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.