date, 1661, is in the centre arch, over the principal gateway, and it is said to have been used as a hospital for persons recovering from the Great Plague in 1665.
“Our poet had an uncle named William Plumbe, who resided at North End, Fulham, having married the widow of John Gresham, the second son of Sir John Gresham, who was Lord Mayor of London in 1547, and which lady was the only daughter and heir of Edward Dormer of Fulham. Here it was, while visiting his uncle, that Sylvester formed the attachment which is the subject of his poem (see the folio edition of his works, 1621). Uncle Plumbe had been a widower; and from monuments which exist, or existed, in the parish church of Fulham, appears to have departed this life on the 9th February, 1593–4, aged sixty. In the previous May, his widow had lost her son Edmund (or Edward) Gresham, at the age of sixteen; and seriously touched by the rapid proofs of mortality within her house, from which the hand of death had within twelve months removed both a husband and a child, made preparations for her own demise by recording her intention to repose beside their remains: and to her husband’s memory she raised, in Fulham Church, a monument ‘of alabaster, inlaid and ornamented with various-coloured marble,’ leaving a space after her name for the insertion of the date of her death and age, which appear never to have been supplied.”
The arms of “Dormer, impaled with Gresham,” we are told remain, “those of Plumbe are gone.” Sylvester’s “Triumph of Faith” is consecrated “to the grateful memory of the first kind fosterer of our tender Muses, by my never sufficiently honoured dear uncle, W. Plumb, Esq.” It is not our intention to linger over the recollections connected with the age of Elizabeth in Fulham Fields or at North End, although there can be no doubt that a little research might bring some curious local particulars to light connected with the history of the literature, the drama, and the fine arts of that period,
The gardens here provide the London markets with a large supply of vegetables. A very primitive form of draw-well was common here, consisting of a pole, balanced horizontally on an upright, the bucket being affixed to a rope at one end.
A little beyond “Wentworth Cottage,” the road branches off, the turning to the right going to Hammersmith, and that to the left leading to Fulham. Hammersmith was a part of Fulham until 1834, when it was formed into a separate parish by Act of Parliament.
