by Jane Brown
Coombe was not a happy commission (today it is a spacious ‘green lung’ and country park). Lord Craven was more interested in his racing, having airily told Lancelot, ‘I shall leave67 everything else to you’ – meaning the park. Lady Craven, the former Elizabeth Berkeley, was hostile, writing in her later Memoirs (1826) that they had been ‘plundered’ over the costs by ‘the famous man68 called Capability Brown’. She noted that £12,000 was laid out, whereas Lancelot’s account shows just over £7,000, and added that she felt herself perfectly capable of ‘adding to Nature’. The Cravens’ marriage was foundering, perhaps an underlying cause.
His next port of call, Lord Donegall’s Fisherwick, near Lichfield, also appeared to slip beyond Lancelot’s complete control. Lord Donegall was kind and prompt in his payments of £500 or £300 (and sometimes more), which had arrived regularly for six years and now amounted to more than £6,000 (with £1,000 paid to Drummonds, which may, or may not, have been additional). The house, rebuilt on old foundations and somewhat in the manner of Croome, appeared huge and bulky, though Lord Donegall was very happy with Henry Holland’s silk-hung rooms. Outdoors, Lancelot’s wizardry conjured lawns and curving waters, joined by a cascade, but there was a sense of impermanence about Fisherwick, and it was not destined for long life. The Marquess, as he became, died in 1799 and the estate faced an uncertain future; sale particulars of 1808 describe flourishing plantations, ‘with the finest trees69 and shrubs of all descriptions and ornamented in various parts with greenhouses, temples and seats, and the canals and rivers with Bridges and Cascades’. The park was ‘abundantly stocked with deer and game and richly ornamented with groups of fine forest trees’. But the gloss failed to find it all a secure future, the house was demolished, the park broken into lots and eventually used for gravel extraction. For the Staffordshire volume (2009) of his Historic Gardens of England, Timothy Mowl explored the remains of Fisherwick, finding:
the approach road70 to the site is flanked by a dramatic ha-ha of squared and coursed red sandstone, stubby gatepiers with the Earl’s coronets survive near the site of the house, and there are still discoveries to be made … amongst the thick undergrowth is a silted-up winding stream and stretches of water that are now little more than pools, but Brown’s Cascade just clings on, as do the Kitchen Garden walls.fn1
One Last Diamond, Milton and Sherborne
In the New Year, of 1776, Lancelot was on the road again, making calls as he headed for Dorset. Lord Chatham’s glee at rediscovering himself as a West Saxon with dirty acres at Burton Pynsent referred to his family’s roots in Dorset, and they might have remained in country obscurity, were it not for the exploits of his grandfather, Governor Thomas Pitt, who had done well in India and bought himself a fine diamond. (The gem, so the story goes, was brought home in the heel of Robert Pitt’s shoe, Robert being the Governor’s eldest son and Lord Chatham’s father. The diamond was bought for £24,000 and the wily Governor managed to sell it to the French for five times that sum. It was set in the crown for Louis XIV’s coronation in 1722, then adorned Napoleon’s sword of state; it was restored to Louis XVIII, but has since disappeared.)
With his diamond money, Governor Pitt bought Boconnoc in Cornwall, property in Okehampton including control of the parliamentary seat, and Swallowfield Park in Berkshire (close to George Pitt’s Stratfield Saye, and Lancelot could well have worked at both places). He also added to the Blandford St Mary estate where he had been born. This last is the Down estate, just over the hill from Milton Abbas; work mentioned in the accounts for Down seems to tally with Lancelot’s visits to Milton. In the 1770s Down was the home of Thomas Pitt, Lord Chatham’s nephew, in whom he had taken a considerable interest, and an Orangery was being built, the work done by Stephen Carpenter of Blandford, who also worked at Milton. The house has gone, but Down remains a sequestered vale of green, with Lebanon cedars and a fugitive elegance that suggests an abandoned Brown landscape. Needless to say, Down does not appear in Lancelot’s accounts; is it just one more strand in the skein of mutual obligations that ties Lancelot and Lord Chatham?
At Milton he found an unhappy place. Lady Milton had recently died and her husband was absorbed in her memorialising; their son John Damer, less than ten years after his brilliant match with Anne Seymour Conway,71 was estranged from the beautiful and talented sculptress, and was drinking and gambling himself to perdition. Lord Milton, refusing to pay his son’s debts, was branded cruel and unheeding; Lancelot probably knew more than most, but said less, for he had worked at the Conway home, Park Place at Henley, a heavenly spot overlooking the Thames valley. Lord Milton had also quarrelled with William Chambers and brought in James Wyatt to finish his abbey house, but there were still small building jobs that fell to the good-natured Lancelot.
When, almost a dozen years earlier, his lordship had expressed the desire for a lake, Lancelot had replied that the only source for the water was the Hilton stream, and the only way for the water to go was down the valley to the south, where it flowed through Middleton village. Lord Milton had taken him at his word, and in the intervening years he had been buying in the plots, in line with a plan commissioned from Surveyor Woodward; this is a large plan of childlike clarity, every building coloured red, every plot outlined and measured, with the name of the tenant. The dullest villager could not fail to see the logic of the system: vacant plots were taken in hand, and life tenancies all too frequently proved short, for instance: ‘Plot 120 late John Heron, in hand; Plot 29 John Hallet an orchard [worth little]; Next door on lower Henbury lane plot 66 Francis Vacher for life, died 1773, in hand; Plot 42 Barn meadow late William Muckles, in hand’, but Muckles’s fifteenth-century cottage on Mount Pleasant survived, and is there still; was it thought ornamental?
Milton Abbas. The lawyer’s plan c.1770 showing Lord Milton’s clearance of the houses of Middleton town, from Duck, Broad, the High and Market Streets, with the exception of the properties of Mr Harrison, who refused to sell, but was eventually flooded out. The Rivulet was dammed to the south, the valley flooded but the lake was never satisfactory.
Milton Abbey.
Abbey garden.
Abbey church and churchyard.
School – later moved to Dorchester.
Lord Milton’s wall.
Lord Milton’s kitchen garden and orchard.
Rivulet running across Lord Milton’s estate.
Harrison plots.
Other plots.
Woodward’s survey moved relentlessly through the plots – often the tenancies were Lord Milton’s own, or there were only absentee executors to be dealt with – and soon it becomes clear that Lord Milton would eventually have control. Only one man is known to have stood firm, a lawyer named Harrison, who was eventually deliberately flooded out.
Where was Lancelot in this nefarious dealing? He had already seen such a scheme of surpassing ingenuity at Audley End, where Sir John Griffin Griffin had acquired swathes of land in just this way, following the example of his revered aunt, the Countess of Portsmouth. He had seen the earliest ‘model’ villages, the new rows of housing at Harewood designed by John Carr of York, and at Lowther by the Adam brothers; he had spoken to gardeners who were delighted with their modern houses, as any sensible person would be. He recalled the stone cottage where he was born, and contrasted it with his nephew Richard Brown’s fine modern house at Kirkharle. All over the land – at least the land he knew – owners were removing scattered dwellings and replacing them on better sites; this was just one of the lesser despotisms of the role of a landowner. But Middleton was different; it was a thriving township, and it was (as has been mentioned) as though the Egremonts had decided to demolish Petworth, or the Methuens had removed Corsham.
Prior to their falling-out over expenses, and Chambers calling Lord Milton an ‘unmannerly, imperious Lord’73 who treated everybody ill, William Chambers had supplied ‘a plan of a part of the intended Village’ with a description, in a letter of 3rd April 1773. This plan has not been found, but
John Harris notes that ‘from Chambers’ description … the layout of the village74 was his’. On the other hand, Dorothy Stroud asserts that in November 1774 Lancelot noted that he ‘had given plans75 for the village for which he was paid’ 100 guineas, and on this evidence she seems certain that the village was his, though Lancelot’s plans have not been found, either. Posterity has largely taken the Stroud view: that the outrageously picturesque street of toy-like thatched cottages was designed by Lancelot, another stroke of his surprising genius, for which he is applauded – and vilified.
The new village of Milton Abbas, 1770.
In Lancelot’s defence, it seems only pertinent to suggest that such prodigy picturesqueness – only to be matched by Nash and Repton’s Blaise Hamlet almost thirty years later – was unlikely to have come from the ponderous hand of the practical and overworked Lancelot Brown. He simply did not have the architectural imagination to take so many years’ leap in philanthropic design. Nor would he have had the heart to place the village in such a deep valley, orientated almost east–west, so that half the houses spend half their days in chill and mouldering shade, the chimneys hardly draw and the gardens are so steep and shaded as to be almost useless. The final insult was that each cottage, though they were originally pairs of cottages (that is, two rooms down and two up, with a communal staircase), was separated by a horse-chestnut tree (supposedly to deter pests). These naturally grew so large, shading each cottage even more, raining inedible ‘conkers’ and leathery, useless leaves, that they were eventually felled in 1953. Lancelot would never have allowed such a use for the huge trees he planted in avenues or on great lawns – or even as ‘beneath the spreading chestnut tree’ on village greens.
The clearance of the old town was completed in about 1779, the year that the Tregonwell almshouses in the old town were dismantled and reerected in the new village street. It was to be another eight years before the estate accounts mention payments for levelling the west lawn of the abbey house, and grubbing out the hedges to open the view to the new lake. Clearly, the greater villainry at Milton would be to have made the lake that flooded the former orchards and gardens of Middleton, but here Lancelot is innocent. Though he was paid a final 100 guineas, which might have been for a plan and a visit (but could equally easily have been one of his ‘for my trouble’ clearing-up payments), there is no plan. Several years later in Lord Milton’s ongoing dispute (with the immovable Harrison), the lawyers had to make their own plan, showing an ungainly stretch of water with indications of dams ending in the main dam that carries the road to Cheselbourne. Subsequent maps, and the present appearance, show the lake to have been a poor thing, impossible to have been Lancelot’s, on either technical or artistic counts. It simply did not work, and after a dispute over water rights to Milton Mill, it was abandoned.
To return to the winter of 1776, Lancelot was snowed up at Milton and so anxious to get away that he abandoned his chaise and took to horseback for a ride to Sherborne on 15th January; it was 10 rough miles through country lanes before he reached the Dorchester–Sherborne turnpike, and with 6 or so miles more to go, it was no wonder he arrived ‘with great difficulty’.76 His welcome was warm, for he got on well with the Digbys at Sherborne Castle and they with him, and despite the weather the prospect was sunny. Sherborne Castle has the happiest of situations, and there were no troubles with the neighbours here, even though it was close to the town. There might have been, for the old castle built by Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, in the twelfth century was on the hill at the east end of the town, but this had been abandoned by Sir Walter Raleigh (who found it too expensive to alter) and he had built a new house farther to the south, on a secondary hill. The valley between was crossed by the River Yeo, and here Raleigh’s half-brother, Adrian Gilbert, who was something of a plantsman, made a garden with canals and cascades, using the unusual plants that Raleigh brought home from his voyages. A spot called ‘Raleigh’s Seat’ survives, and with it goes an old story with new meaning – he was enjoying a quiet smoke one evening when an anxious servant doused him with ale, thinking he was on fire.
With Raleigh’s sad fall from grace and execution in 1618, James I sold Sherborne Castle estate to the Digbys, who enlarged Raleigh’s house into a storybook construction of white towers, essentially unfortresslike, but still a ‘castle’. Edward, 6th Lord Digby, is said to have made the lake between the old and new castles after he watched a flash-flood of the Yeo; Lancelot may have advised him on this, but any further works were halted when Edward died suddenly, aged twenty-seven, in 1757. Now, albeit nearly twenty years on, his younger brother Henry, 7th Lord Digby, was seriously embellishing his grounds. He and Lancelot spent two January days riding out and giving instructions; Lancelot had already installed Cornelius Dickinson as his foreman for the works. The same pattern followed the next year, in January 1777, when it was recorded in the Game Book that ‘Mr Brown came77 from Lord Milton’s while we were at dinner – and was very agreeable’; and after two days, ‘Captain R[obert Digby] went with regret to Minterne before breakfast sorry to loose any of Mr Brown’s company.’
Lancelot’s pleasing relationship with the Digbys resulted in a serene and understated, typically ‘Brownian’ setting for Sherborne Castle, as if the mood of its making imparted some blithe spirit. The view (reminiscent of the same aspect at Corsham Court) from the Georgian windows of the east front is across an apron of swelling lawn, which falls (the fall unseen) into a curtain of majestic trees, mostly beech, which Lancelot would have underplanted with holly. A break in the trees allows a glimpse of water, which fades into the distance, where the land begins to rise on either side and the lake begins, transforming the Yeo stream. Turn to the south-east and, beyond the unseen ha-ha, the land is still rising, smoothly green punctuated by substantial park trees, which gather as the slope steepens until they clothe the top of the ridge. Turn to the north and the tree curtain breaks for a view across the lake, the water seen through the hovering branches of a huge cedar of Lebanon, one of Lancelot’s favourite tricks. On the far side of the lake, the bank pleasingly open, is the ‘Dry Ground’, which was above the Yeo’s flood, a wide green slope with an echoing cedar and more beech, the trees masking the boundary line of Pinford Lane.
These ‘simple’ views constitute a masterclass in the Brownian landscape style; the materials are merely earth, water and trees, but the way he has disposed these familiar elements launches them into a kaleidoscope of fugitive (the favourite eighteenth-century word) effects. The near lawn, painstakingly moulded and rolled into a swelling curve, cut smooth for summer dancing through the shadows, is at other times thickly flowered or sheep-grazed; the lake – comfortingly controlled within ‘natural’ contours, inviting fishing and boating picnics, and skimming swans and geese – is open to the sky and seasonal lights; in some places it is shaded, dark, mysterious, appealing to the amorous or adventurous, and the long-resident pike. Beyond the ha-ha the park is lushly green and grazed, shadowed with browsing lines along the lip where the contours take a lurch and green changes to rough bracken, the preserve of wild animals and birds. The specimen trees, oaks and planes, can stand proudly alone; the more gregarious beech and chestnuts are gathered into sturdy fortresses, their seasonal colours enhanced by the occasional evergreens. The scene changes subtly and slowly, indeed is never still, just as ‘nature’ intended, through numberless lights and seasons. All is good and true. There are no falsities, no rigid avenues flatten the natural inequalities of land, no water from an improbable source spurts from a carved stone, no alien contortions or colours of tree or flower offend the eye. Though subject to twenty-first-century management, Sherborne Castle still exhibits a good plain example of what is now called the essential English Landscape Style: it is intriguing to discover that the Digbys owned an Italian pastoral landscape painting by Claude – a view across a lake, framed in trees – which gave them their inspiration and informed their agreeable talks with Lancelot.
Sherborne Park. Plan of works for the
7th Lord Digby 1776–79. The park has been sympathetically maintained with great respect for Lancelot’s ideas. Especially good are the walks around the west of the lake to the old castle and the Dry Ground, and along Pinford Lane, and the views to be taken from the east lawn of the new Castle.
Old Castle.
New Castle.
Lake inspired by a flash flood of the river Yeo, as watched by the 6th Lord Digby.
Dam and outfall where river Yeo continues its journey.
Many of the walks and rides that Lancelot planned with Henry Digby can still be taken at Sherborne: to the old castle and along the top of the Dry Grounds to Pinford; the views they discussed, the breaks in the trees that suddenly open out glimpses of the old castle, or the new, are still cherished.
fn1 Mowl thinks that Lancelot may have worked at Byrkley Lodge north of Fisherwick, where a cascade also survives. Himley Park, the last of Lancelot’s Staffordshire commissions, is now a public park, just west of Tipton and Dudley.
12
TREADING THE ENCHANTED GROUND
Now I must request1 you to inform Mama that a great Man has paid us a Visit, which Visit (as happens sometimes with great Men) has ended in very little. You will guess that I mean the illustrious Mr Brown, who walk’d unexpectedly in[to] the Garden on Tuesday Morning, & Din’d with us, in his Way to Hawnes. He did not pay much Attention, or open any Scheme relative to the middle of the Garden. He saw indeed that the Water might appear to come from one Wood &flow into the other, but he did not know whether a winding Water through a strait Avenue might not look inconsistent, as if the Avenue was destroy’d & part of the Wood clear’d away it might unravel the Mystery of the Garden.