It was the Earl of Bristol who bought the place from Buckingham, and it is at this time that we meet with a notice of it in Evelyn’s diary under the date 15th January, 1678–9: “Went with my Lady Sunderland to Chelsey and dined with the Countesse of Bristol in the greate house, formerly the Duke of Buckingham’s, a spacious and excellent place, for the extent of ground and situation in good aire. The house is large but ill-contrived.”
In 1682 the Marquis of Worcester, afterwards Duke of Beaufort, became the owner of the mansion; and from him it was named Beaufort House, thereafter always called so. He selected this place that he might live, says Strype, “in an air he thought much healthier, and near enough to the town for business.” In 1738 Sir Hans Sloane bought the house and soon after pulled it down; giving the famous Inigo Jones-gateway to the Earl of Burlington, who removed it to Chiswick, where it stands to-day in the gardens of the Duke of Devonshire’s Chiswick House, not far from the statue of the architect. It was on meeting its disjointed stones, as they were being carted away, that Alexander Pope wrote the well-known lines:
Passenger: “O Gate, how com’st thou here?”
Gate: “I was brought from Chelsea last year,
Batter’d with wind and weather;
Inigo Jones put me together;
Sir Hans Sloane
Let me alone;
Burlington brought me hither.”
Do not think, however, that this gateway is the only relic of More’s mansion; for the persevering prowler may find still another, well worth the search. Where King’s Road curves about to Millman’s Street—known on the old maps of those days as the Lovers’ Walk, “A Way to Little Chelsea”—an ancient gateway gave entrance to More’s back garden and stables, and through it we may now pass into the Moravian Burial Ground. Here, in the peacefullest spot in all London, lie in rows, men and women on opposite sides, our Moravian brothers and sisters, “departed,” as their little headstones, in their touching simplicity, tell us. Grass grows above them, great trees guard them; trees perhaps planted by More himself. For this was part of the “very fine gardens” which Bowack speaks of; and that massive wall at the farther end was built in the century which saw the Armada. In among the gardens of the houses beyond, may be found other bits of wall; all built of very narrow bricks, such as we trace in More’s chapel in Chelsea Old Church; bricks made only then, peculiar to that period, not seen since. This largest piece we are looking at is still solid enough, though bulging here and there with its weight of over three hundred years, its bricks black with age and smoke; here are the traces of beams once set in it, here is a bit of an archway, there the remains of a fireplace. Thomas More’s arm rested on this wall: it is part of him, and he mutely bequeaths it to our care. It is well that we should claim salvage for this bit of wreckage thrown upon the beach of Time, with his mark upon it.
The little brick cottage of the keeper of the graveyard is overrun with vines, and answers to the assurance of the antiquity of all within the enclosure. The long low building of one room formerly serving as the Moravian Chapel is now used for a Sunday School. As I glance through the windows in this Sunday sunset I see boys wriggling on board benches, struggling with big Bible names, and mad for the fresh air and the freedom outside; one belated boy, trying at the locked gate, does not look unhappy at being refused entrance. There are memorial tablets on the chapel walls; one of them bears the name of “Christian Renatus, Count of Zinzendorf”; another that of “Maria Justina, Countess Reuss.” These were the son and daughter of the great Zinzendorf; and to tell how these came here I must give you the story of another great Chelsea mansion, Lindsey House. [57]
It still stands slightly slant-wise to the river road, just west of the quaint group of houses on the corner of Cheyne Walk and Beaufort Street. Its front has been stuccoed, and it has been otherwise modernized; but it has not been entirely robbed of its old-fashioned stateliness. The five separate dwellings into which it was long ago divided have harboured some famous tenants; Martin the painter lived in that one which still inherits the old name, “Lindsey House.” Here, too, lived Brunel, the great engineer; Bramah, famous for his locks, in another. It was the Earl of Lindsey, who, about 1674, built this grand new mansion on the site of a former house: between Beaufort House, you see, and the river. It remained in his family until 1750, when it was bought by Count Zinzendorf as a residence for himself and the Moravian Brethren of whom he was the head: and at the same time he bought from Sir Hans Sloane the stables of More’s mansion to be used as a chapel, and his garden for a graveyard. Zinzendorf was a man of a rare nature, lifted above all that is petty and paltry in ordinary life: a spiritual knight, he had founded in his youth, at Halle, a sort of knighthood, “The Slaves of Virtue” and also the “Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed;” teaching his disciples there, teaching the Dutchmen in Holland, and the negroes in Pennsylvania, [58] later—teaching and preaching all his life—the brotherhood of man, the essential unity of all forms of religion. A true Catholic, his aim in life was to unite all sects. As head and guardian of his little body of Herrnhuters, he had used his own fortune to buy 100,000 acres of land in North Carolina, from Lord Granville, in 1749; and in the following year he bought this property at Chelsea. But no part of it now belongs to the Moravians, except this burial-ground; still in use, as we have seen, having been exempted by special provision from the Act of 1855, which closed the other intramural graveyards of London, by reason of this one burying but one body in each grave, and that so deeply.
The name of Pennsylvania just mentioned comes to us again as we walk a little further west; for its famous founder, William Penn, is oddly enough associated with the notorious Cremorne Gardens, which lay just here. The very name of this haunt of feasting and flirting by a peculiar irony was derived from the Viscount Cremorne, its former owner, “this most excellent man,” known, even when plain Thomas Dawson, before his peerage, as a model of all that was steady and sedate. His second wife, the great-granddaughter of William Penn, was named Philadelphia, from the city of her birth—a good woman, whose character, her funeral sermon assures us, “it was difficult to delineate.” She, becoming Lady Cremorne, and outliving her husband, inherited this charming villa and grounds, called Chelsea Farm; and left it at her death, in 1825, to her nephew, Granville Penn, “one of the Hereditary Governors and Proprietaries of the late Province of Pennsylvania.” He soon sold it, and it became a den of drinking, dancing, devilry. The ancient gilded barge, “The Folly,” moored on its river front, was once more the scene of just such orgies as it had known in its youth, during the roystering days of the Restoration.
Past the prim and proper brick cottages, past the innocent nursery garden, which cover wicked old Cremorne: through new streets and crescents built on the site of the famous Ashburnham estate—where, in old days, stretched the great gardens of the learned Dr. Cadogan, filled with rarest medicinal plants: out beyond the high brick wall, massive with reserve and respectability, behind which hides old Stanley House—built by Sir Arthur Gorges, who was embalmed in his friend Spenser’s verse as Alcyon, for his talents and his conjugal affection, and who was here visited once by Queen Elizabeth; her thrifty-minded majesty accepting, as was her wont, the customary gift of greeting, “a faire jewell,” from her host:—so we come to the westernmost edge of Chelsea. Here, standing on the little bridge which carries King’s Road across the deep railway cutting into Sand’s End, Fulham, we look over to an old plaster-fronted house, once known as Sandford Manor House. This was one of the many residences of Mistress Eleanor Gwynne; and in it, a hundred years after her, lived Joseph Addison. It has been newly plastered, the sloping roof raised a little, and the wings long since torn down; but it has been very slightly modernized otherwise; and Mr. McMinn, its occupant, with rare and real reverence has preserved its antique features; all the more marked by their contrast with the great modern gasometers beyond. Within, its square hall retains the old wainscotting, and the staircase remains as when Charles II. rode up it on his pony, for a freak. The delightful little back garden is perhaps hardly altered since those days, except that the four walnut trees which Charles is said to have planted in the front garden have gone to decay and have recently been uprooted. At its foot, where now the railway cuts through, once ran “the creek with barges gliding deep, beside the long grass,” on the banks of which Addison went bird-nesting, in search of eggs for the young Earl of Warwick. This was when he was thinking of marrying the lad’s mother, and the letters—still in existence—which he wrote from here to the little ten-year-old earl, are as genuine and charming as anything which ever came from his pen. One of them begins: “The business of this is to invite you to a concert of music, which I have found out in the neighbouring wood.” I wish space allowed me to quote more of these letters. Although they are dated simply at Sand’s End, none other than Sandford House has ever stood which can make entirely good the descriptions of that country retreat, “whereto Mr. Addison often retires in summer.” What would one not give to have been invited out there, on such an evening as Thackeray tells us of?