Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783
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There is every reason to believe that William and Ursula Brown’s fifth child and third son – they were Jack, Geordie and Lancie (or Larnie) as children, but John, George and Lancelot when grown – had a good and loving upbringing at Kirkharle. The Loraine estate was a small world, an estate of about 2,000 acres, about a quarter of that being dry pasture, with meadows and moorland crossed by the Kirkharle burn and Swildurburn, all on the south side of the River Wansbeck. The Thorntons farmed the land to the north, the Swinburnes were at Capheaton and Bavington to the south, and the Blacketts’Wallington estate lay to the east. In the dozen or so years since his arrival William Brown had proved himself to be fair and honest and hard-working, and had confirmed his place in the small community.
The Loraines had been at Kirkharle since about 1430; their baronetcy was a gift from Charles II in 1664 for services rendered to his father, but though their hearts were Stuart, they saw the wisdom of seeming Hanoverian. With the death of Sir Thomas, who was buried at Kirkharle on 14th January 1718, the estate was inherited by his grandson William Loraine, a London lawyer and politician in late middle-age. For several years Sir William had been much at Kirkharle minding his inheritance: his first wife had lived only three years after their marriage (she was Elizabeth Lawrence, daughter of the Mayor of London in the Plague year of 1665), but he had her fortune, plus another from his second wife, Anne Smith from Buckinghamshire, the daughter of another family of loyalist lawyers who had benefited at Charles II’s restoration. Anne brought him five sons and four daughters, and fifty years of married life. His scholarly turn of mind had made him ‘competent in Judgment of Architecture and Physick, exemplary in Planting and Enclosure’ and he was keenly occupied in building new farmsteads, ‘draining Morasses, clearing the Lands of ponderous, massy, and hard Stones, to prepare them for Tillage’.5 In other words, Sir William was a pioneering improving landowner, whose knowledge and experience were to benefit the three Brown boys. The shadow on this happy valley was that he had taken the opportunity of buying some of the land forfeited by the Swinburnes of Capheaton for their support of the Earl of Derwentwater, which caused a rift between Kirkharle and its southern neighbour.
The Brown boys grew sturdy and strong, the Northumbrian way, on breakfasts of bread, beer and salt fish, dinners of roast pike or mutton, the eternal mutton broths and casseroles, all sweetened with ‘Singin’ Hinnies’ – griddle scones thick with currants. Local tradition has it that the young Lancelot went to school at nearby Cambo, but it seems certain that he started in the small school at Kirkharle, with an itinerant or dame teacher; someone – and it could well have been their mother Ursula – gave all three brothers the foundation of a good strong writing hand and the means of self-expression. Not to be despised was the inescapable reiver genetic inheritance: Lancelot’s brothers would have put him on a pony almost as soon as he could walk; he soon became an accomplished rider, and it would form the basis of his life. Instinctively they practised fellcraft: the ability to smell the landscape, looking to the skies for the coming squall, sensing the dangers of a sucking bog, the way to hide in and escape from a gorse thicket, skills once practised in bloody earnest, which were now boys’ adventures and games. It was a frugal, energetic childhood, in the open air in all weathers, running errands, fishing in the burn pools, snaring a hare for the pot, or a marten or wild cat for the churchwarden’s bounty penny.
William and Ursula’s youngest child, Elizabeth, was christened on 5th November 1719. Then, the following spring, this prospering little household was hit by the death of their father William Brown, hardly into his mid-forties, who was buried in the churchyard on 4th April 1720: the register styled him ‘William Brown of Kirkharle’, which spoke of the respect he had earned. Whether it was pneumonia or some chest infection that took him, or a farm accident, is unknown, but it must have been a desperately sad time, hardly understood by the four-year-old Lancelot. John Brown, the eldest brother, was just twelve, and his childhood probably ended as he was pushed to fill his father’s shoes; Dorothy and Mary, sixteen and fourteen, had quite possibly to become apprentice cooks or seamstresses, but such is the silence of domestic history that we shall never know. What is certain is that John and seven-year-old George took especial care of Lancelot, and looked out for him and taught him all they knew, and more.
One other event of these years can be identified, when the occupants of Kirkharle’s street turned out onto the green slope just beside their customary path to church, for the unveiling of Sir William Loraine’s new memorial: ‘In Memory of Robert Loraine6 his Ancestor who was Barbarously Murdered in this place by the Scots in 1483 for his good service to his Country against their thefts & Robberys As he was returning Home from the church Alone where he had been at his private Devotions’.
This perhaps reminded them all that the peace of Kirkharle had not always been, and was hard-won.fn4
Once again, tradition has it that Lancelot Brown remained at school until he was sixteen, in 1732, when he was launched on his seven-year apprenticeship in the Kirkharle estate workshops. This was a long schooling for those days and invites many questions: the fate of all three brothers may provide some likely answers. At the gathering around the memorial in 1728 John, the eldest, was in his twentieth year, and with the encouragement of Sir William Loraine he was well on the way to becoming an accomplished surveyor, which fitted him for managing the Kirkharle estate and, before he was much older, for the additional roles in road-building and other engineering projects that were fast improving this countryside. George, at fifteen, was a gentler character, home-loving and good with his hands, and was an apprentice stonemason on the neighbouring Wallington estate, where he was to remain all his life. There was a schoolhouse at Cambo, the Wallington estate village just 1½ miles by footpath from Kirkharle, which merited a full-time schoolmaster, where both George and Lancelot could well have had their later education. The two estates, Wallington and Kirkharle, worked in neighbourly harmony, and all three Brown brothers were well regarded at Wallington; John was a close friend of William Robson, the Wallington agent, who was later godfather to John’s son. George’s schooling finished when he was twelve, as was customary, whereas Lancelot – with the benefit of being the youngest, and an attractive and curious boy – may have earned his extra years as a country scholar at Morpeth Grammar School: if Sir William Loraine had sponsored John’s training as a surveyor, he could easily have helped Lancelot to the grammar school, for he had great influence in the town and was a Member of Parliament in the county interest.
And what of their mother, the widow Ursula Brown, who makes no recorded appearances in the later stories of her sons? She was only in her early forties when she was widowed, and it seems most likely that she would have married again. Searching the registers once more for her unusual first name, the only possible mention is of an Ursula Elliott, who was buried in 1742 in East Woodburn, a hamlet tucked into the foothills and beside the Rede, an exquisite, remote place. Had she seen her daughters Dorothy and Mary and her three boys settled, then taken her youngest daughter Elizabeth back into Redesdale? At the time she died, John was about to make an interesting marriage, George was settled at Cambo, and Lancelot was far away, at Stowe.
The Apprentice
At the end of his schooling Lancelot had grown into an attractive youth, tall and long-boned in the Northumbrian manner, with amused blue eyes and thick, wavy brown hair. It seems strange that such a personable young man did not leave for Newcastle and some smart architectural or engineering apprenticeship, but his tendency to racking coughs and chest complaints that marked his later life (and that of his brother John) suggested that the dust and pollution of the city’s airs would do him no good, and that he was better in the open air. Besides, he loved his home countryside and had, as yet, no desire to leave; he had the airy confidence of his Redesdale forebears, a rich inheritance, as judged by Iris Wedgwood in her descriptions of Redesdale shepherds, ‘with the manners and bearing of gentlemen and a store
of knowledge far beyond farming matters’; from their long winter evenings reading, the shepherds tended to sturdy independence in their opinions, not aping their landlords and ‘certainly not cowed by marquess or duke’.7 This was a heritage that Lancelot absorbed; he had something of this opinionated, mischievous spirit, albeit overlaid with charm, and needed plenty of space. Also, the Redesdale connection was still tainted by an Act of the Merchant Venturers8 of Newcastle (made in 1554, but in force until 1771) that they would take no apprentice ‘borne or brought up in Tyndall, Ryddisdall or any other such lyke places’.
So it was to be an apprenticeship at home, at Kirkharle with Sir William Loraine’s head gardener, whose name is not recorded, and under brother John’s eye. The ancient ‘trade crafte or misterie of Gardening’9 was endemic in country life, and was influenced by the Company of Gardeners’ syllabus for apprentices to learn ‘planting, grafting, Setting, sowing, cutting’ and every attention due to trees and ‘Plantes, herbes, seedes, fruite trees, Stockes [and] Settes’. Sir William had spent much of his life in London, and it was amongst the City’s guildsmen and seedsmen that he formed his own gardening ambitions, which were to shape Lancelot’s future; the patient tasks of the kitchen garden and propagating yards were the basis, and Lancelot learned enough of these domestic skills to know when and where to employ them, but he was also plunged into the midst of Sir William’s more robust schemes. Sir William ‘planted of Forest-trees,10 Twenty-four thousand, and of Quick-Sets above Four Hundred and eighty-thousand; and being skilfull in the Fruit-Garden, planted of Fruit Trees Five hundred and eighty’. Hand in hand with the planting were the necessary improvements, drainage and enclosure works with hedges and fences, paths and drives, and it is surely no accident that Richard Welford, in reporting these details in Men of Mark ’Twixt Tyne and Tweed (1895), gives the completion date most definitely ‘to 1738 inclusive’. At this time Lancelot would have completed his term, and as Sir William was by then almost eighty years old, a good, strong amanuensis had clearly been essential for all these works. Lancelot’s grounding in the basic skills of his life’s work – land drainage, setting the line of a hedge or an avenue, the propagating and planting of trees – was thus acquired in his beloved home landscape.
It was perfectly in the paternalistic tradition that Sir William would take an interest in this willing pupil, for he had most likely been present at his baptism and had watched him grow. The term ‘amanuensis’ is not too strong, and caused jealousies perhaps in the rank-and-file gardeners, the kind of envy that spawns rumours about favouritism and sons born ‘the wrong side of the blanket’. This was most unlikely at Kirkharle. (It was actually Squire Blackett at Wallington who had the reputation for liberally fathering about the countryside, though this was equally unlikely in Lancelot’s case, and an insult to the integrity of William and Ursula Brown.)
The Loraines11 were of that cast of gentry who found serious solace in the planting of trees, especially royal oaks, the Boscobel oak being the saviour tree of Charles II. (Their arms were crested by a ‘couped’ and sprouting laurel, with a red belt edged and buckled for a Civil War battle honour, as an additional mark of their interests and loyalties.) Interestingly the growing of fruit trees, Sir William’s particular passion, was also politically symbolic – stemming from Oxford nurseryman Ralph Austen’s Treatise (1653, 1657, 1665) on fruit-growing and cider-making as a national restorative; not to be outdone, Sir Thomas Sclater, a Cambridge man, kept an orchard diary from the autumn of 1674, detailing his absorbing interest and enthusiasm, which led to a proposal to the Royal Society for the encouragement of scientific fruit-growing in both universities as an example to gardeners and landowners in general. Lancelot’s expertise and interest in fruit production in orchards and walled gardens remained with him always.
The ‘favouritism’, and consequently access to Kirkharle Hall, allowed to John and Lancelot meant that opportunities to read the books in Sir William’s library gave Lancelot his ideas about the world beyond the fruit garden. Sir William’s competence ‘in Architecture and Physick’ came from his own ability, but also from the company he had kept in London; his first father-in-law was the Mayor of London, Sir John Lawrence, who had employed Robert Hooke to survey the fire-damaged streets of the City, and who continued to be involved in Wren’s and Hooke’s rebuilding plans. Sir William may well have had Hooke’s fantastic Micrographia (published by the Royal Society in 1665), with his astounding drawings of the monstrous flea and the barbed nettle as seen through his single-lens microscope: he would have known how Hooke had elevated the skills of surveying by his ‘swift, faultless arithmetic’,12 his calculations of the strain on a load-bearing wall, of the support needed for a tall building, of the compensation due for land taken for road widening. This was a professional expertise that appealed to both John and Lancelot, the latter finding a particular challenge in building tall structures.fn5
Another influential earlier work was John Evelyn’s Sylva,13 or, A Discourse of Forest Trees (published by the Royal Society in 1664), also urging the patriotic duty to grow timber, and annexed to Pomona, concerning fruit trees and cider. Sylva, with its affectionate portraits of personable oaks, elms, chestnuts, rowans, maples, limes, birch, alders, larch and Scots pines (the signature tree beloved of royalists) and its sound techniques of woodland management, remained valid throughout Lancelot’s career. It introduced Lancelot to the aesthetics of trees in the landscape: ‘Nothing could be more ravishing’ than a spreading oak at handsome intervals in the wood; elms for avenues he described as ‘a tree of comfort, sociable and so affecting to grow in company that the very best I have seen do almost touch one another’; of the beech, ‘spreading trees, and noble shades with their well furnished and glittering leaves’; and of the enigmatic ash, the provider of poles for garden work, for arbours and espaliers, companion to the carpenter, wheelwright, cartwright, cooper, turner and thatcher, ‘there is money – a small and pleasurable industry for 40 years – in planting ash’.
A flattering title ensured a place in a gentleman’s library, none more so than Stephen Switzer’s The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation originally published in 1715, with a major enlargement into three volumes as Ichnographia Rustica in 1718. Switzer was enough of an iconoclast to attract a young man’s attention, and time and again in Lancelot’s working life echoes of Switzer’s philosophy appear. Switzer was an advocate of the ferme ornée, where ‘Planting, Agriculture, and the other Business and Pleasures of a Country Life’ were as pretty as a garden; he was the slayer of the ‘loathsome burden’ of vast and expensive formal gardens; he was sufficiently well travelled to describe French ideas for a ditch, la fosse – the term from siege warfare that was so deftly adapted to the ‘ha-ha’. Lancelot frequently used the word fosse in later life, and only rarely ‘ha-ha’. And Switzer wrote so appealingly:
Surely happiness would be the lot14 of the rural gardener if his Grounds were handsomely divided by Avenues and Hedges; … and if there were Trees for Shades with little Walks and purling Streams, mix’d and incorporated with one another, what cou’d be more diverting?
And why, is not a level easy Walk of Gravel or Sand shaded over with Trees, and running thro’ a Corn Field or Pasture Ground, as pleasing as the largest Walk in the most magnificent Garden one can think of?
Besides as these Hedge Rows, little natural Coppices, large Woods, Corn Fields, &c. mix’d one amongst another, are as delightful as the finest Garden; so they are much cheaper made, and still cheaper kept …
And more than all, the careless and loose Tresses of Nature, that are easily mov’d by the least Breath of Wind, offer more to the Imagination than the most delicate Pyramid, or … most elaborately clip’d Espalier …
Again, why should we be at that great Expence of levelling of Hills, or filling up of Dales, when they are the Beauty of Nature?
Sylva and Switzer, and Batty Langley’s New Principles of Gardening – first published in 1728 with straightforward direct
ions for the making of aesthetically pleasing ‘Walks’ and ‘Groves’ – were the most widespread and obvious sources for Lancelot’s interest in gardening on the larger scale. To a young man who had seen so little of this world, who had perhaps travelled as far as Newcastle and seen the formal garden of Anderson Place belonging to the Blacketts, who had enjoyed summer jaunts when all the countryside turned out for the August Stagshaw Fair, these books introduced the fabled and far-away names of Stowe, Blenheim, Grimsthorpe and Castle Howard.
Sir William Loraine’s formal gardens with their avenues, walks and even a fountain were much admired in their day, but these gardens where Lancelot worked out his apprenticeship have disappeared. From the scant archival information and from evidence on the ground, the landscape architect Nick Owen has suggested their layout in the accompanying sketch. The Kirkharle Hall that Lancelot knew has been in part demolished, but stood on the axis of east–west avenues stretching along the valley: these were most likely elm avenues, for the ground was wet, but there was also a beech avenue to the south, on the rising ground towards Capheaton. Kirkharle Hall had large walled gardens close by, home to the favoured fruits, flowers and most likely the fountain, which was part of the garden’s water supply – the water piped from ponds linked by the Kirkharle burn on the western slope, which would have given sufficient head of water for the fountain. Also on this western, and south-facing, slope and behind the row of cottages where the Browns lived was a pleasure ground, well planted and screened with copses of trees. The vast numbers of hawthorn quicksets that Sir William is credited with planting were undoubtedly for the hedges to enclose his fields.
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Kirkharle demesne as it was during Lancelot’s apprenticeship, constructed from evidence on the ground by Nick Owen.