The Old Soldiers have their own gardens near at hand, and as we stroll there we pass College Fields, perpetuating the name of King James’s College; and so on between double rows of lime trees, gnarled and bent, under which the amorous veterans flirt sedately with the demure nursemaids, whose neglected charges meanwhile play with the sheep.  Through the gate we enter a small but well-arranged domain, divided into tiny squares; each planted by its owner in flowers or in vegetables as may suit him, so giving him a little more tobacco money by his sales.  They seem fond of those plants which put themselves most in evidence; and their little gardens are all aglow with gorgeous hollyhocks, dahlias, sunflowers, of the most gigantic and highly coloured kinds.  It is a delight to watch the old fellows of a summer afternoon, bending intent on their toil in shirt-sleeves; or stalking stiffly about in their long red coats, senilely chaffing and cackling!

You will be pleased, I hope, to learn that this little piece of ground is called Ranelagh Gardens, and is the sole surviving remnant of that famous resort so dear to an older generation.  “The R:^t Hon:^ble Richard Earle of Ranelagh,” as he is styled on the original “Ground Plot of the Royal Hospital” in the British Museum, being made one of the three commissioners appointed in the beginning to manage the young asylum, leases to himself seven acres of its grounds on the east, lying along the river, and there builds a grand mansion, in 1691; the gardens of which are “curiously kept and elegantly designed: so esteemed the best in England.”  This first Earl of Ranelagh has been one of the pupils of a certain schoolmaster named John Milton, probably at his house in Barbican in the City, so recently torn down.  The Earl becomes a famous man, in a different line from his teacher, and dying in 1712, leaves Ranelagh House and its gardens to his son; who sells the place in 1733 to Lacy, Garrick’s partner in the Drury Lane theatre patent; to be made by him a place of open-air amusement, after the manner of the favourite Vauxhall.  But “it has totally beat Vauxhall,” writes Horace Walpole.  “Nobody goes anywhere else, everybody goes there.  My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it, that he says he has ordered all his letters to be directed thither.”  Of course, he has his sneer at the “rival mobs” of the two places; but he does not disdain to show himself a very swell mob’s man, in his famous carouse at Ranelagh, with Miss Ashe and Lady Caroline Petersham.  His father, Sir Robert, was proud to parade here his lovely mistress, Miss Chudleigh; “not over clothed,” as Leigh Hunt delicately puts it.  The manners and morals of this place and this time have never been so pithily presented as in George Selwyn’s mot, on hearing that one of the waiters had been convicted of robbery: “What a horrid idea he’ll give of us to those fellows in Newgate!”

At this distance, however, the fêtes, frolics, fire-works and all the fashionable frivolity of the place look bright and bewildering.  Nor did grave and reverend men disdain to spend their evenings at Ranelagh—“to give expansion and gay sensation to the mind,” as staid old Dr. Johnson asserted!  Goldsmith felt its gaiety, when he came here to forget the misery of his lodging in Green Arbour Court, where now stands the Holborn Viaduct station.  Laurence Sterne, fresh to the town from his Yorkshire parsonage, finding himself in great vogue—his portrait much stared at, in Spring Gardens, one of the four sent there, selected by Sir Joshua as his choicest works—plunged forthwith into all sorts of frivolities, and was seen in Ranelagh more often than was considered seemly.  Smollett sometimes emerged from out his Chelsea solitude for a sight of this festive world; Fielding came here to study the scenes for his “Amelia”; and Addison, too, who chats about the place in his Spectator. [80]  It is spoken of in the Connoisseur and the Citizen of the World; the poet Bloomfield introduced it, and Fanny Burney placed here a scene in her “Evelina.”  At this time—just one hundred years ago—she was a little past twenty-six, and was living with her father, Dr. Burney, recently made organist of the hospital chapel, next door.  Ranelagh had then begun to “decline and fall off,” in Silas Wegg’s immortal phrase: having been open since 1742, it was finally closed at the beginning of this century, its artificial oil-moon paling before the rising radiance of gas-lighted new Cremorne.

On an old tracing of the Hospital boundaries kept in its archives, I found this inscription: “To answer the Earl of Ranelagh’s house on the east side of the College, an house was builded in the Earl of Orford’s garden on the west side.”  This was the house into which Sir Robert Walpole moved from his lodgings near by, where now Walpole Street runs; the same lodgings in which the Earl of Sandwich had lived long before.  The Edward Montague, who, as Commander of the fleet, brought Charles II. back to England, was made Earl of Sandwich for this service, and in 1663 he came to live in Chelsea, “to take the ayre.”  But there was a “Mrs. Betty Becke,” his landlady’s daughter, who seems to have been the real reason for this retirement, and at whom the moral Pepys sneers as “a slut.”  He writes under date of September 9, 1663: “I am ashamed to see my lord so grossly play the fool, to the flinging off of all honour, friends, and servants, and everything and person that is good, with his carrying her abroad, and playing on the lute under her window, and forty other poor sordid things, which I am grieved to hear.”  Having occasion to visit his chief here, on naval business, the Clerk of the Admiralty finds him “all alone, with one joynte of meat, mightily extolling the manner of his retirement, and the goodness of his diet;” and was so perturbed, and so loyal withal, as to dare to write him, “that her wantonness occasioned much scandal, though unjustly, to his Lordship.”  Nor was his Lordship offended by this frankness, but remained friendly to his Secretary.

Crossing through court and quadrangle and garden, to the western side of the Hospital, we are allowed to enter its infirmary, and to pass into ward No. 7.  Here we stand in Sir Robert Walpole’s dining-room, unchanged since he left it, except that the array of fine Italian pictures has gone from the walls, and that decrepid soldiers lie about on cots, coughing and drinking gruel from mugs.  But for all this, perhaps by reason of all this, this room, with its heavily moulded ceiling, its stately marble mantle—in severe white throughout—is one of the most impressive relics of by-gone grandeur in all London.  The house, grand in its day, grand still in its mutilation, was built by Sir John Vanbrugh, whose architecture—florid and faulty, but with a dignity of its own, such as strikes one in his masterpiece, Blenheim, called by Thackeray “a piece of splendid barbarism”—was as heavy as his comedies were light; and served to bring on him Swift’s epitaph:

This one end—all that remains of the old red-brick mansion—has been raised a storey, but otherwise stands almost as when Walpole lived here from 1723 to 1746, and from its chambers ruled England through his subjects George I. and George II., whom he allowed to reign.  It was from this room that he rushed out on the arrival of the express with the news of the death of the first George.  He left his dinner-table at three p.m. on the 14th June, 1727, and took horse at once:—so riding that he “killed two horses under him,” says his son Horace:—and was the first to reach the Prince of Wales at Richmond with the news.  To Walpole House used to drive, from her palace at Kensington, the wife of this same Prince of Wales; who, now become George II., cheered her solitude by writing to her long letters from his residence at Hanover, filled with praises of his latest lady-love.  These epistles the fair-haired, blue-eyed, sweet-voiced woman would bring weeping to Walpole, in search of the comfort which he graciously gave, by assuring her that now that she was growing old she must expect this sort of thing!  A little later Walpole drove from here to Kensington, and stood beside the King at her deathbed; Caroline commending to Walpole’s protection her husband and his monarch!  Here came Bolingbroke on his return from his exile in France, to dine at the invitation of his great rival, whom he hated and envied.  It was not a joyful dinner for him, and Horace Walpole tells us that “the first morsel he put into his mouth was near choking him, and he was reduced to rise from the table and leave the room for some minutes.  I never heard of their meeting more.”  Here Swift used to stride into dinner, studying his host for the rôle of Flimnap in his “Gulliver,” which he was then writing.  Here fat John Gay, then secretary or steward to Lady Monmouth, a little farther on in Chelsea, swaggered in his fine clothes, and being snubbed by his cynical host, put him on the stage as “Macheath” in his “Beggar’s Opera.”  Pope used to drive over in his little trap from Twickenham, before his friend Bolingbroke’s return, to entertain Sir Robert with the details of his row about Lady Mary Wortley Montague with Lord Hervey; that be-rouged fop whom he pilloried in his rage, as

The famous gardens, on which the gay and extravagant Lady Walpole spent her time and money, have been built over by the successive additions to the Infirmary; and we no longer can see the conservatory and grotto, without which in those days no garden was considered complete.  The bit of ground left serves now for the convalescent soldiers, and the graceful tree in the centre, its branches growing horizontally out from the top of the trunk, forms a natural arbour, which they mightily enjoy upon a sunny afternoon.  Down at the lower end of the garden, a bit of rotting wooden fence set above a sunken wall marks the line of the river-bank as it ran before the building of the embankment.  Just here, on a pleasant terrace and in its summer-house, that royal scamp, George IV., was fond of philandering with his fair friends; this scene suggesting a curious contrast with the group once surely sitting or strolling here—a group made up of no less august personages than Charles II. and the Earl of Sandwich with the Duchess of Mazarin, followed by “her adoring old friend” St. Evremond.  For that lovely and luckless lady lived just across the road, outside these grounds; and to her house in Paradise Row I wish now to take you.

All that is now left of old Paradise Row is half a dozen small brick cottages, with tiny gardens in front, and vines climbing above.  Once, when all about here was country, these dwellings must have been really delightful, and have justified the suggestion of their name, looking out as they did on pleasant parterres, terraced to the river.  Unpretending as they are, they have harboured many historic personages.  In Paradise Row—it is now partly Queen’s Road West—lived the first Duke of St. Albans, Nell Gwynne’s son, not far from the more modest mansion of his venerated grandmother, among the “neat-houses” at Millbank.  Her garden sloped down to the river, and therein she fell one day, and was drowned; and they wrote a most woeful ballad “Upon that never-to-be-forgotten matron, old Madame Gwynn, who died in her own fish-pond;” and it would seem from these ribald rhymes that the lamented lady was fat and fond of brandy!  This latter weakness is also the theme of Rochester’s muse, in his “Panegyric upon Nelly,” when he commends her scorn of cost in the funeral rites—

In old Paradise Row also lived the Earls of Pelham and of Sandwich, and the Duchess of Hamilton.  At the corner of Robinson’s Lane—now Flood Street—stood Lord Robarte’s house, wherein he gave the famous supper to Charles II. on the 4th of September, 1660, and was soon after made Earl of Radnor: whence the street of that name hard by.  On April 19, 1665, Pepys visited him here, and “found it to be the prettiest contrived house that ever I saw in my life.”  It stood there until within a few weeks, a venerable tavern known as “The Duke’s Head”: now gone the way of so much historic brick and mortar!  Latest of all our Chelsea celebrities, Faulkner, the historian of Chelsea, lived on the corner of Paradise Row, and what was then Ormond Row, now commonplace Smith Street.  A quiet, quaint old public-house, “The Chelsea Pensioner,” stands where Faulkner worked with such pains, on his driest of records; yet to them we are all glad to go for many of our facts about modern Chelsea.  These poor little plaster-fronted cottages, stretching from this corner to Christchurch Street, now represent the once stately Ormond Row; and the swinging sign of the “Ormond Dairy” is all we have to commemorate old Ormond House, which stood just here.  In its gardens, sloping to the river bank, Walpole’s later house was built, as we have seen it to-day.

Paradise Row

Let us stop again before the little two-storied house, the easternmost of Paradise Row, standing discreetly back from the street behind a prim plot of grass; well-wrought-iron gates are swung on square gate-posts, a-top of each of which is an old-fashioned stone globe, of the sort seldom seen nowadays.  A queer little sounding-board projects over the small door; and above the little windows we read “School of Discipline, Instituted A.D. 1825.”  It is the oldest school of the kind in London, was founded by Elizabeth Fry, and in it young girls, forty-two at a time, each staying two years, “are reformed for five shillings a week,” and fitted for domestic service.  They wear very queer aprons, their hair is plastered properly, their shoes are clumsy; and no queerer contrast was ever imagined than that between them and the perfumed, curled, high-heeled dame, who once lived here.  She is well worth looking back at, as we sit here in her low-ceilinged drawing-room, darkly panelled, as are hall and staircase by which we have passed in entering.

Hortensia Mancini, the daughter of Cardinal Mazarin’s sister, had been married while very young to some Duke, who was allowed to assume the name of Mazarin on his marriage.  A religious fanatic, he soon shut her up in a convent, from which she took her flight and found her way to England in boy’s costume.  There, as the handsomest woman in Europe, her coming caused commotion among her rivals, all remembering the flutter she had excited in Charles II. during his exile in France.  Ruvigny [91] writes: “She has entered the English court as Armida entered the camp of Godfrey.”  Indeed, this one soon showed that she, too, was a sorceress; and Rochester, in his famous “Farewell,” acclaims her the “renowned Mazarine, first in the glorious Roll of Infamy.”  Living luxuriously and lavishly for a while, until by the death of her royal lover she lost her pension of £4000 yearly, she came at length to this little house as her last dwelling-place; and even here, reduced to real poverty, unable to pay her butcher or her baker, written down on the Parish books of 1695, “A Defaulter of the Parish Rates:” she yet persisted in giving grand dinners—the cost of which (so old Lysons heard) was met by each guest leaving monies under his napkin!  For all that, this modest mansion was the favourite resort of famous men of her day; who lounged in of an evening to discuss and speculate, to play at her basset-tables, to listen to her music, mostly dramatic, the forerunner of Italian opera in this country.  Here came Sydney Godolphin, that rare man who was “never in the way, and yet never out of the way;” here the king was frequently found; here Saint Evremond was always found!  How real to us is the figure of this gallant old Frenchman, as we see him in the National Portrait Gallery: his white hair flowing below his black cap; his large forehead; his dark blue eyes; the great wen that grew in his later years between them, just at the top of his nose: a shrewd, kindly, epicurean face.  He came of a noble Norman family from Denis le Guast, this Charles de Saint Denys, Seigneur de Saint Evremond.  Entering the army at an early age, he rose rapidly to a captaincy; his bravery and his wit—a little less than that of Voltaire, whom he helped to form, says Hallam—making him the friend of Turenne, of the great Condè, and of others of that brilliant band.  Satirizing Mazarin, he was locked in the Bastille for three months; and when free, he finally fled from the cardinal’s fury, and came to England: here to end his days, waiting on this still fascinating woman, worshipping her, advising her, writing plays for her, and poetry to her.  He held the rank of Governor of Duck Island, in the ornamental water of St. James’s Park—an office invented for him by Charles II., and having a fine title, a large salary, and no duties.  You may throw bread to-day to the lineal descendants of those ducks of which the King was so fond.  Saint Evremond died in 1703, and lies in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, near to Chaucer and Beaumont and Dryden; his adored lady having died in 1699 in this very house.  She was not buried; for after all these years of self-effacement her devoted husband again appears, has her body embalmed, and carries it with him wherever he journeys.

Mary Astell lived and died in her little house in Paradise Row; a near neighbour of, and a curious contrast to, the Duchess of Mazarin, whom she pointed at in her writings as a warning of the doom decreed to beauty and to wit, when shackled in slavery to Man, and so dis-weaponed in the fight against fate and forgetfulness.  She devoted herself to celibacy and “to the propagation of virtue,” as Smollett slily put it.  Congreve satirized her, too; Swift stained her with his sneers as “Madonella;” Addison and Steele made fun of her in their gentler way.  Doubtless there was something of la Précieuse Ridicule to that generation in the aspect of this most learned lady, who wrote pamphlets and essays; in which, following More’s lead, she urged the higher education of her sex; and preached as well as practised persistent protests against the folly of those pretty women, “who think more of their glasses than of their reflections.”  She inveighed much—this in our modern manner—against marriage, and woman’s devotion to man; putting it with point and pith, that Woman owes a duty to Man “only by the way, just as it may be any man’s duty to keep hogs; he was not made for this, but if he hires himself out for this employment, he is bound to perform it conscientiously.”  One good work of hers still survives.  Failing to found among her female friends a College or Community for Celibacy and Study, she induced Lady Elizabeth Hastings—her immortalized as the Aspasia of the Tatler by Congreve and by Steele, and to whom the latter applied his exquisite words, “to love her is a liberal education”—and other noble ladies to endow in 1729 a school for the daughters of old pensioners of the Royal Hospital; and this little child’s charity was the precursor and harbinger of the present grand asylum at Hampstead, which clothes, educates, and cares for these girls.

It is but a step to the spacious, many-windowed brick building in the King’s Road; on the pediment of which, in Cheltenham Terrace, we read: “The Royal Military Asylum for the Children of Soldiers of the Regular Army.”  It is popularly known as the “Duke of York’s School,” and is devoted to the training of the orphan boys of poor soldiers.  It is a pleasant sight to watch them going through their manœuvres in their gravel ground; or, off duty, playing football and leap-frog.  They bear themselves right martially in their red jackets and queer caps, a few proudly carrying their corporal’s yellow chevrons, a fewer still prouder of their “good conduct stripes.”  It was “B 65,” big with the double dignity of both badges of honour, who unbent to my questioning; and explained that the lads are entered at the age of ten, can remain until fourteen, can then become drummers if fitted for that vocation, or can give up their army career and take their chances in civilians’ pursuits.

We may not pause long before the iron gates which let us look in on the mansion named Blacklands; now a private mad-house, and the only remnant of the great estate once owned by Lord Cheyne, and which covered more than the extent of Sloane Street and Square, Cadogan and Hans Place: all these laid out and built by Holland in 1777, and by him called Hans Town.  We might have stopped, a while ago, in front of the vast Chelsea barracks, just to the south, to look at the faded plaster-fronted shop, opposite.  “The Old Chelsea Bun-House,” its sign assured us it was, before its demolition last year; yet it was only the descendant of the original house, which stood a little farther east up Pimlico Road, formerly Jews’ Road.  That once mal-odorous street is yet fragrant with the buns baked there in the last century, when the little shop was crowded with dainty damsels in hoops and furbelows, with gallants in wigs and three-cornered hats, while stately flunkies strode in the street below.  “Pray, are not the fine buns sold here in our town as the rare Chelsea buns?  I bought one to-day in my walk”—Swift tells Stella in his journal for 1712.  Half-mad George III. and Queen Charlotte—she popularly known as “Old Snuffy”—were fond of driving out to Chelsea Bun-House, to sit on its verandah munching buns, much stared at by the curious crowd.  The old building was torn down in 1839, “to the general regret in London and its environs,” its crazy collection of poor pictures, bogus antiques, and genuine Chelsea ware being sold by auction; all of which is duly chronicled in “The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction” of April 6, 1839.

Tite street

We turn the corner, and pass through Tite Street, and so come, in refreshing contrast with its ambitious artificiality, to a bit of genuine nature—a great garden stretching from Swan Walk and the Queen’s Road, and fronting just here on the Embankment.  On one of the great stone posts of this entrance—once the water-gate—we read: “The Botanic Garden of the Society of Apothecaries of London, A.D. 1673;” on the other: “Granted to the Society in Perpetuity by Sir Hans Sloane, Bart., A.D. 1723.”  These grounds remain intact as when in this last-named year four acres of Lord Cheyne’s former domain were made over to the Society of Apothecaries for “The Chelsea Physick Garden;” with permission to build thereon a barge-house and offices, for their convenience when they came up the river.  The buildings were demolished in 1853, but the gardens have bravely held out against the Vandal hordes of bricklayers and builders; and in them all the herbs of Materia Medica which can grow in the open air are cultivated to this very day for the instruction of medical students, just as when Dr. Johnson’s Polyphilus—the universal genius of the Rambler—started to come out here from London streets to see a new plant in flower.  The trees are no longer so vigorous as when Evelyn, so fond of fine trees, praised them; and of the twelve noble Cedars of Lebanon planted by the hand of Sir Hans, but one still stands; and this one, even in its decrepitude, is nearly as notable, it seems to me, as that glorious unequalled one in the private garden of Monseigneur the Archbishop of Tours.  In the centre stands the statue of Sir Hans Sloane, put up in 1733, chipped and stained by wind and weather.  For, in this garden Hans Sloane studied, and when he became rich and famous and bought the manor of Chelsea, he gave the freehold of this place to the Apothecaries’ Company on condition that it should be devoted for ever to the use of all students of nature.

Westward a little way, we come to “Swan House.”  This modern-antique mansion stands on the site of, and gets its name from, the “Old Swan Tavern,” which has been gone these fifteen years now, and which stood right over the river, with projecting wooden balconies, and a land entrance from Queen’s Road.  It and its predecessor—a little lower down the river—were historic public-houses resorted to by parties pleasuring from town; and this was always a house of call for watermen with their wherries, as we find so well pictured in Marryat’s “Jacob Faithful.”  Here Pepys turned back on the 9th of April, 1666; having come out for a holiday, and “thinking to have been merry at Chelsey; but being come almost to the house by coach near the waterside, a house alone, I think the Swan,” he learned from a passer-by that the plague had broken out in this suburb, and that the “house was shut up of the sickness.  So we with great affright . . . went away for Kensington.”  The old fellow—he was young then—was fond of taking boat or coach, “to be merry at Chelsey”; often with Mrs. Knipp, the pretty actress; sometimes with both her and his wife, and then he drily complains to his diary—“and my wife out of humour, as she always is when this woman is by.”  Yet the critics claim that he had no sense of fun!  Until the “Old Swan” was torn down, it served as the goal for the annual race which is still rowed on the first day of every August from the “Old Swan Tavern” at London Bridge, by the young Thames watermen, for the prize instituted in 1715 by Doggett—that fine low comedian of Queen Anne’s day: a silver medal stamped with the white horse of Hanover (in commemoration of the First George’s coronation), and a waterman’s orange-coloured coat full of pockets, each pocket holding a golden guinea.

Statue of Sir Han’s Sloane in the Botanic Gardens

Just beyond, at Flood Street, begins Cheyne Walk; still, despite almost daily despoiling, despite embankments and gas and cabs, the most old-fashioned, dignified, and impressive spot in all London.  Those of its modest brick houses which remain have not been ruined by too many modern improvements; they are prim and respectable, clad in a sedate secluded sobriety, not at all of this day.  Their little front gardens are unpretending and almost sad.  Between them and the street are fine specimens of old wrought iron in railings and in gates, in last century brackets for lamps, in iron extinguishers for the links they used to carry.  The name “Hans Sloane House” is wrought in open iron letters, in the gate of No. 17; in others, the numbers alone are thus worked in the antique pattern.  “Manor House” has an attractive old plaster front; on another a shining brass plate, dimly marked “Gothic House” in well-worn letters, is just what we want to find there.  In No. 4 died, on the night of the 22nd December, 1880, Mrs. John Walter Cross, more widely known as George Eliot.  And in this same house lived for many years Daniel Maclise, the painter of the two grandest national pictures yet produced in England; “the gentlest and most modest of men,” said his friend Charles Dickens.  Here he died on the 25th of April, 1870, and from here he was carried to Kensal Green.

No. 4, Cheyne Walk

In No. 15 lived for a long time that youthful genius, Cecil Lawson; whose admirable works, rejected at one time by the Royal Academy, have been hung in places of honour, since.  One would be glad to have stepped from his studio into that next door, No. 16, and to have seen Dante Gabriel Rossetti at work there. [109]  His house—now again known by its ancient and proper title, “Queen’s House”—stands back between court and garden, its stately double front bowed out by a spacious central bay, the famous drawing-room on the first floor taking the whole width.  This great bay, as high as the house, is not so old, however; and must be an addition of more recent years; for the house itself plainly dates from the days of the Stuarts.  Indeed, it shows the influence, if not the very hand, of the admirable Wren; not only in the external architecture, but in the perfect proportion to all its parts of the panelling, the windows, the doorways within.  All the hall-ways and the rooms, even to the kitchen, are heavily wainscotted; and there mounts, up through the whole height of the interior, a spiral staircase, its balustrade of finest hand-wrought iron.  So, too, are the railings and the gateway of the front courtyard, as you see them in our sketch; and, while much of their dainty detail has been gnawed away by the tooth of time, they still show the skill, the patience, and the conscience of the workers of that earlier day.  The iron crown which once topped this gate has long since been taken away; but we may still trace in twisted iron the initials “C. R.,” and we may still see these same initials in larger iron lettering within the pattern of the back-garden railings.  Catherine of Braganza, Queen of England, is the name they are believed to commemorate; and legend says that this house was once tenanted by, and perhaps built for, that long-suffering consort of Charles II.  I like to fancy her within these walls—the brilliant brunette stepping down from Lely’s canvas at Hampton Court or at Versailles; whose superb black eyes were celebrated by the court poet, Edmund Waller, in an ode on her birthday, and were characterized by sedate John Evelyn as “languishing and excellent”; and who was pronounced to be “mighty pretty” by that erudite and studious critic of female beauty, Samuel Pepys.  She wears the black velvet costume so becoming to her, and divides her days between pious rites and frisky dances—devoted equally to both!  A narrow, bigoted, good woman, this: yet, withal, simple, confiding, affectionate, modest, patient under neglect from her husband, and under insult from his mistresses; deserving a little longer devotion than the six weeks Charles vouchsafed to her after their marriage, never deserving the lampoons with which Andrew Marvel befouled her.

Gateway of Rossetti’s old house

When this front courtyard of “Queen’s House” happened to be dug up, not long ago, three sorts of bricks were unearthed: those of modern make, those of the Stuart time, those of the Tudor type.  These latter were the same narrow flat ones spoken of as being found in More’s chapel and wall; and were evidently the wreckage of the water-gate once standing here, giving entrance, together with the water stairway, from the river—running close alongside then—to the palace of Henry VIII.  And in the foundations of “Queen’s House” are to be seen remains of that Tudor stone-work; while, in the cellars of the adjacent houses are heavy nail-studded doors and windows, and similar survivals of that old Palace.  It was built just here by the King, who had learned to like Chelsea, in his visits to More.  He had bartered land elsewhere—presumably stolen by him—for the old Manor House standing farther west, near the Church, which belonged to the Lawrence family.  That not suiting him, he built this new Manor House—a little back from the river bank, and a little east of where Oakley Street now runs—its gardens reaching nearly to the present Flood Street, Manor Street having been cut through their midst.  It was of brick, its front and its gateway much like that of St. James’s Palace, as it looks up St. James’s Street; that built just before this, by Wolsey, and “conveyed” to himself by the King.  An old document describes the Manor House, as the “said capital messuage, containing on the first floor, 3 cellars, 3 halls, 3 kitchens, 3 parlours, 9 other rooms and larders; on the second floor, 3 drawing rooms and 17 chambers, and above, Summer-rooms, closets and garrets; 1 stable and 1 coach-house.”  That seems not so very grand in the eyes of our modern magnificence.

I have been able to trace the great grounds of the palace, covered in part with streets and houses as they now are, and in part forming the rear gardens of this end of Cheyne Walk.   And in these gardens are still standing here and there remnants of the ancient encircling walls.  The fine garden of Queen’s House was originally a portion of the palace grounds, and stood intact even to Rossetti’s time; something of its extent then being shown in our sketch.  The noble lime trees still stand there, and among them two strange exotic trees, their leaves unknown to the local gardeners.  This garden is now partly built on by new mansions, partly usurped by their gardens.  In two of the latter—spreading out into both—stands the mulberry tree planted by the hand of the Princess Elizabeth, still sturdy in its hale old age.  At the back of other houses a little farther west, notably in the garden of Mr. Druse, stand some very ancient trees; and I saw there, not very long ago—but gone, for ever now—a bit of crumbling wall, and an arch, within which were the old hinges whereon a gate was once hung.  That gate gave entrance from the land side, by a path leading across the fields from the King’s Road, to the palace grounds; and through it, Seymour slipped on his secret visits to Katherine Parr, as we know by a letter of hers: “I pray you let me have knowledge over night, at what hour ye will come, that your portress may wait at the gate to the fields for you.”  And she and Seymour had their historic romps under these very trees with the Princess Elizabeth, then a girl of thirteen.  Within doors, too, there were strange pranks “betwixt the Lord Admiral, and the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace,” as was later confessed by Katherine Aschyly, her maid.  When the young lady learned that Miss Aschyly and Her Cofferer were under examination in the Tower, says the old chronicler, “She was marvelous abashede, and ded weype very tenderly a long Time, demandyng of my Lady Browne wether they had confessed anything!”  Katherine Parr did not enjoy these frolics, and sometimes was furious with jealousy on finding them out; but for all that, she patiently returned to her persistent pious writing, too kindly a nature to harbour malice or suspicion.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s garden

Elizabeth had come to live in the Manor House, at the age of four, that she might grow up in that healthful air: her father placing, with his customary delicacy, the daughter of Anne Boleyn under the care and tuition and example of his latest wife, the staid and studious Katherine Parr.  To this latter, the King had given, on their marriage, the Manor House as her jointure; and there she lived in great state, after Henry’s death.  Already before their marriage, even then a wistful widow, she had been bewitched by Seymour; and had meant to marry him, but for being forced to submit to the King’s will to make her his queen.  Once queen, she seemed to subdue her passion for Seymour; says the naïve ancient chronicler, “it does not appear that any interruption to connubial comforts arose out of that particular source.”  The estimable monarch rotted to death at the end of January, 1546–7, and the month of May was made merry to his widow—but thirty-five years old—by her secret marriage with Seymour.  He was a turbulent, unscrupulous, handsome rascal, a greedy gambler, an insane intriguer; brother of the Protector Somerset, maternal uncle of King Edward VII., brother-in-law of the King; and he had tried to marry the Princess Elizabeth, then a girl of thirteen or fourteen, even while coquetting with the Queen-Dowager Katherine Parr.  The girl with her Boleyn blood doubtless delighted in the mystery of the secret visits, which she knew of, and in the secret marriage later, which she surely suspected.  The Queen-Dowager must have found it a trying and turbulent task to train her, and had more comfort in her other pupil, little Lady Jane Grey; who came here often for a visit, and for sympathy in the studies in which she was already a prodigy, even then at the age of eleven.  She is a pure and perfect picture, this lovely and gentle girl, amid all these cruel and crafty creatures; but we cannot follow her farther in the touching tragedy, in which she played the innocent usurper, the blameless martyr.  Nor can we say more of Katherine Parr—probably poisoned by her husband—nor of his death on the block, nor of the rascally and wretched record of the future owners of this Manor House; but let us come directly down to the year 1712, when it was sold by Lord William Cheyne, lord of the manor, widely known as “Lady Jane’s husband,” to Sir Hans Sloane.  It was looked on then as a grand place, and Evelyn, visiting Lord Cheyne and Lady Jane, notes in his diary that the gardens are fine, the fountains “very surprising and extraordinary.”  These had been designed by Winstanley, him who built Eddystone Lighthouse, and who perished therein.

Hans Sloane had come up to London, a young Irish student of medicine; and, frequenting the Botanical Gardens in Chelsea, just in view of this Manor House, he must often have looked at and perhaps longed to live in the roomy old mansion.  After his return from Jamaica, he pursued his studies with such success that he was made President of the Royal Society on the death of Sir Isaac Newton, in 1727.  He became a famous physician, was doctor to the Queens Anne and Caroline, as well as to George I., who made him a baronet in 1716; the first physician so ennobled in England.  As he grew in wealth he bought much property in Chelsea, first this Manor House—wherein he lived for fourteen years, and wherein he died—then More’s house, then land in other quarters of this suburb.  His name is perpetuated in Sloane Square and in Hans Place, and his property now forms the estate of the Earl of Cadogan, whose ancestor, the famous General Cadogan, a Colonel of the Horse Guards in Marlborough’s wars, married Elizabeth, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Hans Sloane; so that the present Earl of Cadogan is “Lord of the Manor and Viscount Chelsey.”

There was an Irish servant of Sir Hans Sloane, one Salter, who established himself in 1695 as a barber in a little house in Cheyne Walk which stood on the site of the present Nos. 17 and 18: “six doors beyond Manor Street,” contemporary papers say, and I have no doubt this is the correct site.  Salter was a thin little man, with a hungry look as of one fond of philosophy or of fretting; and Vice-Admiral Munden, just home from years of service on the Spanish coast, dubbed him, in a freak, Don Saltero, a title he carried to his death.  He took in all the papers, and had musical instruments lying about—he himself twanged Don-like the guitar—that his customers might divert themselves while awaiting their turns.  His master had given him a lot of rubbish, for which his own house had no more room, as well as duplicates of curiosities of real value in the Museum in Bloomsbury.  To these he added others of his own invention: the inevitable bit of the Holy Cross, the pillar to which Jesus was tied when scourged, a necklace of Job’s tears; and, as the little barber rhymed in his advertisements in 1723, just after De Foe had set the town talking with his new book—

So that “my eye was diverted by ten thousand gimcracks on the walls and ceiling,” as Steele puts it in the Tatler, describing a Voyage to Chelsea.  For Don Saltero’s museum, barber’s shop, reading-room, coffee-house had become quite the vogue, and a favourite lounge for men of quality.  Old St. Evremond was probably among the first to be shaved here; Richard Cromwell used to come often and sit silently—“a little, and very neat old man, with a most placid countenance, the effect of his innocent and unambitious life.”  Steele and Addison and their friends were frequent visitors “to the Coffee House where the Literati sit in council.”  And there came here one day about 1724 or 1725, a young man of eighteen or twenty years, out for a holiday from the printing-press at which he worked in Bartholomew Close—Benjamin Franklin by name, recently arrived from the loyal Colonies of North America, and lodging in Little Britain.  He had brought with him to London a purse of asbestos, which Sir Hans Sloane, hearing of, bought at a handsome price, and added to his museum.  To this museum he gave the young printer an invitation, and probably told him about Don Saltero’s.  It was on Franklin’s return from there—the party went by river, of course—that he undressed and leapt into the water, and, as he wrote in his letters, “swam from near Chelsea the whole way to Blackfriars Bridge, exhibiting during the course a variety of feats of activity and address, both upon the surface of the water, as well as under it.  This sight occasioned much astonishment and pleasure to those to whom it was new.”

Don Saltero’s

It is a far cry from Dick Steele to Charles Lamb, yet the latter too makes mention of the “Don Saltero Tavern” in one of his letters; saying that he had had offered to him, by a fellow clerk in the India House, all the ornaments of its smoking-room, at the time of the auction-sale, when the collection was dispersed.

This was in 1807, and the place was then turned into a tavern; its original sign—“Don Saltero’s, 1695,” in gold letters on a green board—swinging between beams in front, until the demolition of the old house only twenty years ago. [125]