Part 2

All this rigidity in religion was but the natural stand of a strong character against the drift of the times and the current that was carrying crowds down with the king; and it narrowed none in the least this man’s broad spirit, nor touched for the worse his quaint, gentle humour, his fine wit, his sweet and wholesome nature. It was he who had said, in better balanced days:—“A man may live for the next world, yet be merry withal:” his was the dainty description of Jane Shore in her youth:—“Proper she was and fair; nothing in hir body that you would have changed, but if you would have wished hir somewhat higher;” and his that pitiful picture of her old age and misery. It was of him that Erasmus wrote these beautiful words: “There was not any man living who was so affectionate to his children as he; and he loveth his old wife as well as if she were a young maid.” Nor was she only “old,” but, in the words of More’s grandson, “of good yeares, of no good favour nor complexion, nor very rich; her disposition very near and worldly.” Moreover, she was his second wife; and to her—selfish, grasping, hard, nagging—this man grandly gave unswerving devotion to the very last. His was, indeed, an ideal household into which I like to look; all dwelling together in affectionate amity; father, mother, the son and his wife, the three daughters—“the Moricæ”—and their husbands, with all the grandchildren; and the orphan girl, Margery Giggs, adopted as a daughter by More, “and as dear to him as if she were his own.” There is work for all, and “no wrangling, no idle word was heard; no one was idle,” Erasmus tells us. All the female folk study too—a rare thing then, for More was centuries ahead of his time in his larger views of woman’s education, as he—the greatest minister of Humanism—was in political and in mightier matters. Pithily he put it: “It mattereth not, in harvest time, whether the corn were sown by a man or a woman.” At his table—his dining-hour was doubtless late, for he urges this boon among the other wise innovations of his “Utopia”—met the “best society” of England, and famous foreign guests. Perhaps it was here that Erasmus sat, greatest of scholars and divines, himself easily first of all that notable band; admiring, as he owns, Grocyn’s vast range of knowledge, and Linacre’s subtle, deep, fine judgment; seeming to hear Plato speak, as he listens to Colet—him who founded St. Paul’s School—and wondering “did nature ever frame a disposition more gentle, more sweet, more happy,” than that of his host!

From this home, More was taken to a prison, by his good King. He had refused, by countenancing Henry’s divorce, to debase himself and his great office, and had stepped down from it on May 16, 1533, with even greater joy than he had stepped up to it on Wolsey’s disgrace, four years previously. So he retired to this Chelsea mansion with but one hundred pounds a year income left to him; after so many years of high and of lucrative office. Here he bothered no more about public concerns, but busied himself with the welfare of his household, preparing his family and himself for the end which he saw coming. It came soon enough; and when he refused to violate his conscience by acknowledging Henry’s supremacy over that of the Pope as the head of the Church, and by taking the oath of succession (under which Anne Boleyn’s children were to be acknowledged the lawful heirs to the crown), he was carried down the river to the Tower; and there imprisoned for a whole year, in the very cell, it is said, wherein he had sat as grand inquisitor, aforetime racking heretics. “Very nigh Heaven,” he said it was, looking up contentedly from this narrow tenement. At nine o’clock of the morning of July 16, 1535, he was led to the block on Tower Hill and there beheaded. You may walk there and look on the place to-day: but lately found and fixed on, railed in and paved. His courage and his constancy had never once failed him, save as he was being brought back to his cell after his trial in Westminster Hall; when his favourite daughter, Margaret Roper, waiting among the crowd on Tower Wharf—learning his sentence by the token of the blade of the headsman’s axe turned towards him—broke through the guards, and clung to his neck, kissing him and sobbing, “Oh, my father!” with no other words uttered. Then for a moment the father in him was unmanned, as he moaned, “My Meg!” and kissed her for the last time. On the morning of his execution he was cheerful and even jocular: “I pray you, master Lieutenant,” said he at the scaffold-steps, “see me safe up, and for my coming down I can shift for myself.” He put aside his beard out of the axe’s reach—“for _it_ has never committed treason”—and so laid his reverend head on the block; too noble a head to drop in so worthless a cause.

“A dauntless soul erect, who smiled at death,” is Thomson’s fitting phrase. And Erasmus wrote: “All lament his death as the loss of their own father or brother. I myself have seen tears come from those men who never saw More. . . . How many souls hath that axe wounded which cut off More’s head!”

Where they buried his body has always been matter of conjecture. In a record, printed in 1726, his great-grandson says: “His trunke was interred in Chelsey Church, near the middle of the south wall;” but other records tell us that it was inhumed beneath the Tower Chapel; and it seems certain that no one will ever really know the truth about this. We do know, however, that his head was exposed on a spike above London Bridge, “where as traytors’ heads are sett upon poles; having remained some moneths there, being to be cast into the Thames, because roome should be made for diverse others, who in plentiful sorte suffered martyrdome for the same supremacie.” It was taken away by Margaret Roper, by bribery or stealth; “least—as she stoutly affirmed before the Councell, being called before them for the same matter—it should be foode for fishes; which she buried where she thought fittest.” This spot was found—in 1835, after just three centuries of doubt—to be in the vault of the Roper family in St. Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury: and there his head remains to-day “in a leaden box something in the shape of a bee-hive, open in the front, and with an iron grating before it.”

In my visits to Canterbury, as I stroll down its delightful old street to St. Dunstan’s, I pause always in front of the ancient carved stone gateway—all that is left of the Roper mansion—fancying I see that devoted daughter hurrying home, secretly and by night, carrying her beloved burden in a silver casket: carrying it all the way in her own hands, fearful of entrusting it to those of any other. Most lovable as well as most learned among women—“her humility equal to her learning,” “no woman, that could speak so well, did speak so little,” says old Fuller in his “Worthies”—Margaret Roper holds her high place among the Fair Women of England, and her story is very near the first in the Legend of Good Women.

“Morn broadened on the borders of the dark, Ere I saw her, who clasped in the last trance Her murder’d father’s head.”

And, amid all the thronging shadows which people Chelsea’s shore, there walks no more vivid personality than his, as it moves before us through all his characteristic career; from the day he was taken from his school in Threadneedle Street, and made page-boy to Cardinal Morten, who said of him, seeing already his promise of wit and of worth: “This child here, waiting at table, whosoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man;” then to Oxford on his scanty allowance; thence to New Inn and to Lincoln’s Inn, studying law by his father’s desire, albeit longing himself for the pulpit; then law-reader of Furnivall’s Inn, whence he was called to the bar at the age of twenty-one, and so going to live “religiously yet without vow” in the Charter-House; lecturing in St. Lawrence, Old Jewry, on Augustine’s “City of God,” listened to by “all the chief learned of London”; patiently practising his profession, taking “no fee of Widow, Orphane, or poor person”; becoming famous, near and far, for his capacity, learning, integrity; and thus elected to the House of Commons when only twenty-three, and soon made Speaker; rapidly rising to the highest place in the realm, that of Lord High Chancellor; and then, as he passed daily to his seat on the woolsack, stopping always before his aged father, who sat, as judge of the court of the King’s Bench, in William Rufus’s Hall at Westminster, and “reverently kneeling down in the sight of all, ask his blessing.”

In the gallery of Old Masters at Brussels, I found lately, after long searching, a diminutive dark canvas set in a black frame, with a small gilt column on each side; its tiny tablet bears the inscription: “Holbein le jeune, 1497–1543. Thomas Morus.” This most attractive painting shows a table on which lies a small dog, peering at his master who sits behind; in More’s right hand, one finger between the leaves, he holds a book; his left hand grips his dark gown at the neck; a flat cap is on his head; a short curling beard, steadfast honest eyes, a plain, resolute, shrewd, strong face:—this is the man “in his habit as he lived” in the later years of his good life.

This portrait—as well as the more famous group of More and his family, now in Nostell Priory—was painted by Hans Holbein, {48} while he was living with More. He had grown tired of his dissipated life in Basle and of his wife, and had come to England with a letter of introduction to More, from Erasmus, whose portrait Holbein had just finished in Basle; and More was so pleased with the man that he gave him a home with himself. Here were passed three of the happiest years of the great painter’s life, during which he did much good work. Some of this was shown to the king on one of his visits, More having hung several of the portraits in a fine light for that purpose; and they so charmed the delicate-minded monarch that he asked, “if such an artist were still alive, and to be had for money?” So it came to pass that Holbein, on losing his good friend, entered the king’s service, and there remained until his own death.

* * * * *

After More’s execution, and the confiscation of his property—which is a tautological way of speaking of any of Henry’s murders—the house passed through many hands, noble and base, clean and dirty; and while everything is of interest concerning walls which, in Cicero’s words, “could give such good reason for their fame,” it would be but dry detail to follow their forlorn fortunes fully. Of the noblemen and courtiers who dwelt here, few are worthy our notice: but I may mention that as early as 1586 Lord and Lady Dacre had bought the house and estate; and here her brother, Thomas Sackville, often visited her, and from here many of his letters are dated. Here he may have written his “Gorbudic,” the first English Tragedy. It was Sackville who was sent to tell Queen Mary of Scots that her sentence was signed, and he it was who saw it executed. Lady Dacre, surviving her husband, willed the place to the great Lord Burleigh; and so it came to his son, Lord Robert Cecil, afterwards Earl of Salisbury. He rebuilt the house and improved the place in 1619, so that even then it was “the greatest house in Chelsey.” So great that, later, James I. found it just the place he wanted for his favourite “dear Steenie,” first Duke of Buckingham; giving its owner, then Craufield, Earl of Middlesex, snug lodgings in the Tower, in exchange. Charles I., as deeply infatuated with the Duke as his royal father had been, gave the estate out and out to him, in 1627; and his it remained until the Commonwealth seized on it.

His son, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham—a man worthy of, and worse even than his sire—regained the property by his shifty marriage with the daughter of Fairfax, and it was confirmed to him on the Restoration; but in 1664 it was sold, along with all the other estates of this poor and profligate scoundrel—the last and the lowest of the Villiers. He was the Zimri of Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel”:

. . . “everything by starts and nothing long; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was Chymist, Fidler, Statesman, and Buffoon.

* * * *

Beggar’d by fools, when still he found too late He had his jest and they had his estate.”

And Pope tells us, in his stinging verse, how “this lord of useless thousands ends” his ignoble life, deserted and despised:

“In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half hung, The floor of plaister and the walls of dung, On once a flock bed, but repair’d with straw, With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw; The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red; Great Villiers lies!”

It was the Earl of Bristol who bought the place from Buckingham, and it is at this time that we meet with a notice of it in Evelyn’s diary under the date 15th January, 1678–9: “Went with my Lady Sunderland to Chelsey and dined with the Countesse of Bristol in the greate house, formerly the Duke of Buckingham’s, a spacious and excellent place, for the extent of ground and situation in good aire. The house is large but ill-contrived.”

In 1682 the Marquis of Worcester, afterwards Duke of Beaufort, became the owner of the mansion; and from him it was named Beaufort House, thereafter always called so. He selected this place that he might live, says Strype, “in an air he thought much healthier, and near enough to the town for business.” In 1738 Sir Hans Sloane bought the house and soon after pulled it down; giving the famous Inigo Jones-gateway to the Earl of Burlington, who removed it to Chiswick, where it stands to-day in the gardens of the Duke of Devonshire’s Chiswick House, not far from the statue of the architect. It was on meeting its disjointed stones, as they were being carted away, that Alexander Pope wrote the well-known lines:

_Passenger_: “O Gate, how com’st thou here?”

_Gate_: “I was brought from Chelsea last year, Batter’d with wind and weather; Inigo Jones put me together; Sir Hans Sloane Let me alone; Burlington brought me hither.”

Do not think, however, that this gateway is the only relic of More’s mansion; for the persevering prowler may find still another, well worth the search. Where King’s Road curves about to Millman’s Street—known on the old maps of those days as the Lovers’ Walk, “A Way to Little Chelsea”—an ancient gateway gave entrance to More’s back garden and stables, and through it we may now pass into the Moravian Burial Ground. Here, in the peacefullest spot in all London, lie in rows, men and women on opposite sides, our Moravian brothers and sisters, “departed,” as their little headstones, in their touching simplicity, tell us. Grass grows above them, great trees guard them; trees perhaps planted by More himself. For this was part of the “very fine gardens” which Bowack speaks of; and that massive wall at the farther end was built in the century which saw the Armada. In among the gardens of the houses beyond, may be found other bits of wall; all built of very narrow bricks, such as we trace in More’s chapel in Chelsea Old Church; bricks made only then, peculiar to that period, not seen since. This largest piece we are looking at is still solid enough, though bulging here and there with its weight of over three hundred years, its bricks black with age and smoke; here are the traces of beams once set in it, here is a bit of an archway, there the remains of a fireplace. Thomas More’s arm rested on this wall: it is part of him, and he mutely bequeaths it to our care. It is well that we should claim salvage for this bit of wreckage thrown upon the beach of Time, with his mark upon it.

The little brick cottage of the keeper of the graveyard is overrun with vines, and answers to the assurance of the antiquity of all within the enclosure. The long low building of one room formerly serving as the Moravian Chapel is now used for a Sunday School. As I glance through the windows in this Sunday sunset I see boys wriggling on board benches, struggling with big Bible names, and mad for the fresh air and the freedom outside; one belated boy, trying at the locked gate, does not look unhappy at being refused entrance. There are memorial tablets on the chapel walls; one of them bears the name of “Christian Renatus, Count of Zinzendorf”; another that of “Maria Justina, Countess Reuss.” These were the son and daughter of the great Zinzendorf; and to tell how these came here I must give you the story of another great Chelsea mansion, Lindsey House. {57}

[Picture: The Houses at Chelsea]

It still stands slightly slant-wise to the river road, just west of the quaint group of houses on the corner of Cheyne Walk and Beaufort Street. Its front has been stuccoed, and it has been otherwise modernized; but it has not been entirely robbed of its old-fashioned stateliness. The five separate dwellings into which it was long ago divided have harboured some famous tenants; Martin the painter lived in that one which still inherits the old name, “Lindsey House.” Here, too, lived Brunel, the great engineer; Bramah, famous for his locks, in another. It was the Earl of Lindsey, who, about 1674, built this grand new mansion on the site of a former house: between Beaufort House, you see, and the river. It remained in his family until 1750, when it was bought by Count Zinzendorf as a residence for himself and the Moravian Brethren of whom he was the head: and at the same time he bought from Sir Hans Sloane the stables of More’s mansion to be used as a chapel, and his garden for a graveyard. Zinzendorf was a man of a rare nature, lifted above all that is petty and paltry in ordinary life: a spiritual knight, he had founded in his youth, at Halle, a sort of knighthood, “The Slaves of Virtue” and also the “Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed;” teaching his disciples there, teaching the Dutchmen in Holland, and the negroes in Pennsylvania, {58} later—teaching and preaching all his life—the brotherhood of man, the essential unity of all forms of religion. A true Catholic, his aim in life was to unite all sects. As head and guardian of his little body of Herrnhuters, he had used his own fortune to buy 100,000 acres of land in North Carolina, from Lord Granville, in 1749; and in the following year he bought this property at Chelsea. But no part of it now belongs to the Moravians, except this burial-ground; still in use, as we have seen, having been exempted by special provision from the Act of 1855, which closed the other intramural graveyards of London, by reason of this one burying but one body in each grave, and that so deeply.

[Picture: Lindsey House and Battersea Bridge]

The name of Pennsylvania just mentioned comes to us again as we walk a little further west; for its famous founder, William Penn, is oddly enough associated with the notorious Cremorne Gardens, which lay just here. The very name of this haunt of feasting and flirting by a peculiar irony was derived from the Viscount Cremorne, its former owner, “this most excellent man,” known, even when plain Thomas Dawson, before his peerage, as a model of all that was steady and sedate. His second wife, the great-granddaughter of William Penn, was named Philadelphia, from the city of her birth—a good woman, whose character, her funeral sermon assures us, “it was difficult to delineate.” She, becoming Lady Cremorne, and outliving her husband, inherited this charming villa and grounds, called Chelsea Farm; and left it at her death, in 1825, to her nephew, Granville Penn, “one of the Hereditary Governors and Proprietaries of the late Province of Pennsylvania.” He soon sold it, and it became a den of drinking, dancing, devilry. The ancient gilded barge, “The Folly,” moored on its river front, was once more the scene of just such orgies as it had known in its youth, during the roystering days of the Restoration.

Past the prim and proper brick cottages, past the innocent nursery garden, which cover wicked old Cremorne: through new streets and crescents built on the site of the famous Ashburnham estate—where, in old days, stretched the great gardens of the learned Dr. Cadogan, filled with rarest medicinal plants: out beyond the high brick wall, massive with reserve and respectability, behind which hides old Stanley House—built by Sir Arthur Gorges, who was embalmed in his friend Spenser’s verse as Alcyon, for his talents and his conjugal affection, and who was here visited once by Queen Elizabeth; her thrifty-minded majesty accepting, as was her wont, the customary gift of greeting, “a faire jewell,” from her host:—so we come to the westernmost edge of Chelsea. Here, standing on the little bridge which carries King’s Road across the deep railway cutting into Sand’s End, Fulham, we look over to an old plaster-fronted house, once known as Sandford Manor House. This was one of the many residences of Mistress Eleanor Gwynne; and in it, a hundred years after her, lived Joseph Addison. It has been newly plastered, the sloping roof raised a little, and the wings long since torn down; but it has been very slightly modernized otherwise; and Mr. McMinn, its occupant, with rare and real reverence has preserved its antique features; all the more marked by their contrast with the great modern gasometers beyond. Within, its square hall retains the old wainscotting, and the staircase remains as when Charles II. rode up it on his pony, for a freak. The delightful little back garden is perhaps hardly altered since those days, except that the four walnut trees which Charles is said to have planted in the front garden have gone to decay and have recently been uprooted. At its foot, where now the railway cuts through, once ran “the creek with barges gliding deep, beside the long grass,” on the banks of which Addison went bird-nesting, in search of eggs for the young Earl of Warwick. This was when he was thinking of marrying the lad’s mother, and the letters—still in existence—which he wrote from here to the little ten-year-old earl, are as genuine and charming as anything which ever came from his pen. One of them begins: “The business of this is to invite you to a concert of music, which I have found out in the neighbouring wood.” I wish space allowed me to quote more of these letters. Although they are dated simply at Sand’s End, none other than Sandford House has ever stood which can make entirely good the descriptions of that country retreat, “whereto Mr. Addison often retires in summer.” What would one not give to have been invited out there, on such an evening as Thackeray tells us of?

“When the time came to leave, Esmond marched homeward to his lodgings, and met Mr. Addison on the road, walking to a cottage which he had at Fulham, the moon shining on his handsome serene face. ‘What cheer, brother?’ says Addison, laughing: ‘I thought it was a foot-pad advancing in the dark, and behold, it is an old friend. We may shake hands, Colonel, in the dark; ’tis better than fighting by daylight. Why should we quarrel because thou art a Whig and I am a Tory? Turn thy steps and walk with me to Fulham, where there is a nightingale still singing in the garden, and a cool bottle in a cave I know of. You shall drink to the Pretender, if you like. I will drink my liquor in my own way.’”

[Picture: Sandford Manor House, Sand’s End]