The Forlorn Hope: A Tale of Old Chelsea

Transcribed from the 1844 edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org. Many thanks to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Libraries, Local Studies, for allowing their copy to be used for this transcription.

THE FORLORN HOPE: A STORY OF OLD CHELSEA.

BY Mrs. S. C. HALL.

CHELSEA Hospital, or, as the old soldiers prefer to call it, “Chelsea College,” appears much the same at all seasons of the year; its simple, dignified, and, if the phrase may be permitted, healthful and useful, style of architecture, suggests the same ideas, under the hot sun of June and amid the snows of bleak December; bringing conviction that the venerable structure is a safe, suitable, comfortable, and happy, as well as honourable, retreat for the brave men who have so effectually “kept the foreigner from fooling us.” The simple story I have to tell, commences with a morning in April, 1838. It was a warm, soft morning, of the first spring month; the sun shone along the colonnade of “the Royal College.” Some of the veterans—who, fearing rheumatism more than they ever feared cold steel or leaden bullet, had kept close quarters all the winter, in their comfortable nooks up stairs—were now slowly pacing beside the stately pillars of their own palace, inhaling the refreshing breeze that crossed the water-garden from the Thames, and talking cheerfully of the coming summer. Truly the “pensioners” seem, to the full, aware of their privileges, and of their claims—far less upon our sympathies than upon our gratitude and respect. The college is THEIRS; they look, walk, and talk, in perfect and indisputable consciousness that it is their house, and that those who cross its courts, loiter in its gardens, or view its halls, chapel, and dormitories, are but visitors—graciously admitted, and generously instructed by them. And who will dare to question their right?

The veterans are, as they may well be, proud of their country and their hospital; they are too natural to disguise the feeling that they love a good listener; to such they will tell how Madam Gwyn asked the king—the second Charles—to endow a last earthly home for his brave soldiers; and how rejoiced she was to have it built at Chelsea, because she was born there, for that all human souls love the places where they were born! They point to the tattered flags in the noble hall and sacred chapel, as if the trophies were actually won by their own hands; they will digress from them to Sir Christopher Wren, not seeming to know very clearly whether the great architect or Charles the Second planned the structure—they are apt to confound Henry the Eighth with the second James, who presented to their church such splendid communion plate; but make no mistake at all about Queen Victoria, who came herself to see them—“God bless her Majesty!” I never met one who was not proud of his quarters; they praise the freshness and sweetness of the air, the liberality of the treatment, and point out, with gratitude, their little gardens which occupy the site of the famous Ranelagh of fashionable memory, where they can follow their own fancies, cultivating, in their plots of ground, the flowers, or herbs, or shrubs that please them best; THE SUMMER-HOUSE, which they say Lord John Russell built for them, occupies a prominent position there; it was worthy a descendant of the noble house of Bedford to care for brave soldiers in the evening of their days. If you have patience, and feel interested in the cheerful garrulities of age, they will hint that they fear the new embankment of “The Thames” will still more dry up the land-springs, and injure their fine old trees. Some can describe the ancient conduit which supplied Winchester Palace and Beaufort House with water, and point out (if you will extend your walk so far) the various sites of houses in the immediate vicinity, where dwelt the great men of old times,—chiefest among them all, the wise Sir Thomas More, Lord High Chancellor of England, who lived “hard by,” and had for his near neighbours the Earl of Essex, the Princess Elizabeth; and, farther down, at Old Brompton, Oliver Cromwell and Lord Burleigh. But those who would know more than the pensioners can tell them concerning Chelsea, and its neighbourhood—that suburb of London most rich in honourable and interesting associations with the past—may consult good Mr. Faulkner, the accurate and pains-taking Historian of the district, who lives in a small book-shop near at hand, flourishing, as he ought to, in the very centre of places he has so effectually aided to commemorate.

The story of “Mistress Nelly’s” prayer that an asylum might be provided for aged veterans, “whose work was done,” rests mainly on tradition; but there is nothing of improbability about it. Her influence over the voluptuous monarch,

“Who never said a foolish thing And never did a wise one,”

was, at one period, unbounded. It was in this instance, at least, exerted in the cause of mercy and virtue, as well as gratitude; the College remains a lasting contradiction to the memorable epigram I have quoted; inasmuch as a “wiser thing” than its foundation, to say nothing of its justice, is not recorded in the chronicles of the reign of any British sovereign. Many a victory has been won for these kingdoms by the knowledge that the maimed soldier will not be a deserted beggar—by the certainty that honourable “scars” will be healed by other ointment than that of mere pity! Chelsea and Greenwich are enduring monuments to prove that a Nation knows how to be grateful. The brave men who pace along these corridors may “talk o’er their wounds,” and while shouldering their crutches, to “show how fields were won,” point to the recompense as a stimulus to younger candidates for glory. Who can sufficiently estimate the value of this reward? Let us ask what it has done for our country; but let us ask it on the battle fields, where French eagles were taken: eagles, a score of which are now the trophies of our triumphs, in the very halls which the veterans, who won them, tread up and down.

The pensioners—though, as human beings, each may have a distinctive character—are, to a certain degree, alike; clean and orderly, erect in their carriage for a much longer period than civilians of equal ages, and disputing all the encroachments of time, inch by inch—fighting with as much determination for life as formerly they did for glory. When they die, they die of old age.

The month I have said was April—the April of 1838: old James Hardy and John Coyne were walking beneath the colonnade that faces the water-garden. They were both old, yet John considered James a mere boy. John’s face had been “broken up” by a gun-shot wound at Seringapatam, which anticipated time; and James “stumped” very vigorously along on a brace of wooden legs, his eyes bright and twinkling, his laugh ringing out, at the conclusion of each of his brief, pithy stories, which he told as earnestly as if John could hear them; John, however, had heard them all before he became deaf, and as James only re-drew upon his ancient store, John had no great loss. He looked up in his comrade’s face, caught the cheerful infection of his comrade’s laugh, by sight though not by sound, and laughed also—not as James laughed, but in a little quiet way, something like the rattle of a baby’s drum—and then James would wind it up by saying—“There! did you ever hear the like of that before!” and bestow a sounding slap on his friend’s shoulder. They were comrades in every sense of the word, for they inhabited the same dormitory, nest by nest; John cherishing a canary, whose song he had never heard, though he used to declare it sang like a nightingale, with a woodlark’s note—while James had ranged all manner of curious crockery on the shelf over his bed, filling up the intermediate spaces with caricatures of the French, the iron head of a halbert, the buckle of a French cuirass, a fragment of an ensign’s gorget, and a few other reliques of a “foughten field,”—

“The treasures of a soldier, bought with blood, And kept at life’s expense.”

As they strutted lovingly together, delighting, as children do, in sunshine, while James talked and laughed incessantly, a tall, thin, military-looking man, as hard and erect as a ramrod, marched up to them, with as measured a tread as if he were in the ranks; then, wheeling about, presented James with a leaf of laurel, one of many he held in his hand; there was a wild sparkle in his eyes, and a bright flush upon his cheek.

“What for, serjeant-major?” inquired James, taking the leaf, and giving a military salute.

“Toulouse!” answered the veteran, in a voice of triumph; yet the tone was full of music, and rendered ample justice to the musical word. “Toulouse! my old fellow,” he repeated.

“So it is!” answered James Hardy; “it is the anniversary, sure enough. And yet, master, if we are to mount a fresh laurel for every day we gained a victory, we shall have to get as many as there are days in the year.”

“Right, Hardy, right,” replied the sergeant-major. “Right; three hundred and sixty-five laurel-leaves per annum. Right, that was well said. Lucy walked out this morning and gathered me a basketful; she knew I’d want them for my old comrades, as soon as I could get down to the college. She’s worthy to be a soldier’s daughter.”

“Ah, ah! and a soldier’s wife,” responded James; “isn’t she, John?” And John, thinking James had been telling a story, laughed his little laugh as usual.

“Worthy to be anything, thank God,” said the sergeant-major; but the expression of his face changed; it lost its flush and its proud glance of triumph; anxiety for his only child obliterated even the memory of “Toulouse:”—the soldier was absorbed in the father,—and he continued, “No: I should not like her to be a soldier’s wife, Jem, I should not; she hasn’t strength for campaigning. It killed her poor mother; they said it was consumption; but it was no such thing. It was the wet and dry, heat and cold, ups and downs of campaigning; she would not leave me—not she: it is a wonderful thing, the abiding love that links a frail, delicate woman to the rough soldier and his life of hardships; and such a loving mother as she had, and such a home; she never heard anything louder than the ripple of the mountain rill, and the coo of the ringdove, until, a girl of seventeen, she plunged with me into the hot war. You remember her, Jem?” The sergeant-major’s seventeen years of widowhood had not dried up the sources of his grief; he drew his hand across his eyes, and then began, hastily and with a tremulous hand, to fit the laurel leaves, which he still held, one within the other.

“That I do—remember her—and well;” answered James Hardy.

“What is it?” inquired old John. James made him understand they were speaking of poor Mrs. Joyce.

“Ah!” said John, “she was an angel,—Miss Lucy is very like her mother—very like her—even to the way she has in church of laying her hand on her heart—so,—as if it beat too fast.”

“She does not do that, does she, James?” inquired the sergeant-major, eagerly; “I never saw her do that.”