Although today the 19th century Chelsea Embankment is one of London’s major traffic routes, in the 16th century, travel from Chelsea to central London and in particular Whitehall, was easiest and quickest by river. Landing stages would have projected into the river from the bank-side path, serving a string of riverside residences occupied by courtiers and Royal officials. By 1536 the two most important of these residences were in the ownership of the Crown. Sir Thomas More’s house had been forfeit, following his beheading for refusing to take any oath that ignored the spiritual authority of the Pope and Chelsea Manor had been granted to Henry VIII by his Lord Chamberlain, Sir William Sandys, in exchange for the buildings of Mottisfont Priory, following its dissolution.

In the summer of 1538 a plague raged in central London and so in order that they might escape the pestilence, the King offered the use of Sir Thomas Moore’s house to the French Ambassador and Chelsea Manor to the Lord Privy Seal, Sir Thomas Cromwell who, following Henry’s break with Rome, masterminded the dissolution of the monasteries and the destruction of monastic churches and shrines.

During the summer of 1538 Cromwell ordered the statues stripped from the despoiled monastic shrines to be brought to Chelsea so that he could witness their being burnt, personally. Three were particularly important: Our Lady of Walsingham, The Black Madonna of Willesden and Our Lady of Grace of Ipswich. Our Lady of Walsingham is a shrine specifically dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and in the medieval Christian world was ranked fourth as a pilgrimage site after Jerusalem, Compostela and Rome. The Black Madonna of Willesden included among its devotees Henry VIII's mother Elizabeth of York and Sir Thomas More, who visited the shrine two weeks before his arrest and imprisonment in the Tower of London. Upon seeing the desecrated Shrine at Walsingham, The Earl of Arundel, St Philip Howard wrote of his lament (link to poem) He was later imprisoned for his faith in the Tower, and after his death the poem was found together with a penitential psalm written in his hand.