Cheyne Walk—The King’s Road and the Queen’s—George Eliot—Dr. Dominiceti’s baths—A French author’s cleverness—“The Yorkshire Grey”—Cecil Lawson’s pictures—Rossetti, Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Haweis, and their guests—The Don Saltero—“The Magpie”—Remains of Shrewsbury House and Mary Queen of Scots—The Children’s Hospital—Crosby Hall, Lindsey House, Turner’s House—The way between the Pales.

CHEYNE WALK is beautiful at all seasons and under all aspects; each time that I regard it from a fresh point, or return to it after a temporary absence, I think, “Never has it looked so lovely before!”

But for the purposes of historical interest it is well to walk it from end to end, or rather, to loiter in it, and, for choice, in early autumn, when the sunshine is as mellow as the tones of the old brick, and the trees and creepers are not too heavily green to obscure its gracious lines.

So, if you will see this riverside row of storied houses aright, turn with me down Flood Street—when you leave your motor-bus at the Town Hall—and begin at the beginning of the Walk that will lead you through the drama, tragic and comic, of at least five centuries.

Until a few years ago the two main thoroughfares from London to Chelsea were the King’s Road and the Queen’s Road. In that their juxtaposition recalled an interesting tradition, I am sorry that Queen’s Road has lately been altered to Royal Hospital Road.

For in the days of Charles II. the King had a private road for his coach through the fields to Chelsea, where dwelt Mistress Elinor Gwynn (at Sandford Manor when she received the King’s visits, but, report says, in a squalid little riverside hovel, not far from Chelsea Barracks, in her previous chrysalis stage), and Queen Catharine of Braganza, who also visited at Chelsea, paying less lively duty calls, as wives must, objected to using her husband’s route lest a domestic matter, which she preferred to ignore, should be forced on her attention.

So the King came his road and the Queen hers, following parallel paths, and poor, stupid Catharine tried to keep her eyes shut to her consort’s “merry” ways. Had she tried to make her own a little less stiff, bigoted, and unintelligent, she might have been happier, for she was young and pretty enough to charm Charles at first; her determined adherence to Portuguese manners, dress, and language was as much to blame for Charles’s neglect, as his own inconstant nature.

The first two houses in Cheyne Walk are modern, but then begins the row of beautiful mansions which forms the Walk, as distinguished from the previous frontage of great buildings standing detached, in the gardens of the Manor House. These buildings were pulled down and the gardens surrendered to the builders in 1717, and housebuilding on the riverside began apace. In No. 4 George Eliot (Mrs. Cross) lived for a few weeks only, and died from the result of a chill in 1880, just as she had begun to find pleasure in her beautiful view. At No. 5 James Camden Nield lived a miser’s life, and left a fortune of half a million pounds to Queen Victoria, whose Uncle Leopold congratulates her in one of his letters “on having a little money of her own” in her early married life. At No. 6 Dr. Dominiceti had his famous medicinal baths, a wonder-working quackery of the eighteenth century of which in heated argument Dr. Johnson said to an opponent of differing views:

“Well, sir, go to Dominiceti and get fumigated, and be sure that the steam be directed to thy head, for that is the peccant part!”

Between No. 6 and Manor Street some modern houses have been interpolated. No. 11, I think, is the number which has been omitted from the sequence in numbering them, and a clever French novelist has taken advantage of this peculiarity to lay the scene of his story in the nonexistent house, which he can consequently describe with all the exuberance of his fancy. I have met French visitors walking round this end of Cheyne Walk in great perplexity trying to locate their author’s plot: the fact that larger buildings took the place of humbler ones, and that the numbers beyond could not be disturbed, account for the omission.

Some thirty years ago, when the old houses were demolished, a considerable portion of an underground passage was laid bare to the right of Manor Street. It was obviously a section of that subterranean passage which connected the Chelsea Palace with Kensington. I crept down it for the space of a yard or two, and rejoiced to think that the Princess Elizabeth might have done the same, in one of those romping games with her stepfather, the Lord High Admiral Seymour, which “Katheryn the Queene” found too hoydenish for the young lady’s age and dignity. Nos. 13 and 14, formerly one house, were the well-known inn “The Yorkshire Grey,” with its own stairs at the riverside, dear to country visitors from the north of England.

No. 15, now in the possession of Lord Courtney of Penwith, was in the seventies the home of the artist family of William Lawson. Cecil Lawson’s pictures of Chelsea before the Embankment was built, were exhibited in a one-man show at Burlington House a few years back, and gave an exquisite idea of the waterside in its rural days, Queen’s House, No. 16, was once called Tudor House, and its basement is said to contain remains of the original Tudor workmanship of Henry VIII.’s Palace. Whether this is so or not, it is unquestionably on the site of some of the old Manor House buildings; the name was changed by the Rev. H. R. Haweis, who favoured the idea that many Queens—Katharine Parr, Elizabeth, Anne of Cleves, Catharine of Braganza—must have occupied the position, though not the actual mansion.

Mr. Haweis’ tenancy followed on that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who lived here from 1863 to 1882. William Rossetti, George Meredith, Algernon Swinburne, and others of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood joined at first in the mÉnage; then came Dante Rossetti’s short and sad married life, and later he lived secluded, spending much of his time in his garden at the back, where he tried to acclimatise strange animals, of whose wild ways exaggerated reports were spread abroad, perhaps to ensure the poet’s privacy.

Of Rossetti’s later life, I who write can speak as an eye-witness, for in 1878 we went to live next door, at No. 17, and found him a quiet, very retiring, but most polite and obliging neighbour. As our gardens at the back adjoined we often saw him pacing under his trees dressed in an old brown dressing-gown like a friar’s habit. He went nowhere and received little company. Once we had lost a pet tortoise, which came up from under the dividing wall on Mr. Rossetti’s side of the boundary: the poet lifted it gently back and dropped it over without a word, then scurried away indoors, lest we might be moved to overwhelm him with thanks. He died while at Margate for his health, and I remember we had hardly heard the news, when we saw people (certainly unauthorised) removing all sorts of parcels and pieces of furniture from the house to a cab, which was loaded outside and in, and driven rapidly away.

When his effects came to be examined much of value had disappeared, but who were the culprits was never known.

Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Haweis’ tenancy of Queen’s House was very different. They entertained half London at their big crushes, which always had a character and a “go” which made them eagerly sought after and vastly amusing. Nearly always the party was built round some lion of the literary or scientific world. Ernest Renan and Oliver Wendell Holmes happen to be two guests whom I particularly recall. Renan was big, overblown, with the rolling gait and merry, round face of Southern France: Oliver Wendell Holmes was tiny, silver-haired, fragile as a bright-eyed little field mouse. Mr. Haweis, who did not know what shyness meant, exploited his visitors with the utmost vivacity and good nature; he had the social instinct in a high degree, and enjoyed his own parties so heartily that few of his guests could fail to do the same.

Nos. 17 and 18 were in 1718 the celebrated Don Saltero Museum and Coffee-house, removed from Danvers Street to this more eligible situation; the old site is now occupied by the baker’s shop, 77, Cheyne Walk. “James Salter, the coffee man,” was at one time valet to Sir Hans Sloane, and may have formed the idea of his museum from pickings, let us hope discarded, by this eminent collector. He was an Irishman who could mix punch, and draw teeth, play a little on the fiddle, and keep his patrons amused, though his wonderful curios read like simple rubbish to-day, and strongly remind us of the bogus collections which used to be a sideshow at bazaars in the country. Still, “Forget me not at Salter’s, in thy next bowl!” said the wits, and a galaxy of wonderful men must have met at “the Don’s” of an afternoon as Richard Steele describes it in the Tatler. The famous collection was sold in 1799, and the coffee-house became a public-house; in 1867 it was divided into two private residences.

The houses Nos. 19 to 26 were built about sixty years later than those we have been considering, when the last part of the Manor frontage was taken down; the difference in style is easy to trace—there is a uniformity of style, which has evidently been aimed at, and the magnificent ironwork of the earlier date is wanting.

At No. 24 there are vaults which undoubtedly date from Tudor times, and tradition says that the gnarled old wisteria embracing No. 20 is a creeper of the Manor House garden. All these houses have fine panelling, staircases and fireplaces, and handrails—some of earlier fashion than the buildings themselves, which points at their adaptation from previous mansions.

Modern houses intervene in the curve where stood Winchester House, the Bishop’s Palace: at No. 27 Mr. and Mrs. Bram Stoker lived, in the palmy days of the Lyceum Theatre under Sir Henry Irving’s management, and dispensed delightful Irish hospitality.

Across Oakley Street, we come to a lately restored house which bears the old sign of the Magpie and Stump. The “Magpie Inn,” one of the oldest houses in Chelsea, was a rendezvous for the supporters of the Stuart cause in 1715 and 1745; they could slip away by water if in danger of discovery. Next come, alas! some lamentable gaps, interspersed with a few odd walls and gables still remaining, parts of old Shrewsbury House, where Mary Queen of Scots was held in custody by the Earl of Shrewsbury. The form of the house cannot be traced, though an old print gives it as a hollow square standing back from the present roadway; it was broken up in 1813, but without doubt parts of it have been built into the present small houses.

By the by, the Earl of Shrewsbury who had charge of Queen Mary was also fourth husband of the notorious Bess of Hardwick, and Queen Elizabeth is reported to have pitied him for having such intimate acquaintance with “two she devils.”

No. 48 was once a Quakers’ Meeting House. The Hospital for Incurable Children, of which Queen Alexandra is President, nobly fills the site of some very old, tall houses, in one of which Holman Hunt painted his “Light of the World”; the old vine was preserved, and still bears small, sweet grapes in a hot season; the children’s voices sound merrily as you pass their open windows, and the saddest inmates are those who, having been sent here as incurable, are told that they are nearly healed and must shortly return to their homes.

Beyond Lombards’ Row, already noticed, where the old Archway House stood to shelter Jacobite plotters, are some new houses which are surely an anachronism in our Queen Anne Walk (the original dates hereabouts are 1710-11), but the Copper Door is a fine piece of work, and a splendid reflector of sunshine.

Across Danvers Street lies the waste land surrounding the lately erected Crosby Hall, of which I do not suffer myself to write, so keenly do I resent its importation into the hallowed precincts of Sir Thomas More’s whilom garden. Those who wish to inspect it can do so by inquiring for the custodian and the keys at More’s Gardens Mansions (entrance corner of Beaufort Street).

Crossing Beaufort Street, all the houses are gracious and of good report, and the entire proportions of Lindsey House can be made out from the pavement on the riverside, sub-divided as it now is into five or six different dwellings, and at one gabled end slightly extended.

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