“Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye wauking yet,
Or are ye sleeping, I would wit?
O haste ye, get up, for the drums do beat;
O fye, Cope! rise up in the morning!”
—of the Sir John Cope who was forced to retreat from Preston Pans in “the ’45,” and against whom all the shafts of Jacobite ribaldry have been levelled?
Faulkner says that this house, which was “subsequently occupied by the late Mr. Duffield as a private madhouse, has been pulled down, and its site is now called Odell’s Place, a little eastward of Lord Shaftesbury’s;” that is to say, opposite to Manor Hall, and Sir John Cope’s house was not improbably the residence of two distinguished naval officers, Sir James Wishart and Sir John Balchen. The former was made an admiral, and knighted by Queen Anne in 1703, and appointed one of the lords of the Admiralty, but was dismissed from the naval service by George I. for favouring the interests of the Pretender, and died at Little Chelsea on the 30th of May, 1723. In the ‘Daily Courant,’ Monday, July 15, 1723, the following advertisement appears:—
“To be sold by auction, the household goods, plate, china ware, linen, &c., of Sir James Wishart, deceased, on Thursday the 18th instant, at his late dwelling-house at Little Chelsea. The goods to be seen this day, to-morrow, and Wednesday, before the sale, from 9 to 12 in the morning, and from 3 to 7 in the evening. Catalogues to be had at the sale.
“N.B. A coach and chariot to be sold, and the house to be let.”
Admiral Sir John Balchen resided at Little Chelsea soon after Sir James Wishart’s death. In 1744, Admiral Balchen perished in the Victory, of 120 guns, which had the reputation of being the most beautiful ship in the world, but foundered, with eleven hundred souls on board, in the Bay of Biscay.
On the 31st of March, 1723, Edward Hyde, the third Earl of Clarendon, died “at his house, Little Chelsea;” but where the earl’s house stood I am unable to state.
Mrs. Robinson, the fascinating “Perdita,” tells us, in her
autobiography, that, at the age of ten (1768), she was “placed for education in a school at Chelsea.” And she then commences a most distressing narrative, in which the last tragic scene she was witness to occurred at Little Chelsea.
“The mistress of this seminary,” Mrs. Robinson describes as “perhaps one of the most extraordinary women that ever graced, or disgraced, society. Her name was Meribah Lorrington. She was the most extensively accomplished female that I ever remember to have met with; her mental powers were no less capable of cultivation than superiorly cultivated. Her father, whose name was Hull, had from her infancy been master of an academy at Earl’s Court, near Fulham; and early after his marriage, losing his wife, he resolved on giving this daughter a masculine education. Meribah was early instructed in all the modern accomplishments, as well as in classical knowledge. She was mistress of the Latin, French, and Italian languages; she was said to be a perfect arithmetician and astronomer, and possessed the art of painting on silk to a degree of exquisite perfection. But, alas! with all these advantages, she was addicted to one vice, which at times so completely absorbed her faculties as to deprive her of every power, either mental or corporeal. Thus, daily and hourly, her superior acquirements, her enlightened understanding, yielded to the intemperance of her ruling infatuation, and every power of reflection seemed absorbed in the unfeminine propensity.
“All that I ever learned,” adds Mrs. Robinson, “I acquired from this extraordinary woman. In those hours when her senses were not intoxicated, she would delight in the task of instructing me. She had only five or six pupils, and it was my lot to be her particular favourite. She always, out of school, called me her little friend, and made no scruple of conversing with me (sometimes half the night, for I slept in her chamber) on domestic and confidential affairs. I felt for her very sincere affection, and I listened with peculiar attention to all the lessons she inculcated. Once I recollect her mentioning the particular failing which disgraced so intelligent a being. She pleaded, in excuse of it, the unmitigable regret of a widowed heart, and with compunction declared that she flew to intoxication as the only refuge from the pang of prevailing sorrow.”
Mrs. Robinson remained more than twelve months under the care of Mrs. Lorrington,