Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  The tunnel was not long, as the road was narrow and the technique used was an extension of the passages into an ice house, of which Lancelot had plenty of experience: his ice house at Syon is at the corner of the walled garden, and the one at Ashridge has a long entrance tunnel. Ice houses11 at Tong Castle (now at Avoncroft Museum at Bromsgrove), Petworth, Stowe, Wakefield Lawn (beneath the lake), Milton Abbas and Hampton Court (at Kingston Bridge) were all part of his experience so far.

  The tunnel entrance in the main garden is shown in Zoffany’s A View of Hampton House with Garrick Writing of 1762; in the companion picture, A View of Hampton Garden with Mr and Mrs Garrick Taking Tea, Mark Laird has identified two newly planted Salix babylonica, weeping willows on the river bank, early associations of the willow with water and another inspiration from Pope’s garden at Twickenham. Although Garrick vehemently claimed his garden as his own work, it was probably Lancelot who obliged by finding trees and shrubs – including the willows, cedars, sweet chestnuts and a tulip-tree – from his friends’ nurseries at Fulham and Kensington.fn2

  Naturally Garrick had fun with Lancelot’s profession. In 1757 he had revived his first play, Lethe, or Aesop in the Shades – a sharp commentary on the tribulations of marriage and on ‘the difficulties playwrights, actors and public have to endure from aristocratic patrons’. Aesop invites ordinary mortals to drink the waters of Lethe, the river of oblivion, and then return to normal lives, freed of their troubles. The new character in the revival was Lord Chalkstone:12

  I came merely for a little conversation with you, to see your Elysian fields here – [looking about thro’ his glass] which, by the bye, Mr Aesop, are laid out most detestably – No taste, no fancy in the whole world!

  His lordship asks the name of the river – Styx:

  … why, ’tis as strait as Fleet-ditch – you should have given it a serpentine sweep, and slope the banks of it – The place, indeed, has very fine capabilities; but you should clear the wood to the left, and clump the trees to the right: in short, the whole wants variety, extent, contrast, and inequality – (going towards the orchestra he looks into the pit) – Upon my word, here’s a very fine hah-hah! And a most curious collection of evergreens.

  20th February 1766 had seen the first performance of The Clandestine Marriage,13 in which Garrick had included a garden, half-seen in the dusk:

  Lord Ogleby: What steeple’s that we see yonder? The parish church I suppose.

  Mr Sterling, the nouveau garden owner: Ha! Ha! Ha! That’s admirable. It is no church at all my lord! It is a spire that I have built against a tree, a field or two off, to terminate the prospect. One must always have a church, or an obelisk, or a something to terminate the prospect, you know. That’s a rule of taste, my lord.

  The gregarious Garricks were at the centre of Lancelot’s Hampton friendships, and he may even have come face to face with Horace Walpole there, for though Walpole comments so frequently upon Lancelot’s doings, he never actually mentions speaking to him. Lancelot’s circle included Richard Owen Cambridge, who lived on the river at a house upstream from Richmond ferry and was the source of the oft-repeated quip that he hoped to die before Lancelot, as he wished to see Heaven before it was improved. And Edward Lovibond,14 the leisured son of a director of the East India Company, poet and rural economist, spent most of his life in Hampton, living at Elm Lodge; he reputedly left one-third share of his estate to Lancelot.fn3

  One imagines the two of them, Lancelot and Garrick – the one tall and perhaps ponderous if his breathing was bad, the other shorter but infinitely livelier, his fire damped down, but sparkling with good humour – doffing and bowing to everyone they met, as they progressed across Hampton Court Green in pursuit of the latest local gossip. Another of Lancelot’s overlords, the Ranger of Bushy Park – George Montagu Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax (he had married Miss Dunk for her money, and her uncle had insisted that he take the name and ‘be of some trade’, which meant entering a City livery company) – had acquired a lease of some of Bushy’s acres and built Hampton Court House for his mistress, the former chanteuse, Mrs Anna Maria Donaldson. Now the garden was being made; it was not large, but had a heart-shaped lake and a most remarkable grotto. Seeing this, Garrick broke into verse, as he so often did:

  A Grotto this,15 by Mortal hand!

  O no – we tread on fairy-land,

  ’Tis rais’d by Mab’s inchanted Wand!

  So rare, so elegant, so bright;

  It dazzles, while It charms the sight;

  In all you see her Magic Skill,

  The velvet green, the tinkling Rill,

  The crystal Lake, the little Isle,

  The various flow’rs that round it smile …

  In the garden they met presumably not the Queen of the Fairies, but her amanuensis, Thomas Wright, a well-set-up and rather sprightly gentleman a little older than themselves, who had already built a series of decorative garden buildings, including a menagerie, for Lord Halifax at Horton House in Northamptonshire. Wright hailed from County Durham – Westerton outside Bishop Auckland – and he and Lancelot had been travelling their parallel courses for years. Wright was a serious astronomer and a mathematician, but he had earned his crust being a country-house tutor in star-gazing, and in designing flower gardens for the ladies, such as the Duchess of Beaufort at Badminton House, and he had also worked at Shugborough. The survival of a number of his sketches and drawings has intrigued garden historians, but it is not clear how seriously Wright himself took his garden works – he clearly owed a great deal to Switzer and Kent, but his iconoclastic attitude to architectural disciplines made him whimsical, an ‘Artinatural’, and he was never Lancelot’s rival.

  ‘Till a lawn16 looks like a ten of spades’

  Augustus Henry Fitzroy, 3rd Duke of Grafton, was well known to Lancelot: the Duke had acted the assiduous go-between for George III and the ailing Lord Chatham, and as a result now found himself Prime Minister, though ‘not really up to the job’.17 The Duke (who was probably too nice to last more than three years) had been a boy when Lancelot worked for his father – a jowly grandee, very like Charles II, his grandfather – at Wakefield Lawn, and so it was for old times’ sake that Grafton summoned Lancelot to Euston Hall in Suffolk. Lancelot had followed William Kent at Wakefield Lawn, and now followed him at Euston, where Kent worked in the last year of his life, 1748. One of Kent’s deceptively simple sketches perfectly captures the great eastern arc of Euston’s park as seen from the hall, the green slope ‘propped up’ as on an easel; the green slope that Kent sprinkled with clumps of trees, so that Walpole said that it looked like the ten of spades. Euston was a much-loved family home, and the Graftons (who evoked Lancelot’s Stuart loyalties, with their greater right to the throne of England than the present incumbent) were disdainful of the designer’s ‘flim-flam’ and Kent was remembered as absolutist in his demands, which did not suit; his temple was moved to where it was more convenient for watching the racehorses being exercised. The Duke was passionate about horse-breeding and racing; he commissioned George Stubbs18 to paint his Mares and Foals on the river bank at Euston. This is the Black Bourne, which flows in meandering fashion from ancient Euston Mill to Fakenham, and which bears the marks of Lancelot’s widening and planting for about a mile to the south of the hall. Some magnificent cedars of Lebanon also speak of his presence. The 3rd Duke was portrayed in sober brown country dress by Nathaniel Dance, probably in about 1770, at the same time as Dance portrayed Lancelot in sober green for his portrait at Burghley.

  It would be nice to think that Lancelot met George Stubbs (at Euston?), for they had much in common, including patrons and their journeyings. Lancelot had a permanent, practical interest in horseflesh, for a good saddle-horse had made his early career possible, and at Wilderness House, besides his ‘chaise cattle’, he kept a riding hack for a quick response to a summons from the King, or simply for the pleasure of riding across Hampton Green on a fine morning. Stubbs was the younger by eight years, but also a nor
therner with (stronger) Jacobite loyalties and openly Catholic. Like Lancelot, he had to work his way from his northern obscurity, teaching himself the skills of his unusual profession. Stubbs had been to Italy, which of course Lancelot had not, but now the country-house rounds governed both their lives.

  According to his biographer, Robin Blake, Stubbs’s silent protest against the cruelties of horse-racing was to portray his thoroughbreds in elegant landscapes: the Duke of Grafton’s Antinous appears against the background of Euston’s park, as also Mares and Foals. Stubbs painted Robert Pigot’s Sharke walking towards his trainer, beneath trees beside a lake, and he also portrayed Pigot’s father, Lord Pigot, on horseback in Lancelot’s park at Patshull. A Hound Coursing a Stag was painted for Lord Midleton of Peper Harow in Surrey in a parkland setting ‘exceptionally fine and surely not imaginary’, according to Blake, and Lancelot had worked at Peper Harow. The Grosvenor Hunt at meet in the flat landscape of Cheshire, painted by Stubbs in or around 1762, shows a view of the country as seen from the saloon of Eaton Hall, the view Lancelot had just ‘dressed’ (or may still have been working on), and for which Lord Grosvenor paid him £800.

  ‘I left Thee at Burghley’

  As Garrick’s verses to Richard Owen Cambridge suggest, visits to Burghley could become very sociable affairs, and Lancelot was at his happiest there, knowing he was appreciated. One of Lord Exeter’s familiar short notes in his modest rounded handwriting arrived at Wilderness House early in December 1767, giving precise measurements for the statue of Bacchus for a new pedestal so that he could stand in the new entrance hall. The Earl was planning to go to Italy in 1768 with his new wife Anne Cheatham, and would be gone for almost two years, and the attention to Bacchus marks the culmination of many of Lancelot’s tasks supervising alterations, buildings and decorations in and around Burghley House; at last he could attend to the work he had anticipated a dozen years earlier, the managing of the park drainage and making of the lake.

  This was not one of his quick assessments in an afternoon’s ride, for he had had seasons wet and dry to observe the habits of the water, which filled so many ornamental canals and ponds, which now were – as at Chatsworth – regarded as both unpleasant and ineffectual. Burghley was a more subtle problem than Croome, but just as difficult. (The drainage problems of houses so far apart geographically suggests that they were built in drier times.) Springs from the limestone ridge west of Burghley’s park were the source of the house water supply, but instead of running freely across the south front of the house on a ‘fault line’ that Haynes’s 1755 survey had marked out, the supply had to be captured and diverted to a pump house, and the surplus channelled elsewhere. Additionally the platform on which the house stood had to be drained, to stop the flower beds filling with water.

  The solution is one of Lancelot’s fanfare effects: from a viewpoint in the park north-west of the house, the whole sweep of his ha-ha is seen curving round from the north entrance court, passing the west front at a distance, ending on the south-west at the lake’s edge. From the house it is a traditional ha-ha, invisible in a carpet of green that is eventually closed by trees, but effectively preventing even the deer – the ditch is so wide – from leaping into the gardens. From the park, stand back and the line of the wall sinks into the contours; close up again and the ‘seep holes’ in the wall reveal an efficient drainage device, leaving the house on its green stage. Setting the house dry allowed the water to be channelled into the long lake, somewhat in the ‘river stile’ that crossed the park from west to east, ending in the Great Pond, with altered outline, to the south-east of the house. This was the work of several years and must have been starting – with the ha-ha – when David Garrick wrote his ditty about the jovial house-party at Burghley in August 1770.

  Future ‘landmarks’ included Lord Exeter’s choice of the three-arched bridge design in a letter of 4th January 1773. From August onwards, supplies of regular stone, finishing ashlar, lime from the Wothorpe kilns and masons’ cramps and pegs were steadily acquired. The Stamford mason Thomas Manton was finally paid £538 for his handiwork in January 1778 (the total cost of the bridge was about £1,000). In May 1778 Eleanor Coade supplied four terracotta lions for £114 (though these were replaced in 1844). The digging of the lake moved steadily eastwards, and the Great Pond had to be excavated to the correct level; wheelbarrows and carts were constantly being repaired or supplied. It is clear from the accounts that the bridge was built before the dam at the eastern head, as it was the critical feature in the water level; the lake is shown fairly well filled in an etching by Paul Sandby in 1780; the stock-fish were bought two years after Lancelot’s death, so the patient, careful process was completed, but he never saw it. Queen Anne’s Avenue still marked the central vista from the south front of the house, but now with the bridge a new drive to the south was made; the amount of earth-moving involved for the lake and the grading of the surrounding land is evident in the deep cutting of this drive, and is recalled to this day in the names ‘Capability’s Leap’ or ‘Capability’s Classic’, as obstacles in the annual Burghley Horse Trials.

  Burghley House. Plan showing Lancelot’s works for Lord Exeter 1754–1779:

  Burghley House and north entrance court.

  Site of north-west wing, removed by Lancelot to improve views.

  East courtyard and stable court.

  Orangery.

  Boat-house and spillover sluice for the lake.

  Site of former Great Pond filled with spoil from new lake.

  Three-arched bridge, design sent by Lancelot but constructed after his death.

  ‘Capability’s Leap’, the cutting in the south drive used in the Burghley Horse Trials.

  Dairy buildings, probably designed by Lancelot.

  Alnwick, Rothley and Kirkharle

  Lancelot was regularly at Burghley and even in Yorkshire, but he could rarely have made those long extra miles to his native Northumberland. There is no record of him returning until July 1769, when after breaking his journey at Burghley, he headed on northwards for Alnwick. His head sent him because the Duke of Northumberland wanted him to work at Alnwick Castle, and he liked the Duke, and the Duchess Elizabeth even more. But his heart had a say too, prompted especially by his brother John’s sudden death in March 1766, for he had owed John so much in the way of his early training and had never had the opportunity to thank him, or even raise a glass to John’s own success. Lancelot was swimming in the larger pond (or lake), but John’s reputation in the North was quite as considerable: ‘he will be missed19 in this part of the country very much,’ wrote the Wallington agent William Robson to Sir Walter Blackett with the news of John’s death. John20 had long overcome Dame Anne Loraine’s disdain at his marriage to her daughter Jane, and it had been a good marriage, with their fine son, Richard. John’s progress from farm manager to agent at Kirkharle, then as a surveyor to the turnpike trust, had landed him the plum position of agent to the Duke of Portland’s northern estates (thought to equal the holdings of the Duke of Northumberland) in the early 1760s.

  The Duke of Portland was largely an absentee landlord and so John’s monthly reports tell more of his working life than Lancelot knew: he worked from his home, Whitridge on the Kirkharle estate, and dealt directly with the Duke on matters concerning his tenancies, rents, boundary disputes and coal-prospecting, often working with the distinguished mining engineer William Brown of Throckley. John was both fair and kind; typically he asks for a ‘charitable benefaction’21 on behalf of farmer Richard Embleton, who has looked for limestone on his land without success ‘and has now lost his eyesight’; the Duke liked his land dressed with lime, and sent five guineas. Like Lancelot, John also rode miles in the foulest weathers, high up into the Cumbrian fells – where the Duke was having an infamous dispute with Sir James Lowther – and deep into the Coquet valley, as well as into Yorkshire (to visit Lord Holderness at Hornby or Aston) and down into Nottinghamshire on mining business and to see the Duke at Welbeck Abbey. In Octobe
r 1763 he noted work starting at the new Welbeck colliery. Just over a year later he was organising for ‘4 Isle of Skye cows22 and one bull’ purchased at Crieff Fair, to be driven down to Welbeck for the Duchess, although he feared they would not be the right colour. His letters are full of his good humour, and he appeared to love his work.

  In February 1765 John was laid up with ‘a severe cold’, but appeared to return to normal work: a year later he suffered from ‘a pleuratick feaver’ that the doctor could not relieve, and he died on 11th March. He was fifty-eight years old. George Brown, much the shyest of the three brothers, wrote to Lancelot the next day, asking him to tell the Duke, which he did immediately. From Blenheim on 20th March he wrote to the Duke a second time to arrange a visit, putting forward the hope of Jane Brown and William Robson (the Wallington agent who was Richard’s godfather) that Richard could take his father’s place, with all the guidance that Robson could give him. Lancelot was a persuasive ambassador and the Duke agreed.

  Then a year later, in March 1767, William Robson died, leaving Richard ‘a pretty good fortune which I hope he will deserve,’ said Lancelot, once again giving the Duke of Portland bad news. Richard had enlisted the help of George Robson, possibly William’s brother and Sir Ralph Milbanke’s agent, as his mentor, and promised ‘unwearied diligence’23 in the Duke’s service. He grew in confidence, as his letters show, and his relationship with the Duke prospered; in February 1768 Richard came south and stayed at Wilderness House (Lancelot had probably not seen him as a grown man) and they went to Blenheim together. Richard probably came again in the spring of 1769, spurring Lancelot’s conscience for his trip to Northumberland.