These, the most famous of all the London pleasure gardens, were known in their earliest days as the New Spring Garden at Vauxhall, and continued till late in the eighteenth century to be advertised as Spring Gardens.[318]
The Spring Garden was opened to the public shortly after the Restoration, probably in 1661.[319] It was a prettily contrived plantation, laid out with walks and arbours: the nightingale sang in the trees; wild roses could be gathered in the hedges, and cherries in the orchard. The Rotunda, the Orchestra, and the Triumphal Arches, distinctive features of the later Vauxhall, were then non-existent, and the proprietor’s house from which refreshments were supplied was probably the only building that broke the charm of its rural isolation. It was a pleasant place to walk in, and the visitor might spend what he pleased, for nothing was charged for admission. It soon became one of the favourite haunts of Pepys, who first visited it on 29 May 1662. On hot summer days, he would take water to Foxhall with Deb and Mercer and his wife, to stroll in the garden alleys, and eat a lobster or a syllabub. On one day in May (29, 1666) he found two handsome ladies calling on Mrs. Pepys. He was burdened with Admiralty business—“but, Lord! to see how my nature could not refrain from the temptation, but I must invite them to go to Foxhall, to Spring Gardens.”
In a few years the Spring Garden became well known. Fine people came thither to divert themselves and the citizen also spent his holiday there, “pulling off cherries [says Pepys] and God knows what.” The song of the birds was charming, but from about 1667 more sophisticated harmony was furnished by a harp, some fiddles, and a Jew’s trump. About this time the rude behaviour of the gallants of the town began to be noted at the Spring Garden. Gentlemen like “young Newport” and Harry Killigrew, “a rogue newly come back out of France, but still in disgrace at our Court,” would thrust themselves into the supper-arbours and almost seize on the ladies, “perhaps civil ladies,” as Pepys conjectures. “Their mad talk [he adds] did make my heart ake,” though he himself, at a later time, was found at the gardens eating and drinking with Mrs. Knipp, “it being darkish.”
During the last thirty years of the seventeenth century, the Spring Garden, if less perturbed by the Killigrews and Newports, was not a little notorious as a rendezvous for fashionable gallantry and intrigue. “’Tis infallibly some intrigue that brings them to Spring Garden” says Lady Fancyful in ‘The Provoked Wife’ (1697), and Tom Brown (Amusements, 1700, p. 54) declares that in the close walks of the gardens “both sexes meet, and mutually serve one another as guides to lose their way, and the windings and turnings in the little Wildernesses are so intricate, that the most experienced mothers have often lost themselves in looking for their daughters.” It is not hard to picture Mrs. Frail “with a man alone” at Spring Garden; Hippolita eating a cheese-cake or a syllabub “with cousin,” and the gallant of Sedley’s ‘Bellamira’ (1687) passing off on Thisbe the fine compliments that he had already tried on “the flame-coloured Petticoat in New Spring Garden.”
On the evening of 17 May, 1711, Swift (it is interesting to note) visited the gardens with Lady Kerry and Miss Pratt, “to hear the nightingales.”[320] The visit of Addison’s Sir Roger in the spring of 1712 is classical.[321] “We were now arrived at Spring Garden, which is exquisitely pleasant at this time of year. When I considered the fragrancy of the walks and bowers, with the choirs of birds that sung upon the trees, and the loose tribe of people that walked under their shades, I could not but look upon the place as a kind of Mahometan Paradise.” You must understand, says the Knight, there is nothing in the world that pleases a man in love so much as your nightingale. “He here fetched a deep sigh, and was falling into a fit of musing, when a mask, who came behind him, gave him a gentle tap upon the shoulder, and asked him if he would drink a bottle of mead with her.” The old Knight bid the baggage begone, and retired with his friend for a glass of Burton and a slice of hung beef. He told the waiter to carry the remainder to the one-legged waterman who had rowed him to Foxhall, and, as he left the garden animadverted upon the morals of the place in his famous utterance on the paucity of nightingales.
In 1726 the Spring Garden is singled out as one of the London sights,[322] but it would seem that it had fallen into disrepute, and that fresh attractions and a management less lax were now demanded.[323]
§ 2. 1732–1767.
In 1728 Mr. Jonathan Tyers, the true founder of Vauxhall Gardens, obtained from Elizabeth Masters a lease of the Spring Gardens for thirty years at an annual rent of £250, and by subsequent purchases (in 1752 and 1758) became the actual owner of the estate. He greatly altered and improved the gardens, and on Wednesday 7 June 1732 opened Vauxhall with a Ridotto al fresco. The visitors came between nine and eleven in the evening, most of them wearing dominoes and lawyers’ gowns, and the company did not separate till three or four the next morning. The later Vauxhall numbered its visitors by thousands, but at this fête only about four hundred people were present, and the guard of a hundred soldiers stationed in the gardens, with bayonets fixed, was an unnecessary precaution. Good order prevailed, though a tipsy waiter put on a masquerading dress, and a pickpocket stole fifty guineas from a visitor, “but the rogue was taken in the fact.” A guinea ticket gave admission to this entertainment, which was repeated several times during the summer.
From about 1737 the Spring Gardens began to present certain features that long remained characteristic. The admission at the gate was one shilling, the regular charge till 1792, and silver tickets were issued admitting two persons for the season, which began in April or May.[324]
An orchestra containing an organ was erected in the garden, and the concert about this time lasted from five or six till nine. About 1758 this orchestra was replaced by a more elaborate ‘Gothic’ structure “painted white and bloom colour” and having a dome surmounted by a plume of feathers. The concert was at first instrumental, but in 1745 Tyers added vocal music, and engaged Mrs. Arne, the elder Reinhold, and the famous tenor, Thomas Lowe, who remained the principal singer at Vauxhall till about 1763.