At this distance, however, the fêtes, frolics, fire-works and all the fashionable frivolity of the place look bright and bewildering. Nor did grave and reverend men disdain to spend their evenings at Ranelagh—“to give expansion and gay sensation to the mind,” as staid old Dr. Johnson asserted! Goldsmith felt its gaiety, when he came here to forget the misery of his lodging in Green Arbour Court, where now stands the Holborn Viaduct station. Laurence Sterne, fresh to the town from his Yorkshire parsonage, finding himself in great vogue—his portrait much stared at, in Spring Gardens, one of the four sent there, selected by Sir Joshua as his choicest works—plunged forthwith into all sorts of frivolities, and was seen in Ranelagh more often than was considered seemly. Smollett sometimes emerged from out his Chelsea solitude for a sight of this festive world; Fielding came here to study the scenes for his “Amelia”; and Addison, too, who chats about the place in his Spectator. [80] It is spoken of in the Connoisseur and the Citizen of the World; the poet Bloomfield introduced it, and Fanny Burney placed here a scene in her “Evelina.” At this time—just one hundred years ago—she was a little past twenty-six, and was living with her father, Dr. Burney, recently made organist of the hospital chapel, next door. Ranelagh had then begun to “decline and fall off,” in Silas Wegg’s immortal phrase: having been open since 1742, it was finally closed at the beginning of this century, its artificial oil-moon paling before the rising radiance of gas-lighted new Cremorne.
On an old tracing of the Hospital boundaries kept in its archives, I found this inscription: “To answer the Earl of Ranelagh’s house on the east side of the College, an house was builded in the Earl of Orford’s garden on the west side.” This was the house into which Sir Robert Walpole moved from his lodgings near by, where now Walpole Street runs; the same lodgings in which the Earl of Sandwich had lived long before. The Edward Montague, who, as Commander of the fleet, brought Charles II. back to England, was made Earl of Sandwich for this service, and in 1663 he came to live in Chelsea, “to take the ayre.” But there was a “Mrs. Betty Becke,” his landlady’s daughter, who seems to have been the real reason for this retirement, and at whom the moral Pepys sneers as “a slut.” He writes under date of September 9, 1663: “I am ashamed to see my lord so grossly play the fool, to the flinging off of all honour, friends, and servants, and everything and person that is good, with his carrying her abroad, and playing on the lute under her window, and forty other poor sordid things, which I am grieved to hear.” Having occasion to visit his chief here, on naval business, the Clerk of the Admiralty finds him “all alone, with one joynte of meat, mightily extolling the manner of his retirement, and the goodness of his diet;” and was so perturbed, and so loyal withal, as to dare to write him, “that her wantonness occasioned much scandal, though unjustly, to his Lordship.” Nor was his Lordship offended by this frankness, but remained friendly to his Secretary.
Crossing through court and quadrangle and garden, to the western side of the Hospital, we are allowed to enter its infirmary, and to pass into ward No. 7. Here we stand in Sir Robert Walpole’s dining-room, unchanged since he left it, except that the array of fine Italian pictures has gone from the walls, and that decrepid soldiers lie about on cots, coughing and drinking gruel from mugs. But for all this, perhaps by reason of all this, this room, with its heavily moulded ceiling, its stately marble mantle—in severe white throughout—is one of the most impressive relics of by-gone grandeur in all London. The house, grand in its day, grand still in its mutilation, was built by Sir John Vanbrugh, whose architecture—florid and faulty, but with a dignity of its own, such as strikes one in his masterpiece, Blenheim, called by Thackeray “a piece of splendid barbarism”—was as heavy as his comedies were light; and served to bring on him Swift’s epitaph:
“Lie heavy on him earth, for he
Hath laid many a heavy load on thee.”
This one end—all that remains of the old red-brick mansion—has been raised a storey, but otherwise stands almost as when Walpole lived here from 1723 to 1746, and from its chambers ruled England through his subjects George I. and George II., whom he allowed to reign. It was from this room that he rushed out on the arrival of the express with the news of the death of the first George. He left his dinner-table at three p.m. on the 14th June, 1727, and took horse at once:—so riding that he “killed two horses under him,” says his son Horace:—and was the first to reach the Prince of Wales at Richmond with the news. To Walpole House used to drive, from her palace at Kensington, the wife of this same Prince of Wales; who, now become George II., cheered her solitude by writing to her long letters from his residence at Hanover, filled with praises of his latest lady-love. These epistles the fair-haired, blue-eyed, sweet-voiced woman would bring weeping to Walpole, in search of the comfort which he graciously gave, by assuring her that now that she was growing old she must expect this sort of thing! A little later Walpole drove from here to Kensington, and stood beside the King at her deathbed; Caroline commending to Walpole’s protection her husband and his monarch! Here came Bolingbroke on his return from his exile in France, to dine at the invitation of his great rival, whom he hated and envied. It was not a joyful dinner for him, and Horace Walpole tells us that “the first morsel he put into his mouth was near choking him, and he was reduced to rise from the table and leave the room for some minutes. I never heard of their meeting more.” Here Swift used to stride into dinner, studying his host for the rôle of Flimnap in his “Gulliver,” which he was then writing. Here fat John Gay, then secretary or steward to Lady Monmouth, a little farther on in Chelsea, swaggered in his fine clothes, and being snubbed by his cynical host, put him on the stage as “Macheath” in his “Beggar’s Opera.” Pope used to drive over in his little trap from Twickenham, before his friend Bolingbroke’s return, to entertain Sir Robert with the details of his row about Lady Mary Wortley Montague with Lord Hervey; that be-rouged fop whom he pilloried in his rage, as
“This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings.”
The famous gardens, on which the gay and extravagant Lady Walpole spent her time and money, have been built over by the successive additions to the Infirmary; and we no longer can see the conservatory and grotto, without which in those days no garden was considered complete. The bit of ground left serves now for the convalescent soldiers, and the graceful tree in the centre, its branches growing horizontally out from the top of the trunk, forms a natural arbour, which they mightily enjoy upon a sunny afternoon. Down at the lower end of the garden, a bit of rotting wooden fence set above a sunken wall marks the line of the river-bank as it ran before the building of the embankment. Just here, on a pleasant terrace and in its summer-house, that royal scamp, George IV., was fond of philandering with his fair friends; this scene suggesting a curious contrast with the group once surely sitting or strolling here—a group made up of no less august personages than Charles II. and the Earl of Sandwich with the Duchess of Mazarin, followed by “her adoring old friend” St. Evremond. For that lovely and luckless lady lived just across the road, outside these grounds; and to her house in Paradise Row I wish now to take you.
All that is now left of old Paradise Row is half a dozen small brick cottages, with tiny gardens in front, and vines climbing above. Once, when all about here was country, these dwellings must have been really delightful, and have justified the suggestion of their name, looking out as they did on pleasant parterres, terraced to the river. Unpretending as they are, they have harboured many historic personages. In Paradise Row—it is now partly Queen’s Road West—lived the first Duke of St. Albans, Nell Gwynne’s son, not far from the more modest mansion of his venerated grandmother, among the “neat-houses” at Millbank. Her garden sloped down to the river, and therein she fell one day, and was drowned; and they wrote a most woeful ballad “Upon that never-to-be-forgotten matron, old Madame Gwynn, who died in her own fish-pond;” and it would seem from these ribald rhymes that the lamented lady was fat and fond of brandy! This latter weakness is also the theme of Rochester’s muse, in his “Panegyric upon Nelly,” when he commends her scorn of cost in the funeral rites—
“To celebrate this martyr of the ditch.
Burnt Brandy did in flaming Brimmers flow,
Drunk at her Fun’ral: while her well-pleased Shade
Rejoic’d, e’en in the sober Fields below,
At all the Drunkenness her Death had made!”
In old Paradise Row also lived the Earls of Pelham and of Sandwich, and the Duchess of Hamilton. At the corner of Robinson’s Lane—now Flood Street—stood Lord Robarte’s house, wherein he gave the famous supper to Charles II. on the 4th of September, 1660, and was soon after made Earl of Radnor: whence the street of that name hard by. On April 19, 1665, Pepys visited him here, and “found it to be the prettiest contrived house that ever I saw in my life.” It stood there until within a few weeks, a venerable tavern known as “The Duke’s Head”: now gone the way of so much historic brick and mortar! Latest of all our Chelsea celebrities, Faulkner, the historian of Chelsea, lived on the corner of Paradise Row, and what was then Ormond Row, now commonplace Smith Street. A quiet, quaint old public-house, “The Chelsea Pensioner,” stands where Faulkner worked with such pains, on his driest of records; yet to them we are all glad to go for many of our facts about modern Chelsea. These poor little plaster-fronted cottages, stretching from this corner to Christchurch Street, now represent the once stately Ormond Row; and the swinging sign of the “Ormond Dairy” is all we have to commemorate old Ormond House, which stood just here. In its gardens, sloping to the river bank, Walpole’s later house was built, as we have seen it to-day.