Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  At the death of his uncle, the Duke of Argyll, in 1761, Bute had moved some of the rarest trees from Whitton to Kew for safety (a sophora, zelkova, oriental plane and Gingko biloba survived into our time) and now the doting Augusta allowed him to help himself to others for Luton: ‘We have got as many trees as we wanted this season from the Princess of Wales’s garden,’22 wrote Lancelot on 11th March 1767, ‘on which acct I desired Mr Haverfield to forward the trees for your Lordship as fast as possible. I have sent by the bearer another plan for the walls of the kitchen garden without a green house. The walls are the aspect I think best.’

  Luton had a priority in the mid-1760s, and the park gave itself gracefully to Lancelot’s treatments. The agricultural observer Arthur Young travelled at the end of this decade (A Six Months’ Tour through the North of England, 1770) and, though ostensibly looking for Lord Bute’s advanced agricultural methods, he found a park of well over 1,000 acres (reports vary from 1,200 to 1,500), ‘very fine beeches’23 and the ‘finest water I have ever seen’ with a ‘sloop with ornamental sails and flying colours’ and two other boats at anchor. The immensely long water was made by damming the River Lea; Young noted a wooden bridge concealing the dam and the unfinished cascade, ‘but a capability; when a little improved, and catched from a proper point of view, it will add to the variety of the scene’. Is this the first use of ‘capability’ in print, and was it Young who coined the nickname?

  The kitchen garden, a huge octagon of dark-red, heat-retaining bricks, is sited well south of the house, adjacent to the ornamental Flower Garden Wood, and both were designed to be visited from the house. A design similar to the Luton octagon is illustrated by Switzer in his Practical Fruit Garden of 1727, with entrances on the east and west walls, the whole having an orientation a little to the east of south, for full sun an hour before noon. The ‘morning air24 is purer’ was the accepted lore, as Switzer wrote, and the heat of the afternoon sun ‘generally languid and unhealthy’. Where space permitted, as at Luton, orientation and free airs were critical to the siting of the kitchen gardens, more so than soils that could be mollified by labours. Luton’s walled garden – the building supervised by William Ireland – was completed by 1770. Lancelot’s design without the greenhouse suggests that Robert Adam, who was altering the house and designing the stables for Lord Bute, was also to design a conservatory.

  Unhappily no records of the planting have been found, for the warm red walls would have had space, inside and outside, for hundreds of pears, apricots, cherries, peaches, figs, quince and all manner of wall fruit, with espaliers for apples and pears inside the garden, and frames and pits for melons and pineapples and hothouses for vines still leaving room for swathes of vegetables and salad greens. Lancelot never forgot that he was apprenticed in the garden at Kirkharle, where fruit was greatly prized.

  In 1761 Lord Bute had been appointed as Ranger of Richmond deer park, the vast ‘new park’ of something like 2,500 acres of ‘unspoiled old English land’25 that Charles I had enclosed as a hunting preserve. The park – not to be confused with the Old Deer Park by the Thames, which was then part of George III’s favoured retreat next door to Kew – stretched from Richmond town in the west to Roehampton on the eastern boundary, and from Sheen in the north to Kingston Hill in the south; it had been kept and carefully guarded as a vast royal game larder, once home to flocks of turkeys, although these had mostly been eaten and replaced by red deer from Hanover. George III intended to turn the park over to corn, but the soil proved too poor and the deer too rampageous. Lancelot is thought to have organised the planting of belts of trees on the north, between the Richmond and Roehampton gates, and on the south along the Kingston Hill boundary between Robin Hood and Kingston gates. Elms on the ridge in the north-east corner near Bog Lodge were felled in the 1970s and reputedly planted by him. Any additional landscaping was undesirable because the park remained a ‘game larder’, the ‘Kew Cart’26 making regular deliveries of venison, pheasant, partridge and hares to the royal kitchens at Kew and Windsor. Perquisites of venison and game also found their ways to Wilderness House.

  Audley End27

  When work began in earnest at Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire in the autumn of 1764, Lancelot was already involved at Audley End in Essex, where events reveal the pressure that he was under. If he included them in the same expedition they were about 34 miles apart, a cross-country ride along the road from Luton to Hitchin and Royston, then across a forgotten patch of old England, through Barley and Wendens Ambo to Saffron Walden. Audley End was in the still-enchanting valley of the River Granta (or Cam), a river in no hurry, winding its leisurely and willow-shaded way through small communities of ochre-walled cottages and huge barns, these being indicative of its well-being. It is still a countryside of delightful architectural miniatures, which abound in the villages of Newport to the south and in Littlebury, Audley End’s community to the north; the road between them runs parallel to the river, along the Shortgrove boundary to present a grandstand view of the fabled Audley End. The house sits – rather like a dowager who no longer paints and powders, but retains her beautiful bone structure – as one of the most exquisite of park ornaments, and the Brownian miniature park suits her to perfection.

  By that summer of 1764, Lancelot had learned that new heirs could be difficult, especially those that had waited patiently for their inheritance, and Sir John Griffin Griffin at Audley End had waited for more than forty years. He was born John Griffin Whitwell in Northamptonshire in 1719 and, as any inheritance seemed remote, he opted for the army as a twenty-year-old ensign in a Hanoverian regiment, where he fought at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743 and rose rapidly in rank. He knew that his uncle, the 3rd Lord Griffin, had dissipated the Griffin fortune and estate, and so his hopes rested on his mother and his aunt, Anne Whitwell and Elizabeth, Countess of Portsmouth, as granddaughters of the 3rd Earl of Suffolk. For the Earls of Suffolk, Audley End had proved an extravagant beauty since they had started building in 1603, breaking both their fortunes and their hearts; once palatial, with two courtyards and numerous garden courts, admired by Cosimo de Medici and coveted by Charles II, who acquired it for his Newmarket house-parties (though his successor and less merry monarch William III quickly returned it to the Suffolks), it was by now a fragment of its former self. When the 10th Earl died in 1745 with no direct heir, there was a family scramble for the estates, in which the proud and feisty Elizabeth (née Griffin), Countess of Portsmouth, successfully acquired half the lands, some 3,500 acres, continuing her campaign until she also acquired the neglected house at a bargain price. The Countess Elizabeth, using the funds amassed from her two marriages, was determined to regain the Griffin pride for the benefit of her favourite nephew, who was directed to change his name from Whitwell to Griffin, hence the strange doubling of the Griffin, on which he was insistent.

  The Countess Elizabeth died in 1762, leaving a restored Audley End and having instigated (with her friend Colonel William Vachell, in league with the estate steward Thomas Pennystone) a military-style campaign for the buying-in or enclosing of dozens of fields and strip-tenancies to the east and south of the house. At the moment of his inheritance Sir John Griffin Griffin was Lieutenant-Colonel of the 33 rd Regiment of Foot Guards, based in Hanover, MP for Andover in Hampshire (in the gift of his kinsmen, by his aunt’s marriage into the Wallop family, Earls of Portsmouth), mildly Pittian in his politics, and honoured by the King, who had ceremoniously installed him as a Knight of the Bath in May 1761. Sir John was a tough-looking and imposing figure, muscular from his hard military living, portrayed in his ceremonial robes by Biagio Rebecca, and in his regimentals by Benjamin West, fulfilling perfectly George III’s ideal of a commander in his beloved army. His first wife died in the summer of 1764 and he soon remarried. His new wife was Katherine Clayton of Harleyford, a house by the Thames at Marlow (where Lancelot would soon go).

  On 29th October 1762 ‘the common brick bridge’28 over the Cam carrying the public road into Saffron Walden
was badly damaged by flood waters, and Sir John took the opportunity to ask Robert Adam, who was already designing interiors for the house, to design the new bridge, prominently in view from the house. In March or April of 1763, with the bridge under construction, Lancelot had been summoned, and he hastily entered into a contract29 with Sir John for works to be completed in thirteen months. The contract had seven clauses, beginning with his agreements: (1) to widen the Cam into a linear lake as it crossed the park lawn; (2) to make the drives that enclosed this ellipse of lawn connecting the house to the Littlebury–Newport road; (3) to make good the surface for the sowing of this lawn, using grass seed and Dutch clover or turf as thought best; and (4) to plant the dozen clumps of trees and the copses that connected the views from the park into the surrounding landscape, including the construction of a ha-ha on the east side of the house to protect the flower gardens. Other clauses covered the making of a grove, a sheltered lawn and tree garden on the south side of the house, where some Lebanon cedars survive, screening the house from the Saffron Walden road, and finally the making of the new road on both sides of the Adam bridge. The work was to be done ‘between the date hereof and May 1764’, for the sum of £660, with Sir John to find the trees and shrubs, tools and wheelbarrows.

  Audley End layout: north is to the right, the house (A) at the foot and the Newport to Littlebury road at the top; Adam’s bridge is on the left.

  This was clearly a rash agreement, with so much weather-sensitive work on the river (and a misunderstanding about which way it was to be made to bend) and the risk that Sir John’s supplies of trees might not suit Lancelot’s planting intentions (1,300 larches, with limes, silver firs, Portuguese laurels, poplars, birches and 3,000 Dutch alders from Rotterdam – Sir John clearly had his continental sources – and great numbers of Scots-pine seedlings were planted). Unsurprisingly, May 1764 came and passed, and Audley End was not finished: Sir John wrote that work ‘was very backward30 at the latter end of 1764 – when I was neither satisfied with the delay, nor with the manner in which some of its parts were finishing’. The contract was cancelled ‘by a gentleman’s agreement’,31 Sir John having paid the £660; and work continued, possibly with a second contract (though this is uncertain), with amounts being paid as necessary.

  Things seem finally to have been settled in May 1767, and Sir John very reasonably gave Lancelot £150 ‘for his trouble’. But in October that year Lancelot wrote to say that there was a sum outstanding, as it had been for a year, and so an amount of interest was charged, about £90. He had looked into his accounts and found that he had had to sell some 3 per cent stocks to fund work continuing at Audley End, and so felt justified in reclaiming the interest. Sir John was adamant that he had paid everything and everybody – meaning the workmen at Audley End – on time and that the interest was not due. A long silence ensued, and in February 1768, addressing each other stiffly in the third person, each held their ground, with Lancelot finishing, ‘Mr Brown will never labour more to convince Sir John as he knows that there is none so blind32 as him that will not see.’

  Much has been made of this infamous wrangle, Sir John being slated as Lancelot’s most unpleasant client; Thomas Hinde writes that ‘the whole incident is a strange one’33 because the subject of interest arises nowhere else in Lancelot’s accounting, so why was it charged on this occasion? The answer surely lies in Lancelot’s frantic efforts to keep up with his workload, in his employment of Samuel Lapidge (‘Mr Lepidge [sic] knows my accounts’ appears in his draft Will, 1769) and in Lapidge’s new-broom tendencies in trying to unravel Lancelot’s undoubtedly chaotic affairs. The whole process, and the very idea of interest – and certainly the stiff ‘Mr Brown informes Sir John Griffen’, with the spelling mistakes and leaving out the essential second ‘Griffin’ – are completely uncharacteristic of Lancelot himself. But having appointed his accounts assistant, he had to support his actions, and the only way out was to let time pass so that the faux pas was forgotten.fn3

  The plan for Audley End is a beautiful drawing in a different style of detailing, and is perhaps by Lapidge instead of Spyers. On the ground the plan, with its hesitantly oval framework of drives, comes to life on two levels: it is a theatrical landscape, with the house on the stage, the entrance drive sweeping in from the road, over Adam’s bridge, with deceptive undulations (which are hardly there) and, at least in the nineteenth century, judiciously grouped trees along the drive allowing the views to open and close. Today, and on foot, walking around the house to the Grove and the formal garden, and then across the lawn to the River Cam, the views from ‘the stalls’ – the lower tier – evolve and dissolve. As well as the cedars, some marvellous plane trees (also Lancelot’s favourites) remain. Lift your eyes then to the ‘grand tier’ – to the west, beyond the road, is Ring Hill with the Temple of Victory, on the north the feisty Countess’s memorial column is backed by the spring wood clothing its own hill, and southwards is the Temple of Concord on its green hill; these immutable hills, which embrace ‘the quiet splendour’ of Audley End, are so perfect that they seem to have been cast by a giant’s hands. Or painted as scenery? In reality they are the canny wooing of Mother Nature by Mr Brown!

  ‘My western expedition’, late 1764

  It was the nature of Lancelot’s virtually one-man profession that the jobs sprang up like proverbial mushrooms over which he had no control. He did try to ‘cluster’ or ‘group’ them to save his horse-miles – perhaps for good business reasons put forward by Samuel Lapidge, though more likely for the sake of his health, prompted by his wife’s concerns. We can never know how many requests he rejected, but his journeyings of the fourteen years since his epic ride from Stowe to Croome had fallen into a kind of pattern: he only ever had a sprinkling of jobs in Kent, Sussex or Surrey; he had more in Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset, and even more from Croome in Worcestershire northwards into Staffordshire. The ‘fallout’ from Stowe in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire was lessening, but the requests for him to return to the North, northwards from Burghley up the Great North Road into Yorkshire and Northumberland, were multiplying. His small-scale stamping ground of Essex and Suffolk had spread into spacious Norfolk, with Melton Constable in the far north near Holt. His adored Thames valley still kept him sallying forth, but usually in the happy knowledge that he could be home for supper.

  Sometimes he wanted to see his client and wrote ahead to make the appointment; sometimes he preferred to study progress or problems quietly with his foreman or the head gardener. His ‘expeditions’, extended trips, were carefully planned: encouraged by the fine and fair autumn that lingered, he set out in early December 1764 ‘on my western expedition’, and the 8th of the month found him at Testwood near Southampton. He was writing a letter and typically excusing himself to Lord Northampton, who wanted him at Castle Ashby in far-away Northamptonshire, but was also asking where he could find the cough lozenges that Lady Northampton had given him on his previous visit, as they suited him so well.

  At Testwood he stayed with the hospitable Serles: ‘Mrs Serle34 flatters herself Mr Brown will not for ever pass by Testwood without taking any notice of his friends there whose best comp[liment]s. and good wishes always attend him.’ These friends possessed some of the best salmon-and trout-fishing in England, if he had time to spare, for their old house overlooked the lush meadows and streams of the sprawling Test estuary, with a famous salmon-leap nearby.fn4

  The Serles’ house was more than convenient for Broadlands, about 5 miles to the north beside the Test at Romsey, and the first goal of this expedition. Celia Fiennes had given a copious, if chaotic description of her relatives the St Barbes’ fine old house, full of tapestry-hung closets and painted staircases, with an outside Bathing House as well as a generous collection of stills, barns, dairies and stables. Most intriguing of all, ‘there is a water house35 that by a Wheele casts up the water out of the River just by and fills the pipes to serve all the house and to fill the bason designed in the middle of the Garden with a S
pout’. The house supply was stored in three golden balls, each holding several gallons, placed conveniently on the roofs. When Fiennes visited, seventy years before Lancelot, the gardens were being made (‘the Mold and Soyle is black and such as they cut up for peate’), with walled courts, a railed bowling green and massed clipped evergreens.

  Henry Temple, a relative of Lord Cobham at Stowe, had bought Broadlands in the 1730s and, after living with the massed evergreens for twenty years, had resorted to ‘giving away36 all the fine pyramid greens to those that will fetch them, of which many cartloads are gone already’, as he wrote in a letter to his son. The son, also Henry Temple, 2nd Viscount Palmerston, had inherited in 1757 at the age of eighteen. Now returned from the first of three trips to Italy, he had summoned Lancelot, and as a result of this first visit Lancelot was commissioned to tidy up the old place by encasing the house in a classical façade and evoking a Claudian setting beside the beautiful river. Celia Fiennes had noted that the old stables were brick, but said nothing about the house materials, which could have been clunch or chalkstone (by now difficult to acquire and expensive), so it was decided that Broadlands should be of whitish bricks, made not far away at Exbury. Lord Palmerston had admired the pale bricks of Holkham Hall in Norfolk and it was well known that Lancelot had an aversion to red houses, or at least new red houses, in his settings. The King’s Master Gardener on progress in his coach, and with his assistant Mr Lapidge, clearly inspired confidence, for his young lordship was soon writing that he had ‘only settled the plans37 with Brown and have left everything in the execution of them to him’.