by Jane Brown
Lord Bute’s misfortunes were threefold: he had lost his place amongst the capricious society that so largely made up Lancelot’s patrons (a salutary warning?); he had failed to find recognition for his tremendous labours upon a system of plant classification that rivalled Linnaeus’s sexual system, set out in Species Plantarum of 1753 (but by no means completely accepted); and third, he was at loggerheads with the new favourite and Director of Kew gardens, Sir Joseph Banks. Jealousy and hurt were evident in the facetious manner in which Bute replied to a request from Sir Joseph and Dr Carl Solander to visit Luton:
[Lord Bute] is sorry53 Mr Banks thinks it necessary to ask a permission to see Luton Garden. Can there be a spot dedicated to vegetables & shut up from the first Patron of Botany. The truth is Ld Bute has long wished for the pleasure of seeing Mr Banks & Doctor Solander at the place, when he might profit by their superior knowledge in his favourite Science.
Lancelot was determinedly loyal to Bute – whose son, Lord Mount Stuart, did pay Henry Holland a substantial sum for alterations to Cardiff Castle – and this may have counted against him, especially with Banks. Many years later, Lancelot’s youngest son, Thomas, claimed that Banks and his father were ‘old friends’, but there is no evidence for this.
Of Peasants in Periwigs and Melon Grounds
In the cold spring of May 1772, Horace Walpole wrote from Strawberry Hill to William Mason, complaining that ‘the dreaded East54 is all the wind that blows’, and adding, ‘the newspapers tell me that Mr Chambers has Sir-Williamized himself’, by the desire of the Knights of the Polar Star (a Swedish honour), ‘and is going to publish a treatise on ornamental gardening’. Clearly thinking of Kew, Walpole supposed that Chambers would think a garden ‘as a subject to be built in – in truth our climate is so bad that instead of filling one’s garden with buildings, we might rather fill our buildings with gardens, as the only way of enjoying the latter!’ Later in the month, on 25th May, Walpole wrote again, ‘I have read Chambers’s book55 … it is more extravagant than the worst Chinese [wall]paper, and is written in wild revenge against Brown, the only surprising consequence is that it is laughed at, and is not likely to be adopted.’
‘Written in wild revenge against Brown?’Was this really the case, or just the waspish Walpole’s dramatisation? Chambers’s infamous book, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening by Sir William Chambers Kt, Comptroller of his Majesty’s Works, was printed in 1772 by W. Griffin, printer to the Royal Academy, then in Russell Street, Covent Garden, and sold widely in London. An actual reading soon discovers his aims: to praise the Italian Renaissance villa gardens and Versailles-like French formalism, for their straight lines, temples, banqueting houses, topiary pyramids and spouting waters (without any recognition that such things had been in high fashion in England56 a century earlier). Chambers rages, ‘In England, where this antient style is held in detestation’, a new manner has been adopted whereby ‘our gardens differ very little from common fields, so closely is common nature copied in most of them’; he imagines the discomforts of some putative stranger, who ‘is often at a loss to know whether he be walking in a meadow, or in a pleasure ground’, who has nothing to amuse him or excite his curiosity and is lost in a large space, ‘doomed to walk one unvarying path, to find a hard seat which comforts him little’, so that he must either drag on to the end or ‘return back by the tedious way he came’.
Chambers had spent much of his life abroad, but it seems he had not opened his eyes to England – nor his ears to English sensibilities. The ‘antient’ gardens were the fashions of monarchs who ruled by divine right, and those days were banished. The English loved their green acres, the simple freedom of being out of doors, a virtue that Sir William Temple had liked to quote regarding Charles II on his return from exile in France, saying he ‘liked that Country best,57 which might be enjoy’d the most Hours of the Day, and the most Days in the Year, which he was sure was to be done in England more than in any country whatsoever’.
Chambers might just as well have blamed the new taste on the Hanoverian regime, but he chose instead to point out the lack of ‘regular professors’,58 or rather too many ‘peasants [who] emerge from the melon grounds to commence professors’. In abandoning gardens to ‘kitchen gardeners, well skilled in the culture of salads, but little acquainted with the principles of ornamental gardening’, he might well have meant his nearest target, the Scots gardener William Aiton, raised in the kitchen-garden apprentice system and now in charge of Kew Gardens. The good-natured Aiton was portrayed by Nathaniel Dance in his ‘uneasy’ periwig. Lancelot’s newly made Sion Hill and Syon House gardens could be read as ‘a large green field, scattered over with a few straggling trees, and verged to a confused border of little shrubs and flowers’ by an ignorant eye – ignorant of nature, trees and flowers. But Chambers goes farther: ‘whole woods have been59 swept away to make room for a little grass and a few American weeds’ – and this is surely directed at Charles Hamilton’s theatrical plantings of American shrubs at Painshill, and at the works of Joseph Spence and Thomas Wright? He does not name ‘our virtuosi’, but accuses them of not leaving ‘an acre of shade, not three trees growing in a line, from Land’s End to the Tweed’, and if their ‘humour for devastation’ continues, there will not be a forest-tree left standing in the whole kingdom’. If Lancelot had not risen in wrath at this last accusation, he would have spluttered in fury at Chambers’s opening on the virtues of the Chinese: ‘the Chinese Gardeners take nature for their pattern – their first consideration is the nature of the ground – to which circumstances they carefully attend’ as to ‘the wealth and temper of their clients’. So much for Pope’s dictum of thirty years before on consulting ‘the Genius of the Place’.
In the name of Chinese gardeners, Chambers proceeds to reinvent well-practised themes, vistas – as taken from a seat or pavilion – the haha, a winter garden, ‘waters for sailing,60 rowing, fishing’ (China has lakes of several miles in circumference) and ‘in the centres of plantations large tracts of land laid out for secret and voluptuous engagements’ – close walks and hedges that sound much like a maze. He goes off to flights of fancy on ‘gloomy woods with distorted trees, where tiger and jackal howl’; on instruments of torture used as ornaments (gibbets and crosses); and on dark passages ending in steep precipices. His chaotic fantasies offended Walpole’s sense of due restraint and historical accuracy, which he had so deftly managed in his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto published in 1764.
Chambers’s Dissertation foreshadowed the taste for the Picturesque in garden styles, and the standard he raised for the betterment of professional gardeners was not in vain. He ended with a plea: ‘Gardeners must be men of genius, experience and judgement; quick in perception, rich in expedients, fertile in imagination and thoroughly versed in all the affections of the human mind.’
It was not an attack on Lancelot, but it was written in complete ignorance of what he and others had been doing for half a century.
We only have it from other people that Lancelot was offended; probably all would have been soon forgotten, had not his old ally, Rev. William Mason, decided to have a little fun with the contretemps, striking out with An Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers, Knight, which appeared in January of 1773, when Lancelot was far too ill to read it, and was more concerned with his daughter’s wedding:
Come then, prolific Art,61 and with thee bring
The charms that rise from thy exhaustless spring;
To Richmond come, for see untutor’d Brown
Destroys those wonders which were once thy own.
Lo, from his melon-ground the peasant slave
Has rudely rush’d and levelle’d Merlin’s cave;
Knock’d down the waxen wizard, seiz’d his wand,
And marr’d, with impious hand, each sweet design
Of Stephen Duck and good Queen Caroline.
It might be pertinent that Mason had come from spending dark weeks in Cambridge, sorting and collecting the pap
ers of his friend Thomas Gray. However, it was to Pope’s idiom that he then turned:
Haste, bid yon livelong terrace62 re-ascend,
Replace each vista, straighten every bend;
Shut out the Thames; shall that ignoble thing
Approach the presence of great Ocean’s king?
No, let barbaric glories feast his eyes,
August pagodas round his palace rise,
And finish’d Richmond open to his view,
A work to wonder at, perhaps – a Kew.
The Heroic Epistle was very popular and much laughed at. Lancelot, even when well enough, would not have regarded satire as his rightful field, though he might just have totted up the numbers – the hundreds of thousands of trees he had planted in the previous decades.
‘Let Vanity take a look at Ambition’
Lord Clive leading Lancelot to the border counties had a happy legacy. The Harleys were the ancestral lords of the country flowing south via Knighton and Presteigne, living at Eywood at Titley, tucked into the steep hills that divided the valleys of the Hindwell brook, a tributary of the Lugg, and the River Arrow. Eywood must have seemed extremely remote in the eighteenth century, but the Harleys, in the person of the 4th Earl of Oxford, were not to be ignored, and so Lancelot made his way there in the August of 1775, presumably as a result of the gentry grapevine. (He noted his visit, but nothing else, and today Eywood is a broken and much-maligned landscape, where it is impossible to be certain of his civilising hand.) At Eywood he met Lord Oxford’s younger brother, Thomas Harley, who, in his middle forties and with his City fortune, was returning ‘home’ and had bought Berrington just north of Leominster.
It seems they drove the 20 winding miles eastwards into England, for Lancelot to have a look at Berrington, where Thomas Harley immediately asked him to design the park. Indeed, he may have asked Lancelot to design him a new house as well, but Lancelot was pleased enough to fall back on a Claremont-style working partnership with Henry Holland. How fortunate this was, for Berrington is an exquisite smaller cousin to Claremont, though red rather than creamy-white, encased in red sandstone quarried from Shuttocks Hill a mile away, and brought by horse-drawn carriages on a tramway constructed across the park. For us in retrospect, Holland’s interiors, with their swirls and swags and ice-cream colours suffused in dramatic lights, reveal an enchanting interlude between the styles of Robert Adam and John Soane.
Unmistakeably Lancelot had the siting of Berrington.63 Perhaps, in his famed way of speedy grasp and judgement, he paced around with Harley, and told him, ‘There, just there, that is the place for your house.’ That it was a matter of finding the right spot rather than making it is borne out by the Foreman’s notes for the shell of the building, taken from Holland’s drawings, with their implicit economy of labours: ‘dig out for the Basement story four feet deep (except in Stewards room 7 feet) dig for the foundations of the walls 18" deeper, dig for a dry area round the House 6” lower than the floor, dig for the drains to the outside of the Building, dispose the Ground round the House, Make the drains in Brickworks.’ The walls were of brick faced with stone and roofed in Westmorland slates. The foundations for the portico and steps were added to the south entrance front, setting the perfect stage for the view, which is typically ‘Brownian’ and equally typically economical with effects. Nature had done most of the work, providing a wide valley crossed by a tributary stream; Lancelot provided a silvery pool, a 14-acre lake with a large island (made of the spoil), the wooded island bestowing on generations of happy children the stuff of their dreams.
Berrington Hall, Herefordshire, built for Thomas Harley by Lancelot in partnership with his son-in-law Henry Holland as the architect. Lord Clive’s Claremont in Surrey and the now vanished Cadland house by Southampton Water were built by the same partnership methods.
We can almost hear the Harleys’ talk of the extravagant panorama that can be taken in with so little effort from the portico: to the south, beyond Lugg and Arrow, to steep-sided Westhope Hill and the Roman Watling Street; farther south across the Wye to the distant ridge of the Black Mountains; swinging westwards, the view brushes over Eywood, backed by the old Radnor Forest, and then northwards to the family’s Brampton Bryan beside the Teme, coming homewards across the watery ways of Leintwardine and the thickly wooded ridges of Leinthall, where the Iron Age fort of Croft Ambrey sits on the skyline. Berrington is a fine example of how Lancelot gave his client more than a house in a park, but a home set in the mists of time. His house cost Harley about £15,000, paid to Henry Holland; Lancelot earned £1,600.
In early December of 1775 Lancelot set out for the Midlands, with Biddy’s last words ringing in his ears, ‘Don’t forget to write.’ His intentions were good, but he had a little leeway, as he was headed for Luton Hoo and the safe harbour of Lord Bute’s. Or was it so safe? He stayed two nights and they drank a bottle of sweet, rich Tokay each evening, as he confessed to Biddy, ‘which was rather too much64 for me as my cough has been very troublesome’. His confession was preambled with some of his mischief, written on 11th December, from Coombe Abbey at Coventry, which he had reached by way of Fawsley in Northamptonshire:
I came by Mr Knightley’s where I stay’d one night and met a cheerful domestic wife that never wishes to stir from home – she looks after her Birds and makes her husband’s pleasures her own – she had all the wifely virtues, but no child, and I am sorry for [that, for] perhaps she would have had more pleasure and better appetite for it if she had a few.
The cheerful wife was Catherine Dashwood, married to Lucy Knightley (named for a connection to the Lucys and Charlecote, although he is known to have disliked his name), who left the matter of progeny to his youngest brother John Knightley and his wife Mary Baines, who had six children: their daughter Elizabeth was married to John Fleming, and earlier in the summer Lancelot had visited the Flemings at North Stoneham near Southampton, conveniently close to Broadlands.
The Knightleys had been at Fawsley, which was about 10 miles west of Northampton in surprisingly remote countryside, for long centuries. Their monuments crowd the ancient church, and hall and church are situated in a watery vale. Fawsley was a noted lost village, though cleared for sheep-grazing a good two centuries before Lancelot’s arrival. He had been making the lake and plantations in the valley for several years, and the Knightleys’ home, as so many other houses of his clients, had become his convenient overnight halt. Most of the hall was Elizabethan, and Lancelot found himself sharing his dark bedroom with the portraits of martyrs, Charles I, Bishop Laud and Lord Strafford, which led him ‘very much upon65 the Phylosophick strain’ and the contemplation of vanity, ambition and the wages thereof. ‘A Day so spent is not one of the worst we spend,’ he wrote to Biddy, ‘and just to conclude it, I have entered into a conversation with you which has every charm except your company which will ever be the sincere and the principal delight, my dear Biddy, of your affectionate h[usband].’
Lord Craven’s Coombe Abbey at Coventry, hardly less haunted than Fawsley, was the very fictional Gothic image of a Cistercian abbey, its ghostly grey stones sprawling around the cloisters – these enclosed and furnished with the horned heads of dead cattle and a stuffed wild cat – and around cavernous halls. The Great Hall had welcoming log fires, and the newer rooms were richly furnished, but for Lancelot, in his philosophic mood, there was no escape from the doleful dark eyes that gazed down from the many portraits of the 1st Lord Craven’s beloved Stuarts: the murdered King Charles I, his sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia, her sons Rupert and Maurice, and generations of the warrior Cravens. Was it only his tired imagination, or were they accusing him of destroying their old gardens, even the image of the garden that was Stuart England?
Coombe had a large and nondescript deer park; it was more suited to ranges of sweet chestnut or lime avenues as in the olden days, but Lancelot had found these broken and moth-eaten, full of dead trees, through lack of care. If John Byng66 – that noted ‘observer’ and nosey parker, who
called him ‘my friend Capability Brown’ (a more general than personal bonhomie, and made in 1786 after Lancelot’s death) – thought he had ‘ruined old avenues’ and not planted enough in their places, it was fair comment, for his plantations had not had time to grow. Byng’s other jibes concerning Coombe Abbey, that the water stagnated and there was no ‘inequality’ of ground, revealed Lancelot’s difficulties: the park was a feebly contoured desert and it was job enough to persuade the streams to fill the lake at all; the water lolled about in a great hook-ended pond, which at least would serve for boating and fishing (150 years later the lake had become the oldest and largest heronry in the country). Had Lancelot overreached himself at Coombe? Were there some places that just did not respond to his persuasion? Faced with a December morning and cold hours to spend inspecting the great drab park, the gruelling necessities of his profession perhaps weighed heavily.