Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  ‘Short river’ begun prior to Lancelot’s arrival, with white wooden ‘Halfpenny’ bridge.

  River-style lake extended to southern boundary, with dam and sluice on the park boundary.

  North extension of watercourse and new lake, with two islands.

  Robert Adam’s Temple Greenhouse, shrubbery of exotics protected by ha-ha from grazing meadow.

  Lancelot’s Grotto.

  Lancelot’s Rotunda, with distant views; adjacent Shrubbery-planting to shelter path to the Church (and Ice-house).

  So there he was, out in the soggy meadows at Croome, working out his professional identity. He had little wish to design houses or build them, but felt honour bound to have the buildings in the right places for the good of his effects, knowing that he had to deal with the buildings to win his park commissions.

  Croome was a good 100 miles from Hammersmith; how many times Lancelot made that trip can only be imagined, with the building and the drainage to be supervised, and the site for the Earl’s new house at Spring Hill outside Broadway to be visited on the way out or back. Events, or an event, had complicated matters, in that the sober, handsome, musical, but humourless George William, Lord Coventry, a Groom of the Bedchamber, had fallen violently in love with a Beauty. This was none other than Maria Gunning, the eldest of the four daughters of Colonel John Gunning of Castle Coole in County Fermanagh and his wife Bridget Bourke of Mayo (of a family of famous beauties). Mrs Gunning had brought Maria and her equally beautiful sister Elizabeth to London for the 1751 Season, allegedly hoping they would become actresses or duchesses: Elizabeth was swept off her feet by James, 6th Duke of Hamilton, and Maria and Lord Coventry were married in early March 1752. Maria was vivacious and outspoken, a continual embarrassment to the Earl although he adored her, and she produced a stream of children, including an heir. The Countess did not appreciate the countryside, for she was much more Hyde Park than Croome Park, but Croome worshipped her, and every kitchen maid and garden boy and farmer’s wife for miles around came under her spell. Lancelot was probably not immune. The Coventrys became great celebrities, and though the Earl wrote to San Miller in 1756 to say that Croome ‘was a good deal altered14 since you saw it’, he meant the house rather than the park, where Lancelot’s improvements were of a lesser priority.

  Croome’s first phase ended with the death of the Countess, at only twenty-eight, her last illness supposedly aggravated by the lead poisoning from her lavish use of cosmetics. She was buried on the Croome estate at Pirton, and it is said that a crowd of 10,000 people, an astounding number in this almost deserted landscape, came to say their farewells. For the Earl, the old wound of his brother’s loss was reopened, and he was desolate; he wrote a poem of mourning:

  Her noble Partner ’midst his Mansion Mourns15

  Now treads at [evening] the dusky vale folorn

  Like Philomela pouring Plaintive Tones

  At night’s pale Moon upon her lonely Thorn.

  Warwick, ‘a few ideas16 of Kent and Mr Southcote’

  Walpole’s verdict of 1751 on his view of Warwick’s ‘enchanting’ castle, and the River Avon’s cascade, ‘well laid out by one Brown who has set upon a few ideas of Kent and Mr Southcote’, was that of a connoisseur and critic. Of course Lancelot had learned from Kent’s work at Stowe, but it is unlikely that he visited Philip Southcote’s ferme ornée at Wooburn in Surrey. The gentlemen-aesthetes, like Walpole, had their own circles of favourites, but Lancelot was not of that world, nor did he follow predictable paths; his response was to the particular ‘genius’ of the place where he worked.

  His work at Warwick Castle is difficult for us to judge, partly because it was so overlaid by changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also because the castle is marketed as ‘Britain’s Greatest Medieval Experience’ by its owners, Merlin Entertainments, who purchased it from the Greville family in 1978. Of course, for the castle’s well-being this is a very good thing, but there is a disjointure between the pervasive atmosphere of dastardly deeds in dark dungeons (with the added bloodthirstiness, ghosts and demons beloved of armies of visiting children) and the civilised and serene setting beside the Avon that Lancelot contrived. His work is much appreciated, albeit summed up in the castle guide by facile phrases: ‘It may look natural,17 but the curved sweep of the lawns down from the castle to the river is man-made. Specially chosen trees and shrubs were planted to create a frame for the castle and the landscape. The courtyard was also raised by several feet to give it a more classically balanced look.’ When a second’s thought is given to the implications of ‘softening’ the slopes of an impregnable fortress and converting its vast, rubbish-strewn bailey into a svelte green court fit for an Oxbridge college, then the soubriquet ‘Brown the Magician’ is not idly applied.

  Lord Brooke had grown used to the Smiths, first Francis and then his son William, as overseers retained for making alterations and answering his lordship’s whims. There were similarities between the genial Francis Smith, ‘our honest builder’, and Lancelot: both unflappable and notable for their integrity, and for dealing with their aristocratic clients with a polished deference. Now the firm of Smiths was in the hands of the Hiorn brothers, whom Lancelot had already made his allies, differentiating his outdoor works from the builders’ sphere, so that they most likely provided craftsmen for the Warwick work when needed.

  When Horace Walpole looked over the Banbury-road bridge in the summer of 1751 and saw the old mill and cascade and the ‘natural’ setting of the south side of the castle, work was only just beginning. (This bridge was not moved eastwards to its present site until after Lancelot’s day.) Lancelot was allocated a number of workmen, a team of horses and a four-wheeled box-wagon to accomplish these Herculean tasks. The dourness of the work can only be imagined, with one gang of men digging and stone-heaving on the outer slopes of the motte, or mound, and along the riverside, using the rubble to make up the ground of the bailey inside, every cartload bumping over the roughened ground, up and down the slopes endlessly. They worked in all weathers, perhaps allowed into the shelter of the bailey in the bitterest cold. The bailey, with the surface of a well-trampled field – grown on 500-year-old layers of rubbish and slops, with haphazard levels that necessitated changes in steps and doorways – had to be raised, levelled and harrowed for seeding with fine grasses. It would be nice to think of an August ‘holiday’ (the best time for seeding) with the ox-drawn harrow, the oxen wreathed in corn marigold and daisies for their entry into the castle, levelling the barrowed soil, followed by the men raking, and the women and girls gathering baskets of couch grass and other undesirables. Then the seed would be broadcast, ‘the cleanest hayseed’ mixed with Dutch clover, to await the hoped-for rains. On the south side of the castle the River Avon, which divided around the long Castle Meadow, had its banks shaved and grassed, and planted with trees, so that it assumed the semblance of a double linear lake.

  The intermediate phase of work at Warwick was in the ‘park’ across the Avon. Here, amid soggy and frequently flooded meadows, some seventeenth-century tree planting – the ghost of a formal wilderness – remained. This area was bounded on the east by the Banbury road, which Lancelot screened with a belt of planting. His chief work was in the drainage and damming of the Ram brook, which came from Myton in the east, to make a linear lake controlled by a sluice and dam where it joined the River Avon, with a road over this dam to connect what were now the two parts of the park. A number of clumps of trees were planted to assist the drying-out of the meadows, though these did not always please: ‘I have undone18 many of the things [Brown] left me as I thought looking formal in the planting way,’ grumbled Lord Brooke; ‘[he was] ever making round clumps that merit nothing but being very tame indeed’. However, he did not remove them all, for Thomas Hinde has observed that ‘the clumps, twenty-one trees in the shape of a filled-in oval are planted with geometric regularity, each tree with the name of a member of the family beside it’. In addition to the emerald slopes and l
awns of the castle surroundings – ‘I must say19 he hitt off the slip of the garden ground well,’ Lord Brooke later conceded – Lancelot’s chief memorials at Warwick are the cedars of Lebanon and evergreen oaks (Quercus ilex), some of his favourite trees, of a majesty to match the castle.

  Lord Brooke came to regard Lancelot as ‘his old friend Mr Brown’. The final task at Warwick, for which Lancelot issued a contract of works that was agreed, was nothing short of ‘excavating’ the castle’s massive stone walls, to create a series of family rooms out of dark cells. Thomas Gray, a friend to Lancelot, but not necessarily to Lord Brooke, saw the result soon after its completion in 1754 and was waspishly censorious of ‘a little burrough20 in the massy walls of the place for his little self and his children, which is hung with paper and printed linen, and carved chimney pieces in the exact manner of Berkl[e]y Square or Argyle Buildings’ (in Bath). In other words, shockingly nouveau. We can judge for ourselves, for these rooms, as redecorated by Frances ‘Daisy’, Countess of Warwick in the 1890s, for entertaining the Prince of Wales, are shown to visitors as the setting for a royal weekend party with the Warwicks, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Winston Churchill and his mother Jenny, Lady Randolph Churchill, Field Marshal Lord Roberts and Dame Clara Butt. The rooms, furniture and costumes are authentic – only the flesh is wax. We know they also had a launch, built by the Great Western Railway Company, for trips on the lake and along the Avon.

  In the context of the 1750s, it does seem curious that Sanderson Miller and his friends were busily sprinkling rocky knolls with sham castles, while here at Warwick, Lancelot was redeeming the violent history of a real fortress whose warring days were done.

  During 1752 the smell of success made Lancelot reckless. Each new commission was enthusiastically accepted and, though surely he had the image of England in his head now, it was only afterwards that he considered the geographical implications. After his first exhilarating inspection, each new job had to be programmed into the sequence of current works. Neither lords nor labourers, it seems, understood that his work was not finite, like building, and that deadlines so easily became lost in mud and mire. By now all his first jobs were up and running. Petworth Park, for which he had requested a survey on his visit the previous year, was a most tempting prospect, but like the fairground juggler, Lancelot already had a number of plates to keep in the air. A tour of inspection might take him to the ladies at Stoke Park, who deserved his attention, and Lady Cobham liked to hear of Biddy’s and the children’s welfare. He might drop in at Wotton Underwood to see the Grenvilles for the same reasons (George Grenville was now a Commissioner at the Treasury and rising fast), and at Wakefield Lawn to check on progress (he finished there in 1755). Twenty-five miles farther north along Watling Street, at Newnham Paddox, Lord Denbigh’s lake edgings were greening up nicely and the plantations had taken well. His lordship was in funds again and now considered rebuilding his house in the image of the new Croome.

  Thinking about this as he rode, Lancelot crossed another 20 miles of country north of Coventry to Packington. Here the new Hall Pool, made by linking the old fishponds, was filling into ‘a dramatic long sheet21 of water’, and the extents of the belts and clumps of trees needed staking out, which could well amount to two days’ work. Turning south for home, Sir James Dashwood of Kirtlington had recently paid him £100, and depending upon the progress of the ha-ha and the plantations, Lancelot might be able to ask for more.

  His stays at home were never long, for he was either dashing westwards again to Croome or, as he had promised to visit Lord Coventry’s and San Miller’s friend, Lord Dacre at Belhus, might head in completely the opposite direction, 20 miles or so beyond West Ham and into Essex. Lord Dacre was part of the Oxford coterie united by gardening, and grief: he had begun energetically four years earlier, planting 200 elms, some in a grove behind his house, others on his newly made south lawn; he had ploughed up 60 acres around the house ‘to clean it thoroughly and lay it down quite smooth and fine’, to which end he was ‘preparing a Dunghill of Chalk22 marsh earth and Dung as big as my house to spread all over it’.

  The Dacres’ happiness was completely destroyed when their nine-year-old daughter Barbara died in March 1749; Dacre’s letters to Miller and their friends had previously been concerned with the new-found inoculation against smallpox, brought from Turkey by Lady MaryWortley Montagu, but it is unclear whether her death was related to this. The Dacres retreated to Italy in their grief, and commissioned Pompeo Batoni for a triple portrait, as if Barbara was still with them. On returning to Belhus in 1751, Lord Dacre wanted Lancelot to help forward his gardening schemes and grew quite tetchy that he did not come. He was always of a worrying disposition, nervous of his mother’s known Catholicism, of being able to manage his newly inherited Belhus efficiently, and Barbara’s fate only exacerbated this. Lancelot became the butt of his stinging tongue, but eventually of his generous praise.

  * * *

  In the early spring of 1753 Lancelot was at Petworth House. He returned home in time to put in his order for shrubs and trees to John Williamson at Kensington Gore, and this first order is dated 11th April 1753. The contract for the first phase of work at Petworth is dated 1st May.

  Petworth enchanted Lancelot from the start. For a change, his work was close to a town, and one with comfortable inns; the house, ‘with its elbows to the town’23 as Defoe quaintly put it, was approached through severe and substantial courts and offices, and it was all the more rewarding to break out onto the garden side. Here, the 6th Duke of Somerset’s house, built some sixty years earlier in all the splendour of the master-craftsman-architect tradition of French influence, presented its 320-foot-long, many-windowed west façade to the park. To the north were pleasure gardens, thought to have been designed for the Duke by the formalist George London, with terrace, walks and an orangery garden.

  Petworth’s new owner, Charles Wyndham, 2nd Earl of Egremont, had not expected his inheritance, and he enjoyed beautifying his house and his grounds. Lancelot’s first contract was for work on the formal pleasure gardens, which he by no means destroyed, but rather refreshed. He proposed ‘to reduce24 and shorten the terraces, giving the ground a natural form in order that it blended properly with the Park and the level in front of the House’. Apart from this shortening of the terraces, he worked within the existing geometry. He became a flower gardener, proposing drifts of flowering shrubs to frame and unite the shapes of outgrown formal spaces, or cabinets (for small ‘rooms’), including an oval garden for bay trees, and the orangery garden, now devoted to aloes in pots. The bays, Laurus nobilis, and the Aloe vera were both Mediterranean imports at home in Petworth’s seaborne airs, the first aromatic, the second fleshly elegant, and both rare enough for comment, when gathered in numbers.

  A wilderness of birch trees with straight paths criss-crossing it, ‘the Birchen walks’, dating from the early seventeenth century, was restored and apparently extended, with the addition of serpentine walks edged with flowering shrubs. The wilderness was to be contained, and protected from the park, by a flamboyant segmental sweep of ha-ha, ‘A Foss to keep out the Deer Etc.’ – a design idea that Lancelot had tried at Kirtlington, but now applied with greater verve. His plant25 orders to John Williamson, ‘to be Charged to the Earl of Egremont’, were for dozens of shrub roses, jasmines, lilacs, tamarisks, thorns, honeysuckles and hollyhocks. He also ordered the American imports that he had so recently seen in Fulham: the brightly coloured maples, ‘Virginia Shumach’; Rubus odoratus, ‘Virginia Raspberry’; and cloudy ‘Smoke bushes’ (Cotinus) – all the very height of fashion.

  Collapse, and retrenchment, 1753 (aged thirty-seven)

  Within weeks of signing the Petworth contract, however, in the middle of this first stage of work there, Lancelot drove himself to exhaustion and collapse. This seems to have been much more than an asthmatic attack, for he was laid very low for several weeks: a severe chilling, the result of too many wet and cold journeys, developed into someth
ing much more serious, perhaps a painful and feverish pleurisy. There was no shortage of doctors in Hammersmith, for there were many prosperous patients; opium was the panacea, and bleeding the all-too-frequent medic’s remedy. The authority of the day was still Sir John Floyer’s A Treatise of the Asthma (1698), with its emphasis on the benefits of cold baths. It is most likely that Biddy’s nursing saved him, with gentler warm bathing and fomentations, poultices and liberal doses of beef tea and barley gruel. Small amounts of Indian tea and coffee were then regarded as restoratives. Lancelot’s legacy from this illness was the frequent and retching cough, and gasping for breath, of the asthmatic, but like Dr Johnson (who consulted Floyer’s Treatise as late as 1784) he was philosophic – this was ‘only occasional and unless it be excited by labour or cold, gives me no molestation, nor does it lay very close siege to life’.26 There were many popular remedies, and Lancelot became something of a connoisseur of ‘pectoral’ lozenges containing camphor, balm or liquorice, or other concoctions, which he kept close by him. The pleurisy was, though, serious; in the sporting parlance of the day, a near-run thing, and he knew that Biddy had saved his life. If she was not already so, his wife now became the one woman who excited him to emotional extremes in the cause of loving gratitude.

  The River Thames played a part in his convalescence; as his breathing eased, he sat at the window gazing out on the placidly flowing river, a soothing presence. Then he progressed to dozing in the sun outdoors, lulled by the slop-slop of the tide and the drift of chatter from passing boats. Everything London needed passed by the Mall at Hammersmith: coal and cattle and sheep, timber and bales of cloth, as well as the gardeners with their strawberries and flowers. Lancelot’s view was from the top of the river’s great loop around Castelnau and Barnes; this was not a long reach, but the westering sun, beyond Chiswick eyot (more prominent at the Hammersmith end in those days), turned it into a river of gold. In sun or misty rain, and frankly sometimes stinking, the great wash of water, combing its green banks and shingly beaches, overhung with trees that guarded sequestered paths on the opposite side, instilled its presence into his soul. In the quiet of evenings, washed with a fresh breeze and a passing sailboat or a punt or two, the Thames appeared as an elegant lake.