Chislehurst its earlier format corresponded to the letters IMP (for "imperial"). The Chislehurst civil parish formed an urban district of Kent from 1894 to 1934. In 1934 it became part of the Chislehurst and Sidcup Urban District, which was split in 1965 between the London boroughs of Bromley and Bexley. The Walsingham family, including Christopher Marlowe's patron, Sir Thomas Walsingham and Queen Elizabeth I's spymaster, Francis Walsingham, had a home in Scadbury Park, now a nature reserve in which the ruins of the house can still be seen. A water tower used to straddle the road from Chislehurst to Bromley until
Richard Baines fellow-seminarist his rejection of the Catholic faith and his plans to return to England to report to the queen's spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham about the various plots being hatched in Rheims. In May 1582 he was imprisoned in Rheims town gaol, but a year later was back at the seminary, still a prisoner, where he wrote a lengthy confession of his offences. It seems quite likely that he had in fact been an agent of Sir Francis Walsingham all along. Walsingham died in 1590, and Baines was next heard of in early 1592, when he was in Flushing, at that