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Title: A road-book to old Chelsea

Author: G. B. Stuart

Release date: January 17, 2015 [eBook #48003]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Giovanni Fini, Donald Cummings, Adrian
        Mastronardi and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
        at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
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        Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A ROAD-BOOK TO OLD CHELSEA ***




Produced by Giovanni Fini, Donald Cummings, Adrian
Mastronardi and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
Libraries.)







TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.

—Bold text has been rendered as =bold text=.




                      A ROAD-BOOK TO OLD CHELSEA

[Illustration:
  _SIFTON PRAED & Cᵒ Lᵗᵈ._
THE ROADS THAT LEAD TO CHELSEA.
_Frontispiece._]




                            A ROAD-BOOK TO
                              OLD CHELSEA

                                  BY

                             G. B. STUART


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

  KATHERYN THE QUEENE.

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


  WITH SKETCH MAP AND FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS


                                LONDON
                            HUGH REES, LTD.
                   5 REGENT STREET, PALL MALL, S.W.
                                 1914




PREFACE


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

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

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

  G. B. S.




                               CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                   PAGE

     I. THE ROAD TO THE CHURCH                               9

    II. THE OLD CHURCH: NORTH SIDE AND CHANCEL              15

   III. THE OLD CHURCH: SOUTH SIDE AND THE MORE CHAPEL      23

    IV. THE OLD CHURCH: THE NAVE AND ITS MONUMENTS          31

     V. CHURCH STREET TO QUEEN’S ELM                        39

    VI. CHEYNE WALK FROM EAST TO WEST                       47

   VII. SIDE STREETS AND BACK GARDENS                       57

  VIII. THE ROAD TO THE ROYAL HOSPITAL                      65

        L’ENVOI                                             73




A ROAD-BOOK TO OLD CHELSEA




CHAPTER I

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


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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: _Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston._
THOMAS CARLYLE.
p. 10] ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


NOTES




CHAPTER II

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: _Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd._
LOMBARDS’ ROW.
p. 16] ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


NOTES




CHAPTER III

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He who had all the Gorges’ soules in one.

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

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

Their epitaph beginning,

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

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

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

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

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

“Lamp-laboured verse” is first-rate.

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

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

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

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

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


NOTES




CHAPTER IV

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book of Common Prayer, 1723.

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

Two volumes (Nos. I. and III.) of Foxe’s _Book of Martyrs_. A very fine
edition dated 1684.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


NOTES




CHAPTER V

 Sir Hans Sloane—His houses and bequests—The gates of Beaufort House
 living in Piccadilly—The clock—The restoration of 1910—Church
 Lane—The Petyt House—Queen Elizabeth’s Cofferer—Church Lane and its
 residents—The Rectory—The King’s Theatre and the stocks—Upper Church
 Street and the Queen’s Elm.


THE tomb of Sir Hans Sloane is the chief object of interest in the
little strip of churchyard which remains to the Old Church. It shows
the urn and serpents of Esculapius, and its epitaph is pleasant
reading; we fancy we see the courtly, kindly, pompous old physician
who lived at Beaufort House and must have been a familiar figure on
the riverside, pacing with dignity, or being carried in his chair to
the Physic Garden which he presented to the Apothecaries Company and
to Chelsea. His name has been repeated in a score of ways; throughout
the district his daughters and co-heiresses, in their turn, have stood
sponsor to many of our streets. Their marriages link the Past and
Present with names that are, literally, part of Chelsea. Sir Hans, an
Ulsterman by birth, first lived in Sir Thomas More’s “Great House,”
which he caused to be pulled down—it had fallen into disrepair, and
was overweighted by its grounds and expensive gardens.[1] He later
removed to the Manor House, once Henry VIII.’s Palace, which occupied
the space now filled by the houses of Cheyne Walk stretching westward
from the corner of Oakley Street to Manor Street.

Sir Hans’ collection of natural curiosities and works of art formed the
nucleus of the British Museum: he had wished that his rarities could
have remained and have been exhibited in the Manor House itself, and
that the adjoining gardens should be opened to the public, but this was
found impracticable; the estate was divided and sold after Sir Hans’
death, and Cheyne Walk’s separate houses were built. Many of these show
in their basements the solid remains of Tudor masonry.

Of the thousands who daily pass Devonshire House, Piccadilly, we wonder
how many persons know the history of the great iron gates which adorn
the Duke’s otherwise forbidding wall? They are the gateway designed by
Inigo Jones for Beaufort House when occupied by the Earl of Middlesex.
Sir Hans, when he demolished the Chancellor’s beautiful home, gave the
gates to the Earl of Burlington and they were set up for a time at
Chiswick; the late Duke of Devonshire recovered them, and set them up
once more, in front of a great town house. Pope’s funny little verse to
the gates, which he met on the road to Chiswick in an ignominious cart,
is well known—

  “O Gate, how cam’st thou hither?”
  “I was brought from Chelsea last year
  Battered by Wind and Weather!”

and often quoted, but few inquire whose gate it was and where it has
gone to.

If time and space allowed, there are a hundred more points of interest
about the Old Church over which we might linger, but it is impossible
to do more than indicate its chief features in a guide-book of our
present dimensions. Suffice to mention that the tower, replacing an
earlier steeple, was built in 1679; that the clock, made and presented
by Sir Hans Sloane’s gardener, a Quaker and amateur mechanic, is still
keeping good time after more than 150 years’ work; that the new vestry
is built as a memorial to Mr. Davies’ long incumbency.

The latest restoration of the church in 1910 owes its origin to the
short but vigorous rule of Mr. Prideaux, who recognised the necessity
and did not allow himself to be daunted by the immense difficulties
of the work required. Some of our conservative Chelsea hearts dreaded
it, as though the Huns and Vandals were at our church gates, but the
sympathetic manner in which it was carried out reconciled even the most
fearful to the unavoidable changes.

As we remember the Rev. R. H. Davies very gratefully for freeing the
two chapels from the thrall of private ownership, so we thank the Rev.
S. P. T. Prideaux for so bravely carrying through the immense work of
the restoration and re-beautifying of 1910.

To his successor, the Rev. M. S. Farmer, we owe the completion of the
organ and the careful and reverent re-arrangement of the surrounding
church garden.

As we leave the church, Cheyne Walk stretches stately and placid
to either side of us, and the river beyond, which used to lap the
churchyard wall when Henry VIII. was rowed up in his royal barge to
visit the beloved Chancellor (whose head he presently cut off), shows
like silver between the bounds of its magnificent embankment; all this
must have a chapter to itself, and as we are at Church Street corner,
we will take the opportunity of turning due north and following it, the
“Church Lane” of older days, to its end at Queen’s Elm.

Just above the church lies the Petyt House, erected in 1706 by William
Petyt; it has been rebuilt, but its Queen Anne character has been kept.
A grim-faced portrait of its founder hangs inside, and the house is
still used for Sunday-school and parish purposes, “Church purposes”
being strictly prescribed. It was originally the parish school,
succeeding a parochial school built somewhere near the same site by
Rector Ward, “Cofferer to Queen Elizabeth,” in 1595. “Cofferer” is a
delightful title, and suggests comfortable resources in the background.

Church Street is now a squalid thoroughfare leading from Fulham and
King’s Road straight to the Embankment by a short cut that is narrow,
crowded, and always swarming with children. But in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries it was dignified and residential, and even
now if you obliterate in your mind’s eye the ugly, cheap shop fronts
you will find Queen Anne brickwork behind; generous windows, warmly
tiled roofs, and panelled rooms within. Here in the good Queen’s days
lived the _élite_ of the literary world: Bishop Atterbury schemed
for the Stuarts in a “house on the waterside,” probably opposite the
church; Dean Swift had his lodging a little further up the lane, where
he deplored “confounded coarse sheets and an awkward bed”; Addison
came across the fields from Sandford Manor House to meet the wits at
Don Saltero’s coffee-house; Dr. Arbuthnot and Sir John Shadwell, the
Queen’s physicians, and many others, scientists and men of letters,
lived in the Church Street houses which to-day are stables, laundries,
offices, and small shops.

Trelawny, Bishop of Winchester, was a force in this coterie’s earlier
days; later Dr. Johnson visited here. Possibly the existence of great
houses and influential owners of property in and about our Village of
Palaces brought the wits and writers to Chelsea: Shrewsbury House,
Winchester House, Lindsey House, Essex House, and others were in the
possession of noblemen who might happily count as patrons to launch
a new book or a new enterprise if the authors knew how to play their
cards well and politely.

A few hundred yards above the Petyt House the rectory wall begins,
and one of the most delightful houses and gardens in London is seen
behind it. An older rectory house existed on much the same site from
the early sixteenth century, and the roll of Chelsea rectors being
complete since 1289, it may well have been earlier still. But in 1694
we read that Rector John King found the rectory house so dilapidated
that he removed to lodgings in Church Lane, and it was probably rebuilt
shortly afterwards. Rector Blunt, and our present rector, Archdeacon
Bevan, have done much to beautify and improve it, and though they have
generously given part of its surrounding land for necessary parish
purposes, the garden, with Queen Elizabeth’s mulberry-tree, still
remains a joy and refreshment to many—an oasis of flowers, and trees,
and lovely age-old turf in the midst of the busiest commercial quarter
of the parish.

The General Omnibus Company has its office where once the stage
coaches used to rumble in from the Great North Road; and the King’s
House, an unrivalled cinematograph theatre, faces the corner where,
tradition says, the stocks used to stand for the wholesome punishment
of miscreants and disturbers of the peace. If only the cinema could
reproduce some of the scenes which were enacted on this spot two
hundred years ago, how interesting would be the revival, and how
Suffragettes would tremble!

Upper Church Street, across the King’s Road, was till recently a pretty
countrified street, irregularly set with charming houses small and big.
Here lived Felix Moscheles, the painter, Mr. De Morgan, the novelist,
Mr. Bernard Partridge, the _Punch_ cartoonist, reflecting and adding to
the effulgence of the Chelsea Arts Club. But the newly planned Avenue
of the Vale, with its antennæ of new streets in every direction, has
cost us Church Street as we have loved it since childhood; “_c’est
magnifique_,” this new tasteful suburb of old Chelsea, but it is not
the homely purlieu that we, and Dean Swift, used to know.

Even as I write the hammers of the housebreakers are busy on the walls
of “The Queen’s Elm” public-house, an ugly structure enough which no
one can regret for itself, though with the passing of its existence as
a house of refreshment one fears its Elizabethan legend may disappear
also. Here under an elm the Queen “stood up” for shelter in a storm of
rain with Lord Burleigh, who inherited the Dacre property in Chelsea
and Brompton, and was probably conducting her Majesty to one or other
of his newly acquired properties. Elizabeth was fond of paying surprise
visits to her subjects, and on one occasion when she went to Beaufort
House unexpectedly, in its owner’s absence, she was unrecognised, and
refused admittance. Under the elm at the corner of Church Street and
Fulham Road legend says she and her great minister talked of umbrellas,
which about this time were first introduced from the East, but were not
yet in general—even in royal—use.

As I passed the old public-house, the stucco frontage of which was
falling in clouds of dust to the ground, I saw for the first time a
beautifully pitched and red-tiled roof disclosed at the back of the
building. It, too, may be gone to-morrow, but I like to think I have
just caught a farewell glimpse of the roof that sheltered Queen Bess.


NOTES




CHAPTER VI

 Cheyne Walk—The King’s Road and the Queen’s—George Eliot—Dr.
 Dominiceti’s baths—A French author’s cleverness—“The Yorkshire
 Grey”—Cecil Lawson’s pictures—Rossetti, Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Haweis, and
 their guests—The Don Saltero—“The Magpie”—Remains of Shrewsbury House
 and Mary Queen of Scots—The Children’s Hospital—Crosby Hall, Lindsey
 House, Turner’s House—The way between the Pales.


CHEYNE WALK is beautiful at all seasons and under all aspects; each
time that I regard it from a fresh point, or return to it after a
temporary absence, I think, “Never has it looked so lovely before!”

But for the purposes of historical interest it is well to walk it from
end to end, or rather, to loiter in it, and, for choice, in early
autumn, when the sunshine is as mellow as the tones of the old brick,
and the trees and creepers are not too heavily green to obscure its
gracious lines.

So, if you will see this riverside row of storied houses aright, turn
with me down Flood Street—when you leave your motor-bus at the Town
Hall—and begin at the beginning of the Walk that will lead you through
the drama, tragic and comic, of at least five centuries.

Until a few years ago the two main thoroughfares from London to Chelsea
were the King’s Road and the Queen’s Road. In that their juxtaposition
recalled an interesting tradition, I am sorry that Queen’s Road has
lately been altered to Royal Hospital Road.

For in the days of Charles II. the King had a private road for his
coach through the fields to Chelsea, where dwelt Mistress Elinor Gwynn
(at Sandford Manor when she received the King’s visits, but, report
says, in a squalid little riverside hovel, not far from Chelsea
Barracks, in her previous chrysalis stage), and Queen Catharine of
Braganza, who also visited at Chelsea, paying less lively duty calls,
as wives must, objected to using her husband’s route lest a domestic
matter, which she preferred to ignore, should be forced on her
attention.

So the King came his road and the Queen hers, following parallel
paths, and poor, stupid Catharine tried to keep her eyes shut to her
consort’s “merry” ways. Had she tried to make her own a little less
stiff, bigoted, and unintelligent, she might have been happier, for she
was young and pretty enough to charm Charles at first; her determined
adherence to Portuguese manners, dress, and language was as much to
blame for Charles’s neglect, as his own inconstant nature.

The first two houses in Cheyne Walk are modern, but then begins the
row of beautiful mansions which forms the Walk, as distinguished from
the previous frontage of great buildings standing detached, in the
gardens of the Manor House. These buildings were pulled down and the
gardens surrendered to the builders in 1717, and housebuilding on the
riverside began apace. In No. 4 George Eliot (Mrs. Cross) lived for a
few weeks only, and died from the result of a chill in 1880, just as
she had begun to find pleasure in her beautiful view. At No. 5 James
Camden Nield lived a miser’s life, and left a fortune of half a million
pounds to Queen Victoria, whose Uncle Leopold congratulates her in
one of his letters “on having a little money of her own” in her early
married life. At No. 6 Dr. Dominiceti had his famous medicinal baths,
a wonder-working quackery of the eighteenth century of which in heated
argument Dr. Johnson said to an opponent of differing views:

“Well, sir, go to Dominiceti and get fumigated, and be sure that the
steam be directed to thy head, for that is the peccant part!”

Between No. 6 and Manor Street some modern houses have been
interpolated. No. 11, I think, is the number which has been omitted
from the sequence in numbering them, and a clever French novelist has
taken advantage of this peculiarity to lay the scene of his story in
the nonexistent house, which he can consequently describe with all the
exuberance of his fancy. I have met French visitors walking round this
end of Cheyne Walk in great perplexity trying to locate their author’s
plot: the fact that larger buildings took the place of humbler ones,
and that the numbers beyond could not be disturbed, account for the
omission.

Some thirty years ago, when the old houses were demolished, a
considerable portion of an underground passage was laid bare to the
right of Manor Street. It was obviously a section of that subterranean
passage which connected the Chelsea Palace with Kensington. I crept
down it for the space of a yard or two, and rejoiced to think that the
Princess Elizabeth might have done the same, in one of those romping
games with her stepfather, the Lord High Admiral Seymour, which
“Katheryn the Queene” found too hoydenish for the young lady’s age and
dignity. Nos. 13 and 14, formerly one house, were the well-known inn
“The Yorkshire Grey,” with its own stairs at the riverside, dear to
country visitors from the north of England.

No. 15, now in the possession of Lord Courtney of Penwith, was in
the seventies the home of the artist family of William Lawson. Cecil
Lawson’s pictures of Chelsea before the Embankment was built, were
exhibited in a one-man show at Burlington House a few years back, and
gave an exquisite idea of the waterside in its rural days, Queen’s
House, No. 16, was once called Tudor House, and its basement is said
to contain remains of the original Tudor workmanship of Henry VIII.’s
Palace. Whether this is so or not, it is unquestionably on the site of
some of the old Manor House buildings; the name was changed by the Rev.
H. R. Haweis, who favoured the idea that many Queens—Katharine Parr,
Elizabeth, Anne of Cleves, Catharine of Braganza—must have occupied
the position, though not the actual mansion.

Mr. Haweis’ tenancy followed on that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who
lived here from 1863 to 1882. William Rossetti, George Meredith,
Algernon Swinburne, and others of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
joined at first in the _ménage_; then came Dante Rossetti’s short and
sad married life, and later he lived secluded, spending much of his
time in his garden at the back, where he tried to acclimatise strange
animals, of whose wild ways exaggerated reports were spread abroad,
perhaps to ensure the poet’s privacy.

Of Rossetti’s later life, I who write can speak as an eye-witness, for
in 1878 we went to live next door, at No. 17, and found him a quiet,
very retiring, but most polite and obliging neighbour. As our gardens
at the back adjoined we often saw him pacing under his trees dressed in
an old brown dressing-gown like a friar’s habit. He went nowhere and
received little company. Once we had lost a pet tortoise, which came up
from under the dividing wall on Mr. Rossetti’s side of the boundary:
the poet lifted it gently back and dropped it over without a word, then
scurried away indoors, lest we might be moved to overwhelm him with
thanks. He died while at Margate for his health, and I remember we had
hardly heard the news, when we saw people (certainly unauthorised)
removing all sorts of parcels and pieces of furniture from the house to
a cab, which was loaded outside and in, and driven rapidly away.

When his effects came to be examined much of value had disappeared, but
who were the culprits was never known.

Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Haweis’ tenancy of Queen’s House was very different.
They entertained half London at their big crushes, which always had a
character and a “go” which made them eagerly sought after and vastly
amusing. Nearly always the party was built round some lion of the
literary or scientific world. Ernest Renan and Oliver Wendell Holmes
happen to be two guests whom I particularly recall. Renan was big,
overblown, with the rolling gait and merry, round face of Southern
France: Oliver Wendell Holmes was tiny, silver-haired, fragile as a
bright-eyed little field mouse. Mr. Haweis, who did not know what
shyness meant, exploited his visitors with the utmost vivacity and good
nature; he had the social instinct in a high degree, and enjoyed his
own parties so heartily that few of his guests could fail to do the
same.

Nos. 17 and 18 were in 1718 the celebrated Don Saltero Museum and
Coffee-house, removed from Danvers Street to this more eligible
situation; the old site is now occupied by the baker’s shop, 77, Cheyne
Walk. “James Salter, the coffee man,” was at one time valet to Sir
Hans Sloane, and may have formed the idea of his museum from pickings,
let us hope discarded, by this eminent collector. He was an Irishman
who could mix punch, and draw teeth, play a little on the fiddle, and
keep his patrons amused, though his wonderful curios read like simple
rubbish to-day, and strongly remind us of the bogus collections which
used to be a sideshow at bazaars in the country. Still, “Forget me
not at Salter’s, in thy next bowl!” said the wits, and a galaxy of
wonderful men must have met at “the Don’s” of an afternoon as Richard
Steele describes it in the _Tatler_. The famous collection was sold
in 1799, and the coffee-house became a public-house; in 1867 it was
divided into two private residences.

The houses Nos. 19 to 26 were built about sixty years later than those
we have been considering, when the last part of the Manor frontage
was taken down; the difference in style is easy to trace—there is
a uniformity of style, which has evidently been aimed at, and the
magnificent ironwork of the earlier date is wanting.

At No. 24 there are vaults which undoubtedly date from Tudor times,
and tradition says that the gnarled old wisteria embracing No. 20
is a creeper of the Manor House garden. All these houses have fine
panelling, staircases and fireplaces, and handrails—some of earlier
fashion than the buildings themselves, which points at their adaptation
from previous mansions.

Modern houses intervene in the curve where stood Winchester House, the
Bishop’s Palace: at No. 27 Mr. and Mrs. Bram Stoker lived, in the palmy
days of the Lyceum Theatre under Sir Henry Irving’s management, and
dispensed delightful Irish hospitality.

Across Oakley Street, we come to a lately restored house which bears
the old sign of the Magpie and Stump. The “Magpie Inn,” one of the
oldest houses in Chelsea, was a rendezvous for the supporters of
the Stuart cause in 1715 and 1745; they could slip away by water
if in danger of discovery. Next come, alas! some lamentable gaps,
interspersed with a few odd walls and gables still remaining, parts of
old Shrewsbury House, where Mary Queen of Scots was held in custody by
the Earl of Shrewsbury. The form of the house cannot be traced, though
an old print gives it as a hollow square standing back from the present
roadway; it was broken up in 1813, but without doubt parts of it have
been built into the present small houses.

By the by, the Earl of Shrewsbury who had charge of Queen Mary was also
fourth husband of the notorious Bess of Hardwick, and Queen Elizabeth
is reported to have pitied him for having such intimate acquaintance
with “two she devils.”

No. 48 was once a Quakers’ Meeting House. The Hospital for Incurable
Children, of which Queen Alexandra is President, nobly fills the site
of some very old, tall houses, in one of which Holman Hunt painted
his “Light of the World”; the old vine was preserved, and still bears
small, sweet grapes in a hot season; the children’s voices sound
merrily as you pass their open windows, and the saddest inmates are
those who, having been sent here as incurable, are told that they are
nearly healed and must shortly return to their homes.

Beyond Lombards’ Row, already noticed, where the old Archway House
stood to shelter Jacobite plotters, are some new houses which are
surely an anachronism in our Queen Anne Walk (the original dates
hereabouts are 1710-11), but the Copper Door is a fine piece of work,
and a splendid reflector of sunshine.

Across Danvers Street lies the waste land surrounding the lately
erected Crosby Hall, of which I do not suffer myself to write, so
keenly do I resent its importation into the hallowed precincts of Sir
Thomas More’s whilom garden. Those who wish to inspect it can do so by
inquiring for the custodian and the keys at More’s Gardens Mansions
(entrance corner of Beaufort Street).

[Illustration: _Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd._
LINDSEY HOUSE.
p. 52] ]

Crossing Beaufort Street, all the houses are gracious and of good
report, and the entire proportions of Lindsey House can be made out
from the pavement on the riverside, sub-divided as it now is into five
or six different dwellings, and at one gabled end slightly extended.

This was the great house of Sir Theodore de Mayerne, Court Physician,
1639; of Robert, Earl of Lindsey, Lord High Chamberlain, 1671; of
Count Zinzendorf, the Moravian Leader, 1750: it occupied a part of the
grounds of Beaufort House, and rose to importance as that great mansion
declined. The Moravian fraternity had their colony and chapel and
burying-ground behind Millman Street, where members of their persuasion
were buried upright, under small square headstones, with the object,
tradition says, of rising more quickly at the General Resurrection than
other people. Finally, after passing many picturesque houses and some
squalid modern interpolations, we come to Turner’s house, with the
balcony where he watched the sunrise, and with the south-west window
where he died with the sunset flooding his face in 1851.

Cheyne Walk ends at World’s End Passage, “the way between the Pales,”
as the map of 1717 has it, which led across the fields and marshes to
Kensington.


NOTES




CHAPTER VII

 Lots Road—Ashburnham House—Sandford Manor—Beaufort House and a corner
 of a “fayre garden”—Tudor bricks—Danvers House and the Herberts—Lord
 Wharton’s scheme of silk production—Henry VIII.’s Hunting Lodge in
 Glebe Place—The Manor House gardens and those who have walked there.


AS WE HAVE reached the western limit of Cheyne Walk and may not be
there again, for the uninteresting industrial district which begins
here is not likely to tempt us back, we will say a few words about some
of the old names that survive, under very altered conditions, and then
turn our backs on it.

Lots Road, which might easily suggest the dreary desert tramp of the
migrating Patriarch, is so called because it is built on the site of
four lots of pasture-land belonging to the manor, and the first of the
property to be sold. In 1740 this land surrounded Chelsea Farm, the
residence of the Methodist Lady Huntingdon, the friend of Whitfield and
inventor of a “Persuasion” all her own. Then, in sharp contrast, it
became Chelsea Gardens, later opened as Cremorne, and closed in 1875,
when its pretensions to fashion had been eclipsed in rowdyism.

Further to the north-west lay Ashburnham House, whither Master William
Ashburnham was steering on the memorable night when he was nearly
submerged in Chelsea Reach: the name has been well preserved in the
handsome church and adjacent block of mansions.

Chelsea Creek was once a much-used waterway to Kensington, and the
old lock-keeper’s cottage used to be a picturesque object; there was
perhaps a back way to Sandford Manor House, occupied first by Nell
Gwynn, later by Addison, which gallants and savants used in turn.
The remains of the little old dwelling stand in the yard of the Gas
Company, to the right of the railway, and accessible from King’s Road
at Stanley Bridge; but they are rather a deplorable relic of two
popular historic figures, and any day may see them swept away. There
are some survivals which even the keenest antiquarian must feel had
better be graciously obliterated if they cannot be restored to dignity.
Addison’s description of his home as Sandys’ End, written in 1708,
scarcely prepares us for the desolation of its present-day appearance.

Returning eastward, along Cheyne Walk, we naturally turn up Beaufort
Street, and try to realise, while the tram screams at us from the
middle of the road, that Sir Thomas More’s fair house and gardens
lay here on either hand. The Clock-house entry to the Moravian
burial-ground is perhaps the original north-west corner of these
grounds; on the east they stretch to Danvers Street. Here and there are
still to be found pieces of wall which show the unmistakable nuggets of
Tudor brickwork; and I once saw the surprising spectacle of a correctly
attired clergyman astride a twelve-foot wall at the back of the old
Pheasantry, trying to detach a brick as a memento of his visit to the
Chancellor’s domain. I regret that I failed to observe his descent, but
I met him later ruefully amused and very dirty; and he had to confess
that the sixteenth-century builders had been too clever for him, and he
had torn his hands and his clothes for no result. But the Chancellor’s
motto, “Serve God and be merrie,” was certainly his also; and the fact
that he had not been able to detach one brick seemed to convince him of
its undoubted Tudor-ness!

Those who would read of “the Greatest House in Chelsea,” and Sir Thomas
More’s life there, should get Mr, Randall Davies’ recently published
book and study its complete record; here we can only briefly relate how
after More’s execution it was granted to the Marquis of Winchester,
inherited by Lady Dacre, bequeathed by her to Lord Burleigh, and later
occupied by Sir Arthur Gorges, the Dukes of Buckingham, the Dukes of
Beaufort, and finally was bought and pulled down by Sir Hans Sloane,
who seems to have had a mania for demolishing historic great houses.
Perhaps as a physician his sanitary instincts were more alert than his
feelings of sentiment.

There is just one corner of Beaufort Street where a realisation of the
past may really be achieved in a very delightful and unexpected manner.
Turn in at the iron gateway to Argyle Mansions (at the right-hand side
of the street, where the tramlines end and the King’s Road crosses),
and you will find yourself in an undreamed of survival of a part of the
Chancellor’s garden. You will find some old trees and a mulberry-bush,
and some turf, that is Chelsea, not London, sward; you will be hard to
please or to interest if you cannot picture a garden scene here: Sir
Thomas with his arm about his “Meg’s” shoulder—Erasmus reading in the
shade—perhaps the King’s Majesty himself, swaggering condescendingly,
and as yet uncrossed in his desires and uncontradicted in his supremacy.

It is but a scrap of green, but it is genuine Chelsea history—far more
so than the intrusive Crosby Hall, which hunches its shoulder to the
garden a few hundred yards further on and whose connection with Sir
Thomas is remote and with Chelsea is nil.

Danvers Street with its tablet, “This is Danvers Street, begun in ye
year 1696 by Benjamin Stallwood,” commemorates the older Danvers House,
home of the versatile Sir John Danvers, a courtier, a regicide, and
then a courtier again as the whirligig of time carried him along. His
wife was the pious and beautiful Lady Herbert, mother by her first
marriage of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and of George Herbert, the sweet
singer; the Herbert family was constant at church, and it is pleasant
to think that some of the poet’s “Church Porch” thoughts may have come
to him in the calm seclusion of the Old Church. Lord Wharton, who later
lived at Danvers House and was the author of the famous Whig song
“Lillibulero” to which Purcell wrote the music, tried to introduce the
silk industry into Chelsea, for the employment of the French Huguenots
who had a colony hereabouts. Two thousand mulberry trees were planted
along the north of King’s Road, on the Elm Park estate, and in other
large gardens, but unluckily a mulberry was chosen which did not
approve itself to English silkworms, and after a specimen petticoat had
been presented to Queen Caroline, we hear no more of the venture.

But this doubtless accounts for the many odd-corner mulberry trees in
our various back-gardens: Queen Elizabeth has been associated with
several of them, and without hesitation we believe that she planted the
Rectory garden tree—but for the rest, we credit Lord Wharton.

A little intricate turn, opposite the new County School buildings,
into Glebe Place brings us, at the south-east corner, to Henry VIII.’s
Hunting Lodge, a tiny dwelling, with beautiful fish-scale tiling, and
so narrow a doorway that our ordinary conception of King Hal’s figure
seems to give the lie to this tradition. But Henry was doubtless of
slenderer build when he came to shoot bernagle on the riverside, and
incidentally to court Mistress Jane Seymour; it is worth asking the
present occupier of the little house for permission to see the ladder
stairway to the floor above. Again we are amazed to think how Henry
ever mounted it; the Lodge, as it is called still, must have been very
convenient in old days to that Tudor Lane which divided Upper Cheyne
Row and ran straight to the Thames side, where in the reeds of the
Battersea shore wild geese were plentiful.

The gardens at the back of the Cheyne Walk houses east of Oakley Street
are all hallowed ground, for here without a doubt stretched the lawns
and glades of the royal pleasaunce, where “Katheryn the Queene” waited
so anxiously for the Lord High Admiral—her fourth husband, it is true,
but her first love; where she bade him play with romance, at the little
gate in the fields, in the letter which he told her not to write but
which she could not resist writing.

[Illustration: _Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston._
HENRY VIII.’S HUNTING LODGE.
p. 60] ]

Presently, Elizabeth the hoyden was romping and flirting with her
stepfather in these very precincts, and poor Queen Katharine was sadly
disillusioned and crept away to Sudeley to die. Anne of Cleves may have
paced here in sedate Dutch fashion, debating whether she should invite
her whilom husband to tea, which she certainly did and found it quite
entertainment enough. Lady Jane Grey visited here, and as Guildford
Dudley lived hard by, perhaps conducted her priggish courtship under
these very trees. By-and-by Sir Hans Sloane is wheeled up in his
invalid chair and matures his practical plans for breaking up the
estate and sending a tide of new building over Chelsea.

Afterwards, when each house had its individual garden, the company
that flocked to Cheyne Walk was, in Georgian times, scarcely less
distinguished, and in our own day no less interesting: some magnet
quality in the very earth surely brings those who are dear and
delightful to rest in Chelsea by the river?


NOTES




CHAPTER VIII

 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 life and 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.

[Illustration: _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 his _Herbal_ without “the grey mare’s” clever
assistance), Philip Miller, of the _Gardeners’ 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’ recreation room, 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 the _Whitster’s_ Pew, 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’ENVOI


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 & 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, CONFECTIONERS
                          AND CATERERS, ETC.


           All Orders carried out under Personal Supervision




                  _FOR PARTICULARS OF CHARACTERISTIC_

  CHELSEA
         HOUSES

TO BUY OR RENT, APPLY

WHEELER BROS.

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:
  WESTERN
  1782

  WRIGHT’S DAIRY

  _Chief Office
  and Dairies_:

  38, 44, 46, 48, Church Street,
  CHELSEA.

  _Branch Offices_: 69, KING’S ROAD, CHELSEA, AND
  3, 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.

[Illustration: “The Chelsea Weavers.”
258 King’s Rd. Chelsea.]

       *       *       *       *       *

“The Good Intent”

  Restaurant and Tea Rooms

12, Vale Terrace, King’s Road, Chelsea

  _=Lunches=_ _(2 courses), 12.30 to 2 p.m._ _=1/3=_
  _=Teas=_ _     -     -     -     -       _  _=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, 1912_




    The...

  Animals’ Hospital & Institute

      75, KINNERTON STREET,
          WILTON PLACE, S.W.

  Telephone 317 Victoria.      Established 1888.

  TO PROVIDE TREATMENT
  FOR SUFFERING ANIMALS


  All information will be given on application to—

  WALTER BETTS, _Secretary_.




                               FOOTNOTE:

[1] See Mr. Randall Davies’ _Greatest House in Chelsea_.






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