Chapter One: A Town of Palaces CHAPTER ONE A TOWN OF PALACES In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the London metropolis sprawls from the tar-caked wharves of Wapping in the east to the walls of Hyde Park in the west: the greatest, richest, most rapidly expanding trading city in the world. St. Paul''s dominates the skyline in the City, as brick and stone rise from the ashes of the Great Fire. Mayfair is a neoclassical building site--the finest architectural period in England''s history is underway. Terraces of houses, church spires with glinting weather vanes are interspersed with swathes of parkland and open fields along the city''s artery, the salmon-rich silent highway, the Thames, which teems with sailing boats, pleasure boats, merchant ships, barges, small craft, and yachts. A visitor in the summer of 1717 might witness the royal party, the new Hanoverian King George I and his attendants, on their stately barge, followed by an orchestra of fifty on another, playing Handel''s Water Music . They board at Whitechapel, pass marshes and heathland, and disembark at Chelsea, two miles upstream. The banks shine with beauty on either side of the river; it compares only to the river "Tyber.
nothing in the world can imitate it."1 Daniel Defoe calls London a "Great and Monstrous Thing,"2 but Chelsea is a village outside the city, an airy "town of palaces"3 where the river breeze shakes the boughs of the fertile gardens, none so spacious as those of the Royal Hospital.4 Prosperous townspeople head for Chelsea on Sundays for fresh, clean air. Here there are market gardens supplying fruit and vegetables for the town, alongside the graceful houses of noble families.5 At the hospital, the grounds are designed in French formal style, front and back; two L-shaped canals lined with swan houses flow from the river up the sweeping gardens. At the bank of the Thames, there is a terrace, pavilions, and steps down to the water. On the south side lies open country--trees, fields, homesteads, and windmills, like a scene painted by a Dutch old master. The river can only be crossed by ferry here and sheep are driven through the streets from local farms.
The austere redbrick splendor of Wren''s home for old soldiers contains a gracious three-story, high-ceilinged apartment in a river-facing wing. In 1726, this forms the light-filled London home of the lieutenant governor, Colonel Thomas Chudleigh, his wife Harriet, and the two children who have survived infancy: dutiful, seven-year-old Thomas and the angelic-looking, adored five-year-old Elizabeth. The hospital estate is their playground: they run along stone-flagged corridors and through colonnades of Doric columns under the inscription "IN SUBSIDIUM ET LEVAMEN, EMERITORUM SENIO, BELLOQUE FRACTORUM"I towards the chapel and the dining hall, past the gilded statue of founder Charles II cast as a Roman emperor, near-blinding when the sun hits it, and the royal portraits, across lawns lined with limes and chestnut trees, orchards, and their family kitchen garden, all the way down to the river. The Chudleigh children grow up accustomed to a degree of stately grandeur and plenty. They have several playmates, the children of hospital staff--the secretary, the clerk of works, the physician6--and they live alongside the elderly majority, 400 old or wounded soldiers. Chelsea, like its inspiration, Louis XIV''s Hôtel des Invalides, is an architectural celebration of both military courage and a king''s benevolence. It is said that in England, the hospitals resemble palaces, and the palaces resemble prisons.7 Although the men sleep in small wooden berths and the stairs have shallow risers to aid their superannuated frames, prayers are said in the chapel beneath a glorious Resurrection by Sebastiano Ricci, and the Great Hall is fit for a medieval king.
Governor Charles Churchill and Lt. Governor Chudleigh dine on a high table on a dais and the pensioners eat beneath them at long tables. Flags of battlefield triumph and portraits of princes line the walls, most prominently, Antonio Verrio''s mural of Charles II, crowned by the winged figure of Victory. Within the institution live a chaplain, a porter, a baker, a brewer, an apothecary, a physician, a wardrobe keeper, linen-women, a sexton, cooks, butlers, gardeners, matrons, housekeepers, an organist, a barber, a treasurer, a canal keeper. The clerk of works oversees the building.8 Most senior of all the residents are the paymaster--in 1720, it was Robert Walpole, who became prime minister9 the following year--the governor, and the lieutenant governor. As the children are aware as they weave their way through the faltering steps of the pensioners, with pats and smiles, the hospital is also a garrison, the men subject to military discipline: chapel twice a day, a roll call, and gate-closing time at 10 P.M.
Some men--they are all men10--stand sentinel. A drumbeat calls them to the hall for lunch, between eleven and twelve. Food is served on pewter dishes; tablecloths reach to the floor, to double up as napkins; mugs of beer are poured from leather "jacks" or jugs, and the undercroft below the hall contains a brewery with six weeks'' supply.11 Pensioners wear variations of crimson cloth coats and tricorne hats, depending on rank and regiment. It is such a picturesque scene that tourists such as a young Benjamin FranklinII come to watch them from the gallery. It is an idyllic place to grow up. The Chudleigh children''s earliest years are spent among the gracious architecture of this strange palace of military heroes, a compressed version of the strict hierarchy of Georgian society itself, with their father, a man of high status, respected by all. Constant entertainment is provided by the river, which represents the chaotic world on the edge of the estate, a globe on the fringe of their consciousness.
By the hospital stairsIII on the river, numbered, lightweight boats, painted red or green, wait on the water ready to take passengers: "oars" have two boatmen; "scullers" one. When a person approaches, the boatmen, dressed in velvet caps and red or green doublets, run to meet them, calling out "lustily ''oars, oars!'' or ''Sculler, sculler!''?" When the passenger chooses a boat, the others "unite in abusive language at the offending boatman."12 The hospital is bookended by plutocrats'' villas, one the house of Lord Ranelagh, the late, corrupt hospital treasurer and army paymaster, to Swift, "the vainest old fool I ever saw."13 Now lived in by his widow, its garden is known as the most resplendent in England, a "paradise"14 to Defoe. One day Elizabeth will frequent the same spot when it becomes the Ranelagh pleasure gardens, a lamplit land of nocturnal delight. On the other side is the house of the Walpole family, with its octagonal riverside summerhouse topped with a golden pineapple, its Vanbrugh orangery, and its grotto. The Princess of Wales (the future queen, Caroline) and the court are frequent visitors, along with the ton ,15 the fashionable set, such as the peripatetic writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,16 of whom we will hear more. Proximity to power is part of the climate.
Politics is discussed constantly in Chelsea. Writer, Whig Richard Steele (Col. Chudleigh subscribed to his entire Spectator when it was published in 1721) and scientist philosopher Isaac Newton meet at Don Saltero''s, the whimsical coffeehouse on nearby Cheyne Walk, where the cabinet of curiosities includes attractions such as a nun''s whip, "the Pope''s infallible candle," and a bat with four ears.IV The Botanick Gardens nearby with their cedar trees, the first in England, now belong to Saltero''s regular physician and naturalist Hans Sloane, whose collection of rare artifacts will one day become the British Museum.17 A child in this environment learns the importance of the monarch, military might, and courage. Young Elizabeth Chudleigh, with her expressive blue eyes, fair wavy hair, and the peachy plump cheeks inherited from her father, is armed with natural beauty and bravado. She has an intrepid, unconquerable spirit worthy of the military herself. She wears a simple bodice-and-skirt dress of pale calico, cap and apron, having graduated out of the padded infant "pudding" hat that protected her while she learned to walk.
Her constant companion, her brother Thomas, now in breeches, wants to be a soldier like his father and the old war chroniclers who surround him with their stories. The Chelsea veterans of the Duke of Marlborough''s decisive battles against the French in Flanders and Germany18 dote on the children and their playmates, Horace Walpole, the prime minister''s son,19 diarist to be, a delicate child of eight, and Horace Mann, future dip.