Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  Lancelot’s brother George kept him in touch with the excitements of new money at Wallington, next door, where the Blackett of the day was now Sir Walter Calverley Blackett, who had rather come in by the side door. He was born Walter Calverley of Calverley in the Aire valley, and his mother was Julia Blackett, who inherited a substantial part of the fortune of her brother, Sir William Blackett, 2nd Baronet, on his death in 1728, on condition that her son married Sir William’s illegitimate but much-loved daughter Elizabeth Ord, and took the name of Blackett. This had duly happened, and the new Sir Walter Calverley Blackett found himself with the newly built house at Wallington and a considerable income from lead-mining interests in Hexhamshire, all carefully counted and docketed by an army of cashiers and clerks in Newcastle, to spend on his estate. (Sir William Blackett had originally bought Wallington and lead mines in Allendale from Sir John Fenwick of colourful reputation; it was Fenwick’s confiscated horse White Sorel that tripped on the molehill at Hampton Court and despatched his rider King William III, thus making way for Good Queen Anne – a much-prized story hereabouts.)

  George Brown was prospering, the epitome of Sir Walter’s reputed dictum: ‘Every man carries his honour in his own hand15 … origin is nothing, it shall never have weight with me.’ George became firmly established at Wallington, and graduated from mason to mason-architect (his signed drawings for kitchens and service buildings of the 1760s are in the house), and worked with the architect Daniel Garrett,16 who came to Wallington in the mid-1730s. Garrett designed the Hall’s coach house and clock tower and the sloping green court that connects them, and all the estate buildings in Cambo, which George Brown built (including George’s own house, where he was to live on his marriage to Catherine Fenwick of Hartburn and for the rest of his life).

  Daniel Garrett was a figure of no mean interest: some twenty years older than Lancelot, he was of humble, northern beginnings and had been taken up by Lord Burlington as the lowliest of appointees to the Office of Works in 1727. He was a Labourer-in-Trust or foreman, where Henry Flitcroft was Clerk of Works and William Kent was Master Carpenter. Garrett must have been an attractive character, for he progressed to being Lord Burlington’s ‘personal clerk of works and draughtsman’, and so had acquired the habits and proportions of the Palladian revival and was familiar with Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House and its gardens. He built the cathedral library in Newcastle for Sir Walter Blackett in 1736. Other places where Garrett worked, in the North at Gibside for George Bowes and at Nunwick for Lancelot Allgood, and farther south in the Midlands at Warwick Castle and Kirtlington, soon become connections of Lancelot’s early career, suggesting that he was encouraged by Daniel Garrett; in Garrett’s work at Wallington, Lancelot glimpsed for the first time a way of working that he might make his own. The most obvious difficulty was that Garrett had progressed partly by his ability as an architectural draughtsman, an accomplishment that Lancelot had no means of acquiring in those early years.

  History is so definite on the date 1738 for the ending of Sir William Loraine’s gardening enterprises that Lancelot’s twenty-second summer becomes his time of decision: if his had been an ordinary apprenticeship he would have taken his presentation tools, his status as a journeyman and gone to a position as a gardener that he had learned of via the grapevine. Gardeners, or at least those with ambition, were expected to travel long distances, to leave room for the young apprentices, and perhaps try one new position before they settled into a marriage and a headship, which brought a desirable house. A typical example and friend of Garrett’s was the redoubtable Thomas Knowlton,17 Lord Burlington’s head gardener at his estate at Londesborough in Yorkshire since 1726, who was settled for life, with a good house, many perquisites and a respected position in the community. But, even before he left home, Lancelot had rejected the idea of a journeyman’s position in a conventional flower-and-vegetable garden, and this was a situation he always avoided.

  * * *

  Points from Batty Langley for Apprentice Brown:

  1. That the grand Front of a Building lie open upon an elegant Lawn or Plain of Grass, adorn’d with beautiful Statues, terminated on its Sides with open Groves

  2. That such Walks, whose Views cannot be extended, terminate in Woods, Forests, mishapen Rocks, old Ruins, grand Buildings, &c

  3. That shady Walks be planted from the End-Views of a House, and terminate in those open Groves … and thereby you may enter into immediate Shade, as soon as out of the House, without being heated by the scorching Rays of the Sun

  4. That Hills and Dales, of easy Ascents, be made by Art, where Nature has not perform’d that Work before

  5. That all Walks whose Lengths are short, and lead away from any Point of View, be made narrower at their further Ends than at the hither Part; for by the Inclination of their Sides, they appear to be of a much greater length than they really are;

  6. that the walks of a Wilderness be never narrower than ten Feet, or wider than twenty five Feet; and these walks be so plac’d as to respect the best Views of the Country

  7. Observe, at proper Distances, to place publick and private Cabinets, which should be encompass’d with a Hedge of Ever-Greens, and Flowering Shrubs next behind them, before the Forest-Trees that are Standards [nb interpreted as layering]

  8. All Grass-Walks should be laid with the same Curvature as Gravel-Walks; for, by their being made flat or level from Side to Side, they soon settle into Holes in the Middle; the Proportion for the Heights of the Crown, is as five is to one, that is, if the Walk be five Foot in Breadth, the Height of the Middle, above the Level of the Sides must be one Inch; if ten Foot, two inches &c

  9. Distant Hills are beautiful Objects when planted with little Woods; as also are Valleys, when intermix’d with Water and large Plains; and a rude Coppice [clump] in the Middle of a fine Meadow, is a delightful Object

  10. In the Planting of Groves, you must observe a regular Irregularity; not … like an Orchard … but in a rural Manner, as if they had receiv’d their Situation from Nature itself; plant in and about your several Groves good store of Black-cherry and other Trees that produce Food for Birds, which will not a little add to the Pleasure …

  11. The several Kinds of Forest-Trees make beautiful Groves, as also doth many Ever-Greens, or both mix’d together; but none more beautiful than that noble Tree the [Scots] Pine [to which the Cedar of Lebanon is soon added].

  * * *

  Notes applicable to Lancelot’s training, from Batty Langley’s ‘General Directions,’ New Principles of Gardening, 1728.

  One day towards the end of his apprenticeship George Brown came home with the news of another arrival at Wallington, a man named William Joyce who was surveying for improvements to the grounds and the woods. Joyce was a southerner, an itinerant layer-out of gardens, a disciple and acquaintance of the very same Stephen Switzer whose books Lancelot had seen. At this time, in 1737, Joyce had placed an advertisement in the Newcastle Courant offering himself as ‘being qualified and fitted with proper instruments18 for describing and surveying land and maping [sic] gentlemen’s estates’.fn6 An exercise in surveying the Wallington grounds using the ‘proper instruments’ had all the appeal of a celebrity masterclass, for a surveyor’s theodolite19 was a rare and expensive instrument, which neither Sir Walter Blackett nor Sir William Loraine possessed. All the surveying and measuring at Kirkharle, and Wallington, had hitherto been a painstaking process of playing out the Gunter’s chain (of 66 feet), placing the marking rods, measuring the offsets and listing the measurements in the field-book. To observe the use of a plane-table and compass in making a plan of the grounds, and the use of the Wheel or Perambulator that measured distances, even in the absence of a theodolite, was a scientific demonstration, to be talked of for days to come.fn7

  Stephen Switzer’s ideal of rural gardening, promoting the fashion of the early eighteenth century, from Ichnographia Rustica, 1718.

  William Joyce offered an even more vivid image of what Lancelot might
be, a travelling ‘describer and surveyor’, laying out grounds: ‘design’ was not a word much used at the time. At first it seems Lancelot looked for work in his home country, though the evidence is almost nonexistent (for who would record the doings of a nonentity of a young gardener?), but the strong local traditions cannot be completely ignored. At the Swinburnes’ Capheaton Hall he is accused of destroying a ‘beautiful formal garden’ shown in a drawing by Robert Crossby of the 1670s, substituting Switzer-style walks in natural copses and alongside a ‘purling’ stream, which were ‘much cheaper made, and still cheaper kept’. Lancelot is also supposed to have worked at Benwell Tower, the Newcastle terminus of the Wall and the home of ‘Bonnie Bobby Shafto’s’ family; he was later to be claimed by one of the family as an old friend when they met in London. That he worked at the Charltons’ Hesleyside20 had long been mooted on the strength of a plan that William Charlton mentioned in 1776, but this has been investigated and discounted by Professor Brian Hackett. Perhaps because of the connections with Daniel Garrett and William Joyce, it is said that Lancelot applied for work at Nunwick, but this has never been proved. But, nearer home, at Hartburn, about halfway between Cambo and Morpeth, the Hart burn flows beside a steep and prettily wooded river-cliff, where ‘pleasant and romantic’21 walks were planned and made by Archdeacon Thomas Sharp at some time in the middle of the eighteenth century. It is perfectly possible that Lancelot gained some work experience here at the very outset of this project: Hartburn Glebe traditionally belongs to, and is maintained by, the people of Hartburn. Most intriguing of all is the story that he worked for the feisty, musical, coal-rich George Bowes, who was making his vast garden beside the Derwent at Gibside in County Durham, though if this was true, then Lancelot did not stay at Gibside for any length of time.

  All these failed efforts and false starts were in the months after his twenty-second birthday in the summer of 1738, when the circumstantial evidence points to some disruption in the happy life at Kirkharle. The completion of Sir William Loraine’s garden and park layout meant the removal of the ‘street’ of cottages where the Browns and their fellow estate workers lived (as shown on the plan on see here), and the building of a group of new houses on the higher land to the west of the park. As Sir William was a benevolent landlord, this was hardly the brutal ejection that marked this process in other places; it was gradual, but nonetheless disturbing: was it the dilapidation and promised destruction of her home that decided Ursula Brown to accept Mr Elliott’s offer of marriage and return to Redesdale, with the youngest Brown, Elizabeth, who was nineteen? The older sisters, Dorothy and Mary, were both in their thirties and were married with houses of their own; George, a fully fledged stonemason, was committed to his life and work in Cambo.fn8

  With John Brown, aged thirty, an interesting situation had arisen. John had become Sir William Loraine’s valued right-hand man in farm and estate matters, virtually his agent or steward. Agents were important figures in Northumbrian country life, the go-between a landlord and his employees and neighbours – customarily taciturn souls, keeping everyone’s secrets. The agent went in at the front door at weddings and Christmases, and on working days he was found in the estate office or business room in the house, with its comfortable leather chairs, rent table and plan chest (having entered through the gun lobby). He was almost, though not quite, one of the family, and this closeness had turned John’s life into a romance, as he won the heart of the Loraines’ daughter, Jane. Little is known about Jane, except that she was in her late thirties, the youngest of nine siblings, was fond of children and made herself useful to her married sisters and brothers; she was certainly held high in the family affections for the rest of her long life, with allowances for her welfare mentioned in her mother’s and other family wills. Jane and John were very sure of their love, and were to have a good and enduring marriage, producing a fine son, Richard Brown, though they did not marry until 1743, after Jane’s father’s death. But even their contemplated marriage made the housing situation sensitive, for Jane Loraine could not possibly move out of Kirkharle Hall to live in a village cottage, nor perhaps even in the best of the new-built Kirkharle houses that was marked for the agent.fn9 In all this upheaval and uncertainty it must have seemed timely for Lancelot to leave. Jane’s mother, Dame Anne (an address she preferred to ‘Lady Loraine’), came to his rescue, saying she would give him letters of introduction to her relatives, the Vyners in Lincolnshire, whom she knew were moving to a new estate, and to the Smiths in Buckinghamshire.

  To Lancelot, the concepts of ‘Lincolnshire’ and ‘Buckinghamshire’ were necessarily hazy: Sir William’s maps were probably acquired in the days when he travelled a great deal, some thirty years before, but still served, and William Camden’s Britannia – in one of many seventeenth-century reissues, or the splendid 1695 folio published by Robert Morden – revealed the English counties in their separate and eccentric glories and combined them into an atlas. There were reissues of John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain in 1710 and 1713. (The enduring popularity of the Jacobeans Camden and Speed indicates a lull in English map-making in the years when Lancelot began his travels, but the glorious flush of famous names – the atlases by George Bickham (1743), John Roque (1746), Thomas Kitchin (1749) and Emanuel Bowen (1767) – soon materialised.) As for finding his way south, if he was fortunate Lancelot acquired John Ogilby’s Britannia, the ribbon-maps first published in 1675, but latterly reduced into a traveller’s Pocket Guide bound in calf and of a handy size for the saddlebag. These maps marked the route with every bridge, crossroads, hamlet, town and many landmarks, as well as the unfailing compass points; the first sequence was for the road from London to Aberdeen, easily read in reverse for the southwards journey. Emanuel Bowen’s and John Owen’s version of Ogilby, Britannia Depicta, or Ogilby Improv’d, first published in 1720 and in twelve subsequent editions to 1764, gave him copious information and road directions for every county. In a very real sense the skills of the English map-makers made Lancelot’s career possible: he knew nothing of England when he set out from his northern fastness in early 1739, he rode his saddle-horse into a land full of strange sights and even stranger people, on his first of many voyages of discovery.

  fn1 Vicar of Elsdon from 1674 to 1715.

  fn2 Substantially the route of Thomas Telford’s road, the present A696.

  fn3 Derwentwater’s other supporters who rode south were routed at the Battle of Preston. The rising was over, and Derwentwater was hanged on Tower Hill in February 1716. Lancelot Errington died in his bed at Beaufront Castle in 1746, broken-hearted at the defeat at Culloden.

  fn4 The year was 1728; the stone is still there.

  fn5 Lancelot advised on the building of the Gibside Column of Liberty, see here; his Burton Pynsent tower in Somerset, designed and built for Lord Chatham in 1765, can be cited as Robert Hooke’s influence, a younger and smaller ‘cousin’ of Hooke’s Monument to the Great Fire of London.

  fn6 He had worked at the Allgoods’ Nunwick on the garden for Daniel Garrett’s house, which was sited dramatically overlooking the North Tyne a few miles north of Milecastle 29 on the Wall.

  fn7 A theodolite was acquired much later for the Wallington estate and was shared with Kirkharle; Letter Book 1764–76, NRO 672/2/48, 10th October 1769. An instrument of about 1760 made by Thomas Heath ‘at the sign of the Hercules and Globe’ in the Strand, London, and another by Heath of about 1730, are in the Science and Engineering Collection of Tyne & Wear County Museums, Newcastle

  fn8 In Barbara Charlton’s Recollections of a Northumbrian Lady 1815–66, 1989, see here, there is mention of Miss Catherine Fenwick, born in 1756, kinswoman of the Catherine Fenwick married to George Brown of Cambo – a lady who, at eighty-three, spoke in broadest Northumbrian singsong ‘like a cook’, though she looked like a duchess!

  fn9 This house is prominent and marked as belonging to ‘Mr Brown’ on Armstrong’s map of 1769, though by that time it was Richard’s.

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  CHERCHEZ LA FEMME, OR LANCELOT’S BRIDE

  The old mayor climbed the belfry tower

  The ringers ran by two, by three;

  ‘Pull, if ye never pulled before;

  Good ringers, pull your best,’ quoth he.

  ‘Play uppe, play uppe, O Boston bells!

  Ply all your changes, all your swells,

  Play uppe “The Brides of Enderby”.’1

  —Jean Ingelow,

  ‘High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571’, 1863

  THE TWO YEARS from Lancelot’s leaving Kirkharle in early 1739 until he started work at Stowe in early 1741 are almost lost years, with few clues as to his whereabouts; but during these two years he met and won the woman who was to be his wife, and gained a great deal of experience in water engineering and the making of lakes, the key to his later successes. It is clearly worth detecting his progress.

  I think that he went on his way via William Joyce, who was based in Gateshead, perhaps to acquire some polish to his surveying. Joyce, apparently pessimistic about his own future in planning gentlemen’s estates, despairing that so many northern landowners were more interested in developing their coal mines than their parks, was starting his own nursery. Nurseries were prospering on sheltered sites on the south bank of the Tyne, conveniently placed for the excellent coastal transport of plant stock. Master John Strandrick of the St Michael and Mr Jonathan Weldon of the William of Newcastle both carried bundles of cherry, damson, medlar trees and sweet-briars from Henry Woodman’s nursery at Strand on the Green on the Thames. Plants did not mind rough weather and were good trade in winter, suiting both the lifting and planting seasons and making way for the human cargo in better weather after the spring storms. William Joyce was soon advertising fruit trees, shrubs and seeds ‘at Gateshead2 as cheap as in London’, and his nursery was to flourish, becoming one of the most important in the north. There is just a chance that Joyce did arrange for Lancelot to meet Stephen Switzer, for Henry Woodman3 had written just a few years earlier, ‘I am not att all surpris’d [that] Mr Switzer has been with you & all in your Neighbourhood seeing he has nothing else to recommend him (having not a foot of Nursery ground & what he sells must take of others) but his elaborate draughts & designs.’ Woodman, an influential Thames-side nurseryman, clearly thought little of itinerant designers and had continued: ‘as every man is to be commended for his diligence & Industry I would not here be thought to say any thing illnatur’d of him but confess ’tis a practice I was always asham’d of to thrust my selfe [forward]’.