Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  Sanderson Miller to the Rescue

  Another meeting in the garden was of even greater consequence. Sanderson Miller was a young gentleman-architect; his father, also Sanderson Miller, had been a prosperous Banbury merchant who lived at Boycott Manor, until Lord Cobham bought it around 1712, at the start of his territorially expansive gardening. Miller senior had moved westwards to Radway Grange, spectacularly positioned at the foot of Edge Hill in Warwickshire. Sanderson junior was Lancelot’s age, but his education had included three companionable and enjoyable years at Oxford. He had inherited Radway in 1737, as the only surviving (though youngest) son, and, enthused by his Oxford friends, soon became a passionate improver, with a talent for designing buildings, mostly in the Gothic style. In 1746 he had married Susannah Trotman, who was related to the Temples, so he naturally gravitated to Stowe. He also kept a diary, and the entry for 5th November 1749 reads: at Stowe ‘Walking in the Garden5 with the Com[pany] & Mr Brown & Dorrel’, for five hours!

  Five hours was time enough to get the measure of Lancelot, finding him refreshingly conversible on the nuances of lake edgings, dam pilings and the foundations for temples and columns. At some point Miller said that Lancelot ‘really must see Radway’ and, after the invitation had been repeated, Lancelot took him seriously. And so, when Bridget insisted that she had recovered from the birth and death of little William, and Lancelot had seen Lady Cobham settled at Stoke, he made plans for a long expedition, a ride to explore the heart of England and look for work. He could well be spared as all his labourers were busy in the fields, for garden improvements now gave way to farming priorities.

  He set out at the end of the first week in August of 1750, his hack splashing through the ford and on to the Boycott Farm crossroads, where he turned north; he could see the Miller’s old Boycott Manor across a small valley, and then his road was up and down through the harvest fields. Biddlesden was where the monks of the now-ruined abbey had first bridged the river Great Ouse, and there looked to be a tremendous opportunity for a lake, but no one to pay for it. The going was high and dry across Northamptonshire and, barring incidents, he could easily reach Banbury in time for supper. His first goal was out of the town north-westwards, on the old road through Drayton and Wroxton, which passed alongside the pale of Lord North’s park.

  Wroxton was Sanderson Miller’s pride and joy; Miller was his lordship’s gentlemanly provider of Gothic fantasies for the abbey and the park, and his Temple on the Mount was being built. Of greatest interest were the ‘irregularities’6 of the 70 acres ‘finely diversified with wood and water’; Lord North had replaced his old formal gardens and canals with lawns and serpentine streams, wide enough for the pleasures of a rowing boat; the water was ingeniously drawn from the Sor brook, thus draining what had been a bog. He had naturalised the Great Pond into a 7-acre lake and planted a great number of trees, which were now casting delightful shadows on the waters; in addition he had a Chinese summer house, the venue for suppers of cold meats and ice cream. Wroxton was a fine example of how a courtier might indulge his private tastes and considerable talents in a home secreted down a country lane, somewhere in England. Francis North, later the Earl of Guilford, was in his late forties, a friend to both George II and Frederick, Prince of Wales; the latter was godfather to his son, named Frederick, who had grown up in ‘a happy and devout7 family atmosphere’ at Wroxton (a wise man kept both his children and his gardens from exposure to the great world). Frederick was now eighteen and down from Oxford; he and Lancelot would be easy acquaintances in later years.

  Sanderson Miller’s Gothic Tower on Edge Hill in Warwickshire, drawn by Barbara Jones for Follies and Grottoes, 1953.

  Wroxton’s innovations were interesting, but there was no work for Lancelot. Just over 4 miles farther on was Upton House, set high, with a long valley opening to the south, where the stream was being dammed to make a pool, the Temple Pool, and a hillside spring was being harnessed to fall in a cascade. The owner, William Bumstead, had dared to make an offer for Radway Grange, deeply offending San Miller. ‘Pox take Bumstead8 and all fools who are your enemies,’ wrote a consoling friend. There was no future there.

  Sanderson Miller’s Egge Cottage at Radway, where Lancelot dined on his visit in August 1750, drawn by Barbara Jones.

  Stopping at Upton depended on how long Lancelot had loitered around Hornton, attracted by the dust clouds and crunching of the quarrymen’s saws, for this was the home country of the coveted Middle Lias or Marlstone, the iron-stained golden stone that had been used for Stowe’s Gothic Temple. Lancelot was ever the curious traveller, and so much of England was new to him; he stored sights and impressions for future use, but also as fuel for the stories he took home to Biddy and their children.

  A short distance beyond Hornton he came to the hamlet of Edge Hill, dominated by San Miller’s new Sham Castle or Gothic Tower, of the same Hornton stone. Finally, winding his way down into Radway, he found an entrancing village, its cottages and houses set well back in long gardens, and all seeming, as Alec Clifton-Taylor described, ‘to soak up and store the sunshine within their rich tawny brown carapace’.9 That day, however, it was raining. San Miller recorded in his diary for 10th August: ‘Wet’, but that Brown ‘had dined here’10. Radway Grange, Jacobean and many-gabled, was at the head of the village street, with its land stretching up to the Edge Hill ridge; ‘here’ meant that they dined in Edge or Egge Cottage, built about six years earlier for just such purposes, as Miller’s workroom and for entertaining his gardening friends. The papers on the workroom table revealed Miller’s artistic approach, his practice of sketching his ideas for buildings; the masons worked from the sketches, managing without measured drawings.

  That month Miller was celebrating the completion of his Tower with parties, and poetic appreciation from his friend Richard Jago11 in his poem ‘Edge-Hill’:

  Like a tall Rampart! Here the Mountain rears

  Its verdant Edge … thanks Miller! For thy Paths

  That ease our winding steps! Thanks to the Rill,

  The Banks, the Trees, the Shrubs, th’enraptured Sense

  Regaling, or with Fragrance, Shape or Sound,

  And stilling every Tumult in the Breast!

  Lancelot – having climbed the verdant Edge, having praised every Gothic niche and painted window, every castellation and every step and turn of the curious castle – was, one hopes, blessed with a clear sunset so that he could see out over the vast battlefield plain. Miller never tired of describing the spectacle of some 25,000 men drawn up to fight on Sunday, 23rd October 1642, in the first major action of the Civil War and a royalist victory. He was holding his celebration for the Tower on 3 rd September, the anniversary of Cromwell’s death.

  The following day, 11 th August, Miller recorded, ‘rode with him12 across yeValley &c.’, which meant following the foot of the ridge round to Arlescote, then across the valley (which now carries the M40) to where the land rises again and the hamlets of Avon Dassett and Burton Dassett are locked in vertiginous contours. Lancelot may have had an errand to fulfil at the Temples’ estate of Burton Dassett, but their real goal was southwards, where the road climbs gently into the Farnborough demesne, the home of the Holbech family, and where Miller wanted to show Lancelot a new meaning of the word ‘terrace’. Farnborough Hall was hardly more than fifty years old, built of the same glowing Hornton stone with Warwickshire grey ashlar trimmings, a lovely house, but hopelessly sited for a garden; the house was backed into the village and a hill, and looked out on a valley that wished only to be waterlogged. Hence the ‘good and wise’ William Holbech II was making a virtue out of this difficulty by building a wide green terrace, curving upwards and away to the south. This terrace was already half a mile long, but destined for greater length, like a linear park, driveable by phaeton or dog-cart, commanding views over the watery Vale of the Red Horse. Here is Richard Jago again, on the construction of the terrace:

  … In sturdy Troops,13

  The Jocund L
abourers hie, and, at his Nod,

  A thousand Hands o’er smooth the slanting Hill,

  Or scoop new Channels for the gath’ring Flood,

  And, in his Pleasures, find a solid Joy.

  Jago exaggerates, even for a poem of friendship, for although the local men and boys were undoubtedly glad of work in the lulls of the farming year, 100 would have been more likely than 1,000, who would have just fallen over each other and their barrows. As an essay in man-sculpted earthworks, Lancelot would have found this fascinating, as was the way Holbech had contrived the streams of the Hanwell valley into appearing an elongated lake.

  Sanderson Miller was proud of having advised Holbech, and the buildings to ornament the terrace were to his designs. They were built, like Farnborough Hall itself, by Smiths’ of Warwick, who had built the Radcliffe Camera for James Gibbs. Francis Smith had died in 1738, and his son William in 1748, but the firm was still a force in the Midlands, now managed by the mason-architects the Hiorn family of Warwick, who kept the talented company of Smiths’ artisans together. William Hiorn was known to be working at Farnborough; was it here that Lancelot heard of the intended improvements at Warwick Castle?

  Sanderson Miller had been kindness itself, but not wholly altruistic; he and his gardening friends, ‘the warmhearted crew’ he had met at Oxford, had their moments of enthusiasm for digging and planting, but were sensibly aware that their extensive plans depended upon really hard labours. Miller had purposefully ‘educated’ Lancelot into their tastes by letting him see Wroxton, Radway and Farnborough. Miller liked to keep his Gothic ‘plums’ for himself, but saw Lancelot as useful where the landscape challenges were great, and he mentioned his friends George William Coventry at Croome near Worcester, and Thomas Barrett Lennard at Belhus in Essex. If Lancelot was to extend his trip to Croome, then he really should see George Lucy’s great deer park at Charlecote and Lord Brooke at Warwick Castle, and ride another half a day north to Lord Guernsey’s Packington, before turning south.

  Armed with names and directions, Lancelot continued on his journey. First he came to, and perhaps visited, Compton Verney, with a new façade by Smiths’ of Warwick, but an old-fashioned, straight entrance drive. (He was not commercially minded enough to carry a trade-card, but proving himself to be the late Lord Cobham’s Clerk at Stowe was recommendation enough for his name to be noted.)

  Soon he reached Charlecote’s gatehouse, close to the Stratford road at that time. He quickly learned that the Lucys had been at Charlecote for some 550 years, and that the many-chimneyed brick house glimpsed through the gatehouse’s arch was built by Sir Thomas Lucy in Queen Elizabeth’s golden days. The park was newly paled and stocked with deer, and was in the care of James Mounford, Keeper to George Lucy. Here he certainly had the opportunity to ride around the park and decide what he would do, if asked. He saw James Fish’s fine 1736 map of the estate, which gave him his bearings, so that he could make a sketch of his ideas.

  To the north of the house he found remnants of raised formal gardens and brick-lined canals, or long ponds for carp. George Lucy had built a new summer house overlooking these ponds, replacing the brick gazebo of sixty years before, so he was clearly in the mood for spending money on his gardens. Maturing avenues, some of limes, radiated across the park; it was a salutary thought that when Charlecote was built, it was prettily sited beside the sunlit glades of the Forest of Arden (hence the young Will Shakespeare being caught for poaching in what had become Sir Thomas Lucy’s park). A hundred years later, in the mid-seventeenth century, it exhibited a bleak aspect, ‘deserted on every side,14 shut off by hills and thickets from almost all light and society of man. Also it has a river by it, whose waters are at all times nearly stagnant, save that once in the year it washes the house itself, as the Nile washes Egypt.’ In the ensuing fifty years the thickets had been cleared, and the house and park opened up to sunny fields and meadows beside the River Avon, which ran close by the west front of the house.

  Charlecote had the air of a happy place, and George Lucy ranked high in the list of Lancelot’s most amiable clients. He was two years older than Lancelot, had inherited Charlecote when he was thirty, in 1744, and looked exactly as Pompeo Batoni portrayed him, with a candid, fresh, if rather prissy face revealing his kind heart and ‘simple shrewdness’,15 as well as his passion for fine clothes and good food. He ‘feared boredom, loved his dogs … and pretty women, abhorred marriage16 but constantly talked of it’, and ‘bumped all over Europe’ in the meantime. Charlecote was ruled by a triumvirate of which Lancelot needed to be aware. George Lucy was good friends with the Dowager Countess of Coventry, widow of the 2nd Earl. Born Lady Anne Somerset at Badminton, she was in her seventies and lived in a tall house at Snitterfield, just north of Stratford. San Miller’s poetical friend Richard Jago was curate at Snitterfield and was also her good friend. The Dowager Countess had had a sad life, her only son having died at Eton when he was nine, and she had long been estranged from the Coventrys at Croome (although Miller’s friend George William Coventry, soon to be Lancelot’s 6th Earl, was to amend the connection). The Dowager Countess ‘did not think it was necessary for Mr Lucy to take so irrevocable a step as marrying to solve his servant problems’, so she had found ‘an excellent widow’,17 Mrs Philippa Hayes, to come and live at Charlecote as Housekeeper. Mrs Hayes was the proverbial treasure, who ruled benignly whether her master was at home or not, and noted everything down in her Memorandum Book. It was Mrs Hayes who had requested the Batoni portrait; Mrs Hayes who relayed all the Charlecote news when George Lucy was on his travels; Mrs Hayes who dispensed the Cheltenham waters that he sent home for dosing the household; Mrs Hayes who welcomed weather-bound travellers, who chased the rats out of the upstairs bedchambers, who was passionately fond of her poultry – ‘Fowls from the Tenants’ and ‘Fish18 taken out of the Old Canal’ being essentials to their diet. Fortunately both the Dowager and Mrs Hayes took to Lancelot, who found enough encouragement on this first visit to make up his mind to return.

  He found that Warwick was full of masons and carpenters who worked for the Smith firm; Francis Smith was a legend in the town for his part in the rebuilding after a great fire in 1694, and the building was continuing, notably the new Shire Hall to San Miller’s design. Mr Collins, ‘the best stone-carver’19 in Warwick, worked in Smith’s Marble and Stone Yard in Theatre Street, a base for all the building gossip of the Midland shires. Warwick held another of the benevolent ghosts of Lancelot’s career, that of the old royal gardener to Queen Anne and George I, Henry Wise, whose family remained at Warwick Priory, though he had now been dead for a dozen years. Very much alive was the enthusiastic ‘little Brooke’, Lord Brooke at the Castle, who wanted to naturalise his river bank and almost immediately set Lancelot to work, at least according to Horace Walpole in a letter written on 22nd July 1751:

  The view20 [of the Castle] pleased me more than I can express; the river Avon tumbles down a cascade at the foot of it. It is well laid out by one Brown who has set upon a few ideas of Kent and Mr Southcote. One sees what the prevalence of taste does; little Brooke who would have chuckled to have been born in an age of clipt hedges and cockle-shell avenues, has submitted to let his garden and park be natural.

  And so the greatest gossip of the age had discovered Lancelot Brown.

  Packington and Croome

  Packington was another 18 miles north via Kenilworth, but San Miller had enthused about the ambitions of Lord Guernsey (later the 3rd Earl of Aylesford). The park was enormous and undulating, well watered by tributaries of the River Blythe, and with remnants of ancient ponds; his lordship wanted a lake – perhaps lakes – with cascades, and he also wanted sport and profit, with a duck decoy and ponds for rearing fish, which he intended selling on the London markets. This was Lancelot’s introduction to the commercial advantages of lake-making; Lord Guernsey’s ideas were undoubtedly drawn from his relative’s, Charles Jennens’s (Handel’s librettist for Belshazzar and Messiah), Gopsall21 in Leicestershire. A
t Gopsall, John Grundy the Younger had recently (1749) planned a dam and cascade 300 yards long to contain a Great Pond, for fish-keeping purposes. This was a pioneering cement-cored dam construction, of some significance in the progress of water engineering. Whether Lancelot visited Gopsall is not known, but he came to some conclusions for Packington, sketching his ideas on the reverse of his sketch plan for Charlecote, and leaving it at Packington for Lord Guernsey’s consideration. (Though Lancelot returned the following year (1751), the extent of his work is unclear; Packington is still owned by the Aylesford family, and the landscape features extensive fishing lakes on a far larger scale than anything he designed.)

  It was a good day’s ride back through Warwick to Stratford, and a night stop, before taking the Alcester road. He noted Ragley Park, for these places were the geography of his life now, but had another hard day’s journeying to Croome. The obvious way for a stranger to avoid the hazards of this watery land was to head for Evesham and take the Pershore road westwards, keeping the long shoulder of Bredon Hill on the left-hand horizon, then south from Pershore, crossing Defford bridge and so into the Croome estate. This eastern approach led him directly to the vast walled gardens, where he found direction; emerging through the gate in the wall, the whole western view to the distant Malverns was spread out before him, across a wide and wet plain divided into large fields and an area called ‘Seggy Meer Common’ (‘seggy’ meaning soggy). To the left the house nestled beside the church, with the remnants of formal courts and gardens at front and rear. It was, or could be, a splendid scene, but the air was tinged with sadness, which Sanderson Miller would have explained. The Coventry family had come through a time of rifts, and the 5th Earl and his wife Elizabeth Allen had inherited Croome from a distant cousin in 1719; although they spent more time in London, the 5th Earl had conscientiously improved his estate, looking forward to the time when his heir, Thomas Henry, Viscount Deerhurst, would take it over. Thomas Henry (born in 1721) and his brother George William (born in 1722) were like twins, inseparable through school and at Oxford, where they played leading roles in Sanderson Miller’s ‘warmhearted crew’ of friends. Their mother, the Countess Elizabeth, had died in 1738; and then, unaccountably, Thomas Henry, Lord Deerhurst, died on 20th May 1744 – ‘unhappy, Black day’22 – at the age of twenty-three. The Earl was never to recover from these blows. He had no heart for Croome and stayed in London, and in 1748 had settled the estate on his second son, George William, who still struggled with the loss of his brother: