by Jane Brown
Sometimes they walked in the opposite direction, taking ‘a delightful rural walk’, as locally described, through the lanes to the village of Shepherd’s Bush; or along by the Stamford brook to medieval Palingswick Green near Ravenscourt Park, or farther north to Wormholt Woods and the heathery ‘scrubs’ (much later corrupted to Wormwood Scrubs) and Old Oak Common, ‘and from thence the eye commands beautiful and extensive views on the south’ bounded by the far Surrey hills – Thomson’s ‘matchless vale46 of Thames’,
Fair-winding up to where the Muses haunt
In Twit’nam’s bowers, and for their Pope implore
The healing God; to royal Hampton’s pile,
To Clermont’s terraced height, and Esher’s groves,
Where in the sweetest solitude, embraced
By the soft windings of the silent Mole,
From courts and senates Pelham finds repose.
Most frequently they walked by the river, the companionable Thames, where their neighbours took the air, and as well as the boating there was plenty of fishing activity. Salmon and sturgeon were still being taken out, though declining stocks made the sight of sturgeon something of an event. Eel-baskets were brought in from the river’s bed; there was the season for ‘blenneting’ for roach and dace with small drift nets, which began each July; and there were barbel in plenty. Lancelot was more than ever in thrall to the great river. So many people obviously enjoyed boating and fishing for pleasure, it seemed that, given a stretch of water, everyone appreciated it. New lakes were in his proposals for Croome, Petworth and Burghley, though even his best clients needed persuasion, and with Lord Dacre at Belhus he was soon conducting a campaign: ‘I have had Brown down with me at Belhouse,’47 Dacre wrote to San Miller, ‘and am going to make a pool where now the run of water is, in the lower part of my park … Brown and indeed my own little judgment tells me that it will be a very great ornament.’ With Lancelot out of sight, Lord Dacre’s courage failed, though he later rallied and declared himself a ‘Bold man’ for deciding ‘that all the rushy part of Bumstead Mead will be converted into water’ – ‘nothing less than a ten-acre pool’.
Pools, or lakes, suited the scale of Lancelot’s working, for they were a slow-maturing labour and a desirable fashion. From now on, no self-respecting park owner could be found harbouring an old fishpond.
fn1 Bishop Terrick, vicar of Twickenham, became Bishop of London in 1764; he employed Stiff Leadbetter, surveyor to St Paul’s Cathedral, to build ‘Strawberry Hill’ Gothic additions to the palace, and Bishop Terrick incorporated the exotic trees into a park, with meandering walks through orchard and meadows; he apparently wanted to ‘employ’ the Thames as his ‘water’ effect, but a moat and public right of way along the river bank prevented this. Fulham Palace garden, with its stately cedars of Lebanon, has always been remarked upon as being in the Brown style – was it not possible that the Bishop asked Lancelot’s advice?
fn2 Lancelot paid Nathaniel Richmond £3,122 – of the £6,000 – between 1754 and 1759; Richmond lived at Rickmansworth and supervised the work at Moor Park. He was clearly capable and ambitious, and keen on his independence, though ready to work with Lancelot when required, as he did on Syon Park and Sion Hill.
fn3 The Chinese bridge built at Croome of 1755 was taken from an illustration in Halfpenny’s Improvements in Architecture and Carpentry of 1754.
6
LANCELOT AND ‘THE GREAT COMMONER’
My House!1 tis true, a small & old one
Yet now tis warm, tho’ once a cold one.
My Study holds three thousand volumes,
And yet I sigh for Gothic columns,
Such as Sir Roger, learned Knight of Taste
At Arbury so well has placed,
Or such as Dacre, Gothic Master
Has introduced instead of Plaister.
Sanderson Miller, 13th December 1750
LANCELOT HAD OBSERVED William Pitt’s progress from the early days of their encounters at Stowe. In his first government post as Paymaster-General to the Forces – a post traditionally ripe for profits – Pitt had, ‘to the astonishment2 of other politicians and the delight of a wider public’, lodged the balance of the public money with the Bank of England and waived his personal commission. This had given people the idea that he was ‘different from other politicians, less corrupt and self-interested’; these were the seeds of a growing adulation. Indeed, Pitt had little regard for money, and he was sometimes notoriously extravagant and at others pleaded poverty; when he had money, he was generous to his gardening friends, as Sanderson Miller continued:
With here a large Settee for sleep,
A window there to take a peep
Of Lawns & Woods and Cows & Sheep,
And Laurel Walk & Strawberry Bank
For which the Paymaster I thank.
The Paymaster well skilled in planting
Pleas’d to assist when cash was wanting.
He bid my Laurels grow, they grew
Fast as his Laurels always do.
Pitt had parted with his first house and garden, South Lodge at Enfield, in the early 1750s, and resumed his ‘wandering Scythian life’,3 his summer ramblings, giving his opinions and advice on other people’s gardens. Even his closest friends and relations were in fear of failing him: ‘It vexes me4 that you can’t find fencing enough from all my father’s wood,’ wrote George Lyttelton from London to his cousin Molly West at Hagley, ‘to enclose the plantation that Pitt marked out for the cottage. He will be much disappointed not to see it done, and indeed so shall I … I won’t answer for Pitt’s coming to Hagley at Whitsuntide, especially as there will be no cottage built nor trees planted there.’ To his own cousin John Pitt, at ‘dear unknown, delightful, picturesque Encombe’ in its Dorset cove, Pitt exhorted: ‘Throw about your verdant hills5 some thousands of trees – group away’ (that is, clump them). His word was law and ‘his wrath terrible’, just as in the House of Commons, but Encombe was remote enough to be safe.
After five years as Paymaster-General, having set in train the strengthening of the navy and the army and underwritten future victories, Pitt collapsed (in the late summer of 1751) and was absent from politics for well over two years. The ‘collapses’, which became frequent, were attributed to gout; he was to be found dramatically swathed in flannel for an agony of his head, his stomach or his feet (though this is now understood to be manic depression, bipolar disorder, which took an awful toll on his body systems). In the midsummer of 1754 he was at Tunbridge Wells, taking the waters with Gilbert West, another gout sufferer, and more pleasantly occupied with the Wests at West Wickham (where he made suggestions for improvements), and with Elizabeth Montagu, who summered at Hayes Place nearby (whilst her husband Edward preferred Yorkshire). Mrs Montagu wrote of how ‘we have been wandering about like a company of gypsies,6 visiting all the fine parks and seats in the neighbourhood’. They must have talked of Lancelot, for from this time she joins the ranks of ‘Lancelot-watchers’; she was to observe from afar, and patiently, for many years.
At the end of July, Pitt resumed his rambling into Sussex, then north to Hertfordshire. The Sebrights of Beechwood Park, south of Luton at Markyate, were amongst his Hertfordshire friends, and Lancelot was working there. His commission followed the usual pattern, with a survey requested (1753), upon which he based proposals for generously sweeping plantations and huge clumps in a variety of ‘amoebic’ shapes in the park; if these suggest that Pitt enthused Sir John Sebright, it would not be surprising. Beechwood’s house was fronted by a formal terrace with bastions, removed in favour of a natural green sweep into the park, but retaining the ‘copses’ of wilderness planting that flanked the sweep.fn1
William Pitt rambled on from Beechwood to Stowe, all in ‘continual rains’,7 until he reached the small spa of Astrop Wells in Northamptonshire, one of his favoured cures. There he was ‘lodged in a dungeon called the Manor House of King’s Sutton’, drinking the waters of St Rumbold’s Well in the morning an
d riding ‘in the dirt of Northamptonshire all the rest of the day’, hoping he was leading a healthy life, ‘for pleasure never found its way hither’. Astrop, in the Cherwell valley just south of Banbury, was the home of the lawyer and MP, Sir John Willes, the elderly Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, for whom Smiths of Warwick had built a new house (1735–8) in Astrop Park. Pitt’s ‘dungeon’ was Willes’s old manor house. Within a few years (the late 1750s) Lancelot was also at Astrop (perhaps for cold bathing?), where he made a long, narrow lake from the stream flowing down from Astrop Hill and planted a sheltering belt of trees.
Still in 1754, William Pitt, ‘well cobbled8 up by Astrop waters and the life of a post-boy, always in the saddle’, changed his mind about his planned visit to Bath and Encombe, and took himself the much shorter distance back to Wotton Underwood. There he proposed to the thirty-four-year-old Lady Hester Grenville – she who had witnessed Lady Cobham’s twittery about the sheep in the garden at Stowe, and whom Pitt had known for more than twenty years. They were married on 16th November that year and were to be blissfully enraptured with each other, and their children and gardens, for the rest of his life. Their honeymoon was spent at Mrs Montagu’s Hayes Place near Bromley, which she was persuaded to sell, as both Mr and Lady Hester Pitt had fallen in love with it; on his earlier visit Pitt had wandered off, as usual, ‘and found the most beautiful rural scene9 that can be imagined’, and immediately ordered ‘a tent, a picnic and tea’.
Hayes Place was an elegant villa, which the Pitts extended to twenty-four bedrooms, with stabling for sixteen horses, housing for four carriages, and the usual offices, dairy, brewhouse, laundry and a walled garden with peach houses and pineapple pits. While Hayes was being got ready for them, the Pitts spent four months at Chevening, about 8 miles to the south over Westerham Hill. This was the home of Philip, 2nd Earl Stanhope, whose mother Lucy was Pitt’s cousin. It is said that Pitt designed Chevening’s carriage drive, but Lancelot’s name has also been suggested for this. Lancelot certainly became very familiar with Hayes Place. Pitt extended Hayes’s 60 acres of fenced park by buying and renting fields in the adjoining parish of Farnborough. Hayes became (we have only the estate agent’s description from 1789) ‘pleasure grounds10 disposed with taste, fringed with rich plantations, timber scattered with pleasing negligence, [a] paddock refreshed with a sheet of water and the grounds adorned with seats, alcoves etc’. It became Pitt’s refuge, prized for its seclusion; from love nest, it ripened into nursery as Hester’s ‘ever passionate husband’,11 (as he signed himself) sired a yearly sequence of children: little Hester, John, Harriot, ‘William the Fourth’ and James.
While all this was going on, Lancelot had returned to Lord Egremont’s Petworth, where work had been interrupted by his illness. (Petworth was now drawn into the Pitt networking, in that Lord Egremont’s sister Elizabeth was married to George Grenville, now William Pitt’s brother-in-law.) The leftover flower gardening from the first contract was completed, and shrubs planted to adorn the extended walks from the birch grove ‘on through ye Laurels12 leading up to the Seat where the Dutchess of Somerset used to drink her Coffee as likewise through the Padock & on ye Side of [ye] new Terras, making at the same Time proper preparations for Flowers’.
And then, to bolster his new resolution, Lancelot went forward eagerly with the lake, all the works now carefully set out in contract form (1754). The first stage was the staking out, forming both the desired and practical outline and calculating the amount of earth to be moved ‘for the lake in the park near the Half Moon Wood’,13 where a pond existed. This followed Taverner’s other, more risky way of lake-making: ‘the one digged right downe14 into the ground by labour of man’, with clay spread for the lining. The following summer, in June 1755, the work included ‘the alteration of the Pond in all its parts viz the digging of all such parts out as are not deep enough, according to the stakes. The making of all the necessary clay walls. The levelling the bottom and making the slopes and for pitching the sides … to prevent the cattle from damaging it’. A picturesque process this, with gangs of men spreading the clay, readily dug from the gault-clay strata nearby, and with endlessly processing horses and carts, as on an Egyptian tomb. The clay then had to be ‘puddled’, or tamped into a solid layer when wet, the best-known method being to drive a herd of sheep backwards and forwards, their little hooves making excellent tamps. A sheepsfoot roller was the more prosaic solution. There were subsequent hiccups, panics over leaks, but all were overcome; the following summer ‘a further new lake’ (now known as the Lower Pond) was ordered.
The Fox Letter17
Unsurprisingly, if Lancelot can be said to have had any political allegiance, it was ‘Pittian’.15 Pitt, observes William Hague in his biography of Pitt the Younger, ‘would have called himself a Whig, the term Tory being largely pejorative and still heavily associated with suspected Jacobite sympathies … but [he] was usually distinct in his views from the great figures of the Whig aristocracy’. Lancelot, we suspect, had a small corner of his heart that was Jacobite, but then he was merely a gardener. At this time, ‘Whigs seemed to hold no common ground.16 Every issue engendered new disagreements. Every Whig seemed to be a party in his own right, and what was worse, to glory in the fact.’ William Pitt was certainly a party in his own right, and Lancelot was of his party; both were in sympathy with the ‘Patriot’ or ‘Country Interest’. Lancelot was deeply patriotic with a small ‘p’: it was the inevitability of his profession and his daily communion with the soils and the very fabric of England. Like Pitt too, he could sometimes seem ‘frankly Tory’, being wary of the Hanoverian George II with his divided loyalties. Lancelot’s clients reflected this ambivalence.
In the summer of 1755 the coffee-house gossips talked of nothing but Pitt and Henry Fox wrestling, at least verbally, each wanting to succeed the long-serving Duke of Newcastle as First Secretary (Prime Minister). George II did not like Pitt, but the people would have him; the King wanted Fox, but Pitt would not have him. The protagonists met in secret, seeking a compromise, but by early May they had fallen out entirely and it was said there would be no further communication between them. The Commons gave up the struggle and repaired to recess and gardening. An earthquake trembled over most of southern England on 1st August, causing considerable alarm. (It was later realised to be the advance tremor of the disastrous Lisbon quake of 1st November.)
Having heard of the warring, Lancelot was surprised by the arrival of a scrawled note from Kensington, dated 20th August, a scrawl redolent of the sweaty hands of a passionate and impulsive man: ‘I am hard at work and digging gravel and have made a bargain for 500 loads of ballast which will move about 200 loads of earth – if you can come and put in a few stakes it would be a great guidance.’ It was signed ‘H. Fox’. Fox, variously ‘an ambitious vain toad’18 or of a ‘cunning, black, devilish countenance’, lived in Holland Park with his wife Caroline Lennox, the eldest daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Richmond, with whom he had made a runaway – or at least a gallop across Mayfair – marriage. They were settled in a huge, decaying Jacobean mansion in the midst of the farms, cottages and gravel pits of Kensington, hence his ‘bargain’ in selling the gravel. Holland House occupied the whole rectangular block between Kensington and Notting Hill, with an ancient right of way, Holland Walk, cutting through on the east boundary. Did Lancelot go off to Kensington to give his ‘great guidance’? Joshua Rhodes’s survey19 of Kensington of 1766 shows an oval or round pond, rather in the manner of the pond in Kensington Gardens, with radiating avenues of trees springing from this; was this the pond Fox had dug? Did Lancelot peg out the shape and the lines of the avenues? It seems an un-Brownian feature, but then Henry Fox would have had his own way, and his wife’s taste (Lady Caroline had spent long youthful hours helping her mother decorate the Shell Grotto at Goodwood) was for the antique fashion. Rhodes’s survey also shows a boundary belt of trees sheltering a serpentine walk around Holland Park, so perhaps there was a little touch of the
Brown style.
At some time in the late summer of 1756 Lancelot went to Madingley Hall outside Cambridge to discuss the making of gravel walks, lawns and a ha-ha with Sir John Hynde Cotton 4th Baronet, a man of his own age, a Member of Parliament and ‘something in the City’, who was enormously well connected in Cambridge and around. How they met is uncertain, but Sir John was related to the Yorkes (Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’s family) at Wimpole, owned Shortgrove on the Cam near Saffron Walden (one of Lancelot’s parks) and was connected to the Houblons of Great Hallingbury (another of Lancelot’s clients) – a typical cat’s cradle of connections. Lancelot was clearly happy about the work, Madingley Hall being a beautiful red-brick mansion of the time of Henry VIII, sited on rising ground with views over placid countryside, and he promised a contract to define the works and the costs.
