A house which once stood on the King's Road here, near Stanley Bridge, was known as Brickhills when it was part of the estate of Sir Thomas More that was subsequently owned by Sir Arthur and Lady Elizabeth Gorges. It was leased by Lady Elizabeth to their daughter, also Elizabeth, on her marriage to Sir Robert Stanley in 1627. That marriage had caused great grief to the groom's family including, supposedly, the premature death of his mother the Countess of Derby. Elizabeth with one child surviving from the three born to them was a widow after only five years. She was bequeathed what was then Stanley House and her family lived here until the last died in 1691. Thea Holme in her book 'Chelsea' suggests that the discomfort of the Stanleys might have been roused by Elizabeth having inherited some of her maternal grandfather's nasty characteristics. He, the Earl of Lincoln who bought Sir Thomas More's Great House in 1598, according to his son locked up his wife 'without suffering her either to write or hear from any of her friends, having appointed to guard her an Italian, a man that hath done divers murders in Italy and the Low Countries, for which he fled into England; from whom I protest she has just cause hourly to fear the cutting of her throat'. In the Old Church, Chelsea, is the rather grandiose monument to Sir Robert which it is believed the Stanleys were responsible for erecting. It doesn't bear any reference to his wife.

O/S Co-ords:2604.7728
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Chelsea