A marble statue by Rysbach in the centre of the garden commemorates him. It was erected in 1737 at a cost of nearly £300. Mr. Miller, son of a gardener employed by the Apothecaries, wrote a valuable horticultural dictionary, and a new genus of plants was named after him.
Linnæus visited the garden in 1736. Of the four cedars—the first ever brought to England—planted here in 1683, one alone survives.
Returning to the Embankment, we see a few more fine houses in the pseudo-ancient style. Clock House and Old Swan House were built from designs by Norman Shaw, R.A. Standing near is a large monument, with an inscription to the effect: “Chelsea Embankment, opened 1874 by Lt.-Col. Sir J. Macnaghten Hogg, K.C.B. Sir Joseph W. Bazalgette, C.B., engineer.” The Embankment is a magnificent piece of work, extending for nearly a mile, and made of Portland cement concrete, faced with dressed blocks of granite. Somewhere on the site of the row of houses in Cheyne Walk stood what was known as the New Manor House, built by King Henry VIII. as part of the jointure of Queen Catherine Parr, 25 who afterwards lived here with her fourth husband, Thomas Seymour, Lord High Admiral. Here the young Princess Elizabeth came to stay with her stepmother, and also poor little Lady Jane Grey at the age of eleven. The history of the Manor House, of course, coincides with the history of the manor, which has been given at length elsewhere. Lysons, writing in 1795, states that the building was pulled down “many years ago.” It was built in 1536, and thus was probably in existence about 250 years. More than a century after, some time prior to 1663, James, Duke of Hamilton, had built a house adjoining the Manor House on the western side. The palace of the Bishops of Winchester at Southwark had become dilapidated, and the Bishop of that time, George Morley, purchased Hamilton’s new house for £4,250 to be the episcopal residence. From that time until the investment of Bishop Tomline, 1820, eight Bishops lived in the house successively. Of these, Bishop Hoadley, one of the best-known names among them, was the sixth. He was born in 1676, the son of a master of Norwich Grammar School. He was a Fellow of Catherine’s Hall at Cambridge, and wrote several political works which brought him into notice. He passed successively through the sees of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury, and Winchester. He was succeeded by the Hon. Brownlow North, to whom Faulkner dedicated his first 26 edition of “Chelsea.” Lady Tomline, the wife of the Bishop of that name, took a dislike to the house at Chelsea and refused to live there. The great hall was forty feet long by twenty wide, and the three drawing-rooms extended the whole length of the south front. The front stood rather further back than the Manor House, not on a line with it. The palace stood just where Oakley Street now opens into Cheyne Walk. The houses standing on the sites of these palaces are mostly modern. No. 1 has a fine doorway which came from an old house at the other end of the row. In the next Mr. Beerbohm Tree and his wife lived for a short time after their marriage.
No. 4 has had a series of notable inmates. William Dyce, R.A., was the occupant in 1846, and later on Daniel Maclise, R.A. Then came George Eliot, with Mr. Cross, intending to stay in Chelsea for the winter, but three weeks after she caught cold and died in this house. Local historians have mentioned a strange shoot which ran from the top to the bottom of this house; this has disappeared, but on the front-staircase still remain some fresco paintings executed by Sir J. Thornhill, and altered by Maclise. In 1792 a retired jeweller named Neild came to No. 5. The condition of prisoners incarcerated for small debts occupied his thoughts and energies, and he worked to ameliorate it. He left his son 27 James Neild an immense fortune. This eccentric individual, however, was a miser, who scrimped and scraped all his life, and at his death left all his money to Queen Victoria. The gate-piers before this house are very fine, tall, and square, of mellowed red brick, surmounted by vases. These vases superseded the stone balls in fashion at the end of the Jacobean period. Hogarth is said to have been a frequent visitor to this house. In the sixth house Dr. Weedon Butler, father of the Headmaster of Harrow, kept a school, which was very well known for about thirty years. In the next block we have the famous Queen’s House, marked by the little statuette of Mercury on the parapet. It is supposed to have been named after Catherine of Braganza, but beyond some initials—C. R. (Catherine Regina)—in the ironwork of the gate, there seems no fact in support of this. The two Rossettis, Meredith, and Swinburne came here in 1862, but soon parted company, and D. G. Rossetti alone remained. He decorated some of the fireplaces with tiles himself; that in the drawing-room is still inlaid with glazed blue and white Persian tiles of old design. In his time it was called Tudor House, but when the Rev. H. R. Haweis (d. 1901) came to live here, he resumed the older name of Queen’s House. It is supposed to have been built by Wren, and the rooms are beautifully proportioned, panelled, and of great height. 28
The next house to this on the eastern side was occupied for many years by the artistic family of the Lawsons. Thomas Attwood, a pupil of Mozart and himself a great composer, died there in 1838. The house had formerly a magnificent garden, to the mulberries of which Hazlitt makes allusion in one of his essays. No. 18 was the home of the famous Don Saltero’s museum. This man, correctly Salter, was a servant of Sir Hans Sloane, and his collection was formed from the overflowings of his master’s. Some of the curiosities dispersed by the sale in 1799 are still to be seen in the houses of Chelsea families in the form of petrified seaweed and shells. The museum was to attract people to the building, which was also a coffee-house; this was at that time something of a novelty. It was first opened in 1695. Sir Richard Steele, in the Tatler, says: “When I came into the coffee-house I had not time to salute the company before my eye was diverted by ten thousand gimcracks round the room and on the ceiling.” Catalogues of the curiosities are still extant, and one of them is preserved in the Chelsea Public Library.
Of the remaining houses none have associations. The originals were too small for the requirements of those who wished to live in such an expensive situation, and within the last score of years they have been pulled down and others built on their 29 sites. One of these so destroyed was called the Gothic House; in it lived Count D’Orsay, and it was most beautifully finished both inside and out. The decorative work was executed by Pugin, and has been described by those who remember it as gorgeous. In another there was a beautiful Chippendale staircase, which, it is to be feared, was ruthlessly chopped up. In the last house of all was an elaborate ceiling after the style of Wedgwood. The doorway of this house is now at No. 1.
The garden which lies in front of these houses adds much to their picturesqueness in summer by showing the glimpses of old walls and red brick through curtains of green leaves. In it, opposite to the house where he used to live, there is a gray granite fountain to the memory of Rossetti. It is surmounted by a bronze alto-relievo bust modelled by Mr. F. Madox Brown.
A district old enough to be squalid, but not old enough to be interesting, is enclosed by Smith and Manor Streets, running at right angles to the Embankment. New red-brick mansions at the end of Flood Street indicate that the miserable plaster-fronted houses will not be allowed to have their own way much longer. No street has changed its name so frequently as Flood Street. It was first called Pound Lane, from the parish pound that stood at the south end; it then became Robinson’s 30 Lane; in 1838 it is marked as Queen Street; and in 1865 it was finally turned into Flood Street, from L. T. Flood, a parish benefactor, in whose memory a service is still held every year in St. Luke’s Church.
Oakley Street is very modern. In a map of 1838 there is no trace of it, but only a great open space where Winchester House formerly stood. In No. 32 lives Dr. Phené, who was the first to plant trees in the streets of London. Phené Street, leading into Oakley Crescent, is named after him. The line of houses on the west side of Oakley Street is broken by a garden thickly set with trees. This belongs to Cheyne House, the property of Dr. Phené; the house cannot be seen from the street in summer-time. The oldest part is perhaps Tudor, and the latest in the style of Wren. One wall is decorated with fleurs-de-lys. In the garden was grown the original moss-rose, a freak of Nature, from which all other moss-roses have sprung. In the grounds was discovered a subterranean passage, which Dr. Phené claims fixes the site of Shrewsbury or Alston House. It runs due south, and indicates the site as adjacent to Winchester House on the west side. Faulkner, writing in 1810, says: “The most ancient house now remaining in this parish is situated on the banks of the river, not far from the site of the Manor House built by King Henry VIII., and 31 appears to have been erected about that period. It was for many years the residence of the Shrewsbury family, but little of its ancient splendour now remains.” He describes it as an irregular brick building, forming three sides of a quadrangle. The principal room, which was wainscotted with oak, was 120 feet long, and one of the rooms, supposed to have been an oratory, was painted in imitation of marble. Faulkner mentions the subterranean passage “leading towards Kensington,” which Dr. Phené has opened out.
Shrewsbury House was built in the reign of Henry VIII. by George, Earl of Shrewsbury, who was succeeded in 1538 by his son Francis. The son of Francis, George, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, who succeeded in his turn, was a very wealthy and powerful nobleman. He was high in Queen Elizabeth’s favour, and it was to his care that the captive Mary, Queen of Scots, was entrusted. Though Elizabeth considered he treated the royal prisoner with too much consideration, she afterwards forgave him, and appointed him to see the execution of the death-warrant. He married for his second wife a lady who had already had three husbands, each more wealthy than the last. By the second of these, Sir William Cavendish, she had a large family. Her husband left his house at Chelsea wholly to her. She outlived him 32 seventeen years, and with her immense wealth built the three magnificent mansions of Chatsworth, Oldcotes, and Hardwick, and all these she left to her son William Cavendish, afterwards created Baron Cavendish and Earl of Devonshire. A son of a younger brother was created Marquis of Newcastle, and his daughter and coheiress was Lady Jane, who brought her husband, Charles Cheyne, such a large dower that he was enabled to buy the Manor of Chelsea.