HARPER'S

NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

No. III-AUGUST, 1850.-VOL. I.

ness as well as intellectual power. We first read over the memories of him preserved by

PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOME OF SIR Erasmus, Hoddesdon, Roper, Aubrey, his own

namesake, and others. It is pleasant to muse over the past; pleasant to know that much of malice and bigotry has departed, to return ne HILE living more, that the prevalence of a spirit which could in the neigh-render even Sir Thomas More unjust and, to borhood of seeming, cruel, is passing away. Though we Chelsea, we do implicitly believe there would be no lack of determined great hearts, and brave hearts, at the present to look up- day, if it were necessary to bring them to the on the few test, still there have been few men like unto broken walls him. It is a pleasant and a profitable task, so that once in- to sift through past ages, so to separate the closed the wheat from the chaff, to see, when the feelings residence of of party and prejudice sink to their proper inSir Thomas significance, how the morally great stands forth More, a man in its own dignity, bright, glorious, and everwho, despite the bitterness inseparable from a lasting. St. Evremond sets forth the firmness persecuting age, was of most wonderful good- and constancy of Petronius Arbiter in his last VOL. I No. 3.-T

moments, and imagines he discovers in them a softer nobility of mind and resolution, than in the deaths of Seneca, Cato, or Socrates himself; but Addison says, and we can not but think truly, that if he was so well pleased with gayety of humor in a dying man, he might have found a much more noble instance of it in Sir Thomas More, who died upon a point of religion, and is respected as a martyr by that side for which he suffered." What was pious philosophy in this extraordinary man, might seem frenzy in any one who does not resemble him as well in the cheerfulness of his temper as in the sanctity of his life and manners.

Oh, that some such man as he were to sit upon our woolsack now; what would the world think, if when the mighty oracle commanded the next cause to come on, the reply should be, "Please your good lordship, there is no other!" Well might the smart epigrammatist write:

When MORE some time had chancellor been,
NO MORE suits did remain;

Then we heard a trumpet ringing its scarlet music through the air, and we stood in the old tilt-yard at Whitehall, and the pompous Wolsey, the bloated king, the still living Holbein, the picturesque Surrey, the Aragonian Catharine. the gentle Jane, the butterfly Anne Bullen, the coarse-seeming but wise-thinking Ann of Cleves, the precise Catherine Howard, and the stouthearted Catherine Parr, passed us so closely by, that we could have touched their garments; then a bowing troop of court gallants came on: others whose names and actions you may read of in history; and then the hero of our thoughts, Sir Thomas More-well dressed, for it was a time of pageants-was talking somewhat apart to his pale-faced friend Erasmus, while "Son Roper," as the chancellor loved to call his sonin-law, stood watchfully and respectfully a little on one side. Even if we had never seen the pictures Holbein painted of his first patron, we should have known him by the bright benevo lence of his aspect, the singular purity of his complexion, his penetrating yet gentle eyes, and the incomparable grandeur with which We mused over the history of his time until we virtue and independence dignified even an inslept, and dreamed and first in our dream we different figure. His smile was so catching that saw a fair meadow, and it was sprinkled over the most broken-hearted were won by it to forwith white daisies, and a bull was feeding get their sorrows; and his voice, low and sweet therein; and as we looked upon him he grew though it was, was so distinct, that we heard fatter and fatter, and roared in the wantonness it above all the coarse jests, loud music, and of power and strength, so that the earth trem- trumpet calls of the vain and idle crowd. bled; and he plucked the branches off the trees, while we listened, we awoke; resolved next and trampled on the ancient inclosures of the day to make our pilgrimage, perfectly satisfied meadow, and as he stormed, and bellowed, and at the outset, that though no fewer than four destroyed, the daisies became human heads, and houses in Chelsea contend for the honor of his the creature flung them about, and warmed his residence, Doctor King's arguments in favor of hoofs in the hot blood that flowed from them; the site being the same as that of Beaufort and we grew sick and sorry at heart, and House-upon the greater part of which now thought, is there no one to slay the destroyer? stands Beaufort-row-are the most conclusive, And when we looked again, the Eighth Harry those who are curious in the matter can go and was alone in the meadow; and, while many see his manuscripts in the British Museum. heads were lying upon the grass, some kept Passing Beaufort-row, we proceeded straight perpetually bowing before him, while others on to the turn leading to the Chelsea Clocksung his praises as wise, just, and merciful. house.

The same shall never MORE be seen,

Till MORE be there again!

And

A line of ancient trees runs along the back of the narrow gardens of Milman's-row, which is parallel with, but further from town than Beaufort-row, and affords a grateful shade in the summer time. We resolved to walk quietly round, and then enter the chapel. How strange the changes of the world! The graves of a simple, peace-loving, unambitious people were lying around us, and yet it was the place which Erasmus describes as "Sir Thomas More's estate, purchased at Chelsey," and where "he built him a house, neither mean nor subject to envy, yet magnificent and commodious enough." How dearly he loved this place, and how much care he bestowed upon it, can be gathered from the various documents still extant.* The bravery with whien, soon after he was elected a burgess to parliament, he opposed a subsidy demanded by Henry the Seventh, with so much power that he won the parliament to his opin

It is an old, patched-up, rickety dwelling, and the graves not raised above the level of the containing, perhaps, but few of the original sward. They are of two sizes only: the larger tones, yet interesting as being the lodge- for grown persons, the smaller for children. entrance to the offices of Beaufort-House; re- The inscriptions on the grave-stones, in general, markable, also, as the dwelling of a family of seldom record more than the names and ages the name of Howard, who have occupied it for of the persons interred. The men are buried in more than a hundred years, the first possessor one division, the women in another. We read being gardener to Sir Hans Sloane, into whose one or two of the names, and they were quaint possession, after a lapse of years, and many and strange: Anne Rypheria Hurloch;" changes, a portion of Sir Thomas More's prop- "Anna Benigna La Trobe;" and one was erty had passed. This Howard had skill in the especially interesting, James Gillray, forty years distilling of herbs and perfumes, which his de- sexton to this simple cemetery, and father of scendant carries on to this day. We lifted the Gillray, the H. B. of the past century. One heavy brass knocker, and were admitted into thing pleased us mightily, the extreme old age the old clock-house." The interior shows to which the dwellers in this house seemed to evident marks of extreme age, the flooring being have attained. ridgy and seamed, bearing their marks with a discontented creaking, like the secret murmurs of a faded beauty against her wrinkles! On the counter stood a few frost-bitten geraniums, and drawers, containing various roots and seeds, were ranged round the walls, while above them were placed good stout quart and pint bottles of distilled waters. The man would have it that the "clock-house" was the "real original" lodge-entrance to "Beaufort House;" and so we agreed it might have been, but not, "perhaps," built during Sir Thomas More's lifetime. To this insinuation he turned a deaf ear, assuring us that his family, having lived there so long, must know all about it, and that the brother of Sir Hans Sloane's gardener had made ne great clock in old Chelsea Church, as the church books could prove. "You can, if you please," he said, "go under the archway at the side of this house, leading into the Moravian chapel and burying-ground, where the notice, that within are the Park-chapel Schools,' is put up." And that is quite true; the Moravians now only use the chapel which was erected in their burying-ground to perform an occasional funeral service in, and so they "let it" to the infant school. The burying-ground is very pretty in the summer time. Its space occupies only a small portion of the chancellor's garden; part of its walls are very old, and the south one certainly belonged to Beaufort House There have been some who trace out a Tudo arch and one or two Gothic windows as having been filled up with more modern mason-work: but that may be fancy. There seems no doubt that the Moravian chapel stands on the site of the old stables.

"Then," we said, "the clock-house could only have been at the entrance to the offices." The man looked for a moment a little hurt at this observation, as derogatory to the dignity of his dwelling, but he smiled, and said, "Perhaps so;" and very good-naturedly showed us the cemetery of this interesting people. Indeed, their original settlement in Chelsea is quite a romance. The chapel stands to the left of the burying-ground, which is entered by a primitive wicket-gate; it forms a square of thick grass, erossed by broad gravel walks, kept with the greatest neatness. The tombstones are all tat,

After the death of More, this favorite home of his,

where he had so frequently gathered "a choice company
of men distinguished by their genius and learning"
passed into the rapacious hands of his bad sovereign,
and by him was presented to Sir William Pawlet, ulti-
mately Lord High Treasurer and Marquis of Winchester ;
from his hands it passed into Lord Dacre's, to whom
succeeded Lord Burghley; then followed his son, the
Earl of Salisbury, as its master; from him it passed suc-
cessively to the Earl of Lincoln, Sir Arthur Gorges, the
Earl of Middlesex, Villiers duke of Buckingham, Sir
Bulstrode Whitelock, the second Duke of Buckingham,
the Earl of Bristol, the Duke of Beaufort, and ultimately
to Sir Hans Sloane, who obtained it in 1738, and after
keeping it for two years razed it to the ground; an
unhappy want of reverence on the part of the great
naturalist for the home of so many great men. There is

a print of it by J. Knyff, in 1699, which is copied (p. 292);
it shows some old features, but it had then been enlarged
and altered. Erasmus has well described it as it was in
More's lifetime. It had "a chapel, a library, and a gal
lery, called the New Buildings, a good distance from his
main house, wherein his custom was to busy himself in
prayer and meditation, whensoever he was at leisure."
Heywood, in his Il Moro (Florence, 1556), describes “the
garden as wonderfully charming, both from the advant
ages of its site, for from one part almost the whole of
the noble city of London was visible, and from the other
the beautiful Thames, with green meadows by woody
eminences all around, and also for its own beauty, for it
was crowned with an almost perpetual verduro."
one side was a small green eminence to command the
prospect.

At

ion, and incensed the king so greatly, that, out the simplicity which so frequently and so beauof revenge, he committed the young barrister's tifully blends with the intellectuality that seems father to the Tower, and fined him in the fine to belong to a higher world than this. When of a hundred pounds! That bravery remained he "took to marrying," he fancied the second with him to the last, and with it was mingled daughter of a Mr. Colt, a gentleman of Essex;

he resigned the great seal of England (of which his wife knew nothing), Sir Thomas presented himself at the pew-door, and, after the fashion of his servitor, quaintly said, "Madam, my lord is gone." The vain woman could not comprehend his meaning, which, when, during their short walk home, he fully explained, she was greatly pained thereby, lamenting it with ex--the pale and earnest countenance of "son Roceeding bitterness of spirit.