Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  In 1746 Pitt acquired a small estate of his own, on a ridge overlooking Enfield Chace, 65 acres beside the lane from Enfield to East Barnet, known as South Lodge. His venture was prompted by nostalgia, for soon after his birth in 1708 the family had taken refuge from a smallpox epidemic at Forty Lodge near Enfield, giving him an imagined fondness for Enfield Chace. He spent £1,350 on refurbishments to the Lodge, but the grounds were his real interest, where, according to Gilbert West, he had ‘a little paradise34 opened in the wild’, with the stream making two lakes with a wooded island, rustic bridge and a temple to Pan in the Doric style. It is possible that he ‘borrowed’ Lancelot to help with this, with Lord Cobham’s blessing. Pitt was at his happiest working in his own garden, but – as with his febrile finances, which lurched from extravagance to pleading poverty – even these enthusiasms were short-lived, and he parted with South Lodge after five years. He would not have dreamed of paying Lancelot – nor perhaps would Lancelot have accepted payment, for he had a very strict code on such matters – and as they met as young men with futures to make, there seemed an innate equality (despite their differing fames) and their dealings were on the basis of an exchange of uncounted favours.fn3

  In the autumn of 1745, when Bridget was heavily pregnant with their first child, the kingdom of Stowe was thrown into a panic by the news that Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite army were forging their way southwards: ‘The country was greatly alarm’d on Friday with the rebels,’35 wrote Lord Fermanagh to the Verneys on 8th December:

  Ld Cobham pack’d up his arms and plate and the best things and sent them away, but where I don’t know. This frightened people very much. They were carrying his things to Oxford but Mr Greenvill [Richard Grenville] stopt em upon the road and ordered them somewhere else. Ld Cobham was in town but Mr Dorrel [Lord Cobham’s secretary] sent to the house and immediately they began to pack up and dismiss the workmen. ’Twas a simple affair and did hurt as it lower’d people’s spirits.

  The rebels got no nearer than Derby and then began to retreat; eventually this news filtered to Stowe and everyone relaxed, the house was returned to order and work restarted. In this atmosphere Bridget gave birth to the Browns’ first child, their daughter Bridget, always to be especially adored and blest with a bright and happy future.

  The Grecian Valley, ‘not Taste or Judgment?’36

  The estate records for 1746 show another spurt of activity in the garden, the making of the Grecian Valley in the as-yet-unused north-east ‘quarter’, of about 60 acres, which Lancelot had enclosed with the ha-ha. In the winter of 1746–7 he spent much of his time walking and surveying what was still rough paddocks and farmland, now to be moulded into an ideal valley that the poets likened to ‘the Vale of Tempe’. Lord Cobham was present as Lancelot supervised the men and their barrows as they wheeled and carted out almost 24,000 cubic yards of earth (spread over the northern park) to scoop out the dog-legged valley, which gave space to the naturalistic effect even more so than the Elysian Fields. Trees and evergreens were planted around the rim of the vale; paths were to wander through these, whilst the valley itself was intended as a piece of water. Lancelot was at last practising his favourite occupation, but was tactfully uncertain about the finishing, showing that he still respected his employer’s pride of ownership: ‘as to finishing the Head of the Oval,’37 he wrote, ‘I had never formed any other idea than what your lordship gave me “to Forme the Laurell Plantation with a Sweep under it and Concave to the Ovall” – that the Slope of the Head your Lordship thought might some time or other have statues put on it.’ Work had come this far by February 1747 and Lord Cobham was away in London, and so Lancelot added his opinion that his lordship had given ‘no absolute Orders to finish it and indeed I think it would be better not finished this season – thinking that a summer’s talk and tryel’s about it may make it a very fine thing’.

  Stowe, the Grecian Valley c.1750, as Lancelot left it, with sheep grazing, the Temple completed (but not named for Concord and Victory until later) and Captain Grenville’s column which was subsequently moved. From The Beauties of Stowe, 1750.

  The summer’s talk and trials, mocking-up effects for Cobham’s approval, indicates the care that went into this pictorial landscape-making. The concave sweep up to the overhanging laurels, ‘some time or other’ to be dotted with statues, was a Kentish notion. At the opposite end of the vale there was to be a large building, looking down the vale and placed at an oblique angle, very much as Claude Lorrain set his buildings in many pastorals, for instance the Landscape with Ascanius shooting the stag of Silvia, of 1682 (now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). Lord Cobham could have adapted this trick from Vanbrugh’s and Kent’s inspirations from stagesets, or from George Lambert’s painting of Chiswick38 of 1742, the angled ‘View from a balustraded platform above the cascade to the side of the villa and partially along the lake’. Equally Cobham could have seen Claude’s Liber Veritatis (200 of his drawings) which was in the collection at Devonshire House in Piccadilly.

  The Grecian Valley’s building was started in 1747, and in a note attached to that year’s accounts Lancelot explains, ‘the plan of the Long Room39 will be sent by the next post. I should have sent it this post but could not get it finished’. On her visit six months later in the summer of 1748, Sophia Newdigate noted ‘Noble Apartments’40 newly completed in the house, including the ballroom, gallery and chapel, all of similar ‘long room’ proportions; the ‘foundation only’ was laid on the ‘prodigious building’ that she was told was copied from Maison Carrée at Nîmes, in the new area of the garden. No one called the ‘maison’ a temple, and it could have been Lancelot’s ‘long room’, and the timing suggests that he had been trusted with the construction drawing for the footing platform and therefore played a considerable role in its brilliant siting.fn4

  Also in that summer of 1748 the Marchioness Grey visited Stowe, describing the embryonic Grecian Valley:

  Stowe, Lord Cobham’s Monument, built by Lancelot two years before Lord Cobham’s death in 1749.

  there are now going on Improvements41 in the 60 Acres last inclos’d, which is a Fall and Rise again of the Hill on the Opposite Side behind that which is already finished. But even this by the Laying-out seems to have no sort of Variety. The Slopes bare like the Other Side with Walks up or round them; a Piece of Water is to be in the Valley below, and vast Buildings larger and mightier than all the Others upon the Sides: – Sure this is not Taste or Judgment!

  Jemima Yorke, the Marchioness Grey, was the most top-lofty of aristocrats, mistress of her own Wrest Park, with its fine and ancient formal garden, and – by her marriage – of Wimpole Hall; it was not in her nature to approve of anything anyone else did, and though she was naturally suspicious of the new naturalism, she noticed Lancelot Brown and what he was doing, and approved.

  Gibside, County Durham: Lancelot had given George Bowes advice on the building, and work in progress was sketched by R. R. Angerstein, Travel Diary 1753–1755

  The phrase ‘Grecian diagonal’, also in the 1747 accounts, refers to the vista from Lord Cobham’s monument to the new building (Concord and Victory), another critical piece of siting. Lancelot was certainly in charge of the construction of the monument, a fluted octagonal shaft 104 feet high with a spiral staircase inside, built on Lady Cobham’s orders, before her husband’s death. Possibly Gibbs supplied the design, which Lancelot found he had to modify in the construction, because ‘the Wind has42 a very great effect on Buildings that stand on so small a Base’. (The monument had to be additionally buttressed forty-five years later.)

  His observation on the effect of the wind was written in a letter to George Bowes of Gibside, after Lancelot had left Stowe, when Bowes asked his advice, perhaps indicating that Lancelot was given the opportunity to return to work in the North. Columns entered his repertory of unusual building skills: it is possible to see the connection from Hooke’s Great Fire Monument, seen in Micrographia in his youth (though not yet in reality), to Lor
d Cobham’s monument and the Gibside Column, culminating in the Burton Pynsent Column built for Pitt in the 1760s. Once Lancelot had accomplished a project with success, he stored away the details for possible future use.

  Lord Cobham died in September 1749, and was buried in the crypt beneath the Penyston chapel in Stowe church. There is no flamboyant monument in the church, nor apparently was there pomp and circumstance at his funeral, of which no account survives. Perhaps he felt his garden was sufficient memorial.

  The Grecian Valley had been his lordship’s final piece of garden-making. For Lancelot it was unfinished, for the intended water was never made. There were springs enough, and the ground lay wet in rainy seasons, but a lake would have needed a holding dam and puddled-clay lining, major works that he could not organise without express permission. Jealousy may enter the equation here, for Cobham’s heir, his nephew Richard Grenville, had become increasingly impatient of waiting for his inheritance, ever since he had taken charge in the panic caused by the news of the approaching Jacobites in 1745. Grenville had used the rectory at Finmere, just west of Buckingham, as a base for keeping his eye on Stowe, and Lancelot worked there for him; a ha-ha, dell and trees, ‘so disposed43 as to produce the effect of a long perspective and considerable space where there was really very little’, survive at Finmere. But the Grenvilles soon made it clear that they would bring their own senior staff to Stowe with them, and Lancelot would have to leave.

  Lady Cobham, her distress magnified by her love of Stowe and fears that her husband’s legacy would be changed, turned to Lancelot to help her remove to her old home, Stoke Park at Stoke Poges in far south Buckinghamshire, inherited from her father Edmund Halsey. Soon after the move Anna Grenville, writing from London to her husband at Stowe, revealed the situation – she had seen the King, who asked if all the Stowe estate ‘was to be put into gardens?’:

  I went to my Lady Cobham44 yesterday and she began in a violent manner about the Sheep being put into the garden. I told her they look’d mighty pretty and that everybody said it wou’d make the turf much firmer, but if they did harm they would be taken out I suppos’d, but that I really never disputed anything with you for I thought you knew much better than I, and she said she shou’d scold you well when she saw you.

  Now Lancelot became embroiled in the argument, as Anna Grenville continues:

  I knew what I was to meet with for she told Brown she had cry’d all night and never slept a wink about it and raved and tore and said if my Lord C could know how Stow was used how vext he would be, and he said Lady Temple and Lady Hester [Richard Grenville’s mother and sister] were in an uproar about it too. They were both by when she begun with me but they button’d up their mouths and said not one word. Now one should imagine they might have tryd to stop her instead of setting her to work considering you are a party concern’d. I wish you would ask Brown what she said to him for I have not seen him … It happened at a bad time for me for I was ill and low spirited and she worried me almost to death, I fancy you will be tired enough with her and the less we see her and have to do with her the better.

  Not so Lancelot, who continued to visit Lady Cobham at Stoke Park, and in the summer of 1750 made a plan for some garden alterations. He found a huge brick-and-mullioned house full of Tudor glories with a small park containing five fishponds, which he transformed into a long piece of water. A consolation for the Grecian Valley from the kind Lady Cobham? The water ‘flowed’ beside a wide lawn and was crossed by a pretty three-arched bridge, with a Palladian topping. Referring to the bridge John Harris has noted, ‘if architectural historians45 mutter James Gibbs they may not be wrong’. Gibbs and Lancelot may even have done some of the work at Stoke before Lord Cobham’s death, for the house had been managed from Stowe ever since 1729 when Lady Cobham’s father had died, though it was usually let to friends or relations.

  Lancelot was given time to arrange his leaving, and the Brown family were not to be hurried out of their home: little Bridget was now approaching her fourth birthday, their son Lance, baptised on 13th January 1748, was a toddler, and Bridget expected another baby in the spring of 1750. This was William, who was baptised in April, but soon died. Even so, their Boycott Pavilion, intended for one widower gentleman, and fine for a happy couple with their first baby, was now too small for them.

  fn1 In 1973 Simon Whistler engraved the signatures of Lancelot and Bridget, copied from the register, beside a window in the south aisle.

  fn2 Or Paul Whitehead:31 ‘Aske ye, What’s Honour? I’ll the truth impart, /Know, honour then, is Honesty of Heart. /To the sweet scenes of social Stow repair, /And search the Master’s breast – /You’ll find it there.’

  fn3 An overgrown lake, relict wood and guardian cedars of Lebanon survive on the South Lodge site, amidst modern houses.

  fn4 The building was not roofed until after Lord Cobham’s death, and it has no named designer for the original; in the 1750s Cobham’s heir, Richard Grenville, made alterations to it, and he is portrayed by William Hoare holding a model of it (the pun on his title of Earl Temple, inherited from his mother in 1752, cannot be discounted). It was dubbed ‘The Temple of Concord and Victory’ in 1763, in honour of the peace after William Pitt’s great victories of the Seven Years War, in which the Grenville brothers had played some part.

  4

  SURVEYING HIS FUTURE – LANCELOT’S GREAT RIDE

  But as where Britain’s Fair assembled shine,

  The rays of beauty spread a light divine;

  So here, where nature does her triumphs show,

  And with majestic hand adorns a Stowe;

  Description fails – all fancy is too mean,

  They only can conceive it – who have seen!

  Samuel Boyse,1 ‘The Triumphs of Nature’, 1742

  THE SUMMER OF 1750 saw the circulation of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard’; the churchyard being under the windows of Lady Cobham’s house at Stoke Poges, and Gray being a local young man. When Gray was not academically occupied in Cambridge, he spent his time with his mother and aunts at West End Cottage (now Stoke Court), less than a mile from the church to the north. Like Lady Cobham, the Grays were bereaved, Thomas’s much-loved Aunt Mary having died the previous autumn, leaving his mother and one aunt at the cottage. However, in that summer they were all cheered; ‘Lady Cobham was by all accounts delighted to learn,’ writes Robert Mack, ‘that the author of the Elegy2 then being shown and read in every fashionable London drawing room was even then residing with his mother and his aunt at their residence in Stoke Poges.’ Lady Cobham’s glooms were lifted by having a poet to lionise, and there were to be two happy outcomes: one that Thomas Gray and Lancelot Brown (who were the same age, thirty-four) met each other that summer; and, second, that Gray wrote a delightful farrago entitled ‘The Long Story’3 of how the ‘Amazons’ – Lady Cobham, her companions Lady Schaub and Miss Henrietta Jane Speed (the daughter of the same Colonel Speed who was to have lived in Lancelot’s Boycott Pavilion at Stowe) – made an ‘assault’ on the Grays’ cottage to find him:

  The heroines undertook the task;

  Through lanes unknown, o’er styles they ventured

  Rapped at the door, nor stayed to ask

  But bounce into the parlour entered.

  The trembling family they daunt,

  They flirt, they sing, they laugh, they tattle,

  Rummage his mother, pinch his aunt,

  And upstairs in a whirlwind rattle.

  The poet is eventually found, speechless, though not for long: ‘The Long Story’ was a relief to all after the anguish of the ‘Elegy’. The inhabitants of West End Cottage and Stoke Park became the best of friends, and Lady Cobham lived on happily at Stoke for ten years, with interludes spent in livelier society in London or Hampton Court, where she had many friends, including the actor David Garrick and his vivacious circle. These ‘Amazons’, and their poet, became founder members of a company of Lancelot’s well-wishers, people of all kinds and cond
itions (by no means all owners of large estates) who spoke of him warmly and forwarded his cause. This oiling of the social machinery, which in our time has been rationalised into business accounting as ‘goodwill’, is hardly documented at all in Lancelot’s life, but often it is clear that whispers in the dark, or prayers, enabled the timeliness of his good fortunes. Thomas Gray, like William Pitt (‘Honorary President’ of the Brown well-wishers), was an inveterate rambler, and he and his great gardening friend, the Rev. William Mason, were watchers of Lancelot’s progress.

  It has long been known that Lord Cobham had ‘lent’ Lancelot to his friends and relations. He was sympathetically aware that Lancelot had to have a future that he could not provide, and allowed that meetings in the garden at Stowe might have consequences. The Denbighs, the 5th Earl and his wife Isabella, were garden visitors, the Cobhams’ town neighbours in Hanover Square, and they had a house, Newnham Paddox,4 set in lovely Warwickshire countryside just south of where Watling Street meets the Fosse Way. In the spring of 1746 Lancelot had been to Newnham to plan and direct ‘alterations of the grand canal, and carrying it on to the head of the pond in the park … with other work done in consequence of this’. Eighteen months later the joining of the canal and pond into ‘the serpentine water’ had been achieved, and Lancelot was levelling the banks, and cleaning the pond and ‘laying it with hanging slopes’. At this point the Denbighs ran out of money.