CHAPTER VICheyne Walk—The King’s Road and the Queen’s—George Eliot—Dr. Dominiceti’s baths—A French author’s cleverness—“The Yorkshire Grey”—Cecil Lawson’s pictures—Rossetti, Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Haweis, and their guests—The Don Saltero—“The Magpie”—Remains of Shrewsbury House and Mary Queen of Scots—The Children’s Hospital—Crosby Hall, Lindsey House, Turner’s House—The way between the Pales.CHEYNE WALK is beautiful at all seasons and under all aspects; each time that I regard it from a fresh point, or return to it after a temporary absence, I think, “Never has it looked so lovely before!”But for the purposes of historical interest it is well to walk it from end to end, or rather, to loiter in it, and, for choice, in early autumn, when the sunshine is as mellow as the tones of the old brick, and the trees and creepers are not too heavily green to obscure its gracious lines.So, if you will see this riverside row of storied houses aright, turn with me down Flood Street—when you leave your motor-bus at the Town Hall—and begin at the beginning of the Walk that will lead you through the drama, tragic and comic, of at least five centuries.Until a few years ago the two main thoroughfares from London to Chelsea were the King’s Road and the Queen’s Road. In that their juxtaposition recalled an interesting tradition, I am sorry that Queen’s Road has lately been altered to Royal Hospital Road.For in the days of Charles II. the King had a private road for his coach through the fields to Chelsea, where dwelt Mistress Elinor Gwynn (at Sandford Manor when she received the King’s visits, but, report says, in a squalidlittle riverside hovel, not far from Chelsea Barracks, in her previous chrysalis stage), and Queen Catharine of Braganza, who also visited at Chelsea, paying less lively duty calls, as wives must, objected to using her husband’s route lest a domestic matter, which she preferred to ignore, should be forced on her attention.So the King came his road and the Queen hers, following parallel paths, and poor, stupid Catharine tried to keep her eyes shut to her consort’s “merry” ways. Had she tried to make her own a little less stiff, bigoted, and unintelligent, she might have been happier, for she was young and pretty enough to charm Charles at first; her determined adherence to Portuguese manners, dress, and language was as much to blame for Charles’s neglect, as his own inconstant nature.The first two houses in Cheyne Walk are modern, but then begins the row of beautiful mansions which forms the Walk, as distinguished from the previous frontage of great buildings standing detached, in the gardens of the Manor House. These buildings were pulled down and the gardens surrendered to the builders in 1717, and housebuilding on the riverside began apace. In No. 4 George Eliot (Mrs. Cross) lived for a few weeks only, and died from the result of a chill in 1880, just as she had begun to find pleasure in her beautiful view. At No. 5 James Camden Nield lived a miser’s life, and left a fortune of half a million pounds to Queen Victoria, whose Uncle Leopold congratulates her in one of his letters “on having a little money of her own” in her early married life. At No. 6 Dr. Dominiceti had his famous medicinal baths, a wonder-working quackery of the eighteenth century of which in heated argument Dr. Johnson said to an opponent of differing views:“Well, sir, go to Dominiceti and get fumigated, and be sure that the steam be directed to thy head, for that is the peccant part!”Between No. 6 and Manor Street some modern houses have been interpolated. No. 11, I think, is the number which has been omitted from the sequence in numbering them, and a clever French novelist has taken advantageof this peculiarity to lay the scene of his story in the nonexistent house, which he can consequently describe with all the exuberance of his fancy. I have met French visitors walking round this end of Cheyne Walk in great perplexity trying to locate their author’s plot: the fact that larger buildings took the place of humbler ones, and that the numbers beyond could not be disturbed, account for the omission.Some thirty years ago, when the old houses were demolished, a considerable portion of an underground passage was laid bare to the right of Manor Street. It was obviously a section of that subterranean passage which connected the Chelsea Palace with Kensington. I crept down it for the space of a yard or two, and rejoiced to think that the Princess Elizabeth might have done the same, in one of those romping games with her stepfather, the Lord High Admiral Seymour, which “Katheryn the Queene” found too hoydenish for the young lady’s age and dignity. Nos. 13 and 14, formerly one house, were the well-known inn “The Yorkshire Grey,” with its own stairs at the riverside, dear to country visitors from the north of England.No. 15, now in the possession of Lord Courtney of Penwith, was in the seventies the home of the artist family of William Lawson. Cecil Lawson’s pictures of Chelsea before the Embankment was built, were exhibited in a one-man show at Burlington House a few years back, and gave an exquisite idea of the waterside in its rural days, Queen’s House, No. 16, was once called Tudor House, and its basement is said to contain remains of the original Tudor workmanship of Henry VIII.’s Palace. Whether this is so or not, it is unquestionably on the site of some of the old Manor House buildings; the name was changed by the Rev. H. R. Haweis, who favoured the idea that many Queens—Katharine Parr, Elizabeth, Anne of Cleves, Catharine of Braganza—must have occupied the position, though not the actual mansion.Mr. Haweis’ tenancy followed on that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who lived here from 1863 to 1882. William Rossetti, George Meredith, Algernon Swinburne, andothers of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood joined at first in theménage; then came Dante Rossetti’s short and sad married life, and later he lived secluded, spending much of his time in his garden at the back, where he tried to acclimatise strange animals, of whose wild ways exaggerated reports were spread abroad, perhaps to ensure the poet’s privacy.Of Rossetti’s later life, I who write can speak as an eye-witness, for in 1878 we went to live next door, at No. 17, and found him a quiet, very retiring, but most polite and obliging neighbour. As our gardens at the back adjoined we often saw him pacing under his trees dressed in an old brown dressing-gown like a friar’s habit. He went nowhere and received little company. Once we had lost a pet tortoise, which came up from under the dividing wall on Mr. Rossetti’s side of the boundary: the poet lifted it gently back and dropped it over without a word, then scurried away indoors, lest we might be moved to overwhelm him with thanks. He died while at Margate for his health, and I remember we had hardly heard the news, when we saw people (certainly unauthorised) removing all sorts of parcels and pieces of furniture from the house to a cab, which was loaded outside and in, and driven rapidly away.When his effects came to be examined much of value had disappeared, but who were the culprits was never known.Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Haweis’ tenancy of Queen’s House was very different. They entertained half London at their big crushes, which always had a character and a “go” which made them eagerly sought after and vastly amusing. Nearly always the party was built round some lion of the literary or scientific world. Ernest Renan and Oliver Wendell Holmes happen to be two guests whom I particularly recall. Renan was big, overblown, with the rolling gait and merry, round face of Southern France: Oliver Wendell Holmes was tiny, silver-haired, fragile as a bright-eyed little field mouse. Mr. Haweis, who did not know what shyness meant, exploited his visitors with the utmost vivacity and good nature; he had the socialinstinct in a high degree, and enjoyed his own parties so heartily that few of his guests could fail to do the same.Nos. 17 and 18 were in 1718 the celebrated Don Saltero Museum and Coffee-house, removed from Danvers Street to this more eligible situation; the old site is now occupied by the baker’s shop, 77, Cheyne Walk. “James Salter, the coffee man,” was at one time valet to Sir Hans Sloane, and may have formed the idea of his museum from pickings, let us hope discarded, by this eminent collector. He was an Irishman who could mix punch, and draw teeth, play a little on the fiddle, and keep his patrons amused, though his wonderful curios read like simple rubbish to-day, and strongly remind us of the bogus collections which used to be a sideshow at bazaars in the country. Still, “Forget me not at Salter’s, in thy next bowl!” said the wits, and a galaxy of wonderful men must have met at “the Don’s” of an afternoon as Richard Steele describes it in theTatler. The famous collection was sold in 1799, and the coffee-house became a public-house; in 1867 it was divided into two private residences.The houses Nos. 19 to 26 were built about sixty years later than those we have been considering, when the last part of the Manor frontage was taken down; the difference in style is easy to trace—there is a uniformity of style, which has evidently been aimed at, and the magnificent ironwork of the earlier date is wanting.At No. 24 there are vaults which undoubtedly date from Tudor times, and tradition says that the gnarled old wisteria embracing No. 20 is a creeper of the Manor House garden. All these houses have fine panelling, staircases and fireplaces, and handrails—some of earlier fashion than the buildings themselves, which points at their adaptation from previous mansions.Modern houses intervene in the curve where stood Winchester House, the Bishop’s Palace: at No. 27 Mr. and Mrs. Bram Stoker lived, in the palmy days of the Lyceum Theatre under Sir Henry Irving’s management, and dispensed delightful Irish hospitality.Across Oakley Street, we come to a lately restored house which bears the old sign of the Magpie and Stump. The “Magpie Inn,” one of the oldest houses in Chelsea, was a rendezvous for the supporters of the Stuart cause in 1715 and 1745; they could slip away by water if in danger of discovery. Next come, alas! some lamentable gaps, interspersed with a few odd walls and gables still remaining, parts of old Shrewsbury House, where Mary Queen of Scots was held in custody by the Earl of Shrewsbury. The form of the house cannot be traced, though an old print gives it as a hollow square standing back from the present roadway; it was broken up in 1813, but without doubt parts of it have been built into the present small houses.By the by, the Earl of Shrewsbury who had charge of Queen Mary was also fourth husband of the notorious Bess of Hardwick, and Queen Elizabeth is reported to have pitied him for having such intimate acquaintance with “two she devils.”No. 48 was once a Quakers’ Meeting House. The Hospital for Incurable Children, of which Queen Alexandra is President, nobly fills the site of some very old, tall houses, in one of which Holman Hunt painted his “Light of the World”; the old vine was preserved, and still bears small, sweet grapes in a hot season; the children’s voices sound merrily as you pass their open windows, and the saddest inmates are those who, having been sent here as incurable, are told that they are nearly healed and must shortly return to their homes.Beyond Lombards’ Row, already noticed, where the old Archway House stood to shelter Jacobite plotters, are some new houses which are surely an anachronism in our Queen Anne Walk (the original dates hereabouts are 1710-11), but the Copper Door is a fine piece of work, and a splendid reflector of sunshine.Across Danvers Street lies the waste land surrounding the lately erected Crosby Hall, of which I do not suffer myself to write, so keenly do I resent its importation into the hallowed precincts of Sir Thomas More’s whilom garden. Those who wish to inspect it can do so by inquiring for the custodian and the keys at More’s Gardens Mansions (entrance corner of Beaufort Street).Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.LINDSEY HOUSE.p.52]Crossing Beaufort Street, all the houses are gracious and of good report, and the entire proportions of Lindsey House can be made out from the pavement on the riverside, sub-divided as it now is into five or six different dwellings, and at one gabled end slightly extended.This was the great house of Sir Theodore de Mayerne, Court Physician, 1639; of Robert, Earl of Lindsey, Lord High Chamberlain, 1671; of Count Zinzendorf, the Moravian Leader, 1750: it occupied a part of the grounds of Beaufort House, and rose to importance as that great mansion declined. The Moravian fraternity had their colony and chapel and burying-ground behind Millman Street, where members of their persuasion were buried upright, under small square headstones, with the object, tradition says, of rising more quickly at the General Resurrection than other people. Finally, after passing many picturesque houses and some squalid modern interpolations, we come to Turner’s house, with the balcony where he watched the sunrise, and with the south-west window where he died with the sunset flooding his face in 1851.Cheyne Walk ends at World’s End Passage, “the way between the Pales,” as the map of 1717 has it, which led across the fields and marshes to Kensington.NOTESCHAPTER VIILots Road—Ashburnham House—Sandford Manor—Beaufort House and a corner of a “fayre garden”—Tudor bricks—Danvers House and the Herberts—Lord Wharton’s scheme of silk production—Henry VIII.’s Hunting Lodge in Glebe Place—The Manor House gardens and those who have walked there.AS WE HAVE reached the western limit of Cheyne Walk and may not be there again, for the uninteresting industrial district which begins here is not likely to tempt us back, we will say a few words about some of the old names that survive, under very altered conditions, and then turn our backs on it.Lots Road, which might easily suggest the dreary desert tramp of the migrating Patriarch, is so called because it is built on the site of four lots of pasture-land belonging to the manor, and the first of the property to be sold. In 1740 this land surrounded Chelsea Farm, the residence of the Methodist Lady Huntingdon, the friend of Whitfield and inventor of a “Persuasion” all her own. Then, in sharp contrast, it became Chelsea Gardens, later opened as Cremorne, and closed in 1875, when its pretensions to fashion had been eclipsed in rowdyism.Further to the north-west lay Ashburnham House, whither Master William Ashburnham was steering on the memorable night when he was nearly submerged in Chelsea Reach: the name has been well preserved in the handsome church and adjacent block of mansions.Chelsea Creek was once a much-used waterway to Kensington, and the old lock-keeper’s cottage used to be a picturesque object; there was perhaps a back wayto Sandford Manor House, occupied first by Nell Gwynn, later by Addison, which gallants and savants used in turn. The remains of the little old dwelling stand in the yard of the Gas Company, to the right of the railway, and accessible from King’s Road at Stanley Bridge; but they are rather a deplorable relic of two popular historic figures, and any day may see them swept away. There are some survivals which even the keenest antiquarian must feel had better be graciously obliterated if they cannot be restored to dignity. Addison’s description of his home as Sandys’ End, written in 1708, scarcely prepares us for the desolation of its present-day appearance.Returning eastward, along Cheyne Walk, we naturally turn up Beaufort Street, and try to realise, while the tram screams at us from the middle of the road, that Sir Thomas More’s fair house and gardens lay here on either hand. The Clock-house entry to the Moravian burial-ground is perhaps the original north-west corner of these grounds; on the east they stretch to Danvers Street. Here and there are still to be found pieces of wall which show the unmistakable nuggets of Tudor brickwork; and I once saw the surprising spectacle of a correctly attired clergyman astride a twelve-foot wall at the back of the old Pheasantry, trying to detach a brick as a memento of his visit to the Chancellor’s domain. I regret that I failed to observe his descent, but I met him later ruefully amused and very dirty; and he had to confess that the sixteenth-century builders had been too clever for him, and he had torn his hands and his clothes for no result. But the Chancellor’s motto, “Serve God and be merrie,” was certainly his also; and the fact that he had not been able to detach one brick seemed to convince him of its undoubted Tudor-ness!Those who would read of “the Greatest House in Chelsea,” and Sir Thomas More’s life there, should get Mr, Randall Davies’ recently published book and study its complete record; here we can only briefly relate how after More’s execution it was granted to the Marquis of Winchester, inherited by Lady Dacre, bequeathed by her to Lord Burleigh, and later occupied by Sir Arthur Gorges, theDukes of Buckingham, the Dukes of Beaufort, and finally was bought and pulled down by Sir Hans Sloane, who seems to have had a mania for demolishing historic great houses. Perhaps as a physician his sanitary instincts were more alert than his feelings of sentiment.There is just one corner of Beaufort Street where a realisation of the past may really be achieved in a very delightful and unexpected manner. Turn in at the iron gateway to Argyle Mansions (at the right-hand side of the street, where the tramlines end and the King’s Road crosses), and you will find yourself in an undreamed of survival of a part of the Chancellor’s garden. You will find some old trees and a mulberry-bush, and some turf, that is Chelsea, not London, sward; you will be hard to please or to interest if you cannot picture a garden scene here: Sir Thomas with his arm about his “Meg’s” shoulder—Erasmus reading in the shade—perhaps the King’s Majesty himself, swaggering condescendingly, and as yet uncrossed in his desires and uncontradicted in his supremacy.It is but a scrap of green, but it is genuine Chelsea history—far more so than the intrusive Crosby Hall, which hunches its shoulder to the garden a few hundred yards further on and whose connection with Sir Thomas is remote and with Chelsea is nil.Danvers Street with its tablet, “This is Danvers Street, begun in ye year 1696 by Benjamin Stallwood,” commemorates the older Danvers House, home of the versatile Sir John Danvers, a courtier, a regicide, and then a courtier again as the whirligig of time carried him along. His wife was the pious and beautiful Lady Herbert, mother by her first marriage of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and of George Herbert, the sweet singer; the Herbert family was constant at church, and it is pleasant to think that some of the poet’s “Church Porch” thoughts may have come to him in the calm seclusion of the Old Church. Lord Wharton, who later lived at Danvers House and was the author of the famous Whig song “Lillibulero” to which Purcell wrote the music, tried to introduce the silk industry into Chelsea, for the employment of the French Huguenots who had a colony hereabouts. Two thousand mulberrytrees were planted along the north of King’s Road, on the Elm Park estate, and in other large gardens, but unluckily a mulberry was chosen which did not approve itself to English silkworms, and after a specimen petticoat had been presented to Queen Caroline, we hear no more of the venture.But this doubtless accounts for the many odd-corner mulberry trees in our various back-gardens: Queen Elizabeth has been associated with several of them, and without hesitation we believe that she planted the Rectory garden tree—but for the rest, we credit Lord Wharton.A little intricate turn, opposite the new County School buildings, into Glebe Place brings us, at the south-east corner, to Henry VIII.’s Hunting Lodge, a tiny dwelling, with beautiful fish-scale tiling, and so narrow a doorway that our ordinary conception of King Hal’s figure seems to give the lie to this tradition. But Henry was doubtless of slenderer build when he came to shoot bernagle on the riverside, and incidentally to court Mistress Jane Seymour; it is worth asking the present occupier of the little house for permission to see the ladder stairway to the floor above. Again we are amazed to think how Henry ever mounted it; the Lodge, as it is called still, must have been very convenient in old days to that Tudor Lane which divided Upper Cheyne Row and ran straight to the Thames side, where in the reeds of the Battersea shore wild geese were plentiful.The gardens at the back of the Cheyne Walk houses east of Oakley Street are all hallowed ground, for here without a doubt stretched the lawns and glades of the royal pleasaunce, where “Katheryn the Queene” waited so anxiously for the Lord High Admiral—her fourth husband, it is true, but her first love; where she bade him play with romance, at the little gate in the fields, in the letter which he told her not to write but which she could not resist writing.Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston.HENRY VIII.’S HUNTING LODGE.p.60]Presently, Elizabeth the hoyden was romping and flirting with her stepfather in these very precincts, and poor Queen Katharine was sadly disillusioned and crept away to Sudeley to die. Anne of Cleves may have paced here in sedate Dutch fashion, debating whether she should invite her whilom husband to tea, which she certainly did and found it quite entertainment enough. Lady Jane Grey visited here, and as Guildford Dudley lived hard by, perhaps conducted her priggish courtship under these very trees. By-and-by Sir Hans Sloane is wheeled up in his invalid chair and matures his practical plans for breaking up the estate and sending a tide of new building over Chelsea.Afterwards, when each house had its individual garden, the company that flocked to Cheyne Walk was, in Georgian times, scarcely less distinguished, and in our own day no less interesting: some magnet quality in the very earth surely brings those who are dear and delightful to rest in Chelsea by the river?NOTESCHAPTER VIIICarlyle’s and Rossetti’s monuments—Paradise Row as it used to be—Hortense de Mazarin—Whistler’s White House and the Victoria Hospital—The Physick Garden—Swan Walk and Doggett’s race for the “Coat and Badge”—The Royal Hospital—Poor, pretty Nelly’s pleasure house—The Chapel—The Hall—An American offer—A French Eagle—Walpole House and a Queen at dinner—Ranelagh and its Rotunda—The Pensioners’ Gardens.IN the Embankment Gardens, facing Cheyne Row and Queen’s House respectively, are the statue of Carlyle by Boehm and the Drinking Fountain Memorial to Rossetti, with a portrait in relief by his friend, Ford Madox Brown. Both are excellent likenesses, though Carlyle’s is a peaceful presentment, and Rossetti’s mournful and rather repellent.Passing through the gardens, I have often been reminded of the Greek painter and the birds who pecked at his grapes, for the children often stop to finger the pile of books under Carlyle’s chair. “They’m real books, ain’t they, missus, wat the old genelman wrote?” Thus we talk of Carlyle still, a stone’s throw from his study windows. It is interesting to know that the annual number of visitors to the Carlyle House increases steadily, and the custodian assures us that the knowledge of his works—intelligent, not merely curious—increases also, though among Colonials and Americans he is better known than among ordinary English people. And for “Colonials” read Scotch, or Scotch extracted.Leaving Cheyne Walk behind and walking eastward, we pass blocks of new flats and modern houses where once was Queen’s Road and beautiful Paradise Row—a terrace of houses that three hundred years ago was a centre of lifeand fashion. Here lived Hortense Duchesse de Mazarin, who dared not marry Charles II. in his days of exile, but flirted with him extensively later, and accepted a pension from him of £4,000 a year, which she spent on riotous entertainments rather than on paying her just rates and debts. Charles, Duke of St. Albans, son of Nell Gwynn and the Merry Monarch, lived here, and so did Mary Astell, the Suffragette of her times, whose advanced views found little favour with the wits at the Don Saltero or the fashionables of the Court, though serious John Evelyn sees fit to commend her. Dukes and earls and “smart” bishops jostled each other in Paradise Row in the gay Stuart days, then artists, physicians, scientists, and schoolmasters succeeded to the fine old houses with their stately forecourts, and Elizabeth Fry established her “School of Discipline” for homeless and vagabond girls at the corner in 1828. Finally, in 1908 it was swept away, and re-created to meet modern requirements as Royal Hospital Road.Tite Street turns off towards the river, and holds two buildings of note: Mr. Whistler’s White House, which looks as if it had strayed out of its way from Constantinople, and the Victoria Hospital for Children, a splendid new building, embracing, as its nucleus, Gough House, built by the Earl of Carberry in Charles II.’s time. Sir Richard Gough, who succeeded the Earl, gave it its name. The hospital is an unspeakable boon to the poor of the district; it has seventy beds, and a very extensive out-patients’ department, as well as a convalescent home at Broadstairs. Visitors can visit it daily between 2 and 4 p.m., and all parents must owe it their gratitude for its devotion to the cause of all children in illness.The Physick Garden entrance faces Swan Walk, and a ring at the resounding bell in the wall will bring an answering gardener, who will admit the inquiring visitor; but it is generally understood that such visits are made for reasons of botanical or scientific research.There is no fee, but visitors sign their names in the register, and, if I am not mistaken, enter the object of their special study. The garden, presented by Sir Hans Sloane to the Apothecaries Company, is mainly designed for the use and assistance of students of medicine and botany. All the plants grown in it have their medicinal value. Only one of the Lebanon cedars planted in 1683 remains.Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.SIR HANS SLOANE.p.66]Linnæus, Sir Joseph Banks, Mrs. Elizabeth Blackwell (the “better horse” of the luckless Alexander Blackwell, who dwelt in Swan Walk and would never have written hisHerbalwithout “the grey mare’s” clever assistance), Philip Miller, of theGardeners’ Dictionary, all loved the Physick Garden, and used it as Sir Hans intended.The old houses in Swan Walk—four or five in number—are all beautiful in their stately proportions and mellow colouring.The “Old Swan Inn,” a hostel for country junketings in Pepys’s time, stood on the waterside till the Embankment came to Chelsea. It was the goal for Doggett’s watermen’s race, still rowed on August 1 in commemoration of the Protestant Succession. This year, 1914, it will celebrate its 200th anniversary. The “Coat and Badge” (the latter the silver token of the White Horse of Hanover) were annually held by the victor, and a couple of guineas accrued to him as well from the loyal Irish Orangemen’s pockets. Wentworth House, on the Embankment, now occupies the site, and the “Old Paradise Wharf and Stairs” were just beyond.And now, whether we walk by the Embankment or by the parallel road, we reach the grounds of the Royal Hospital—that most perfect work of Sir Christopher Wren, which, oddly enough, Chelsea people still persist in calling “Controversy College,” Archbishop Laud’s name for it when James I. tried to coax it into a sort of theological academy. If you ask your way to the Royal Hospital, you will invariably be corrected, and “the College” substituted, and why the name remains is a Chelsea mystery.Nell Gwynn’s part in its foundation as an asylum for old soldiers may be a myth, but is as certain to live as the Hospital to stand. “What is this? King Charles’s Hospital?” and its pretty rejoinder, “And Nelly’s pleasure house,” was almost the most popular quotation of our Chelsea Pageant in June 1908.Every 29th of May King Charles’s statue is wreathed with oak, and the pensioners get double rations of beef and plum pudding, and if you fall into conversation with one of the red-coated old soldiers in the hospital gardens, where they love to saunter and watch the nursemaids and the children and the emancipated terriers of a morning, you will find that he is well up in the legend of “poor, pretty Nelly,” and proud of his connection with an institution which is in no sense a charity.It is impossible here to describe all that is to be seen at Chelsea Hospital, but there is no difficulty in going over it—either with a guide from the secretary’s office on application, or informally by presenting oneself at service at the Chapel on Sundays (11 a.m. and 6.30 p.m.) and glancing into the hall and the kitchens as one passes out through the beautiful colonnade, which gives upon the garden side. The old pensioners are courteous to visitors and love to show all they can. The great staircases leading to the rooms above are worth noticing, and so are the doorways, and the wonderful balance and proportion of the long lines of windows. Restrictions are few, and one is struck by the ease and freedom of the place, as compared with similar institutions in other countries.In the chapel, the wonderful collection of flags taken in action is worth studying, with the official handbook; perhaps as interesting a study is that of the faces and expressions of the ranks of old soldiers as they sit in orderly rows. The service is not long, though when the preacher allows himself an extra five minutes’ law, I have seen a hand steal tentatively to a coat-pocket, and a before-dinner pipe stealthily prepared under shelter of the pew ledge.The Communion plate—silver-gilt and presented by James I. to his theologians—is magnificent. An American visitor once offered the existing chaplain an exact replica of all the articles, and a thousand pounds for himself, if he would permit the set to be copied, and “no questions asked.” The transatlantic enthusiast went away with a very poor idea of English business capacity.In the hall, which is now the pensioners’ recreationroom, there are numberless objects of interest. We can only instance the case of unclaimed medals, and the “Black Jack” leather kegs used in the canteen of the Army in Flanders in Marlborough’s campaigns.In the hall the Duke of Wellington’s coffin lay in state November 1852, and during the crowd and excitement of the two days’ ceremony, one of the French Eagles taken at Waterloo was stolen—re-captured, it is supposed, by French visitors.The sittings in the chapel are allotted to the officers and staff of the hospital (note theWhitster’sPew, where sits the head of the laundry), but visitors can generally find accommodation if they present themselves at the Sunday services.Walpole House, now the Infirmary, was once the residence of the great Whig Minister, and in his garden George II. and Caroline the Illustrious, when Prince and Princess of Wales, sometimes sat down to dinner, while Chelsea people stared at them through the adjacent railings. A special permission is necessary to view the Infirmary.One other Royal remembrance, and I must close this inadequate account of the Royal Hospital treasures. There is a fine bust of Queen Victoria executed especially for the hall, and paid for by every man in the hospital giving his pay for one day—that day being the great Jubilee of 1887. It shows the great Queen at her noblest and best, as her soldiers love to remember her.East of the hospital lie Ranelagh Gardens, beautiful in their placid old age, and reminiscent in their glades and winding walks of a gay and frivolous past. The huge Rotunda, where nearly three thousand persons could circulate with ease, went out of fashion about 1750. Balloon ascents and fireworks ceased to attract, and in 1804 the big building was pulled down, and the gardens incorporated in the hospital grounds.To-day the pensioners’ little plots of garden, to the north of Ranelagh, are fuller of interest than this flimsy spectre of past gaiety. Some of the old men are ingenious gardeners; each one expresses himself in his allotted space,and builds a rockery, an arbour, or a fountain as his fancy directs, and will gladly sell a nosegay of old-fashioned flowers to a passing stranger.Truly Nell Gwynn and Sir Christopher Wren have given the old soldiers a goodly heritage in the Royal Hospital.NOTESL’ENVOIAND SO WE come to the boundary of Chelsea on the east, for at Sloane Square (and strictly speaking in a corner house, half of which stands in the parish and half outside) the “bounds” used to be “beaten,” and a young boy received a birching which was supposed to write the exact line of parish demarcation on his memory, for transmission to the next generation. I suppose he was adequately rewarded, and I never heard that the assault was made a cause for complaint. Whether a Chelsea boy of to-day would still suffer it, is questionable.Old Chelsea, with its queer ways and its originality in thought and action, is fading day by day. The Bun-house has gone from Union Street, and Box Farm from King’s Road. Who thinks of the “callous murder of an Oriental” when they cut through Turk’s Row? Even the Duke of York’s School, founded in 1801, has carried its little “sons of the brave” off to Dover, where we hope they still say, as they ought, “God bless the Regent and the Duke of York!” but where the object-lesson of the Royal Hospital will not be a part of their education, as it was in Chelsea.And with these changes thick and fast upon us, can you, O stranger, cousin from America, or brother from Greater Britain overseas, wonder that we of the old village by the river cling fast to our legends and traditions of the past, setting them, childish as some may deem them, in that Light of Romance “that never was on sea or land.” How it gilds the simplest deed, lights up the dimmest corner; how it shows certain figures of the past, more real to us than any neighbours of to-day!Here in a Chelsea backwater where the children have spread a “grotto,” and cry for your “remembrance” of the Holy Sepulchre that they symbolise so unwitting, we too may realise that we have been on pilgrimage back to Tudor days, and the stately times of great Elizabeth, and the Court of merry Charles.And if the Road-book has served you, as an afternoon’s guide, to make you love and see Chelsea, then, by my halidom! two of us are well pleased!PERCY T. HARRIS,M.P.S.Silver Medallist in Chemistry & PhysicsDISPENSING STORE CHEMIST183a, King’s Road, ChelseaTel.: 3029 Western.All Prescriptions and Medicines Skilfully prepared from materials of the best quality only. Absolute accuracy of detail, early delivery, and moderate charges characterise this old-established but up-to-date business, which affords a choice of the largest Stock of Chemists’ Sundries, Photographic Materials, and Patent Medicines in Chelsea.RODWELL BROS.forAFTERNOON TEAS235 King’s Road, ChelseaBAKERS, CONFECTIONERSAND CATERERS, ETC.All Orders carried out under Personal SupervisionFOR PARTICULARS OF CHARACTERISTICTO BUY OR RENT, APPLYWHEELERBros.Chartered Surveyors and Auctioneers1, SYDNEY STREET, FULHAM RD.,CHELSEATelephone: Kensington 1687Tuberculin DispensaryThe Old Chelsea Dispensary has been reopened by the Tuberculin Dispensary League, and Patients are treated at 1, Manor Street, Chelsea (next to the Town Hall). Letters of recommendation are unnecessary.Subscriptions will be gratefully received by the Hon. Treasurer,RANDALL DAVIES,Esq.,1, CHEYNE GARDENS, CHELSEA,or by the London & South Western Bank, 140, King’s Road, S.W.ESTABLISHED AT COOK’S GROUND, CHELSEA, OVER 100 YEARSThe Farm, being but a few yards away from Carlyle’s House in Cheyne Row, two goats were kept at it specially to supply him with milk.TELEPHONE:WESTERN1782WRIGHT’S DAIRYChief Officeand Dairies:38, 44, 46, 48, Church Street,CHELSEA.Branch Offices: 69, KING’S ROAD, CHELSEA,and3, WESTBOURNE STREET, SLOANE SQUARE.DAIRY FARMS:FARINGDON, BERKS :: TETBURY, GLOS.Under Medical, Veterinary, and Sanitary Inspection.SPECIALITY—Nursery Milk for Infants & InvalidsHAS SUPPLIED THE CHEYNE HOSPITAL FOR CHILDREN FOR OVER THIRTY-FIVE YEARS.“The Good Intent”Restaurant and Tea Rooms12, Vale Terrace, King’s Road, ChelseaLunches(2 courses), 12.30 to 2 p.m.1/3Teas----6d.Dinners(3 courses), 6.45 to 9 p.m.1/6“‘The Good Intent’ did not indeed require that last resort of the apologist—to be credited with good intentions; and I used sometimes to think that here was a possible successor to the beloved Don Saltero who used to gather together the Chelsea celebrities for the purpose of refreshing their wits and their bodies.”From “The Architectural Review,” November, 1912The...Animals’ Hospital & Institute75, KINNERTON STREET,WILTON PLACE, S.W.Telephone 317 Victoria.Established 1888.TO PROVIDE TREATMENTFOR SUFFERING ANIMALSAll information will be given on application to—WALTER BETTS,Secretary.FOOTNOTE:[1]See Mr. Randall Davies’Greatest House in Chelsea.
CHAPTER VICheyne Walk—The King’s Road and the Queen’s—George Eliot—Dr. Dominiceti’s baths—A French author’s cleverness—“The Yorkshire Grey”—Cecil Lawson’s pictures—Rossetti, Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Haweis, and their guests—The Don Saltero—“The Magpie”—Remains of Shrewsbury House and Mary Queen of Scots—The Children’s Hospital—Crosby Hall, Lindsey House, Turner’s House—The way between the Pales.CHEYNE WALK is beautiful at all seasons and under all aspects; each time that I regard it from a fresh point, or return to it after a temporary absence, I think, “Never has it looked so lovely before!”But for the purposes of historical interest it is well to walk it from end to end, or rather, to loiter in it, and, for choice, in early autumn, when the sunshine is as mellow as the tones of the old brick, and the trees and creepers are not too heavily green to obscure its gracious lines.So, if you will see this riverside row of storied houses aright, turn with me down Flood Street—when you leave your motor-bus at the Town Hall—and begin at the beginning of the Walk that will lead you through the drama, tragic and comic, of at least five centuries.Until a few years ago the two main thoroughfares from London to Chelsea were the King’s Road and the Queen’s Road. In that their juxtaposition recalled an interesting tradition, I am sorry that Queen’s Road has lately been altered to Royal Hospital Road.For in the days of Charles II. the King had a private road for his coach through the fields to Chelsea, where dwelt Mistress Elinor Gwynn (at Sandford Manor when she received the King’s visits, but, report says, in a squalidlittle riverside hovel, not far from Chelsea Barracks, in her previous chrysalis stage), and Queen Catharine of Braganza, who also visited at Chelsea, paying less lively duty calls, as wives must, objected to using her husband’s route lest a domestic matter, which she preferred to ignore, should be forced on her attention.So the King came his road and the Queen hers, following parallel paths, and poor, stupid Catharine tried to keep her eyes shut to her consort’s “merry” ways. Had she tried to make her own a little less stiff, bigoted, and unintelligent, she might have been happier, for she was young and pretty enough to charm Charles at first; her determined adherence to Portuguese manners, dress, and language was as much to blame for Charles’s neglect, as his own inconstant nature.The first two houses in Cheyne Walk are modern, but then begins the row of beautiful mansions which forms the Walk, as distinguished from the previous frontage of great buildings standing detached, in the gardens of the Manor House. These buildings were pulled down and the gardens surrendered to the builders in 1717, and housebuilding on the riverside began apace. In No. 4 George Eliot (Mrs. Cross) lived for a few weeks only, and died from the result of a chill in 1880, just as she had begun to find pleasure in her beautiful view. At No. 5 James Camden Nield lived a miser’s life, and left a fortune of half a million pounds to Queen Victoria, whose Uncle Leopold congratulates her in one of his letters “on having a little money of her own” in her early married life. At No. 6 Dr. Dominiceti had his famous medicinal baths, a wonder-working quackery of the eighteenth century of which in heated argument Dr. Johnson said to an opponent of differing views:“Well, sir, go to Dominiceti and get fumigated, and be sure that the steam be directed to thy head, for that is the peccant part!”Between No. 6 and Manor Street some modern houses have been interpolated. No. 11, I think, is the number which has been omitted from the sequence in numbering them, and a clever French novelist has taken advantageof this peculiarity to lay the scene of his story in the nonexistent house, which he can consequently describe with all the exuberance of his fancy. I have met French visitors walking round this end of Cheyne Walk in great perplexity trying to locate their author’s plot: the fact that larger buildings took the place of humbler ones, and that the numbers beyond could not be disturbed, account for the omission.Some thirty years ago, when the old houses were demolished, a considerable portion of an underground passage was laid bare to the right of Manor Street. It was obviously a section of that subterranean passage which connected the Chelsea Palace with Kensington. I crept down it for the space of a yard or two, and rejoiced to think that the Princess Elizabeth might have done the same, in one of those romping games with her stepfather, the Lord High Admiral Seymour, which “Katheryn the Queene” found too hoydenish for the young lady’s age and dignity. Nos. 13 and 14, formerly one house, were the well-known inn “The Yorkshire Grey,” with its own stairs at the riverside, dear to country visitors from the north of England.No. 15, now in the possession of Lord Courtney of Penwith, was in the seventies the home of the artist family of William Lawson. Cecil Lawson’s pictures of Chelsea before the Embankment was built, were exhibited in a one-man show at Burlington House a few years back, and gave an exquisite idea of the waterside in its rural days, Queen’s House, No. 16, was once called Tudor House, and its basement is said to contain remains of the original Tudor workmanship of Henry VIII.’s Palace. Whether this is so or not, it is unquestionably on the site of some of the old Manor House buildings; the name was changed by the Rev. H. R. Haweis, who favoured the idea that many Queens—Katharine Parr, Elizabeth, Anne of Cleves, Catharine of Braganza—must have occupied the position, though not the actual mansion.Mr. Haweis’ tenancy followed on that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who lived here from 1863 to 1882. William Rossetti, George Meredith, Algernon Swinburne, andothers of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood joined at first in theménage; then came Dante Rossetti’s short and sad married life, and later he lived secluded, spending much of his time in his garden at the back, where he tried to acclimatise strange animals, of whose wild ways exaggerated reports were spread abroad, perhaps to ensure the poet’s privacy.Of Rossetti’s later life, I who write can speak as an eye-witness, for in 1878 we went to live next door, at No. 17, and found him a quiet, very retiring, but most polite and obliging neighbour. As our gardens at the back adjoined we often saw him pacing under his trees dressed in an old brown dressing-gown like a friar’s habit. He went nowhere and received little company. Once we had lost a pet tortoise, which came up from under the dividing wall on Mr. Rossetti’s side of the boundary: the poet lifted it gently back and dropped it over without a word, then scurried away indoors, lest we might be moved to overwhelm him with thanks. He died while at Margate for his health, and I remember we had hardly heard the news, when we saw people (certainly unauthorised) removing all sorts of parcels and pieces of furniture from the house to a cab, which was loaded outside and in, and driven rapidly away.When his effects came to be examined much of value had disappeared, but who were the culprits was never known.Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Haweis’ tenancy of Queen’s House was very different. They entertained half London at their big crushes, which always had a character and a “go” which made them eagerly sought after and vastly amusing. Nearly always the party was built round some lion of the literary or scientific world. Ernest Renan and Oliver Wendell Holmes happen to be two guests whom I particularly recall. Renan was big, overblown, with the rolling gait and merry, round face of Southern France: Oliver Wendell Holmes was tiny, silver-haired, fragile as a bright-eyed little field mouse. Mr. Haweis, who did not know what shyness meant, exploited his visitors with the utmost vivacity and good nature; he had the socialinstinct in a high degree, and enjoyed his own parties so heartily that few of his guests could fail to do the same.Nos. 17 and 18 were in 1718 the celebrated Don Saltero Museum and Coffee-house, removed from Danvers Street to this more eligible situation; the old site is now occupied by the baker’s shop, 77, Cheyne Walk. “James Salter, the coffee man,” was at one time valet to Sir Hans Sloane, and may have formed the idea of his museum from pickings, let us hope discarded, by this eminent collector. He was an Irishman who could mix punch, and draw teeth, play a little on the fiddle, and keep his patrons amused, though his wonderful curios read like simple rubbish to-day, and strongly remind us of the bogus collections which used to be a sideshow at bazaars in the country. Still, “Forget me not at Salter’s, in thy next bowl!” said the wits, and a galaxy of wonderful men must have met at “the Don’s” of an afternoon as Richard Steele describes it in theTatler. The famous collection was sold in 1799, and the coffee-house became a public-house; in 1867 it was divided into two private residences.The houses Nos. 19 to 26 were built about sixty years later than those we have been considering, when the last part of the Manor frontage was taken down; the difference in style is easy to trace—there is a uniformity of style, which has evidently been aimed at, and the magnificent ironwork of the earlier date is wanting.At No. 24 there are vaults which undoubtedly date from Tudor times, and tradition says that the gnarled old wisteria embracing No. 20 is a creeper of the Manor House garden. All these houses have fine panelling, staircases and fireplaces, and handrails—some of earlier fashion than the buildings themselves, which points at their adaptation from previous mansions.Modern houses intervene in the curve where stood Winchester House, the Bishop’s Palace: at No. 27 Mr. and Mrs. Bram Stoker lived, in the palmy days of the Lyceum Theatre under Sir Henry Irving’s management, and dispensed delightful Irish hospitality.Across Oakley Street, we come to a lately restored house which bears the old sign of the Magpie and Stump. The “Magpie Inn,” one of the oldest houses in Chelsea, was a rendezvous for the supporters of the Stuart cause in 1715 and 1745; they could slip away by water if in danger of discovery. Next come, alas! some lamentable gaps, interspersed with a few odd walls and gables still remaining, parts of old Shrewsbury House, where Mary Queen of Scots was held in custody by the Earl of Shrewsbury. The form of the house cannot be traced, though an old print gives it as a hollow square standing back from the present roadway; it was broken up in 1813, but without doubt parts of it have been built into the present small houses.By the by, the Earl of Shrewsbury who had charge of Queen Mary was also fourth husband of the notorious Bess of Hardwick, and Queen Elizabeth is reported to have pitied him for having such intimate acquaintance with “two she devils.”No. 48 was once a Quakers’ Meeting House. The Hospital for Incurable Children, of which Queen Alexandra is President, nobly fills the site of some very old, tall houses, in one of which Holman Hunt painted his “Light of the World”; the old vine was preserved, and still bears small, sweet grapes in a hot season; the children’s voices sound merrily as you pass their open windows, and the saddest inmates are those who, having been sent here as incurable, are told that they are nearly healed and must shortly return to their homes.Beyond Lombards’ Row, already noticed, where the old Archway House stood to shelter Jacobite plotters, are some new houses which are surely an anachronism in our Queen Anne Walk (the original dates hereabouts are 1710-11), but the Copper Door is a fine piece of work, and a splendid reflector of sunshine.Across Danvers Street lies the waste land surrounding the lately erected Crosby Hall, of which I do not suffer myself to write, so keenly do I resent its importation into the hallowed precincts of Sir Thomas More’s whilom garden. Those who wish to inspect it can do so by inquiring for the custodian and the keys at More’s Gardens Mansions (entrance corner of Beaufort Street).Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.LINDSEY HOUSE.p.52]Crossing Beaufort Street, all the houses are gracious and of good report, and the entire proportions of Lindsey House can be made out from the pavement on the riverside, sub-divided as it now is into five or six different dwellings, and at one gabled end slightly extended.This was the great house of Sir Theodore de Mayerne, Court Physician, 1639; of Robert, Earl of Lindsey, Lord High Chamberlain, 1671; of Count Zinzendorf, the Moravian Leader, 1750: it occupied a part of the grounds of Beaufort House, and rose to importance as that great mansion declined. The Moravian fraternity had their colony and chapel and burying-ground behind Millman Street, where members of their persuasion were buried upright, under small square headstones, with the object, tradition says, of rising more quickly at the General Resurrection than other people. Finally, after passing many picturesque houses and some squalid modern interpolations, we come to Turner’s house, with the balcony where he watched the sunrise, and with the south-west window where he died with the sunset flooding his face in 1851.Cheyne Walk ends at World’s End Passage, “the way between the Pales,” as the map of 1717 has it, which led across the fields and marshes to Kensington.NOTES
Cheyne Walk—The King’s Road and the Queen’s—George Eliot—Dr. Dominiceti’s baths—A French author’s cleverness—“The Yorkshire Grey”—Cecil Lawson’s pictures—Rossetti, Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Haweis, and their guests—The Don Saltero—“The Magpie”—Remains of Shrewsbury House and Mary Queen of Scots—The Children’s Hospital—Crosby Hall, Lindsey House, Turner’s House—The way between the Pales.
CHEYNE WALK is beautiful at all seasons and under all aspects; each time that I regard it from a fresh point, or return to it after a temporary absence, I think, “Never has it looked so lovely before!”
But for the purposes of historical interest it is well to walk it from end to end, or rather, to loiter in it, and, for choice, in early autumn, when the sunshine is as mellow as the tones of the old brick, and the trees and creepers are not too heavily green to obscure its gracious lines.
So, if you will see this riverside row of storied houses aright, turn with me down Flood Street—when you leave your motor-bus at the Town Hall—and begin at the beginning of the Walk that will lead you through the drama, tragic and comic, of at least five centuries.
Until a few years ago the two main thoroughfares from London to Chelsea were the King’s Road and the Queen’s Road. In that their juxtaposition recalled an interesting tradition, I am sorry that Queen’s Road has lately been altered to Royal Hospital Road.
For in the days of Charles II. the King had a private road for his coach through the fields to Chelsea, where dwelt Mistress Elinor Gwynn (at Sandford Manor when she received the King’s visits, but, report says, in a squalidlittle riverside hovel, not far from Chelsea Barracks, in her previous chrysalis stage), and Queen Catharine of Braganza, who also visited at Chelsea, paying less lively duty calls, as wives must, objected to using her husband’s route lest a domestic matter, which she preferred to ignore, should be forced on her attention.
So the King came his road and the Queen hers, following parallel paths, and poor, stupid Catharine tried to keep her eyes shut to her consort’s “merry” ways. Had she tried to make her own a little less stiff, bigoted, and unintelligent, she might have been happier, for she was young and pretty enough to charm Charles at first; her determined adherence to Portuguese manners, dress, and language was as much to blame for Charles’s neglect, as his own inconstant nature.
The first two houses in Cheyne Walk are modern, but then begins the row of beautiful mansions which forms the Walk, as distinguished from the previous frontage of great buildings standing detached, in the gardens of the Manor House. These buildings were pulled down and the gardens surrendered to the builders in 1717, and housebuilding on the riverside began apace. In No. 4 George Eliot (Mrs. Cross) lived for a few weeks only, and died from the result of a chill in 1880, just as she had begun to find pleasure in her beautiful view. At No. 5 James Camden Nield lived a miser’s life, and left a fortune of half a million pounds to Queen Victoria, whose Uncle Leopold congratulates her in one of his letters “on having a little money of her own” in her early married life. At No. 6 Dr. Dominiceti had his famous medicinal baths, a wonder-working quackery of the eighteenth century of which in heated argument Dr. Johnson said to an opponent of differing views:
“Well, sir, go to Dominiceti and get fumigated, and be sure that the steam be directed to thy head, for that is the peccant part!”
Between No. 6 and Manor Street some modern houses have been interpolated. No. 11, I think, is the number which has been omitted from the sequence in numbering them, and a clever French novelist has taken advantageof this peculiarity to lay the scene of his story in the nonexistent house, which he can consequently describe with all the exuberance of his fancy. I have met French visitors walking round this end of Cheyne Walk in great perplexity trying to locate their author’s plot: the fact that larger buildings took the place of humbler ones, and that the numbers beyond could not be disturbed, account for the omission.
Some thirty years ago, when the old houses were demolished, a considerable portion of an underground passage was laid bare to the right of Manor Street. It was obviously a section of that subterranean passage which connected the Chelsea Palace with Kensington. I crept down it for the space of a yard or two, and rejoiced to think that the Princess Elizabeth might have done the same, in one of those romping games with her stepfather, the Lord High Admiral Seymour, which “Katheryn the Queene” found too hoydenish for the young lady’s age and dignity. Nos. 13 and 14, formerly one house, were the well-known inn “The Yorkshire Grey,” with its own stairs at the riverside, dear to country visitors from the north of England.
No. 15, now in the possession of Lord Courtney of Penwith, was in the seventies the home of the artist family of William Lawson. Cecil Lawson’s pictures of Chelsea before the Embankment was built, were exhibited in a one-man show at Burlington House a few years back, and gave an exquisite idea of the waterside in its rural days, Queen’s House, No. 16, was once called Tudor House, and its basement is said to contain remains of the original Tudor workmanship of Henry VIII.’s Palace. Whether this is so or not, it is unquestionably on the site of some of the old Manor House buildings; the name was changed by the Rev. H. R. Haweis, who favoured the idea that many Queens—Katharine Parr, Elizabeth, Anne of Cleves, Catharine of Braganza—must have occupied the position, though not the actual mansion.
Mr. Haweis’ tenancy followed on that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who lived here from 1863 to 1882. William Rossetti, George Meredith, Algernon Swinburne, andothers of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood joined at first in theménage; then came Dante Rossetti’s short and sad married life, and later he lived secluded, spending much of his time in his garden at the back, where he tried to acclimatise strange animals, of whose wild ways exaggerated reports were spread abroad, perhaps to ensure the poet’s privacy.
Of Rossetti’s later life, I who write can speak as an eye-witness, for in 1878 we went to live next door, at No. 17, and found him a quiet, very retiring, but most polite and obliging neighbour. As our gardens at the back adjoined we often saw him pacing under his trees dressed in an old brown dressing-gown like a friar’s habit. He went nowhere and received little company. Once we had lost a pet tortoise, which came up from under the dividing wall on Mr. Rossetti’s side of the boundary: the poet lifted it gently back and dropped it over without a word, then scurried away indoors, lest we might be moved to overwhelm him with thanks. He died while at Margate for his health, and I remember we had hardly heard the news, when we saw people (certainly unauthorised) removing all sorts of parcels and pieces of furniture from the house to a cab, which was loaded outside and in, and driven rapidly away.
When his effects came to be examined much of value had disappeared, but who were the culprits was never known.
Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Haweis’ tenancy of Queen’s House was very different. They entertained half London at their big crushes, which always had a character and a “go” which made them eagerly sought after and vastly amusing. Nearly always the party was built round some lion of the literary or scientific world. Ernest Renan and Oliver Wendell Holmes happen to be two guests whom I particularly recall. Renan was big, overblown, with the rolling gait and merry, round face of Southern France: Oliver Wendell Holmes was tiny, silver-haired, fragile as a bright-eyed little field mouse. Mr. Haweis, who did not know what shyness meant, exploited his visitors with the utmost vivacity and good nature; he had the socialinstinct in a high degree, and enjoyed his own parties so heartily that few of his guests could fail to do the same.
Nos. 17 and 18 were in 1718 the celebrated Don Saltero Museum and Coffee-house, removed from Danvers Street to this more eligible situation; the old site is now occupied by the baker’s shop, 77, Cheyne Walk. “James Salter, the coffee man,” was at one time valet to Sir Hans Sloane, and may have formed the idea of his museum from pickings, let us hope discarded, by this eminent collector. He was an Irishman who could mix punch, and draw teeth, play a little on the fiddle, and keep his patrons amused, though his wonderful curios read like simple rubbish to-day, and strongly remind us of the bogus collections which used to be a sideshow at bazaars in the country. Still, “Forget me not at Salter’s, in thy next bowl!” said the wits, and a galaxy of wonderful men must have met at “the Don’s” of an afternoon as Richard Steele describes it in theTatler. The famous collection was sold in 1799, and the coffee-house became a public-house; in 1867 it was divided into two private residences.
The houses Nos. 19 to 26 were built about sixty years later than those we have been considering, when the last part of the Manor frontage was taken down; the difference in style is easy to trace—there is a uniformity of style, which has evidently been aimed at, and the magnificent ironwork of the earlier date is wanting.
At No. 24 there are vaults which undoubtedly date from Tudor times, and tradition says that the gnarled old wisteria embracing No. 20 is a creeper of the Manor House garden. All these houses have fine panelling, staircases and fireplaces, and handrails—some of earlier fashion than the buildings themselves, which points at their adaptation from previous mansions.
Modern houses intervene in the curve where stood Winchester House, the Bishop’s Palace: at No. 27 Mr. and Mrs. Bram Stoker lived, in the palmy days of the Lyceum Theatre under Sir Henry Irving’s management, and dispensed delightful Irish hospitality.
Across Oakley Street, we come to a lately restored house which bears the old sign of the Magpie and Stump. The “Magpie Inn,” one of the oldest houses in Chelsea, was a rendezvous for the supporters of the Stuart cause in 1715 and 1745; they could slip away by water if in danger of discovery. Next come, alas! some lamentable gaps, interspersed with a few odd walls and gables still remaining, parts of old Shrewsbury House, where Mary Queen of Scots was held in custody by the Earl of Shrewsbury. The form of the house cannot be traced, though an old print gives it as a hollow square standing back from the present roadway; it was broken up in 1813, but without doubt parts of it have been built into the present small houses.
By the by, the Earl of Shrewsbury who had charge of Queen Mary was also fourth husband of the notorious Bess of Hardwick, and Queen Elizabeth is reported to have pitied him for having such intimate acquaintance with “two she devils.”
No. 48 was once a Quakers’ Meeting House. The Hospital for Incurable Children, of which Queen Alexandra is President, nobly fills the site of some very old, tall houses, in one of which Holman Hunt painted his “Light of the World”; the old vine was preserved, and still bears small, sweet grapes in a hot season; the children’s voices sound merrily as you pass their open windows, and the saddest inmates are those who, having been sent here as incurable, are told that they are nearly healed and must shortly return to their homes.
Beyond Lombards’ Row, already noticed, where the old Archway House stood to shelter Jacobite plotters, are some new houses which are surely an anachronism in our Queen Anne Walk (the original dates hereabouts are 1710-11), but the Copper Door is a fine piece of work, and a splendid reflector of sunshine.
Across Danvers Street lies the waste land surrounding the lately erected Crosby Hall, of which I do not suffer myself to write, so keenly do I resent its importation into the hallowed precincts of Sir Thomas More’s whilom garden. Those who wish to inspect it can do so by inquiring for the custodian and the keys at More’s Gardens Mansions (entrance corner of Beaufort Street).
Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.LINDSEY HOUSE.p.52]
Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.LINDSEY HOUSE.p.52]
Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.
LINDSEY HOUSE.
p.52]
Crossing Beaufort Street, all the houses are gracious and of good report, and the entire proportions of Lindsey House can be made out from the pavement on the riverside, sub-divided as it now is into five or six different dwellings, and at one gabled end slightly extended.
This was the great house of Sir Theodore de Mayerne, Court Physician, 1639; of Robert, Earl of Lindsey, Lord High Chamberlain, 1671; of Count Zinzendorf, the Moravian Leader, 1750: it occupied a part of the grounds of Beaufort House, and rose to importance as that great mansion declined. The Moravian fraternity had their colony and chapel and burying-ground behind Millman Street, where members of their persuasion were buried upright, under small square headstones, with the object, tradition says, of rising more quickly at the General Resurrection than other people. Finally, after passing many picturesque houses and some squalid modern interpolations, we come to Turner’s house, with the balcony where he watched the sunrise, and with the south-west window where he died with the sunset flooding his face in 1851.
Cheyne Walk ends at World’s End Passage, “the way between the Pales,” as the map of 1717 has it, which led across the fields and marshes to Kensington.
NOTES
CHAPTER VIILots Road—Ashburnham House—Sandford Manor—Beaufort House and a corner of a “fayre garden”—Tudor bricks—Danvers House and the Herberts—Lord Wharton’s scheme of silk production—Henry VIII.’s Hunting Lodge in Glebe Place—The Manor House gardens and those who have walked there.AS WE HAVE reached the western limit of Cheyne Walk and may not be there again, for the uninteresting industrial district which begins here is not likely to tempt us back, we will say a few words about some of the old names that survive, under very altered conditions, and then turn our backs on it.Lots Road, which might easily suggest the dreary desert tramp of the migrating Patriarch, is so called because it is built on the site of four lots of pasture-land belonging to the manor, and the first of the property to be sold. In 1740 this land surrounded Chelsea Farm, the residence of the Methodist Lady Huntingdon, the friend of Whitfield and inventor of a “Persuasion” all her own. Then, in sharp contrast, it became Chelsea Gardens, later opened as Cremorne, and closed in 1875, when its pretensions to fashion had been eclipsed in rowdyism.Further to the north-west lay Ashburnham House, whither Master William Ashburnham was steering on the memorable night when he was nearly submerged in Chelsea Reach: the name has been well preserved in the handsome church and adjacent block of mansions.Chelsea Creek was once a much-used waterway to Kensington, and the old lock-keeper’s cottage used to be a picturesque object; there was perhaps a back wayto Sandford Manor House, occupied first by Nell Gwynn, later by Addison, which gallants and savants used in turn. The remains of the little old dwelling stand in the yard of the Gas Company, to the right of the railway, and accessible from King’s Road at Stanley Bridge; but they are rather a deplorable relic of two popular historic figures, and any day may see them swept away. There are some survivals which even the keenest antiquarian must feel had better be graciously obliterated if they cannot be restored to dignity. Addison’s description of his home as Sandys’ End, written in 1708, scarcely prepares us for the desolation of its present-day appearance.Returning eastward, along Cheyne Walk, we naturally turn up Beaufort Street, and try to realise, while the tram screams at us from the middle of the road, that Sir Thomas More’s fair house and gardens lay here on either hand. The Clock-house entry to the Moravian burial-ground is perhaps the original north-west corner of these grounds; on the east they stretch to Danvers Street. Here and there are still to be found pieces of wall which show the unmistakable nuggets of Tudor brickwork; and I once saw the surprising spectacle of a correctly attired clergyman astride a twelve-foot wall at the back of the old Pheasantry, trying to detach a brick as a memento of his visit to the Chancellor’s domain. I regret that I failed to observe his descent, but I met him later ruefully amused and very dirty; and he had to confess that the sixteenth-century builders had been too clever for him, and he had torn his hands and his clothes for no result. But the Chancellor’s motto, “Serve God and be merrie,” was certainly his also; and the fact that he had not been able to detach one brick seemed to convince him of its undoubted Tudor-ness!Those who would read of “the Greatest House in Chelsea,” and Sir Thomas More’s life there, should get Mr, Randall Davies’ recently published book and study its complete record; here we can only briefly relate how after More’s execution it was granted to the Marquis of Winchester, inherited by Lady Dacre, bequeathed by her to Lord Burleigh, and later occupied by Sir Arthur Gorges, theDukes of Buckingham, the Dukes of Beaufort, and finally was bought and pulled down by Sir Hans Sloane, who seems to have had a mania for demolishing historic great houses. Perhaps as a physician his sanitary instincts were more alert than his feelings of sentiment.There is just one corner of Beaufort Street where a realisation of the past may really be achieved in a very delightful and unexpected manner. Turn in at the iron gateway to Argyle Mansions (at the right-hand side of the street, where the tramlines end and the King’s Road crosses), and you will find yourself in an undreamed of survival of a part of the Chancellor’s garden. You will find some old trees and a mulberry-bush, and some turf, that is Chelsea, not London, sward; you will be hard to please or to interest if you cannot picture a garden scene here: Sir Thomas with his arm about his “Meg’s” shoulder—Erasmus reading in the shade—perhaps the King’s Majesty himself, swaggering condescendingly, and as yet uncrossed in his desires and uncontradicted in his supremacy.It is but a scrap of green, but it is genuine Chelsea history—far more so than the intrusive Crosby Hall, which hunches its shoulder to the garden a few hundred yards further on and whose connection with Sir Thomas is remote and with Chelsea is nil.Danvers Street with its tablet, “This is Danvers Street, begun in ye year 1696 by Benjamin Stallwood,” commemorates the older Danvers House, home of the versatile Sir John Danvers, a courtier, a regicide, and then a courtier again as the whirligig of time carried him along. His wife was the pious and beautiful Lady Herbert, mother by her first marriage of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and of George Herbert, the sweet singer; the Herbert family was constant at church, and it is pleasant to think that some of the poet’s “Church Porch” thoughts may have come to him in the calm seclusion of the Old Church. Lord Wharton, who later lived at Danvers House and was the author of the famous Whig song “Lillibulero” to which Purcell wrote the music, tried to introduce the silk industry into Chelsea, for the employment of the French Huguenots who had a colony hereabouts. Two thousand mulberrytrees were planted along the north of King’s Road, on the Elm Park estate, and in other large gardens, but unluckily a mulberry was chosen which did not approve itself to English silkworms, and after a specimen petticoat had been presented to Queen Caroline, we hear no more of the venture.But this doubtless accounts for the many odd-corner mulberry trees in our various back-gardens: Queen Elizabeth has been associated with several of them, and without hesitation we believe that she planted the Rectory garden tree—but for the rest, we credit Lord Wharton.A little intricate turn, opposite the new County School buildings, into Glebe Place brings us, at the south-east corner, to Henry VIII.’s Hunting Lodge, a tiny dwelling, with beautiful fish-scale tiling, and so narrow a doorway that our ordinary conception of King Hal’s figure seems to give the lie to this tradition. But Henry was doubtless of slenderer build when he came to shoot bernagle on the riverside, and incidentally to court Mistress Jane Seymour; it is worth asking the present occupier of the little house for permission to see the ladder stairway to the floor above. Again we are amazed to think how Henry ever mounted it; the Lodge, as it is called still, must have been very convenient in old days to that Tudor Lane which divided Upper Cheyne Row and ran straight to the Thames side, where in the reeds of the Battersea shore wild geese were plentiful.The gardens at the back of the Cheyne Walk houses east of Oakley Street are all hallowed ground, for here without a doubt stretched the lawns and glades of the royal pleasaunce, where “Katheryn the Queene” waited so anxiously for the Lord High Admiral—her fourth husband, it is true, but her first love; where she bade him play with romance, at the little gate in the fields, in the letter which he told her not to write but which she could not resist writing.Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston.HENRY VIII.’S HUNTING LODGE.p.60]Presently, Elizabeth the hoyden was romping and flirting with her stepfather in these very precincts, and poor Queen Katharine was sadly disillusioned and crept away to Sudeley to die. Anne of Cleves may have paced here in sedate Dutch fashion, debating whether she should invite her whilom husband to tea, which she certainly did and found it quite entertainment enough. Lady Jane Grey visited here, and as Guildford Dudley lived hard by, perhaps conducted her priggish courtship under these very trees. By-and-by Sir Hans Sloane is wheeled up in his invalid chair and matures his practical plans for breaking up the estate and sending a tide of new building over Chelsea.Afterwards, when each house had its individual garden, the company that flocked to Cheyne Walk was, in Georgian times, scarcely less distinguished, and in our own day no less interesting: some magnet quality in the very earth surely brings those who are dear and delightful to rest in Chelsea by the river?NOTES
Lots Road—Ashburnham House—Sandford Manor—Beaufort House and a corner of a “fayre garden”—Tudor bricks—Danvers House and the Herberts—Lord Wharton’s scheme of silk production—Henry VIII.’s Hunting Lodge in Glebe Place—The Manor House gardens and those who have walked there.
AS WE HAVE reached the western limit of Cheyne Walk and may not be there again, for the uninteresting industrial district which begins here is not likely to tempt us back, we will say a few words about some of the old names that survive, under very altered conditions, and then turn our backs on it.
Lots Road, which might easily suggest the dreary desert tramp of the migrating Patriarch, is so called because it is built on the site of four lots of pasture-land belonging to the manor, and the first of the property to be sold. In 1740 this land surrounded Chelsea Farm, the residence of the Methodist Lady Huntingdon, the friend of Whitfield and inventor of a “Persuasion” all her own. Then, in sharp contrast, it became Chelsea Gardens, later opened as Cremorne, and closed in 1875, when its pretensions to fashion had been eclipsed in rowdyism.
Further to the north-west lay Ashburnham House, whither Master William Ashburnham was steering on the memorable night when he was nearly submerged in Chelsea Reach: the name has been well preserved in the handsome church and adjacent block of mansions.
Chelsea Creek was once a much-used waterway to Kensington, and the old lock-keeper’s cottage used to be a picturesque object; there was perhaps a back wayto Sandford Manor House, occupied first by Nell Gwynn, later by Addison, which gallants and savants used in turn. The remains of the little old dwelling stand in the yard of the Gas Company, to the right of the railway, and accessible from King’s Road at Stanley Bridge; but they are rather a deplorable relic of two popular historic figures, and any day may see them swept away. There are some survivals which even the keenest antiquarian must feel had better be graciously obliterated if they cannot be restored to dignity. Addison’s description of his home as Sandys’ End, written in 1708, scarcely prepares us for the desolation of its present-day appearance.
Returning eastward, along Cheyne Walk, we naturally turn up Beaufort Street, and try to realise, while the tram screams at us from the middle of the road, that Sir Thomas More’s fair house and gardens lay here on either hand. The Clock-house entry to the Moravian burial-ground is perhaps the original north-west corner of these grounds; on the east they stretch to Danvers Street. Here and there are still to be found pieces of wall which show the unmistakable nuggets of Tudor brickwork; and I once saw the surprising spectacle of a correctly attired clergyman astride a twelve-foot wall at the back of the old Pheasantry, trying to detach a brick as a memento of his visit to the Chancellor’s domain. I regret that I failed to observe his descent, but I met him later ruefully amused and very dirty; and he had to confess that the sixteenth-century builders had been too clever for him, and he had torn his hands and his clothes for no result. But the Chancellor’s motto, “Serve God and be merrie,” was certainly his also; and the fact that he had not been able to detach one brick seemed to convince him of its undoubted Tudor-ness!
Those who would read of “the Greatest House in Chelsea,” and Sir Thomas More’s life there, should get Mr, Randall Davies’ recently published book and study its complete record; here we can only briefly relate how after More’s execution it was granted to the Marquis of Winchester, inherited by Lady Dacre, bequeathed by her to Lord Burleigh, and later occupied by Sir Arthur Gorges, theDukes of Buckingham, the Dukes of Beaufort, and finally was bought and pulled down by Sir Hans Sloane, who seems to have had a mania for demolishing historic great houses. Perhaps as a physician his sanitary instincts were more alert than his feelings of sentiment.
There is just one corner of Beaufort Street where a realisation of the past may really be achieved in a very delightful and unexpected manner. Turn in at the iron gateway to Argyle Mansions (at the right-hand side of the street, where the tramlines end and the King’s Road crosses), and you will find yourself in an undreamed of survival of a part of the Chancellor’s garden. You will find some old trees and a mulberry-bush, and some turf, that is Chelsea, not London, sward; you will be hard to please or to interest if you cannot picture a garden scene here: Sir Thomas with his arm about his “Meg’s” shoulder—Erasmus reading in the shade—perhaps the King’s Majesty himself, swaggering condescendingly, and as yet uncrossed in his desires and uncontradicted in his supremacy.
It is but a scrap of green, but it is genuine Chelsea history—far more so than the intrusive Crosby Hall, which hunches its shoulder to the garden a few hundred yards further on and whose connection with Sir Thomas is remote and with Chelsea is nil.
Danvers Street with its tablet, “This is Danvers Street, begun in ye year 1696 by Benjamin Stallwood,” commemorates the older Danvers House, home of the versatile Sir John Danvers, a courtier, a regicide, and then a courtier again as the whirligig of time carried him along. His wife was the pious and beautiful Lady Herbert, mother by her first marriage of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and of George Herbert, the sweet singer; the Herbert family was constant at church, and it is pleasant to think that some of the poet’s “Church Porch” thoughts may have come to him in the calm seclusion of the Old Church. Lord Wharton, who later lived at Danvers House and was the author of the famous Whig song “Lillibulero” to which Purcell wrote the music, tried to introduce the silk industry into Chelsea, for the employment of the French Huguenots who had a colony hereabouts. Two thousand mulberrytrees were planted along the north of King’s Road, on the Elm Park estate, and in other large gardens, but unluckily a mulberry was chosen which did not approve itself to English silkworms, and after a specimen petticoat had been presented to Queen Caroline, we hear no more of the venture.
But this doubtless accounts for the many odd-corner mulberry trees in our various back-gardens: Queen Elizabeth has been associated with several of them, and without hesitation we believe that she planted the Rectory garden tree—but for the rest, we credit Lord Wharton.
A little intricate turn, opposite the new County School buildings, into Glebe Place brings us, at the south-east corner, to Henry VIII.’s Hunting Lodge, a tiny dwelling, with beautiful fish-scale tiling, and so narrow a doorway that our ordinary conception of King Hal’s figure seems to give the lie to this tradition. But Henry was doubtless of slenderer build when he came to shoot bernagle on the riverside, and incidentally to court Mistress Jane Seymour; it is worth asking the present occupier of the little house for permission to see the ladder stairway to the floor above. Again we are amazed to think how Henry ever mounted it; the Lodge, as it is called still, must have been very convenient in old days to that Tudor Lane which divided Upper Cheyne Row and ran straight to the Thames side, where in the reeds of the Battersea shore wild geese were plentiful.
The gardens at the back of the Cheyne Walk houses east of Oakley Street are all hallowed ground, for here without a doubt stretched the lawns and glades of the royal pleasaunce, where “Katheryn the Queene” waited so anxiously for the Lord High Admiral—her fourth husband, it is true, but her first love; where she bade him play with romance, at the little gate in the fields, in the letter which he told her not to write but which she could not resist writing.
Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston.HENRY VIII.’S HUNTING LODGE.p.60]
Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston.HENRY VIII.’S HUNTING LODGE.p.60]
Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston.
HENRY VIII.’S HUNTING LODGE.
p.60]
Presently, Elizabeth the hoyden was romping and flirting with her stepfather in these very precincts, and poor Queen Katharine was sadly disillusioned and crept away to Sudeley to die. Anne of Cleves may have paced here in sedate Dutch fashion, debating whether she should invite her whilom husband to tea, which she certainly did and found it quite entertainment enough. Lady Jane Grey visited here, and as Guildford Dudley lived hard by, perhaps conducted her priggish courtship under these very trees. By-and-by Sir Hans Sloane is wheeled up in his invalid chair and matures his practical plans for breaking up the estate and sending a tide of new building over Chelsea.
Afterwards, when each house had its individual garden, the company that flocked to Cheyne Walk was, in Georgian times, scarcely less distinguished, and in our own day no less interesting: some magnet quality in the very earth surely brings those who are dear and delightful to rest in Chelsea by the river?
NOTES
CHAPTER VIIICarlyle’s and Rossetti’s monuments—Paradise Row as it used to be—Hortense de Mazarin—Whistler’s White House and the Victoria Hospital—The Physick Garden—Swan Walk and Doggett’s race for the “Coat and Badge”—The Royal Hospital—Poor, pretty Nelly’s pleasure house—The Chapel—The Hall—An American offer—A French Eagle—Walpole House and a Queen at dinner—Ranelagh and its Rotunda—The Pensioners’ Gardens.IN the Embankment Gardens, facing Cheyne Row and Queen’s House respectively, are the statue of Carlyle by Boehm and the Drinking Fountain Memorial to Rossetti, with a portrait in relief by his friend, Ford Madox Brown. Both are excellent likenesses, though Carlyle’s is a peaceful presentment, and Rossetti’s mournful and rather repellent.Passing through the gardens, I have often been reminded of the Greek painter and the birds who pecked at his grapes, for the children often stop to finger the pile of books under Carlyle’s chair. “They’m real books, ain’t they, missus, wat the old genelman wrote?” Thus we talk of Carlyle still, a stone’s throw from his study windows. It is interesting to know that the annual number of visitors to the Carlyle House increases steadily, and the custodian assures us that the knowledge of his works—intelligent, not merely curious—increases also, though among Colonials and Americans he is better known than among ordinary English people. And for “Colonials” read Scotch, or Scotch extracted.Leaving Cheyne Walk behind and walking eastward, we pass blocks of new flats and modern houses where once was Queen’s Road and beautiful Paradise Row—a terrace of houses that three hundred years ago was a centre of lifeand fashion. Here lived Hortense Duchesse de Mazarin, who dared not marry Charles II. in his days of exile, but flirted with him extensively later, and accepted a pension from him of £4,000 a year, which she spent on riotous entertainments rather than on paying her just rates and debts. Charles, Duke of St. Albans, son of Nell Gwynn and the Merry Monarch, lived here, and so did Mary Astell, the Suffragette of her times, whose advanced views found little favour with the wits at the Don Saltero or the fashionables of the Court, though serious John Evelyn sees fit to commend her. Dukes and earls and “smart” bishops jostled each other in Paradise Row in the gay Stuart days, then artists, physicians, scientists, and schoolmasters succeeded to the fine old houses with their stately forecourts, and Elizabeth Fry established her “School of Discipline” for homeless and vagabond girls at the corner in 1828. Finally, in 1908 it was swept away, and re-created to meet modern requirements as Royal Hospital Road.Tite Street turns off towards the river, and holds two buildings of note: Mr. Whistler’s White House, which looks as if it had strayed out of its way from Constantinople, and the Victoria Hospital for Children, a splendid new building, embracing, as its nucleus, Gough House, built by the Earl of Carberry in Charles II.’s time. Sir Richard Gough, who succeeded the Earl, gave it its name. The hospital is an unspeakable boon to the poor of the district; it has seventy beds, and a very extensive out-patients’ department, as well as a convalescent home at Broadstairs. Visitors can visit it daily between 2 and 4 p.m., and all parents must owe it their gratitude for its devotion to the cause of all children in illness.The Physick Garden entrance faces Swan Walk, and a ring at the resounding bell in the wall will bring an answering gardener, who will admit the inquiring visitor; but it is generally understood that such visits are made for reasons of botanical or scientific research.There is no fee, but visitors sign their names in the register, and, if I am not mistaken, enter the object of their special study. The garden, presented by Sir Hans Sloane to the Apothecaries Company, is mainly designed for the use and assistance of students of medicine and botany. All the plants grown in it have their medicinal value. Only one of the Lebanon cedars planted in 1683 remains.Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.SIR HANS SLOANE.p.66]Linnæus, Sir Joseph Banks, Mrs. Elizabeth Blackwell (the “better horse” of the luckless Alexander Blackwell, who dwelt in Swan Walk and would never have written hisHerbalwithout “the grey mare’s” clever assistance), Philip Miller, of theGardeners’ Dictionary, all loved the Physick Garden, and used it as Sir Hans intended.The old houses in Swan Walk—four or five in number—are all beautiful in their stately proportions and mellow colouring.The “Old Swan Inn,” a hostel for country junketings in Pepys’s time, stood on the waterside till the Embankment came to Chelsea. It was the goal for Doggett’s watermen’s race, still rowed on August 1 in commemoration of the Protestant Succession. This year, 1914, it will celebrate its 200th anniversary. The “Coat and Badge” (the latter the silver token of the White Horse of Hanover) were annually held by the victor, and a couple of guineas accrued to him as well from the loyal Irish Orangemen’s pockets. Wentworth House, on the Embankment, now occupies the site, and the “Old Paradise Wharf and Stairs” were just beyond.And now, whether we walk by the Embankment or by the parallel road, we reach the grounds of the Royal Hospital—that most perfect work of Sir Christopher Wren, which, oddly enough, Chelsea people still persist in calling “Controversy College,” Archbishop Laud’s name for it when James I. tried to coax it into a sort of theological academy. If you ask your way to the Royal Hospital, you will invariably be corrected, and “the College” substituted, and why the name remains is a Chelsea mystery.Nell Gwynn’s part in its foundation as an asylum for old soldiers may be a myth, but is as certain to live as the Hospital to stand. “What is this? King Charles’s Hospital?” and its pretty rejoinder, “And Nelly’s pleasure house,” was almost the most popular quotation of our Chelsea Pageant in June 1908.Every 29th of May King Charles’s statue is wreathed with oak, and the pensioners get double rations of beef and plum pudding, and if you fall into conversation with one of the red-coated old soldiers in the hospital gardens, where they love to saunter and watch the nursemaids and the children and the emancipated terriers of a morning, you will find that he is well up in the legend of “poor, pretty Nelly,” and proud of his connection with an institution which is in no sense a charity.It is impossible here to describe all that is to be seen at Chelsea Hospital, but there is no difficulty in going over it—either with a guide from the secretary’s office on application, or informally by presenting oneself at service at the Chapel on Sundays (11 a.m. and 6.30 p.m.) and glancing into the hall and the kitchens as one passes out through the beautiful colonnade, which gives upon the garden side. The old pensioners are courteous to visitors and love to show all they can. The great staircases leading to the rooms above are worth noticing, and so are the doorways, and the wonderful balance and proportion of the long lines of windows. Restrictions are few, and one is struck by the ease and freedom of the place, as compared with similar institutions in other countries.In the chapel, the wonderful collection of flags taken in action is worth studying, with the official handbook; perhaps as interesting a study is that of the faces and expressions of the ranks of old soldiers as they sit in orderly rows. The service is not long, though when the preacher allows himself an extra five minutes’ law, I have seen a hand steal tentatively to a coat-pocket, and a before-dinner pipe stealthily prepared under shelter of the pew ledge.The Communion plate—silver-gilt and presented by James I. to his theologians—is magnificent. An American visitor once offered the existing chaplain an exact replica of all the articles, and a thousand pounds for himself, if he would permit the set to be copied, and “no questions asked.” The transatlantic enthusiast went away with a very poor idea of English business capacity.In the hall, which is now the pensioners’ recreationroom, there are numberless objects of interest. We can only instance the case of unclaimed medals, and the “Black Jack” leather kegs used in the canteen of the Army in Flanders in Marlborough’s campaigns.In the hall the Duke of Wellington’s coffin lay in state November 1852, and during the crowd and excitement of the two days’ ceremony, one of the French Eagles taken at Waterloo was stolen—re-captured, it is supposed, by French visitors.The sittings in the chapel are allotted to the officers and staff of the hospital (note theWhitster’sPew, where sits the head of the laundry), but visitors can generally find accommodation if they present themselves at the Sunday services.Walpole House, now the Infirmary, was once the residence of the great Whig Minister, and in his garden George II. and Caroline the Illustrious, when Prince and Princess of Wales, sometimes sat down to dinner, while Chelsea people stared at them through the adjacent railings. A special permission is necessary to view the Infirmary.One other Royal remembrance, and I must close this inadequate account of the Royal Hospital treasures. There is a fine bust of Queen Victoria executed especially for the hall, and paid for by every man in the hospital giving his pay for one day—that day being the great Jubilee of 1887. It shows the great Queen at her noblest and best, as her soldiers love to remember her.East of the hospital lie Ranelagh Gardens, beautiful in their placid old age, and reminiscent in their glades and winding walks of a gay and frivolous past. The huge Rotunda, where nearly three thousand persons could circulate with ease, went out of fashion about 1750. Balloon ascents and fireworks ceased to attract, and in 1804 the big building was pulled down, and the gardens incorporated in the hospital grounds.To-day the pensioners’ little plots of garden, to the north of Ranelagh, are fuller of interest than this flimsy spectre of past gaiety. Some of the old men are ingenious gardeners; each one expresses himself in his allotted space,and builds a rockery, an arbour, or a fountain as his fancy directs, and will gladly sell a nosegay of old-fashioned flowers to a passing stranger.Truly Nell Gwynn and Sir Christopher Wren have given the old soldiers a goodly heritage in the Royal Hospital.NOTES
Carlyle’s and Rossetti’s monuments—Paradise Row as it used to be—Hortense de Mazarin—Whistler’s White House and the Victoria Hospital—The Physick Garden—Swan Walk and Doggett’s race for the “Coat and Badge”—The Royal Hospital—Poor, pretty Nelly’s pleasure house—The Chapel—The Hall—An American offer—A French Eagle—Walpole House and a Queen at dinner—Ranelagh and its Rotunda—The Pensioners’ Gardens.
IN the Embankment Gardens, facing Cheyne Row and Queen’s House respectively, are the statue of Carlyle by Boehm and the Drinking Fountain Memorial to Rossetti, with a portrait in relief by his friend, Ford Madox Brown. Both are excellent likenesses, though Carlyle’s is a peaceful presentment, and Rossetti’s mournful and rather repellent.
Passing through the gardens, I have often been reminded of the Greek painter and the birds who pecked at his grapes, for the children often stop to finger the pile of books under Carlyle’s chair. “They’m real books, ain’t they, missus, wat the old genelman wrote?” Thus we talk of Carlyle still, a stone’s throw from his study windows. It is interesting to know that the annual number of visitors to the Carlyle House increases steadily, and the custodian assures us that the knowledge of his works—intelligent, not merely curious—increases also, though among Colonials and Americans he is better known than among ordinary English people. And for “Colonials” read Scotch, or Scotch extracted.
Leaving Cheyne Walk behind and walking eastward, we pass blocks of new flats and modern houses where once was Queen’s Road and beautiful Paradise Row—a terrace of houses that three hundred years ago was a centre of lifeand fashion. Here lived Hortense Duchesse de Mazarin, who dared not marry Charles II. in his days of exile, but flirted with him extensively later, and accepted a pension from him of £4,000 a year, which she spent on riotous entertainments rather than on paying her just rates and debts. Charles, Duke of St. Albans, son of Nell Gwynn and the Merry Monarch, lived here, and so did Mary Astell, the Suffragette of her times, whose advanced views found little favour with the wits at the Don Saltero or the fashionables of the Court, though serious John Evelyn sees fit to commend her. Dukes and earls and “smart” bishops jostled each other in Paradise Row in the gay Stuart days, then artists, physicians, scientists, and schoolmasters succeeded to the fine old houses with their stately forecourts, and Elizabeth Fry established her “School of Discipline” for homeless and vagabond girls at the corner in 1828. Finally, in 1908 it was swept away, and re-created to meet modern requirements as Royal Hospital Road.
Tite Street turns off towards the river, and holds two buildings of note: Mr. Whistler’s White House, which looks as if it had strayed out of its way from Constantinople, and the Victoria Hospital for Children, a splendid new building, embracing, as its nucleus, Gough House, built by the Earl of Carberry in Charles II.’s time. Sir Richard Gough, who succeeded the Earl, gave it its name. The hospital is an unspeakable boon to the poor of the district; it has seventy beds, and a very extensive out-patients’ department, as well as a convalescent home at Broadstairs. Visitors can visit it daily between 2 and 4 p.m., and all parents must owe it their gratitude for its devotion to the cause of all children in illness.
The Physick Garden entrance faces Swan Walk, and a ring at the resounding bell in the wall will bring an answering gardener, who will admit the inquiring visitor; but it is generally understood that such visits are made for reasons of botanical or scientific research.
There is no fee, but visitors sign their names in the register, and, if I am not mistaken, enter the object of their special study. The garden, presented by Sir Hans Sloane to the Apothecaries Company, is mainly designed for the use and assistance of students of medicine and botany. All the plants grown in it have their medicinal value. Only one of the Lebanon cedars planted in 1683 remains.
Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.SIR HANS SLOANE.p.66]
Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.SIR HANS SLOANE.p.66]
Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.
SIR HANS SLOANE.
p.66]
Linnæus, Sir Joseph Banks, Mrs. Elizabeth Blackwell (the “better horse” of the luckless Alexander Blackwell, who dwelt in Swan Walk and would never have written hisHerbalwithout “the grey mare’s” clever assistance), Philip Miller, of theGardeners’ Dictionary, all loved the Physick Garden, and used it as Sir Hans intended.
The old houses in Swan Walk—four or five in number—are all beautiful in their stately proportions and mellow colouring.
The “Old Swan Inn,” a hostel for country junketings in Pepys’s time, stood on the waterside till the Embankment came to Chelsea. It was the goal for Doggett’s watermen’s race, still rowed on August 1 in commemoration of the Protestant Succession. This year, 1914, it will celebrate its 200th anniversary. The “Coat and Badge” (the latter the silver token of the White Horse of Hanover) were annually held by the victor, and a couple of guineas accrued to him as well from the loyal Irish Orangemen’s pockets. Wentworth House, on the Embankment, now occupies the site, and the “Old Paradise Wharf and Stairs” were just beyond.
And now, whether we walk by the Embankment or by the parallel road, we reach the grounds of the Royal Hospital—that most perfect work of Sir Christopher Wren, which, oddly enough, Chelsea people still persist in calling “Controversy College,” Archbishop Laud’s name for it when James I. tried to coax it into a sort of theological academy. If you ask your way to the Royal Hospital, you will invariably be corrected, and “the College” substituted, and why the name remains is a Chelsea mystery.
Nell Gwynn’s part in its foundation as an asylum for old soldiers may be a myth, but is as certain to live as the Hospital to stand. “What is this? King Charles’s Hospital?” and its pretty rejoinder, “And Nelly’s pleasure house,” was almost the most popular quotation of our Chelsea Pageant in June 1908.
Every 29th of May King Charles’s statue is wreathed with oak, and the pensioners get double rations of beef and plum pudding, and if you fall into conversation with one of the red-coated old soldiers in the hospital gardens, where they love to saunter and watch the nursemaids and the children and the emancipated terriers of a morning, you will find that he is well up in the legend of “poor, pretty Nelly,” and proud of his connection with an institution which is in no sense a charity.
It is impossible here to describe all that is to be seen at Chelsea Hospital, but there is no difficulty in going over it—either with a guide from the secretary’s office on application, or informally by presenting oneself at service at the Chapel on Sundays (11 a.m. and 6.30 p.m.) and glancing into the hall and the kitchens as one passes out through the beautiful colonnade, which gives upon the garden side. The old pensioners are courteous to visitors and love to show all they can. The great staircases leading to the rooms above are worth noticing, and so are the doorways, and the wonderful balance and proportion of the long lines of windows. Restrictions are few, and one is struck by the ease and freedom of the place, as compared with similar institutions in other countries.
In the chapel, the wonderful collection of flags taken in action is worth studying, with the official handbook; perhaps as interesting a study is that of the faces and expressions of the ranks of old soldiers as they sit in orderly rows. The service is not long, though when the preacher allows himself an extra five minutes’ law, I have seen a hand steal tentatively to a coat-pocket, and a before-dinner pipe stealthily prepared under shelter of the pew ledge.
The Communion plate—silver-gilt and presented by James I. to his theologians—is magnificent. An American visitor once offered the existing chaplain an exact replica of all the articles, and a thousand pounds for himself, if he would permit the set to be copied, and “no questions asked.” The transatlantic enthusiast went away with a very poor idea of English business capacity.
In the hall, which is now the pensioners’ recreationroom, there are numberless objects of interest. We can only instance the case of unclaimed medals, and the “Black Jack” leather kegs used in the canteen of the Army in Flanders in Marlborough’s campaigns.
In the hall the Duke of Wellington’s coffin lay in state November 1852, and during the crowd and excitement of the two days’ ceremony, one of the French Eagles taken at Waterloo was stolen—re-captured, it is supposed, by French visitors.
The sittings in the chapel are allotted to the officers and staff of the hospital (note theWhitster’sPew, where sits the head of the laundry), but visitors can generally find accommodation if they present themselves at the Sunday services.
Walpole House, now the Infirmary, was once the residence of the great Whig Minister, and in his garden George II. and Caroline the Illustrious, when Prince and Princess of Wales, sometimes sat down to dinner, while Chelsea people stared at them through the adjacent railings. A special permission is necessary to view the Infirmary.
One other Royal remembrance, and I must close this inadequate account of the Royal Hospital treasures. There is a fine bust of Queen Victoria executed especially for the hall, and paid for by every man in the hospital giving his pay for one day—that day being the great Jubilee of 1887. It shows the great Queen at her noblest and best, as her soldiers love to remember her.
East of the hospital lie Ranelagh Gardens, beautiful in their placid old age, and reminiscent in their glades and winding walks of a gay and frivolous past. The huge Rotunda, where nearly three thousand persons could circulate with ease, went out of fashion about 1750. Balloon ascents and fireworks ceased to attract, and in 1804 the big building was pulled down, and the gardens incorporated in the hospital grounds.
To-day the pensioners’ little plots of garden, to the north of Ranelagh, are fuller of interest than this flimsy spectre of past gaiety. Some of the old men are ingenious gardeners; each one expresses himself in his allotted space,and builds a rockery, an arbour, or a fountain as his fancy directs, and will gladly sell a nosegay of old-fashioned flowers to a passing stranger.
Truly Nell Gwynn and Sir Christopher Wren have given the old soldiers a goodly heritage in the Royal Hospital.
NOTES
L’ENVOIAND SO WE come to the boundary of Chelsea on the east, for at Sloane Square (and strictly speaking in a corner house, half of which stands in the parish and half outside) the “bounds” used to be “beaten,” and a young boy received a birching which was supposed to write the exact line of parish demarcation on his memory, for transmission to the next generation. I suppose he was adequately rewarded, and I never heard that the assault was made a cause for complaint. Whether a Chelsea boy of to-day would still suffer it, is questionable.Old Chelsea, with its queer ways and its originality in thought and action, is fading day by day. The Bun-house has gone from Union Street, and Box Farm from King’s Road. Who thinks of the “callous murder of an Oriental” when they cut through Turk’s Row? Even the Duke of York’s School, founded in 1801, has carried its little “sons of the brave” off to Dover, where we hope they still say, as they ought, “God bless the Regent and the Duke of York!” but where the object-lesson of the Royal Hospital will not be a part of their education, as it was in Chelsea.And with these changes thick and fast upon us, can you, O stranger, cousin from America, or brother from Greater Britain overseas, wonder that we of the old village by the river cling fast to our legends and traditions of the past, setting them, childish as some may deem them, in that Light of Romance “that never was on sea or land.” How it gilds the simplest deed, lights up the dimmest corner; how it shows certain figures of the past, more real to us than any neighbours of to-day!Here in a Chelsea backwater where the children have spread a “grotto,” and cry for your “remembrance” of the Holy Sepulchre that they symbolise so unwitting, we too may realise that we have been on pilgrimage back to Tudor days, and the stately times of great Elizabeth, and the Court of merry Charles.And if the Road-book has served you, as an afternoon’s guide, to make you love and see Chelsea, then, by my halidom! two of us are well pleased!
AND SO WE come to the boundary of Chelsea on the east, for at Sloane Square (and strictly speaking in a corner house, half of which stands in the parish and half outside) the “bounds” used to be “beaten,” and a young boy received a birching which was supposed to write the exact line of parish demarcation on his memory, for transmission to the next generation. I suppose he was adequately rewarded, and I never heard that the assault was made a cause for complaint. Whether a Chelsea boy of to-day would still suffer it, is questionable.
Old Chelsea, with its queer ways and its originality in thought and action, is fading day by day. The Bun-house has gone from Union Street, and Box Farm from King’s Road. Who thinks of the “callous murder of an Oriental” when they cut through Turk’s Row? Even the Duke of York’s School, founded in 1801, has carried its little “sons of the brave” off to Dover, where we hope they still say, as they ought, “God bless the Regent and the Duke of York!” but where the object-lesson of the Royal Hospital will not be a part of their education, as it was in Chelsea.
And with these changes thick and fast upon us, can you, O stranger, cousin from America, or brother from Greater Britain overseas, wonder that we of the old village by the river cling fast to our legends and traditions of the past, setting them, childish as some may deem them, in that Light of Romance “that never was on sea or land.” How it gilds the simplest deed, lights up the dimmest corner; how it shows certain figures of the past, more real to us than any neighbours of to-day!
Here in a Chelsea backwater where the children have spread a “grotto,” and cry for your “remembrance” of the Holy Sepulchre that they symbolise so unwitting, we too may realise that we have been on pilgrimage back to Tudor days, and the stately times of great Elizabeth, and the Court of merry Charles.
And if the Road-book has served you, as an afternoon’s guide, to make you love and see Chelsea, then, by my halidom! two of us are well pleased!
PERCY T. HARRIS,M.P.S.Silver Medallist in Chemistry & PhysicsDISPENSING STORE CHEMIST183a, King’s Road, ChelseaTel.: 3029 Western.All Prescriptions and Medicines Skilfully prepared from materials of the best quality only. Absolute accuracy of detail, early delivery, and moderate charges characterise this old-established but up-to-date business, which affords a choice of the largest Stock of Chemists’ Sundries, Photographic Materials, and Patent Medicines in Chelsea.RODWELL BROS.forAFTERNOON TEAS235 King’s Road, ChelseaBAKERS, CONFECTIONERSAND CATERERS, ETC.All Orders carried out under Personal SupervisionFOR PARTICULARS OF CHARACTERISTICTO BUY OR RENT, APPLYWHEELERBros.Chartered Surveyors and Auctioneers1, SYDNEY STREET, FULHAM RD.,CHELSEATelephone: Kensington 1687Tuberculin DispensaryThe Old Chelsea Dispensary has been reopened by the Tuberculin Dispensary League, and Patients are treated at 1, Manor Street, Chelsea (next to the Town Hall). Letters of recommendation are unnecessary.Subscriptions will be gratefully received by the Hon. Treasurer,RANDALL DAVIES,Esq.,1, CHEYNE GARDENS, CHELSEA,or by the London & South Western Bank, 140, King’s Road, S.W.ESTABLISHED AT COOK’S GROUND, CHELSEA, OVER 100 YEARSThe Farm, being but a few yards away from Carlyle’s House in Cheyne Row, two goats were kept at it specially to supply him with milk.TELEPHONE:WESTERN1782WRIGHT’S DAIRYChief Officeand Dairies:38, 44, 46, 48, Church Street,CHELSEA.Branch Offices: 69, KING’S ROAD, CHELSEA,and3, WESTBOURNE STREET, SLOANE SQUARE.DAIRY FARMS:FARINGDON, BERKS :: TETBURY, GLOS.Under Medical, Veterinary, and Sanitary Inspection.SPECIALITY—Nursery Milk for Infants & InvalidsHAS SUPPLIED THE CHEYNE HOSPITAL FOR CHILDREN FOR OVER THIRTY-FIVE YEARS.“The Good Intent”Restaurant and Tea Rooms12, Vale Terrace, King’s Road, ChelseaLunches(2 courses), 12.30 to 2 p.m.1/3Teas----6d.Dinners(3 courses), 6.45 to 9 p.m.1/6“‘The Good Intent’ did not indeed require that last resort of the apologist—to be credited with good intentions; and I used sometimes to think that here was a possible successor to the beloved Don Saltero who used to gather together the Chelsea celebrities for the purpose of refreshing their wits and their bodies.”From “The Architectural Review,” November, 1912The...Animals’ Hospital & Institute75, KINNERTON STREET,WILTON PLACE, S.W.Telephone 317 Victoria.Established 1888.TO PROVIDE TREATMENTFOR SUFFERING ANIMALSAll information will be given on application to—WALTER BETTS,Secretary.
PERCY T. HARRIS,M.P.S.
Silver Medallist in Chemistry & Physics
DISPENSING STORE CHEMIST
183a, King’s Road, Chelsea
Tel.: 3029 Western.
All Prescriptions and Medicines Skilfully prepared from materials of the best quality only. Absolute accuracy of detail, early delivery, and moderate charges characterise this old-established but up-to-date business, which affords a choice of the largest Stock of Chemists’ Sundries, Photographic Materials, and Patent Medicines in Chelsea.
RODWELL BROS.
for
AFTERNOON TEAS
235 King’s Road, Chelsea
BAKERS, CONFECTIONERSAND CATERERS, ETC.
All Orders carried out under Personal Supervision
FOR PARTICULARS OF CHARACTERISTIC
TO BUY OR RENT, APPLY
WHEELERBros.
Chartered Surveyors and Auctioneers
1, SYDNEY STREET, FULHAM RD.,
CHELSEA
Telephone: Kensington 1687
Tuberculin Dispensary
The Old Chelsea Dispensary has been reopened by the Tuberculin Dispensary League, and Patients are treated at 1, Manor Street, Chelsea (next to the Town Hall). Letters of recommendation are unnecessary.
Subscriptions will be gratefully received by the Hon. Treasurer,
RANDALL DAVIES,Esq.,
1, CHEYNE GARDENS, CHELSEA,
or by the London & South Western Bank, 140, King’s Road, S.W.
ESTABLISHED AT COOK’S GROUND, CHELSEA, OVER 100 YEARS
The Farm, being but a few yards away from Carlyle’s House in Cheyne Row, two goats were kept at it specially to supply him with milk.
TELEPHONE:WESTERN1782
WRIGHT’S DAIRY
Chief Officeand Dairies:
38, 44, 46, 48, Church Street,
CHELSEA.
Branch Offices: 69, KING’S ROAD, CHELSEA,and3, WESTBOURNE STREET, SLOANE SQUARE.
DAIRY FARMS:
FARINGDON, BERKS :: TETBURY, GLOS.
Under Medical, Veterinary, and Sanitary Inspection.
SPECIALITY—
Nursery Milk for Infants & Invalids
HAS SUPPLIED THE CHEYNE HOSPITAL FOR CHILDREN FOR OVER THIRTY-FIVE YEARS.
“The Good Intent”
Restaurant and Tea Rooms
12, Vale Terrace, King’s Road, Chelsea
“‘The Good Intent’ did not indeed require that last resort of the apologist—to be credited with good intentions; and I used sometimes to think that here was a possible successor to the beloved Don Saltero who used to gather together the Chelsea celebrities for the purpose of refreshing their wits and their bodies.”
From “The Architectural Review,” November, 1912
The...
Animals’ Hospital & Institute
75, KINNERTON STREET,
WILTON PLACE, S.W.
TO PROVIDE TREATMENTFOR SUFFERING ANIMALS
All information will be given on application to—
WALTER BETTS,Secretary.
FOOTNOTE:[1]See Mr. Randall Davies’Greatest House in Chelsea.
FOOTNOTE:
[1]See Mr. Randall Davies’Greatest House in Chelsea.
[1]See Mr. Randall Davies’Greatest House in Chelsea.