The Skirts of the Great City

by N. D'Anvers

Lord Burghley, who had been created Earl of Essex, before his death left his Wimbledon property to his youngest son, Edward Cecil, who received the title of Lord Wimbledon in 1626. The latter, who was an eloquent writer as well as a distinguished soldier, and is included in Horace Walpole's catalogue of royal and noble authors, died in 1638, at the beginning of the acute stage of the conflict between autocratic and constitutional government, and his heir sold his Wimbledon home to Queen Henrietta Maria, who was often there with her husband and children during the few years of happiness that remained to them. Only a short time before the end of his troubled career, Charles I. gave orders that some melon seeds from Spain should be planted in the gardens, but whether this was done or not is not known. The beautiful house and estate were sold in 1649 by the Parliamentary Commissioners to a Mr. Baynes, from whom they were soon afterwards purchased by General Lambert, who is said to have found great consolation for the troubles resulting from his refusal to take the oath of allegiance to the Protector by cultivating flowers, the tulips and gilliflowers he raised at Wimbledon having been the finest that could be had for love or money.

After the Restoration Charles II. gave back the Wimbledon manor-house to his widowed mother, but it was too full of sad memories for her to care to live in it, and she sold it in 1661—the year, by the way, of the trial of General Lambert for treason—to John Digby, Earl of Bristol, who with the aid of the famous John Evelyn soon completely transformed it to suit his own taste. It was in the parish church of Wimbledon that the earl made his famous renunciation of the Roman Catholic religion, that was described by the French ambassador, who happened to be present, as an insolent and daring act; and it was whilst he was living in his half-finished mansion that he narrowly escaped arrest somewhat later when Charles II. sent messengers to arrest him. The Earl of Bristol died at Wimbledon in 1676, and his estate, after changing hands several times, was bought in 1717 by Sir Theodore Jansen, one of the promoters of the luckless South Sea scheme, who, with little reverence for the beauty and historic associations of the house, at once began to pull it down. Before he had time to build another he and his fellow-speculators were ruined, and the Wimbledon estate was sold by him to Sarah Jennings, the famous Duchess of Marlborough. She in her turn built a new and costly mansion which she bequeathed, with the rest of the property, to her grandson, John Spencer, to whose descendants it belonged—passing, in accordance with the custom known as borough English, to the youngest, not the eldest son—until 1871, when it was sold and broken up into a number of small holdings. The house built for the duchess, in which Hannah More was the guest, in 1786, of the Bishop of St. Asaph, was burned down in 1785, and the then owner replaced it with that still standing, known as Wimbledon Park House, that is associated with the memory of Sir William Paxton, the architect of the Crystal Palace, who began his career as assistant to his brother, who was head gardener for many years to the Cecil family.

At the present time Wimbledon, in spite of all the changes that have taken place in its general appearance, is one of the most beautiful of the London suburbs, and though it has lost its historic manor-house, it retains many fine old mansions that bear witness to its aristocratic associations. Amongst these, perhaps the finest is Eagle House, on the Green, a noble Jacobean structure, with ten gables, built by Robert Bell, a wealthy London merchant in the reign of James I., and occupied for some years, from 1789, by the Right Honourable William Grenville, the relation and colleague of William Pitt, who often visited him there, one of the bedrooms being still named after him. A house not far off, known as Wimbledon Lodge, was at the same time the home of the famous philanthropist, William Wilberforce, who in his Journal makes many allusions to his happy meetings at Eagle House with William Pitt, whom he sometimes persuaded to go to church with him.

At Chester House, another fine old mansion that faces the common, John Horne Tooke spent the last years of his life, and died in 1812, leaving instructions in his will that he should be buried in a mausoleum, still preserved in the garden; but his wishes were disregarded, for he rests in the churchyard of Ealing. Near the Crooked Billet, already referred to in connection with Thomas Cromwell, lived John Murray, founder of the publishing house named after him, and amongst his neighbours were William Gifford, the first editor of the Quarterly Review, and James Perry, the originator of the Morning Chronicle. Melrose House, on West Hill, now a home for incurables, was once the seat of the Duke of Sutherland. Madame Goldschmidt, better known as Jenny Lind, lived for several years in Wimbledon Park, and it was in Wresil Lodge that the celebrated Anglo-Indian statesman, Sir Bartle Frere, passed away.

The Parsonage of Wimbledon is a very picturesque old homestead, but there is little of interest about the modern parish church, that has had several predecessors, except the mortuary chapel connected with it that was built in the early seventeenth century as a family vault by Lord Wimbledon. There are, however, two or three noteworthy eighteenth-century tombs in the churchyard, that also owns a memorial to the celebrated American painter, Gilbert Stuart Newton, who died at Chelsea in 1835.

The chief glory of Wimbledon is now, as it has been for centuries, its breezy elevated common, that is more than a thousand acres in extent, and with Putney Heath, Richmond Park, Ham and Sheen commons, form an unbroken stretch of varied scenery unrivalled even in the heart of the country for its rural charm. Peaceful as Wimbledon Common now seems, however, it has witnessed many stirring and gruesome incidents, for it was long a favourite haunt of highwaymen and a noted place for duels. The secluded Coombe Wood on its outskirts, beloved of Constable and Stothard, where stands the house occupied by Lord Liverpool when he was Prime Minister, was the chief lurking-place of those lying in wait for unwary travellers, who were often not only robbed but murdered in broad daylight. It was no unusual thing for the bodies of criminals to be left hanging in chains till they rotted away near the spot where their worst deeds were done, and in a contemporary caricature of the duel already referred to between William Pitt and William Tierney, the remains of the notorious Jerry Abershaw, who suffered death at Kensington in 1735, are seen in the background dangling from a post close to the Windmill which is still such a picturesque feature of the common.

In 1789 occurred the encounter between Colonel Lennox, later Duke of Richmond, and the Duke of York, second son of George III., that caused much excitement at the time, for it was unusual for a commoner to challenge a prince of the blood, though the latter was in this case undoubtedly in the wrong, a fact of which he proved his sense by refusing to fire at his antagonist, who had to be content with discharging one bullet only that passed harmlessly through his adversary's hair. In 1807 a duel was fought in Coombe Wood, in which both parties were slightly wounded, between Sir Francis Burdett, the famous Conservative statesman, and Mr. Paull, who had been one of his agents in his successful candidature for Westminster; and in 1809 a certain Mr. Payne was mortally wounded in a duel on the common with a Mr. Clarke, who had made dishonourable proposals to his sister. More celebrated than either of these meetings, however, was that of 1839, when the Marquis of Londonderry met Henry Grattan, son of the famous Irish patriot of that name, and, after allowing his opponent to fire at him, discharged his own pistol in the air, a quiet way of proving his contempt for the duel as a mode of settling quarrels. A year later the future Emperor Napoleon III. challenged his fellow-countryman, Comte Léon, to a combat on Wimbledon Common, but a dispute having arisen between them when on the ground as to the weapons to be used, so much delay was caused that the police appeared on the scene and arrested the whole party, who were brought before the magistrate at Bow Street and bound over to keep the peace. Far more serious than this fiasco was the encounter, in the same year, between the Earl of Cardigan, later leader of the famous charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, and Captain Harvey Tuckett, one of his officers, whom he had treated with unwarrantable harshness. The latter was seriously wounded, and public indignation against the earl was very great, but though he was tried by his peers in 1841 he escaped punishment through a legal quibble, his counsel having pretended that it was impossible to prove the identity of the sufferer with the Captain Tuckett named in the indictment.

By the middle of the nineteenth century duelling had quite gone out of fashion in England; and although a few hostile meetings have since taken place on Wimbledon Common, they have been mere farces unworthy of serious consideration. The beautiful open space has since then become associated with memories of a far more ennobling kind, for it has been the scene of many a great gathering of volunteers, which have made the name of Wimbledon known throughout the civilised world, and have done more, perhaps, than anything else to make military service popular in England.