Henry VIII’s Chancellor moved to the village (originally a Saxon settlement stretching around the Old Church) in 1520 and built himself a house in Beaufort Street, where he kept ‘many varieties of birds, an ape, a fox, a weasel, and a ferret’, according to his guest Erasmus of Rotterdam. It was from there that he was taken to the Tower to be beheaded for being ‘the King’s good servant, but God’s first’. The house has long been lost, but part of its former grounds are, fittingly, home to the Allen Hall Catholic Seminary: the grim concrete chapel has a Marmite appeal, but the gardens preserve some ancient mulberries thought to have been planted by the Lord Chancellor himself.
Part of More’s chapel at the Old Church also survives, although the building was all but destroyed by a parachute mine in April 1941, and another of his former homes still soars above Chelsea. This is Crosby Hall, where he lived between 1519 and 1523— except that, at the time, it stood in Bishopsgate. In 1910, the house was moved piece by piece to Cheyne Walk, where it remains, a slice of medieval London in SW3.
This story is from the May 05, 2021 edition of Country Life UK.
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This story is from the May 05, 2021 edition of Country Life UK.
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