Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  Lancelot Brown made a distressingly public end, collapsing in a Mayfair street on a winter’s evening in early 1783. He had dined with his old acquaintance, Lord Coventry, at Coventry House in Piccadilly (now no. 106), and only had to walk around the corner to his daughter’s, Mrs Holland’s, in Hertford Street where he was staying: but, for whatever reason, he fell – and, being a big man, fell heavily – and being Lancelot Brown, the King’s Master Gardener and a familiar figure, he was soon surrounded by willing helpers. Tradition has it that he fell outside Lord Sandwich’s house, also in Hertford Street, where the footmen knew him well, and so in safe hands he was carried home to his daughter’s house. There he was made comfortable, and the next morning – for he would have no undue fuss – his wife Biddy was fetched from their home at Hampton Court, and his lawyer Mr Edison was summoned so that he could dictate and sign a codicil to his Will. That evening, Thursday, 6th February 1783, at about nine O’clock he died.

  The news travelled fast. ‘Your Dryads6 must go into black gloves, Madam’ was the pretty phrase that Horace Walpole used to Lady Ossory, rather spoiling it in his waspish way. ‘Their father-in-law, Lady Nature’s second husband, is dead.’ He later tidied his thoughts into a suitable epitaph:

  With one Lost Paradise7 the name

  Of our first ancestor is stained:

  Brown shall enjoy unsullied fame

  For many a Paradise he regained.

  Tributes were paid to ‘his great and fine genius’,8 and to his ‘uncommon degree of fortitude and good spirits’, for it was well known that he suffered from asthmatic attacks, the legacy of a serious illness when he was in his thirties. Lord Coventry spoke openly of his loss, of the ideals and ambitions that they had shared for more than twenty years in making his country home at Croome in Worcestershire: he later placed a Coadestone casket beside Croome’s lake, with the inscription:

  To the Memory of

  Lancelot Brown

  Who by the powers of

  His inimitable

  And creative genius

  Formed this garden scene

  Out of a morass.

  Far across the country, at Burghley House outside Stamford, where Lancelot had worked happily for more than twenty-five years, Lord Exeter had Brown’s portrait by Nathaniel Dance placed in the Pagoda Room. It hangs there still. The King, George III, was less gracious: when he met his Richmond gardener, Michael Milliken, Lancelot’s protégé whom he brought south from Chatsworth into thirty-five years of comfortable royal service, he is reported as saying, ‘Brown is dead! Now Mellicant9 [sic] you and I can do here what we please.’ Walpole thought this story ‘worth a million’. In his home country, which Lancelot had left forty-five years before, the Newcastle Courant10 reported his death ‘of an apoplexy’, identifying him as Head Gardener to His Majesty at Hampton Court ‘and uncle to Richard Brown, Esq. of this town’. Richard was the only child of Lancelot’s eldest brother John Brown and his wife Jane, the daughter of Sir William Loraine.

  The following year, 1784, François de La Rochefoucauld visited England and caught a fresh memory: he wrote in his Mélanges sur Angleterre that ‘Le Brun’11 had so quick and sure an eye that, after riding around a park for an hour, he could conceive a design, for the whole, which he had marked out in an additional half a day. ‘Le Brun’ did one French design but had no ambitions there, and when he was offered £1,000 by the Duke of Leinster to go to Ireland, to Carton in County Kildare, he replied that ‘he had not yet finished England’.12 Sadly he could not finish England: but he had perfected a phenomenon of cultural design, the natural English Landscape Garden, which was dubbed ‘le jardin anglais’ in Europe, and which carried its implicit vision of England into worldwide and lasting fame.

  In the Hollands’ house in Hertford Street all was quiet. As Lancelot and Bridget lived in a tied house at Hampton Court, their only home of their own was the small Huntingdonshire manor of Fenstanton, which Lancelot had acquired just fifteen years earlier, thinking of his retirement. After a few days the cortège set out, just the men as was the custom, led by his eldest son Lance and his son-in-law Henry Holland, on the sombre journey northwards, along the old road through Hoddesdon and Ware to Royston. After milepost 44, in Cambridgeshire, they passed along the boundary of Wimpole Park, where Lancelot had so recently been, and hopefully the estate workers were there to salute his passing. Soon after milepost 53 at Papworth St Everard (as it was then called), they left the road the Romans had called Ermine Street and struck off along the low-lying and muddy track towards Hilton; they may have taken shelter at Lance Brown’s house at Elsworth on the hill, and carried on northwards to Fenny Stanton. The ‘fenny’ is the clue, for the low road through Hilton and across the green to Fenny Stanton was very wet, a fraught passage for a heavily laden coffin cart across running rivulets and rickety bridges.

  They brought him, almost a stranger to a strange land, to a place he had hardly visited, but where he was laid to rest: and here, in the little church of St Peter and St Paul beside the green at Fenstanton, the mysteries begin. In the church register his burial date is 16th February, which was a Sunday, and most unlikely, but for an error or some mishap – perhaps simply the muddy roads, which made the cortège late. For many years the churchwardens of Fenstanton have puzzled over the location of their most famous grave, a matter much debated. Some people have said that Lancelot is not buried here at all. On the chancel wall is that most quoted of epitaphs:

  Ye Sons of Elegance,13 who truly taste

  The Simple charms that genuine Art supplies,

  Come from the sylvan Scenes His Genius grac’d

  And offer here your tributary Sighs.

  But know that more than Genius slumbers here,

  Virtues were his which Arts best power transcend.

  Come, ye Superior train who these revere

  And weep the Christian Husband, Father, Friend.

  This was written by the Reverend William Mason, author of a long poem The English Garden and friend of Thomas Gray, and both Gray and Mason had been familiar with Lancelot and his works for many years. Mason, who at Lance Brown’s request was consulted by Lord Coventry over the epitaph, easily made the connections between Gray’s Elegy and the remote, uncelebrated scene at Fenny Stanton, where:

  … with dirges due14 in sad array

  Slow thro’ the church-way path we saw him borne.

  Approach and read (for thou can’st read) the lay,

  Grav’d on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.

  Lancelot had intended Fenstanton to be the family’s home, though he had never lived there himself. His wife Biddy died in the summer of 1786, and she was buried beside him. Shortly afterwards their daughter Peggy married James Rust of Brampton, and Lance Brown and his brother Jack, when he retired from the navy, and the youngest brother Thomas, all lived in the Huntingdon area. This quiet little countryside became home to Lancelot’s descendants for many years to come.

  1

  NORTHERN PERSPECTIVE

  The breath of Spring is gratefu’, As mild it sweeps alang;

  Awaukening bud an’ blossom, The broomy braes among;

  And wafting notes of gladness, Fra ilka bower and tree;

  Yet the bonnie Redesdale lassie, Is sweeter still to me.

  ‘The Bonnie Redesdale Lassie’, contemporary ballad

  THE FACTS OF his beginning are bare. Lancelot, son of William Brown, was baptised in the church at Kirkharle in Northumberland on Sunday 30th August 1716, as the vicar, Richard Ward, recorded in the register. No date was given for his birth and no mention made of his mother.

  Kirkharle, in the Wansbeck valley west of Morpeth, was the demesne of the aged Sir Thomas Loraine and home to something over two dozen families in farms and cottages. William Brown was a newcomer, but had proved himself reliable as Sir Thomas’s steward or estate manager. Even so, for a baby destined to cut a glorious swathe across England and dine with dukes, Lancelot’s was a modest birth, and subsequent historians had to e
xcuse this apparent disconformity of the social order by suggesting that he was an aristocratic by-blow. This was romantic nonsense, typical of the Victorians; better by far to search for his mother and William Brown’s forebears in the Northumbrian landscape that nurtured them all.

  From the south and Corbridge, the road the Romans made breaches the Wall at the Port Gate, at milecastle 22, and strikes bravely northwards into the wild and chilly uplands. After 1½ miles it attains Beukley top, and at a glance it can be seen lurching relentlessly northwards, heading for Jedburgh in leaps and bounds across half of Northumberland. To the west the majestic North Tyne makes its brown and bubbling way down from Liddesdale, and in the northern distance is Redesdale, where the Brown forebears are most likely to be found. This panorama is Lancelot Brown’s native landscape in its largest guise, the country between the Wall and the Border, which in the early eighteenth century had more in common with lowland Scotland than with any English county. Oatmeal was the staple diet, about one-third of adults were able to read (more than in many an English shire) and available books and newspapers were more likely produced in Edinburgh than in London: ‘Northumbrians and Lowland Scots even tended to look alike, with the same raw, high-boned faces1 and the same thin, angular physiques’.

  Redesdale presents a brown, peat-stained countryside, where ‘brownt’ was synonymous with burnt, where the Burns and the Milburns were infamous reiver clans, and where names called across the heather were as variable as the winds, until they were finally fixed and written down. These men of the hills wore brown clothes, the wool was naturally browned and made good camouflage for their nefarious deeds amongst the brakes of bracken. The name Brown was thus easily acquired. One early Brown was a wily lawman in the fifteenth century; another worked for Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Lord Walsingham; yet another, the leader of a gang of rustlers named Geordie Brown, was captured and saved by the ‘fyrebrande’2 Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Roxburgh, only to be recaptured and hanged in 1596. The name is not common in the sparse records of the time, and Browns were easily outnumbered by ranks of Hedleys, Elliotts, Reeds and Robsons in Redesdale, and by Fenwicks, Ridleys and Forsters farther east. Elsdon is traditionally the capital of Redesdale (Otterburn had no church or church conformity until the 1870s) and the registers begin in 1672 – though in such a damp and musty vestry, in such wild and rough country, their veracity cannot be absolutely trustworthy, nor the efforts to get to the church for baptisms and marriages too urgent. There were many common-law marriages, and itinerant priests of the Catholic and Dissenting kinds who administered to the scattered cottages in the hills, and many good reasons why the Brown ancestors are inevitably elusive.

  The first Elsdon church register, of a brief seventeen pages with the bottoms lost to the damp, reveals likely seventeenth-century Browns of ‘Hadderwyk’ – Heatherwick, the gentle fells crossed by the Heatherwick burn, which flows into the Rede, just south of Otterburn. In the middle of winter, in late February 1686, the body of ‘Old Thomas’ Brown was carried from his home 7 miles into Elsdon, for burial and entry into the Rev. William Mitford’s register.fn1 ‘Old Thomas’ was a weaver who lived out his days on the green and heathery fells, where sheep and goats were kept for their wool. He is a good beginning, and at least three of his sons are known by their names: the eldest Lancelot; then Thomas, also a weaver and outworker for the Otterburn mill, who had married Jane in 1675; and John, who married Elizabeth in 1676. After their father’s death there was weaving work for Thomas the younger, but his brothers had to seek their livings elsewhere.

  The Elsdon registers show the Browns, brothers and cousins. The customary family names are Thomas, John and William (though Lancelot is rare), with Dorothy and Mary for the girls. They peopled the hills around Otterburn, filtering to Corsenside and Overacres – home of the Howards, the lords of Redesdale – and to Raylees and Ravenscleugh. Northumberland’s great historian, the Rev. John Hodgson, who knew this countryside so well, believed that Lancelot, Old Thomas the Weaver’s eldest son, became ‘of Ravenscleugh’, his name appearing in the Hedley family records by virtue of the marriage of his niece Mary Brown to Anthony Hedley of Hopefoot. From Ravenscleugh, a hamlet deep in the hills about 5 miles south of Elsdon, he moved south to Kirkharle, where his burial is recorded, Lancelott Browne, on 26th August 1699, the entry sadly and shamefully marked that the dues were not paid; such a contrast to the seemly obsequies on Old Thomas’s departure. Dorothy, ‘his relict,’ lasted hardly another year and was buried on 3rd August 1700.

  Lancelot and Dorothy had at least three sons, and two of them had moved into the countryside around Kirkharle, but William Brown was still in Redesdale. In the spring of 1701 he was married in Elsdon church, to Ursula Hall: they were ‘both of this parish’. Ursula’s parents were John and Ursula Hall of Girsonfield, and her father was directly descended from one of the most formidable of the Border reiver clans, the famously ‘fause-hearted Ha’s’3 whose exploits are recalled in the Border ballads. Girsonfield was no longer their fortress as of 200 years before, but was tamed into a comfortable farmhouse, although the family still reared strong characters of consequence in Northumberland, and undoubtedly William Brown had made a good marriage: his bride could hold her head high in any company, and was to impart that edge of pride to her sons.

  William and Ursula were a well set-up couple, both in their early twenties, but they knew there was no future for them in Redesdale; there were no schools for their children, the only work was shepherding or farming in a remote steading, and after a hundred long years of settlement, which had come about when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, the holdings had grown ever smaller and the land played out. When the Howards sold the lordship of Redesdale to the Duke of Northumberland in 1750, it was valued at a mere £350. A spate of improvements and enclosures was coming, but not in time for the young Browns, and it was necessary for them to leave. Was it a message from William’s mother, the failing Dorothy, that had alerted William that work and house awaited him at Kirkharle?

  Their way south along the old drove roadfn2 led them for five high and open miles over Ottercops Moss, across a seemingly endless country of hills and crags, suddenly and surprisingly transformed into a flat meadowland with many streams when they reached ancient Kirkwhelpington. Here the streams form themselves into the infant River Wansbeck, which they could easily follow for a few miles of level journeying into the Kirkharle demesne. Their new home was in this gentle valley of lazily rolling meadows and big trees, with the gathering of grey stone cottages beside the burn, all watched over by the church dedicated to St Wilfrith, or Wilfrid, the seventh-century monk of Lindisfarne.

  St Wilfrid’s Church, Kirkharle where Lancelot was baptised in the summer of 1716, from Hodgson’s Northumberland, 1827.

  As Ursula Brown did not become pregnant with her first child until the autumn of 1703, a good two years after their marriage, it seems that William might have travelled alone to secure his job and home from Sir Thomas Loraine. Ursula was clearly a young woman who knew what she was doing, and their first child, a daughter named Dorothy, was born on 18th May 1704 and baptised in Kirkharle’s church three weeks later. Dorothy was followed by Mary, on 22nd August 1706 (baptised on 12th September), and then John, baptised on 3rd February 1709. Then a space, which may indicate a miscarriage (though there is no entry for an infant burial), until George, ‘Geordie’, was baptised on 29th October 1713, followed by Lancelot, who was born in the summer three years later.

  Lancelot was seemingly named for his grandfather, but knowing how mothers make romance out of their sons’ names, there are other possibilities, not least that Ursula was bewitched by the balladeers’ rendering of Arthurian stories, and of the greatest and most thoughtful (if not the most perfect) of the knights Sir Lancelot, whose castle of Joyous Gard4 was believed by Northumbrians to be at Alnwick or Bamburgh. The assiduity of their children’s baptisms, dates of more importance than their actual birthdays (which are not recorded for John, Geor
ge and Lancelot), reveals how the Browns chose to conform to ordered English society. It was less than a decade after the Union of 1707, and Lancelot was to be their first baby born into Hanoverian Great Britain; even so, their hearts may have told them differently, especially when the call came across the countryside to join the gathering at Green Rigg on 6th October 1715 to ride in support of the Pretender’s claim. The country rose almost to a man, led by Charles II’s grandson James, the Earl of Derwentwater, the Member of Parliament Thomas Forster and sundry Widdringtons, Thorntons, Shaftos, Charltons and Swinburnes. Ursula’s kinsman (possibly her uncle), Judge Jack Hall of Otterburn Tower, was with them. Did William Brown ride? Or was he excused by Sir Thomas Loraine’s plea of age and infirmity, just as Sir Thomas (nearing seventy) excused himself, and so did their neighbour Sir William Blackett at Wallington. Sir William found it politic to attend to his interests in ‘Geordie’ (for George I) Newcastle. All that winter, when Ursula’s latest pregnancy began (it is possible that the unwarlike William did ride, and that Lancelot was conceived as the result of his early and safe return), the country was alive with news of the rebels’ doings, and especially of how Lancelot Errington, having ‘taken’ Holy Island for the cause, had to hide amidst seaweed and rocks to escape the soldiers from Berwick; soon captured, shot and wounded, he still managed to escape, hiding in a pea stack and succoured by the local people until he took ship to France.fn3