“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.
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.”
“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.
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.”