by Jane Brown
Most spectacular of all was Belvoir Castle, about 5 miles west of the Great North Road just south of Grantham, a road much travelled by Lancelot. Even Arthur Young, who was not easily impressed, and stressed that his road was not by Belvoir but that he went purposely to view it, was overawed: it ‘suddenly appears20 an immense prospect over a prodigiously extensive vale,’ Young wrote in his Six Weeks’ Tour through the Southern Counties. The castle was ‘almost in the clouds on the top of a vast hill’, almost equally unreachable along a road that was ‘dreadfully bad’. Presumably Lancelot’s approach was much the same; they saw not the turreted fairytale castle we see today, but a huge square house, with its approach drive spiralling around the mound, snail-fashion, and about one-third of the way up, the mound extends to a huge flat terrace, with walks and pools, from which the stupendous view out over the Vale of Belvoir is taken. Jonathan Spyers made an extensive survey and Lancelot planned his ‘alterations’, and these were ‘made very descriptive, fair and neat’ and ‘bound into a book’, as Lancelot noted in his account book. ‘Bound into a book’ is the most intriguing phrase, hinting that presenting a scheme in this form was the coming fashion, and not entirely Repton’s innovation when he produced his first Red Book a decade later. At Belvoir nothing came of Lancelot’s plans because of the death of the 3rd Duke of Rutland in 1779. His heir, his grandson Charles Granby, was a close friend and political ally of the young William Pitt, with other preoccupations.
Return to Croome
After this heavy dose of possibilities, it was a relief to return to well-travelled paths and old friends. Croome was ever there to be visited, and Lancelot had a fatherly affection for the place, for at Croome everything had turned out so happily. George William Coventry was settled with his second wife, Barbara St John, sister to the Dean of Worcester, a more ordinary beauty than the lamented Maria, but with a generous dowry and a real love of country life, gardening and animals. Croome was now sumptuously furnished, with tapestries from the French Royal Gobelin works, a library fitted out by premier carpenters Vile and Cobb, and other fine furnishings masterminded by Robert Adam. Adam had even designed the Coventrys’ wedding bed, with fluted spiral bedposts, Corinthian capitals and a carved dome, ‘the whole dressed in fresh green linen’.21
Croome was a sporting estate: the stable court, completed in a plain solidity reminiscent of Burghley’s stables (but to designs submitted by Smith of Warwick some years earlier), now rejoiced in a clock made by Thomas Mudge and an elegant lamp standard set in the centre and surrounded by railings, designed by Adam. On the east hill, near Lancelot’s church (with Adam’s interior) and his Rotunda, was the new ice house, almost certainly Lancelot’s work, with an oval chamber 15 feet across at its widest, sunk 20 feet into the ground and with a thatched roof. It was surrounded by cool shade-planting, but still convenient for the house kitchens. Adam and Lancelot seemed to dovetail easily into their responses to the Countess’s ideas, for they had manoeuvred around each other for long enough now, each to know the other’s sensitivities. Lancelot must have told the Coventrys about the grotto of love at Hampton Court House being made by Thomas Wright, for, uncharacteristically, he made a grotto at Croome, a modest effort in tufa and rockwork beside the lake, which eventually acquired a nymph, Sabrina fair, the titular deity of the River Severn.
The Temple Greenhouse, Adam’s huge columned portico into which frames fitted for winter protection, sited by Lancelot beside the shrubbery, held the nucleus of the Coventrys’ collection of exotic plants, brought home from the Indies and Africa by their travelling friends. Adam’s ingenuity was responsible for any number of ‘follies’, although invariably Lancelot had the placing of them and he laid out the circuits – a 3-mile walk and 10-mile ride – for taking the views. Lancelot’s water course through the park was now extended northwards to curl in imitation of the Severn and roll out into the new lake. The three-arched bridge was Adam’s, but the rockwork Dry Arch was Lancelot’s, not to mention his unseen last phase of the drainage to make all this happen.
Lancelot had also relished the challenge of the pleasance at Pirton,22 the 1,200 acres of the hilly old park of timbered Pirton Court, north of Croome Court’s vale. The lamented Maria was buried at Pirton, where the little timber-towered church of St Peter’s seems to sit level with the Malverns’ tops and presides over the exuberantly dipping fields that sweep up to the cedar-dotted ridge. Though the fields are now mainly arable (and there is the compromising presence of the M5 on the western horizon), it is still evidently Lancelot’s landscape, with visible remnants of his scalloped belts and clumps of trees. In the dip to the north the layout is focused on the medieval fishpond, Pirton Pool of legendary expanse, for which Lancelot proposed carefully ‘serpentising’ the edges and adding two large, planted islands.
A sporting footnote is added to the Croome Park lake by an estate map of 1796, where part of the outline is shown very definitely ‘pulled out’ at the corners, giving it the shape of an animal pelt pinned to a board. This shape is indicative of a duck decoy, the corner channels screened by woodland and easily fitted with the netting tunnels into which the wildfowl, innocently landed upon the open lake, were lured and captured. Duck made much better eating without being sprinkled with lead shot, which those of bon-viveur tastes felt strongly about. Lancelot was familiar with the decoy at Wotton Underwood and may have played a part in its making: he had twice visited the Aubreys’ Boarstall, just a few miles to the west beyond Brill, the home of a seventeenth-century decoy that was in continued use. There was also one at Aynho nearby. Once the distinctive shape of a decoy is learned, it is possible to see them in several places. They were a common feature in the fenland landscape, and Lancelot would have seen them around Boston. At Chillington in Staffordshire, where James Paine had described Lancelot’s lake as ‘confessedly one of the finest pieces of water’ in the country, the ‘neck’ of water at the south-west corner looks very like the decoy secreted in Big Wood.
Park decoys were set in woodland, so that the business of the decoyman and his dog could be conducted in quiet, the dog ‘piper’ – traditionally a red setter – working to the subtlest of sound signals, with the decoyman’s skills veering towards sorcery as he charmed his tame lure-ducks to tempt the deluded incomers. Decoys were much used in the seventeenth century and were greatly revived for nineteenth-century sport, and so Lancelot’s examples helped bridge the gap of knowledge that enabled the art to survive. The Book of Duck Decoys, their construction, management and history by Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey Bt., of Thirkelby Park, Thirsk, published in May 1886, is the celebrated authority. He mentions the Chillington decoy, and those discussed above, and lists decoys at Packington, Oakly, Lowther and Kimpton Hoo amongst Lancelot’s parks.
Mrs Montagu’s Sandleford Priory
In the summer of 1781 Lancelot was at Sandleford Priory, just south of Newbury. It was familiar country, with the Cravens’ Benham in the Kennet valley, where Henry Holland’s house had turned out prettily enough, a few miles to the north, and Highclere about the same distance to the south. Could he have resisted calling at Highclere, where he had left his overall proposals for the Herberts’ park a decade earlier? He had spent hours riding around the hugely impressive deer park, which had once belonged to the Bishops of Winchester and was still partly protected by its medieval pale, dominated on the south by Sidown and Beacon Hills, while to the north were the fishponds, fed from abundant chalk streams, run by the medieval bishops as commercial fisheries. Robert Sawyer Herbert and his brother, the Architect Earl of Pembroke from Wilton, had done a great deal to the park in the way of avenues and eye-catchers: Lancelot remembered the litany of associations, of places of interest and views, which he had incorporated into the rides he marked out, and the new roads he planned. The fishponds had conjoined into Milford Lake, which took on his outline, and the new Dunsmere was made, moving the Newbury road to the east. Henry Herbert, just become Lord Porchester (in 1780), had so loyally implemented much of Lancelot
’s plan that Highclere has become known as one of the finest Brown parks, though Lancelot himself had hardly touched it.
Sandleford was a much more domestic place, and though he had not entered the park gate before, it was a kind of homecoming. Lancelot was working for Elizabeth Montagu, at last; they had first met a quarter of a century before, when William Pitt had found himself in love with both Hester Grenville and Mrs Montagu’s Hayes in Kent and won both of them, having persuaded Mrs Montagu to part with Hayes. With the Pitts and the Garricks among her close friends, and her much larger social circle, Elizabeth Montagu was certainly aware of Lancelot’s progress, but she was constrained – as her life in general was – as an intelligent and educated woman constantly berating herself as to what a woman, or at least a lady, did not do. She was a creature of nervous energy, called ‘Fidget’ as a child, and invariably likened to a chattering bird; her person appeared fragile, and her life had the impression of taking place in a gilded cage. She had been married at twenty-four to the dourly mathematical Edward Montagu, who was fifty; it was a marriage of great affection and loyalty. Montagu had already owned Sandleford, over which the young Elizabeth was ecstatic: ‘I think I may say23 you never saw anything so pretty as the view these gardens command, for my part I would not change the situation for any I ever saw; there is nothing in Nature pretty that they have not. The prospect is allegro’; this suited her philosophy, expressed as ‘Mirth with thee I chose to live’, and she would have nothing melancholy or of Stygian gloom. The prospect from Sandleford was cheerful:
we have a pretty village24 on a rising ground just before us – a silver stream washes the foot of the village – Nature has been very indulgent to this country, and has given it enough of wood and water: the first we have in good plenty, and a power of having more of the latter, as improvements are undertaken.
Edward Montagu was a keen fisherman: ‘Mr M has just taken some prodigious carp from a fish-pond … and was throwing three of the old monks’ ponds, or fish-stews, into one large one.’ This seems almost the only alteration he made; they planted an oak to celebrate the birth of their son, who died at just over a year old, but his ‘Punch’s Oak’25 was to live to a venerable age.
Sandleford became a peaceful retreat: ‘my desk and I26 are placed under the shade of some noble elms,’ she wrote, at other times referring to ‘my sylvan palace’ or the ‘arched roofs of twilight groves’. Childless, portrayed by Allan Ramsay in 1762 with huge, kind brown eyes that seem close to tears, Mrs Montagu itemised her life’s roles as ‘a Critick, a Coal Owner, a Land Steward, a sociable creature’. Her days were divided between her London literary salon, her bluestocking friends and protégées, their visits to the Montagus’ Denton estate and colliery, and Allerton Park in Yorkshire, all of which she managed owing to Edward’s declining health, as well as her sociable outings to Bath. She nursed her husband loyally until his death in 1775, when he left her a fortune and set her free: at Sandleford, where the long-established ‘Scotch’ gardener Thomas Woodhouse and the equally long-serving bailiff also died at about the same time, her cage was indeed opened and she was able to please herself.
Sandleford, the rather battered remains of an Augustinian priory, sat on the south-western corner of the high heath of Greenham Common; the pretty village in the view was Newtown, and the silver stream the Enborne, which flowed southwards from the Common. The soils were Bagshot sands over London clay, and the estate still occupied medieval boundaries. On the east there were paths up to the Common, with a stream flowing down, but most of the acreage was to the west of the Newbury road (then hardly a barrier) towards Wash Common. Mrs Montagu saw herself as a ‘farmeress’: ‘at Sandleford you will find27 us busy in the care of arable land,’ she wrote to her brother in June 1777, ‘the meagre condition of the soil forbids me to live in the state of a shepherdess queen which I look upon as the highest rural dignity.’ The land west of the road remained this way, but took on the lilting rhythms of Lancelot’s definition of boundaries and planting belts.
With her new-found freedom, Mrs Montagu had James Wyatt build her an elliptical, domed drawing room and convert the old chapel ruin into a dining-room, her ‘reformed chapel’.28 Firstly, as she explained to Lancelot, her views from these rooms were not quite elevated enough; he responded ‘by removing a good deal29 of ground and throwing it down below to raise what was too low, while he sunk what was too high [and] has much improved the view to the south’. He further heightened an east window, with a fanlight, ‘so that the arch formed by the trees is now visible. These rooms are the most beautiful imaginable. With the shelter the comfort and convenience of walls and roofs you have [a] beautiful passage of the green shade of the grove’ – a luminosity brought indoors that was a rare effect.
Lancelot stayed for several days on at least one occasion; we may imagine them sitting and talking over old times, and she enjoyed his company. ‘He is an agreeable,30 pleasant companion, as well as a great genius in his profession. I consider him a great poet.’ She felt almost embarrassed that she had spent so much on the ‘Demons, Pomp31 and Vanity’ with her much-celebrated new house in Portman Square, and that ‘the noble genius of Mr Brown should be restrained by ignoble considerations and circumstances’ at Sandleford, but she had a horror of incurring debt, and ‘so his improvements must not go beyond what my cash will immediately answer’. Lancelot was all compliance, and they made good progress; ‘as fast as time32 wrinkles my forehead, I smooth the grounds about Sandleford,’ she wrote:
in a little while I shall not see anything belonging to me that is not pretty, except when I behold myself in the looking glass … Mr Brown has not neglected any of [Sandleford’s] capabilities. He is forming it into a lovely pastoral – a sweet Arcadian scene. In not attempting more, he adapts his scheme to the character of the place and my purse. We shall not erect temples to the gods, build proud bridges over humble rivulets, or do any of the marvellous things suggested by the caprice, and indulged by the wantonness of wealth.
Surely the ‘proud bridges over humble rivulets’ meant they had talked of Blenheim and other of Lancelot’s achievements; did he confess to her that some of his clients spent too much money and that places were spoilt by this, for after all, the lords and their purses came after the places with him. Mrs Montagu, so skilled in the arts of conversation, surely drew him out to speak of his lonely profession. On one occasion they walked up to the common and looked at the stream course. ‘I am not fond33 of large pieces of standing water but nothing adds so sweet and so placid an air to a place as a winding river,’ she had written earlier. Lancelot proposed a series of ponds and cascades, rather as at Wynnstay, though less dramatically so, and she responded, ‘and I am sure all my geese will be swans, when Mr Brown has improved the little river which divides Admiral Derby’s territory and mine’. The largest pond became known as Brown’s Pond.
In the July of 1782, with work in full swing, Mrs Montagu gave a supper for her workers, and she described it:
The scene is extremely34 animated; 20 men at work in the wood and grove, and the fields around are full of haymakers. The persons employed on the work are poor weavers who by the decay of our manufacture at Newbury are void of employment, and not having been trained to the business of agriculture are not dexterous at the rake and pitchfork, but the plain digging and driving wheel barrows they can perform and are very glad to get their daily subsistence.
She also employed the destitute soldiers who roamed the countryside, and made a practice of employing girls who could not get work elsewhere. She must have told Lancelot about her workforce, for in the following October he wrote to her from York, ‘honoured with your letter which is an exact Picture of your mind, full of Compassion and good will to all; the Season has been such as I never saw before, and I am doubtfull the consequence of it will be tolerable to the Poor in many places’. He promised to visit Sandleford before she left at the end of October, and if he did, it was their last meeting. But she had given him the blessed h
abit of self-awareness, and the ability to talk of what he did, even though it was so late: one day in December in the garden at Hampton Court he encountered Mrs Montagu’s friend and ‘fellow’ bluestocking, Hannah More, who was staying at Hampton with the widowed Mrs Garrick. ‘Never was such delicious weather!’ she wrote:
I passed two hours35 in the garden the other day as if it has been April with my friend Mr Brown. I took a very agreeable lecture from him in his art, and he promised to give me taste by inoculation. He illustrates everything he says about gardening by some literary or grammatical allusion. He told me he compared his art to literary composition. ‘Now there’ said he, pointing his finger, ‘I make a comma, and there’ pointing to another spot, ‘where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.
It was a stumbling start, and not kindly received when passed about.
The Christian husband, father, friend
We could wish that Lancelot had had more time to spend with Mrs Montagu and Hannah More, for between them they could well have encouraged him to write his memoirs, or at least his professional Hints for posterity. As it was, he was all activity right to the end: in the January of 1783 he made a trip to Suffolk, to Euston, Ickworth and Heveningham. This last was a commission from Sir Gerard Vanneck for his large park in that spectacular but quiet countryside south of Halesworth. Lancelot’s scheme was a polished masterpiece, with river-style lake, drive and woodland belt echoing each other’s sinuousities across a floating greensward.