Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  Lancelot’s Biddy was capable of all the comforts (even toasted rhubarb, though that had gone out of fashion), but she had her hands full with their growing family. She may have written up Lancelot’s accounts when there was no one else to do so, but she would not be emulating the childless Patience Wise in answering letters, directing work and placating angry clients in her husband’s absences. Charles Bridgeman, successor to Wise as royal gardener, had found he needed other enterprises – he owned the famous Bell Inn at Stilton on the Great North Road – to support his travelling consultancy. Indeed, designing alone seemed a perilous living, even for a great architect; ‘when Vanbrugh3 could hardly afford to pay for his mother’s funeral, Wise was retiring to Warwick Priory, leaving £200,000 at his death’. Rich or poor, these were Lancelot’s predecessors, his inescapable ghosts, from whom he asserted his right to practise on his own terms, and without running a nursery.

  Lancelot had to find nurseries that would suit him now: Robert Furber’s fashionable nursery was in Kensington Gore; Furber was nearing retirement (he died in 1756), and so Lancelot made the aquaintance of his assistant and heir, John Williamson, from whom he was soon ordering flowering shrubs. This connection brought him an introduction to Philip Miller, curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden, whose influence was extensively weblike, and his Gardener’s Dictionary (1732) in accruing editions had biblical status. Furber and Williamson also had close connections with the Gray nursery of Fulham, where Lancelot found a treasure trove of his favourite cedar of Lebanon, which became his signature tree. These were a speciality ‘because they are the most beautiful4 of the evergreen race, and because they are the dearest; half a guinea apiece in baskets’, in the opinion of the fastidious Horace Walpole. Christopher Gray advertised ‘a greater Variety of Trees, Shrubs, Plants and Flowers cultivated in [the] nursery, than can perhaps be found in any other Garden for sale, not only in England, but also in any Part of Europe’. There were also ‘scarce’ arbutus ‘at a crown apiece, but they are very beautiful’ (not so the Lignum vitae, which ‘stink abominably if you touch them and never make a handsome tree’) and, as Walpole explained in a letter to George Montagu, ‘cypresses in pots at half a crown apiece – [if] you turn them out of the pot with all their mould they never fail!’

  A cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani): the tree that Lancelot ‘discovered’ being propagated at Gray’s Nursery in Fulham, and which became his signature tree.

  With Williamson’s and Gray’s acquaintance, Lancelot made contact with the elite fellowship of Bartram’s Boxes, a private trade in seeds and plants organised by a prosperous Quaker haberdasher in the City of London, Peter Collinson, and by the Pennsylvanian and Quaker farmer and botanist, John Bartram. Bartram would go botanising after his harvest was in, collecting seeds and seedlings, which were boxed and shipped with masters already carrying cargoes for the Collinson textile business. This box-scheme had been working for ten years, the packing and protection of seeds and plants in moss had been patiently mastered, and Collinson’s effective organisation made sure that the boxes arrived safely, the plants ‘as fresh and Lively5 as if that Minute taken out of the Woods’. From his office in the City, Collinson distributed the box contents, or a whole box, to his eagerly awaiting customers. He was shy of naming these, but there were about sixty: they included members of the royal family, Lords Bute and Petre, the owners of Longleat, Blenheim and Syon (all these were Lancelot’s clients) as well as the participating nurseries: Williamson’s, Gray’s, John Bush at Isleworth, James Gordon of Mile End and James Wood at Huntingdon. As Mark Laird has explained, this was the organisation responsible for the popularity of American plants, a craze that now soared to ‘almost manic activity,6 rather as tulips had done one hundred years before’. Everyone wanted the colourful maples, thorns, robinias, ailanthus, red oaks, tulip trees and cornus, and Lancelot soon learned to use them.

  Christopher Gray had the commercial coup of being able to propagate from the American plants growing in the garden of Fulham Palace. These were the first from the colonies, sent home to Bishop Henry Compton by his priestly collectors some fifty years earlier: the first Magnolia virginiana was shipped in a collection from Governor Nicholson of Virginia in 1698 for ‘yr Lordsps paradise at Fulham’. Lancelot was able to explore this ‘paradise’, seeing for the first time ‘the black Virginian walnut-tree,7 the cluster-pine, the honey-locust, the pseudoacacia, the ash-maple’ and the curious cork-oak.fn1

  The Thames was the life-blood of Hammersmith, the reason for its prized accessibility. The surrounding fields were fast converting from arable to strawberries, lavender and lettuces, as well as fruit and nursery stock to serve the London markets. The Thames was their supply route, as The Spectator had so delightfully discovered one fine August dawn when he ‘fell in with a Fleet of Gardiners bound for the several Market-ports of London’ – a cheerful crowd that amassed ‘Ten Sail of Apricock Boats’8 at Somerset House landing stage. Grapes were grown in Hammersmith, and it was actually a rule of the parish workhouse that all spare land should be devoted to vines9 and the wine sold for its upkeep; the very name ‘Vine’ was a popular street and house name, as in Lee and Kennedy’s10 Vineyard Nursery on Hammersmith’s eastern boundary (the site of Olympia). Here, in James Lee, a fuchsia-mad botanist, and Lewis Kennedy (both in their thirties) Lancelot found contemporaries of consequence. West from Hammersmith was the nursery run by Henry Woodman at Strand on the Green, who traded by sea to William Joyce in Gateshead, and who had so derided Switzer for not growing his own plants. The now ageing and respected Woodman (who died in 1758) was also a past master at packing nursery stock plants for safe journeying, an unsung but necessary skill, explained by Thomas Hitt11 in his A Treatise of Fruit-Trees, of 1755.

  These were practicalities resolved, resources should he need them: in addition, two seeming gifts of fate confirmed the happiness of choosing Hammersmith. Lancelot discovered that nearby Twickenham was the home of Joshua Spyers or Spires, a respected churchwarden and ‘draftsman’, so described in 1749, who also supplied trees to Walpole for Strawberry Hill, and to whom Walpole paid two guineas for a survey of his Strawberry Hill estate. Joshua seems to have been near the end of his days, but his son, Jonathan, an accomplished artist, surveyor and plan-maker, shortly became Lancelot’s most-valued travelling surveyor. He paid Jonathan Spyers for each survey and plan as it was accomplished, the fee varying according to the acreage surveyed and allowing for travelling and board expenses. Spyers’s usual fee was £56. Lancelot also found his foremen from a pool of freelance travelling gardeners, with either surveying or nursery experience, who made good livings by being based in Hammersmith, part of the close professional networking. At this early stage of his career he was essentially on his own, with no permanent assistant; each workforce was controlled and paid by the foreman, and was drawn either from estate labour or directly from the locality.

  The other ‘discovery’, whether made through a trip to Gray’s Nursery or a visit to Fulham Palace, or through churchgoing – for All Saints at Fulham was the mother-church of Hammersmith’s St Paul’s – was the builder Henry Holland. Henry and Mary Holland had a house in Church Row, Fulham; he was a churchwarden at All Saints and they had a family of whom the eldest Margaret was nine, followed by Ann (seven), Henry junior (six), Mary (five), and Catherine was on the way. As families, the Hollands and Browns had much in common. In business terms, Henry Holland was a successful builder with a safe reputation, well regarded for his streets of town houses, especially in fast-developing Mayfair, and was apparently interested in extending into the country-house market. On the strength of Holland’s promises, Lancelot decided that he could fulfil all of the Earl of Coventry’s dreams and schemes for Croome.

  The Croome decision made, and an immediate trip to Worcestershire planned, Lancelot then heard that George and Elizabeth Grenville at Wotton Underwood had given him a recommendation to her brother, Lord Egremont at Petworth House in Sussex. In late 1751, with the family all settled in th
e Mall house, Lancelot galloped off down the Portsmouth road into yet another county that was completely new to him, and within sight of Petersfield he turned eastwards onto the old road that follows the River Rother to Midhurst and Petworth. Petworth, he rejoiced, was to be a ‘park’ job, with the hope of a lake. But first he must tackle Croome.

  Croome, ‘the dusky Vale folorn’

  Of his sculptural materials – earth, trees and water – Lancelot had the most fun with water. Water, given space, clearly enjoys itself, fresh river water tumbling in spate, ousted by the flood from its accustomed bed and running wildly like a naughty child, careering across fields, making bubbly, translucent cascades where it falls into a rut, and then curling and dancing its way by the shortest route back to the mother river. There was plenty of water to watch at Croome in the wet West Country, positioned as it was between two gentle hills which spawned the streams that fed the great rivers, the Severn to the west and the Avon to the east. Croome had always been wet and marshy, and Lancelot wondered why the Coventrys had put up with it since 1592, but habitation had bred their affection. Croome D’Abitot, the Elizabethan village by the church, had been named for Urso D’Abitot (D’Abetot), whom William the Conqueror had created hereditary Sheriff of Worcestershire (after his considerably violent progress across the country from the Sussex landings). In the sixteenth century the lawyer Thomas Coventry had bought that desirable Norman pedigree along with the open fields and pastures. Thomas Coventry had come from London with a fortune made by his kinsman John, a mercer and a friend of Mayor Richard Whittington.

  Lancelot looked over Croome from the east hill; he looked down on a brick house of squarish proportions, of five bays and two projecting wings on the north front; the medieval church lay north-west of the house, and north and south of the house were the shadows of the extensive courts of seventeenth-century Croome, and the ghosts of once-glorious gardens. The Earl of Coventry’s new, but rather short ‘river’ ambled across the scene from north to south, and from his eyrie Lancelot worked out the lines of the land drains that would channel surplus waters to fill a lake, and a longer ‘river’ flowing past the house to the south boundary of the park, where the holding dam would be built. The underlying geology was complicated – patches of clay of differing stickinesses overlaid with gravels – and so his careful planning of the drain lines was vital; some of these are 1½ miles in length, with a fall of perhaps 6 inches, others are dug as much as 8 feet down. The drain runs are sometimes of rubble limestone, and the larger drains and culverts are of brick (this is traditional technology that would be familiar to local labourers, for the pottery-tile drain did not come into use until later in the eighteenth century). The materials undoubtedly came from the courtyard walls that had been cleared, and the demolition of the old church. The Earl wanted a green landscape flowing around his house and decreed that the church should be moved; perhaps it was Lancelot who suggested that the new one could be built on the east hill to attract the eye from many points around the park and the house’s north-facing windows.

  Sanderson Miller was still in close attendance, as no doubt Lancelot wished (as he was soon to wish for Miller’s advice at Burghley). The Earl wrote to Miller saying, ‘Whatever merits12 it may in future time boast it will be ungrateful not to acknowledge you the primary Author’ of Croome. This in no way contradicts his frequent praise of Lancelot as the effulgent tamer of the ‘morass’, but it may explain how the three of them came to decide upon the treatment for the house. Croome Court was to be rebuilt on the foundations of the existing house, which lacked length and presence. The new house at Hagley, so much admired by both San Miller and George William Coventry, was being discussed and designed by Miller, with detailed plans and elevations drawn by John Chute, a sociable and talented amateur of the family at The Vyne near Basingstoke. Chute’s Hagley was a distinctive house, with four fronts of freestone, and a tower at each corner rising higher than the main building. The strong similarity between Hagley and the new Croome cannot be missed; Hagley’s ‘Italian House’, reminiscent also of Inigo Jones’s work at Wilton, was a combination of tastes that the Earl of Coventry could not resist.

  The ‘Hagley design’ meant adding the four towers to the existing footings at Croome, giving the house the desired additional bulk and presence; while the ‘Wilton effect’ – the way Wilton is set low – made a virtue of Croome’s lowness. Lancelot, ever the perfectionist when it came to understanding new concepts, and in need of physical confirmation of the proportions, seems to have visited Wilton in early 1753. His visually retentive memory was clear and accurate, and with measurements and perhaps a trace from a drawing, he would have provided enough information for the builders’ estimates, which almost entirely depended upon a unit price multiplied out, with the ‘near-guess’ of experience for bulk supplies, such as sand and lime. It was customary for the master masons, master carpenters and other tradesmen to render their own estimates. They were invariably supplied with only a ‘draft’ of the look of the building, and made their own measured drawings for unusual details, such as a string course or cornice moulding, and possibly for the Venetian windows that were a feature of Wilton and Croome.

  At Croome the old house was dismantled, leaving the centrally horizontal chimney-range intact, and then built up again on the extended plan, with the addition of the corner towers. Like (the much-better documented) Smiths’ of Warwick, Holland’s worked in the traditions passed down from the medieval guilds, relying on the interlocking competences of masons and carpenters. Each had his own patterns and experience, but after that ‘much of the “designing”13 remained empirical, with details worked out, as building progressed’, as Francis Smith’s biographer Andor Gomme writes of the firm’s craftsmen. Their materials – timber, brick and stone – had changed not at all, and even with the Palladian innovations the principles remained the same, and ‘new classical mouldings were interpreted only as surface variations on structural techniques which had barely changed during the past six hundred years’. The purists’ disdain for Palladianism was because they saw it as purely ‘façade-ism’. Lancelot’s experience as Clerk of Works at Stowe had equipped him well to manage both men and supplies, and he had mastered knowledge of the new architectural detailing. Proof that he was competent and likeable would seem to come from the fact that three master craftsmen who worked at Croome, each with his own team of labour – William Eltonhead the bricklayer, Robert Newman the mason, and John Hobcroft the carpenter – are all found working with him on many later commissions. Benjamin Read, who worked as his landscape foreman at Croome, was to work on Lancelot’s largest and most important landscapes for the next twenty years.

  Lancelot has been called the ‘architect’ of Croome, and in the subsidiary meaning of ‘a person who brings about a specified thing’, then of course he was; he was the visionary who saw the whole landscape and the buildings in the landscape, and he possessed the practical abilities to bring vision and ideas into existence. He was undoubtedly happier out in his park than on the building site. At Croome, it was in fact the house rebuilding that kept him there for long visits, but when the builders were busy he had time to examine the falls of the ground painstakingly and work out his drainage lines. Drainage was of critical importance to Croome, but it was also his opportunity to perfect vital skills. Thus Lord Coventry’s appreciation that the beauty and comforts of his home derived almost entirely from its being lifted out of a ‘morass’ were just. That he called the green-clad and tall figure his ‘architect’, as he watched him moving across the meadows with his notebook and an assistant wielding the pedometer (the wheeled instrument for measuring distances), was entirely apt. Lancelot was working in the tradition of Henry Wise, Charles Bridgeman and William Kent, but it was a slim tradition and few understood his aims: measuring and mathematics were obvious preliminaries to building, but why would one want to measure grass? For the time being, and for Lancelot, there was no named role between the architect and that of the gardener –
the latter firmly bedded down with the lettuces and pineapples.

  Lancelot knew he was not an architect; he had not made the obligatory pilgrimage to Italy, nor studied at the feet of a drawing master. In his day ‘architect’ was an appellation grasped by the well-born, like Lord Burlington and the 9th ‘Architect Earl’ of Pembroke, and by the ‘amateur’ Sanderson Miller, or rewarded to the outrageously talented, like James Gibbs, William Kent or Robert Adam. A mason’s apprenticeship, as Hawksmoor had had with Wren, hardly existed and was almost exclusively managed by the all-powerful Office of Works. Lancelot’s life so far has made it perfectly clear that none of the above apply.

  Croome Court. Layout plan explaining Lancelot’s taming of the ‘morass’ mainly 1751-65 for the 6th Earl of Coventry:

  The house, rebuilt and extended at both ends, and adjacent stable court built to plans by Smith of Warwick; (area A shows site of Croome d’ Abitot old church and walled garden courts).

  Walled kitchen garden, a centre of activity at the time.

  New church of St Mary Magdalene, built on the eastern hill, the view point for Lancelot’s approach to the layout.