Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  He had, unusually, time for his immediate surroundings. It was an easy stroll along Chiswick Mall and through part of the village to Chiswick House. Previously, his loyalty to Stowe made Lancelot jealous of Chiswick’s fame, but it was now Chiswick in decline, and worth investigation. The immediate surround of the villa, with elegant stemmed-up trees shading the vases, urns and statues, was protected by iron railings, but the park was accessible at will. He could wander along the paths that snaked through the wilderness, and along the river that had lost its ‘canal’ formality and become gradually more serpentine, until at the far end it widened into a beautiful lake, with a newly made cascade. And such a convalescence would end in a holiday, and a boat trip for all the family upriver to Kew, perhaps to a picnic on the Green; there Lancelot could gaze beyond the busy Brentford ferry and note how the Thames settled into lakelike sinuousities as it flowed past Princess Augusta’s Kew Garden and, on the opposite bank, had all the appearance of a lake as the foreground to Syon House.

  His strength regained, serious thoughts were in order. He owed it to Biddy, who was not used to penury and worry, to acknowledge the precarious nature of his living. Taking a percentage of costs did not work for him as it did for architects, for landscape costs were a fraction of those for building, and completion was much delayed. His need to collect his monies, invariably paid late – £50 here, £100 there, and not paid at all if he did not collect – was too precarious, hopelessly insecure. His situation paled in contrast to that of his brothers. John and Jane Brown and their young son Richard were comfortably established in their home, Whitridge, on the Kirkharle estate, and John had recently been appointed clerk, treasurer and surveyor to the Alemouth Turnpike Trust. He was also surveyor for the eastern end of the Military Road from Newcastle to Carlisle, as well as the Ponteland turnpike. John’s fellow trustees, with whom he was ranked a ‘Gentleman’, included representatives of the Ridley, Allgood, Blackett, Grey and Errington families – proof of his successful establishment.

  George Brown and his wife Catherine were almost as comfortably settled in their house in Cambo, where George was responsibly involved with many of Sir Walter Calverley Blackett’s property and mining interests. They may have urged their younger brother to come home? There is some evidence too that Biddy’s brother, John Wayet, tried to persuade them to go back to Boston – after an earthquake in August 1755 he proposed to the Town Council that Mr Brown of Hammersmith might be paid a fee to inspect some of the council properties.

  Petworth House. Proposals carried out for 2nd Lord Egremont, from 1753:

  Petworth House, and the church and town to the east.

  Shelter planting along road to Guildford (A283).

  The 17th century ‘Birchen Walks’ restored and enhanced, with serpentine paths and sweeping segmental ha-ha.

  The first lake, now the Upper Pond; the south end of the lake has been foreshortened, presumably when the new line of the road to Tillington and Midhurst (A272) was made.

  Lancelot’s second lake, now the Lower Pond.

  Against this background, Lancelot applied the more businesslike way of working that he was trying at Petworth, with written and agreed contracts. Works would be detailed, with agreed down-payments of £200–300 on the quarter-days, so that he could pay his men working on direct labour on the job money from the client, and keep his own share. For really long-term works, as at Croome, he should be paid an annual retainer, though at the moment he did not want to impose this upon Lord Coventry and appear ungrateful to a generous patron. It was now that he opened his account at Drummonds Bank in Charing Cross, and it seems he did a little job for Andrew Drummond for the privilege, making a pleasant journey of some 10 miles over the green hills of Middlesex to Drummond’s house at Stanmore. ‘Old Andrew’ (he was in his mid-sixties), the founder of the bank, had bought his estate – distinguished by the artificial ‘Belmount’ with a summer house on the top – in his first prosperity in 1729. He lived there ‘in great style27 which he could well afford’, a stout and rubicund gentleman with his intelligent spaniel, as painted by Johann Zoffany in his park – of which he was soon to be ‘very vain’, having had it ‘dressed up’ by Mr Brown.

  In 1753 Drummonds Bank was in Angell Court at Charing Cross, now the corner of Whitehall, and across the road from Northumberland House. The bank liked its lordly customers, but Andrew Drummond had a kindness for artists and craftsmen too: he was treasurer for St Martin-in-the-Fields and the bank had managed the financing of James Gibbs’s great church, which is how Gibbs came to be a Drummonds customer. The painters Johann Zoffany and Giovanni Battista Cipriani, the cabinet-maker Thomas Chippendale whose workshop was in St Martin’s Lane, and Captain Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital all transacted their business in Angell Court. For the boy from Kirkharle, it was something of an arrival, to be the possessor of a bank account, and to become at home in the convivial surroundings of the coffee- and chop-houses, the booksellers, instrument-makers and wig-makers and other delights of the courts along the Strand and around Covent Garden.

  News of Lancelot’s illness had spread. ‘I am sorry28 to hear of your indisposition by Lord Egremont,’ wrote Admiral Lord Anson, in his bold sailorly scrawl, on 26th September 1753. ‘I am going to Moor Park today and shall be there till Sunday. The next week I shall go down on Thursday and shall not return till Monday by which time I hope and wish you may think yourself well enough to let me see you.’ The Admiral, George, Baron Anson of Soberton, victor of the 1747 action at Cape Finisterre and hero of his famous ship Centurion’s four-year circumnavigation of the world (which had included saving the city of Canton from fire and capturing a Spanish treasure-galleon), was clearly a force to be reckoned with, and Lancelot surely found himself well enough.

  Moor Park in south Hertfordshire was a ‘white Palladian palace’29 by the Italian architect Giacomo Leoni, finished thirty years before: it stood on a spur with views to Cassiobury Park and Watford to the north, and southwards to Uxbridge, and in a park 4 miles round, crossed by avenues of mature elms and walnut trees. Charles Bridgeman had reworked (or replaced) the older gardens on two faces of the house into an embracing hexagonal terrace, holding a long canal surrounded by ‘wilderness’ plantings of evergreens and fruit trees. The nature of the original ground, and phrases such as ‘a harsh, offensive termination’ and a ‘sharpness of the edge’30 – used in contemporary descriptions of Bridgeman’s gardens – make it clear that the terrace was composed partly of made-up ground (the soil cut away and moved to fill up the new level), and therefore subject to instability. Fashion and necessity decreed that Moor Park’s surroundings were returned to the ‘natural’ landform. Work started at Moor Park the following year, 1754, and it was to be a very expensive operation. Horace Walpole mentioned that the Admiral had paid £6,000 after six years, for what Walpole despised as ‘so many artificial molehills’,31 but what a more generous visitor Thomas Whateley (1770) called ‘hillocks’32 – ‘not diminutive in size and [made] considerable by the fine clumps which distinguish them’. More recently, Alice Buchan (whose maternal grandparents, the Grosvenors, owned Moor Park) recalled Lancelot’s work as a ‘dullish piece33 of Hertfordshire [transformed] into a very fair imitation of Italy’.fn2

  In the October of 1753 Lancelot went to Belhus, where his very appearance convinced the doubting Thomas, Lord Dacre. ‘Brown has been here’,34 he wrote to San Miller, ‘and by what I find has realy been very ill … and upon the whole I begin now to think that he has not grown too Great to despise my little Businesses. He attributed to many hindrances his being so long absent, and says I ought to remember that for two months in summer I myself was not here …’ To make up, Lancelot ‘slaved at setting out the road and the rest of the Shrubbery all day’, talked over plans all evening, ‘and was in the best humour imaginable. Of his own accord [he] promised to come again next month.’

  ‘The alteration of Burleigh’35

  Two visits in two months were most unlikely; most clients were c
ontent with two visits a year. There is no record of what happened to the promise, but Belhus was not forgotten, although it was nearly a year later that Lord Dacre reported to San Miller, ‘Brown went with me about a month ago to Belhouse [sic] in order to give me his opinion about some plantations.’ ‘He tells me,’ Dacre added, ‘that he has the alteration of Burleigh and that not only of the Park but of the house which wherever it is Gothick he intends to preserve in that Stile.’ So, Lancelot entered upon his third great commission of these earliest years of his solo career: Croome, Petworth and now Burghley, where on his own admission he was to have ‘twenty-five years pleasure36 in restoring the monument of a great minister to a great Queen’.

  Susceptible to effects, which were his stock-in-trade, Lancelot may be permitted a gasp at his first sight of the Cecils’ wondrous palace, the many-pinnacled and chimneyed Burghley, glowing in the afternoon sun. It was almost exactly 200 years old, the house that Queen Elizabeth’s Mr Secretary Cecil had started to build in 1555. And now he, Lancelot Brown, had the altering of it and its vast park – he may be further permitted a flutter of the heart and a sigh of anticipation, as he turned his horse to ride down into Stamford St Martin’s.

  Belhus, Essex, extract from Chapman and Andre’s Map of Essex, 1777, showing Lord Dacre’s garden with the belts planted by Lancelot and the wet part of Bumstead meads where his lordship was eventually persuaded to make the lake. After many visits in the 1750s Lancelot gave up in exasperation, and Samuel Driver made Lady Dacre’s flower gardens 1764–5, and Richard Woods completed the lake, 1770.

  He was already familiar with The George, at the foot of St Martin’s Hill beside the River Welland, one of the most famous hostelries of the Great North Road. The George belonged to the Cecils, and much Burghley business was conducted there: it was one of ‘the plums37 of the innkeeping trade’, let with a 90-acre farm holding, which supplied meat and milk and the stables’ needs for hay and fodder. One night at the inn, using his eyes and talking to the landlord Marmaduke Skurray, told Lancelot a great deal, especially about the Welland, which flowed by his window: the Welland, with a catchment area across half of England, and its tributary the Chater coming in from Rutland, just west of the town, sent torrents of muddy water pouring through Stamford in rainy seasons (as it still does). Next morning, depending on the mood of the river, Lancelot either rode along Water Street or climbed St Martin’s hill directly, turning halfway up into the lane that ran along beside miles of Burghley’s wall. He found the ‘town’ entrance into the park, and as he walked his horse eastwards realised that the benefit of the hill soon fell away. He came to the ‘tipping point’ – there was always a tipping point – the nodal from where his designer’s eye assessed the scene, and realised that the great house actually sat (close to the 40-metre contours) perilously close to the water table of the Welland. It was all too evident: Burghley was surrounded by sparkling waters, by pools, basins and canals, and by the Great Pond on the south-east – all the result of the attempts of 200 years’ labour ‘to sett the house dry’.38 Generations of gardeners had found it ‘sore work’ in the beds, orchards and plantations, with all too often the refrain ‘he say the holes wyll stand full of water do what he can’ when the planting season came around. The cellars flooded too. Burghley clearly needed a lake.

  On that first visit Lancelot found a house coming back to life after decades of deaths and misfortunes, making a fresh start in the hands of Brownlow Cecil, 9th Earl of Exeter, who was thirty, and his wife Laetitia Townshend, who brought him a dowry of £70,000 (or at least the interest at 3 per cent). Lancelot’s relationship with Lord Exeter was direct – they only ever dealt directly with each other, and they took to each other: his lordship’s ‘bluff, blunt-featured,39 rosy-cheeked face and mild blue eyes’ had more a look of Farmer Giles, but also ‘the unquestioned self-assurance of a landowning potentate’. He also had a touch of vanity, and Thomas Hudson had just portrayed him in Vandyke costume, well stomached in a long, black silk doublet with slashed sleeves, his round face rising from a fluff of white lace.

  For Lancelot, all Lord Exeter’s personal qualities were enhanced by his love of Burghley; he didn’t own Burghley, it was his sacred trust. He was ‘an eminently peaceful potentate’40 who enjoyed the society of his Stamford friends and country neighbours, making only the shortest stays in London when necessary. The resources of the estates were considerable: ‘the Home Manors’,41 an array of villages in Lincolnshire and Rutland with well-wooded lands in Rockingham Forest (the Wood Books income averaged £1,000 a year in the 1750s), quarries of valuable building stones, the Yorkshire estate (£2,300 gross rental) and the London estate – Catherine Street and a ‘shopping mall’, the Exeter Exchange between the Strand and Covent Garden.

  Stamford, of which the Cecils owned a goodly southern portion, was pre-eminently a stone town, the home of generations of master masons, their assistants and fixer masons who worked the products of the famous limestone quarries at Barnack, Ketton, Collyweston, Clipsham and Lyddington. Lord Exeter, only too aware of the way the estate was encumbered with the debts of his lavishly spending precedessor, the 5th Earl (who had spent £38,000 on travelling and collecting Italian paintings and furniture, and paying for the works of Antonio Verrio, Grinling Gibbons and the other craftsmen that filled the house), ‘ran his estate42 in the style of an old-fashioned investment trust, geared to low-interest [and] semi-permanent loans’.

  Before anything was done at Burghley, Lord Exeter commissioned ‘An Accurate Survey of the House, Pleasure Grounds and Park’ from John Haynes, a surveyor he knew from York. Haynes spent a good deal of time during 1755 on his scaled and annotated survey, which was accompanied by a series of architectural sketches of the house and garden features, making a detailed record. Lord Exeter was a careful steward.

  Lancelot found Burghley with an array of avenues and cross-avenues, courts and orchards, laid out by his old familiar ghostly colleague, George London (possibly with additional work from Charles Bridgeman). London’s last planting of 1702, Queen Anne’s Avenue of 1,200 double-banked limes, stretched for a mile southwards from the house. Lord Exeter wanted this approach enhanced by enlarging the upper windows of the south front and raising the parapet, which was balustraded, to hide roof clutter; this jobbing mason’s work was duly done. Lancelot was more concerned that a low stable block sat on the north-west corner of the house, spoiling the views to and from the park: Lord Exeter agreed that this block should be demolished, making the most of the clean gravel sweep of the north entrance court, and considerably enhancing the west façade with its gilded Tijou gates. A new stable court was built east of the house in a practical, no-nonsense pattern-book Gothic.

  In his excited report to Lord Dacre, Lancelot mentioned ‘the old Hall43 whose sides [are] now quite naked’, the lofty Elizabethan banqueting hall with hammerbeam roof, which he thought might take some judicious Gothic ornament, but wished he had Sanderson Miller’s opinion. It seems likely that he turned to the master carpenter William Halfpenny’s Rural Architecture in the Gothic Taste or Chinese and Gothic Architecture Properly Ornamented, both of 1752.fn3 Was there Gothic-arched panelling, reflecting the bays of the hammerbeam roof? We cannot know what Lancelot did, for it was removed when the present panelling and bookcases were installed in the nineteenth century.

  A happier solution was found to Lord Exeter’s request for ornamental ceilings in the Chapel and the Billiard Room: at Burghley, Lancelot is firmly credited with drawing his lordship’s attention to the designs in The Ruins of Palmyra, published in 1753 and destined to become one of the most influential pattern-books of taste. It is a splendid large-folio volume and rare – was it a new acquisition that Lord Exeter wanted to show off, or was Lancelot left to amuse himself amongst the Burghley books? The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor in the Desart was a very superior pattern-book, to the credit of Robert Wood and James Dawkins, ‘two gentlemen’ whose curiosity had carried them more than once to Italy and who ‘wanted to g
o farther’ in 1751. Robert Wood, who had been travelling tutor or ‘bear-leader’ to the Duke of Bridgewater, was almost certainly known to Lord Exeter, who was himself a great Grand Tourist and collector. The lozenge designs for the Burghley ceilings, the work of a master stuccoist, are accurately taken from the exquisite engravings after Borra, by Foudrinier, Müller and Major, for this book. Palmyra ceilings became all the rage, a speciality of Robert Adam, who designed one for Osterley Park44 and another for the gallery at Croome.

  Lancelot’s supervision of these works at Burghley began in 1756: Lord Exeter paid him out of his private account £1,000 a year, £500 each June and December. The Countess Laetitia died that year, and there were no children; in her will she left the use of her £70,000 to her husband until he should marry again. The Earl then adopted his young nephew, Henry Cecil (the child of his younger brother who lived abroad), and brought him to live at Burghley, so that there was a future to work for. Lancelot grew familiar with the many ‘short notes45 in lord Exeter’s small round hand’, which would arrange a meeting in London or ask him to call: he patiently attended to all these requests (which included scouting for a tenant for Lord Exeter’s house in Grosvenor Square), hoping for the day when he was allowed to start work on the lake.

  Family life in the house by the river in Hammersmith Mall recovered from the shock of Lancelot’s illness, but the toll had been heavy. Their fourth son, baptised George Stephen on 7th January 1754, did not live long. A daughter, Anne, was baptised in February two years later, but soon there was another sad little procession to St Paul’s Church, where Thomas Rayne the curate met them for her burial. The little plots in the churchyard bound them to Hammersmith life, which they found comfortable and normally full of delights. Biddy Brown felt at home beside the water, for before being landlocked at Stowe, she had never known life without the jinglings of the breeze in sail riggings and the swish-swash of the tides. She found plentiful and varied shopping in King Street and close by, and in the summers she and the children walked to the local farm gates to buy strawberries and salads. Dame schools and teachers of singing and music and drawing abounded for Bridget (approaching ten), Lance (two years younger) and little Jack (four). Henry and Mary Holland and their family at Fulham were their close and companionable friends; young Henry was at school, but destined for his father’s builders’ business.