by Jane Brown
As the summer days passed, the news went from bad to worse. Lord Chatham ‘was physically and mentally shipwrecked’,46 in a deep melancholia, with little appetite, ‘no strength, recurrent fever, no ability to concentrate, no power of will or command of himself’ – Horace Walpole saw ‘too clearly, the gout flown up into his head’.47 His fledgling administration was in chaos, no one was able to placate the American colonists into ‘duties’ that they did not regard as ‘taxes’ and lift their boycott of British goods, let alone deal with domestic disloyalties. The King wanted to visit Lord Chatham, who begged him not to come, for ‘the honour and weight’ of such a visit ‘would crush him in his enfeebled state’.48 All prayed for a lucid hour, but it did not come; tearful, insisting on a darkened room, Pitt became delusive, making plans for extending North End House (which belonged to Charles Dingley) or for demolishing the buildings that cluttered his views. Anyway, he blustered, he did not like North End; he wanted Hayes – so Hester wrote pleading letters to the new owner, Thomas Walpole, who agreed to sell it back again, fearful of causing a national disaster if he did not.
Lancelot, distraught, wrote to Lady Chatham on 7th August, ‘I have very near as many anxious hours as yr ladyship can have for his Lordship’s health because I love my King and my country and am most faithfully devoted to Lord Chatham.’49 This is such an extreme outburst that it suggests he must have been closely involved: Lady Chatham had power of attorney and she had to sell some of the land at Burton Pynsent in order to raise enough money for Hayes Place; Thomas Walpole had paid them £11,780 for it, and now demanded £17,400 to cover the repairs and improvements that he claimed were necessary. Lord Chatham was aware of these negotiations, though ‘more than once bewildered’,50 and surely Lancelot must have seen him in this state to have become so upset. He would also have found it inexpressibly sad to go down to Burton Pynsent to identify the land that could be sold without detriment to the house or its views.
Unsurprisingly he was ‘much out of order51 for the last five or six days’ of the first week in September. On the 7th he wrote to Lord Northampton:
My intention is to have the estate at the price your Lordship had agreed with Mr Drummond which was I think thirteen thousand pounds. Your lordship will be so good as to signify your pleasure in regard to the time of payment, and a final answer shall be sent when I have seen the estate, at which time an article may be drawn up binding both sides to the conditions that shall be thought necessary.
Lancelot hoped for an immediate answer, and that the family were all well.
Three days later he wrote to Hester Chatham, having heard that the doctors had recommended a change of air and they were leaving North End for Pynsent – ‘I hope in God52 that his lordship mended every day & that you all had a good journey. Pardon my Zeal, Pardon my Vanity, but I wish above all things to know [how] my lord does.’ Lancelot’s last words revealed that he had been down to Pynsent and inspected the steeple, newly completed to his design: he hoped to hear ‘how the Pillar pleases his lordship’. After a few weeks the Chathams moved to Bath, and then back to Hayes Place, where Lord Chatham’s health inexplicably improved, though he was persuaded to resign his office.
Lancelot’s deal with Lord Northampton was closing too; he promised to pay £6,000 or £7,000 at Christmas, and the remainder at Lady Day in 1767. In his account book he wrote off £1,556. 8s., the amount to cover the extra works at Castle Ashby, which he deducted from the settlement. The conveyance was completed with all the historic rights and details of tolls and taxes, and Lord Northampton wrote eccentrically on his copy of the transfer deed, ‘I take the Manor of Fen Stanton to belong to Lawrence [sic] Brown Taste Esq., who gave Lord Northampton Taste in exchange for it.’53 To be fair, the Earl appreciated ‘the taste’ he had bought, and taught his son to do so by severely telling him off for attempting to jump over the newly planted cedar of Lebanon by the Menagerie, for fear of damaging it, a story that was handed down in the family.
However, Castle Ashby is chiefly notable as the park that enabled Lancelot Brown to become a country gentleman. What had he bought? The estate was the manor of Stanton cum Hilton, two ancient villages, Fenny Stanton and Hilton, 1½ miles apart on the edge of the Great Ouse valley in Huntingdonshire. Fenny Stanton (now Fenstanton) lies 9 miles north-west of Cambridge on a road that the Romans made; Hilton is to the west, close to the Old Great North Road on its course from Royston to Caxton and Huntingdon (A1198). These were remote places in a watery and gentle countryside in a small and quiet county: there were no large houses, no dramatic inequalities of landscape that Lancelot54 might feel he had to improve, and there was plenty of good fishing in the quiet meadows beside the Ouse. The Stanton manor house was a good seventeenth-century brick house with little distinction except for its double-height porch; Grove House nearby had once belonged to Joan, Queen of Scotland, who had planted twenty oaks there in 1235. Across the silvery streams of the Ouse was St Ives, the destination of the Man with Seven Wives (with seven hats and seven cats), named for Ivo, a seventh-century Persian holy man whose bones were found there. Along the river was Hemingford Grey, where the beautiful Gunning sisters had grown up; was it dabbling in the dew-washed meadows that made their milkmaid complexions? Whatever the stories, it was a lovely place.
Note in Castle Ashby account – ‘May the 31st 1765 Rec’d of the Earl £300. June the 1st [1767] Rec’d on Acct of the Huntingdon Estate £1556. 8s. 0d which is Charged to Ashby’.
Why Lancelot bought Fenstanton is a much more difficult question to answer. He certainly made the decision when he was under great stresses and arguably not at the best time. Did he simply want to invest in land? Jonathan Spyers did not complete his survey for ten years, so for the time being it was estimated at about 1,000 acres. More likely Lancelot wished to make provision for his family in the event of his death, as the news of his brother John’s sudden death in March 1766 had shaken him. He had his Will drafted (eventually dated 1769), which in the midst of all this heady activity makes poignant reading, but allows an insight into his thoughts.
His foreman Benjamin Read was to be employed ‘to go from Place to Place’ to clear up all the contracted work, ‘and I hope such employment will prove of use to him’. Samuel Lapidge, who ‘knows my accounts,’ was to be an executor, along with ‘my dear wife’, friend John Drummond (old Andrew’s son), John Edison of Cooper’s Hall, London (gentleman and lawyer) and Henry Holland (senior). The Fenstanton estate was to provide annuities for Biddy, Lance, Jack (‘whom God preserve in his hazardous employment’ in the navy) and his eldest daughter Bridget, who was of age and was to have the silver candlestick, as he had always promised. The ‘liberal education’ of Thomas was in his mother’s care, as was their youngest daughter Peggy (their daughter Anne had died).
The remainder of the Fenstanton estate was put in trust for Lance, and Biddy’s dowry land in Lincolnshire was similarly left to Jack. There were legacies to his surviving sister Mary Hudson, to his nephew Richard Brown, to Biddy’s brother and married sister and their niece Phyllis ‘Philly’ Cooke, who lived with them. The housemen William and George Davis were not forgotten, nor were the livery men and boys, nor the housemaids, for all were to have a year’s wages.
It was wise and thoughtful planning, but Lancelot was not finished yet.
Indeed, he was dancing, or nearly so; as the crises had cleared in the September of 1767, he had explored Fenstanton and Hilton and his patch of Huntingdonshire. He intended no hasty decisions and the well-tenanted holdings and houses were left in peace, hardly knowing that their landlord had changed. But for Lancelot, a new northwards pattern was introduced into his travelling life; hardly 10 miles from Fenstanton, he made his first visit to Wimpole in Cambridgeshire, now Jemima, Marchioness Grey’s home with her husband, Lord Hardwicke. ‘Break off. Break off,55 we tread Enchanted Ground,’ she wrote, ‘Mr Brown has been leading me such a Fairy Circle & his Magic Wand has raised such landscapes to the Eye – not visionary for they were all th
ere but his Touch has brought them out with the same Effect as a Painter’s Pencil upon Canvass.’ Though she knew every inch of her own Wrest, the farther reaches of Wimpole’s vast park were unfamiliar, and ‘after having hobbled over rough ground’ for two hours she returned ‘half Tired & half Foot sore’. Lancelot was to concentrate upon the dramatic chalk scarp in the north of the park: Lord Hardwicke was his only client who was apparently interested in forward planning, for he wanted gross costs for three years’ work: ‘perhaps it is absurd to look so far forward but however the sketch of the whole may be of use in every event. If it were not too old-fashioned I wd make you the Complimts of the season,’56 he wrote on Christmas Eve. He hoped Lancelot would work through the holidays to complete the plan of operations for the next year.
fn1 Burton Steeple, as the tower is known locally, still stands on the ridge overlooking West Sedge Moor; park in Curry Rivel and walk along the A378 to a road signed Heale and Stathe: the path to the tower is 300 yards up the road on the left in Moortown Lane.
10
RETURN TO THE NORTH
When You bid Me1 farewell, I was mute & was dull,
A little too Selfish, my heart was too full …
I left thee with CECIL, our right noble Host
O Cambridge, the Worth of such Men thou well knowest:
With Patoun too I left thee, & left thee w’th West,fn1
Who in painting will tell thee & do what is best,
With the great planner Brown, who’s himself ye best Plan,
I envy his Genius, yet doat on ye Man;
Then be not Surpriz’d I was Silent & Surly,
I left Thee with these & I left thee at Burghley.
David Garrick to Richard Owen Cambridge, 8th August 1770
ROYAL CLERK OF works, Joshua Kirby noted that ‘great alterations2 and improvements’ were started ‘by Mr Launcelot Browne’ at the King’s garden by the river at Richmond in the autumn of 1765. Work lasted for five years, the ground was very flat and Lancelot endeavoured to create dells and private groves as the setting for George III’s desired new palace: the palace was not built, and the grounds were amalgamated into Kew Gardens, where the Rhododendron Dell is the surviving fragment of Lancelot’s work.
A single plant, the Great Vine at Hampton Court, is the more famous survivor of the King’s Master Gardener’s work of the late 1760s. The vine was planted in 1768, as a cutting taken from a prolific Black Hamburg variety growing at the home of a retired East India Company seafarer, Sir Charles Raymond, at Valentines at Ilford in Essex. The connection was in the relationship through marriage of the Raymond and Burrell families, Peter Burrell being the King’s Surveyor-General of Crown Lands, another of Lancelot’s overlords and much concerned with the gardens. The vine was planted in open ground, but trained to grow inside the south-facing Vine House, one of the then-revolutionary new stove houses ‘based on the Amsterdam design’,3 built in 1689 to hold William and Mary’s collection of exotic plants. The house had underfloor heating, fireplaces fed by little wheeled furnaces, with vents and flues, and the back and side walls were boarded and painted white, so as to show any contaminations that threatened the precious plant. The venerable vine, now with its own keeper, and as prolific as ever, is one of the most wondrous sights for visitors to Hampton Court, but in Lancelot’s time it was an almost experimental addition to the fruit gardens. Inasmuch as Richmond Park was the official ‘game larder’, the Hampton Court gardens were the ‘fruit basket’, supplying soft summer fruits and wall fruits (apricots, peaches, quinces, medlars, pears) to the royal family and others of importance. A note survives from Lord North, as Prime Minister, to Lancelot requesting that fruit be sent to Downing Street, where he was entertaining a deputation from Oxford University.
Now that the Brown family had settled, Hampton Court was proving a very pleasant place to live, all Lancelot’s ‘lordships’ could be confined to the accounts, and they had found their level amongst friends. Upon closer acquaintance, Hampton Court proved more than a palace, for an incipient privatisation was moving in on the royal demesne as the copyhold leases that had been granted to court officials were inherited by their grandsons with independent careers, or even sold to complete newcomers. Henry Wise’s descendants still occupied his house ‘Between the Walls’, as did George Lowe’s; Lowe’s daughter married Samuel Lapidge, and Lancelot stood godfather to their baby son, who grew up to become the architect Edward Lapidge. On the green, Sir Christopher Wren’s Old Court House had been sold by the Wren family about twenty years before, and was now the home of Thomas Nobbs, about whom little is known except that he too was one of Lancelot’s circle. Hampton had the advantage of a bridge over the Thames to Molesey, a seven-arched construction of wooden lattice with two pairs of Chinese-style guard pavilions – it looked rather as though it had been copied from a blue-and-white Willow-pattern plate. At the Hampton end the bridge was flanked by The Mitre, a coaching inn, and the much less sedate drinking house, the Toy Inn, where royal hangers-on and sometimes minor royals let their hair down. On a rare day when there was nothing in particular to do, Lancelot strolled across Hampton Green of a fine morning to be saluted by the Foot Guards on patrol and chat briefly to the old gatekeeper at the Hampton road. Biddy Brown was shy of ‘society’ and content with her family and household of young people, but Lancelot enjoyed a little celebrity amongst his friends, and he was on his way to visit one of the most celebrated.
David Garrick5 and Lancelot had much in common, even if the actorly excesses of the former made the gardener blush. Garrick was a year younger with a better education, famously taught by the young Samuel Johnson, with whom he had left their home town of Lichfield, with one horse between them and pennies in their pockets. In London they had fallen in with fellow searchers for fame and fortune; it was said that ‘if Johnson had taught Garrick ways of reading, Hogarth taught him ways of seeing’.
Garrick had had a ready-made profession to fall into – two in fact, though he had failed at the wine trade; in the company of William Hogarth, Peg Woffington, Aaron Hill and Colley Cibber, Garrick had discovered his vocation on the stage. Lancelot rarely had time to see a play, though Garrick was forever plying him with tickets, but he knew – as all the world did – that Garrick’s chamaeleon persona assumed a character as he put on the costume, or even at will without any special dress, as with his famous ‘Cushion’ demonstration as reported by Diderot:
Garrick picked up6 a cushion, saying ‘Gentlemen, I am this child’s father’. Thereupon he opened a window, took his cushion, tossed it in the air, kissed it, caressed it, and imitated all the fooleries of a father … but then came a moment when the cushion, or rather, the child slipped from his hand and fell through the window. Then Garrick began to mime the father’s despair … his audience were seized with such consternation and horror that most of them could not bear it and had to leave the room.
As with the cushion, so with his Shakespearean roles – Garrick ‘quit his own mind’7 and put himself into character, so that ‘he becomes so different from his own self that his face and body change, and we can scarce believe it is the same man’. His Richard III was famous beyond even the performances for Hogarth’s portrayal of the King rising from his nightmare on Bosworth’s morning, ‘frozen by terror,8 reaching for his sword and fending off the ghosts with his raised hand’. He had first played Richard III in 1741, the year Lancelot settled at Stowe, and in a sense both their futures were made. In 1749, five years after Lancelot’s marriage, to the respectable and demure Miss Wayet, Garrick had wooed and won the mysterious Eva Maria Veigel, a dancer from Vienna who was the Burlingtons’ ward; Garrick’s fans hated his marriage, but soon forgave him. He did not have an easy victory, for Lady Burlington had intended Eva Maria for none other than George William Coventry. The Garricks had a blissfully happy marriage, and the Burlington connection made them more than comfortable; they lived almost ‘on the job’ at 27 Southampton Street, close to Drury Lane Theatre, but had holidays at Chat
sworth or at Londesborough, and stayed at Chiswick House whenever they wanted. The Burlingtons’ son-in-law Lord Hartington (who became the 4th Duke of Devonshire, Lancelot’s Duke at Chatsworth) and Lord Holderness at Sion Hill were Garrick’s particular friends.
With success, Garrick wanted a country house: after false choices in Derbyshire and Hertfordshire, ‘I shall content Myself9 with ye Bank of ye Thames,’ he had told his friend the Rev. Joseph Smith, rector of Stanmore – the Rev. Smith being the first and most likely link with Lancelot, who was at Stanmore with Andrew Drummond at this time. Garrick had rented Fuller House in Hampton and in August 1754 decided to buy it, changing the name to Hampton House.4
Hampton House was not right on the Thames – the point that had made Garrick think twice – but on the north side of the Hampton Court road, on the edge of Hampton village and just under a mile from Hampton Court’s gate. Garrick knew that Alexander Pope’s villa at Twickenham was similarly sited, and that Pope had had a tunnel dug beneath the road to link with a lawn on the river’s bank. Garrick acquired his lawn, and it is generally believed that Lancelot supervised the building of the tunnel for him. Dr Johnson quipped, ‘David, David, what can’t be over-done, may be under-done.’ There is a lovely story cited in Dorothy Stroud’s book, that when Garrick asked Robert Adam to build a new front onto Hampton House, and the Orangery, the architect arrived with his brother James and two other friends, with their golf clubs: ‘[John] Home, seeing the tunnel,10 offered to drive his ball through it in three strokes, a feat which he accomplished. The ball, however, came to rest in the shallows of the river from where it was retrieved by Garrick and kept as a memento.’ Lancelot bending his stolid frame to a golf club – now there’s a thought!