This was the great house of Sir Theodore de Mayerne, Court Physician, 1639; of Robert, Earl of Lindsey, Lord High Chamberlain, 1671; of Count Zinzendorf, the Moravian Leader, 1750: it occupied a part of the grounds of Beaufort House, and rose to importance as that great mansion declined. The Moravian fraternity had their colony and chapel and burying-ground behind Millman Street, where members of their persuasion were buried upright, under small square headstones, with the object, tradition says, of rising more quickly at the General Resurrection than other people. Finally, after passing many picturesque houses and some squalid modern interpolations, we come to Turner’s house, with the balcony where he watched the sunrise, and with the south-west window where he died with the sunset flooding his face in 1851.
Cheyne Walk ends at World’s End Passage, “the way between the Pales,” as the map of 1717 has it, which led across the fields and marshes to Kensington.
NOTES
CHAPTER VII
Lots Road—Ashburnham House—Sandford Manor—Beaufort House and a corner of a “fayre garden”—Tudor bricks—Danvers House and the Herberts—Lord Wharton’s scheme of silk production—Henry VIII.’s Hunting Lodge in Glebe Place—The Manor House gardens and those who have walked there.
AS WE HAVE reached the western limit of Cheyne Walk and may not be there again, for the uninteresting industrial district which begins here is not likely to tempt us back, we will say a few words about some of the old names that survive, under very altered conditions, and then turn our backs on it.
Lots Road, which might easily suggest the dreary desert tramp of the migrating Patriarch, is so called because it is built on the site of four lots of pasture-land belonging to the manor, and the first of the property to be sold. In 1740 this land surrounded Chelsea Farm, the residence of the Methodist Lady Huntingdon, the friend of Whitfield and inventor of a “Persuasion” all her own. Then, in sharp contrast, it became Chelsea Gardens, later opened as Cremorne, and closed in 1875, when its pretensions to fashion had been eclipsed in rowdyism.