G. B. Stuart

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, [70] 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. ”

“ The tomb originally stood in the More Chapel, which Lady [32] 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!) ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ 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!
[74]
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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Standing in the middle aisle, the beauty of the pulpit [33] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”