Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  I am so shocked23 that I know not what I say or do. If I could be severed into two and one part left alive and the other part taken away, the separation could not be greater. He was indeed the better half and therefore God thought fit the worthiest should be removed …

  His friends encouraged George William to find solace in planting and directing the waters, which he had begun to do. ‘Lord Deerhurst24 has conducted his river well,’ Edward Turner of Ambrosden reported after a visit in 1748; but all too soon George William was losing heart. He could find no peace, and blamed his house: ‘it has always been an Inn25 and always must remain so,’ he grumbled to Miller in February 1750 when asking him to plan a retreat-house; ‘the hospitality of my Ancestors exercised for some generations at Croomb [sic] makes it impossible for me to effect any privacy or retirement’. He wanted to build his retreat on Spring Hill, near Broadway, which was the farthest eastern extent of the enormous 14,000-acre estate. In March, Miller noted that he had started ‘drawing a plan26 for lord D’, but neither plans nor urgencies were Miller’s forte; he knew it was not only Spring Hill, but that the rather frantic George William wanted major alterations to Croome itself – a new church and ornamental buildings, and a new, naturalistic landscape. Hence Miller’s motive in sending Lancelot. Quite what Lancelot thought when George William asked him to take on these major architectural projects can only be imagined. He made one request, that his lordship have the park area surveyed and mapped by a professional surveyor (it was to be John Doherty), ready for his return.

  Then Lancelot headed for home. His timetable had fitted into some fifteen days and he was back at Stowe before the end of August.

  Kirtlington and Wakefield Lawn

  In that autumn of 1750 or early in 1751, whilst still living at Stowe, he had two local jobs. Kirtlington was a ride of about 20 miles from Stowe westwards to the Oxfordshire border, and it belonged to the corpulent Tory baronet, Sir James Dashwood. His house, on the same generous lines, had been built by the ‘Palladian’ Smiths of Warwick, with some involvement by both Daniel Garrett and James Gibbs. Sir James had commissioned a plan for his park from George II’s gardener, the elder Thomas Greening, who seems to have relied entirely upon Switzer and showed the house surrounded by woodland with ‘wiggley paths and small clearings’.

  Greening’s approach was not entirely wrong, for the glories of the park were the plantations of great oaks dating from the fifteenth century. Much less appealing was the flat ground. Sir James had sited his house upon the only hill, so that any appropriately grand view merely drained away into the misty distances. An afternoon spent patiently riding to and fro, examining the ground for an area where a lake could be excavated and a hill raised for a pair of lake pavilions à la Stowe, was the only hope. Lancelot was at Kirtlington several times during the 1750s, but the surest evidence is that Greening’s plan was marked ‘totally changed27 by Brown’. (The park has now been extensively redesigned into a spacious golf course.)

  (Sir James Dashwood was cousin to Sir Francis Dashwood at West Wycombe, which invites speculation. In 1750 Sir Francis was forty-two, wealthy and well travelled, and lavishing his money and taste on West Wycombe house and grounds, for which he had a survey prepared by Louis Jolivet in 1751. Could the survey have been prepared for Lancelot? West Wycombe would have seemed a natural move from Stowe in terms of opportunity, except that Sir Francis was setting out to ridicule Stowe by exaggerating its carnal conceits into features of his own, the swan-shaped lake recalling Leda and her fate, and various mounds aping parts of the female anatomy. Lancelot’s circle of acquaintance became very large, but an intriguing number – Bubb Dodington (later Lord Melcombe), Sir John Aubrey, John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, Charles Churchill, Edward Lovibond, and even the Earl of Bute – are names entangled with the shadowy doings of the Medmenham ‘friars’.28 Among her very last words, Dorothy Stroud records that Thomas Cook, ‘whose peculiar skill29 and taste is exemplified in the happy disposition of the pleasure grounds at West Wycombe’, was one of Lancelot’s assistants and ‘pupils’. Cook worked for Lord Despencer, as Sir Francis Dashwood became, from the late 1760s until Despencer’s death in 1781, when he left Cook an annuity.)

  Wakefield Lawn was Stowe’s neighbour to the east, a hunting lodge belonging to Charles Fitzroy, 2nd Duke of Grafton, whose principal estate was at Euston Hall in Suffolk. For Lancelot, this was a useful connection; for us, it offers a vignette of him at work.

  The ‘lawn’ was a clearing, or park, of 245 acres surrounded by the plantations of Whittlewood Forest; the ducal entrance (Lancelot came in by the back door from Stowe) was from the east, from Watling Street at Potterspury, and the track continued along the side of the hill before taking a sharp left bend and dropping down to cross a stream, and then a sharp right to climb again to the old lodge on rising ground. The lodge entrance was into a long court lined with stables, to house a great many horses, which seemed to have almost equal comforts to the guests in the sixteen heated rooms. The views were to the north, across water to the grazed ‘lawn’ and woods, the scenes of the chase. The water, called the Great Pond, appears to be spring-fed, the source of a stream that falls eastwards, eventually joining the Great Ouse river. Lancelot’s task was to dam the Great Pond, with a cascade into a lower, smaller lake – the dam to carry the road across, between the two pieces of water, to the lodge.

  In a way the job at Wakefield was a gift from the grave; the old lodge was being extended to the designs that William Kent had made for the duke several years earlier. Kent had been unwell for several years and died miserably, ‘of a Mortification30 in his bowels and feet’, on 12th April 1748, aged sixty-three. But for his death, Wakefield Lawn32 would have had a version of the Elysian Fields: a drawing by Kent survives at Chatsworth showing an imposing Euston-like house on a hillside, with foreground water in a rocky gulch presided over by a lounging river god and a startled dog, which has the look of Wakefield. The ‘dog’31 is not well drawn and could be a fox, or even Kent’s idea of a badger – both fox and badger, the favourite beasts of the chase, being carved life-size on the saloon chimneypiece.

  The immaculately ruled, written and folded worksheets of the Duke’s foreman John Wade, record the detailed labours of his workforce of thirty, including six women, in the January chill – ‘moving the islands out of the great pond taking out the mud in some part of it’; there are trees to be removed from the overgrown pond, their roots prepared for ‘fireing’; in some places the pond has to be deepened, in other parts widened. There is a great deal of ‘faggoting of wood’ and ‘making fagots’, which are presumably the brushwood foundation for the dam, or the lake edgings, as well as the waste-not, want-not economy of the woods, producing battens and pins for building and thatching. In between are the more general winter tasks: ‘sowing turnips in the pheasantry’, mole-catching, hay-carting, and working around the stables and garden. The labourers’ names become familiar: Will Walls is always in the garden, at one shilling a day rate, with his assistant Luke Bruff and John Ludgate ‘looking after the teem’ of horses, both paid ninepence a day. The general rate is ninepence a day, sixpence for the women; they work six days, but sometimes on Sundays. These are the groundlings, literally mudlarks, who are making the overgrown pond into a respectable lake; beside them another team is building the earth dam, 80 feet wide at the bottom, ‘calving’ or sloping up to 25–30 feet wide at the top, carrying the roadway. The dam is 700 feet long (and the contour line indicates a depth of 25 feet). Lancelot was supervising the course of the road, construction of the dam and finishings of the lake, as well as the planting of clumps of trees on the lawn; the estate accounts show that he received ‘nine payments, usually £50 or £100 each’, totalling £707. 10s. over a period from December 1750 to May 1755, for both ‘Work’ and ‘the water’.

  But the immediacy of the scene comes from John Wade’s neatly written ‘Account of Labourers and Other Persons employ’d … in the Servis of his Grace’ at Wakefield in June 1751; Wi
ll Walls, Luke Bruff and John Ludgate are at their usual tasks, and:

  Will Wale (a lowlier being) helping Thomas Haloway in the Stables. The other Labourers helping in ye Stables when the Duke was here Cuting a wash and faggoting of wood where Mr Brown wanted ye new Road. Mowing weeds, watering Trees. Making a new Road in Haymead … carrying hay from the Pheasantry … Cleaning out the Reek Yard, Loosening of Earth about new planted Trees, Honing and Rakeing the Gravill yards …

  With a deal less mud in the June sunshine, amidst the bustle of the Duke’s visit, the labourers are caught in time, as if painted by George Stubbs; the countryside is at work and foreman Wade and Lancelot are laying out the course of the new road.

  Lancelot’s great Midlands gallop of August 1750 had extended his education. The journey to Radway, on to Warwick and Packington, and across to Croome, had led him through yet more unfamiliar country, across the entirety of Warwickshire and into Worcestershire, with glimpses of the River Severn and the Malvern Hills. He had covered more than 200 miles. From Thenford Hill above Banbury, he had seen the Cherwell valley laid out as on a map, and from Edge Hill it seemed that half of England hovered in the mist. Had he realised, this young man most familiar with a corner of bony Northumberland and a small patch of Lincolnshire, just how large lowland England was at her broadest hips, and how full of rutted lanes and boggy hollows, and worse pitfalls for a lone man on a horse? Did he imagine he could tame her? Or, on a fine morning or in a golden sunset, did he appreciate just how delectable was Mistress England: a flowering of stone-built villages and summer gardens, set amidst great oak trees, and of willow-edged riverside pastures and fields of neatly stooked corn? Any sober, sane man must ask himself if it was possible, or even desirable, to improve on this happy countryside.

  West Midlands gardeners talked less of Stowe and more of Hagley Park and The Leasowes. The Lytteltons’ Hagley influenced Lord Deerhurst’s ideas for Croome, though Hagley had the advantage of a much more dramatic setting on the edge of the Clent Hills, north of Kidderminster:

  There along the Dale,

  With Woods o’er hung, and shagg’d with mossy Rocks,

  Whence on each hand the gushing Waters play,

  And down the rough Cascade white-dashing fall,

  Or gleam in lengthened Vista thro’ the Trees.

  Thus the popular poet (another northerner) James Thomson, who had revised The Seasons at Hagley, had imagined George Lyttelton ‘courting the Muse’33 in his park, in ‘Spring’. Close by, on the outskirts of Halesowen, was William Shenstone’s modest ferme ornée, his grazing farm of 150 acres, with open fields and planted, watery valleys, which was both productive and beautiful on £300 a year. Shenstone’s The Leasowes was much admired and talked of, though rarely with such insight as in this verse ‘written at a ferme ornée near B[irmingham] 1749’ by his friend Henrietta Luxborough:

  ’Tis Nature34 here bids pleasing scenes arise,

  And wisely gives them Shenston[e] to revise;

  To veil each blemish, brighten ev’ry grace;

  Yet still preserve the lovely parent’s face.

  How well the Bard obeys, each object tells;

  These lucid meads, gay lawns, and mossy cells;

  Where modest Art in silence lurks conceal’d,

  While Nature shines so gracefully reveal’d;

  That She triumphant claims the total plan

  And, with fresh pride, adopts the work of man.

  Hagley and The Leasowes were too far north to be reached on this first trip, but the fame of both was so entwined in the fashion for improvement, which drove so many of Lancelot’s clients’ desires, that he surely saw them soon.

  The Brown family’s move from Stowe was finally fixed for the early summer of 1751; their new baby John, always to be known as Jack, was baptised in Stowe church on 23rd April.

  George William Coventry had become the 6th Earl, fully in control of the Croome fortunes, and seemed likely to fulfil every young professional’s dream of a patron who gave both employment and introductions to his friends. On another visit, armed with John Doherty’s survey of the whole area north and west of the house, Lancelot had given a visionary performance from the eastern hill, describing how the ‘grave young lord’s’35 artificial river would be extended on a romantic course through the whole scene; how the bowl-effect of the park would be emphasised by plantings around the rim; and how – if the new church were positioned on this very hill – his lordship’s friends and relations would be presented with the whole glorious prospect upon leaving the west door on Sunday mornings. That his lordship wanted his house to have the look of Inigo Jones, for whom his ancestor, the 2nd Baron Coventry, had conceived a great admiration during the development of Covent Garden, was something that required thought.

  The prospects of Croome, Charlecote, Warwick, Packington, Kirtlington, Wakefield Lawn, perhaps West Wycombe, and the promise of work for Lord Dacre at Belhus in Essex – these were enough security for Lancelot to venture on his independent career. He and Biddy packed up their belongings and said goodbye to their home in the Boycott Pavilion; never again would they have such a romantic building to live in, but they had truly outgrown it. They set out southwards; for all Stowe’s faults and frustrations, they were leaving the enchanted garden, apparently never to return.

  5

  HAMMERSMITH, A STAGE FOR MR BROWN

  Which way, Amanda, shall we bend our course?

  The choice perplexes. Wherefore should we choose?

  … Say, shall we wind

  Along the streams? Or walk the smiling mead?

  Or court the forest glades? Or wander wild

  Among the waving harvests? Or ascend,

  While radiant Summer opens all its pride,

  Thy hill, delightful Shene? …

  Slow let us trace the matchless vale of Thames …

  James Thomson, ‘Summer’, The Seasons, 1727

  THE BROWNS WERE bound for Hammersmith in the summer of 1751. And why on earth Hammersmith? The practical answer is that someone, probably kind George Lucy of Charlecote, offered them a house for rent. The Lucys had a long connection with Hammersmith, had given land for the churchyard to St Paul’s church, and still owned a house nearby. The Browns’ house was on the Mall, facing the Thames, and it is hardly less significant to add that the lakelike qualities of the river, gazed upon in that first quiet dawn, captivated Lancelot – the Thames, flowing serenely, reflecting sailboats and trees, with softly shelving green banks that made it easy for horses to drink and boys to bathe; the Thames, curving graciously away into the distance or divided by a leafy eyot (or island), was immediately printed upon his mind’s eye as the ideal ‘river-stile’ and serpentine water.

  Hammersmith was a village of picturesque squalor, very pretty in the sunshine, and part of that celebrated riverscape that Daniel Defoe had declared ‘surpassed anything that Danube, Seine or Po1 could muster’. Defoe had given James Thomson his cue, with praises of the ‘distant glories’ displayed from Ham and Hampton Court, Richmond, Syon, Kew and Chiswick, downstream to Fulham and Chelsea, Battersea and Lambeth and thence to Somerset House in the Strand, ‘for one fine house that was to be seen then, there are a hundred; nay, for ought I know, five hundred to be seen now, even as you sit still in a boat’. Though Hammersmith is missing from his list, being more of a working village, Defoe goes on to explain why an ambitious gardener should be there, for ‘the river sides are full of villages and those villages so full of beautiful buildings, charming gardens and rich habitations of gentlemen of quality’ – the very seat of ‘the strange passion for fine gardens which has so commendably possessed the English gentlemen of late years’.

  Hammersmith, J. Oliphant’s view, c.1750, showing the riverside community where the Brown family lived from 1751-64. The houses in the Mall are shown in the middle distance.

  Hammersmith was a companionable mix of houses and cottages cheek by jowl with nursery gardens, boatmen’s cottages, sail-maker’s yards and fields o
f lettuces and lavender. A modest community, it formed one ‘side’ of the parish of Fulham, between the third and fourth mile from Hyde Park Corner on the Kensington turnpike, and on the north bank of the Thames’s great sweep between Chiswick, ‘the cheese farm’, and Fulham, residence of the Bishops of London. The Malls, lower and upper, were separated from one another by the Creek, a picturesque inlet spanned by a wooden bridge – the High Bridge. At the bridge four old footways converged, the Lower Mall and Aspen Place, the Upper Mall and Bridge Street. Lancelot’s letters were addressed simply to ‘The Mall’; the Browns most probably lived in one of the tall seventeenth-century houses that once stood beside the river, but the records that show the rates paid on these houses have been lost.

  Hammersmith was ripe for business. Gardeners’ gossip told Lancelot of the best nurseries, and of good men looking for work, and where to locate the help that he needed. If only for nostalgia’s sake, it was but a short ride to the great Brompton nursery of South Kensington, once the home of ten million plants, which had supplied trees by the hundreds for Blenheim, and equal quantities of apples and pears, mulberries and peaches to Woburn, without any hint of panic. Their roles here as nurserymen had supported the careers of the legendary old formalists, George London and Henry Wise. Stephen Switzer, who described himself as ‘Gardener, Several Years Servant to Mr London2 and Mr Wise’, had admired both of them, and had inherited some of London’s northern clients. Henry Wise, a steady bachelor-gardener of forty-two when he married the daughter of a Royal Master Carpenter, Patience Bankes, found himself with the all-powerful Office of Works’ entrée into royal gardens, as well as a wife who supported him through another forty years – toasted rhubarb being a favourite remedy when he returned from long wet rides from Chatsworth or Longleat.