Henry VIII acquired the manor of Chelsea after More's death in 1535, sold the manor house, and built a palace here for his third wife, Jane Seymour, encompassing the area that is now 19 to 26 Cheyne Walk with the gardens extending to the north east. However Jane who died following Edward's birth in 1537 had little time to enjoy this place.
Henry VIII th married Katherine Parr (1512-48) in 1543 as his sixth wife and her third husband and on that event gave her Chelsea Manor with the palace there which he had had built for Jane Seymour. However she had been courted by Thomas Seymour (c1508-49), Jane's younger brother, and he visited her in Chelsea some four months after Henry's death and wrote afterwards asking for her picture. In her response she said she would write once a fortnight but did not wait that long before she wrote: 'My Lord, I send you my most humble and hearty commendations, being desirous to know how you have done since I saw you. I pray be not offended with me in that I send sooner to you than I said I would, for my promise was but once a fortnight. Howbeit the time is well abbreviated, by what means I know not, except the weeks be shorter in Chelsea than in other places...' They were married secretly in two months rather than the two years that should have been allowed to elapse. Their acceptance at court was allowed by the young Edward whose Protector was Thomas's elder brother. The relationship did not last well. She was an intelligent, well-read, religious lady. Bishop Latimer characterised him as 'a man furthest from the fear of God that I knew or heard of in England'. She died a few days after the birth of her first child. Some of the last of the dialogue between them was reported as her saying 'Those who are about me do not care for me, but stand laughing at my grief.' And he responding as he lay by her 'Why, sweetheart, I would you no hurt.' and she then to have whispered to him 'You have given me many shrewd taunts.' He was rumoured to have poisoned her.
Katherine is supposed to have had a motherly air about her and this was appreciated by Princess Mary as it was by the other of Henry's children. So that young queen may be presumed to have spent some pleasant hours here.
The young Elizabeth however was here after the king's death and when Thomas was in residence. He considered her, at fifteen years old, well ready for more than games of tag. Mrs Ashley, her governess, recorded that when he visited her bedchamber in the morning in his nightshirt 'he would put open the curtains and bid her good morrow, and make as though he would come at her; and she would go farther in the bed, so that he could not come at her. And one morning he strave to have kissed her in bed...' Katherine had her despatched to Cheshunt. After Thomas's execution, Elizabeth claimed 'he had much wit, if very little judgement'.
Before Katherine died, a nine years old Lady Jane Grey came to live here. Thomas was a kind and indulgent father figure to her but this didn't stop him scheming to marry her to Edward and for treason was executed in 1549. With the granting of the manor by Edward to Lord John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, the wretched, studious Lady Jane seems to have passed into Dudley's hands. He married her to his son to become, on Edwards death in 1553, the 9 days queen. She, her father-in-law and husband were executed when Mary's claim was preferred.
Following Dudley's execution all his lands and goods were seized but Mary allowed his widow to be reinstated here where she died, at 46, to be buried in the Old Church with a memorial in the More's Chapel. Following that, the palace had no occupant for a time and then, briefly, was occupied by Henry VIII's fourth wife and queen, Anne of Cleves (1515-57) who also died here but was buried with much splendour in Westminster.

O/S Co-ords:2742.7770
Source(s):

Chambers Biographical Dictionary

Chelsea

What Henry built here was, perhaps, more a fine manor house than a palace. It is reckoned to have covered, roughly, 19 to 26 Cheyne Walk and the grounds to have included 1 to 18 and the gardens of all twenty six.. According to Wriothesley's Chronicle Henry was married to Jane Seymour in Chelsea and the building of the palace which was happening about then can therefore be said to have been for her. However she died following the birth of their son Edward in 1537 and the building was then designated a nursery for Edward and Elizabeth. Thea Holme in her book 'Chelsea' writes:

'No valid picture of this nursery palace has been preserved, but it is thought to have been designed in two quadrangles, the front walls as near to the road as those of existing houses. The road was then only a narrow track running alongside the river, and a flight of steps led down to a landing stage for the royal barges. Reginald Blunt suggests that the Manor probably looked rather like St James's Palace, which was built at about the same time, with solid buttresses and castellated walls. It was made of brick, those narrow, tomato-pink Tudor bricks, which may still be found in the garden walls of some of the Cheyne Walk houses. There were casement windows, one of which remained till 1912 on the garden side of number 25's basement, with its original leaded lights, wrought-iron hinges and cockspur handle.
When King Henry built the Manor he had a conduit made from a spring in Kensington, and a pipe laid to bring water through fields to another conduit somewhere near where Carlyle Square now stands. This supplied the palace, flowing into a vast leaden cistern from which it was drawn. The King saw to it that his gardens, like More's, were designed for beauty and usefulness. For a start, twenty-nine gardeners and six women weeders were set to work. In 1538 there were 'delivered to the King's gardener for his garden in Chelsea all such bays, rosemary, grafts etc. as were fit for his Grace's garden'; and at about the same time an order was delivered of twenty cherry trees, five nut trees, five damson trees and two red peach trees - and from the same firm, two hundred plants of damask roses, eleven setts of whitehorn and sixty-four setts of privet, for hedges. Later we hear of mulberry trees and a fishpond. It was a good garden for children to play in, and for lovers to meet in secretly.'

In the second quarter of the 17th century, in the ownership of the Marquis of Hamilton, a large wing was built onto the west of the palace and the Tudor style of the frontage modernised to match it. After passing through the hands of Cromwell's parliamentarians, the house was sold to Charles Cheyne in 1657 and they sold off Hamilton's new wing to become Winchester House, as the residence of the Bishops of Winchester. Charles Cheyne's heir William had Cheyne Row built in 1708 but then, in 1712, sold the Chelsea Manor estate to Sir Hans Sloane whose family were the last to live here. Following his death number 19 to 26 Cheyne walk were built in its place.

O/S Co-ords:2742.7770
Source(s):

Chelsea

The American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) gave this description to the drinking fountain placed as a memorial to the artist and poet Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (1828-82) in the gardens here. These are in front of Tudor House, otherwise Queen's House and now 16 Cheyne Walk, the home he had for the twenty years up to his death. The original bronze portrait of the poet/artist was designed by Ford Madox Brown, once but briefly Rossetti's tutor, and unveiled in 1887 by Holman Hunt a member of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The present casting was made and installed in 1971 at the expense of members of the Chelsea Society and with donations from others including Sir Charles Wheeler (a past president of the Royal Academy) and the Rossetti Trattoria of Highgate.

O/S Co-ords:2744.7768
Source(s):

Chambers Biographical Dictionary

Chelsea