Part 5

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.”

But greater than his riches, better than all his other services, is the fact that Sir Hans Sloane was the founder of the British Museum. The extraordinary collection in Natural History, of books and of manuscripts, with which his house in Bloomsbury was filled, and which then overflowed into his Chelsea house, was left by him to the Nation, on the payment to his estate of only £20,000; it having cost him not less than £50,000. Parliament passed the appropriation, the purchase was perfected, and this little pond has now grown into the great ocean of the British Museum; on the shores of which, we who come to scoop up our small spoonfuls of knowledge are cared for so courteously by its guardians.

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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—

“Monsters of all sorts here are seen, Strange things in Nature as they grew so; Some relics of the Sheba Queen, And fragments of the famed Bob Crusoe.”

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.”

[Picture: 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}

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A little farther on, just west of Oakley Street, on the outer edge of the roadway of Cheyne Walk, stood, until within a few months, another old sign, at which I was wont to look in delight, unshamed by the mute mockery of the passing Briton, who wondered what the sentimental prowler could see to attract him in this rusty relic. It stood in front of the little public-house lately burned to the ground—“The Magpie and Stump:” two solid posts carrying a wide cross-piece, all bristling with spikes for the impalement of the climbing boy of the period; “MAGPIE AND STUMP, QUOIT GROUNDS,” in dingy letters on the outer side, once plain for all rowing men to read from the river; above was an iron Magpie on an iron Stump, both decrepid with age, and a rusty old weathercock, too stiff to turn even the letter _E_—alone left of the four points of the compass. Between these posts might still be traced the top stone of an old water-staircase, embedded now in the new-made ground which forms the embankment garden here; just as you might have seen, only the other day, the water-stairs of Whitehall Palace, which have now been carted away. Up this staircase Queen Elizabeth has often stepped, on her frequent visits to the rich and powerful Earl of Shrewsbury, her devoted subject and friend. For, on the river slope, just back of Cheyne Walk here, stood, until the second decade of this century, Shrewsbury House, another one of Chelsea’s grand mansions. It was an irregular brick structure, much gabled, built about a quadrangle; although but one storey in height it was sufficiently spacious, its great room being one hundred and twenty feet in length, wainscotted in finely carved oak, and its oratory painted to resemble marble. In a circular room there was concealed a trap-door, giving entrance to a winding stairway, which led to an underground passage; believed to have opened on the river wall at low tide, and to have twisted inland to the “Black Horse” in Chelsea, and thence to Holland House, Kensington. Local gossip claims that it was used by the Jacobites of 1745, and perhaps of 1715, too; for they made their rendezvous by the river at this tavern, and here drank to their “King over the water.” In the grounds of the “Magpie and Stump” is a wooden trapdoor, through which I once descended by stone steps into a paved stone passage, sufficiently wide and high for two to pass, standing erect. This bit is all that remains of the old tunnel—the river portion being used as a coal-hole, the inland end soon stopped up and lost in neighbouring cellars.

[Picture: Cheyne Walk, with the Magpie and Stump]

The wife of this Earl of Shrewsbury is well worth our attention for a moment, by reason of her beauty, her character, her romantic career, her many marriages. Elizabeth Hardwick of Derby became Mrs. Barley at the age of fourteen, and was a wealthy widow when only sixteen; she soon married Sir William Cavendish, ancestor of the Duke of Devonshire; to be widowed soon again, and soon to become the wife of Sir William St. Loo, Captain of Queen Elizabeth’s Guard. His death left her still so lovely, witty, attractive, as to captivate the greatest subject in the land; and she became the Countess of Shrewsbury; having risen regularly in riches, position, power, with each of her marriages. After the death of her fourth husband she consented to remain a widow. At her death, seventeen years later, she bequeathed this Chelsea mansion to her son William, afterward the first Duke of Devonshire; together with the three grandest seats in England—Hardwick, Oldcoates, Chatsworth—all builded by her at successive stages of her eventful career.

Hard by here we trace the site of another notable mansion—the ancient palace of the Bishops of Winchester—which stood a little back from the river bank, just where broad Oakley Street runs up from opposite the Albert Suspension Bridge. It was only two storeys high and of humble exterior, yet it contained many grand rooms, lavishly decorated. On the wall of one of the chambers, there was found, when the building was torn down early in the century, a group of nine life-size figures, admirably done in black on the white plaster; believed to have been drawn by Hogarth in one of his visits to his friend Bishop Hoadley, here.

A step farther westward along Cheyne Walk and we turn into Lawrence Street; at the upper end of which, at the corner of Justice Walk, we shall find, in the cellars of “The Prince of Wales” tavern and of the adjoining houses, the remains of the ovens and baking-rooms of the famous Chelsea China factory. For it stood just here during the short forty years of its existence, having been established in 1745. Why it failed and why the factory was torn down, no one seems to know; for its work was extremely fine, and its best ware—turned out from 1750 to 1765—was equal to that of Sèvres. Skilled foreign artizans had been brought over, and an extraordinary specimen of unskilled native workman appeared in Dr. Samuel Johnson. The old scholar conceived the idea that he could make china as admirably as he could make a dictionary; but he never mastered the secret of mixing, and each piece of his cracked in the baking! He used to come out here twice a week, his old housekeeper carrying his basket of food for the day; and was made free of the whole factory, except the mixing-room. They presented him with a full service of their own make, properly baked, however; which he gave or bequeathed to Mrs. Piozzo, and which, at the sale of her effects, was bought by Lord Holland. In “Holland House by Kensington”—to use its good old title—I have seen it, carefully preserved among the other famed _curios_.

[Picture: A Chelsea corner]

“This is Danvers Street, begun in ye Yeare 1696,” says the quaint old lettering in a corner house of Cheyne Walk; and this street marks the site of Danvers House, which had formed part of More’s property—perhaps the “new buildinge”—and which had gone to his son-in-law, Roper. It came afterward to be owned by Sir John Danvers, a gentleman-usher of Charles I., and he made a superb place of it; of which the deep foundations and the fallen columns now lie under Paultons Square, at the upper end of the street. Sir John Danvers was the second husband of Magdalen Herbert, a woman notable for her famous family of boys: her first son was that strong and strange original, Lord Herbert of Cherbury; her fifth son was George Herbert, of undying memory. The poet lived here for a while. Donne, the preacher, then at Oxford, used to stop at her house on his visits to London; and when he became Vicar of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West, in the Strand, near Isaac Walton’s old shop in Chancery Lane, and had converted the Gentle Angler, these two certainly strolled often out here together. Donne preached Lady Danvers’ funeral sermon in Old Chelsea Church in 1627; notable as one of his most touching discourses.

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In the embankment gardens we have passed a statue recently placed there; a man seated in a chair, uncouth of figure, with bent brow and rugged face. And in the wall of the corner house behind we stop to look at a small memorial tablet, still more recently placed; a medallion portrait of the same face, and beneath, this inscription: “Thomas Carlyle lived at 24, Cheyne Row, 1834–81.” For this is not the house in which he lived, and the tablet was fixed on this one with queer common sense, his own being in Chancery at that time! It is to be found farther up in this little dull street running from Cheyne Walk just here; in which there is nothing that is not commonplace, save the little cottage covered with vines, in the wall above which is a stone with odd old-fashioned lettering—“This is Gt. Cheyne Row, 1708.” About the middle of the row of small dreary brick houses, the one once numbered 5, now 24, is that in which he dwelt for nearly fifty years, and wherein he wrote his commination service large on all mankind; talking more eloquently, and more loquaciously withal, in praise of silence, than any man who ever scolded all through life that he might do honour to the strong arm and the still tongue!

[Picture: Statue of Thomas Carlyle, by Boehm]

The look-out across the narrow street from his front windows—“mainly into trees,” he wrote to Sir William Hamilton, on moving here—shows now nothing but a long, low, depressing wall, above which rises a many-windowed model dwelling-house; and it is surely one of the least inspiring prospects in all London: while from the back he could see nothing of interest except the westernmost end of the old wall of Henry VIII.’s Manor House garden, which still stands here. It gave him a hint in his pamphlet, “Shooting Niagara;” wherein, sneering at modern bricks and bricklayers, he says: “Bricks, burn them rightly, build them faithfully with mortar faithfully tempered, _they_ will stand. . . . We have them here at the head of this garden, which are in their third or fourth century.”

Long before his day, there had lived, almost on this same spot, another “Hermit of Chelsea,” in the person of Dr. Tobias Smollett; who came here to live in retirement in 1750, fresh from the fame of his “Roderick Random;” seeking such seclusion partly on account of his daughter’s health and his own, and partly for the sake of his work. Here he wrote “Ferdinand Count Fathom,” finished Hume’s “History of England,” and began his translation of “Don Quixote;” and here took place those Sunday dinners, the delicious description of which, and of the guests, he has put into the mouth of young Jerry Melford, in “Humphrey Clinker.” Here were spent some of his happiest days, with his work and with his friends from town; Johnson, Garrick, Sterne, John Wilkes, John Hunter: the latter probably coming from Earl’s Court, Kensington, where his place—mansion, museum, and menagerie in one—stood till very lately. Smollett was as well known in the streets of Chelsea, in his day, as Carlyle in ours—“a good-sized, strongly-made man, graceful, dignified, and pleasant.”

[Picture: Carlyle’s house, Great Cheyne Row]

It was a fine old place, with extensive grounds, which Smollett took; being the ancient Manor House of the Lawrences, once owned by Henry VIII., as we have seen. The house stood exactly on the site of this block of two-storied brick cottages called “Little Cheyne Row,” between Great Cheyne Row and Lawrence Street. Its early history has little that need detain us, until, in 1714, it came to be called Monmouth House, from its new owner, the Duchess of Monmouth and Buccleuch; who came here with John Gay as her domestic steward or secretary, and who here lived to the age of ninety. She had been an ornament of Charles II.’s court, a real jewel amidst all the pinchbeck and paste of his setting. She was the widow of his son, the hapless Duke of Monmouth; “who began life with no legal right to his being, and ended it by forfeiting all similar right to his head.” It is to this gracious and gentle _chatelaine_ that Sir Walter Scott sings his “Lay of the Last Minstrel”:

“For she had known adversity, Though born in such a high degree; In pride of power, in beauty’s bloom, Had wept o’er Monmouth’s bloody tomb.”

Smollett left the place for ever, in 1769, and a little later, went to die in Spain; a brave, silent, sad man, for all the fun in his books, and already broken in health by the untimely death of his daughter. The Chelsea historian, Faulkner, writing in 1829, says that Monmouth House was then “a melancholy scene of desolation and ruin.” It was finally torn down and carted away in 1834.

[Picture: The Chelsea Rectory]

The grounds of Monmouth House—now built over by a great board-school—stretched back to those of the Rectory of St. Luke’s, a step to the northward. The Rectory is an irregular brick building, delightful to the eye, set in an old-fashioned lawn with great trees; its tranquillity assured by a high brick wall. It is a very old house, was built by the Marquis of Winchester, and granted by him to the parish on May 6th, 1566, at the request of Queen Elizabeth. Glebe Place, just at hand, shows the site of the glebe land given in her time, in exchange for the older parsonage, which stood still farther west, behind Millman’s Row, now Millman’s Street.

The historic interest of this Chelsea Rectory, however, is dwarfed by its personal appeal to all of us, for that it was the home of three notable boys; named, in the order of their ages, Charles, George, and Henry Kingsley. They came here in the year 1836; their father, the Rev. Charles Kingsley, having received the living of St. Luke’s, Chelsea, from Lord Cadogan. So their beloved west-country life was exchanged for the prim, parochial prosiness, which made such a doleful difference to them all. For these boys were born, it seems to me, with the instant love of life and movement in their blood. Charles has shown it in almost everything he wrote; Henry gave utterance to it in his books only in a less degree, because it found vent in his years of wandering; while George—better known as “The Doctor”—appears for a little while at spasmodic intervals at his home on Highgate Hill, then plunges into space again, and is vaguely heard of, now yachting in the South Seas, now chatting delightfully in a Colorado mining-camp. Henry, the youngest, was a sensitive, shy lad, delicate in health; and the old dames in this neighbourhood tell of his quiet manner and modest bearing. Many of the poor old women about here have a vivid remembrance of “the boys,” and speak of the whole family with respect and affection. Henry was born in 1830, studied at King’s College, London, for a little over two years, 1844–6; his name was entered at Worcester College, Oxford, March 6th, 1850; where he kept ten terms, leaving at Easter, 1853, without taking his degree. The Australian “gold-digging fever” was then raging, and he started for that country with two friends. There he did all sorts of things: tried mining, tried herding, became a stockman, was in the mounted police; and after about five years of these varied vocations, returned to England with no gold in his pockets. It was all in his brain; a precious possession of experience of life and of men, to be coined into the characters and the scenes which have passed current all over the globe. All his Australian stories are admirable, and “Geoffrey Hamlyn”—his first work, produced soon after his return, in 1859—is the best tale of colonial life ever written. His parents had intended that he should take holy orders, hoping perhaps that he should succeed his father in the living of old St. Luke’s; but he felt himself utterly unfitted for this profession, as he also, although with less reason, believed himself unfitted for that of the journalist. This latter he tried for a while when he came back to England; and indeed, as a correspondent he displayed dash enough, and after the surrender of Sedan, was the first man to enter within the French lines. He found at length his proper place as an essayist and a novelist. In all his works, there is to me a strange and nameless charm—a quaint humour, a genuine sentiment, an atmosphere all his own, breezy, buoyant, boyish; seeming to show a personality behind all his creations—that of their creator—a fair, frank, fresh-hearted man. He had true artistic talent in another direction, too, inherited from his grandfather; and he may have been just in judging himself capable of gaining far greater reputation as a painter than as a novelist, even. His skill in drawing was amazing, and the few water-colours and oils left to his family—and unknown outside of its members—are masterpieces. On his return from Australia, he lived for a while with his mother at “The Cottage,” at Eversleigh; never caring for Chelsea after the death of his father. He was married in 1864 by Charles Kingsley and Gerald Blunt, the present Rector of Chelsea. On May 24th, 1876, “on the vigil of the Ascension,” only forty-six years of age, he died at Cuckfield, Sussex, which quiet retreat he had chosen twelve months before.

Henry Kingsley especially appeals to us, just here, for that he has given us, in “The Hillyars and Burtons,” so vivid a picture of modern Chelsea—its streets and by-ways, its old houses and its venerable church, in delightful detail, as he saw them when a boy. The Hillyar family is a romantic reproduction of that ancient Chelsea family, the Lawrences; in “The Burtons” he gives us his reminiscence of the Wyatt household, living at Wargrave, Henley-on-Thames. The brave girl, Emma Burton, is a portrait of Emma Wyatt. The old home of the Burtons—“the very large house which stood by itself, as it were, fronting the buildings opposite our forge; which contained twenty-five rooms, some of them very large, and which was called by us, indifferently, Church Place, or Queen Elizabeth’s Place”—_this_ was the only one of the grand mansions just here in Chelsea left standing when the Kingsleys came here. “It had been in reality the palace of the young Earl of Essex; a very large three-storied house of old brick, with stone-mullioned windows and doorways.” You may see a print of it in “kind old Mr. Faulkner’s” book, as he found it in 1830, dilapidated then, and let out to many tenants. Later, it sunk lower still; and finally the grand old fabric—“which had been trodden often enough by the statesmen and dandies of Queen Elizabeth’s court, and most certainly by that mighty woman herself”—was demolished between 1840–42. The boy of ten or twelve then, Henry Kingsley, must have had the same feelings of wonder and regret, which he puts into the speech of Jim Burton, as he looked on this historic pile, roofless, dis-windowed, pickaxed to pieces. He is not quite correct in letting Jim Burton fix its site on the south side of Paultons Square; it stood between that square and Church Street, exactly where now stands a block of poor little one-storied houses, “Paulton Terrace, 1843,” painted on its pediment; and at the back, built in with some still more wretched little dwellings, you shall still see part of the palace wall of Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, the son of the Putney blacksmith.

From this ancient site I often walk, in company with the Burton brothers, Joe and Jim, their sister Emma and Erne Hillyar behind, down old Church Lane, now Church Street, haunted by historic shades, to where, at its foot, stands “Chelsea Old Church.”