Old Chelsea: A Summer-Day's Stroll

by Benjamin Ellis Martin

Let us stop again before the little two-storied house, the easternmost of Paradise Row, standing discreetly back from the street behind a prim plot of grass; well-wrought-iron gates are swung on square gate-posts, a-top of each of which is an old-fashioned stone globe, of the sort seldom seen nowadays. A queer little sounding-board projects over the small door; and above the little windows we read “School of Discipline, Instituted A.D. 1825.” It is the oldest school of the kind in London, was founded by Elizabeth Fry, and in it young girls, forty-two at a time, each staying two years, “are reformed for five shillings a week,” and fitted for domestic service. They wear very queer aprons, their hair is plastered properly, their shoes are clumsy; and no queerer contrast was ever imagined than that between them and the perfumed, curled, high-heeled dame, who once lived here. She is well worth looking back at, as we sit here in her low-ceilinged drawing-room, darkly panelled, as are hall and staircase by which we have passed in entering.

Hortensia Mancini, the daughter of Cardinal Mazarin’s sister, had been married while very young to some Duke, who was allowed to assume the name of Mazarin on his marriage. A religious fanatic, he soon shut her up in a convent, from which she took her flight and found her way to England in boy’s costume. There, as the handsomest woman in Europe, her coming caused commotion among her rivals, all remembering the flutter she had excited in Charles II. during his exile in France. Ruvigny [91] writes: “She has entered the English court as Armida entered the camp of Godfrey.” Indeed, this one soon showed that she, too, was a sorceress; and Rochester, in his famous “Farewell,” acclaims her the “renowned Mazarine, first in the glorious Roll of Infamy.” Living luxuriously and lavishly for a while, until by the death of her royal lover she lost her pension of £4000 yearly, she came at length to this little house as her last dwelling-place; and even here, reduced to real poverty, unable to pay her butcher or her baker, written down on the Parish books of 1695, “A Defaulter of the Parish Rates:” she yet persisted in giving grand dinners—the cost of which (so old Lysons heard) was met by each guest leaving monies under his napkin! For all that, this modest mansion was the favourite resort of famous men of her day; who lounged in of an evening to discuss and speculate, to play at her basset-tables, to listen to her music, mostly dramatic, the forerunner of Italian opera in this country. Here came Sydney Godolphin, that rare man who was “never in the way, and yet never out of the way;” here the king was frequently found; here Saint Evremond was always found! How real to us is the figure of this gallant old Frenchman, as we see him in the National Portrait Gallery: his white hair flowing below his black cap; his large forehead; his dark blue eyes; the great wen that grew in his later years between them, just at the top of his nose: a shrewd, kindly, epicurean face. He came of a noble Norman family from Denis le Guast, this Charles de Saint Denys, Seigneur de Saint Evremond. Entering the army at an early age, he rose rapidly to a captaincy; his bravery and his wit—a little less than that of Voltaire, whom he helped to form, says Hallam—making him the friend of Turenne, of the great Condè, and of others of that brilliant band. Satirizing Mazarin, he was locked in the Bastille for three months; and when free, he finally fled from the cardinal’s fury, and came to England: here to end his days, waiting on this still fascinating woman, worshipping her, advising her, writing plays for her, and poetry to her. He held the rank of Governor of Duck Island, in the ornamental water of St. James’s Park—an office invented for him by Charles II., and having a fine title, a large salary, and no duties. You may throw bread to-day to the lineal descendants of those ducks of which the King was so fond. Saint Evremond died in 1703, and lies in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, near to Chaucer and Beaumont and Dryden; his adored lady having died in 1699 in this very house. She was not buried; for after all these years of self-effacement her devoted husband again appears, has her body embalmed, and carries it with him wherever he journeys.

Mary Astell lived and died in her little house in Paradise Row; a near neighbour of, and a curious contrast to, the Duchess of Mazarin, whom she pointed at in her writings as a warning of the doom decreed to beauty and to wit, when shackled in slavery to Man, and so dis-weaponed in the fight against fate and forgetfulness. She devoted herself to celibacy and “to the propagation of virtue,” as Smollett slily put it. Congreve satirized her, too; Swift stained her with his sneers as “Madonella;” Addison and Steele made fun of her in their gentler way. Doubtless there was something of la Précieuse Ridicule to that generation in the aspect of this most learned lady, who wrote pamphlets and essays; in which, following More’s lead, she urged the higher education of her sex; and preached as well as practised persistent protests against the folly of those pretty women, “who think more of their glasses than of their reflections.” She inveighed much—this in our modern manner—against marriage, and woman’s devotion to man; putting it with point and pith, that Woman owes a duty to Man “only by the way, just as it may be any man’s duty to keep hogs; he was not made for this, but if he hires himself out for this employment, he is bound to perform it conscientiously.” One good work of hers still survives. Failing to found among her female friends a College or Community for Celibacy and Study, she induced Lady Elizabeth Hastings—her immortalized as the Aspasia of the Tatler by Congreve and by Steele, and to whom the latter applied his exquisite words, “to love her is a liberal education”—and other noble ladies to endow in 1729 a school for the daughters of old pensioners of the Royal Hospital; and this little child’s charity was the precursor and harbinger of the present grand asylum at Hampstead, which clothes, educates, and cares for these girls.

It is but a step to the spacious, many-windowed brick building in the King’s Road; on the pediment of which, in Cheltenham Terrace, we read: “The Royal Military Asylum for the Children of Soldiers of the Regular Army.” It is popularly known as the “Duke of York’s School,” and is devoted to the training of the orphan boys of poor soldiers. It is a pleasant sight to watch them going through their manœuvres in their gravel ground; or, off duty, playing football and leap-frog. They bear themselves right martially in their red jackets and queer caps, a few proudly carrying their corporal’s yellow chevrons, a fewer still prouder of their “good conduct stripes.” It was “B 65,” big with the double dignity of both badges of honour, who unbent to my questioning; and explained that the lads are entered at the age of ten, can remain until fourteen, can then become drummers if fitted for that vocation, or can give up their army career and take their chances in civilians’ pursuits.

We may not pause long before the iron gates which let us look in on the mansion named Blacklands; now a private mad-house, and the only remnant of the great estate once owned by Lord Cheyne, and which covered more than the extent of Sloane Street and Square, Cadogan and Hans Place: all these laid out and built by Holland in 1777, and by him called Hans Town. We might have stopped, a while ago, in front of the vast Chelsea barracks, just to the south, to look at the faded plaster-fronted shop, opposite. “The Old Chelsea Bun-House,” its sign assured us it was, before its demolition last year; yet it was only the descendant of the original house, which stood a little farther east up Pimlico Road, formerly Jews’ Road. That once mal-odorous street is yet fragrant with the buns baked there in the last century, when the little shop was crowded with dainty damsels in hoops and furbelows, with gallants in wigs and three-cornered hats, while stately flunkies strode in the street below. “Pray, are not the fine buns sold here in our town as the rare Chelsea buns? I bought one to-day in my walk”—Swift tells Stella in his journal for 1712. Half-mad George III. and Queen Charlotte—she popularly known as “Old Snuffy”—were fond of driving out to Chelsea Bun-House, to sit on its verandah munching buns, much stared at by the curious crowd. The old building was torn down in 1839, “to the general regret in London and its environs,” its crazy collection of poor pictures, bogus antiques, and genuine Chelsea ware being sold by auction; all of which is duly chronicled in “The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction” of April 6, 1839.

Turning back again to Paradise Row, we glance across the road at a great square mansion standing in spacious grounds, used as the Victoria Hospital for Children, a beneficent institution. This is Gough House, built by that profane Earl of Carberry, who diced and drank and dallied in company with Buckingham and Rochester and Sedley. Early in the last century it came into possession of Sir John Gough, whence the name it still retains. Nearly two centuries of odd doings and of queer social history tenant these walls; but we can pause no longer than to glance at the little cots standing against the ancient wainscotting of the stately rooms, and the infant patients toddling up the massive oak staircases.

We turn the corner, and pass through Tite Street, and so come, in refreshing contrast with its ambitious artificiality, to a bit of genuine nature—a great garden stretching from Swan Walk and the Queen’s Road, and fronting just here on the Embankment. On one of the great stone posts of this entrance—once the water-gate—we read: “The Botanic Garden of the Society of Apothecaries of London, A.D. 1673;” on the other: “Granted to the Society in Perpetuity by Sir Hans Sloane, Bart., A.D. 1723.” These grounds remain intact as when in this last-named year four acres of Lord Cheyne’s former domain were made over to the Society of Apothecaries for “The Chelsea Physick Garden;” with permission to build thereon a barge-house and offices, for their convenience when they came up the river. The buildings were demolished in 1853, but the gardens have bravely held out against the Vandal hordes of bricklayers and builders; and in them all the herbs of Materia Medica which can grow in the open air are cultivated to this very day for the instruction of medical students, just as when Dr. Johnson’s Polyphilus—the universal genius of the Rambler—started to come out here from London streets to see a new plant in flower. The trees are no longer so vigorous as when Evelyn, so fond of fine trees, praised them; and of the twelve noble Cedars of Lebanon planted by the hand of Sir Hans, but one still stands; and this one, even in its decrepitude, is nearly as notable, it seems to me, as that glorious unequalled one in the private garden of Monseigneur the Archbishop of Tours. In the centre stands the statue of Sir Hans Sloane, put up in 1733, chipped and stained by wind and weather. For, in this garden Hans Sloane studied, and when he became rich and famous and bought the manor of Chelsea, he gave the freehold of this place to the Apothecaries’ Company on condition that it should be devoted for ever to the use of all students of nature.

Westward a little way, we come to “Swan House.” This modern-antique mansion stands on the site of, and gets its name from, the “Old Swan Tavern,” which has been gone these fifteen years now, and which stood right over the river, with projecting wooden balconies, and a land entrance from Queen’s Road. It and its predecessor—a little lower down the river—were historic public-houses resorted to by parties pleasuring from town; and this was always a house of call for watermen with their wherries, as we find so well pictured in Marryat’s “Jacob Faithful.” Here Pepys turned back on the 9th of April, 1666; having come out for a holiday, and “thinking to have been merry at Chelsey; but being come almost to the house by coach near the waterside, a house alone, I think the Swan,” he learned from a passer-by that the plague had broken out in this suburb, and that the “house was shut up of the sickness. So we with great affright . . . went away for Kensington.” The old fellow—he was young then—was fond of taking boat or coach, “to be merry at Chelsey”; often with Mrs. Knipp, the pretty actress; sometimes with both her and his wife, and then he drily complains to his diary—“and my wife out of humour, as she always is when this woman is by.” Yet the critics claim that he had no sense of fun! Until the “Old Swan” was torn down, it served as the goal for the annual race which is still rowed on the first day of every August from the “Old Swan Tavern” at London Bridge, by the young Thames watermen, for the prize instituted in 1715 by Doggett—that fine low comedian of Queen Anne’s day: a silver medal stamped with the white horse of Hanover (in commemoration of the First George’s coronation), and a waterman’s orange-coloured coat full of pockets, each pocket holding a golden guinea.