Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  Lancelot’s lakes had soon become an intrinsic part of his improvements, much in evidence in his new stamping ground of Wiltshire. For the work at Longleat he was paid an estimated £4,500 in five years, 1757–62, a vivid demonstration of the impact of a young heir on his decrepit inheritance.

  Frances Hertford, the patroness of the flowery Church Walk Wilderness at Syon, had grown up at Longleat, the home of her ‘most affectionate grandfather’,37 the 1st Viscount Weymouth, who was a passionate grower of fruit and planter of Pinus strobus (the Weymouth or white pine), the seeds being imported from New England. ‘I hope we shall see you here very soon,’ he had written to Frances in the summer of 1710, ‘though Longleat had never less fruit; but the gardens are pleasant, and there is room enough for you and your sister to show off your good dancing.’ Lord Weymouth had had George London lay out his gardens some twenty years earlier: a spectacular Great Parterre, with a central canal and fountain, divided into four-square lawns edged with clipped yews and flower-filled borders. Ranged on each side of the Parterre were whole sequences of walled gardens, their walls crowded with flowers and fruit; hardly a Longleat wall was without pears, apples, quince, cherries or apricots, and Longleat was famed for its fruit. Lord Weymouth had died four years later, in 1714, leaving an estate of 50,000 acres38 with an annual income of £12,000, ‘a little paradise [run] on a basis of mutual service and benefit between landlord and community’. Confusion and sadness are the marks of the following decades, for the 2nd Viscount went to live in Horningsham after the death of his wife in 1736, and Longleat was emptied and shuttered, ‘plunged heavily into debt and disrepair’.39

  In 1754 the 3rd Viscount came of age and returned: the splendours of forty years earlier were hardly evident, tastes had changed, and it was logical that Lord Weymouth should instruct Lancelot to set his house in a natural park, which the contours dictated as a bowl of greensward. Lancelot installed John Sanderson as foreman for this tremendous task; apart from the unceasing labours of dismantling, digging and barrowing away to make the smooth lawns around the house, there were the views across the 1,100-acre park to be manipulated with land-moulding and tree-planting; the ancient ‘lete’ from which the house took its name flowed down from the hill beyond Horningsham to the south, and it was engineered into an apparently natural series of lakes, 1 mile long; finally, a new walled kitchen garden, of immense proportions, was built at Horningsham and, apart from the drive to be constructed between the two, there were walks, adorned with shrubs and flowers, to be made from the house door to a hill called High Wood, and on from High Wood to Horningsham.

  Unfortunately, these glorious achievements at Longleat were over-shadowed by the much-quoted verdict of the celebrated and well-connected Mrs Delany; as Mary Granville, she was married at Longleat in 1718. On returning in 1760, she noted ‘not much alteration in the house, but the gardens are no more!40 They are succeeded by a fine lawn, a serpentine river, wooded hills, gravel paths meandering round a shrubbery all modernised by the ingenious Mr Brown!’ Mrs Delany, a figure of some respect, has been frequently turned into an accuser, a witness to Lancelot’s supposed crime of destroying old gardens. Her words should perhaps be read in the context of her experience. She was lively, intelligent, poor and not quite eighteen at her marriage – ‘sacrifice’ is perhaps the better word – to the ungainly, morose and crimson-countenanced, but rich Alexander Pendarves, who was sixty. Some six miserable years later she woke up one morning to find him dead beside her. She had other reasons for expressions of loss on returning to Longleat, which were probably nothing to do with the gardens. Nor was she necessarily being critical of what Lancelot had done.

  Some of the details of Lancelot’s works have been changed in the intervening 250 years, but overall Longleat remains glorious and truly Brownian. What would he say if he could stand at Heaven’s Gate and watch the daily summer procession of cars winding their way down into his park, bringing the visitors to enjoy Longleat’s attractions and support its upkeep. His great silver-trunked beeches at Heaven’s Gate are gone, lost in the storms of twenty years ago, but the guardians of British woodlands, the ‘Men of the Trees’ have replaced them and carved his name with theirs.

  Shortly after seeing George Lucy in Bath, in April 1761, Lancelot presented himself at Bowood, just south of the London road at Calne, where he had hopes of a lake. John Fitzmaurice, created Earl of Shelburne in 1753, had bought the estate the following year, both his title and his fortune being inherited from his mother Anne Petty, heiress of the polymath Sir William Petty, physician, surveyor, political economist, colleague of Wren, Pepys and Samuel Hartlib, and inventor of the ‘catamaran’41 and the artificial harbour. His father, Thomas Fitzmaurice, 1st Earl of Kerry, was the direct descendant of a twelfth-century baron of Kerry who had sired swashbuckling generations loyal to their sea-misted mountain country, and rather less so to the English Crown.

  Landlocked Bowood was a passport to English society and politics. The Earl had bought an unfinished house, which the architect Henry Keene and the builders Holland’s had completed for him, with a park parcelled out of an old royal hunting forest (and, one fears, the grudges held by the displaced locals42 to go with it). Lord Shelburne had been recommended to consult Lancelot, but had not troubled to ask why: ‘What wou’d you give43 to know the consequences of the visit of the famous Mr Brown and the fruit of the 30 guineas which I gave him?’ he had written to his son and heir. ‘He passed two days with me … and twenty times assured me that he does not know a finer place in England than Bowood park, and he is sure no Prince in Europe has so fine a fruit garden.’ Not knowing any European princes, Lancelot crossed his fingers over the fruit garden, which was expensive and newly made; but the Earl, wistfully sighing over his Kerry mountains, perhaps did not appreciate how Lancelot loved England, and how it was all beautiful to him – especially if he had the improving of the plot in question. The Earl continued, ‘I am persuaded44 that the man means to present me at some future time with a well-digested plan for this place, and perhaps to come to me to explain it.’

  It was not a good beginning, the ‘well-digested’ implying facile repetition. The Earl received his plan, and was now (April 1761) – apparently happily – parting with £500 for the start of the contract. In May he died. William, 2nd Earl of Shelburne and Pitt’s close colleague, was to be a much more understanding client, but a decent interval had to be observed.

  The lull in proceedings at Bowood was no bad thing, for Lancelot was struggling with asthmatic attacks through the summer of 1761 and, besides checking on progress at Longleat, needed to make a start at Corsham Court, 5 miles west of Bowood in the Bath direction. He had already submitted a very cursory estimate for the park at Corsham to the owner, Paul Methuen, in December 1760, its ambiguities revealing the pressure he was under:

  Making the great Walks45 and sunke Fence between the House and the Chippenham Road. [The only direction for the park to extend was to the north of the Elizabethan house, to the road, and it was to be divided for deer park and grazing land by the sunk fence, with a ha-ha in front of the house; the Great Walk, 1 mile long, was made.]

  The Draining [of] the ground between the Sunke Fence and the line of the garden. To making the Water in the Parks, as also the levelling round it. [An oval lake was intended for Corsham, east of the house, but this unusual design was not explained or supervised, nor was the source of water identified; what transpired was a pear-shaped lake and was soon changed.]

  The levelling round the House, as also on Front the New Building.

  [The new building, a picture gallery on the east side of the house, made the commission appealing, providing the chance to relate the house to the setting.]

  The Sunke Fence on the Front of the Church-yard. All the Planting included Mr Methuen to find trees … the above Articles come to one Thousand and twenty Pounds.

  In September 1761 Lancelot had to apologise for ‘My health46 which has been extreamly bad [but] is now on the mend and I
hope soon to be quite stout’. He intended to send John Sanderson from Longleat to Corsham to get the work started. In Paul Methuen he had found an enlightened client, who appreciated that a building needed to be carefully related to its setting, especially concerning the views from the windows. The picture gallery was to be added to the Methuens’ mellow Elizabethan house, to make ready for a promised inheritance of paintings collected by Methuen’s cousin and godfather, the well-travelled diplomat Sir Paul Methuen. However, it was not easy, for the church and the quaint streets of Corsham village clung close on the south and west sides of the Court – the juxtaposition of these buildings contributing to a stunning townscape. Only the east side of the house was unimpeded, so here the picture gallery – reminiscent of Lancelot’s 1747 layout for Stowe’s ‘Long Room’ (75 × 25 × 20 feet high) – was duly built.

  Corsham Court, Works carried out for Paul Methuen c.1761–64, originally concerned with the addition of a rectangular Picture Gallery to the east end of the house. Lancelot then persuaded his client that having built the gallery with east-facing windows, he had to contrive the views.

  Corsham Court with St Bartholomew’s Church.

  Lancelot’s ha-ha made to divide the park.

  Lancelot’s lake was more delicately shaped (pear-shaped) but this was modified after his time.

  Gardens, shrubberies and wilderness walks to Lancelot’s Gothic Bath House (also subsequently modified). The North Avenue and the South Avenue were conserved as part of the ‘wilderness’ walks.

  The picture gallery is a plain block, with alterations to key it into the existing house; it has a fine coffered ceiling of ‘Palmyra’ design origins, the work of the stuccoist Thomas Stocking of Bristol. Despite the considerable attentions of both Repton and Nash to almost everything that Lancelot planned here, there is still the deep satisfaction of his coolly logical layout, especially in the line of the ha-ha which defines the garden; some of the trees are splendid and are certainly his, and the double-storey bath house (though Gothicised by Nash) nods to its parent, Sanderson Miller’s pavilion at Farnborough Hall.

  ‘An exceeding great tumble’47

  Corsham Court had its problems, for the lines of communication were so long and Lancelot’s health suffered from the travelling, but there were other reasons for difficulties. These seemed to mount and almost overwhelm Lancelot in the early 1760s, the prelude to a frantic decade. In his letter to Paul Methuen of September 1761 he offered a tantalising grumble: ‘but the Queen’s not coming has made an exceeding great tumble in my business’. George II had collapsed and died while dressing for his morning walk the previous 24th October (1760), and the country was now ruled by his twenty-two-year-old grandson George III. George, inclined to melancholia and to falling in love with unsuitable girls, was also thought to be too much influenced by his ‘dearest friend’ John Stuart, the 3rd Earl of Bute. A Scot of such a clan and from a western isle, however much the elegant courtier, was clearly thought by many to be a retrograde influence, and the priority was a royal marriage to a good German princess. These things, however, are not arranged overnight – and even when they are arranged, and the princess, Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, has been found – there are courtesies to be observed, and prayers to be offered that the weather in the Channel would be kind. Rumours were rife, facts were few, and through long summer days everyone waited. From Lancelot’s point of view, several of his would-be clients dared not be missing in the depths of the countryside when the new Queen’s household was appointed, nor would they commit to expensive works before their royal remuneration was assured. To Lancelot’s lordly patrons, the court was a major employer: ‘the Queen’s not coming’ kept everyone in suspense.

  The Princess arrived, after a stormy crossing, and was bundled into a coach at Harwich and then jolted on to London; matters were so delicate that no one had told her that she was to marry the first man she met. It was a day of intense heat, 8th September, and the young King and the seventeen-year-old Charlotte,48 weighed down in a dress of gold and silver, were married immediately after their first meeting, in the Chapel Royal at St James’s, at ten o’clock that evening. Their coronation was celebrated on 22nd September.

  St James’s Palace was the accepted royal residence, but George III hated it, for it was ancient and he considered it filthy and affording little privacy. The garden – that is, St James’s Park – had been open to Londoners for many years, and although it was the accepted haunt of the beau monde at the perambulating hours in the Mall, it was a played-out formal landscape dating from Charles II’s time. There was a long and mouldering canal (the haunt of flocks of geese and ducks), an ancient pond (Rosamund’s Pond, which stank) and ancient elms shaded the cow pastures where milkmaids sold beakers of warm and frothy milk. Londoners loved the park, but it was hardly a suitable royal garden.

  Soon after the royal marriage a combination of immediacy, William Pitt and Lord Bute, resulted in Lancelot being asked to improve the park. His plan was to retain the Mall and Birdcage Walk avenues of limes, and in the space between them he proposed to replace the formal canal with a serpentine lake, as the young King favoured the natural style. Perhaps Lord Bute and his fellow courtiers had imagined that a refurbished palace and a redesigned and private park would do? Until, that is, they consulted the wiseacres with their memories of the King’s grandmother, Queen Caroline, who had asked Prime Minister Robert Walpole what the cost would be of regaining St James’s Park as a private garden. Walpole’s sonorous reply, ‘Only three CROWNS,49 madame’, put an end to the idea.

  A better solution was found when it was revealed that the Duke of Buckingham’s heir, Sir Charles Sheffield, was disposed to sell his house at the head of the Mall; the beavering lawyers had discovered that part of the property was held on a ninety-nine-year Crown lease, which was about to expire. Buckingham House had long been coveted by the royal family for its large and private garden and its wilderness where nightingales sang; indeed, the young King had been taken as a boy by his father to hear them. The new plan was for the court to remain at St James’s, while the beau monde and the milkmaids stayed in the park, and George III – or rather his trustees, Lord Bute and Philip Carteret Webb, acting on his behalf – paid £28,000 for what was to be called the Queen’s House. The Queen’s House was to be a triumph, the symbol of George and Charlotte’s successful marriage, where their large family were reared in both privacy and apparent happiness.

  The Duke of Buckingham’s once-fine formal garden had been neglected since the Duchess died in 1742. Soon after the royal purchase, and in 1762 or 1763, Lancelot was asked to improve the garden. The survey made for the conveyance shows that he found a crooked hexagon of pasture crossed by a straggling double avenue of limes, which formerly flanked a long canal that had been filled in. With some extra acres acquired from what is now Green Park, he proposed alternative schemes: the more elaborate scheme used sculpted drifts of trees to create two large groves, the largest of these centred on the garden front of the house, containing a sublimely egg-shaped, oval lake. Sadly, this was not made (Queen Charlotte, a doting mother, perhaps feared for the safety of her young family?). Lancelot’s generous ‘ambits’ or surrounds of trees gave just the desired privacy, and it seems that much of this shelter belt was planted. But there the elegance faded, for the ‘garden’ became paddocks for the animals that the Queen collected, particularly her Kashmiri goats, but most famously the elephant and zebra (the latter painted by George Stubbs), which could sometimes be seen through the railings and became a great attraction.fn4

  There is no obvious evidence that Lancelot was paid for the St James’s Park or Queen’s House designs, and they do not appear in his surviving account book, which dates from 1762. Were they simply credited to him, royal appointment pending? Was he expected to become a polished courtier, as Henry Wise had been? Lancelot was far too busy to either wait around for patronage or become clubbable, though he did make one attempt at joining a fashionable society. This was
the Society for the Encouragement of Arts,50 Manufactures & Commerce, founded in 1754 as a forum for discussions and publishing papers on a wide range of social and economic policies. It was based in the Strand, and one imagines Lancelot hurrying to or from Drummonds Bank or Northumberland House on a sunny morning, when he met Sir Thomas Robinson, a great proposer of members, in line with a drive to reach 1,200. Lancelot was proposed at a meeting on 6th August 1760, and elected on 20th August – ‘Lancelot Brown Esq, Hammersmith’ being entered in the register – and he paid his two-guinea subscription. He found his fellow members to be attorneys, cabinet-makers, soldiers, merchants, clothiers and booksellers, and there were also a great number of his clients and supporters, as well as Robert Adam, David Garrick and William Chambers. Most importantly for Lancelot, and elected at the same meeting, were the brothers Clive: Robert and Richard and George.

  The Queen’s House, now Buckingham Palace, Lancelot’s proposals for Queen Charlotte’s grounds, c.1762.

  Robert Clive was the hero of the hour, newly returned to England, as Lady Northumberland had recorded in her diary just a month earlier, on 15th July 1760: ‘Colonel Clive51 arrived from India dined in public at the White Hart in Guildford [with] all the doors and windows thrown open, that everybody’s curiosity might be satisfied.’ On his way to London, Clive had passed close to Claremont at Esher, and had perhaps been fêted there by the Duke of Newcastle – had he fallen in love with it then? Lancelot’s fame would have been new to him, but their encounter was significant, for Colonel Clive was a fine judge of beautiful places and had a fortune to spend.

  The new Society talked much of landscape – a word frequently noted in the minutes, though this emerged as the offer of premiums or awards ‘for mezzotints,52 etchings, and engravings of woods, pastures or landscape’. A large sub-committee was set up for the promotion of these images, without Lancelot, but including the painters Joshua Reynolds and Richard Wilson and the architect William Chambers. Tree-planting was another favoured topic, frequently mentioned in the minutes as ‘logging’, because it transpired that the interest of many landowning members was in commercial forestry and the production of ‘props’ for the burgeoning mining industry. Lancelot’s subscription was not recorded after that first year.