1. Can he have been the father of the
"Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye wauking yet,
Or are ye sleeping, I would wit?
O haste ye, get up, for the drums do beat;
O fye, Cope! rise up in the morning!"
--of the Sir John Cope who was forced to retreat from Preston Pans in
"the '45," and against whom all the shafts of Jacobite ribaldry have been
levelled?
Faulkner says that this house, which was "subsequently occupied by the
late Mr. Duffield as a private madhouse, has been pulled down, and its
site is now called Odell's Place, a little eastward of Lord
Shaftesbury's;" that is to say, opposite to Manor Hall, and Sir John
Cope's house was not improbably the residence of two distinguished naval
officers, Sir James Wishart and Sir John Balchen. The former was made an
admiral, and knighted by Queen Anne in 1703, and appointed one of the
lords of the Admiralty, but was dismissed from the naval service by
George I. for favouring the interests of the Pretender, and died at
Little Chelsea on the 30th of May, 1723. In the 'Daily Courant,' Monday,
July 15, 1723, the following advertisement appears:--
"To be sold by auction, the household goods, plate, china ware,
linen, &c., of Sir James Wishart, deceased, on Thursday the 18th
instant, at his late dwelling-house at Little Chelsea. The goods to
be seen this day, to-morrow, and Wednesday, before the sale, from 9
to 12 in the morning, and from 3 to 7 in the evening. Catalogues to
be had at the sale.
"N.B. A coach and chariot to be sold, and the house to be let."
Admiral Sir John Balchen resided at Little Chelsea soon after Sir James
Wishart's death. In 1744, Admiral Balchen perished in the Victory, of
120 guns, which had the reputation of being the most beautiful ship in
the world, but foundered, with eleven hundred souls on board, in the Bay
of Biscay.
On the 31st of March, 1723, Edward Hyde, the third Earl of Clarendon,
died "at his house, Little Chelsea;" but where the earl's house stood I
am unable to state.
Mrs. Robinson, the fascinating "Perdita," tells us, in her autobiography,
that, at the age of ten (1768), she was "placed for education in a school
at Chelsea." And she then commences a most distressing narrative, in
which the last tragic scene she was witness to occurred at Little
Chelsea.
"The mistress of this seminary," Mrs. Robinson describes as "perhaps
one of the most extraordinary women that ever graced,
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