by Jane Brown
In these earliest years of George III’s reign, Lancelot’s innocent lake-making and planting activities were caught up in great matters, and many of his patrons and clients were currently mired in ministerial instability. He had two royal commissions, but still no royal appointment. He had well-founded hopes of Lord Bute as a client, but it was disconcerting that the amiable Lord Holderness of Sion Hill had been ousted to make way for Bute, the King’s favourite, as Secretary of State for the Northern Department. This meant that Pitt and Lord Bute were in uneasy harness, with Pitt, the ‘great hawk-nosed tyrant’, scheming ever more expensively to win the war. Suddenly, just days after the coronation on 22nd September, Pitt announced his resignation. He lost his temper in disgust at the criticism of his policies, which were essentially to fight more wars to end the war, his patience and pride foundering on the rejection of his plan to capture a Spanish treasure fleet sailing from the River Plate in order to escalate Spanish aggression. He resigned on 5th October 1761, and this was the prelude to five years in the wilderness. He accepted a title for Hester, who became Countess of Chatham, and a pension of £3,000 a year.
In the ensuing Cabinet reshuffle, and much to Pitt’s fury, his brother-in-law George Grenville defected to Lord Bute, causing a rift between Pitts and Grenvilles, which meant that the new Countess could no longer take her children to Wotton Underwood. When Lord Bute, hounded by gossip and lampoons – his ‘erections’ at Kew doubling for his developments of Kew Gardens and his supposed affair with Princess Augusta – and disowned by the King, resigned in April 1763, it was George Grenville who rose to the top of the pile as First Lord of the Treasury. Grenville was apparently dull and domineering (‘an unimaginative schoolmaster’53) and the King would soon tire of him, but he was in the highest office, and in charge of patronage, at the moment when Lancelot needed him.
‘Will the Thames ever forgive me?’
After eleven years of sociable widowhood Lady Cobham had died in March 1760; Stoke Park was to be sold. She left her riches to her companion, Miss Henrietta Jane Speed, and it seems likely that to Lancelot she did a last good deed, in mentioning his name to her new young neighbour, the 4th Duke of Marlborough at Langley Park. Lancelot was duly summoned to Langley and presented his scheme, with a large lake, which the Duke liked ‘very well’; but, he added in his letter of 29th June 1763,54 ‘as I cannot begin to make alterations (at least expensive ones) at this place and [Langley] at the same time, I have a notion I shall begin here immediately so that the sooner you come the better’. ‘This place’ was Blenheim.
Ever since his small and successful lake on the River Glyme at Kiddington, Lancelot must have dreamed of Blenheim, hovering like Olympus on the near horizon. The Glyme also flowed through Blenheim’s park, where it met the Evenlode, and thus the Thames. In the Angler Piscator asserted that of the 325 rivers in England:
the chief is Thamisis,55 compounded of two Rivers, Thame and Isis; whereof the former rising somewhat beyond Thame in Buckinghamshire, and the latter in Cyrencester in Glocestershire meet together about Dorcester in Oxfordshire, the issue of what happy conjunction is the Thameisis or Thames. Hence it flyether betwixt Berks, Buckinghamshire, Middlesex, Surrey, Kent and Essex, and so weddeth himself to the Kentish Medway in the very jaws of the Ocean.
Neither Piscator nor Lancelot had our graphic ways of seeing river systems, but Lancelot knew well enough that the upper tributaries of ‘this glorious River’ were beautiful and challenging, and also that for his purposes the Thames itself could rarely be captured below Oxford – Syon being the exception.
He could easily reach Blenheim in that midsummer, for he was working not 10 miles away to the north at Aynho,56 which is an interesting essay in the ways of water. Aynho belonged to William Cartwright, a Northamptonshire Member of Parliament, fairly recently married to his second wife, Elizabeth Dormer from Rousham. Rousham was William Kent’s romantic ‘Elysian Fields’ garden in the Cherwell valley to the south, and so Elizabeth Cartwright may well have been the spur to improving Aynho, for it was a place of deep country ways and traditions: ‘A Map of the Garden, Park & Some Landscape at Aynho taken by W’ (the name has been torn off, but may be William Collison, who made a later survey) is dated 1758, about four years before Lancelot’s arrival. It shows an old-fashioned place, the house and a cluster of courts and stables, the church close on the east side, with a southward view to a ‘terras’ and lawn and a long, long double avenue stretching out across the fields. On the higher land to the east is an L-shaped pool surrounded by trees, and Puck Well is a feature. This map tells all, for anyone standing on the terrace after a good deal of rain would see rivulets flowing across the middle of the park, which surveyor Collison (if it was he) has marked with Ys to indicate the wet areas.
The Aynho accounts of Francis Burton, the agent, detail the Cartwrights’ complex affairs; they have property all over England, and in London, and are closely connected with their neighbours at Astrop (where Lancelot has been) and with the Knightleys at Fawsley (where he will soon go). William Cartwright habitually drew £50 pocket money, but then ‘£200 for Mr Brown’ is entered on 29th August 1761, for his visit, staking out the ‘lake’, the line of a ha-ha to separate the lawn from the park, and the positions for six clumps of trees. From March 1762 to July 1763 his Drummonds account shows that Lancelot was paid a total of £480, indicating that these works were done. William Cartwright died in 1768 and was succeeded by his son Thomas; a good ten years afterwards it was decided to record those changes to the park landscape; by the time this was done even Lancelot was dead, but the map survives, beautifully cartouched and framed, showing the terrace flanked by wilderness plantations or ‘shrubberies’ of evergreens and deciduous trees, the ha-ha in place at the end of the lawn, and the whole park crossed by an elegant linear lake. The six tree clumps were in place, rather reminiscent of Kent’s style at Rousham and elsewhere.fn5
There was a dramatic change of scale from Aynho to Blenheim, the latter huge in all senses and especially challenging. For Lancelot, Blenheim was mainly about a bridge, Vanbrugh’s Grand Bridge over the River Glyme. The bridge, ‘a truly monumental structure’57 with a main arch spanning 101 feet and flanking subsidiary arches, had been designed with towers and an arcade rising to 80 feet, and contained more than two dozen rooms, some with fireplaces and chimneys, and one ‘plastered and fitted with an elliptical arch as though for a theatre’. The main arch had been completed in 1710, and two more years finished the bridging structure, but then progress was halted and the towers were never topped, nor was the covering arcade built. ‘I made Mr Vanbrugh my enemy,’58 wrote Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, ‘by the constant disputes59 I had with him to prevent his extravagance.’
‘That bridge in the air’ as she called it, was the cause of a major dispute, and another was Vanbrugh’s campaign to preserve the ruins of the old royal manor of Woodstock close by: there was a strange irony in that the bridge only became usable when Woodstock Manor had been demolished, its walls quarried for rubble filling, and ‘the very hill upon which it stood was reduced to provide material to fill those gaps at the valley side and to create a high causeway’. Vanbrugh’s disputes with the Duchess ended in her sending written orders out to the lodge-keepers to prevent him entering the park, and the final ignominy came when he arrived one day with a coachload of friends, who were allowed to enter, while he and his wife had to spend the day in a Woodstock inn.
Such tales, frequently told, made Lancelot wary, and so to have things clear from the start he sent Jonathan Spyers to make a detailed survey of the ‘Park and Gardens with some Land adjoining containing 2, 314 acres’.fn6 The surveyed area stretched from the Woodstock town boundary to the house, the course of the Grand Avenue (two double rows of English elms, 686 elms at 2s. 6d. each, their lines supported by battlemented blocks of four and eight trees) planted by Henry Wise in 1716. The Great Duke of Marlborough had asked Wise ‘to consider he was an old man61 and could not expect to live till the trees w
ere grown’, so the elms were planted fully grown with the baskets that encased their root-balls. It is always said that Wise was a master at moving large trees, and certainly Spyers has drawn the avenue as if complete, even after more than forty-five years.
The Grand Avenue is on the axis that runs across the Grand Bridge, extending through the centre of the house to become the main axis of the Duke’s military tribute garden, the state garden or Woodwork. This was the apotheosis of military gardens, and there was never anything like it at Stowe: a ‘colossal polygon’62 with eight bastions and stone curtain walls, a walk along the walls giving a commander’s view over Wise’s ‘ranks of rifle green’,63 an immaculate planting of yews, hollies, bay trees and laurels (measured for conformity of height before they left the Brompton nursery). The Woodwork and the wilderness plantings to the east and west of it, and Vanbrugh’s gigantic walled kitchen garden, as well as the flower parterres on the east front of the house for the duchess, had constituted Brompton nursery’s finest hour, a tour de force in growing, delivering and planting thousands of differing plants. It was clearly also a maintenance burden, work for an army of clippers and scythers, and it was ever a sore point with the Marlboroughs that the Grateful Nation may well have given them Blenheim, but there was no allowance for maintaining it.
At the time of the 1st Duke’s death in 1722 a final military tribute scheme was in progress, the work of the Duke’s former engineer officer, Colonel John Armstrong, who rejoiced in the title Chief Engineer of England: the Colonel devised the canalisation of the Glyme, which entered the park from the Woodstock direction, and was contained in a Pool, like a giant cistern, dug deeply into the side of the promontory upon which Blenheim house stands. The Pool has a long dam intended for a cascade and controlling the outflow into a narrow, militarily straight canal beneath the Grand Bridge. In 1723 the Duchess Sarah told the Duke of Somerset (the widower 6th ‘Proud’ Duke at Petworth, who had had the effrontery to propose marriage to her) that Vanbrugh had ‘never thought of this cascade … which will be the finest & largest that ever was made’. She also mentioned her plan for a lake ‘on the other side [of the bridge] … and I will have swans & all such sort64 of things …’ But her lake did not appear, for she allowed Colonel Armstrong’s sappers to continue their work, extending the canal on the west side of the bridge to a circular basin that enabled a ninety-degree turn southwards, the canal continuing to a dam, which controlled the flow through three large fishponds, and so back to the natural river. The antiquarian William Stukeley sketched65 Blenheim from above Rosamund’s Well in 1724 and shows the bridge, the canal and the circular pool. On the other hand, Vitruvius Britannicus of 1725 showed Blenheim supposedly complete, but with a canal beneath the Grand Bridge and the lake looking ‘natural’, which has prompted questions as to exactly what Lancelot found.
Blenheim, Oxfordshire, Boydell’s engraving of Colonel Armstrong’s scheme for the military canal for Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough.
He is supposed to have found the Grand Bridge looking ridiculous, the subject of Pope’s wit:
The minnows,66 as under this vast arch they pass,
Murmur, ‘How like whales we look, thanks to your Grace’.
Clearly this much-quoted quip displeased the young George, 4th Duke, who had adored Blenheim from his childhood and was now the proud owner. He must have asked Lancelot to restore some grandeur to his Bridge, but until fairly recently there was a deal of scepticism that the Colonel’s canal had continued beyond the bridge to the circular pool, and beyond that; the discovery of an aerial-survey photograph from 196167 clearly shows the line of the canal, the circular pool and right-angled turn as ghostly shadows in the waters of Blenheim’s lake. A plan and contract for building the canal c.1722 have also been found, the work of masons William Townsend and Bartholomew Peisley junior. (Peisley’s father and Townsend had built the Grand Bridge.) In retrospect, what could have been more fitting in the 1720s than a military canal to complement the military garden?
Spyers’ survey is therefore proved accurate on all points: he shows the artificial nature of the eastern pool with much of the cascade looking redundant, and the complete canal. He also shows the rather ragged state of the Woodwork, the military garden and accompanying wildernesses. Lancelot’s 1765 plan of his proposals is hurried and unfinished – that is, it does not show the Woodwork on the south side of the house, the space being taken up by the annotation: ‘A Plan for the intended alterations to the Water at Blenheim for His Grace the duke of Marlborough’. Even the house is only lightly indicated: ‘To the Water’ clearly indicates his intentions, but the omission of the details of the military gardens has encouraged leaping to the wrong conclusion that he demolished them, when he clearly did nothing of the sort. The evidence supporting Lancelot comes from Thomas Pride’s 1789 survey plan, which shows the contentious areas much as Spyers’ did in 1763.
So what did Lancelot do at Blenheim? He worked there for ten years and the Duke evidently paid him £15,450, an enormous sum implying that a permanent workforce was kept in his employ under the foreman, for much of the time John Midgeley.fn7
To begin with, as was his way, Lancelot had used his eyes and experience; he walked the land on horseback or on foot; coming from the Woodstock Arch entrance (as is most rewarding today), he would have been repelled by the slovenly and marshy course of the Glyme, and the steep and mostly bare banks of the ‘cistern’ pool. The foreground to the house had the appearance of a bare cliff, gashed out of the land: the area below and around the canal as it passed under the Grand Bridge was reed-ridden and marshy, indicating inadequate control of the water; beyond the bridge and around the curving valley sides, the ground was boggy and marshlike, indicating that the Glyme was intent on returning to the areas where it had naturally flowed. It was rather like a vast, overgrown moat surrounding the house on two sides.
For Lancelot, an elaborate drawing was unnecessary; it was all in his head, and in his mind’s eye he could see the natural forms of the land and the flow of the water. Most of all, he could see how the Grand Bridge could be restored to dignity, and the minnows would no longer laugh. Beginning at the Woodstock entrance, with the Glyme and an additional stream flowing down from the park, he made careful ‘openings’ of the banks to softened profiles, grading the soil back considerable distances on either side, and making the level drives from the Woodstock Gate, and across the Grand Bridge. This great labour extended along the river’s course, reshaping the valley until he reached the dam, where the water cascaded back into the ‘natural’ river. The work must have been done in stages, scouring and clay-lining the deepest course, waiting for the water to fill, then opening the banks further, and repeating the laborious adjustments to the banks and curves, and the dam, until the water reached the desired level, at the springing point of the main arch of the Grand Bridge. It was a stately ritual, with men, earth and water moving in tune to the rainfall and the seasons.
With the ground modelled to his satisfaction, the course of the lake was dressed with trees, a Lebanon cedar or two on a low bank, small clumps of shrubs and trees masking the bridge’s ends, hanging woods where the banks were steepest. It was designed to be seen from horseback, or from a phaeton or curricle, the vistas opening and closing as a moving picture – the faster the trotting, the faster the picture changed. Even today on foot the slower magic can be made to work. At several points, but especially from either end of the Grand Bridge, looking south to where the lake appears beyond the planted promontory, Blenheim’s lake makes a very fair imitation of a tree-girt reach of the Thames.
So, did Lancelot really say in his moment of triumph, ‘Will the Thames ever forgive me?’ He had tampered with two of the Thames’s tributaries, for the Glyme flows into the Evenlode as it leaves Blenheim’s park. But Lancelot and the River Thames had a very special relationship, and he could say what he liked; who could blame him, for he had wrought a patient and painstaking miracle, glorified in Turner’s magnificent painting and evid
ent to this day.
‘Mimic desolation covers all’
The Duke’s promised thousands for Blenheim were on a scale in excess of even Burghley and Croome, but at times when the Grand Bridge presided over an expanse of mud and ravaged earth and stones, not unlike a battlefield, Lancelot must have spent some nervous nights – if not weeks of them. Not everyone was on his side, his critics were ready to pounce, and his parks (or the people that owned them) were embroiled in political extremes of hatreds and favouritisms. His ‘landscapes’ were vulnerable, and so was he, with as yet no royal patronage as shelter. A nasty reminder now came in a footnote to his dealings with Henry Fox at Holland Park, far back in 1755.
Fox had succeeded William Pitt as Paymaster-General, reputedly making a profit of £400,000; after the Peace of Paris of 1763 he retired with his title, 1st Baron Holland of Foxley, to the extreme point of Kent, the North Foreland, where he built a mock-Roman villa, called Holland House. The bay, where legend had it Charles II had found refuge from a storm, was called Kingsgate; the villa was surrounded with follies, a miniature parade with cannon, a ruined castle (the stables), the Countess’s fort (an ice house), a crumbling cloister and the ‘gate’ itself, a Gothic arch spanning a break in the chalk cliff. Horace Walpole lambasted the collection of ‘ruins’ as ‘in no style of architecture that ever appeared before or has since’, and Thomas Gray dubbed them the expression ‘of a broken character and constitution’. Gray’s lines ‘On Lord Holland’s68 Seat near Margate, Kent’ (published without his consent in 1769) find the isolation of the place and the nearness of the treacherous Goodwin Sands ominously disturbing: