Part 3

On the corner of the little turning which leads to this house there stands a tavern called “The Nell Gwynne;” this, at the extreme western end of the parish, is matched by another of the same name on its easternmost edge; and between these two public-houses we may track many other footprints of this fair lady, “with whom, for all her frailties, the English people can never be angry,” as Peter Cunningham well says. She has left her trace on Chelsea, as she left it in her time on the light-minded monarch: both shown even yet in Chelsea Hospital, according to that tradition and popular belief which credit her with its founding. To this day the old pensioners worship her as their patron saint! It is true that Louis XIV. had probably given the notion to the English King by his foundation a few years before of the _Invalides_ as a retreat for French veterans; it is true that as early as 1666 Evelyn had sent to Pepys, as Clerk of the Admiralty, a scheme for an Infirmary for Disabled English Sailors. In his diary, January 27, 1681–82, Evelyn says: “This evening Sir Stephen Fox acquainted me again with his Majesty’s resolution of proceeding in the erection of a Royal Hospital for emerited soldiers;” and it is a matter of record that Sir Stephen Fox, first Paymaster-General of the Forces, was the potent factor in the founding. This may well be, but it is at least plausible, and certainly pleasant, to believe that this good-hearted woman, by a judicious and timely movement, brought about a sudden solution of the question, which had been only in suspension in the King’s mind. The general destitution of the discharged soldiers after the Restoration had become a scandal to the King and to the country. In olden times such men had found bread and ale and a night’s rest in monastic houses; but all this had been done away with by the Dissolution. Now, the poor old fellows, who have known nothing all their lives but wars and camps, wander about, lame, hungry, helpless, in these dismal times of peace. Even when able to work, there is no work for them. Old John Hill, serving in the ranks all his life, and now turned adrift to carry the weight of eighty-two years, succeeds after long suing in being appointed to the poor post of beadsman at Gloucester, only to find that the King had just given it to another old soldier, and had forgotten it. So it was all over the kingdom. Nell Gwynne, seeing daily these warriors hobbling about,—the younger ones wounded for her lover at Dunbar and Worcester, the elder ones for her lover’s father at Naseby and Marston Moor,—was touched by the sight: she had been poor herself, yet strangely enough in her prosperity she was always prone to pity poverty. They say that one day, a shabby soldier just escaped from Tangiers—probably an impostor—begged at her carriage door; and she drove home, and urged the King to do something for these disabled servants of the State. And they say, too, that the shifty monarch, in giving the land for the hospital, made a pretty good thing of it for himself!

There had been already a building on the ground, then nearly in ruins, the foundation walls of which may still be seen in the cellar of the chaplain’s house. This was King James’s aborted College for polemic divinity—“A Colledge of Divines and other Learned Men at Chelsey”—nicknamed “Controversy College,” and intended to be “a spiritual garrison, with a magazine of all books.” It was a failure. Nobody would subscribe, for every man was giving his money, at this time, to repair St. Paul’s, and to help Sir Hugh Myddleton bring the New River into London; and only one-eighth of the plan was ever carried out. The Royal Society used the building for a while; in one of its out-houses Prince Rupert invented the drops, which, in Macaulay’s words, “have long amused children and puzzled philosophers”; and by which, absurdly enough, his name is still kept alive; albeit his is a memorable figure, gallant in battle, ardent in love, devoted in science. When he laid down the rapier for the retort, the broadsword for the blowpipe, he pursued chemistry even as he had pursued the flying Roundheads at Edge Hill, with equal ardour here on the quiet shore at Chelsea, far from the court and the crowd. Later, the buildings, falling to pieces, were used even in 1653, along with barges moored on the river front, as a prison for the Dutch taken in the war. Grave John Evelyn, one of the four Commissioners in control of all prisoners of war—he had rode with Rupert as a volunteer—comes to visit his charges on Ash Wednesday, 1665, and notes: “They only complained that their bread was too fine!”

This was the site fixed on for the new infirmary; and in the _Monthly Recorder_ of February 17, 1682, you may read: “His Majesty went to Chelsey Colledge to lay the first stone, with several of the nobility, which is a place designed to be built and endowed by His Majesty for the relief of Indigent Officers, and Incouragement to serve His Majesty.” William and Mary finished the edifice; and it stands—an impressive monument of that union of proportion and of fitness by which Christopher Wren gave beauty to his plainest designs—in stately solidity in the midst of its thirty acres of ground. It is handsomely supported, not only by government aid, but by valuable donations. There are nearly eighty thousand out-pensioners and over five hundred inmates; these latter divided into companies, and doing mimic garrison duty in memory of their active days. Prints of their popular commanders hang all round the walls of the great hall west of the grand entrance, once a dining-room, now used for reading and smoking. In glass cases are the war medals left by veterans dying with no surviving relatives to claim them: on one we find nearly a dozen battles of the Peninsular campaigns; on another Badajos and Lucknow figure in curious conjunction; and rarest of all is one whose owner fought at Inkerman, Balaclava, and the Alma. In this hall the body of the great Duke lay in state amid the memorials of his victories, guarded by his own veterans: successors of those other veterans exultant over the news of Waterloo, whom Wilkie had painted, years before, for the Duke himself.

[Picture: Chelsea Hospital, River Front]

Framed on the wall is a record of the battles, sieges, marches of the Coldstream Guards; which tells us that this famous body is the sole surviving representative of the force which placed Charles II. on the throne, and thus became the nucleus of the standing army of England. The corps had been formed in 1650 by General George Monk, who made drafts of picked men from the various Cromwellian regiments, and led them on that famous march on the first day of the year 1660, from Coldstream to London, which saved the monarchy and gave the guard its historic name. In the chapel, beneath Sebastian Ricci’s great altar-piece, and under the tattered battle-flags, drooping faded and forlorn, you may see, on any Sunday, Hubert Herkomer’s picture in real life. It is a touching scene, this entry of the veterans into their chapel, preceded by their fife and drum: still more touching, the funeral of one of their dead, as they parade painfully from the infirmary, the lone drummer and fife playing the Dead March in Saul. In the quiet old burying-ground hard by, they lie compactly enough, the dead soldiers; and among them, women who have fought and died in men’s attire, their sex unsuspected until their death.

Not only in this burial-ground, but in the quadrangles and courts, and everywhere about, there rests an air of repose, of forgetfulness of the turbulent world without. Here, about the spacious central quadrangle, on massive wooden benches, loaf and smoke and chat the contented old boys; and growl, withal, in their content. They decorate Grinling Gibbons’ bronze statue of Charles II., posing as a Roman in the centre, with oak garlands on “Oak-Apple-Day,” May 29th, the anniversary of the Restoration; on that day they wear oak branches in their caps, and eat much plum-pudding at dinner. Open towards the river, this quadrangle looks out on gracious gardens; just beyond is the great cross, set there to honour the victims of the Sepoy mutiny: “Some died in battle, some of wounds, some of disease, ALL in the devoted performance of Duty.” A little farther out rises the obelisk commemorating those who fell on that dark and doubtful day at Chillian-wallah, January 13th, 1849. As we stand here, beside a quiet Quaker cannon, these memorials to the devoted dead lift themselves directly in front; the terraced gardens slope to the river bank, their “carpet-beds” yellow with the tints of approaching autumn; the graceful towers and swaying chains of Chelsea Suspension Bridge seem floating in the air yonder; above the drooping limes and elms of the embankment the slim spars of lazy sloops slip slowly by; the gleaming river glides beneath, and away over beyond it the feathery masses of the trees of Battersea Park stand solidly against the sky. The opulent summer sun floods the scene, and an enchanting stillness broods above all, broken only by the rare rumble of trains on the farther railway-bridge. All things are half hid in the exquisite English haze: it softens every sharpness, harmonizes every harshness, rounds every shape to grace.

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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.

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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:

“Lie heavy on him earth, for he Hath laid many a heavy load on thee.”

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

“This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings.”

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.

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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—

“To celebrate this martyr of the ditch. Burnt Brandy did in flaming Brimmers flow, Drunk at her Fun’ral: while her well-pleased Shade Rejoic’d, e’en in the sober Fields below, At all the Drunkenness her Death had made!”

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.

[Picture: 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.