by Jane Brown
Switzer was in his late fifties at this time, and had worked for Henry Ellison at Gateshead Park, but as a younger man had worshipped John Vanbrugh and followed him everywhere, and it was his interest in Seaton Delaval Hall that brought him to the north. Seaton Delaval was Vanbrugh’s last great mansion, left unfinished at the architect’s death in 1726; memories, especially country memories, were long-lasting in the 1730s, and ‘Glorious Van’ – Sir John, the ex-soldier, ex-spy and playwright who had prodigiously upped and built his first house, Castle Howard, thereby becoming a famous architect, who was never known to design a garden but was appointed Surveyor of the Royal Gardens and Water Works – was an attractive hero. Whether Lancelot saw Seaton Delaval with Switzer cannot be known, but some Vanbrughian notions were deeply ingrained into his earliest ambitions: a shared passion for battlements and crenellations is easily accounted for, but only someone with an insider’s knowledge could have told him that the architect Vanbrugh saw no necessity for drawing, but had an indispensable ‘organizer, draughtsman4 and designer’ in Nicholas Hawksmoor. Ambitions, it seemed, could be freely chosen by an ambitious young man.
Enter Miss Wayet
Whilst he was with William Joyce at Gateshead it became abundantly clear that the easiest, and most usual, way south was by sea, taking passage with his horse, on one of the coasters calling at Boston, the second-busiest port in England at that time, and closest to his Lincolnshire destination. Joyce perhaps pointed out that the fenland of Lincolnshire was also the proving ground for the latest technology in water engineering and dam-building, knowledge that Lancelot knew he needed to acquire.
How is it possible to say what happened next without a little imagining? For, in Boston, Lancelot met his happy fate; it could well have been a meeting at a Bostonian social gathering, for he was surely equipped with introductions to like-minded professionals in the town; or was it simply the magic of a fine spring morning in 1739? Burly, upright Mr Brown, surveyor and would-be landscape improver, was walking out, wearing his dark-green worsted jacket with a high collar and large pockets, which became his uniform, with a snow-white stock and felted tricorne hat, which he perhaps raised when he met Miss Wayet? Miss Bridget Wayet, who was tall and fair with a prettily pointed nose and demure dress, lived in South Square and walked almost daily past the neat seafarers’ houses and the quays where the ships docked, on her way to the flesh-and fish-markets in the Town Square.
Boston, from Captain Armstrong’s Lincolnshire, 1779.
Boston was a town of about 3,000 souls, a town divided by the outfall of the great and temperamental fenland river, the Witham. The Wayets or Waites were traditionally collectors of the tolls on the town bridge, and had interests on both sides, so to speak: on the harbourage and especially the embankments; consequently they had evolved into professional surveyors and engineers. Bridget’s father, David Wayet, an Alderman and chosen for the mayoralty on May Day 1711, was ‘of respected memory’5 for securing an Act of Parliament for a fresh-water supply to the town from the West Fen, and for building the mill called the Waterhouse. Alderman Wayet had married Mary Kelsall in 1702, and Bridget appears to have been their youngest child, born in 1717. Now, at twenty-two, a mature and capable young woman, she was also a woman of property from her father’s legacy of a land-holding. She lived with her eldest brother John Wayet and his wife Mary, who had been married for about seven years, in their handsome house, built by their father, of five bays with modern sash windows and three storeys, at no. 13 South Square.fn1 Their neighbours were the most distinguished Boston families, the Fydells, Ingelows and Sleaths, who lived beside their warehouses along the quays.
The antiquary William Stukeley, who settled here as a young doctor, called Bridget’s Boston ‘busy and smelly’, but distinguished by the Stump; the town was dominated by St Botolph’s and its tower, the Stump, which came into view at every turn, even in the midst of a forest of masts and windmills. Built out of medieval prosperity, begun about 1425, finished about 1520, it is something of a miracle that such a tower, 272 feet high, could be so wondrously supported to stand straight on mud and sand and, presumably, vast amounts of wool. St Botolph’s, named for the saint of seafaring men, guards the town and the seafarers with its lantern tower,6 the highest and noblest in Europe, seen easily from 40 miles around on land and sea. St Botolph’s was an important part of the Wayets’ life, for they were undoubtedly regular worshippers, and Mary and John (who was to be Mayor in 1755 and 1767) lived into a dignified old age and are commemorated in a handsome monument in the church. It was the custom for family weddings to take place here.
The tidal Witham, measured at the Stump, was 83 feet wide at high water, and lost almost 20 feet at low water (reaching 65 feet). The great slurpings of sand and mud that came and went with the tides were elemental forces in the turbulent history of fen drainage; consequent upon the dangers, Boston was a town of powerful guilds and factional interests, and saw invasions of landowners who swarmed like vultures with every fresh drainage initiative to acquire ‘new’ land. Conflicts were endemic between those who wanted dry land for agriculture and the ‘lawless fenmen’ who revelled in a watery heaven. At this time, as Nicolas Kindersley reported in 1736, the ancient navigation between Lincoln and Boston was useless, a tidal slough of broken embankments and sprawling mud. Ostensibly there was work here for a keen young man to learn about bridge-building and embanking, but perhaps the situation in the town was too chaotic, and the vested interests too inflexible.fn2
Boston and the surrounding flatlands were vulnerable to devastating storms and floods; ‘The Brides of Enderby’, quoted above, commemorates the women of the hamlet of Mavis Enderby, who celebrated the installation of Boston’s bells in the sixteenth century, which rang their warning to those on land, with their menfolk at sea, for ever afterwards. The connection between the town and the villages of the old coastline, about a dozen miles inland across West Fen, remained close, and successful Bostonians sought fresh country air (and firm, dry land) in the countryside between Horncastle and Spilsby; the Wayets were no exception. Also, Joseph Banks II of Revesby – rich in land and money, a man of poor education, rough manners and a warmly philanthropic heart – owned a large area of marshland south of Revesby and Mareham,7 which he planned to drain and enclose. This was a private matter of enclosure, managed by his second son William Banks for the parishes of Tumby, Mareham and Revesby, in which the Langtons, who were cousins of the Bankses, had an interest.
Bridget’s brother John Wayet was also involved in this scheme in 1739 because he owned property at Mareham and Tumby, and their joint needs were for a road and a drain running southwards to Boston, the drain to enter the Witham near the present Anton’s Gowt or Cowbridge. It seems that Lancelot was working here in the autumn of 1739, for in the December the Rev. Bennet Langton wrote from Cavendish Square (he could not persuade his wife and daughters away from the pleasures of London) to Joseph Banks II that ‘Upon my going to Mareham a little before I left the country I had some discourse with Mr Brown concerning inclosing the several [walks], who was satisfied that it would be of the greatest benefit imaginable to the town in general and to all our interests in particular.’ This sounds so like a conversation with Lancelot. The land around Mareham le Fen is still distinctly marked with drain channels as crisply as medieval strips, and with dry footpaths for the villagers, which Lancelot dignified as ‘walks’. The land was so fertile that Mareham saw great subsequent prosperity, with the development of varieties of potato and commercial production of daffodils and tulips; to this day Mareham has a local distinctiveness. These fields and watercourses served for a preliminary practice, with John Wayet’s help, in embankments and sluices and the wilful ways of flowing water, but it seems unlikely that Lancelot found any satisfaction in working here, other than to please Miss Wayet.
The landscape of Mareham le Fen from Armstrong’s Lincolnshire, 1779. Were these the ‘walks’ that Lancelot made in 1739?
The Langton-in-Partney ho
me of the Langtons was another kind of prospect altogether; tucked into the foot of the Wolds just north of Spilsby, the Langton landscape is exuberantly hilly, as if it has escaped from the sea and is lurching and laughing in delight. The gabled Jacobean Old Hall that Lancelot would have known was bowered in trees, its huge and glittering windows gazing southwards across a blue infinity of fen and sea. These hills and dales of Langton offered a challenge that he perhaps dismissed with a laugh, a volatile landscape too nearly reflecting the fey eccentricities of the good and honourable Rev. Bennet Langton, with the play-loving wife and giddy daughters whom he found such a handful, so that nothing was ever settled or straight-running. But Langton senior (as well as his son, also Bennet Langton, who was to be Dr Johnson’s friend, but was still a child in 1739) was known as a keen agriculturist and tree-planter. His mother had come from Langley Castle in the South Tyne country, and so they were certainly known to the Blacketts at Wallington.
TheVyner family, the relatives of Dame Anne Loraine to whom Lancelot had been directed, had made their fortune as goldsmiths in Restoration London, and were in the process of moving from old and damp Tupholme, a lonely Cistercian site on the Witham marshes, to Gautby between Bardney and Horncastle. Gautby has a wonderful site, and extensive brick-walled gardens were being built at this time, in 1739–40, but the Vyners8 seemed in no hurry. The house and the church were their building priorities for the next half-dozen years and they were unlikely to have been persuaded into laying out their park. Mareham, Tumby, Langton and Gautby, were these all Lancelot’s attempts at finding work in Lincolnshire? Did Bridget Wayet, or anyone else for that matter, understand just what he wanted to do, and that the building and managing of a traditional walled kitchen garden, or even of productive market gardens, was not for him? Enough perhaps that in that romantic countryside of the foothills of the Lincolnshire Wolds, through the Enderbys, Somersby and Horncastle, Lancelot and Bridget had time to learn about each other and find that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together.
Lancelot then decided to try Dame Anne Loraine’s other introduction, to her father Richard Smith of Preston Bissett, just south of Buckingham. It was a long trek across the shires, his first real taste of the endless journeyings of his life, but he travelled with purpose and hope. Heading inland to avoid the fens, he could have reached Grantham on a good day’s going, then Melton Mowbray and Market Harborough, and so into Northampton at the end of a third exhausting day’s ride. From there it was an easier 25 miles or so south; coming out of Whittlebury Woods, he would have seen the landmark of Stowe castle, but he continued through Buckingham to the village of Preston, where he found an old gentleman nearing ninety.
However, tradition has it that Squire Smith had found him a job, though Lancelot had to ride for another day westwards, to the Cherwell valley – a country he would come to know very well – and on to the tiny Oxfordshire hamlet of Kiddington. The evidence comes from John Penn, the later owner of Stoke Park at Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire; Penn had found a plan of Stoke attributed to Brown in the house, and was thus interested in Lancelot’s career. Penn wrote in 1813, ‘It has been said that the first piece of water he formed was at Lady Mostyn’s in Oxfordshire.’ In 1739, the date Penn gives, Kiddington was the home of Sir Charles Browne (2nd Baronet, who died in 1751), whose granddaughter and heiress married Sir Edward Mostyn.9 According to Penn, Barbara Mostyn would have been ten years old at the time, and as everything at Kiddington is on a very small scale, to this clearly bright and observant child the ‘arrival’ of a lake where none was before, within easy sight of the house windows, was a great event.
Kiddington is on the River Glyme about three miles north of Blenheim’s park-pale; some explanation of this prodigy lake, Lancelot’s first, is given by Thomas Hinde (1986), who has paid particular attention to eighteenth-century water engineering. Hinde finds Penn believable, for:
Kiddington still looks10 like a Brown garden. Grassy slopes fall below the house to the south and west, where the little river Glyme has been dammed and turned into a modest lake. More grassy slopes rise fairly steeply on the further side where there are new clumps of trees as well as the stumps of much older ones. True, the valley’s shape made the river easy to dam, and its slopes invited lawns and trees, but that is all the more reason for thinking that Brown may have seized the opportunity to make a garden which has most of the features of his numerous later ones.
This almost sacred spot retains a very real magic. A telltale cedar of Lebanon marks the turning off the main road between Woodstock and Enstone, into an older world of pretty cottages fronted by humpy hedges and cottage gardens, with the bridge over the Glyme and the drive to the hall presiding over its sleepy valley. The little Glyme gave itself so easily to make Lancelot’s early dream come true – was he pleased when he realised the effect of his very first lake? Kiddington provided a textbook opportunity for the authoritative John Taverner’s preferred way of making ‘a water’ – that is, ‘with a head (i.e. dam) in a valley between two hills, by swelling of the water over grassie ground, not in former times covered with water’. Taverner, though he had died in 1606, was still the authority; he was Surveyor-General to the King’s Woods south of the Trent, in succession to his father, also John Taverner,11 and had published Certaine Experiments Concerning Fish and Fruite in 1600, which was full of technical advice and was the source for such writers as Batty Langley and Stephen Switzer. Taverner’s careful instructions held good: ‘if you meane to make your head ten foote high, it had need to be ten foote broade in the top, and thirty foote broade in the bottome’, built of ‘only earth being broken very small, and watered with water often times as you raise it: for that will cause it to bind closer and surer than any ramming or timber worke will do’.fn3
There was another omen at Kiddington, and a thunderous one, in that Sir Charles Browne was married to Mary Pitt, the daughter of George Pitt of Stratfield Saye, godfather and cousin to William Pitt, the future Earl of Chatham. The Pitt family networking, in Lancelot’s favour, had begun.
I doubt that Kiddington retained him long in the early months of 1740, but he had discovered that, within a few square miles of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, there were almost a dozen places where he might work. His presence at Kiddington made his name known locally; he may have had a promise of Wotton Underwood from the Grenvilles, and perhaps set his sights on Stowe or Blenheim, but as nothing was immediately forthcoming he returned eastwards to Bridget.
He wanted to give Lincolnshire one more chance, and there was a slim hope of work at Grimsthorpe Castle, the home of the Berties – elevated into the company of Castle Howard and Blenheim, in grand gardening terms, by the attentions of Sir John Vanbrugh, with Stephen Switzer in his wake. In 1715, when the Berties had acquired their dukedom and their kinsman Vanbrugh was on the lookout for a job, they commissioned him to encase their plain old house with monumentally baroque façades. Though much was intended, by the time Vanbrugh died in 1726 the work was stopped, with only the north front, its ‘fortress’ pavilions and courtyard completed. This was built of Ancaster stone, leaving quarries – invariably landscaping opportunities – in the park. Switzer’s evocation of ‘The Manor of Paston’ in The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation and its subsequent editions, which Lancelot knew, was the thinly disguised Grimsthorpe, on which he had wished his ideas of the extensive garden,12 ‘woods, Fields and distant Inclosures’ having the attention of the industrious plantsman, and the garden being thrown ‘open to all View to the unbounded Felicities of distant Prospect, and the expansive volumes of Nature herself’. Switzer’s drawing of his rural garden approaches the fantastic, with east–west and north–south vistas springing from the house in the old formal way, but all the land in between filled with ‘serpentine twinings’ of paths and drives, writhing their way through woods, ‘cabinets and bosquets’, with many a piece of water. If the reigning Bertie, Peregrine, 17th Baron Willoughby de Eresby and 2nd Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven,
was ambitious to this scale, there was a great landscape to be made and planted.
However, English dukes are unlikely slaves to imaginary schemes. When Lancelot arrived in 1740 he found some large pieces of water in the park, rather straight-sided and confined and looking like fishponds: the 2nd Duke was discussing the possibility of building a dam, with thirteen rocky arches as a sham bridge to make an extended water, and additional dams and sluices that would connect the Great Water and the Red Bridge Pond and make them appear as one. It is possible that Lancelot spent some weeks at Grimsthorpe discussing and surveying the possibilities of these great plans, but I fear he discovered there was no place for him, an outsider and a north-country man. The Duke had conservative ways; having considerable interests in the fens, he was knowledgeable on drainage matters and was inclined to favour the well-tried, if technically stilted methods of proven worth, rather than the novel. However nearly he was persuaded by Lancelot, it was not quite enough, and Lancelot could not have known that he had a rival. The Berties were politically powerful in Boston, and his Wayet connection – if it was firm enough – may have counted for him, but the town of Spalding was nearer to Grimsthorpe and this was a town full of remarkable talents, notably within the famous Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, which attracted a rich gathering of scientific minds. The Society had a respected engineer, John Grundy, who had come into the area as a surveyor for the 2nd Duke of Buccleuch’s lands, had presented a fine map of Spalding to the Society, settled in the town and taught mathematics at the grammar school, and was now occupied in planning improvements to the River Welland navigation. Grundy – a worthy pioneer and sound engineer – was known to the Duke of Ancaster and his kind, and the Duke would have looked no farther. Grundy was forty-four and had led an arduous life, but had given his son John, who was three years younger than Lancelot, a thorough and wide-ranging training. When the Duke of Ancaster started his park improvements in 1740 by removing a hillock of land that spoiled the view of the castle’s north front, quite naturally Grundy senior suggested his son for the work: John Grundy junior removed the hillock, built the dams for Grimsthorpe’s lake and remained working at Grimsthorpe for the next twenty years. Lancelot had to wait all that time, and more, for his chance.