V
CHELSEA GROUP
RANELAGH HOUSE AND GARDENS
§ 1. Origin of Ranelagh
About the year 1690 Richard, Viscount (afterwards Earl of) Ranelagh, Paymaster-General of the Forces, built for himself on the east side of Chelsea Hospital a private residence known as Ranelagh House, and laid out a garden. In 1691[208] the house is described as “very fine within, all the rooms being wainscotted with Norway oak,” and the garden plats and walks were “curiously kept and elegantly designed.” Bowack in 1705 says that the gardens were “esteemed to be the best in England, the size considered.” Here Lord Ranelagh lived till his death in 1712.
In 1733 the property was sold, and at that time Lacy, patentee of Drury Lane Theatre, made arrangements for forming Ranelagh into a place of public amusement. Nothing decisive was done till 1741, when a large circular building, the famous Rotunda (at first generally called the Amphitheatre), was erected in the Ranelagh grounds by William Jones, architect to the East India Company.[209]
The capital for the undertaking was furnished by a few shareholders, and was divided into thirty-six shares of £1,000 each. The principal shareholder and manager was Sir Thomas Robinson, Bart., M.P., whose gigantic form was for many years familiar to all frequenters of the Rotunda: a writer of 1774 calls him its Maypole and Garland of Delights.[210]
The Rotunda and Gardens were first opened on 5 April, 1742, with a public breakfast, and a visit to Ranelagh became the vogue. Of the early fortunes of the place the best chronicler is Horace Walpole. On April 22, 1742, he writes to Mann:—“I have been breakfasting this morning at Ranelagh Garden: they have built an immense amphitheatre, with balconies full of little ale-houses: it is in rivalry to Vauxhall and costs above twelve thousand pounds.”[211]
On May 26[212] he again describes the “vast amphitheatre, finely gilt, painted and illuminated; into which everybody that loves eating, drinking, staring, or crowding, is admitted for twelvepence.” In 1744,[213] Mr. Walpole goes “every night constantly” to Ranelagh, “which has totally beat Vauxhall.” “Nobody goes anywhere else; everybody goes there. My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it, that he says he has ordered all his letters to be directed thither.” “The floor is all of beaten princes”; “you can’t set your foot without treading on a Prince or Duke of Cumberland.” In 1748,[214] “Ranelagh is so crowded, that going there t’other night in a string of coaches, we had a stop of six and thirty minutes.”
In 1745 Mr. Thomas Gray had written to a friend[215] that he had no intention of following the stream to Ranelagh, and he touched a weak spot in the delights of the London Pleasure Gardens—the uncertainty of the London weather. “I have never been at Ranelagh Gardens since they were opened.... They do not succeed: people see it once, or twice, and so they go to Vauxhall. Well, but is it not a very great design, very new, finely lighted? Well, yes, aye, very fine truly, so they yawn and go to Vauxhall, and then it’s too hot, and then it’s too cold, and here’s a wind and there’s a damp.” But in August 1746 we find Gray declaring[216] that his evenings lately have been chiefly spent at Ranelagh and Vauxhall.
Other literary people, at least as interesting, as Walpole’s Dukes and Princes, frequented Ranelagh. The learned Mrs. Carter was there in 1748, and found the gardens very pleasant on a June evening, though she did not relish such “tumultary torchlight entertainments.” Goldsmith and Reynolds used to go there together about 1771, and Dr. Johnson “often went to Ranelagh,” which he deemed, as the Rev. Dr. Maxwell apologetically observes, “a place of innocent recreation.”