Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783
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Lancelot’s work at Tixall came in the early 1770s, when Thomas Clifford paid twenty-five guineas for a plan for widening the River Sow in the park, with a bridge, the ‘lake’ being known locally as ‘Tixall Wide’. He was working for Clifford’s brother at Ugbrooke in Devon at the same time.
So, as Lancelot was mixing with the canal promoters at the turn of the 1760s, when his own prospects were looking dim, there comes the inevitable question: was he tempted to join the canal boom? His undoubted affection for Staffordshire, the many commissions he found there, and Lord Gower’s generous and long-standing patronage all suggest attachments. On the other hand, there were vast differences between a utilitarian canal and an ornamental lake – and equally fascinating contrasts between the characters of James Brindley and Lancelot Brown.
Brindley was the same age as Lancelot; he came from a comfortably-off yeoman family in the Peak District, and was apprenticed to a millwright, which gave him a much-respected trade. As Lancelot was settling in Hammersmith, Brindley was moving to Burslem, renting a millwright’s shop from the Wedgwoods. Likenesses of Brindley make him appear good-humoured, but he had a habit of worrying at a problem and was nicknamed ‘the Schemer’. He brooked no nonsense. As Jenny Uglow writes of him: ‘we can still hear his forthright voice in his spelling, as he makes an “occhilor survey21 or a ricconitoring” for the duke’. (Lancelot may have kept his Geordie lilt, but he was never indecipherable). Whereas Lancelot loved the very greenness of his hills and lawns, and the froth of tumbling waters and roughness of barks, Brindley was obsessed with all things mechanical and, frankly, oily – though something written of Brindley in a newspaper of 1771 can be applied to both: ‘He knew Water,22 its Weight and Strength, Turn’d Brooks, made Soughs to a great Length.’ Brindley also ‘made Tunnels for Barges, Boats and Air-vessels; he erected several Banks, Mills, Pumps, Machines, with Wheels and Cranks’, and though Lancelot could do tunnels and bankings, he would never have called himself an engineer, though others did. Both men were happy with the techniques of clay puddling, and Lancelot used it before it became accepted canal practice. But in ways of ‘design’ they were chalk and cheese, and surely Lancelot recoiled at the straight-line canal philosophy. Brindley followed contours to save on earth-moving, and wherever possible sent his canals in straight lines; curves were anathema to him, and nothing could change this rule: in 1767, when Josiah Wedgwood bought the Ridgehouse estate for his new home and pottery works, he did so because it was on the confirmed canal route, which he needed for transporting his raw materials and pots. But Wedgwood, who commissioned the Derby architect Joseph Pickford for his elegantly pedimented Etruria Hall and pottery-works buildings, hoped for a little fashion in his landscape; after long arguments with Brindley’s assistant Hugh Henshall, Wedgwood reported glumly, ‘I could not prevail upon the inflexible Vandal to give me one line of Grace23 – he must go the nearest & best way, or Mr Brindley would go mad.’ (William Emes, who worked frequently with Pickford, landscaped Wedgewood’s Etruria Park.)
Lancelot did not engineer canals, for the lines of grace were in his bones and he would go no other way, as he demonstrated with Lord Gower’s lake at Trentham, just south of the pottery town of Longton. At Trentham he had the Trent itself to play with; nothing argues so well for Lord Gower’s power in the locality as the fact that he could purloin the waters of Piscator’s third river of England – ‘Trent, so called24 for thirty kind of Fishes that are found in it, or for that it receiveth thirty lesser Rivers’ – and Michael Drayton’s ‘Chrystal Trent for fords and fish renown’d’. The lake is spectacular, three-quarters of a mile long, subtly weaving with the contours of the tree-covered hill on the west bank, with space enough for serpentine walks, sometimes open to, and sometimes hidden from, the water. The east bank is lawn, open and sunny, home to some magnificent cedars: Trentham’s lake must rank as one of the finest examples of Lancelot’s intuition, his ability to endow a landscape with strength to withstand future times. Despite the nineteenth-century onslaught of Charles Barry’s Italianate palace and William Nesfield’s vast formal gardens, the lake has held its own; and it still does, a calming presence, amid Trentham’s regenerated and ‘active’ landscape.
A few miles south of Trentham, the Fitzherberts’ Swynnerton, a lovely park of deep undulations, has a ‘Brownian’ lake and boundary plantations. Farther south between Shifnal and Wolverhampton there is a cluster of four more certain commissions, for Weston Park, Tong, Chillington and Patshull. Weston is close to Watling Street, and in the mid-1760s Lancelot fulfilled two contracts for Sir Henry Bridgeman, for evident modernising, with earth-modelling, ‘lowering the Hill25 in the manner agreed to by Sr Henry’, a sunk fence and screening plantations, drives and sloping lawns; two pools are also thought to be his. At the same time he was working at Tong Castle for George Durant, a site cut by the M54, although the lake survives. Just to the east of Tong at the Giffards’ Chillington, approached by a 3-mile avenue from near Brewood, Lancelot’s pool is still the largest in the county, except for the modern Belvide Reservoir. The water source came in from the north and he widened it into a river, more than half a mile long, gradually widening further into The Pool. James Paine designed a bridge for the north end of the river, and he wrote of it all as:
confessedly one26 of the finest pieces of water, within an inclosure, that this Kingdom produces; the verges of which are bounded by fine plantations, intermixed with groves of venerable stately oaks … at another neck of this beautiful water is erected another bridge, concealing the other extreme of the water, built by Lancelot Brown Esq., who designed and conducted the execution of the improvements of this justly admired park.
Finally, in 1765, Patshull Hall and Old Park, near Pattingham, were bought by George Pigot, the recently returned Governor of Madras, where Robert Clive had been his deputy. Patshull cost Pigot £80,000; he paid Lancelot £52. 10s. for a plan that resulted in a spectacular J-shaped lake, which is today a mecca for carp and pike fishermen.
‘Brownifications’27 at Temple Newsam
‘We have had a long continuance28 of fine weather,’ wrote Frances Irwin from Temple Newsam in Yorkshire in early October 1765, ‘but at length the rain is come which I am very sorry for as my Lord has just begun with Mr Brown & wet weather is very unfavourable for their operations.’
Trentham and Temple Newsam were very closely connected, though a good 100 miles apart, and so once again in this frantic year Lancelot had had another long journey, to what was then countryside just east of Leeds.
Temple Newsam was another of his petticoat places, in the ‘good-looking,29 shapely, assured, intelligent’ personage of Viscountess Irwin, who sweetly let the world think that her husband was in charge. She was born Frances Gibson, the natural daughter of the Tory fortune-maker Sam Shepheard (who had challenged Sir John Hynde Cotton’s right to Madingley and lost); he left her a great heiress (£60,000) as long as she did not marry an Irishman, a Scot or the son of a peer. She chose the eligible Charles Ingram, whose uncle then died, making him the 9th Viscount Irwin, and after two years of legal wrangling Frances won permission to marry him, in 1758; he was thirty-one, she was three years younger. They were happy enough, and had five daughters whom they adored, but Frances was most ‘deeply smitten’ by Temple Newsam itself, the tall red-brick Tudor-Jacobean mansion with huge windows, almost ‘more glass than wall’, set in white-railed courts in a park well watered by a tributary of the River Aire. From the start she urged her husband to send for Lancelot; they had met in Whitehall in 1758, and Lancelot promised to be in Yorkshire the following year, but it was not until January 1763 that Lord Irwin was pleased to hear the plans were ready – would Lancelot send them by the flyer, the Leeds Machine, ‘the most expeditious way’?30 The impression is that Lord Irwin was lukewarm about the whole business, but occasionally stirred himself to please his wife; she had by this time produced three daughters, Isabella, Frances and Elizabeth, and undoubtedly many lace-edged handkerchiefs, for she was a fin
e and determined needlewoman.
The Temple, as they called it, was a lovely place, as Sidney Swinney’s31 verse implies, addressing Lord Irwin:
But you, my Lord, at Temple Newsam find,
The Charms of Nature gracefully combin’d
Sweet waving hills, with wood and verdure crown’d
And winding vales, where murmuring streams resound:
Slopes fring’d with Oaks which gradual die away,
And all around romantic scenes display.
The plan was for two lakes, a lawn and ha-ha, and numerous delights: a dairy, menagerie, thatched cottage, grotto, rotunda and bridges in variety. Frances, however, treasured an existing and undoubtedly straight gravel walk for her exercise, and in April 1766, the weather ‘quite like summer’, she wrote, ‘I am out of doors32 all day long, Mr Brown has put us in a wo[e]ful dirty pickle, but my gravel walk is always a resource and very much made use of.’ On 26th July, just after the birth of her youngest daughter Louisa, she wrote, ‘Mr Brown left this morning and indeed we are prodigiously busy in his way as a deal has been done.’33 Six months later in the February 1767 fog, she was not out much, but ‘stood still while Col Pitt & my husband have been Brownifying34 my dear gravel walk, his little wife carried stakes for them to mark out places for shrubs & I stood by to give my approbation’. Clearly the walk had been serpentised and planted; sometimes she called the works ‘Brownifications’.
Once a year in the summer the Irwins went south to Sussex, to what Frances called ‘my little Horsham business’,35 Hills Place, and the business was to keep the local parliamentary seats in the right hands. Lancelot went to Hills twice, but perhaps just to discuss the Temple. Otherwise Frances was at home in the north, ‘an old fashioned country gentlewoman in an old worn out house with my girls’.36 She became a hands-on gardener with itchy fingers to plant in the spring, defying the cold. Lancelot continued his visits well into the 1770s, but it is hard to know what he did, for the park is much altered. Some clues may be in the continuation of Swinney’s verse:37
Delighted still along the park we rove,
Vary’d with Hill and Dale, with Wood and Grove:
Oe’er velvet Lawns what noble Prospects rise,
Fair as the Scenes, that Reuben’s hand supplies.
But when the Lake shall these sweet Grounds adorn,
And bright expanding like the eye of Morn,
Reflect whate’er above its surface rise,
The Hills, the Rocks, the Woods and varying Skies,
Then will the wild and beautiful combine,
And Taste in Beauty grace your whole Design.
Lord Irwin and Lancelot were both shy about the publication of these verses, and Thomas Hinde suggests they wanted to wait for the lake to be finished. Little more can be learned from Frances’s own description, except that she was content:
I apply myself38 to my beauteous Claude where the scene always enchants me; the trees are green, the waters placid & serene & the air has a warmth very comfortable. Altogether it is just as one’s mind should be; no boundless passions or turbulent ambition to perturb one’s breast but the stream of life to flow peacefully & unruffled, sometimes through flowery meads & sometimes through brake till at length it reaches the ocean of eternity.
Lord Irwin died in 1778 and Frances lived on at the Temple until her death in 1807. In her Horsham political ‘business’ she supported the younger Pitt. The Temple Newsam landscape clings on as a ‘green lung’ for ever-encroaching Leeds.
‘My power is but small’
The hot gossip of early July 1766 was that the King ‘sent to Mr Pitt with carte blanche to form a ministry’ and Pitt agreed ‘to extricate39 the country out of a faction’. Lancelot was amazed, for Pitt’s health was appalling, his temper ‘fire and brimstone’, and while Lady Chatham and the children were on holiday in Weymouth, Pitt was dashing to and from Bath, believing in any cure that would fend off his black dog. As he was now Earl of Chatham and Viscount Pitt of Burton Pynsent, he intended to govern from the House of Lords. Lancelot was caught in a maelstrom of gossip because so many of his clients were sent revolving like planets about the sun – or cast into oblivion, for the King had broken with Lord Bute and was never to speak to him again, and Lord Chatham was treating his brothers-in-law George Grenville at Wotton and Earl Temple at Stowe in the same way. The Duke of Northumberland had spent three years in Ireland ‘without any mark of favour’ and so he asked for his dukedom, which he got on condition that he stayed out of the way, but it gave a fillip to his plans for Alnwick. The Duke of Grafton’s Euston and Lord Shelburne’s Bowood were both ‘rested’, as they became ministers. Lady Chatham appealed to Lancelot for help to find a spacious and airy London house (for the St James’s Square house and Hayes Place had both been sold in favour of Burton Pynsent) and they were reduced to borrowing.
Lord Gower, Granville, 2nd earl, at Trentham was briefly out of office, and Lancelot was on his way there, calling at Castle Ashby in Northamptonshire on the way, where he missed Lord Northampton, but saw his agent, Mr Foulerton. Lancelot’s was a familiar face at Castle Ashby, where he had inspected the old-fashioned gardens and grounds and started work on a first contract, on 14th October 1761, for the young 7th Earl of Northampton, ‘of advanced taste40 and great potential as a patron’, who died abroad in 1763. For Spencer Compton, 8th Earl, Lancelot was now expanding the fishponds into lakes, and building an ice house in ‘expensive manner’, for £68, which was set into one end of the dam between the lakes. A ha-ha, ditch and wall were built to protect the kitchen gardens (now the Italian gardens) for £53, and sundry temples, a dairy, a bridge and a domed menagerie (designed by Robert Adam) were all part of the ongoing works.
However, quite another matter was raised in his conversation with agent Foulerton, as we learn from Lancelot’s letter from Trentham, dated 30th July 1766 to Lord Northampton, saying he understood ‘that you and Mr Drummond41 had not agreed about the Huntingdon estate. If no other person is in treaty with your Lordship I shall be glad to have the refusal of it, your Lordship shall have very little trouble with me upon it – I shall give an immediate answer as soon as I know the conditions and have looked it over.’
The Mr Drummond was Henry Drummond, old Andrew Drummond’s nephew and recently married to Elizabeth Compton, the Earl’s sister; he was clearly trying to help the Earl’s known financial difficulties by selling outlying properties. Whether Drummonds were holding the ‘Huntingdon estate’ as surety is not known. Nor do we know if Lancelot had scouted around Huntingdon, though he had surely found out that Fenstanton Manor, with Hilton, was the estate in question. He seems to have decided that, with money in the bank, it was time for some security and investment in a property of his own.
He was busy, as ever, and looking within a 10-mile radius of Westminster for the Chathams, growing ever more concerned at the conflicting rumours:
I had the pleasure42 yesterday to hear at Richmond that his lordship was much better – it gives one hope that [he] will soon be able to stand forth for himself and convince the world that singularity (which they complain of) is laudable when in Contradiction to a multitude [and] it adheres to the dictates of conscient morality and honour. My power is but small but my good wishes for Lord Chatham are unbounded, not new nor altered.
Lancelot added the wish ‘to see (but am doubtful I hope too much) yr ladyship’s family once more in perfect union’, knowing that she was banned from Wotton Underwood and Stowe.
On 25th May 1767 he reminded Lord Northampton, from whom he had heard nothing about ‘Huntingdon’: ‘I shall be much obliged to your Lordship for an answer as I am kept in suspense and have other things on offer, but I was determined to have nothing to do with anybody ’till your Lordship had given me your answer.’43 For the Chathams he had found a villa with 100 acres near Barnet, or possibly a new house at Wimbledon with 150 acres. Was he thinking of himself as well – his ‘other things on offer?’ On 28th May he wrote to Lord Northampton:
I have this moment received a letter from Midgley [the foreman at Castle Ashby] in which he informs me your Lordship desires to know when I shall be at Castle Ashby. My intention was to have been there soon after the King’s birthday [4th June] but he informs me your Lordship means to set out for Derbyshire on Sunday next [so] I will defer my journey.44
‘Huntingdonshire’ was distressing him and he hoped for an answer.
Lancelot was at Castle Ashby on the Sunday, 7th June, but the Earl must have been on the point of leaving, for they discussed minor alterations to the Dairy, but ‘Huntingdon’ was not mentioned; Lancelot did not feel he could visit his wished-for estate without Lord Northampton’s express permission, and left a letter politely telling him so. Then he went off on an extended visit to Blenheim, Croome and Staffordshire. At home a letter from Lady Chatham, of 7th June, awaited him, full of apologies for not having written before, but they had settled on North End House at Hampstead, ending, ‘I am extremely sorry not to be able to give you the pleasure of knowing that my Lord is better, but as yet there is no amendment in his health to mention.’45