Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783
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12 ‘It is impossible’: Lady Chatham, BL Add. Mss. 69795 f.99, 13th November 1777
13 ‘From the Stamp Act’: Lady Chatham, ibid., 1777
14 ‘a rugged and awful crisis’: Ayling, pp.420–1
15 ‘The sentiments of’: 13th November ibid.
16 ‘to deprive the royal offspring’: Ayling, pp.424–5
17 Lancelot from Trentham: BL Add. Mss. 69795 f.101, 15th April 1778
18 ‘she likes them’: Lancelot to Peggy, from Wisbech, BL Add. Mss. 69795 f.103
19 ‘I am just returned’: Lancelot from Hampton Court, Chatham Papers/PRO/30/8/24 f.154, 9th May 1778
20 Pitt’s funeral: see Hague, Prologue
21 death of Thomas Linley: Valerie Purton, ‘A Lost Lincolnshire Link’, in All Things Lincolnshire, ed. Jean Howard and David Start, Lincoln, 2007, pp. 170–3
22 ‘Make the lake’: see Hall, ‘Mr Brown’s Directions’, Garden History, 23:2, Winter 1995, pp. 145–74
23 ‘a Godforsaken place’: Sykes, p. 10
24 ‘Mr Perfect likes’: Sykes, pp. 15–16
25 ‘his primary interest’: Sykes, p.38
26 ‘The Great Brown’: Sykes, p.49
27 ‘small holes made’: Sykes, p.49
28 ‘built fourteen’: Sykes, p.53
29 ‘a veritable orgy’: Sykes, p.54
30 ‘devoted to horticulture’: Jane Brown, Trinity College: A Garden History, 2002, pp.25, 27
31 ‘and no very great funds’: St John’s College archives
32 ‘do wonders’: Brown op. cit., p.29
33 ‘the eye would’: ibid, p.31
34 ‘Mr Brown has’: Marchioness Grey quoted in D.Adshead, Wimpole, 278 Drawings etc., 2009, p.47
35 ‘a Pencil & Paper’: Lady Amabel Polwarth, quoting Lancelot, letter 19 November 1778, Luton & Bedfordshire Archives L30/13/12/52
13 The Omnipotent Magician
This chapter was intended to be my finale, but Lancelot showed no sign of giving up; nor could I let him die. He mellowed, he allowed himself time to sit and talk, and it was as if he softened his landscapes, fitting them into the fashion that we call the ‘Picturesque’. He did this on his own terms, and from his own dealings with the Rev. William Gilpin, whom he had known for many years. Throughout these pages I have purposely refused to foist fashionable intellectual theories upon him from the benefit of hindsight, even though they appeared in books published in his time: it was not his way to rush home to consult Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty or Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, or any other luminary’s words, though he may have imbibed their sentiments from his own conversations.
1 ‘If Jack is’: BL Add. Mss. 69795 f.107
2 ‘I will give’: ibid.
3 ‘very sober’/‘There Remains’: letter to 2nd Viscount Palmerston, 17th November 1779, Broadlands Papers, Hartley Library (Special Collections), University of Southampton, MS 62/BR 103/18/7
4 Henry Cecil and Sally Hoggins: see Elisabeth Inglis-Jones, The Lord of Burghley, 1964
5 ‘boxed and coxed’: Doreen Yarwood, Robert Adam, 1970, p.126, and the whole of Ch. 4 on Adam’s ‘Glorious Decade’, when most of his sites were also Lancelot’s
6 ‘I have always said’: Stroud, 1984, p. 106
7 Appuldurcombe House: see L. O. J. Boynton, English Heritage guide, 2005 edn; Sir Richard Worsley, The History of the Isle of Wight, 1781; Hallie Rubenhold, Lady Worsley’s Whim, An Eighteenth-Century Tale of Sex, Scandal and Divorce, 2009
8 ‘diligently overseen’: 7th Earl of Harewood, introduction to the Harewood guide by Richard Buckle, Derby, n.d. The Norris Museum in St Ives, Cambridgeshire (Gertrude Peet Collection) has a copy of a letter from the Fenstanton Women’s Institute that accompanied a flower basket sent to H.R.H. The Princess Mary in 1922 on the occasion of her marriage to the 6th Earl of Harewood and in recognition of their Lord of the Manor’s designs for Harewood.
9 ‘If Tom Girtin had lived’: J. M. W. Turner, quoted by Richard Buckle in Harewood guide, 1970, p. 16
10 ‘dashed down’: ibid.
11 ‘To finish all the Valley’: for the 1774 contract, see Roger Turner, p.133
12 ‘he has finished’: quoted in Roger Turner, p. 134; see also Peter Fergusson, Roche Abbey, English Heritage guide, 2006 edn
13 ‘the springtime’/‘men of feeling’: Christopher Woodward, In Ruins, 2001, pp. 124–5
14 ‘densely inscribed’/‘Sir George Cornewall’: see Moccas: An English Deer Park, ed. Paul T. Harding and Tom Wall, English Nature, c. 1999, Ch. 2, ‘Historical Context’
15 ‘the visitor was’: John Phibbs, ‘Reading the Landscape’, in Moccas, p.72
16 ‘I fear those’: Rev. Francis Kilvert, quoted in Moccas, opposite title page, from Kilvert’s Diary, 22nd April 1876
17 Wynnstay: Paul Sandby, who was working at Wynnstay, notes a visit to Mr Brown at Hampton Court on Sir Watkin’s behalf on 2nd June 1771, a most definite connection; see Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, ed. John Bonehill and Stephen Daniels, 2009, p.218
18 ‘a very fine’/‘led by the gamekeeper’: Hinde, pp. 193–5
19 ‘to keep myself’/‘£2,500 per annum’: Richard Woods to Lord Arundell, quoted in Hinde, p. 164.
20 ‘suddenly appears’: Young, 1772, p.93
21 ‘fresh green linen’: Gordon, p. 113
22 Pirton: the plan for Pirton Park and Pool, c.1763, and John Snape’s map of the Croome Estate, 1796, were seen while on temporary exhibition at Kelmarsh Hall; they belong to the Croome Estate Trustees Archive
23 ‘I think I may say’: Elizabeth Montagu’s letters were originally edited by her nephew, Matthew Montagu, and published in 1809, 1813 and 1817. See also Elizabeth Montagu: The Queen of the Bluestockings, Correspondence 1720–61, ed. E.J. Climenson, 2 vols, 1906; R. Blunt, Mrs Montagu, Queen of the Blues, her letters and friendships from 1762–80, 2 vols, 1923. My quotations are from the landscape architect Sybil Wade’s statement at the Newbury District Local Plan Inquiry, September 1997 into development affecting Sandleford (St Gabriel’s School)
24 ‘we have a pretty village’/‘Mr M has just taken’: Climenson, 1906, letter after her marriage, c. 1742
25 ‘Punch’s Oak’: Punch was born on 11th May 1743 and the oak soon planted
26 ‘my desk and I’: Blunt op. cit., Summer 1752
27 ‘at Sandleford you will find’: Blunt, 1923, 9th June 1777
28 ‘reformed chapel’: Stroud, 1984, p.195
29 ‘by removing a good deal’: 9th July 1782 in Blunt, 1923
30 ‘He is an agreeable’: Stroud, 1984, p.195
31 ‘Demons, Pomp’: Montagu to Mrs Elizabeth Carter, Blunt 1923, n.d. but 1781
32 ‘as fast as time’: ibid.; there is a 1781 Survey of the Estate at Sandleford in Berkshire Record Office (BRO: D/ELMT19/2/13), which Matthew Montagu identified as by ‘Mr Speers’ – i.e. Jonathan Spyers. No overlay of Lancelot’s scheme has been found, but this may be with the estate papers, which are in America.
33 ‘I am not fond’: letter to Mrs Elizabeth Carter, c.1765, in Blunt op. cit.
34 ‘The scene is extremely’: Stroud, 1984, p.196
35 ‘I passed two hours’: December 1782, Stroud, 1950, p.201; R. B. Johnson, The Letters of Hannah More, 1925
36 ‘My time has been’: Biddy Brown to her daughter Peggy (Margaret), in BL Add. Mss. 69795, ff.110, 112, 114 (the intervening pages are cover sheets)
37 ‘for a term’: Lance Brown to Lord Sandwich, 17 February 1789, in Sir L. Namier and J. Brooke, History of Parliament, House of Commons 1754–90, Vol II, 1964, pp. 122–3
38 Rev. Thomas Brown: he served the parish of Conington for forty years, and a tablet on the chancel wall (beside the organ) commemorates this
39 ‘more an object of’: Henry Holland, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry
40 Henry and Bridget’s son Lancelot: he married Charlotte Peters and, of their fifteen children, twelve married and had large fami
lies, and the name Lancelot has persisted down the generations to the present
41 ‘Gardener to His Majesty’: see Jane Roberts, Royal Landscape, 1997, p.65
42 ‘boldly ventured forth’: G. Carter, P. Goode and K. Laurie, Humphry Repton, 1983, ‘First Years’, p.5
43 ‘the maps of’: ibid., p.11
44 Repton’s gazetteer: see Stephen Daniels, Humphry Repton and the Geography of Georgian England, 1999, pp.256–70
45 ‘codified’: Sylvia Crowe in Carter, Goode and Laurie op. cit., p.128
46 Geoffrey Jellicoe: ibid.
Afterpiece
1 ‘architecture is the art’: Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste, 1980 edn, p.41
2 ‘How happy was the lot’: Ralph Nevill, Sporting Days and Sporting Ways, 1910, pp.238–9
3 James Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 3, p.184, 4th June 1781
4 ‘opened a Road’: Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder, 2009, pp. 126–7
5 ‘the water very fine’/‘a fine one’: Thomas Jefferson, ‘Notes of a Tour of English Gardens’, March and April 1786
6 ‘I am at present’: G. Jellicoe, S. Jellicoe, P. Goode, M. Lancaster (eds)., The Oxford Companion to Gardens, 1986, p.490.
7 ‘Frog Service’: the places illustrated are listed in Ray Desmond, Bibliography of British Gardens, 1984, Appendix, p.313; see also The Green Frog Service, Wedgwood and Bentley’s Imperial Russian Service, ed. M. Raeburn, L. Voronikhina, A. Nurnberg, London, 1995, commemorative volume illustrating the entire service in colour. The Frog Service is in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
8 ‘Poor Brown!’: Lord Harcourt’s letter in Walpole and Mason, Vol. 2, p.406 n.
9 ‘Ill fares the land’: see William Black, Goldsmith, English Men of Letters series, 1880, Ch. 14, ‘The Deserted Village’
10 ‘I may have my revenge’: Jacques, p.122
11 ‘Were England now’: William Cowper, The Task, Book 3, ‘The Garden’
12 ‘wrap’t all o’er’: Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape quoted in Turner, 1999, p.164
13 ‘Mr Brown the gardener’: Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful, etc., 1794, p.188
14 ‘To improve’: ibid. on lawns
15 ‘this fellow crawls’: ibid.
16 ‘To a Gravel Walk’: quoted in Stephen Bending, ‘William Mason’s An Essay on the arrangement of Flowers in Pleasure-Grounds’, Journal of Garden History, 9:4, 1989, pp.217–20
17 ‘saw the deformity’: Dr Mavor on Blenheim, quoted in Green, p.191
18 Paxton: see Kate Colquhoun, A Thing in Disguise, the Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton, 2003
19 ‘more than three hundred miles’: Laura Wood Roper, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, 1973, p.68
20 ‘What artist, so noble’: ibid., p.71. Olmsted identified the question so often asked of Lancelot’s work these days: how did he know what his planting would look like in 250 years’ time? It is interesting that this observation came from an American, from a country with only an infantile concern then for husbandry, after an orgy of raping the land. Olmsted saw himself as saving the threatened wild beauty (e.g. Yosemite) and repairing the ravages of the slave economy, as restoring the living conditions that fostered liberty and self-improvement to ‘the slave, the savage, the maniac, the criminal, and the peasant … as with the child’ (Roper op. cit., p.69).
Lancelot, on the other hand, knew nothing but a countryside of ancient practices governed by the seasons; he knew how trees grew because he was aware of them at all stages of their development, and they grew with him. The moving of well-grown trees was standard practice then, illustrated by the ‘Great Duke’ of Marlborough’s request to Henry Wise for large trees, because he was an old man and had not time to wait for effect; by mixing mature trees with fast-growing ‘nurse’ trees, Lancelot’s effects were soon created in, say, fifteen or twenty years, or even less on good soils. He knew also that good woodland management, taking out the poor and damaged trees to allow space for the young hardwoods to develop, was an essential part of the rural economy, generating interim profits and job opportunities. Lancelot had no need to explain forward management or write maintenance regimes. This much – a mine of collective understanding of trees and woods – we have lost. We have, in old Europe, returned to the ‘infantile’ state of misunderstanding of the young United States of America.
21 Dorothy Stroud: Stroud (1910–87), the daughter of a working mother (her father having left after Dorothy’s birth), finished her education at Edgbaston High School, and in January 1930 she joined Country Life Books, where she met Christopher Hussey who inspired her researches on Brown. At the beginning of the war she worked for John Summerson on the National Monuments Record survey of London, along with her voluntary war work, and then moved with Summerson on his appointment as Curator of Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Dorothy was appointed Inspectress at the Soane in 1946 – she was the Soane – until her retirement in 1984. After Capability Brown, (1950), she wrote Henry Holland (1966) and other books. She always lived in London; after her death her ashes were interred beside Lancelot’s lake at Croome Court, where there is a memorial.
22 ‘it is particularly necessary’: Sylvia Crowe on land-form, Garden Design, 1965 edn, p.103
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