In the extreme north-eastern corner as we enter Chelsea we find Hans Place, a secluded green oval, built about with old-time two-storied brick houses. In No. 25 was born in 1802 the poetess, Letitia E. Landon, known as “L. E. L.”; and at No. 22 she went to school. [31] At the farthest south-western point of the parish, just over on the border of Fulham, stands the old house once tenanted by Nell Gwynne. At the northern end of Church Street, opposite the Jewish burial ground, is a public-house, “The Queen’s Elm,” perpetuating the memory of the tree, there standing until very lately, under which Elizabeth sought shelter from a shower, when strolling in the fields with Burleigh on one of her frequent visits to Chelsea. On the southern, the river, border of the parish, lived George Eliot; and here, at No. 4, Cheyne Walk, she died. Between these spots, marked by the memories of these four women, so far apart in time, rank, and character, how much of history and romance do we traverse!
In taking you for a stroll to-day through Old Chelsea we will not stop to puzzle over the etymology of the name; whether it came from the Saxon, Chelchythe, or from Chesel, meaning gravel, and ea, meaning a bank: nor trace it back to its earliest appearance in Saxon chronicles, in 745, as the Hundred of Ossulston, Middlesex. You may see, if you choose, in the British Museum, the Charter of Edward the Confessor giving the “Manor of Chelsey to the Abbot and brothers of the Ministers of the West,” by whom it was rented for four pounds yearly. But it will not add to the interest of our stroll to learn that when it was a residence of Offa, King of the Mercians, there was a “Geflit-fullic” held here; nor that they had “a contentious synod.” Nor shall we altogether partake of the joy of one Maitland, sounding for many a day up and down the river, and at last finding, on the eighteenth of September, 1732, the very ford between Chelsea and Battersea, traversed by Cæsar’s army in pursuit of the flying Britons. For several centuries after the Conquest, the names Chelcheth or Chelchith were used indifferently; in the sixteenth century it began to be written Chelsey; and it is only since about 1795 that the modern spelling has prevailed.
Among the archives of Chelsea may be seen the will, dated in 1369, of the Earl of Warwick; and we know that long before that year he had come here with the prestige of his prowess at Poictiers, his courage at Cressy, and had built himself a house—the first great nobleman’s house erected here. But we do not know where it stood, nor anything more of it, than that it was afterwards leased by Richard III. to the widowed Duchess of Norfolk for the yearly rental of one red rose.
Sir Thomas More’s is the first house, as well as the fullest of human interest, of which we have any authentic record in Chelsea; and it was he who laid the foundations of the prosperity of the place. He built it for himself in 1520: glad to go from narrow Bucklersbury in the City to sweet sights and sounds and air for his young children. For more than two centuries his house stood here, tenanted by many families, famous and infamous, until 1740, when it was pulled down. It is a labour of love, and no difficult one, to reconstruct it as Bowack saw it: “This house is between 200 and 300 feet in length, has a stately ancient front towards the Thames, also two spacious courtyards, and behind it are very fine gardens. It is so pleasantly situated that the late Queen Mary had a great desire to purchase it before King William built Kensington Palace, but was prevented by some secret obstacles.” An old view signed “L. Knyff del: 1699,” shows us a projecting porch in the centre, a dozen or more generous windows on each floor, four of them oriel; and above, many gables, turrets, and a small tower. The back view crowds together, in picturesque confusion, a mass of casements, close packed gables, and jutting pent-houses. Such was “this pore howse in Chelchith” from which More dated one of his letters; and Erasmus wrote of it that it was “neither mean nor invidiously grand, and so subject to envy, yet commodious enough.” It stood on the slope a little back from the river, half-way up to the King’s Road, about where Beaufort Street now runs. A spacious garden lay in front, too, wherein the great Chancellor was wont to walk, as well as on the gate-house, which, in the words of Aubrey, “was flatt on the top, leaded, from whence is a most pleasant prospect of the Thames and the fields beyond.” Sometimes he walked with his guest Holbein; sometimes with his friend Ellis Heywood, poet and playwright, who wrote warmly about “this enchanting spot”; sometimes with his King, Henry VIII., who, still posing as a good Catholic and Defender of the Faith, used to come up the river, drop into dinner, and saunter afterward in the garden, his arm about More’s neck. The son-in-law, Roper, records this with delight, “never having seen the King so familiar with any one else, except Wolsey.” More knew just what all this was worth, and that his head would count, with the king, for nothing against “say a French city or a citadel.” Wolsey’s fate—the fate of so many others—howbeit warned none of the rest; else could they not have forgotten that to every neck on which had hung that royal ruffian’s arm the axe soon came; and that to be his friend was only a little less dangerous than to be his wife.
In this garden were the stocks for heretics, and the “Jesus tree,” or tree of troth, whereat they were flogged; for More was fond of suppressing heresy, and failing that, he used to suppress the heretics, by flinging them into prison. The resolute old Catholic denied that he had ever laid hands on a dissident, but it is certain that some one did so by his orders. Near his house he had put up the “newe buildinge, for the entertainment of distressed old men and women;” and therein was a small chapel, where he spent much time, praying, and scourging himself with a knotted cord; wearing next his skin the hair shirt which is still preserved in the convent of Spilsberg. He was fond of assisting in the service at the old church, carrying the cross in the procession, and doing divers duties “like a parish clerk.” One day the Duke of Norfolk, coming out to dine with him, “fortuned to finde him in the quier with a surplisse on his backe, singinge:” at the sight of which servile service, the good worldly duke was moved to wrathful remonstrance.
All this rigidity in religion was but the natural stand of a strong character against the drift of the times and the current that was carrying crowds down with the king; and it narrowed none in the least this man’s broad spirit, nor touched for the worse his quaint, gentle humour, his fine wit, his sweet and wholesome nature. It was he who had said, in better balanced days:—“A man may live for the next world, yet be merry withal:” his was the dainty description of Jane Shore in her youth:—“Proper she was and fair; nothing in hir body that you would have changed, but if you would have wished hir somewhat higher;” and his that pitiful picture of her old age and misery. It was of him that Erasmus wrote these beautiful words: “There was not any man living who was so affectionate to his children as he; and he loveth his old wife as well as if she were a young maid.” Nor was she only “old,” but, in the words of More’s grandson, “of good yeares, of no good favour nor complexion, nor very rich; her disposition very near and worldly.” Moreover, she was his second wife; and to her—selfish, grasping, hard, nagging—this man grandly gave unswerving devotion to the very last. His was, indeed, an ideal household into which I like to look; all dwelling together in affectionate amity; father, mother, the son and his wife, the three daughters—“the Moricæ”—and their husbands, with all the grandchildren; and the orphan girl, Margery Giggs, adopted as a daughter by More, “and as dear to him as if she were his own.” There is work for all, and “no wrangling, no idle word was heard; no one was idle,” Erasmus tells us. All the female folk study too—a rare thing then, for More was centuries ahead of his time in his larger views of woman’s education, as he—the greatest minister of Humanism—was in political and in mightier matters. Pithily he put it: “It mattereth not, in harvest time, whether the corn were sown by a man or a woman.” At his table—his dining-hour was doubtless late, for he urges this boon among the other wise innovations of his “Utopia”—met the “best society” of England, and famous foreign guests. Perhaps it was here that Erasmus sat, greatest of scholars and divines, himself easily first of all that notable band; admiring, as he owns, Grocyn’s vast range of knowledge, and Linacre’s subtle, deep, fine judgment; seeming to hear Plato speak, as he listens to Colet—him who founded St. Paul’s School—and wondering “did nature ever frame a disposition more gentle, more sweet, more happy,” than that of his host!
From this home, More was taken to a prison, by his good King. He had refused, by countenancing Henry’s divorce, to debase himself and his great office, and had stepped down from it on May 16, 1533, with even greater joy than he had stepped up to it on Wolsey’s disgrace, four years previously. So he retired to this Chelsea mansion with but one hundred pounds a year income left to him; after so many years of high and of lucrative office. Here he bothered no more about public concerns, but busied himself with the welfare of his household, preparing his family and himself for the end which he saw coming. It came soon enough; and when he refused to violate his conscience by acknowledging Henry’s supremacy over that of the Pope as the head of the Church, and by taking the oath of succession (under which Anne Boleyn’s children were to be acknowledged the lawful heirs to the crown), he was carried down the river to the Tower; and there imprisoned for a whole year, in the very cell, it is said, wherein he had sat as grand inquisitor, aforetime racking heretics. “Very nigh Heaven,” he said it was, looking up contentedly from this narrow tenement. At nine o’clock of the morning of July 16, 1535, he was led to the block on Tower Hill and there beheaded. You may walk there and look on the place to-day: but lately found and fixed on, railed in and paved. His courage and his constancy had never once failed him, save as he was being brought back to his cell after his trial in Westminster Hall; when his favourite daughter, Margaret Roper, waiting among the crowd on Tower Wharf—learning his sentence by the token of the blade of the headsman’s axe turned towards him—broke through the guards, and clung to his neck, kissing him and sobbing, “Oh, my father!” with no other words uttered. Then for a moment the father in him was unmanned, as he moaned, “My Meg!” and kissed her for the last time. On the morning of his execution he was cheerful and even jocular: “I pray you, master Lieutenant,” said he at the scaffold-steps, “see me safe up, and for my coming down I can shift for myself.” He put aside his beard out of the axe’s reach—“for it has never committed treason”—and so laid his reverend head on the block; too noble a head to drop in so worthless a cause.
“A dauntless soul erect, who smiled at death,” is Thomson’s fitting phrase. And Erasmus wrote: “All lament his death as the loss of their own father or brother. I myself have seen tears come from those men who never saw More. . . . How many souls hath that axe wounded which cut off More’s head!”
Where they buried his body has always been matter of conjecture. In a record, printed in 1726, his great-grandson says: “His trunke was interred in Chelsey Church, near the middle of the south wall;” but other records tell us that it was inhumed beneath the Tower Chapel; and it seems certain that no one will ever really know the truth about this. We do know, however, that his head was exposed on a spike above London Bridge, “where as traytors’ heads are sett upon poles; having remained some moneths there, being to be cast into the Thames, because roome should be made for diverse others, who in plentiful sorte suffered martyrdome for the same supremacie.” It was taken away by Margaret Roper, by bribery or stealth; “least—as she stoutly affirmed before the Councell, being called before them for the same matter—it should be foode for fishes; which she buried where she thought fittest.” This spot was found—in 1835, after just three centuries of doubt—to be in the vault of the Roper family in St. Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury: and there his head remains to-day “in a leaden box something in the shape of a bee-hive, open in the front, and with an iron grating before it.”