A portrait of the famous London institution, The Royal Hospital Chelsea.

Excerpt from The Royal Hospital at Chelsea In addition the King appealed to the public for voluntary aid, but the appeals were not successful, and the whole of the voluntary contributions amounted only to about 20,000, to which the King added nearly 7,000, an unapplied balance of Secret Service money: The Royal Hospital may, therefore, be said to have been partly built by the Army itself, and the larger portion of its lands, including Burton's Court, and about half of the South Grounds which face the Embankment, was also purchased with the funds obtained in this manner. But the Ranelagh Gardens and the eastern portion of the South Grounds were bought with moneys bequeathed by private benefactors. The Hospital, then, is in no sense a charity; and its inmates, who are ex-soldiers of good character, disabled by wounds or old age, are there in enjoyment of honest independence, earned by meritorious devotion to the service of their Country. There can be no doubt that it was at first the intention to provide a home sufficiently large to accommodate all veterans who fulfilled the conditions necessary to obtain admission to the Hospital. And when the foundation stone was laid in 1682 the estimate of space was fairly formed to provide for about 500 pensioners. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."