ABSTRACT

The Royal Hospital at Chelsea was founded by Charles II with an original establishment of 422 veterans in 1682. Invalid soldiers could apply to take up residence there as in-pensioners, but far more would receive some state assistance as out-pensioners. No wives or children were allowed to live with Chelsea inpensioners. The plight of some of these veterans’ children had clearly roused the polite classes. There was great interest in moral reform and charitable outreach at this time, seen in the Society for the Reformation of Manners and in the charity school movement. Around the same time (1687), Elizabeth Cellier had attempted, unsuccessfully, to establish a foundling hospital, and the experiment to construct a residential school at Chelsea represents another faltering attempt to rescue and educate poor children. Similar enterprises with more lasting impact can be seen decades later. Both Thomas Coram’s London Foundling Hospital, established in 1739, and the Royal Military Asylum for soldiers’ orphans at Chelsea, begun in 1803, survived into the twentieth century. The call for funding below shows that charity towards soldiers’ families was often justified as a form of compensation for the wounds and hardship the men endured in armed service. It also reveals the middling attitude that veterans and their wives were unlikely to give their offspring—particularly daughters—a stable, moral upbringing.