Just beyond, at Flood Street, begins Cheyne Walk; still, despite almost daily despoiling, despite embankments and gas and cabs, the most old-fashioned, dignified, and impressive spot in all London. Those of its modest brick houses which remain have not been ruined by too many modern improvements; they are prim and respectable, clad in a sedate secluded sobriety, not at all of this day. Their little front gardens are unpretending and almost sad. Between them and the street are fine specimens of old wrought iron in railings and in gates, in last century brackets for lamps, in iron extinguishers for the links they used to carry. The name “Hans Sloane House” is wrought in open iron letters, in the gate of No. 17; in others, the numbers alone are thus worked in the antique pattern. “Manor House” has an attractive old plaster front; on another a shining brass plate, dimly marked “Gothic House” in well-worn letters, is just what we want to find there. In No. 4 died, on the night of the 22nd December, 1880, Mrs. John Walter Cross, more widely known as George Eliot. And in this same house lived for many years Daniel Maclise, the painter of the two grandest national pictures yet produced in England; “the gentlest and most modest of men,” said his friend Charles Dickens. Here he died on the 25th of April, 1870, and from here he was carried to Kensal Green.
In No. 15 lived for a long time that youthful genius, Cecil Lawson; whose admirable works, rejected at one time by the Royal Academy, have been hung in places of honour, since. One would be glad to have stepped from his studio into that next door, No. 16, and to have seen Dante Gabriel Rossetti at work there. [109] His house—now again known by its ancient and proper title, “Queen’s House”—stands back between court and garden, its stately double front bowed out by a spacious central bay, the famous drawing-room on the first floor taking the whole width. This great bay, as high as the house, is not so old, however; and must be an addition of more recent years; for the house itself plainly dates from the days of the Stuarts. Indeed, it shows the influence, if not the very hand, of the admirable Wren; not only in the external architecture, but in the perfect proportion to all its parts of the panelling, the windows, the doorways within. All the hall-ways and the rooms, even to the kitchen, are heavily wainscotted; and there mounts, up through the whole height of the interior, a spiral staircase, its balustrade of finest hand-wrought iron. So, too, are the railings and the gateway of the front courtyard, as you see them in our sketch; and, while much of their dainty detail has been gnawed away by the tooth of time, they still show the skill, the patience, and the conscience of the workers of that earlier day. The iron crown which once topped this gate has long since been taken away; but we may still trace in twisted iron the initials “C. R.,” and we may still see these same initials in larger iron lettering within the pattern of the back-garden railings. Catherine of Braganza, Queen of England, is the name they are believed to commemorate; and legend says that this house was once tenanted by, and perhaps built for, that long-suffering consort of Charles II. I like to fancy her within these walls—the brilliant brunette stepping down from Lely’s canvas at Hampton Court or at Versailles; whose superb black eyes were celebrated by the court poet, Edmund Waller, in an ode on her birthday, and were characterized by sedate John Evelyn as “languishing and excellent”; and who was pronounced to be “mighty pretty” by that erudite and studious critic of female beauty, Samuel Pepys. She wears the black velvet costume so becoming to her, and divides her days between pious rites and frisky dances—devoted equally to both! A narrow, bigoted, good woman, this: yet, withal, simple, confiding, affectionate, modest, patient under neglect from her husband, and under insult from his mistresses; deserving a little longer devotion than the six weeks Charles vouchsafed to her after their marriage, never deserving the lampoons with which Andrew Marvel befouled her.
When this front courtyard of “Queen’s House” happened to be dug up, not long ago, three sorts of bricks were unearthed: those of modern make, those of the Stuart time, those of the Tudor type. These latter were the same narrow flat ones spoken of as being found in More’s chapel and wall; and were evidently the wreckage of the water-gate once standing here, giving entrance, together with the water stairway, from the river—running close alongside then—to the palace of Henry VIII. And in the foundations of “Queen’s House” are to be seen remains of that Tudor stone-work; while, in the cellars of the adjacent houses are heavy nail-studded doors and windows, and similar survivals of that old Palace. It was built just here by the King, who had learned to like Chelsea, in his visits to More. He had bartered land elsewhere—presumably stolen by him—for the old Manor House standing farther west, near the Church, which belonged to the Lawrence family. That not suiting him, he built this new Manor House—a little back from the river bank, and a little east of where Oakley Street now runs—its gardens reaching nearly to the present Flood Street, Manor Street having been cut through their midst. It was of brick, its front and its gateway much like that of St. James’s Palace, as it looks up St. James’s Street; that built just before this, by Wolsey, and “conveyed” to himself by the King. An old document describes the Manor House, as the “said capital messuage, containing on the first floor, 3 cellars, 3 halls, 3 kitchens, 3 parlours, 9 other rooms and larders; on the second floor, 3 drawing rooms and 17 chambers, and above, Summer-rooms, closets and garrets; 1 stable and 1 coach-house.” That seems not so very grand in the eyes of our modern magnificence.
I have been able to trace the great grounds of the palace, covered in part with streets and houses as they now are, and in part forming the rear gardens of this end of Cheyne Walk. And in these gardens are still standing here and there remnants of the ancient encircling walls. The fine garden of Queen’s House was originally a portion of the palace grounds, and stood intact even to Rossetti’s time; something of its extent then being shown in our sketch. The noble lime trees still stand there, and among them two strange exotic trees, their leaves unknown to the local gardeners. This garden is now partly built on by new mansions, partly usurped by their gardens. In two of the latter—spreading out into both—stands the mulberry tree planted by the hand of the Princess Elizabeth, still sturdy in its hale old age. At the back of other houses a little farther west, notably in the garden of Mr. Druse, stand some very ancient trees; and I saw there, not very long ago—but gone, for ever now—a bit of crumbling wall, and an arch, within which were the old hinges whereon a gate was once hung. That gate gave entrance from the land side, by a path leading across the fields from the King’s Road, to the palace grounds; and through it, Seymour slipped on his secret visits to Katherine Parr, as we know by a letter of hers: “I pray you let me have knowledge over night, at what hour ye will come, that your portress may wait at the gate to the fields for you.” And she and Seymour had their historic romps under these very trees with the Princess Elizabeth, then a girl of thirteen. Within doors, too, there were strange pranks “betwixt the Lord Admiral, and the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace,” as was later confessed by Katherine Aschyly, her maid. When the young lady learned that Miss Aschyly and Her Cofferer were under examination in the Tower, says the old chronicler, “She was marvelous abashede, and ded weype very tenderly a long Time, demandyng of my Lady Browne wether they had confessed anything!” Katherine Parr did not enjoy these frolics, and sometimes was furious with jealousy on finding them out; but for all that, she patiently returned to her persistent pious writing, too kindly a nature to harbour malice or suspicion.
Elizabeth had come to live in the Manor House, at the age of four, that she might grow up in that healthful air: her father placing, with his customary delicacy, the daughter of Anne Boleyn under the care and tuition and example of his latest wife, the staid and studious Katherine Parr. To this latter, the King had given, on their marriage, the Manor House as her jointure; and there she lived in great state, after Henry’s death. Already before their marriage, even then a wistful widow, she had been bewitched by Seymour; and had meant to marry him, but for being forced to submit to the King’s will to make her his queen. Once queen, she seemed to subdue her passion for Seymour; says the naïve ancient chronicler, “it does not appear that any interruption to connubial comforts arose out of that particular source.” The estimable monarch rotted to death at the end of January, 1546–7, and the month of May was made merry to his widow—but thirty-five years old—by her secret marriage with Seymour. He was a turbulent, unscrupulous, handsome rascal, a greedy gambler, an insane intriguer; brother of the Protector Somerset, maternal uncle of King Edward VII., brother-in-law of the King; and he had tried to marry the Princess Elizabeth, then a girl of thirteen or fourteen, even while coquetting with the Queen-Dowager Katherine Parr. The girl with her Boleyn blood doubtless delighted in the mystery of the secret visits, which she knew of, and in the secret marriage later, which she surely suspected. The Queen-Dowager must have found it a trying and turbulent task to train her, and had more comfort in her other pupil, little Lady Jane Grey; who came here often for a visit, and for sympathy in the studies in which she was already a prodigy, even then at the age of eleven. She is a pure and perfect picture, this lovely and gentle girl, amid all these cruel and crafty creatures; but we cannot follow her farther in the touching tragedy, in which she played the innocent usurper, the blameless martyr. Nor can we say more of Katherine Parr—probably poisoned by her husband—nor of his death on the block, nor of the rascally and wretched record of the future owners of this Manor House; but let us come directly down to the year 1712, when it was sold by Lord William Cheyne, lord of the manor, widely known as “Lady Jane’s husband,” to Sir Hans Sloane. It was looked on then as a grand place, and Evelyn, visiting Lord Cheyne and Lady Jane, notes in his diary that the gardens are fine, the fountains “very surprising and extraordinary.” These had been designed by Winstanley, him who built Eddystone Lighthouse, and who perished therein.
Hans Sloane had come up to London, a young Irish student of medicine; and, frequenting the Botanical Gardens in Chelsea, just in view of this Manor House, he must often have looked at and perhaps longed to live in the roomy old mansion. After his return from Jamaica, he pursued his studies with such success that he was made President of the Royal Society on the death of Sir Isaac Newton, in 1727. He became a famous physician, was doctor to the Queens Anne and Caroline, as well as to George I., who made him a baronet in 1716; the first physician so ennobled in England. As he grew in wealth he bought much property in Chelsea, first this Manor House—wherein he lived for fourteen years, and wherein he died—then More’s house, then land in other quarters of this suburb. His name is perpetuated in Sloane Square and in Hans Place, and his property now forms the estate of the Earl of Cadogan, whose ancestor, the famous General Cadogan, a Colonel of the Horse Guards in Marlborough’s wars, married Elizabeth, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Hans Sloane; so that the present Earl of Cadogan is “Lord of the Manor and Viscount Chelsey.”