“When the time came to leave, Esmond marched homeward to his lodgings, and met Mr. Addison on the road, walking to a cottage which he had at Fulham, the moon shining on his handsome serene face. ‘What cheer, brother?’ says Addison, laughing: ‘I thought it was a foot-pad advancing in the dark, and behold, it is an old friend. We may shake hands, Colonel, in the dark; ’tis better than fighting by daylight. Why should we quarrel because thou art a Whig and I am a Tory? Turn thy steps and walk with me to Fulham, where there is a nightingale still singing in the garden, and a cool bottle in a cave I know of. You shall drink to the Pretender, if you like. I will drink my liquor in my own way.’”
On the corner of the little turning which leads to this house there stands a tavern called “The Nell Gwynne;” this, at the extreme western end of the parish, is matched by another of the same name on its easternmost edge; and between these two public-houses we may track many other footprints of this fair lady, “with whom, for all her frailties, the English people can never be angry,” as Peter Cunningham well says. She has left her trace on Chelsea, as she left it in her time on the light-minded monarch: both shown even yet in Chelsea Hospital, according to that tradition and popular belief which credit her with its founding. To this day the old pensioners worship her as their patron saint! It is true that Louis XIV. had probably given the notion to the English King by his foundation a few years before of the Invalides as a retreat for French veterans; it is true that as early as 1666 Evelyn had sent to Pepys, as Clerk of the Admiralty, a scheme for an Infirmary for Disabled English Sailors. In his diary, January 27, 1681–82, Evelyn says: “This evening Sir Stephen Fox acquainted me again with his Majesty’s resolution of proceeding in the erection of a Royal Hospital for emerited soldiers;” and it is a matter of record that Sir Stephen Fox, first Paymaster-General of the Forces, was the potent factor in the founding. This may well be, but it is at least plausible, and certainly pleasant, to believe that this good-hearted woman, by a judicious and timely movement, brought about a sudden solution of the question, which had been only in suspension in the King’s mind. The general destitution of the discharged soldiers after the Restoration had become a scandal to the King and to the country. In olden times such men had found bread and ale and a night’s rest in monastic houses; but all this had been done away with by the Dissolution. Now, the poor old fellows, who have known nothing all their lives but wars and camps, wander about, lame, hungry, helpless, in these dismal times of peace. Even when able to work, there is no work for them. Old John Hill, serving in the ranks all his life, and now turned adrift to carry the weight of eighty-two years, succeeds after long suing in being appointed to the poor post of beadsman at Gloucester, only to find that the King had just given it to another old soldier, and had forgotten it. So it was all over the kingdom. Nell Gwynne, seeing daily these warriors hobbling about,—the younger ones wounded for her lover at Dunbar and Worcester, the elder ones for her lover’s father at Naseby and Marston Moor,—was touched by the sight: she had been poor herself, yet strangely enough in her prosperity she was always prone to pity poverty. They say that one day, a shabby soldier just escaped from Tangiers—probably an impostor—begged at her carriage door; and she drove home, and urged the King to do something for these disabled servants of the State. And they say, too, that the shifty monarch, in giving the land for the hospital, made a pretty good thing of it for himself!
There had been already a building on the ground, then nearly in ruins, the foundation walls of which may still be seen in the cellar of the chaplain’s house. This was King James’s aborted College for polemic divinity—“A Colledge of Divines and other Learned Men at Chelsey”—nicknamed “Controversy College,” and intended to be “a spiritual garrison, with a magazine of all books.” It was a failure. Nobody would subscribe, for every man was giving his money, at this time, to repair St. Paul’s, and to help Sir Hugh Myddleton bring the New River into London; and only one-eighth of the plan was ever carried out. The Royal Society used the building for a while; in one of its out-houses Prince Rupert invented the drops, which, in Macaulay’s words, “have long amused children and puzzled philosophers”; and by which, absurdly enough, his name is still kept alive; albeit his is a memorable figure, gallant in battle, ardent in love, devoted in science. When he laid down the rapier for the retort, the broadsword for the blowpipe, he pursued chemistry even as he had pursued the flying Roundheads at Edge Hill, with equal ardour here on the quiet shore at Chelsea, far from the court and the crowd. Later, the buildings, falling to pieces, were used even in 1653, along with barges moored on the river front, as a prison for the Dutch taken in the war. Grave John Evelyn, one of the four Commissioners in control of all prisoners of war—he had rode with Rupert as a volunteer—comes to visit his charges on Ash Wednesday, 1665, and notes: “They only complained that their bread was too fine!”
This was the site fixed on for the new infirmary; and in the Monthly Recorder of February 17, 1682, you may read: “His Majesty went to Chelsey Colledge to lay the first stone, with several of the nobility, which is a place designed to be built and endowed by His Majesty for the relief of Indigent Officers, and Incouragement to serve His Majesty.” William and Mary finished the edifice; and it stands—an impressive monument of that union of proportion and of fitness by which Christopher Wren gave beauty to his plainest designs—in stately solidity in the midst of its thirty acres of ground. It is handsomely supported, not only by government aid, but by valuable donations. There are nearly eighty thousand out-pensioners and over five hundred inmates; these latter divided into companies, and doing mimic garrison duty in memory of their active days. Prints of their popular commanders hang all round the walls of the great hall west of the grand entrance, once a dining-room, now used for reading and smoking. In glass cases are the war medals left by veterans dying with no surviving relatives to claim them: on one we find nearly a dozen battles of the Peninsular campaigns; on another Badajos and Lucknow figure in curious conjunction; and rarest of all is one whose owner fought at Inkerman, Balaclava, and the Alma. In this hall the body of the great Duke lay in state amid the memorials of his victories, guarded by his own veterans: successors of those other veterans exultant over the news of Waterloo, whom Wilkie had painted, years before, for the Duke himself.
Framed on the wall is a record of the battles, sieges, marches of the Coldstream Guards; which tells us that this famous body is the sole surviving representative of the force which placed Charles II. on the throne, and thus became the nucleus of the standing army of England. The corps had been formed in 1650 by General George Monk, who made drafts of picked men from the various Cromwellian regiments, and led them on that famous march on the first day of the year 1660, from Coldstream to London, which saved the monarchy and gave the guard its historic name. In the chapel, beneath Sebastian Ricci’s great altar-piece, and under the tattered battle-flags, drooping faded and forlorn, you may see, on any Sunday, Hubert Herkomer’s picture in real life. It is a touching scene, this entry of the veterans into their chapel, preceded by their fife and drum: still more touching, the funeral of one of their dead, as they parade painfully from the infirmary, the lone drummer and fife playing the Dead March in Saul. In the quiet old burying-ground hard by, they lie compactly enough, the dead soldiers; and among them, women who have fought and died in men’s attire, their sex unsuspected until their death.
Not only in this burial-ground, but in the quadrangles and courts, and everywhere about, there rests an air of repose, of forgetfulness of the turbulent world without. Here, about the spacious central quadrangle, on massive wooden benches, loaf and smoke and chat the contented old boys; and growl, withal, in their content. They decorate Grinling Gibbons’ bronze statue of Charles II., posing as a Roman in the centre, with oak garlands on “Oak-Apple-Day,” May 29th, the anniversary of the Restoration; on that day they wear oak branches in their caps, and eat much plum-pudding at dinner. Open towards the river, this quadrangle looks out on gracious gardens; just beyond is the great cross, set there to honour the victims of the Sepoy mutiny: “Some died in battle, some of wounds, some of disease, All in the devoted performance of Duty.” A little farther out rises the obelisk commemorating those who fell on that dark and doubtful day at Chillian-wallah, January 13th, 1849. As we stand here, beside a quiet Quaker cannon, these memorials to the devoted dead lift themselves directly in front; the terraced gardens slope to the river bank, their “carpet-beds” yellow with the tints of approaching autumn; the graceful towers and swaying chains of Chelsea Suspension Bridge seem floating in the air yonder; above the drooping limes and elms of the embankment the slim spars of lazy sloops slip slowly by; the gleaming river glides beneath, and away over beyond it the feathery masses of the trees of Battersea Park stand solidly against the sky. The opulent summer sun floods the scene, and an enchanting stillness broods above all, broken only by the rare rumble of trains on the farther railway-bridge. All things are half hid in the exquisite English haze: it softens every sharpness, harmonizes every harshness, rounds every shape to grace.
The Old Soldiers have their own gardens near at hand, and as we stroll there we pass College Fields, perpetuating the name of King James’s College; and so on between double rows of lime trees, gnarled and bent, under which the amorous veterans flirt sedately with the demure nursemaids, whose neglected charges meanwhile play with the sheep. Through the gate we enter a small but well-arranged domain, divided into tiny squares; each planted by its owner in flowers or in vegetables as may suit him, so giving him a little more tobacco money by his sales. They seem fond of those plants which put themselves most in evidence; and their little gardens are all aglow with gorgeous hollyhocks, dahlias, sunflowers, of the most gigantic and highly coloured kinds. It is a delight to watch the old fellows of a summer afternoon, bending intent on their toil in shirt-sleeves; or stalking stiffly about in their long red coats, senilely chaffing and cackling!
You will be pleased, I hope, to learn that this little piece of ground is called Ranelagh Gardens, and is the sole surviving remnant of that famous resort so dear to an older generation. “The R:t Hon:ble Richard Earle of Ranelagh,” as he is styled on the original “Ground Plot of the Royal Hospital” in the British Museum, being made one of the three commissioners appointed in the beginning to manage the young asylum, leases to himself seven acres of its grounds on the east, lying along the river, and there builds a grand mansion, in 1691; the gardens of which are “curiously kept and elegantly designed: so esteemed the best in England.” This first Earl of Ranelagh has been one of the pupils of a certain schoolmaster named John Milton, probably at his house in Barbican in the City, so recently torn down. The Earl becomes a famous man, in a different line from his teacher, and dying in 1712, leaves Ranelagh House and its gardens to his son; who sells the place in 1733 to Lacy, Garrick’s partner in the Drury Lane theatre patent; to be made by him a place of open-air amusement, after the manner of the favourite Vauxhall. But “it has totally beat Vauxhall,” writes Horace Walpole. “Nobody goes anywhere else, everybody goes there. My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it, that he says he has ordered all his letters to be directed thither.” Of course, he has his sneer at the “rival mobs” of the two places; but he does not disdain to show himself a very swell mob’s man, in his famous carouse at Ranelagh, with Miss Ashe and Lady Caroline Petersham. His father, Sir Robert, was proud to parade here his lovely mistress, Miss Chudleigh; “not over clothed,” as Leigh Hunt delicately puts it. The manners and morals of this place and this time have never been so pithily presented as in George Selwyn’s mot, on hearing that one of the waiters had been convicted of robbery: “What a horrid idea he’ll give of us to those fellows in Newgate!”