Part 6

“Four hundred years of memory are crowded into that dark old church, and the great flood of change beats round the walls, and shakes the door in vain, but never enters. The dead stand thick together there, as if to make a brave resistance to the moving world outside, which jars upon their slumber. It is a church of the dead. I cannot fancy any one being married in that church—its air would chill the boldest bride that ever walked to the altar.” So Joe Burton well says, sitting in his “old place”—the bench which stood in front of Sir Thomas More’s monument, close to the altar-rails. But for all that, it is not a depressing but rather a delightful old church, if you sit here of a summer afternoon; the sun streaming in from the south-west, slanting on the stone effigies, and the breeze breathing in through the little door beside More’s monument, shaking the grass outside, and the noble river sparkling beyond the embankment garden. To me it has more of fascination than any church in London. Its entire absence of architectural effect in its varying styles; its retention to this day of the simplicity of the village church, even as when built; its many monuments and mural tablets, each one a page of English history; its family escutcheons; its tattered battle flags hung above; the living memories that are built in with every dead stone: all these combine to make it the quaintest, the most impressive, the most lovable of churches. Dean Stanley was fond of calling it one of the Chapters of his Abbey. This is not the place for a description of the monuments, nor for details of their inscriptions; which make us think, as they did the boy Jim Burton, that these buried here “were the best people who ever lived.” Only the tenant of one plain stone coffin is modest in his simple request cut thereon: “Of your Charitie pray for the soul of Edmund Bray, Knight.” As for most of the others, I quite agree with Jim, that the Latin, in which their long epitaphs are written, was the only language appropriate; the English tongue being “utterly unfit to express the various virtues of these wonderful Chelsea people;” among whom, it strikes me, too, that “Sir Thomas More was the most obstinately determined that posterity should hear his own account of himself.” His black marble slab, set deep under a plain grey Gothic arch, is placed on the chancel wall, just where he used to stand in his “surplisse;” above it is his punning crest, a Moor’s head on a shield; and on it is cut his own long Latin inscription, sent by him to his friend Erasmus, who thought it worth printing in his collection of “Tracts and Letters” (Antwerp, 1534). Twice have the characters been recut; and each time has care been taken, for his memory’s sake, to leave blank the last word of the line, which describes him as “troublesome to thieves, murderers and _heretics_.” To the sturdy old Catholic these were all equal—all criminals to be put out of the way. The irony of chance has placed, on the wall close beside his tomb, a tablet which keeps alive the name of one of the Tyndale family, a descendant of that one whose books More burnt, and whose body he would probably have liked to burn, also! More’s two wives are buried here, as well as others of his family; but whether his body lies here, or in a Tower grave, no one knows.

[Picture: A Corner in Chelsea Old Church]

Three of Chelsea’s grandest ladies lie under monuments in the church. Lady Dacre, with her husband Gregory—“their dogs at their feet”—rests under a Gothic canopy, richly wrought with flowers; tomb and canopy all of superb white marble. Its sumptuousness is all the more striking in that it contrasts so strongly with the simplicity ordered by her dying injunctions, as she wrote them on December 20, 1594, when decreeing the establishment of her almshouses—venerable cottages still standing in Tothill Street, Westminster, not far from the little street named for her. In her will she says: “And I earnestly desire that I may be buried in one tombe with my lord at Chelsey, without all earthlie pompe, but with some privat freindes, and nott to be ripped, and towling for me, but no ringing, after service ys done.”

Opposite where she lies, reposes in white marble of the size of life, under a pillared arch on a black marble pedestal, another noted Chelsea dame, Lady Jane Cheyne; and on the marble her worthy husband Charles, transformed here into Carolus, records in sounding Latin the good she did in her life. Notably did she benefit this church, towards the re-building of which she gave largely.

The great Duchess of Northumberland—mother of Elizabeth’s Leicester, grandmother of Sir Philip Sidney—was laid to rest under a magnificent tomb; of which there now is left, to keep alive her memory, here against the wall, only a slab beneath a noble arch, and faded gilt escutcheons beautifully wrought.

And now, glancing about at the monumental marble and brass of these soldiers, statesmen, citizens, simple and stately, we are ready to agree with straight-thinking Jim Burton: “But, on the whole, give me the Hillyars, kneeling humbly, with nothing to say for themselves.” It is the Lawrence family, as I have explained, who are called “The Hillyars” by Henry Kingsley; and his preference—a memory, no doubt, of the Sunday visits of his boyhood to the rector’s pew, which directly faces these tombs—refers to that quaint monument in the Lawrence chapel; where, under a little arch, supported by columns, kneel wife and husband face to face, he in his armour, his three simple-seeming sons in ruffs kneeling behind him; she in her heavy stiff dress, her six daughters on their knees behind in a dutiful row, decreasing in size to the two dead while yet babies on the cushion before her. Says Jim: “I gave them names in my own head. I loved two of them. On the female side I loved the little wee child, for whom there was very small room, and who was crowded against the pillar, kneeling on the skirts of the last of her big sisters. And I loved the big lad, who knelt directly behind his father; between the Knight himself and the two little brothers, dressed so very like blue-coat boys, such quaint little fellows as they were.”

In this Lawrence chapel we see a strange survival of a common custom of the pre-Reformation times; when a great family was wont to build and own its private chapel in the parish church; using it for worship during life, for burial in death, and deeding or bequeathing it, as they did any other real estate. When Sir Thomas Lawrence became Lord of the Manor, he partly bought, and partly built, this chapel; and now, although it forms the entire east end of the north aisle, it has not been modernized like the rest of the church, but retains its high-backed pews and other ancient peculiarities unchanged since the church was repaired in 1667; for it is still private property, belonging to the family to whom it has descended from the Lawrences, and to them goes the income derived from its pews.

Before going out through the main door we stop to look at the wooden rack to which the old books are chained, and underneath, at the little mahogany shelf, for convenience in reading them: these bring back to us the monkish days. Here is the Bible, kept since that time when it was so costly a volume; here the Prayer-book, the Church Homilies, Foxe’s Martyrology: this latter then nearly as sacred as the Scriptures. In the porch now stands the bell which hung for nearly two hundred years in the tower, given to the church by “the Honourable William Ashburnham, Esquire, Cofferer to His Majesty’s Household, 1679;” so its lettering tells us.

Going, one foggy night of that winter, perhaps from that Ashburnham House of which we have seen the site, he lost his way, slipped, and fell into the river; and would have been lost, good swimmer though he was, unable to see the shore, but that he heard this church clock strike nine, and so guided, swam safely toward it. He gave to the church, just then being rebuilt with Lady Cheyne’s funds, this bell, with a sum sufficient to have it rung for five minutes every night at nine. So was done for many years—the ringer receiving “a penny each night and a penny for his candle”—until about half a century ago the fund vanished, somehow, somewhere; and this bell has never been rung since!

Outside, the tiny graveyard is crowded with slabs and monuments, many of them ugly, some curious, a few fine: from the stately stone tomb of Sir Hans Sloane and his wife—a marble urn entwisted with Æsculapian serpents, under a marble canopy—to the simple slab, worn with wind and weather, of Dr. Chamberlayne and his family; of whom the daughter, Anne, more famous than any of the others, “long declining wedlock, and aspiring above her sex and age, fought under her brother with arms and manly attire, in a fire-ship against the French, on the 30th June, 1690: a maiden heroine!” This “Casta Virago” was then but twenty-three, and did not grow in courage with her years; for she soon after consented to marry one John Spraggs, and then died! Here and there, amid unknown graves, we may find those of Magdalen Herbert; Mrs. Fletcher, wife of the Bishop of London, mother of the Fletcher of the famous firm “Beaumont and Fletcher”; Shadwell, the poet-laureate; Woodfall, the publisher of “Junius”; Sir John Fielding, the blind magistrate of Bow Street, half-brother of the novelist.

Amid these English names is written the name of an historic Frenchman; and his historic grave is hid somewhere in a corner of this churchyard, past finding out. {160} The church record reads: “Burial—A.D. 1740, May 18, Brigadier John Cavallier”; and this dry detail of the interment of “only an old officer, who had always behaved very bravely,” is all that is told there of Jean Antoine Cavallier, the Camissard, the leader of the French Huguenots in their long, fierce fight against the cruel and lawless enforcement of Louis XIV.’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; refusing to be apostatized, expatriated, or exterminated. They became the Covenanters of France, and Cavallier—a baker’s apprentice, with a genuine genius for war, the soul of the strife, elected their leader before he was twenty—was their Black Douglas: one even more furious and more ferocious. After fire and slaughter and pillage for two years; affronting the daylight, blazing up the night; amazing the whole world and horrifying their enemies; banded like bandits in the hills of Le Puy, singly like guerillas along the range of the Cevennes; praying, prophesying, slaying:—they were in the end circled about by the Grand Monarque’s soldiery under Villars, shut out from Dutch and English aid, from escape by sea, forced to capitulate. Cavallier was let go to Jersey, was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the island, and finally closed his stormy career peacefully in London. Here he lies, in an unknown grave, in this alien soil; and the Cévenols, up in their hills, still talk of him and of his war two hundred years ago, to-day as if it were yesterday.

* * * * *

As we stand here, the broad embankment, with its dainty gardens, stretches between us and the river; spanned just above by old Battersea Bridge, the only wooden bridge left to the Thames, since that of Putney has gone. For centuries there had been a ferry just here, granted by James I. to some of his “dear relations” for £40. In 1771 this bridge was built for foot-passengers only, was enlarged later, and is soon to be pulled down; its rude and reverend timbers are already propped up here and there. Stand midway on it with me, while the ceaseless stream of men flows by, caring nothing for that at which you and I are looking.

On our right, along the southern shore, stretches Battersea Park, fringed with its great masses of cool foliage; where not long ago were marshes and meadows, and the barren, bleak, Battersea Fields. In those fields was fought the famous duel in 1829, between the Duke of Wellington and Lord Winchelsea. And long before that, in the reeds along that shore was hid Colonel Blood, intending to shoot Charles II. while bathing, as was the King’s custom, “in the Thames over against Chelsey; but his arm was checked by an awe of Majesty.” So, at least, Blood had the impudence to narrate, when on his trial for his audacious and almost successful attempt to steal the royal regalia from the Tower in May, 1671. Whether the King was touched by the narrative, or whether, as has been hinted, his impecunious Majesty was implicated in the plot to rob the crown; it is certain that he pardoned the daring adventurer, and gave him a yearly pension of £500.

[Picture: Old Battersea Church, where Blake was married, showing the window from which Turner sketched]

Beyond the Bridge, back of us, rises the square, squat tower of St. Mary’s, Battersea, builded in the worst churchwarden style; and otherwise only notable for that therein was married Blake the madman; that there Turner loved to sit at the vestry window and sketch; and that there lie the remains and stand the magnificent monument of St. John Bolingbroke, and of his second wife, niece of Madame de Maintenon: both their epitaphs written by him. Not far from the church, on the river bank next to the mill, still stands one wing of the great seventy-roomed Bolingbroke House; in which St. John was born, to which he returned from his stormy exile, there to pass his remaining days in study, and there to die. Through its many old-time chambers with the famous “sprawling Verrio’s” ceiling paintings, I will lead you into the historic cedar-room, on the river front—Bolingbroke’s favourite retreat, whose four walls, panelled with cedar from floor to ceiling, are still as redolent as when Pope—Bolingbroke’s guest—began in it his “Essay on Man,” inspired thereto by his host; whose wit, scholarship, philosophy had, during his exile, inspired also Voltaire and made him own his master. Here in this room were wont to meet Bolingbroke and Pope, Chesterfield and Swift—that brilliant quartette who hated, plotted against, and attacked Walpole. His house—Sir Robert’s—forms part of the great mass of Chelsea Hospital, dim in the distance before us; between, stretches the old Dutch front of Cheyne Walk, near at hand resolving itself into most ancient houses, with quaint windows in their sloping roofs; their red tiles and chocolate-brown bricks showing dark behind the green of the old lime-trees. The setting sun lingers lovingly on the square church tower, venerable with the mellow tints of time; and presently the moon comes up, washing out all these tints, except that of the white wall-tablets; and from out the grey mass shines the clock-face, even now striking nine, as it did for the “Hon. William,” just then soused in the river, more than two hundred years ago. Farther beyond the bridge are two buildings, which also bring the old and the new close together; the “World’s End Tavern,” at the end of the passage of that name, famous three centuries ago as a rendezvous for improper pleasure parties, and introduced in Congreve’s “Love for Love,” in that connection. Just west of the sedate little “public,” “The Aquatic Stores,” are two tiny houses set back from the embankment; stone steps lead down to their minute front gardens; vines clamber up the front of the westernmost house to an iron balcony on its roof. That balcony was put there for his own convenience by Joseph Mallord William Turner, the painter; in that house, No. 119, Cheyne Walk, he lived for many years, and in that front room he died, on the 18th December, 1851. To that upper window, no longer able to paint, too feeble to walk, he was wheeled every morning during his last days that he might lose no light of the winter sun on his beloved Thames. In Battersea Church you may sit in the little vestry window wherein he was wont to sketch. The story of his escape from his grand and gloomy mansion in Queen Anne Street, is well known; he never returned to it, but made his home here with the burly Mrs. Booth. After long hunting, his aged housekeeper, in company with another decrepid dame, found him in hiding, only the day before his death. The barber’s son of Maiden Lane lies in the great cathedral of St. Paul’s, and the evil that he did is buried with him—his eccentricity, his madness if you will—but he lives for all time, as the greatest landscape painter England has known.

[Picture: The Western End of Cheyne Walk]

The long summer afternoon is waning, and the western sky, flaming with fading fires, floods broad Chelsea Reach with waves of dusky gold. The evening mist rises slowly, as yet hiding nothing, but transforming even commonplace objects in a weird unwonted way. Those pretentious blocks of new mansions loom almost lordly now; that distant railway bridge is only a ghost of graceful glimmering arches; money-making factory chimneys and commercial wharves pretend to picturesque possibilities; clumpish barges, sprawling on the mud, are no longer ugly; and a broad-bottomed coasting schooner, unloading stone at a dock, is just what we would choose to see there. And here at the end of this bridge is a fragment of “real old Chelsea,” left intact for our delectation—a cluster of drooping trees on the bank, an unaccountable boat-house, stone steps leading down to the bit of beach, whereon are skiffs drawn up, and cordage lying about, and sail-wrapped spars. Out on the placid Reach there is but little movement; the river steamboats are anchored in a dark mass near the shore, and the last belated one edges up to its mooring beside them for the night; a burly barge drifts slowly by under its dusky brown sails, or a “dumb-barge” floats with the tide, its crew of one man busied with his long sculls and his not-dumb blasphemy; a puffing tug with a red light in its nose drags tortuously a long line of tarpaulin-covered canal boats. As each of these moving objects breaks the burnished waves into bits of golden gloom, the whole still surface of the stream becomes alive for us with a fairy flotilla, born of the brain, yet real enough to our vision. There float ancient barges, six and eight-oared, gorgeous with gilding or severely simple; those of brilliant noblemen, of the City guilds, of Royalty itself. We seem to see Henry VIII. rowing up, on a visit to More; Elizabeth coming to call on Lord Charles Howard of Effingham, him who scattered the “Spanyard’s Invinsable Navye” for her; the first Charles, impatient to dote on his “dear Steenie.” Even the commonest of these curious craft is freighted, for our fancy, with a nameless cargo, not on its bills of lading. So do we gaze across the river of Time that flows between us and the group of famous men and historic women, moving in the twilight of the past on Chelsea’s shore. And we ask, with Marcus Piso, friend of the younger Cicero: “Is it by some mutual instinct, or through some delusion, that when we see the very spots where famous men have lived, we are far more touched than when we hear of the things that they have done, or read something that they have written? It is thus that I am affected at this moment.”

[Picture: Turner’s last dwelling-place]

Here walks Sir Thomas More with his wife and daughters; here George Herbert muses “with a far look in his immortal eyes;” here come Donne and Isaac Walton to visit his mother, Magdalen Herbert. Swift strolls here, alone as he likes best; he has been looking at the hay-makers, just inshore above, in the hot summer day, and is about to bathe in the river—the “more than Oriental scrupulosity” of his bodily care contrasting so keenly with his fondness for moral filth. Here come his friend Atterbury, the learned theologian, from his great garden in Church Lane; and Dr. Arbuthnott, Queen Anne’s famous physician; and another noted doctor, Sir John Shadwell, father of the poet laureate. Locke leaves the summer-house in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s garden, just above where now is St. George’s Workhouse: he has just begun his great essay, while living here as tutor for the son. Pym, Charles’ enemy, who lives on the waterside, stops to look at learned Sir Joseph Banks, who, after a stormy voyage around the world with Captain Cook, now tranquilly sits fishing here; Samuel Johnson strides buoyantly by to his china-making or plods pensively back, downcast with his failure; Hans Sloane walks arm-in-arm with his friend Sir Isaac Newton, who has come out here from his house in Leicester Square; behind them saunter Addison and Dick Steele, and a more queerly-consorted couple, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Carlyle. St. Evremonde goes with one strangely resembling him superficially—Leigh Hunt, who lived at the present No. 10, Upper Cheyne Row; and who, “with his delicate, worn, but keenly intellectual face, his large luminous eyes, his thick shock of wiry grey hair, and little cape of faded black silk over his shoulders, looks like an old French abbé.” Shelley is near them, having come a long way from his lodgings in Hans Place; where he has for a neighbour a certain Joseph Balsamo, calling himself the Count Cagliostro, living in Sloane Street. The Dandy D’Orsay cautiously threads his way, for he is in hiding from his creditors. Turner passes, gazing on his river; and Maclise, who lives here on the bank and dies here too, painting the Thames. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his near neighbour George Eliot go by; and, last of all, Henry Kingsley with the boy Joe Burton, whom he loves, and whom we love, too.

The puffing tug shrieks, and puts to flight these vagrant fancies of an American, sentimentalizing in Chelsea; and so ends his stroll, his returning footsteps echoing the words of Goethe, and reminding him that, after all, “You find in Rome only what you take there.”

[Picture: Battersea bridge and Church from Turner’s house]

THE END.

INDEX.

ABBEY, Westminster, 33, 152

“Absalom and Achitophel,” 50

Addison, Joseph, 23, 63, 65, 66, 80, 94, 122, 178

Albert Suspension Bridge, 131

“Alcyon,” 63

Alma, Battle of the, 73

Almshouses, Lady Dacre’s, 155

Anne, Queen, 105, 119, 177

Apsley House, 13

Aquatic Shores, 169

Arbuthnot, Dr., 177

Armada, 53, 174

Armida, 91

Aschyly, Katherine, 116

Ashburnham, Hon. Wm., 158, 166

„ House, 63, 158

Ashe, Miss, 79

Aspasia, 93

Astell, Mary, 93

Atterbury, 177

Aubrey, John, 38

Augustine, 47

Australia, 147, 148

* * * * *

BADAJOS, 73

Balaclava, 73

Balsamo, Joseph, 178

Banks, Sir Joseph, 177

Barbican, 78

Barley, Mrs., 130

Bartholomew Close, 122

Basle, 48

Bastille, 93

Battersea Bridge, 31, 57, 161, 165

,, Church, 165, 169

,, Fields, 33, 162

„ Park, 76, 162

Beaufort, Duke of, 52

,, House, 52, 58

„ Stairs, 20

,, Street, 37, 57

Beaumont, Francis, 93

„ and Fletcher, 159

Becke, Mrs. Betty, 81

“Beggar’s Opera,” The, 85

Belgravia, 20

Bishop’s Stairs, 20

“Black House,” The, 129

Blackfriars Bridge, 125

Blacklands, 17, 96

Blake, 165

Blenheim, 83

Blessington, Lady, 14

Blood, Colonel, 162

Bloody Bridge, 23

Bloomfield, Robert, 80

Bloomsbury, 120, 121

Blunt, Rev. Gerald, 148

Boleyn, Anne, 42, 116

Bolingbroke House, 165

,, St. John, 84, 85, 165, 166

Booth, Mrs., 170

Botanic Gardens, 101, 119

Bow Street, 160

Bowack, 37, 53

Braganza, Catherine of, 111

Bramah, 58

Bray, Edmund, Knight, 152

Bristol, Earl of, 51

Britons, 33

Brown, Ford Madox, 109

Browne, Lady, 116

Brunel, 58

Brussels, 47

Buckingham, 1st Duke of, 50

,, 2nd „ 50, 51, 98

,, Palace, 23

Bucklersbury, 34

Bulwer, Lady, 32

Bun House, The, 97

Burleigh, Lord, 32, 50

Burlington, Earl of, 52

Burney, Dr., 80

„ Fanny, 80

Burton, Emma, 149, 151

,, “Jim,” 150, 151, 152, 156

„ “Joe,” 151, 178

Butterfly Alley, 28

Byron, Lord, 31

* * * * *

CADOGAN, Doctor, 63

,, Earl of, 119, 146

„ Place, 96

Cæsar, 33

Cagliostro, Count, 178

Camden House, 57

Camera Square, 28

Camissards, The, 160

Canterbury, 45

Carberry, Earl of, 98