Heraldic shields

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Nonconformists

The unobtrusive entrance to the Moravian burial ground can be found in a quiet corner of Chelsea, on Milman’s Street, more or less on the corner with King’s Road. The Moravians had had their meeting room in the City at Fetter Lane since 1742 and continued to use it till an air raid in World War II destroyed the building. In 1750, the brotherhood bought a large plot of land in Chelsea in order to realise their ideal of a dedicated community which was to have the name “Sharon”, but unfortunately, the money ran out and most of the land had to be sold off again in 1774. What remained is the small site of the burial ground with a few buildings, known as Moravian Close.

Beaufort House, drawn by Kip in 1708 for Britannia Illustrata with Beaufort House in the centre of the picture, Lindsey House bottom left, Gorges House between the two and the stable blocks beyond the main house on the left

The money to buy the large piece of land in Chelsea came from Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the head of the Brethren of the Moravian Unity (see for more on him here), but as foreigners were not allowed to own land, it was purchased in trust for the Moravians by various wealthy supporters. The occupation of the original plot of land (stretching from the river to King’s Road) had started in 1524 when Sir Thomas More built a house there surrounded by large gardens and orchards. The Moravian burial ground is situated on what used to be the stable blocks in the northwest corner of the estate. After More was found guilty of treason and executed in July 1535, the estate was granted to Sir William Paulet, the first Marquess of Winchester who had been one of the judges in More’s trial. It was inherited by his son John, the second Marquess. It then passed to Gregory Fienness, Lord Dacre, and his wife Anne who left it to Lord Burleigh and hence to his son Sir Robert Cecil.

In 1599 the house was sold to Henry Clinton, second Earl of Lincoln, and then passed to his son-in-law Sir Arthur Gorges who sold it to Lionel Cranfield, the Earl of Middlesex. Cranfield fell out with Charles I and his property was confiscated and granted in 1627 to George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham. In the Civil War, the house was seized by Parliament, and although the second Duke of Buckingham regained it, he lost it again through debts. It came into the hands of George Digby whose widow sold it in 1682 to Henry Somerset, Marquess of Worcester, later 5th Duke of Beaufort. The house then became known as Beaufort House. The last owner was Sir Hans Sloane who had the building demolished. In the two centuries between the building of the original house for Sir Thomas More and its destruction by Sir Hans Sloane, the house had been modified and enlarged several times and other houses had been built in the grounds, such as Lindsey House and Gorges House.

The buildings that are now on the Moravian site have been transformed several times. In the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, the larger building in the centre of the row of buildings on the north side of the grounds was used by various other organisations; at one time it was a school. The smaller building on the east side was retained by the Moravians as a chapel for burial ceremonies. On the centre building a plaque can be found commemorating Christian Renatus von Zinzendorf, the son of the founder (more on him here). His burial registration refers to the burial ground in Milman’s Street as “Sharon”.

The burial ground itself is divided into four sections: two squares for single and married sisters and two squares for the single and married brethren. The gravestones lie flat on the ground and only have name and dates of birth and death. The Close is a conservation area and the buildings are Grade II listed. Across from the burial ground a pergola can be seen which was set up by sculptors Ernest and Mary Gillick (see here and here) who leased the site from the Moravians from 1914 to 1964. After they left, the Fetter Lane community who had been using various other chapels after their own was destroyed in 1941, decided to relocate to Moravian Close.

The Gillicks were also responsible for the heraldic shields above the stone bench along the south wall. They represent the former owners from Thomas More to Hans Sloane.

More

More, Paulet, Fiennes

Fiennes, Cecil, Clinton

Clinton, Gorges, Cranfield

Cranfield, Villiers, Digby

Somerset, Sloane

The site is open to visitors on Wednesday afternoons and – at least when I was there – is a very pleasant and quiet green space, away from the hustle and bustle of Chelsea.
—————-
The information on the history of Beaufort House came from the Survey of London, vol. 4, The Parish of Chelsea II (1913) and information on the burial ground from A Feasibility Study for Moravian Close, 281 Kings Road, Chelsea, London (2003).
Website of the Church: www.moravian.org.uk.

Beasley’s Yard

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Nonconformists

When I was looking for background material for the post on Jackson & Walford, booksellers of St. Paul’s Churchyard, for my other blog, I found the Autobiography of William Walford which led me to Beasley’s Yard in Uxbridge.

The Autobiography was edited by John Stoughton and published in 1851 by Jackson & Walford. It takes the form of letters written by Walford senior to his friend Stoughton with the intent of having the letters collectively form a memoir of the reverend’s life. As I already said in the blog post on the booksellers, father William was not very good at details such as names or dates, so it is a bit of a haphazard process to distill his life story from the book, but what I am most interested in for the purpose of this post, is his connection to Beasley’s Yard.

The reverend says in one of his letters that he moved from Hackney to Uxbridge “about the time of the publication of this work”. “This work” is his new translation of the Book of Psalms as – in his view at least – the so-called ‘Authorized Version’ was badly translated and could be improved upon. Walford’s edition of the psalms was published in 1837 by Jackson & Walford, so the move to Uxbridge probably took place in 1837 or 1838. Walford senior had already been acquainted with the Congregational community in Uxbridge for quite some time before his move as he “was in the habit of going almost every week to Uxbridge to officiate in a congregation, the minister of which, a relation of my wife, was advanced in years, and lived but a short time after my visits to assist him were first made”.

portrait of William Walford from his Autobiography

After the death of the old minister, Walford continued to travel to Uxbridge, until an illness prevented him from doing so. In the years that he suffered from ill-health, the congregation was first served by a friend of Walford and later by a former pupil, but when the latter left for Birmingham, Walford’s health had improved enough for him to take up his duties again. He moved to Uxbridge “as the congregation was not large, [he] thought the discharge of the duties which it involved would not be oppressive”. His house stood “on Uxbridge Common, moderately elevated, and commands, on the eastern front, the hills of Harrow, Highgate, Hampstead, with several others; and on the west, the vicinity of Windsor, sufficiently near to see the Royal Standard, which waves with the breeze, when the Court is at the Castle”. Uxbridge Town was less than half a mile away from his house and as London could be reached in two hours, the reverend was quite pleased with his new abode.

These days, Uxbridge can be reached in less than half the time it took Walford, so one day I went by Underground to have a look at what was left of the meeting house where he had officiated. The building is situated just off the High Street in Beasley’s Yard, named after Thomas Ebenezer Beasley, the minister of the church from 1790 to 1824.⁽¹⁾ Walford does not mention the name of the minister whose duties he took over, but it could well have been Beasley. The Old Meeting Congregational Church is said to have been founded in the 1660s, but meetings were held in the homes of members until 1716 when their first meeting house was erected.

The 1716 building from The History of the Ancient Town and Borough of Uxbridge by G. Redford and T.H. Riches (1818)

Portrait of Thomas Ebenezer Beasley (Source: British Museum)

To the right of the tower, next to the windows on the present-day building, a few tiles forming the year 1883 can be seen and a plaque on the tower itself gives both the original year of 1716 and the year of the extension and rebuilding of 1883. The west wall was rebuilt, the three remaining 18th-century walls were raised to support a new roof, and a small square tower and vestry were added for a total sum of nearly £1,300.⁽²⁾ The windows are fitted with stained glass in a simple style, befitting the Congregational tenets.

The congregation was never very large and in 1962 it merged with the Providence Congregational Church to form the Uxbridge United Church and in 1972, the Congregational and Methodist churches amalgamated into Christ Church and the building in Beasley’s Yard was no longer needed as a church, but is now used for community purposes and has been renamed Watts Hall, in honour of Isaac Watts, the hymn writer.
When I visited the yard, there was no one around to ask if there was any possibility of looking inside, so the pictures from the outside will have to do, but you can see some inside pictures here.

William Walford’s Autobiography can be read online here.
A 1960 photograph of the yard can be found here.

(1) http://www.eddiethecomputer.co.uk/history/galli.htm.
(2) A History of the County of Middlesex, volume 4 (1971).

Bunhill Fields: John Bunyan and his Publisher

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Baptists, book trade, Bunhill Fields, Daniel Defoe, Francis Smith, John Bunyan, Nonconformists, William Blake

As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world,
I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn:
& I laid me down in that place to sleep:
And as I slept I dreamed a Dream⁽¹⁾

Bunhill Fields’ green space is the last resting place for some 120,000 bodies. The area was used in the mid-sixteenth century to deposit bones from the overflowing charnel house of St. Paul’s; the bones were just dumped and covered with a layer of soil. So many were brought here that the elevation was enough to give windmills a good position above the otherwise flat fen landscape. In 1665, the year the plague raged through London, the City authorities decided to use the ground as a common burial ground for the victims of the disease, but it was most likely never used for that purpose. From the seventeenth century onwards it became the burial ground for dissenters and some well-known names can still be seen on some of the stones or tombs, such as William Blake (1757–1827), John Bunyan (1628-1688), Susannah Wesley, mother of John and Charles of Methodist fame (1669-1742), Isaac Watts (1674-1748) and Daniel Defoe (1661-1731). So many nonconformists choose this as their place of burial, that Robert Southey named Bunhill Fields “the Campo Santo of the Dissenters”.⁽²⁾

Bunhill Fields – Defoe

Bunhill Fields – Blake

Bunhill Fields – Bunyan

The last burial took place in 1854, but it took more than ten years before the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground Act was passed (1867) which gave the City of London the right to maintain the site as an open space. Following damage done in WWII, the park was shaped in the 1960s with a lawn on the northern side and the memorials in regimental rows on the southern side, many of them just plain headstones with the texts no longer legible.

Bunhill Fields Committee Report 1867

In 1867, as part of the effort to have the ground declared a designated open space, the Bunhill Fields Committee published a report to which was annexed a list of the still legible headstones, reprinted from a volume published in 1717 (see here for the e-book).

Most of the inscriptions run along familiar lines, ‘so and so was buried here on the [day] of [month] in the [year] in his/her [age] year’, but some go well beyond that. One of them runs into a whole biography:

Here lyeth the Body of FRANCIS SMITH,
Bookseller, who in his youth was settled in a separate
Congregation, where he sustained, between the Years
of 1659 & 1688, great Persecution by imprisonments,
Exile, and large Fines laid on Ministers and Meeting-
Houses, and for printing and promoting Petitions
for calling of a Parliament, with several things
against Popery, and after near 40 Imprisonments, he
was fined 500l. for printing and selling the Speech
of a Noble Peer, and Three times Corporal Punish-
ment. For the said Fine, he was 5 Years Prisoner in
the King’s-Bench: His hard Duress there, utterly
impaired his health. He dyed House-keeper in the
Custom-House, December the 22d, 1691.

This sound really grim, but then Francis Smith was a rather controversial figure. He became known as ‘Elephant’ Smith, because his bookshop had the shop sign “Elephant and Castle”, from 1659 to be found “without Temple-Bar”, from 1673 in Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange and from 1688 in Pope’s Head Alley”. He was a committed Baptist who also acted as a Baptist Minister and published all sorts of dissenting and radical publications which led him into trouble on numerous occasions, if not into prison. He was one of John Bunyan’s principal publishers in the 1660s and 1670s, for instance for Sighs from Hell of which he brought out several editions.

J. Bunyan, Sighs from Hell

Smith was often accused and taken into custody for publishing seditious material, either of a religious or a political nature, but he was also frequently acquitted by a sympathetic Whig jury. Nevertheless, as the epitaph states, he had to spend several shorter or longer periods in jail. In 1681, he was linked to the printing of Stephen College’s ballad A Ra-Ree Show which was one of the pieces of evidence against the author in a trial for ‘treasonable talk and actions’. College was found guilty and executed. Smith fled the country and his business was continued by his wife Eleanor and their children. In March 1684 he returned to England and was immediately arrested and fined £500. He was unable to raise the money and thrown into jail once more until January 1688, when he was pardoned by the King. After the Glorious Revolution, he petitioned King William and was given the job of watchman in the port of London which he kept until his death in 1691.⁽³⁾

(1) J. Bunyan, A Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678. First lines.
(2) Robert Southey, Common-place Book, vol. 3 (1850), p. 161, no. 405.
(3) Beth Lynch, ‘Smith, Francis (d. 1691)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39672, accessed 10 Nov 2012]

More information on location, opening times, etc. for Bunhill Fields can be found here.