by Jane Brown
This ha-ha, its stabilising wall built of stone blocks two handspans square, owes its style of construction to the Roman builders of Hadrian’s Wall; the blocks had to be split, and were rough-hewn not sawn, which was fine practice for more ornamental building. It was also good practice at managing a team of workmen, and at holding his own when the Stowe masons were inveigled away for work on buildings. The rhythms of digging and barrowing the soil, building the supporting wall and ramming earth behind it had to be well coordinated, whatever the weather. All of Stowe’s garden was built with the age-old methods of men and barrows on planked runs, a system that, with the addition of horses and carts, lasted throughout Lancelot’s career and beyond. As many gardeners did, he devised his own large tree-moving machine – an adaptable bucket on wheels – while at Stowe.
As for wages, Lancelot started at £12.10s. for a half-year, with extra board wages paid six-weekly, this being indicative of his temporary status. After six months his position became clearer, and in the autumn of 1741 he was being paid additional amounts – ‘new gardener’s bills’:14 large sums endorsed by Colonel Speed, indicating that he had negotiated a managerial way of working; he was paying for supplies of stone and materials and the wages of travelling artisan craftsmen, and keeping his own accounts. By Michaelmas 1742 he was officially head gardener, ‘Mr Brown’ – still at £25 a year, but with his allowances for contractors increased again. His extra board wages were £9 for thirty-six weeks and a permanent settlement.
Hopefully he was lodged with some rosy-cheeked pensioner’s widow, as lucky gardeners were, for tragedy and bitterness were about to assault the Stowe community. Old soldier and Steward William Roberts,15 Lancelot’s immediate superior, ‘hanged himself because Lord Cobham had reprimanded him for mistreating, perhaps violently … the Mr D who had convicted a deer stealer’. ‘Mr D’ was a law officer, perhaps even a magistrate, so the matter was serious; but Roberts’s misery and shame serve as chilling evidence of Lord Cobham’s temper when roused, although he continued to support the Steward’s widow and children.
Roberts was replaced as Steward by one Thomas Potts, who was soon at daggers drawn with a colleague, Leonard Lloyd, a lawyer who lived by the church in Buckingham and acted for Lord Cobham in political matters, and as Steward of the Burton Dassett estate. Potts and Lloyd, out to damage each other, poisoned everybody’s working atmosphere, and then Potts vanished, as did the estate-office cash box, heavy with Michaelmas rent monies. A reward of ten guineas was offered for information as to Potts’s whereabouts in the Northampton Mercury. Whether he was found we do not know, but Leonard Lloyd was vindicated, installed as Steward, and Mr Brown rose up one higher and became Clerk of Works.
Enter Jemmy Gibbs
This was an all-inclusive role, and Lancelot found himself responsible for workers on the wider estate, tasting the mixed blessings (the greetings and small gifts, as well as the catcalls and snowballs from hooting urchins) of becoming a well-known figure in Chackmore, Dadford, Silverstone, Whittlebury and the Lillingstones, as well as in Buckingham. He was endorsing his bills for the wages and expenses of carpenters, carters, sawyers, plasterers and masons’ works, for stones from various quarries and for works on the Stowe library and chapel, as well as for garden buildings. His own words are ‘heard’ for the first time speaking up for ‘the Helpers not charg’d Christmas16 which they say they wear always pay’d; if not approv’d [I] shall call it Back’.
Now, though some of the political and poetic undertones of Stowe’s symbols may have passed him by, the importance of the architecture was borne upon him by the ponderous approach of James Gibbs. At Stowe, Vanbrugh, dead for fourteen years, was but a legend, though his 60-foot-high Egyptian pyramid, his memorial in the Home Park, was much in evidence. The ailing William Kent was rarely seen, for he had done most of his work prior to Lancelot’s arrival. So now that Lord Cobham had called Jemmy Gibbs back to design big, important buildings – many to be supervised, brick by brick and stone by stone, by Lancelot – here was an architectural opportunity that he was ready to embrace.
Gibbs was in his sixtieth year, a man grown beyond professional jealousies, and was known to be ‘courteous, moderate,17 humane and charitable’. With a famously classical portfolio behind him, including Pope’s villa at Twickenham, the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the King’s College Fellows’ building and the Senate House in Cambridge, and the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, Gibbs lived and worked independently in Henrietta Street, Marylebone, his only ‘office’ comprising one drawing assistant and his library of architectural books. He was ‘generally payed’ 5 per cent18 of the total cost of a building, great or small, ‘And if I goe to the Countray I am allowed my Coach hire.’ He charged one guinea for a single drawing (say, for a bridge or an obelisk) and five to ten guineas for sets of more complex drawings. Though Gibbs would have been paid directly by Lord Cobham or Steward Lloyd rather than by Lancelot, Lancelot was probably aware of these ‘professional’ charges. Gibbs was also known to be on good terms with the craftsmen he encountered over and over again, including the many who worked for the builders Smiths’ of Warwick, all of them familiar figures in the south Midlands shires. All these things and more, and their shared northernness (though Gibbs was more extreme, he came from Aberdeenshire and was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and by the Jesuits), indicate that Lancelot was deeply impressed by Gibbs and his way of working, and took many of Gibbs’s habits for his own. (Was it from Gibbs that Lancelot first heard the name of the trusty bankers, Drummonds of Charing Cross?)
Gibbs liked to teach; he had long realised the inaccessibility of the vocabulary of classical architecture to the artisans and ambitious craftsmen working in the countryside. His Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture, first published in 1732, was reissued in 1738, priced at one guinea, with loose sets in twenty-one weekly parts at one shilling each, for those who could not afford the whole outlay at once. Rules for Drawing may not have been found by Lancelot as yet, but he studied one of its offshoots, recommended by Gibbs, The Builder’s Dictionary: or Gentleman and Architect’s Companion … faithfully digested from the Most Approved Writers on these Subjects (1734), containing ‘a great deal of useful Knowledge19 in the Building Business’. Lancelot studied this volume, making fifteen pages of handwritten notes on the architectural terms and meanings that he now needed to know (which were retained in the Stowe archives). His point of practical reference was Gibbs’s classical Temple of Friendship, designed at this time, built of fine golden sandstone (now in part-ruins, revealing its brick-and-rubble core) and standing on Bridgeman’s south-eastern bastion, of critical importance in the cross-views. Just to the east, and also by Gibbs, almost an ‘end-of-term’ building project, was the cubic Imperial Closet, with inside the alarmingly full-length figures painted by Francesco Sleter, of three Caesars: Titus, Trajan and Mark Antony.
Stowe, James Gibbs’s Gothic Temple, for which Lancelot supervised the building, inspiring his love of castellations, from George Bickham, The Beauties of Stowe, 1750.
Most interesting by far, and Lancelot’s introduction to Gothic in a hands-on and defining experience, was Gibbs’s innovatory, almost comic building dedicated ‘to the Liberty20 of our Ancestors’, which must have caused some guffaws amongst the builders. Set on Hawkwell Hill, with its pointed arches, churchlike windows, oddly angled castellations and towers (the tallest being 70 feet high), all in the strongest iron-stained east Northamptonshire stone, this stunning building of the Gothic Temple was impressed upon Lancelot’s mind’s eye for ever. It was still unfinished, merely an empty shell, in 1748, and we may imagine him examining it at his leisure in wintry dawns or on summer evenings, until he had marked and inwardly digested all the method of its curious design.
One more important building, erected under his clerkship, was the ‘Lady’s Building’ (subsequently much altered and now called the Queen’s Temple). Gibbs’s original building had a rusticated and arcaded basement, with a pretty V
enetian window for the first-floor room, intended for ‘Ladies employing themselves in Needle and Shell-work’21 and ‘diverting themselves with Painting and Musick’. This was Lancelot’s first experience with the finesse of a Venetian window, a feature that he employed at his first opportunity at Croome.
The rather lackadaisical building programme, with too many new things started at once, gave an otherworldly atmosphere to the kingdom of Stowe. It was like a continuous fête champêtre or living on a stageset. These much-celebrated buildings, however, contained vital lessons about the siting of buildings in a landscape. The Queen’s Temple (Lady’s Building) and Lord Cobham’s male preserve, the Temple of Friendship, answered each other across the length of Hawkwell Field, whilst the Gothic Temple on its eminence looked in from the east – each within its own space, but cohabiting in, as Samuel Richardson found, ‘such a Scene of Magnificence22 and Nature display’d, the Fields abounding with Cattle, the Trees and Water so delightfully intermingled, and such a charming Verdure, Symmetry, and Proportion, every-where presenting to the Eye, that the Judgment is agreeably puzzled, which singly to prefer of so many collected Beauties’. Gibbs made Stowe Lancelot’s ‘university’, and partly his Grand Tour, though more was yet to come.
A Marriage at Stowe
In all these five years since Lancelot left home there is little evidence of family matters. Did Lancelot see his mother Ursula again before she died in 1742? Did he go north for George’s wedding to Catherine Fenwick of Hartburn the following year, or even for John’s wedding to Jane Loraine in the spring of 1744? He certainly kept in touch with home and was surely there sometimes. Possibly he went as part of the same long journey that took him on his last visit to Miss Bridget Wayet in Boston, so that he headed north with the good news that she had agreed to marry him. They were married in the little church of St Mary’s at Stowe on 22nd November 1744. Two years earlier ‘the wal[l]s of the church were white washed23 and the Ld’s Prayer creed and commandments painted on the Walls and the King’s Arms drawn and fram’d and hung up in Mr Gabell’s [vestry room]’. Lancelot and Bridget were married by Henry Gabell (vicar 1734–61) and signed his register in the vestry room. The five ‘very tunable’ seventeenth-century bells sang out.fn1
Lancelot had a home for Bridget, having persuaded Lord Cobham that they should live in the ‘very good habitable House’,24 as Defoe called it, that was the western of the two Boycott Pavilions; as Gilbert West explained in verse, this had been intended for Colonel Speed, Cobham’s:
Stowe, the Boycott Pavilions, as illustrated by Benton Seeley, 1750; the western pavilion, built c.1730 for a ‘gentleman’ was home to Lancelot and Bridget after their marriage in 1744.
Faithful Companion25 of his toilsome Days,
(He led Thee on in Glory’s noble Chace!)
This was truly a mark of Lord Cobham’s regard for Lancelot and his bride, for West’s poem continues:
But shall the Muse approach the Pile, assign’d
Once, for a Mansion to her much-lov’d Friend,
And not bestow one sad, one tuneful Tear,
Unhappy Speed! on thy untimely Bier?
The pavilions marked the western, Oxford entrance to Stowe, and were then joined by railings and gates. (These gates were subsequently moved farther westwards to the newer Oxford entrance.) In her miniature ‘mansion’ Bridget Brown was close to Nelson’s Walk, named for the late foreman William Nelson, which led to the gate into the garden workshops and yards east of Stowe house, where Lancelot was often to be found. She was well secluded from the work gangs and from the constant stream of fine-weather visitors; but even so, one wonders what the former Miss Wayet from morally upright Boston thought of fashionably louche Stowe? She was isolated both physically and socially in a way she had not known before, for living in a garden might sound all very fine and romantic, but Lady Cobham and her ladies required a curtsey, and Bridget had to tolerate being patronised – albeit kindly – in return. One hopes she found at least one good ally amongst the wives of the household’s senior staff. The estate farm and the farms at Boycott supplied her with milk, butter and cheese, but to reach the dairy she had to negotiate the ford at the Oxford Water; in the other direction it was almost 2 miles’ walk to Dadford village. Gifts of venison and game came Lancelot’s way, as well as his perquisites of vegetables and fruit from the gardens,27 but everything else had to wait for holiday jaunts to Buckingham’s markets.
But Bridget was an intelligent and sober young woman, and she had invested her energies into Lancelot’s well-being; it was more than enough to sit by the fire of an evening and hear his news, to sharpen his quills in a wifelike manner, to tidy his books and papers and talk of their dreams. Lancelot settled most happily into married life, and Bridget assumed her additional roles as his closest friend and most-desired companion, a situation that apparently never changed. His marriage was the rich and resourceful backdrop to his life and all that he did, the secret behind his quizzical smile and his ability to disarm the meanest and most critical of clients.
They were, in the old-fashioned sense, a Christian couple, and one wonders what Bridget made of Stowe, if – when walking out into the quiet garden on a fine evening – Lancelot dared introduce her to some of Lord Cobham’s more risqué pagan indulgences: the walk to church through the Elysian Fields meant encountering so many graven images that one (anonymous) visitor had noted that ‘unless the Influence of the Preacher is great indeed, More will pay there Devotions among the Antient Heathens than the Modern Xtians’.26 Lord Cobham fully intended the irony of having the Ten Commandments painted onto the church wall, yet being freely broken all over the garden: Cain was slaying Abel (near the Hermitage), the voluptuous Venus was disporting herself upon a pagan altar in the Rotunda, in Dido’s Cave ‘The Trojan Hero’ Aeneas was ravishing ‘the Tyrian Queen’, while the Sleeping Parlour carried the exhortation ‘Since all things are uncertain, indulge thyself’. In the Temple of Bacchus, ‘The painted Walls mysterious Orgies spread’, and not far away ‘A cool Recess there is … Sacred to Love, to Mirth, and rural Play’. This Recess figures in Gilbert West’s descriptive poem (1732) in the story of a pretty girl on a swing, startled by an ardent youth from whom she fled, ‘swift away, more rapid than the Wind’:
And sought the Shelter of the closer Shade;
Where in thick Covert, to her weary Feet,
A Private Grotto promis’d safe Retreat:
Alas! Too private, for too safely there
The fierce Pursuer seiz’d the helpless Fair;
The Fair he seiz’d, while round him all the Throng
Of laughing Dryads, Hymenaeals sung.
Venus, like a madame nodding her approval. Having escaped one, she fell to a second pursuer (whom she thought a friend), popularly thought to be none other than the previous vicar, Conway Rand – hence the Recess was called the ‘Randibus’.
Conway Rand, apparently good-natured enough to see the joke, was also a former chaplain of one of Cobham’s regiments, as well as the likely guardian of Signor Fido,28 the Italian greyhound memorialised to the rear of the Temple of British Worthies as the epitome of the virtues of Stowe:
He was no Bigot,
Tho’ he doubted of none of the 39 Articles.
And, if to follow Nature,
And to respect the Laws of Society,
Be Philosophy,
He was a perfect Philosopher;
A faithful Friend,
An agreeable Companion,
A loving Husband,
Distinguish’d by a numerous Offspring,
All of which he liv’d to see take good Courses.
‘O Pitt!29 Thy country’s early boast’
Stowe, in clement seasons and fine weather, was a crowded place, and Lancelot soon learned that he had become a figure of interest, ever likely to be drawn into conversation by visitors, or summoned by his lordship, who came striding across the lawns dressed in fading regimentals (he must have had closets full of uniforms that neve
r wore out). He was invariably accompanied by an adulatory string of ambitious young men, his famous ‘Cubs’, and by poets like James Hammond,30 who wrote:
To Stowe’s delightful scenes I now repair,
In Cobham’s smile to lose the gloom of care;fn2
Lancelot never knew who would interrupt his morning’s work with some asinine, time-wasting question or other, for the house was always harbouring new faces. But there was soon one he learned to look out for: ‘the tall, animated, commanding-looking32 Mr Pitt who talked a great deal and was it seemed much listened to’. William Pitt was arrogant and aloof, but – it helped that they were both tall and saw eye-to-eye – he was passionately interested in gardening, and invariably curious as to what Lancelot was doing, and in this way they came to an early (unspoken) understanding. Lancelot, with his reiver shepherd’s genes, refused to be intimidated, and was unfailingly polite, and they became convenable with each other. Pitt was eight years older, a scion of a ‘cockatrice brood33 of Pitts’ thickly sprinkled in the landscape from Stratfield Saye in Hampshire through Dorset to Cornwall and ‘that cursed hiding place’ as Pitt called remote Boconnoc. Cobham’s nephew, George Lyttelton, was his best friend, and together they were founder members of Cobham’s Cubs, supporters of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and destined for bright political futures.
Pitt had been young Cornet Pitt in Cobham’s regiment, and instead of kicking his heels in camp at Towcester or Northampton, he had formed the habit of escaping to Stowe and staying for weeks on end. Now Stowe was an essential stop in his inveterate ramblings around England, to hospitable houses with interesting grounds: to Ralph Allen at Prior Park in Bath, to his cousin John Pitt at Encombe in its own Dorset cove, to the Grenvilles’ Wotton Underwood, to Gilbert West at West Wickham in Kent, to Sanderson Miller at Radway and to the Lytteltons at Hagley. Wherever he went he suggested garden improvements and was not averse to rolling up his sleeves and working at them. Because he was William Pitt, everyone was generously pleased at his taste.