, though some of their matter may be familiar, each has, for its own individual charm, that personal outlook of its author which expresses, with wider and more resourceful knowledge than ours, the love we all bear to our home by the river.

It is because in love of our subject we and the greater writers are equal, that I dare to put forth a new Guide to Chelsea; a little foot-page, a link-boy, a caddy if you will, just to show the way to strangers, to disembarrass them of unnecessary impedimenta, to point out special places of interest which may be visited in a summer afternoon, within that charmed circle of our parish, where every inch is enchanted ground.

G. B. S.

CONTENTSCHAPTERPAGEI.THE ROAD TO THE CHURCH9II.THE OLD CHURCH: NORTH SIDE AND CHANCEL15III.THE OLD CHURCH: SOUTH SIDE AND THE MORE CHAPEL23IV.THE OLD CHURCH: THE NAVE AND ITS MONUMENTS31V.CHURCH STREET TO QUEEN’S ELM39VI.CHEYNE WALK FROM EAST TO WEST47VII.SIDE STREETS AND BACK GARDENS57VIII.THE ROAD TO THE ROYAL HOSPITAL65L’ENVOI73

A ROAD-BOOK TO OLD CHELSEACHAPTER IOmnibuses for Chelsea—The Mystery House—Dr. Phéné’s garden—Cheyne House and Tudor Lane—Leigh Hunt’s home—Cheyne Row and Carlyle—The Tollsey Cottage and James II.—The Lawrences and Lombards’ Row—The Fieldings and Justice Walk.PRESUMING, O stranger, that you will reach Chelsea by motor-bus—either from Kensington by No. 49, from Piccadilly by No. 19, or from the Strand by No. 11—I will ask you to alight at Chelsea Town Hall and turn with me down Oakley Street. As we face the river, there is always fresh air to meet us, and in summer time, above the road smell of asphalt and petrol, there floats a soft, keen savour of growing things and green bushes, hidden away behind walls; if an old door opens, we catch a glimpse of gardens and sometimes of a “mulberry-bush,” grown to forest size, which, planted by the men who fled from the terror of St. Bartholomew, still fruits and flourishes to repay Chelsea hospitality.On the right-hand side, where we turn into Upper Cheyne Row, stands the much-talked-about “Mystery House” of the late eccentric Dr. Phéné. It has never been much of a mystery to its neighbours. Dr. Phéné built it as a storehouse for his collections—some valuable, others worthless—and plastered it with the discarded ornamentsof the old Horticultural Gardens. The old gentleman was vastly proud of his design, and loved to plant himself at the street corner and encourage the remarks of passers-by: that the work was chaotic, and dropping to pieces before it was finished, troubled him not at all, and Chelsea forgave him the architectural monstrosity for the sake of the garden, which his leisurely building methods preserved. The wall which encloses it is one of Dr. Phéné’s happiest “finds,” and is said to be a part of old St. Paul’s—it certainly bears the carven arms of several London boroughs, and is not incongruous to its surroundings; behind it blackbirds, thrushes, and wood-pigeons fancy themselves in the country, and birds and men alike rejoice that the complications of the Phéné property still preserve their shade and shelter untouched.Cheyne House, which also belonged to Dr. Phéné, was less highly esteemed by him than his Renaissance effort, and has been allowed to drop into grievous ruin: it is the house “of ancient gravity and beauty” of which Mr. E. V. Lucas writes so affectionately in hisWanderer in London. It sits back, with its eyes closed, wrapped in its ancient vine, and no one will ever know its three-hundred-year-old secrets. For in the old maps it shows bravely in the centre of its park, and a little narrow walk, called Tudor Lane, led from it to the river, where possibly it had its own landing-stage; a beautiful state reception room at the back had seven windows giving on the terrace. It is sad and strange that so little is known of its inhabitants in the past.No. 4 Upper Cheyne Row is a modern interpolation, filling up the Tudor Lane aperture; but No. 6 is another really old house, dating by its leases from 1665, and having a splendid mulberry tree, which in a document of 1702 is mentioned as “unalienable from the property.”No. 10 (at that time No. 4) was Leigh Hunt’s home for seven years from 1833 to 1840, where, as Carlyle wrote, “the noble Hunt will receive you into his Tinkerdom, in the spirit of a King.” He was often in absolute want during this period, yet his belief in the human and the divine was never shaken by poverty, illness, or distress of mind, and the beautiful quality of his work was maintained in spite of perpetual difficulties.Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston.THOMAS CARLYLE.p.10]The date 1708 on the side wall above Cheyne Cottage fixes the building of Cheyne Row and the west end of Upper Cheyne Row; a beautiful old house which was cleared away in 1894 to make room for the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Redeemer was called Orange House, in political compliment, and its next-door neighbour, York House, was named after James II. These two were probably older than the others, and Lord Cheyne, who formed the Row, built his newer houses into line with those already existing. Some of the iron work of the balconies, etc., and the porticoes, are worth noting.Carlyle’s House (now No. 24) can be visited every week-day, between the hours of 10 a.m. and sunset—admission 1s., Saturdays 6d.—and it speaks for itself. I will only add a reference to Mrs. N., the old servant who spent years in Carlyle’s service, and finished her honoured days in ours—her descriptions of “the Master” writing hisFrederick the Greatwere about the most intimate revelations that have yet been made of the Carlyleménage!The Master would be so immersed in his subject—maps and books being spread all over the floor of his room “in his wrestle with Frederick”—that his lunch would remain unheeded until, stretching up a vague hand, he plunged it into the dish of hashed mutton or rice pudding, as the case might be—regardless of plate, spoon, or decorum. “It was no cook’s credit to cook for him,” was Mrs. N.’s verdict, “a cook that respected herself simply couldn’t do it,” and though she adored Mrs. Carlyle, she left her service to restore her own self-respect.Cheyne Cottage was once the Toll Gate for entering Chelsea Parish at the south-west angle—there was another Toll Gate, I think, at the Fulham end of Church Street, but it was probably to this one on the river bank that James Duke of York, afterwards James II., came one winter night a few minutes later than the recognised closing time, eight o’clock. James was unpopular, and the old woman who kept the gate a staunch Protestant, so that to the outriders’ challenge, “Open to the Duke of York!” sheshrilled back defiance from her bedroom window, “Be ye Duke or devil, ye don’t enter by this gate after eight of the clock!” and so left James and his coach to lumber on to Whitehall through the bankside mud, as best he might.When I first knew Chelsea, the old board with the toll prices and distances under the Royal arms of Charles II. was preserved at the cottage, but this has, I believe, been surrendered to the London Museum.Lawrence Street, between Cheyne Row and the Old Church, boasts the sponsorship of the Lawrence family, goldsmiths and bankers, whose mansion adjoined the church, and whose business premises leave their name to the group of very old houses immediately west of Church Street. These houses, though actually standing in Cheyne Walk, are called Lombards’ Row in commemoration of the Lawrences’ banking business.Fielding, the novelist, and his brother the Justice lived in the big eighteenth-century house facing Justice Walk, and Tobias Smollett lived close by, in a house now pulled down. In the big garden at the back, impecunious “Sunday men,” whose debts kept them at home on other days, were entertained every week at a “rare good Sunday dinner, all being welcome whatever the state of their coats.”And the Chelsea China Factory existed also at the upper end of Lawrence Street for nearly forty years. Dr. Johnson used to experiment there, having an ambition to excel in a porcelain paste of his own invention, but his composition would not stand the baking process—perhaps he had too weighty a hand in the mixing!—and he gave up the work in disgust. Chelsea china commands enormous prices, as its supply was so limited.So by Justice Walk and a turn to the left down Church Street, we reach the Old Church, the heart of Old Chelsea; a still living, warmly beating heart, after eight centuries.NOTES

A ROAD-BOOK TO OLD CHELSEA

Omnibuses for Chelsea—The Mystery House—Dr. Phéné’s garden—Cheyne House and Tudor Lane—Leigh Hunt’s home—Cheyne Row and Carlyle—The Tollsey Cottage and James II.—The Lawrences and Lombards’ Row—The Fieldings and Justice Walk.

PRESUMING, O stranger, that you will reach Chelsea by motor-bus—either from Kensington by No. 49, from Piccadilly by No. 19, or from the Strand by No. 11—I will ask you to alight at Chelsea Town Hall and turn with me down Oakley Street. As we face the river, there is always fresh air to meet us, and in summer time, above the road smell of asphalt and petrol, there floats a soft, keen savour of growing things and green bushes, hidden away behind walls; if an old door opens, we catch a glimpse of gardens and sometimes of a “mulberry-bush,” grown to forest size, which, planted by the men who fled from the terror of St. Bartholomew, still fruits and flourishes to repay Chelsea hospitality.

On the right-hand side, where we turn into Upper Cheyne Row, stands the much-talked-about “Mystery House” of the late eccentric Dr. Phéné. It has never been much of a mystery to its neighbours. Dr. Phéné built it as a storehouse for his collections—some valuable, others worthless—and plastered it with the discarded ornamentsof the old Horticultural Gardens. The old gentleman was vastly proud of his design, and loved to plant himself at the street corner and encourage the remarks of passers-by: that the work was chaotic, and dropping to pieces before it was finished, troubled him not at all, and Chelsea forgave him the architectural monstrosity for the sake of the garden, which his leisurely building methods preserved. The wall which encloses it is one of Dr. Phéné’s happiest “finds,” and is said to be a part of old St. Paul’s—it certainly bears the carven arms of several London boroughs, and is not incongruous to its surroundings; behind it blackbirds, thrushes, and wood-pigeons fancy themselves in the country, and birds and men alike rejoice that the complications of the Phéné property still preserve their shade and shelter untouched.

Cheyne House, which also belonged to Dr. Phéné, was less highly esteemed by him than his Renaissance effort, and has been allowed to drop into grievous ruin: it is the house “of ancient gravity and beauty” of which Mr. E. V. Lucas writes so affectionately in hisWanderer in London. It sits back, with its eyes closed, wrapped in its ancient vine, and no one will ever know its three-hundred-year-old secrets. For in the old maps it shows bravely in the centre of its park, and a little narrow walk, called Tudor Lane, led from it to the river, where possibly it had its own landing-stage; a beautiful state reception room at the back had seven windows giving on the terrace. It is sad and strange that so little is known of its inhabitants in the past.

No. 4 Upper Cheyne Row is a modern interpolation, filling up the Tudor Lane aperture; but No. 6 is another really old house, dating by its leases from 1665, and having a splendid mulberry tree, which in a document of 1702 is mentioned as “unalienable from the property.”

No. 10 (at that time No. 4) was Leigh Hunt’s home for seven years from 1833 to 1840, where, as Carlyle wrote, “the noble Hunt will receive you into his Tinkerdom, in the spirit of a King.” He was often in absolute want during this period, yet his belief in the human and the divine was never shaken by poverty, illness, or distress of mind, and the beautiful quality of his work was maintained in spite of perpetual difficulties.

Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston.THOMAS CARLYLE.p.10]

Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

p.10]

The date 1708 on the side wall above Cheyne Cottage fixes the building of Cheyne Row and the west end of Upper Cheyne Row; a beautiful old house which was cleared away in 1894 to make room for the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Redeemer was called Orange House, in political compliment, and its next-door neighbour, York House, was named after James II. These two were probably older than the others, and Lord Cheyne, who formed the Row, built his newer houses into line with those already existing. Some of the iron work of the balconies, etc., and the porticoes, are worth noting.

Carlyle’s House (now No. 24) can be visited every week-day, between the hours of 10 a.m. and sunset—admission 1s., Saturdays 6d.—and it speaks for itself. I will only add a reference to Mrs. N., the old servant who spent years in Carlyle’s service, and finished her honoured days in ours—her descriptions of “the Master” writing hisFrederick the Greatwere about the most intimate revelations that have yet been made of the Carlyleménage!

The Master would be so immersed in his subject—maps and books being spread all over the floor of his room “in his wrestle with Frederick”—that his lunch would remain unheeded until, stretching up a vague hand, he plunged it into the dish of hashed mutton or rice pudding, as the case might be—regardless of plate, spoon, or decorum. “It was no cook’s credit to cook for him,” was Mrs. N.’s verdict, “a cook that respected herself simply couldn’t do it,” and though she adored Mrs. Carlyle, she left her service to restore her own self-respect.

Cheyne Cottage was once the Toll Gate for entering Chelsea Parish at the south-west angle—there was another Toll Gate, I think, at the Fulham end of Church Street, but it was probably to this one on the river bank that James Duke of York, afterwards James II., came one winter night a few minutes later than the recognised closing time, eight o’clock. James was unpopular, and the old woman who kept the gate a staunch Protestant, so that to the outriders’ challenge, “Open to the Duke of York!” sheshrilled back defiance from her bedroom window, “Be ye Duke or devil, ye don’t enter by this gate after eight of the clock!” and so left James and his coach to lumber on to Whitehall through the bankside mud, as best he might.

When I first knew Chelsea, the old board with the toll prices and distances under the Royal arms of Charles II. was preserved at the cottage, but this has, I believe, been surrendered to the London Museum.

Lawrence Street, between Cheyne Row and the Old Church, boasts the sponsorship of the Lawrence family, goldsmiths and bankers, whose mansion adjoined the church, and whose business premises leave their name to the group of very old houses immediately west of Church Street. These houses, though actually standing in Cheyne Walk, are called Lombards’ Row in commemoration of the Lawrences’ banking business.

Fielding, the novelist, and his brother the Justice lived in the big eighteenth-century house facing Justice Walk, and Tobias Smollett lived close by, in a house now pulled down. In the big garden at the back, impecunious “Sunday men,” whose debts kept them at home on other days, were entertained every week at a “rare good Sunday dinner, all being welcome whatever the state of their coats.”

And the Chelsea China Factory existed also at the upper end of Lawrence Street for nearly forty years. Dr. Johnson used to experiment there, having an ambition to excel in a porcelain paste of his own invention, but his composition would not stand the baking process—perhaps he had too weighty a hand in the mixing!—and he gave up the work in disgust. Chelsea china commands enormous prices, as its supply was so limited.

So by Justice Walk and a turn to the left down Church Street, we reach the Old Church, the heart of Old Chelsea; a still living, warmly beating heart, after eight centuries.

NOTES

CHAPTER IIThe Old Church—Its origin—The new St. Luke’s—Old dedication revived—Henry VIII.’s Marriage to Jane Seymour in the Lawrence Chapel—Princess Elizabeth—The squint and lepers—The plague at Chelsea—The Hungerford memorial—The Bray tomb—Anecdotes of the Rev. R. H. Davies’ incumbency.THE Old Church is first mentioned as the Parish Church of Chelsea in 1290, when the Pope granted “relaxation” to penitents visiting it on All Saints’ Day. It was then, as now, dedicated to All Saints, though for 300 years in between it has been known as St. Luke’s (like the modern Parish Church in Sydney Street). The late Rev. R. H. Davies, for nearly sixty years known and loved at the Old Church, has suggested that the nucleus of the building may have been the Lawrence Chapel, belonging as library and chapel to the Manor House; it is obviously the oldest part of the church, and the chancel and nave have been later added, as the growth of the parish demanded more church room. Many distinct enlargements are recorded, and that of 1670 almost doubled its size and gave it the present square tower.At that date our riverside village was a fashionable country place. Mr. Pepys writes of taking boat up to Chelsea of a Sunday to see the pretty young ladies who flocked to the church and made very sweet singing. But presently the tide of fashion ebbed away from the Thames side, and building and population congregated further north: in 1824 St. Luke’s, Sydney Street, was consecrated as the Parish Church, and the mother by the river became the daughter of the new building.In 1910, after the latest and most sympathetic of restorations, the dedication to All Saints was revived; I always regret that the Saxon form, All Hallows’ found in some old documents, was not chosen, to denote that a church—if not this actual building—existed here frombeforeNorman times.Let us begin our survey at the Lawrence Chapel, on the north side. Here, tradition says, Henry VIII. was married to Jane Seymour, in haste and secrecy to secure the bride’s position, three days after the execution of Anne Boleyn. The marriage was openly repeated with great ceremony ten days later: Jane Seymour is said to have been a damsel who loved delicate eating, and to have been wooed by Henry with many presents of game and venison from the King’s Larder, a house for the preparation of royal dainties on the riverside now demolished.The altar, before which they were married, stood under the east window of the Lawrence Chapel, now occupied by the tomb of Sir John Lawrence; it is good to remember that of this rather questionable marriage was born Edward VI., who gave us our prayer book.Under the little window in the north wall (filled lately with quite unnecessary modern glass), is the seat assigned by tradition to Elizabeth, when, as a somewhat neglected Princess, she lived with her step-mother, “Katheryn the Queene,” at Chelsea Place.Some of the original oak pews remain in the Lawrence Chapel, and a panel with a mitre on it recalls the residence of the Bishops of Winchester in Chelsea; some queer little benches for two persons, very narrow and high-backed, tell of a time and a rule when lounging in church was unknown!The north wall is dated 1350, and the fact that its roofing differs entirely from that of the chancel and other chapels, supports the suggestion that it had been the Manor library.Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.LOMBARDS’ ROW.p.16]The Lawrence monuments are interesting. Thomas Lawrence, the banker and goldsmith of Lombards’ Row, appears with all his Elizabethan family about him. His epitaph is often quoted:Thus Thomas Lawrence spekes to Tymes ensuing:That Death is sure, and Tyme is past renuing!He was the father of Mrs. Sara Colvile, whose rising figure blocks a beautifully carved window—worth seeing from the vestry side—and of Sir John Lawrence, whose epitaph begins with the trenchant lines:When bad men dy, and turn to their last Sleepe,What Stir, the Poets and Ingravers keepe!The Italian triumphal arch, for which the chancel arch was cut, and the symmetry of the church for ever dislocated, is to the memory of one Richard Gervaise, 1563, son of a mercer and sheriff of London, who may have been a business partner or relative of the Lawrences; the brasses of Sir Henry and Lady Christina Waver, 1460, have been stolen from the pavement, where many other Lawrence names are recorded.The Lawrence Chapel subsequently became the property of the Rawlings family, whose crest appears on several of the pew doors, and in 1894 the Rev. R. H. Davies succeeded in securing it for the church.The squint, or hagioscope, shows a glimpse of the altar in the chancel, and tradition has it that lepers used to assemble at the little north door (now leading into the new vestry) or at the north windows to witness the elevation of the Host, without contaminating the congregation; for lepers, I hope we may read, sufferers from ague and marsh-fever, which was a prevailing scourge of the low lands about the river.By the by, it is outside the north wall that the plague victims were buried in a long grave, when the plague visited Chelsea in 1626, and Lady Danvers, mother of George Herbert, nursed her stricken neighbours so bravely. The Chelsea plague-fosse has never been disturbed. A provincial plague-pit known to me was opened in the course of new road-making a few years ago, and four labourers died of a strange, malignant fever. Whether this was the result of coincidence, or of superstitious fear,or of real infection, I cannot say, but we do well, I think, to leave our Chelsea plague-pit unmeddled with!The chancel of the Old Church was built in the thirteenth century, and the nave added much later: the magnificent roof of oak arched beams, like the ribs of a ship, was discovered under the plaster in 1910. The altar, a fine Jacobean table, and the enclosing rails are of Charles I.’s time, when Archbishop Laud decreed that rails should encircle the altar; the east window put in, in 1857, to lessen the glare of light at morning service is fairly harmless, and harmonises with the shadowy church better than more brilliant glass would do. The very beautiful cross and candlesticks were given in 1910, in memory of Charles Kelly, Esq.The aumbry, now used as a credence table, was discovered plastered over in 1855; it was originally intended for a safe, in which the church plate could be kept, and the bar and hinge settings can be traced.To the left of the altar is the Hungerford Memorial slab. Thomas Hungerford, a knight of Wiltshire, married a Chelsea heiress, Drusilla Maidenhead, daughter of Lord Sandys. Hungerford served under four sovereigns; he was present at the “wining of Bologne,” as he calls the Siege of Boulogne in Henry VIII.’s reign, and died “at the adge of seventy yeres.” He was obviously a prophet of reformed spelling!The Bray tomb, now crammed under the chancel wall to clear the approach to the altar, is the oldest of our monuments. Its brasses have been torn away and its carving obscured by plaster. The Brays were Lords of the Manor previous to the Lawrences, and probably the Lawrence Chapel was originally their property. This tomb commemorates four generations of Brays, the last being Sir John Bray, 1557, the order of whose funeral has been preserved at the College of Arms, and has been reproduced in modern pageantry. Lately the Bray family, residing in Surrey, have restored this ancestral tomb. Sir Reginald Bray, of this family, was the architect of Henry VII. Chapel at Westminster.A tiny door in the wall used to lead to the old vestry.Here Mr, Davies, for so many years incumbent of the Old Church, spent much of his time, which was always at the service of inquiring visitors. He had many excellent stories to tell of his adventures in the vestry. Once he was “held up” there for many hours by a bogus photographer who, pretending to take pictures of the church, plugged up the vestry door and broke open the alms boxes. The incumbent sat quietly reading and writing, secure in the knowledge that he had cleared the boxes that morning, until he was presently retrieved by his family, who supposed that he had forgotten the dinner-hour! Had the thief known where to look, the real parish funds were at the moment in the vestry itself.Another time Mr. Davies showed a pair of visitors round the church and was about to receive a small tip for his trouble, when he hastened to explain that he was the parson, not the caretaker, and was delighted to have been available as guide. A sovereign was substituted for the intended gratuity, which he gratefully accepted for the poor of his parish. Later, after the visitors had left, one of them came hurrying back and explained that they had inadvertently run short of money for a return journey. Might they borrow back the sovereign, which should be posted to Mr. Davies in the course of a few hours? Of course the money was relinquished—and never heard of again!Mr. Davies himself told me these anecdotes, as delightfully as he always told a story; they seem to have become part of the history of the church he so dearly loved. A third—the appearance of Sir Thomas More’s ghost—belongs to the next chapter, with other More gossip.NOTES

The Old Church—Its origin—The new St. Luke’s—Old dedication revived—Henry VIII.’s Marriage to Jane Seymour in the Lawrence Chapel—Princess Elizabeth—The squint and lepers—The plague at Chelsea—The Hungerford memorial—The Bray tomb—Anecdotes of the Rev. R. H. Davies’ incumbency.

THE Old Church is first mentioned as the Parish Church of Chelsea in 1290, when the Pope granted “relaxation” to penitents visiting it on All Saints’ Day. It was then, as now, dedicated to All Saints, though for 300 years in between it has been known as St. Luke’s (like the modern Parish Church in Sydney Street). The late Rev. R. H. Davies, for nearly sixty years known and loved at the Old Church, has suggested that the nucleus of the building may have been the Lawrence Chapel, belonging as library and chapel to the Manor House; it is obviously the oldest part of the church, and the chancel and nave have been later added, as the growth of the parish demanded more church room. Many distinct enlargements are recorded, and that of 1670 almost doubled its size and gave it the present square tower.

At that date our riverside village was a fashionable country place. Mr. Pepys writes of taking boat up to Chelsea of a Sunday to see the pretty young ladies who flocked to the church and made very sweet singing. But presently the tide of fashion ebbed away from the Thames side, and building and population congregated further north: in 1824 St. Luke’s, Sydney Street, was consecrated as the Parish Church, and the mother by the river became the daughter of the new building.

In 1910, after the latest and most sympathetic of restorations, the dedication to All Saints was revived; I always regret that the Saxon form, All Hallows’ found in some old documents, was not chosen, to denote that a church—if not this actual building—existed here frombeforeNorman times.

Let us begin our survey at the Lawrence Chapel, on the north side. Here, tradition says, Henry VIII. was married to Jane Seymour, in haste and secrecy to secure the bride’s position, three days after the execution of Anne Boleyn. The marriage was openly repeated with great ceremony ten days later: Jane Seymour is said to have been a damsel who loved delicate eating, and to have been wooed by Henry with many presents of game and venison from the King’s Larder, a house for the preparation of royal dainties on the riverside now demolished.

The altar, before which they were married, stood under the east window of the Lawrence Chapel, now occupied by the tomb of Sir John Lawrence; it is good to remember that of this rather questionable marriage was born Edward VI., who gave us our prayer book.

Under the little window in the north wall (filled lately with quite unnecessary modern glass), is the seat assigned by tradition to Elizabeth, when, as a somewhat neglected Princess, she lived with her step-mother, “Katheryn the Queene,” at Chelsea Place.

Some of the original oak pews remain in the Lawrence Chapel, and a panel with a mitre on it recalls the residence of the Bishops of Winchester in Chelsea; some queer little benches for two persons, very narrow and high-backed, tell of a time and a rule when lounging in church was unknown!

The north wall is dated 1350, and the fact that its roofing differs entirely from that of the chancel and other chapels, supports the suggestion that it had been the Manor library.

Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.LOMBARDS’ ROW.p.16]

Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.

LOMBARDS’ ROW.

p.16]

The Lawrence monuments are interesting. Thomas Lawrence, the banker and goldsmith of Lombards’ Row, appears with all his Elizabethan family about him. His epitaph is often quoted:

Thus Thomas Lawrence spekes to Tymes ensuing:That Death is sure, and Tyme is past renuing!

He was the father of Mrs. Sara Colvile, whose rising figure blocks a beautifully carved window—worth seeing from the vestry side—and of Sir John Lawrence, whose epitaph begins with the trenchant lines:

When bad men dy, and turn to their last Sleepe,What Stir, the Poets and Ingravers keepe!

The Italian triumphal arch, for which the chancel arch was cut, and the symmetry of the church for ever dislocated, is to the memory of one Richard Gervaise, 1563, son of a mercer and sheriff of London, who may have been a business partner or relative of the Lawrences; the brasses of Sir Henry and Lady Christina Waver, 1460, have been stolen from the pavement, where many other Lawrence names are recorded.

The Lawrence Chapel subsequently became the property of the Rawlings family, whose crest appears on several of the pew doors, and in 1894 the Rev. R. H. Davies succeeded in securing it for the church.

The squint, or hagioscope, shows a glimpse of the altar in the chancel, and tradition has it that lepers used to assemble at the little north door (now leading into the new vestry) or at the north windows to witness the elevation of the Host, without contaminating the congregation; for lepers, I hope we may read, sufferers from ague and marsh-fever, which was a prevailing scourge of the low lands about the river.

By the by, it is outside the north wall that the plague victims were buried in a long grave, when the plague visited Chelsea in 1626, and Lady Danvers, mother of George Herbert, nursed her stricken neighbours so bravely. The Chelsea plague-fosse has never been disturbed. A provincial plague-pit known to me was opened in the course of new road-making a few years ago, and four labourers died of a strange, malignant fever. Whether this was the result of coincidence, or of superstitious fear,or of real infection, I cannot say, but we do well, I think, to leave our Chelsea plague-pit unmeddled with!

The chancel of the Old Church was built in the thirteenth century, and the nave added much later: the magnificent roof of oak arched beams, like the ribs of a ship, was discovered under the plaster in 1910. The altar, a fine Jacobean table, and the enclosing rails are of Charles I.’s time, when Archbishop Laud decreed that rails should encircle the altar; the east window put in, in 1857, to lessen the glare of light at morning service is fairly harmless, and harmonises with the shadowy church better than more brilliant glass would do. The very beautiful cross and candlesticks were given in 1910, in memory of Charles Kelly, Esq.

The aumbry, now used as a credence table, was discovered plastered over in 1855; it was originally intended for a safe, in which the church plate could be kept, and the bar and hinge settings can be traced.

To the left of the altar is the Hungerford Memorial slab. Thomas Hungerford, a knight of Wiltshire, married a Chelsea heiress, Drusilla Maidenhead, daughter of Lord Sandys. Hungerford served under four sovereigns; he was present at the “wining of Bologne,” as he calls the Siege of Boulogne in Henry VIII.’s reign, and died “at the adge of seventy yeres.” He was obviously a prophet of reformed spelling!

The Bray tomb, now crammed under the chancel wall to clear the approach to the altar, is the oldest of our monuments. Its brasses have been torn away and its carving obscured by plaster. The Brays were Lords of the Manor previous to the Lawrences, and probably the Lawrence Chapel was originally their property. This tomb commemorates four generations of Brays, the last being Sir John Bray, 1557, the order of whose funeral has been preserved at the College of Arms, and has been reproduced in modern pageantry. Lately the Bray family, residing in Surrey, have restored this ancestral tomb. Sir Reginald Bray, of this family, was the architect of Henry VII. Chapel at Westminster.

A tiny door in the wall used to lead to the old vestry.Here Mr, Davies, for so many years incumbent of the Old Church, spent much of his time, which was always at the service of inquiring visitors. He had many excellent stories to tell of his adventures in the vestry. Once he was “held up” there for many hours by a bogus photographer who, pretending to take pictures of the church, plugged up the vestry door and broke open the alms boxes. The incumbent sat quietly reading and writing, secure in the knowledge that he had cleared the boxes that morning, until he was presently retrieved by his family, who supposed that he had forgotten the dinner-hour! Had the thief known where to look, the real parish funds were at the moment in the vestry itself.

Another time Mr. Davies showed a pair of visitors round the church and was about to receive a small tip for his trouble, when he hastened to explain that he was the parson, not the caretaker, and was delighted to have been available as guide. A sovereign was substituted for the intended gratuity, which he gratefully accepted for the poor of his parish. Later, after the visitors had left, one of them came hurrying back and explained that they had inadvertently run short of money for a return journey. Might they borrow back the sovereign, which should be posted to Mr. Davies in the course of a few hours? Of course the money was relinquished—and never heard of again!

Mr. Davies himself told me these anecdotes, as delightfully as he always told a story; they seem to have become part of the history of the church he so dearly loved. A third—the appearance of Sir Thomas More’s ghost—belongs to the next chapter, with other More gossip.

NOTES

CHAPTER IIIThe More Chapel—Holbein—Erasmus—Sir Thomas More’s arrest—Mistress More—The Duchess of Northumberland—The Gorges—The Stanley tomb—“The Bird and the Baby”—The Dacre helmet—Sir Thomas More’s ghost.THE More Chapel was built in 1528 (date on the east pillar) to accommodate the family and retainers of Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, living in great state at Beaufort House, but not too proud to act as “server” at the altar of his Parish Church. The two pillars evidently guarding the front seat of this family pew are worth careful inspection; the west pillar is said to have been carved by Holbein while on a visit to More’s house—a visit which lasted several years. The east pillar is less well executed and may be by another hand, but both bear the symbolic ornament, dear to the spirit of the time, introducing coats of arms, crest, punning references to family names and signs, which develop in hieroglyphics the career of the great Chancellor. More’s tomb, designed by himself during his imprisonment in the Tower, is in the south wall of the church, and here we find a curious surviving reference to his friendship with another celebrated visitor to Chelsea, Erasmus. In the Latin epitaph cut in slate, which Sir Thomas prepared for his tomb, a word has been omitted and a space left. The word is “Hereticks,” whom he declared he hated implacably, along with “thieves and murderers”; Erasmus found this too sweeping and begged him to cross out the word. He took his friend’s advice but forgot to insert a substitute word, and the spaceremains, a witness to the tolerance of Erasmus and the sweet reasonableness of the Chancellor.Sir Thomas’s favourite motto, “Serve God and be merrie,” is better known than his pompous Latin inscription, as it deserves to be.Tradition makes the More Chapel the scene of Sir Thomas’s farewell message to his wife. On the morning of his arrest, she was waiting for him after Mass in the family pew; he had been acting as “server” at the altar, and had been hurried from thence straight to the river and the Tower.A young groom, by the Chancellor’s orders, went to his wife with this message, which the varlet was bidden to repeat exactly in his master’s words:“Bid Mistress More wait no longer for Master More, for he hath been led away by the King’s command.” A smart box on the ear from the insulted lady rewarded the servant for his literal fulfilment of his lord’s mandate. “What do you mean, sirrah, to speak of Mistress and Master More when you name the Chancellor of England and his lady?” but when the boy persisted in his orders, she began to perceive her husband’s hidden design and realise that he had fallen from his high estate, and in this fashion would break it to her. She was his second wife, and neither beautiful nor very sweet-tempered, but Sir Thomas ever treated her with the most courteous consideration, joked at her shrewishness, and complimented her whenever he could. Still we cannot help suspecting that on this occasion he was a little relieved to send the message of his downfall by the young groom instead of having to deliver it in person.The next tomb of interest in the More Chapel is that of the Duchess of Northumberland, 1555, mother of thirteen children, of whom Robert Earl of Leicester, Guildford Dudley, husband of Lady Jane Grey, and Mary, mother of Sir Philip Sydney, were the most celebrated.This lovely monument has been barbarously treated: the spirals were broken off in 1832 to make room for seats and increase the letting value of the chapel, and its awkward position suggests that it has been pushed out ofits original setting. Several of the brasses have been wrenched away. Chaucer’s tomb in Westminster Abbey is almost a replica of what it must have been when whole, and is probably by the same designer.The Duke and Duchess of Northumberland succeeded Queen Katharine Parr as tenants of the Manor House, the Tudor palace in Cheyne Walk: the Duke and his son Guildford both died on Tower Hill, with the “nine days’ Queen,” and it is greatly to the credit of Queen Mary I. that she interested herself in the bereaved Duchess, and restored to her part of her confiscated possessions. In Elizabeth’s reign the family flourished again, and there is a minute description extant of the Duchess’s gorgeous funeral at the Old Church.But the fact that the More Chapel continued to be the family pew pertaining to Beaufort House suggests that the Northumberland tomb was originally in a far more conspicuous position, and was presently pushed aside to make way for territorial claims. Sir Arthur and Lady Gorges were at Beaufort House in 1620. He is Spenser’s “Alcyon,” and the poet’sDaphnaidawas an elegy on Lady Gorges’ death. The younger Arthur, grandson of this pair of Spenser’s friends, isHe who had all the Gorges’ soules in one.His epitaph is worth spelling out, though it is rather a back-breaking business, and it is noteworthy that his wife, who perhaps was much older than himself, and was certainly very much married, prepared the inscriptions, but omitted to leave orders for the insertion of her own death-date, which, after considerable preamble, is left out altogether.Under the east window lies the splendidly ornate monument of the Stanleys. Sir Robert, whose medallion portrait is supported by the figures of Justice and Fortitude, married a daughter of Sir Arthur Gorges. The children, Ferdinand and Henrietta, are dear little people in stiff Stuart dresses.Their epitaph beginning,The Eagle death, greedy of such sweete prey,With nimble eyes marked where these children lay—refers to the Stanley family legend of “The Bird and the Baby,” of which two children-ancestors were the heroes. An eagle hovers over the tomb.The helmet hanging incongruously in mid-air has the Dacre crest, and is not in its proper place here; a helmet exhibited in church often implies that the wearer fought in the Crusades, but this probably is part of the heraldic ornament of the great Dacre memorial in the nave.The inscription to Sir Robert Stanley is really beautiful in the stately wording and measured metre of the seventeenth century, and is worth quoting entire:To say a Stanley lies here, that aloneWere epitaph enough; noe brass, nor stone,No glorious Tomb, nor Monumental Hearse,Noe gilded trophy, nor Lamp-laboured VerseCan dignify this grave, nor sett it forth,Like the immortal fame of his owne Worth.So, Reader, fixe not here, but quit this RoomAnd fly to Abram’s bosom—there’s his tombe,There rests his Soule, and for his other partsThey are embalmed and shrined in good men’s hearts—A nobler Monument of Stone or LimeNoe Art could raise, for this shall outlast Tyme!“Lamp-laboured verse” is first-rate.We cannot leave the More Chapel without referring to the controversy, dear to the antiquarian papers, as to whether the Chancellor’s body were ever brought from Tower Hill after the fatal July 6, 1535, to be interred in the church he loved. All tradition and probability point to this belief; though his head, exposed on London Bridge, and rescued by his devoted daughter Margaret Roper, was consigned by her to the keeping of St. Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury.Now for another of Mr. Davies’ anecdotes of the Old Church.Some twenty years ago, a marvellous story ran round Chelsea that Sir Thomas More’s ghost had been seen to emerge from the south wall monument and, crossing the sanctuary, disappear into the opposite wall. The figure was unquestionably that of the Chancellor, for besides being quaintly dressed, it was without a head—which clinched the matter. Lady artists, painting in the body of the church, had seen the apparition steal across the chancel, in the gloaming, and spreading the news abroad, soon brought half London to inquire into the marvel.Unluckily Mr. Davies was on guard in his beloved church, and his explanation was crushingly disappointing. He stationed all would-be ghost seekers halfway down the middle aisle, and then produced the ghost—himself—passing from the tiny south door behind the tomb to the vestry opposite, a shawl drawn over his head and wrapped about his shoulders, giving the required appearance of headlessness.Both south door and vestry door within the chancel are now done away with, and even newspaper reporters have heard no more of the ghost.NOTES

The More Chapel—Holbein—Erasmus—Sir Thomas More’s arrest—Mistress More—The Duchess of Northumberland—The Gorges—The Stanley tomb—“The Bird and the Baby”—The Dacre helmet—Sir Thomas More’s ghost.

THE More Chapel was built in 1528 (date on the east pillar) to accommodate the family and retainers of Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, living in great state at Beaufort House, but not too proud to act as “server” at the altar of his Parish Church. The two pillars evidently guarding the front seat of this family pew are worth careful inspection; the west pillar is said to have been carved by Holbein while on a visit to More’s house—a visit which lasted several years. The east pillar is less well executed and may be by another hand, but both bear the symbolic ornament, dear to the spirit of the time, introducing coats of arms, crest, punning references to family names and signs, which develop in hieroglyphics the career of the great Chancellor. More’s tomb, designed by himself during his imprisonment in the Tower, is in the south wall of the church, and here we find a curious surviving reference to his friendship with another celebrated visitor to Chelsea, Erasmus. In the Latin epitaph cut in slate, which Sir Thomas prepared for his tomb, a word has been omitted and a space left. The word is “Hereticks,” whom he declared he hated implacably, along with “thieves and murderers”; Erasmus found this too sweeping and begged him to cross out the word. He took his friend’s advice but forgot to insert a substitute word, and the spaceremains, a witness to the tolerance of Erasmus and the sweet reasonableness of the Chancellor.

Sir Thomas’s favourite motto, “Serve God and be merrie,” is better known than his pompous Latin inscription, as it deserves to be.

Tradition makes the More Chapel the scene of Sir Thomas’s farewell message to his wife. On the morning of his arrest, she was waiting for him after Mass in the family pew; he had been acting as “server” at the altar, and had been hurried from thence straight to the river and the Tower.

A young groom, by the Chancellor’s orders, went to his wife with this message, which the varlet was bidden to repeat exactly in his master’s words:

“Bid Mistress More wait no longer for Master More, for he hath been led away by the King’s command.” A smart box on the ear from the insulted lady rewarded the servant for his literal fulfilment of his lord’s mandate. “What do you mean, sirrah, to speak of Mistress and Master More when you name the Chancellor of England and his lady?” but when the boy persisted in his orders, she began to perceive her husband’s hidden design and realise that he had fallen from his high estate, and in this fashion would break it to her. She was his second wife, and neither beautiful nor very sweet-tempered, but Sir Thomas ever treated her with the most courteous consideration, joked at her shrewishness, and complimented her whenever he could. Still we cannot help suspecting that on this occasion he was a little relieved to send the message of his downfall by the young groom instead of having to deliver it in person.

The next tomb of interest in the More Chapel is that of the Duchess of Northumberland, 1555, mother of thirteen children, of whom Robert Earl of Leicester, Guildford Dudley, husband of Lady Jane Grey, and Mary, mother of Sir Philip Sydney, were the most celebrated.

This lovely monument has been barbarously treated: the spirals were broken off in 1832 to make room for seats and increase the letting value of the chapel, and its awkward position suggests that it has been pushed out ofits original setting. Several of the brasses have been wrenched away. Chaucer’s tomb in Westminster Abbey is almost a replica of what it must have been when whole, and is probably by the same designer.

The Duke and Duchess of Northumberland succeeded Queen Katharine Parr as tenants of the Manor House, the Tudor palace in Cheyne Walk: the Duke and his son Guildford both died on Tower Hill, with the “nine days’ Queen,” and it is greatly to the credit of Queen Mary I. that she interested herself in the bereaved Duchess, and restored to her part of her confiscated possessions. In Elizabeth’s reign the family flourished again, and there is a minute description extant of the Duchess’s gorgeous funeral at the Old Church.

But the fact that the More Chapel continued to be the family pew pertaining to Beaufort House suggests that the Northumberland tomb was originally in a far more conspicuous position, and was presently pushed aside to make way for territorial claims. Sir Arthur and Lady Gorges were at Beaufort House in 1620. He is Spenser’s “Alcyon,” and the poet’sDaphnaidawas an elegy on Lady Gorges’ death. The younger Arthur, grandson of this pair of Spenser’s friends, is

He who had all the Gorges’ soules in one.

His epitaph is worth spelling out, though it is rather a back-breaking business, and it is noteworthy that his wife, who perhaps was much older than himself, and was certainly very much married, prepared the inscriptions, but omitted to leave orders for the insertion of her own death-date, which, after considerable preamble, is left out altogether.

Under the east window lies the splendidly ornate monument of the Stanleys. Sir Robert, whose medallion portrait is supported by the figures of Justice and Fortitude, married a daughter of Sir Arthur Gorges. The children, Ferdinand and Henrietta, are dear little people in stiff Stuart dresses.

Their epitaph beginning,

The Eagle death, greedy of such sweete prey,With nimble eyes marked where these children lay—

refers to the Stanley family legend of “The Bird and the Baby,” of which two children-ancestors were the heroes. An eagle hovers over the tomb.

The helmet hanging incongruously in mid-air has the Dacre crest, and is not in its proper place here; a helmet exhibited in church often implies that the wearer fought in the Crusades, but this probably is part of the heraldic ornament of the great Dacre memorial in the nave.

The inscription to Sir Robert Stanley is really beautiful in the stately wording and measured metre of the seventeenth century, and is worth quoting entire:

To say a Stanley lies here, that aloneWere epitaph enough; noe brass, nor stone,No glorious Tomb, nor Monumental Hearse,Noe gilded trophy, nor Lamp-laboured VerseCan dignify this grave, nor sett it forth,Like the immortal fame of his owne Worth.So, Reader, fixe not here, but quit this RoomAnd fly to Abram’s bosom—there’s his tombe,There rests his Soule, and for his other partsThey are embalmed and shrined in good men’s hearts—A nobler Monument of Stone or LimeNoe Art could raise, for this shall outlast Tyme!

“Lamp-laboured verse” is first-rate.

We cannot leave the More Chapel without referring to the controversy, dear to the antiquarian papers, as to whether the Chancellor’s body were ever brought from Tower Hill after the fatal July 6, 1535, to be interred in the church he loved. All tradition and probability point to this belief; though his head, exposed on London Bridge, and rescued by his devoted daughter Margaret Roper, was consigned by her to the keeping of St. Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury.

Now for another of Mr. Davies’ anecdotes of the Old Church.

Some twenty years ago, a marvellous story ran round Chelsea that Sir Thomas More’s ghost had been seen to emerge from the south wall monument and, crossing the sanctuary, disappear into the opposite wall. The figure was unquestionably that of the Chancellor, for besides being quaintly dressed, it was without a head—which clinched the matter. Lady artists, painting in the body of the church, had seen the apparition steal across the chancel, in the gloaming, and spreading the news abroad, soon brought half London to inquire into the marvel.

Unluckily Mr. Davies was on guard in his beloved church, and his explanation was crushingly disappointing. He stationed all would-be ghost seekers halfway down the middle aisle, and then produced the ghost—himself—passing from the tiny south door behind the tomb to the vestry opposite, a shawl drawn over his head and wrapped about his shoulders, giving the required appearance of headlessness.

Both south door and vestry door within the chancel are now done away with, and even newspaper reporters have heard no more of the ghost.

NOTES

CHAPTER IVThe Dacre tomb and charities—Lady Jane Cheyne, who gave her name to Cheyne Walk—The churchwarden’s official seat—The pulpit where Wesley preached—Dr. Baldwin Hamey and his servant Fletcher—Church burials and the More descendants—The chained books—Public Bible-reading in the eighteenth century—The font and organ—The Queen’s Royal Volunteers—The Ashburnham bell—Books of authority on Chelsea history.THE most beautiful monument in the church is the great Dacre tomb. Lady Dacre was a Sackville and an heiress, and succeeded to the possession of Sir Thomas More’s Beaufort House. She married Lord Dacre of the South—a magnificent Elizabethan title—and their name is still venerated year by year in Chelsea and Westminster for the gifts and charities to which they devoted their fortune. They left no family—the poor stiff little daughter in the very uncomfortably designed cradle beside them having been their only child—and their estates in Chelsea, Kensington, and Brompton passed to Lord Burleigh, with numberless bequests attached for local objects. Emanuel Hospital, Westminster, is their foundation, and Chelsea has the right to two annual presentations conditionally on the tomb being kept clean and in repair. One is tempted to ask whether the conditions are being fulfilled, for the colouring of the wonderful canopy could surely be very much improved by a little knowledgeable wiping and polishing, and the Elizabethan pair themselves—he in late heavy armour, she in “French hood,” Mary, Queen of Scots’ introduction, and ruff—might be reverently dusted with advantage to their beautiful Renaissance detail. The tomb originally stood in the More Chapel, which LadyDacre inherited with Beaufort House, and was moved to its present position in 1667. It is unfortunately placed very much askew to the window and the water-gate which it completely blocks—and this is the more to be regretted because the south side is deficient in exits, and the restoration of the water-gate, as seen in an old print, would add to the beauty and convenience of the church.In the north wall, and almost opposite the Dacre tomb (if anything in the Old Church can be accounted to pair with anything else!), reclines Lady Jane Cheyne, a very heroically proportioned lady, daughter of the first Duke of Newcastle, and, like her father, an ardent royalist. As quite a girl she held Welbeck House, with a slender garrison, for King Charles, and all her life she devoted her fortune to the maintenance of the royal cause and support of her father in exile. She married Lord Cheyne, of a Buckinghamshire family, and bought the Manor House and Palace which had been the scene of so much Tudor history-making, where she lived to see the Restoration of King Charles II. and to benefit Chelsea by her good deeds for fourteen years. Cheyne Walk is named after her, to commemorate her benevolence and exemplary life at the great house which had sheltered many less admirable characters; she was a special patroness of the church, where she directed the renovations of 1667, and possibly it is to her taste that we owe the unfortunate prominence of two magnificent monuments which would have gained so much by being more discreetly located. Lady Jane’s figure and surroundings are scarcely in proportion, but she is an aristocrat to her finger tips—those wonderful finger tips, which seem to have been assured to the royalists of Vandyke’s day!—and one can imagine her holding a fortress, or later, writing a manual of elegant devotions, with equal distinction.The little three-cornered pew, to the right of Lady Jane’s tomb, is the dignified sitting intended for the churchwarden; the mitre which is still found on a panel here and there tells of the Bishop of Winchester’s residence in Chelsea during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Standing in the middle aisle, the beauty of the pulpitcarving must strike every lover of oak, and it is inspiring to think that a broad-minded Chelsea rector, the Hon. and Rev. W. B. Cadogan, invited John Wesley and Whitfield to occupy it. The canopy of the pulpit has been lost, but from wood once part of the “three-decker” structure, the chairs have been fashioned which stand by the altar; the font-cover of oak was found in 1910 in a neglected corner of the tower, and with it two handsome Georgian pewter alms dishes dated 1754; these have been restored to use for Sunday collections. Among the hatchments, many of which remain unidentified, that of Rector Cadogan has been recognised with its motto “Christ, the Hope of Glory”; he died in 1797.On the pillar north of the pulpit hangs the tablet of the clever and eccentric Dr. Baldwin Hamey, who retired from medical practice in 1665 and came to live at Chelsea. He gave liberally to the church restoration fund—perhaps influenced by Lady Jane Cheyne’s enthusiasm—but as a scientist he was intolerant of dogma, and used to carry a leather-bound Virgil to church with him, which passed for a Testament, and saved him from the tedium of listening to doctrine to which he did not conform. He was buried, uncoffined and merely wrapped in a sheet, in the chancel, and his epitaph is a hopeless one, “When the breath goeth out of a Man, he returneth to his Earth,” but later, in 1880, the Royal College of Physicians restored his tablet “in grateful remembrance of their benefactor,” and in spite of the declared pessimism of his creed, his good work is not “interred with his bones,” but lives in the kindly worded remembrance of his scientific brotherhood.On the opposite pillar (south side) a tiny figure of St. Luke, “the doctor’s saint,” stands on a bracket; it formerly decorated the canopy of the pulpit. It was contributed by John Fletcher—Dr. Hamey’s servant and assistant—to the ornamentation of the church at its restoration in 1667, when the “beloved physician” was still patron of the parish. No one has ever satisfactorily explained why, for 300 years, the old dedication to All Saints was in abeyance, and St. Luke was substituted; perhaps at the Reformation St. Luke, the manof science, was considered a more suitable patron for the Church of the New Learning.The stones and inscriptions on the floor of the church show that many Chelsea people lie beneath. Sometimes the scrutiny of names leads to considerable enlightenment of family and local history, but for Chelsea’s visitors this study has no special attraction, so we will not burden them with pavement inscriptions. From a corner between the More Chapel and the nave, nine leaden coffins were removed about forty years ago, when the heating of the church necessitated new stove-pipes. These coffins were supposed to belong to the More family, and may have enclosed the bodies of Will and Margaret Roper, of “Mistress More,” the Chancellor’s second wife, and of Bishop Fisher, but their identification was uncertain. They were removed to the Parish Church in Sydney Street and privately re-interred.The chained books under the south window are a more cheerful reminder of Tudor times, and of Henry VIII.’s decree of a Parish Church Bible, though these are not the original sixteenth-century volumes, but a later set presented by Sir Hans Sloane. They consist of:A “Vinegar” Bible (Baskett’s edition, dated 1717).The Book of Common Prayer, 1723.The Book of Homilies (2 volumes) formerly belonging to Trelawny, the great Bishop of Winchester, 1683.Two volumes (Nos. I. and III.) of Foxe’sBook of Martyrs. A very fine edition dated 1684.Tradition connects these two volumes of Foxe with Charles II., who died in the year 1685. It is possible, though no history of the books records the fact as certain, that they were the King’s property, given or lent to his physician; we love royal tradition in Chelsea, and there is nothing against our adopting this one.The volumes themselves are splendidly bound, printed, and illustrated, but during a careless or too confiding period, when the oak book-case was open to all comers, several illustrations and some of the brass clasps and hinges were carried off as souvenirs, and the case is now strictly locked. It, and the chains, are comparatively modern.I knew an old Chelsea lady who told me that her grandmother was in the habit of repairing to the church every Tuesday and reading aloud from the Bible to as many hearers as cared to listen for an hour, and that the school children regularly attended the reading. While this links us curiously with a past when the Bible was still a rarity, not to be found in everybody’s hands, it makes a suggestion of supplementary education from which our own century might profitably learn a lesson.The font dates from about 1673; the gilding on the cover is the original work. The ship’s bucket in oak standing beside it was presented by members of the choir in 1910. The organ, a very sweet-toned instrument, has been recently beautifully repaired and enlarged by the Rev. Malcolm and Mrs. Farmer.The Colours of the Chelsea Volunteers are the only two flags remaining of a considerable number which adorned the church in 1814. The King’s Colour is said to have been worked by Queen Charlotte and her daughters, and an old print depicts her presenting it to the regiment of the “Queen’s Royal Volunteers”; the picture is chiefly remarkable for the immense amount of cumbrous clothing worn by the Volunteers, and the very scanty draperies of Queen Charlotte and her ladies. The corps was raised in 1804, when Bonaparte threatened invasion, and the Regimental Colour bears a medallion portrait of St. Luke, and the inscription, “St. Luke, Chelsea.” A board in the porch chronicles this presentation, but beyond a loyal willingness to serve, I do not know that the Chelsea Volunteers were ever called upon to show further fight. Opposite this board the Ashburnham Bell reposes, a witness to the legend of 1679, when the Hon. William Ashburnham, swamped in the mud of Chelsea Reach, regained his bearings by hearing the church clock strike nine, and made for the shore by the sound, instead of plunging further into the tideway.In gratitude, he presented this bell to be rung at nine every night from Michaelmas to Lady Day, and left a sum of money to endow it The bell-ringing ceased in 1822, when the peal of the old church was broken up to providenew bells for St. Luke’s in Sydney Street, but in memory of the Ashburnham deliverance and bequest the clock is illuminated every evening at sunset, and by oil lantern, by candle, by gas, and now by electricity, tells the story of the rescue to all who pass by.I have, for want of space, omitted many smaller tablets and inscriptions, which, curious enough in their way, and important in the mosaic of our parish history, are yet little interesting to the passing visitor, unless he is bent on following up some special clue of family or local weight. Should such be his study, I would counsel him to refer to Mr. Reginald’s Blunt’sHistorical Handbook, to Mr. Randall Davies’ splendidHistory of the Old Church, or to the Rev. S. P. T. Prideaux’sShort Account of Chelsea Old Church, to all of which I am infinitely beholden.NOTES

The Dacre tomb and charities—Lady Jane Cheyne, who gave her name to Cheyne Walk—The churchwarden’s official seat—The pulpit where Wesley preached—Dr. Baldwin Hamey and his servant Fletcher—Church burials and the More descendants—The chained books—Public Bible-reading in the eighteenth century—The font and organ—The Queen’s Royal Volunteers—The Ashburnham bell—Books of authority on Chelsea history.

THE most beautiful monument in the church is the great Dacre tomb. Lady Dacre was a Sackville and an heiress, and succeeded to the possession of Sir Thomas More’s Beaufort House. She married Lord Dacre of the South—a magnificent Elizabethan title—and their name is still venerated year by year in Chelsea and Westminster for the gifts and charities to which they devoted their fortune. They left no family—the poor stiff little daughter in the very uncomfortably designed cradle beside them having been their only child—and their estates in Chelsea, Kensington, and Brompton passed to Lord Burleigh, with numberless bequests attached for local objects. Emanuel Hospital, Westminster, is their foundation, and Chelsea has the right to two annual presentations conditionally on the tomb being kept clean and in repair. One is tempted to ask whether the conditions are being fulfilled, for the colouring of the wonderful canopy could surely be very much improved by a little knowledgeable wiping and polishing, and the Elizabethan pair themselves—he in late heavy armour, she in “French hood,” Mary, Queen of Scots’ introduction, and ruff—might be reverently dusted with advantage to their beautiful Renaissance detail. The tomb originally stood in the More Chapel, which LadyDacre inherited with Beaufort House, and was moved to its present position in 1667. It is unfortunately placed very much askew to the window and the water-gate which it completely blocks—and this is the more to be regretted because the south side is deficient in exits, and the restoration of the water-gate, as seen in an old print, would add to the beauty and convenience of the church.

In the north wall, and almost opposite the Dacre tomb (if anything in the Old Church can be accounted to pair with anything else!), reclines Lady Jane Cheyne, a very heroically proportioned lady, daughter of the first Duke of Newcastle, and, like her father, an ardent royalist. As quite a girl she held Welbeck House, with a slender garrison, for King Charles, and all her life she devoted her fortune to the maintenance of the royal cause and support of her father in exile. She married Lord Cheyne, of a Buckinghamshire family, and bought the Manor House and Palace which had been the scene of so much Tudor history-making, where she lived to see the Restoration of King Charles II. and to benefit Chelsea by her good deeds for fourteen years. Cheyne Walk is named after her, to commemorate her benevolence and exemplary life at the great house which had sheltered many less admirable characters; she was a special patroness of the church, where she directed the renovations of 1667, and possibly it is to her taste that we owe the unfortunate prominence of two magnificent monuments which would have gained so much by being more discreetly located. Lady Jane’s figure and surroundings are scarcely in proportion, but she is an aristocrat to her finger tips—those wonderful finger tips, which seem to have been assured to the royalists of Vandyke’s day!—and one can imagine her holding a fortress, or later, writing a manual of elegant devotions, with equal distinction.

The little three-cornered pew, to the right of Lady Jane’s tomb, is the dignified sitting intended for the churchwarden; the mitre which is still found on a panel here and there tells of the Bishop of Winchester’s residence in Chelsea during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Standing in the middle aisle, the beauty of the pulpitcarving must strike every lover of oak, and it is inspiring to think that a broad-minded Chelsea rector, the Hon. and Rev. W. B. Cadogan, invited John Wesley and Whitfield to occupy it. The canopy of the pulpit has been lost, but from wood once part of the “three-decker” structure, the chairs have been fashioned which stand by the altar; the font-cover of oak was found in 1910 in a neglected corner of the tower, and with it two handsome Georgian pewter alms dishes dated 1754; these have been restored to use for Sunday collections. Among the hatchments, many of which remain unidentified, that of Rector Cadogan has been recognised with its motto “Christ, the Hope of Glory”; he died in 1797.

On the pillar north of the pulpit hangs the tablet of the clever and eccentric Dr. Baldwin Hamey, who retired from medical practice in 1665 and came to live at Chelsea. He gave liberally to the church restoration fund—perhaps influenced by Lady Jane Cheyne’s enthusiasm—but as a scientist he was intolerant of dogma, and used to carry a leather-bound Virgil to church with him, which passed for a Testament, and saved him from the tedium of listening to doctrine to which he did not conform. He was buried, uncoffined and merely wrapped in a sheet, in the chancel, and his epitaph is a hopeless one, “When the breath goeth out of a Man, he returneth to his Earth,” but later, in 1880, the Royal College of Physicians restored his tablet “in grateful remembrance of their benefactor,” and in spite of the declared pessimism of his creed, his good work is not “interred with his bones,” but lives in the kindly worded remembrance of his scientific brotherhood.

On the opposite pillar (south side) a tiny figure of St. Luke, “the doctor’s saint,” stands on a bracket; it formerly decorated the canopy of the pulpit. It was contributed by John Fletcher—Dr. Hamey’s servant and assistant—to the ornamentation of the church at its restoration in 1667, when the “beloved physician” was still patron of the parish. No one has ever satisfactorily explained why, for 300 years, the old dedication to All Saints was in abeyance, and St. Luke was substituted; perhaps at the Reformation St. Luke, the manof science, was considered a more suitable patron for the Church of the New Learning.

The stones and inscriptions on the floor of the church show that many Chelsea people lie beneath. Sometimes the scrutiny of names leads to considerable enlightenment of family and local history, but for Chelsea’s visitors this study has no special attraction, so we will not burden them with pavement inscriptions. From a corner between the More Chapel and the nave, nine leaden coffins were removed about forty years ago, when the heating of the church necessitated new stove-pipes. These coffins were supposed to belong to the More family, and may have enclosed the bodies of Will and Margaret Roper, of “Mistress More,” the Chancellor’s second wife, and of Bishop Fisher, but their identification was uncertain. They were removed to the Parish Church in Sydney Street and privately re-interred.

The chained books under the south window are a more cheerful reminder of Tudor times, and of Henry VIII.’s decree of a Parish Church Bible, though these are not the original sixteenth-century volumes, but a later set presented by Sir Hans Sloane. They consist of:

A “Vinegar” Bible (Baskett’s edition, dated 1717).

The Book of Common Prayer, 1723.

The Book of Homilies (2 volumes) formerly belonging to Trelawny, the great Bishop of Winchester, 1683.

Two volumes (Nos. I. and III.) of Foxe’sBook of Martyrs. A very fine edition dated 1684.

Tradition connects these two volumes of Foxe with Charles II., who died in the year 1685. It is possible, though no history of the books records the fact as certain, that they were the King’s property, given or lent to his physician; we love royal tradition in Chelsea, and there is nothing against our adopting this one.

The volumes themselves are splendidly bound, printed, and illustrated, but during a careless or too confiding period, when the oak book-case was open to all comers, several illustrations and some of the brass clasps and hinges were carried off as souvenirs, and the case is now strictly locked. It, and the chains, are comparatively modern.

I knew an old Chelsea lady who told me that her grandmother was in the habit of repairing to the church every Tuesday and reading aloud from the Bible to as many hearers as cared to listen for an hour, and that the school children regularly attended the reading. While this links us curiously with a past when the Bible was still a rarity, not to be found in everybody’s hands, it makes a suggestion of supplementary education from which our own century might profitably learn a lesson.

The font dates from about 1673; the gilding on the cover is the original work. The ship’s bucket in oak standing beside it was presented by members of the choir in 1910. The organ, a very sweet-toned instrument, has been recently beautifully repaired and enlarged by the Rev. Malcolm and Mrs. Farmer.

The Colours of the Chelsea Volunteers are the only two flags remaining of a considerable number which adorned the church in 1814. The King’s Colour is said to have been worked by Queen Charlotte and her daughters, and an old print depicts her presenting it to the regiment of the “Queen’s Royal Volunteers”; the picture is chiefly remarkable for the immense amount of cumbrous clothing worn by the Volunteers, and the very scanty draperies of Queen Charlotte and her ladies. The corps was raised in 1804, when Bonaparte threatened invasion, and the Regimental Colour bears a medallion portrait of St. Luke, and the inscription, “St. Luke, Chelsea.” A board in the porch chronicles this presentation, but beyond a loyal willingness to serve, I do not know that the Chelsea Volunteers were ever called upon to show further fight. Opposite this board the Ashburnham Bell reposes, a witness to the legend of 1679, when the Hon. William Ashburnham, swamped in the mud of Chelsea Reach, regained his bearings by hearing the church clock strike nine, and made for the shore by the sound, instead of plunging further into the tideway.

In gratitude, he presented this bell to be rung at nine every night from Michaelmas to Lady Day, and left a sum of money to endow it The bell-ringing ceased in 1822, when the peal of the old church was broken up to providenew bells for St. Luke’s in Sydney Street, but in memory of the Ashburnham deliverance and bequest the clock is illuminated every evening at sunset, and by oil lantern, by candle, by gas, and now by electricity, tells the story of the rescue to all who pass by.

I have, for want of space, omitted many smaller tablets and inscriptions, which, curious enough in their way, and important in the mosaic of our parish history, are yet little interesting to the passing visitor, unless he is bent on following up some special clue of family or local weight. Should such be his study, I would counsel him to refer to Mr. Reginald’s Blunt’sHistorical Handbook, to Mr. Randall Davies’ splendidHistory of the Old Church, or to the Rev. S. P. T. Prideaux’sShort Account of Chelsea Old Church, to all of which I am infinitely beholden.

NOTES

CHAPTER VSir 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 yearBattered 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 itsorigin 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 andeighteenth 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 theéliteof 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 lovelyage-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, thePunchcartoonist, 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

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 yearBattered 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 itsorigin 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 andeighteenth 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 theéliteof 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 lovelyage-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, thePunchcartoonist, 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

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