by Jane Brown
The Brown boys, all three, seem to have been level-hearted and emotionally adept; they all made apparently happy and lasting marriages. We know nothing of Lancelot’s ‘wild oats’. Like both John and George, he aimed slightly above himself, aspiring to a young lady of comfortable middle-class origins (if Bridget Wayet has to be categorised), well educated and used to civilised living. The rooms in the Wayets’ house in Boston’s South Square were panelled, filled with well-polished and solid furniture, pictures, china and silver, and there were maids for the scullery and laundry, even if Bridget’s sister-in-law Mary Wayet supervised the cooking herself. Everything pointed to the Wayets’ hopes that Lancelot would join the family in Boston, where he would have been assured of a successful living. Fortunately he had his pride and belief in his own destiny and refused to be a comfortable nonentity, but there was no question of asking Bridget to marry him until he could provide a sure income and comfortable home. After his painful rejection at Grimsthorpe he returned to Buckinghamshire.
For a while he seems to have worked at the Grenvilles’ Wotton Underwood, some 8 miles west of Aylesbury in well-watered countryside, where there were the makings of a beautiful park around Charles Bridgeman’s formal garden; Wotton, however, was never likely to be as famous as Stowe, which belonged to the Grenville brothers’ uncle, Lord Cobham, and so when word passed around that the Stowe head gardener, William Love, was retiring, Lancelot took notice. John Penn has informed us that Love’s replacement had to be ‘able to converse13 instructively’ on Lord Cobham’s favourite pursuit, but be ‘free from vanity and conceit which had rendered his former assistants disinclined to alterations upon which he had determined’. For Stowe, Lancelot was prepared to be circumspect, at least for a while. His application was successful – his moment had come.
fn1 The house survives.
fn2 The Witham was not to be tamed until the advent of steam pumps in the later eighteenth century and the work of engineers John Grundy junior and John Smeaton.
fn3 Lancelot used this ’homogenous’ construction in his next dam, at Wakefield Lawn in 1751.
3
THE KINGDOM OF STOWE
Sincerest Critic of my Prose or Rhyme,
Tell how thy pleasing Stowe employs thy Time.
Say, Cobham, what amuses thy Retreat,
Or Schemes of War, or Stratagems of State?
William Congreve,1 ‘Of Improving the Present Time’, 1728
LANCELOT WOULD HAVE been a dull dog if he had not already scouted Stowe, but even so it was an intimidating prospect; indeed, with doubled intimidations: the place and its owner. The estate extended over 5,000 acres, an island cut in green, an island of the fantastick and curious, many of the local people would have said, and quite mad. From Buckingham, Lord Cobham’s pocket borough, its church steeple the springing point of the Stowe layout, Lancelot rode out along the 3-mile, tree-lined drive northwards. On this relentless road with wide verges a man on a horse must feel like a flea on a mouse, but at least there was plenty of warning of the coming of his lordship’s coach and galloping team, which would give way to no one. The drive breasted the hill, the Corinthian Arch was not yet built, from where the rider gazed on the sparkling waters and green acres, the south façade of a giant mansion – and beyond, for miles, the avenues and rides stretched into the wooded distances of Whittlebury and Silverstone.
When Lancelot arrived on a February day in 1741, ringing the bell at the gate beside the Lake Pavilions, the strangers’ entrance with attendant gardener, the kingdom of Stowe was intact – a fortress cut in green, a soldier’s garden in the military manner, as Congreve had divined as he further addressed Cobham:
Dost thou recall to Mind with Joy or Grief
Great Marlborough’s Actions, that immortal Chief,
Whose slightest Trophy raised in each Campaign
More than sufficed to signalise a Reign?
Does the Remembrance, rising, warm thy Heart
With Glory past, where Thou thyself hadst Part,
Or dost thou grieve indignant, now, to see
The fruitless End of all that Victory?
The Kingdom of Stowe, the map published by Sarah Bridgeman, 1739, showing the ‘fortress’ garden laid out by Charles Bridgeman, with the rides extending north to Silverstone. At the foot of the plan the Buckingham avenue has been fore-shortened but extends southwards for about two miles to the town.
Stowe’s spiky outworks, like so many sharp elbows firing out into the sleepy countryside, were still much in evidence – it was a hero’s garden. The fashionable and the curious had made it famous, and visitors had streamed through its walks for more than twenty years, the cleverest (like Congreve and Alexander Pope)2 immortalising the experience in rhyme. Pope’s ‘Epistle to Burlington’ of 1731, whilst commending the virtues of his lordship’s garden at Chiswick House, slides tangentially into praise of Chiswick’s rival at Stowe:
To build, to plant, whatever you intend,
To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend,
To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot;
In all, let Nature never be forgot.
But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,
Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;
Let not each beauty ev’ry where be spy’d,
Where half the skill is decently to hide.
He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,
Surprizes, varies, and conceals the Bounds.
The secret was to ‘Consult the Genius of the Place in all’ – the ‘genius’, in one sense, implying the pagan gods of fields and woods (an allusion to Lord Cobham’s known agnosticism); in a second sense, the ‘genius’ was the character of the countryside, as Pope had explained three years earlier: ‘In laying out a garden, the first and chief thing to be considered is the genius of the place. Thus as [Richings], for example, Lord Bathurst should have raised two or three mounts because his situation is all a plain, and nothing can please without variety.’ Stowe, set in a countryside of greater integrity than the ‘plain’ of Richings (at Iver in south Buckinghamshire) or the fields of Chiswick, inspired the greater accomplishment:
Nature shall join you, Time shall make it grow
A Work to wonder at – perhaps a Stow.
This dalliance in phrases and rhymes concerning politics and gardens amused a considerable spectrum of the reading and travelling public, for whom the great houses and their gardens were the chief attractions of the countryside in summer. Joseph Addison’s3 imaginative rovings in ‘the wild Fields of Nature’, and his suggestion ‘why may not a whole Estate be thrown into a kind of Garden’ in The Spectator (no. 414, 25th June 1712), had diverted the fashion from the gods of war to those of nature, inspiring this new cult, which Stephen Switzer and Batty Langley, amongst others, were adapting into garden-design theories. Lancelot, becoming familiar with the theories, needed to be aware of all the levels of Stowe’s celebrity.
Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham was a formidable employer, and it says much for Lancelot’s nerve and ambition that he grasped the opportunity; it was to be a masterclass in dealing with a difficult lord. His lordship’s portrait had recently been painted (1740) by Jean-BaptisteVan Loo, showing him, at sixty-five, lean and apparently fit from an active life, arrogant of bearing, his mouth the most telling feature of his face, compressed into a sardonic glimmer of a smile above a determined chin – a man who is master of himself, and everyone else. One of Marlborough’s senior generals, he was a soldier through and through, subscribing to the idea of a regiment as ‘a property owned by an unlimited company of which the commanding officer was managing director’;4 as he ran his regiment, so he ran his estates. In peacetime he loved gardening, as so many generals did, and he loved his former comrades, many of whom – including Colonel Samuel Speed, who oversaw the estate accounts, and Steward William Roberts, as well as sappers and engineers-turned-gardeners – were pensioners at Stowe. Lancelot was one of the few, possibly the only one in a senior posi
tion, without a military background; he was on six months’ trial.
The Temple family had prospered as sheep farmers at Burton Dassett in Warwickshire, extending their holdings into the rolling countryside north of Buckingham in Queen Elizabeth I’s days, and buying a knighthood and then a baronetcy to go with their increasing acres. The 3rd Baronet, Sir Richard Temple, having recouped the family fortunes largely out of being MP for the rotten borough of Buckingham for forty years, built a pretty brick house at Stowe, with a look of Wren about it, employing some of Wren’s craftsmen. It was seen by Celia Fiennes in 1694, standing ‘pretty high;5 you enter into a hall, very lofty with a gallery round the top, thence through to a great parlour that opens in a bellcony to the garden … gardens which are one below another with low breast walls and terass walkes’, and with orchards and woods beyond. These terraced ‘rooms’ walled with hedges, with arbours and decorative topiary, were called Sir Richard’s ‘Parlour Garden’.
Sir Richard Temple had married his cousin Mary Knapp, and they had three daughters and an only son, Richard, born on 24th October 1675 and destined for the army. After spells at Eton and Cambridge (Christ’s College), in his twentieth year he joined Captain Ventris Columbine’s Regiment of Foot; he was present at the three months’ siege – ‘undoubtedly ye Most desperate that had been made in ye memory of Man’ – and ultimate capture of the fortress of Namur.6 (Namur was the horrific siege redeemed by Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim in their garden-making described in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.)
In 1697 Richard had inherited Stowe and his father’s parliamentary seat of Buckingham in the Whig interest. His military progress was equally speedy; he had his own Regiment of Foot in 1702, and he served through the gruelling marches and sieges of William III’s and Marlborough’s Flanders campaigns; he was at the siege of Lille, and with Marlborough at the ‘last great set-piece victory’ at Malplaquet7 near Mons in September 1709, ‘though bought at so great a cost that it hardly deserves to be called a victory’. The following year he was appointed one of only five lieutenant-generals of the army in Flanders, and then kicked his heels uncomfortably around Vauban’s great fortresses of northern France until the politicians had argued their way into the Peace of Utrecht, signed to great bell-ringings and bonfires blazing in England in April 1713. With the Tories and Robert Harley in charge, Temple was stripped of his regimentals, only to find himself returned to favour with the coming of George I in 1714: the new king gave him a barony and he took the title of Cobham, under attainder from 1603, from his rather distant kin in Kent. The following year he married Anne Halsey, heiress of Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire, a brewer’s daughter with £20,000. In 1718 he was made Viscount Cobham, a new title that he did not despise (though ‘a miserable compromise … a new and inferior rank’,8 in the opinion of the Tory Harry Bolingbroke) and, with the restitution of his general’s pay and his wife’s fortune, he was freed to serious gardening at Stowe.
Cobham was clearly a man of strong temper and swift actions; but he was also a man of great attractions – for himself and his influences – and Stowe was always busy with friends and visitors. He had seen to profitable marriages for his sisters, Christian Temple to her kinsman Sir Thomas Lyttelton of Hagley, and Hester to Richard Grenville at Wotton; and although he had been intransigently opposed to Maria marrying his regimental chaplain, Richard West, their son Gilbert, a brilliant young man, was soon a great favourite at Stowe. All the nephews were welcomed, as Cobham knew he would have no children of his own (he had arranged for his viscountcy to pass to his nephew Richard Grenville), which is sometimes said to be the ‘fault’ of Lady Cobham, but it is now known that he had been taking drastic remedies for venereal disease for many years.
The military garden,9 as at William III’s own Het Loo in the Netherlands, the ‘siege of Troy’ topiary garden made for him at Kensington Palace, and the Duke of Marlborough’s ‘colossal polygon’ with walks along its bastions at Blenheim represented an appropriate fashion for an age when the street talk was dominated by the war news from Europe. Naturally enough, Lord Cobham’s gardening started in this vein; in 1716, fresh from working for the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim, the popular garden-maker Charles Bridgeman had begun at Stowe, well able to design (as befits a soldier of sieges) the very image of a fort. Bridgeman extended the long southwards vista from the Parlour Garden to the stream, which was dammed to make the Octagon basin, with its attendant Doric Pavilions, marking the south entrance to the gardens. Next Bridgeman ‘threw out’, as sappers do, a salient or earth-bank to the north-west of the Octagon, enclosing a large piece of ground; the salient, though continuing northwards, was interrupted by an angled bastion, the site of Vanbrugh’s Rotunda, which overlooked another piece of formal water, the old Hog Pond transformed into Queen Caroline’s Pond, with her statue presiding.
Once started, extensions proved contagious. The salient, Bridgeman’s bank-and-ditch ha-ha, became a fort-within-a-fort as the bounds were extended twice as far again westwards; Bridgeman dug the tentatively natural Eleven-Acre Lake, bounded by his great fortified bank and ditch, or ha-ha, known as the ‘Grand Terras’, broken by the angled bastion that contained the Temple of Venus; the ha-ha continued northwards to the Boycott Pavilions, built at the west entrance to the park. Within the nearer garden, east of the south vista, where the ancient Stowe parish church was surrounded with trees (and the remaining cottagers moved to Dadford village), Bridgeman laid out the Elysian Fields, the setting for William Kent’s Temples of Ancient Virtue and of British Worthies. Here, in the ‘fields’ of sunlit lawns and serene water, the military garden died; vanquished by the soft-skinned boy from Bridlington, William Kent, and ‘Mr Kent’s notion10 of gardening, viz., to lay them out and work without level or line’. Bridgeman, proud of his work, had commissioned a set of views of Stowe from the French artist Jacques Rigaud and the engraver Bernard Baron, and these were published by Sarah Bridgeman in 1739, the year following her husband’s death.
The bell at the gate by the Doric Lake Pavilions summoned a gardener to conduct visitors around, but the new gardener Lancelot was directed to Lord Cobham’s Steward, William Roberts: as he walked, he passed ‘a long but Narrow Visto11 leading up to the front of the House’, the Octagon basin with central rustic obelisk, failing to spout water ‘for want of a due Supply’, and west of the Octagon the ‘long irregular form of water and cascade over several artificial Craggs and Rocks but only working for about 2 hours’.12 In its winter undress, and empty of belles in fluttering coloured silks and their scarlet-coated beaux, and in the rain, Stowe was at its least attractive.
Stowe, 1742, diagrammatic plan drawn by an anonymous visitor showing the features that existed in Lancelot’s time: these can be identified as follows:
A-A at foot, south of plan, the Lake Pavilions’ entrance
B. Octagon Basin or Water, with C, a cascade.
D. Temple of Venus
E. Temple of Ancient Virtue ‘rais’d on an Eminence’
F-F. The Boycott Pavilions
G. Vanbrugh’s Pyramid
H. Temple of Bacchus
I. A small obelisk
K. A Saxon temple L. A Roman temple
M. Stowe house
N. The Rotunda
O. ‘His Present Majesty’ George II on a column
P. Statue of Queen Caroline, 4 Ionic columns on a pedestal.
Q. The Temple of Virtue
R. A Hermitage
S. S two Shell temples
T. ‘A 3-Arch’d Building’
U. ‘An India house’? W. Temple of British Worthies
X. A bridge Z. The Temple of Friendship.
1. A Pebble ‘house’
2. Congreve’s Monument
3. ‘the end of the River’
4. 4-4-4 ‘Grand Walks’ i.e. boundaries at the time
5. a Cascade 6-6 the ‘narrow visto’ avenue
7-7 Walks 9. Dido’s cave 10. The Sleeping parlour
11. ‘a Witch house’ 1
2. A Gothic Temple, on east boundary i.e. Gibbs’s temple partly-built
13. The cold bath
But there was work to do. Lancelot’s first job was to clear the remnants of Sir Richard Temple’s Parlour Garden terraces, and Lord Cobham’s walls of statue-filled niches, from the south front of the house, so that it lay open to a natural lawn: this still did not open up the great view southwards, except through the ‘Narrow Visto’ of Bridgeman’s bosky Abele Walk, but it was progress towards the rural garden. To the east, beyond the Elysian Fields, the Hawkwell Field was grazed by sheep – ‘a progression from the notion of Elysium13 to that of Arcady, an ideal earthly paradise’ in literary terms. The architect James Gibbs was currently designing a large Gothic Temple to preside over the Hawkwell Field, so Lancelot had to prepare for this, and begin the enormous task of constructing the ha-ha around the east side of the garden, taking in the whole new area that was to become the Grecian Valley.