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.
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.”
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]
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.
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.