by Jane Brown
By early October, Sir John was clearly thinking that he would soon have to leave Madingley for Parliament’s return, and no start had been made on his walks and lawns, so he called at the house in Hammersmith Mall, only to be disappointed, for Lancelot was not at home. He was not far away and was full of apologies, expressed in a letter of 6th October, when he promised to be at Madingley well before Parliament reassembled in mid-November. Being Lancelot, he set out a little late, but was taken ill ‘on the Road’,20 and so returned home. Immediately Lance, aged eight, went down with scarlet fever, and Lancelot expected ‘the other to fall every day’ – poor Jack, just five – ‘which renders it next to impossible for me to leave them till it is got over,’ he told Sir John. Scarlatina was treated then with good nursing, a regime of bathing and throat poultices, a mild diet and cooling drinks, a time-consuming and exhausting task with two small boys. Lancelot was always known to be a good father, but here is a rare glimpse of him putting the family first.
The contract is dated 16th November 1756, and Lancelot eventually arrived at Madingley a week or so later. The works were not great; the contract has interesting details on the construction of a good, old-fashioned domed gravel walk – 7½ or 8 feet wide, ‘laying a sufficient quantity of rubbish [i.e. rubble] under the gravel to keep it dry’ – and reveals an extensive notion of ‘lawns’, all to be given ‘a natural easy level’ and turfed or sown, the quality of finish extended to all the grass in the near park. The contract is a model of economy of labour and materials, carefully guiding the work around the house, using excavated soil from the ‘fosse’ as necessary in the garden; and, it transpires, not digging the complete ha-ha, but ‘only to remove as much earth as wanted in the garden & to make a Pattern of it to be done after & when Sir John pleases’. The agreed charge was £500, payable in three stages in 1757; only two payments (£200 in 1757, £100 in 1760) are credited in Lancelot’s Drummonds bank account. It appears that he had to chase his money, but once again he was paid in other ways. A shaky hand, presumably Sir John’s, has marked the contract:21 ‘never executed nor any other but done upon honor on both sides & never repented by either’.
It was also in 1756, or possibly early 1757, that Lancelot first visited Stratfield Saye in the Loddon valley south of Reading, where he was to work for William Pitt’s cousins, George and Penelope Pitt, for the next seven years. Stratfield Saye, more usually associated with the Dukes of Wellington (it was given to the Great Duke in 1817, two years after his victory at Waterloo), has never been thought of as a Brown park until Drummonds bank archives revealed that the Pitts paid him no less than £3,900. Gerald, 7th Duke of Wellington and an architect himself, clearly had no idea, for he wrote disparagingly of Lancelot’s ‘systematic’22 approach in general, and that ‘he did not perceive that though it was natural for a stream to meander it was not natural for a sober man not to take the shortest, that is to say the straightest, line between any two given points’. He credited George Pitt (later Lord Rivers) with ‘the prophetic eye of taste’ and the reform of Stratfield’s antiquated surroundings: ‘he levelled the dreary garden walls and filled up the fish-ponds and by felling the avenues that frowned round the house he opened it to the cheering light of the sun’. The park was enlarged and planted ‘with the truest taste which Mason or Walpole would have contemplated with delight’. As he wrote, the Duke was looking ‘over the river to distant lawns well broken by large single trees which gradually accede into open groves and thence by a gentle transition into a depth of thick wood forming a varied and picturesque horizon, the wood in some places coming forward to the eye, in others retiring in large irregular masses’. All, presumably, Lancelot’s works.
The Percy Connection
The invisible cord of Pitt’s influence was strengthening, but Lancelot had his own good luck, a timeliness accruing in his career. He was lucky in the changing dynasties, the families where a younger heir invariably had ideas differing from those of his forebears. In these 1750s the young heirs had nearly all been on the Grand Tour, and they had all discovered taste. They had returned home to an almost general inheritance of played-out formal gardens, crumbling basins and canals, outgrown parterres and barren orchards, all seventy-plus years old and suffering from the dipping tides of fortune. The idea of reverting to the old-fashioned did not occur to them (the regressive and unnatural concept of ‘restoration’ had not yet been born). The instinct of the young was to make their own mark on the future.
Lancelot’s good luck was nowhere more evident than in the case of the Percy inheritance. Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset (called ‘Proud’ even amongst dukes), and his duchess Elizabeth Percy (the ‘Duchess’, long remembered at Petworth for taking her coffee at her favourite seat beyond the laurels) were the joint heirs to all the Percy and Seymour estates. The Duchess died first, with everything reverting to her husband, and when the Duke died in 1748, their heir was their only son, Algernon, Earl of Hertford. Lord Hertford had earned his father’s disfavour by allowing his only surviving child, the Duke’s granddaughter, to marry ‘beneath her’, and so the Duke left his Seymour estates to his sister Catherine’s son, Charles Wyndham of Orchard Wyndham in Somerset, who inherited Petworth and was made Earl of Egremont. The Duke could not stop Lord Hertford succeeding as 7th Duke of Somerset, or deprive him of his mother’s Percy estates, which included Syon House, the Alnwick Castle estate and Northumberland House at Charing Cross. The 7th Duke, Algernon, was a tall, sandy-haired, asthmatic and serious man, already over sixty, and married devotedly for many years to Frances Thynne, the poet James Thomson’s ‘gentle Hertford’.23 They were both imaginative and practical gardeners, preferring their quiet life at home, Percy Lodge (more famous as Richings) at Iver in Buckinghamshire to any society. Sadly, all was brought to naught as the Duke died after only two years, in 1750, and Duchess Frances retired to Percy Lodge, which was hers for the rest of her life. Their daughter, Lady Elizabeth, and her husband Sir Hugh Smithson – to whom the Duke had already made over Syon House – now inherited Alnwick Castle and Northumberland House as well, becoming the Earl and Countess of Northumberland (to be created 1st Duke and Duchess in 1766).
So, having fared well at Petworth, it was quite natural that Lancelot should be called to Syon. This pleased him in many ways, especially as it was not much more than an hour’s ride from home. Syon was not a large park, small in comparison with royal Richmond and Kew on the opposite bank of the Thames; it was formerly an abbey, and was confined by Brentford and the Bath road on the north, and by Syon lane, leading to the ferry, on the west. The rambling course of the River Brent formed the eastern boundary, and here planting was required to screen the growing development of wharves where it joined the Thames. Syon House, painted by Canaletto as Lancelot saw it, was distinctive, uncompromisingly foursquare, castellated with corner towers; it gave the appearance of having been plonked on the land, probably high enough and far enough away from the river to be dry, but making no recognition of the presence of the Thames. The 6th Duke of Somerset had planted a double lime avenue on the north-west approach side, and the walled gardens extended on the north-east.
On the west side (the present entrance drive), comparison between a plan of 1747 and John Roque’s Middlesex of 1754 shows that enclosures and terraces had recently been replaced by ‘a landscape of lawns24 and open meadows … and a sinuous walk in a south-westerly direction from the house to Isleworth Church’, known as ‘the church walk wilderness’. The walk described by R. and J. Dodsley, ‘in some places runs along the side, and in others through the middle of a beautiful shrubbery, so that even in the most retired parts of this charming maze, where the prospect is most confined, almost the whole vegetable world rises up as it were in miniature around you …’
Compare this image with Frances Hertford’s description of 1747, of the walk they had made at Percy Lodge. Lord Hertford had made a long, narrow walk:
into the resemblance of a wild lane25 in the country, and made it wider or narrow
er just as he had in mind to take in a great tree or fill up a vacancy with flowering shrubs. On the one hand there is for about forty or fifty yards an open grove, through which you can see a corn field, with a turfed walk of about six foot wide around it, and bordered all round under the wood with roses, honeysuckles, Spanish broom, lilacs, syringas, etc.; and underneath these bushes cowslips, primroses, violets, foxgloves, with every flower that grows wild in the fields … but there is nothing on the side next the corn to separate it from it.
Syon House, Middlesex, from Roque’s plan of Richmond, c.1765, showing the Church Walk Wilderness, the first of Lancelot’s serpentine ‘ambits’ with ‘edge of the cornfield’ atmosphere, inspired by Lady Northumberland’s mother, the Countess of Hertford.
The Hertfords were delighted with this walk, the latest of many naturalistic and pretty ideas for their garden; they were very close to their daughter Elizabeth (Betty) and their son-in-law, and it seems that when they gave them Syon in 1748, they also gave them the idea for the Church Walk Wilderness, with all its seclusion and charm. The Syon version, making use of trees and shrubs supplied by Lancelot’s friend and colleague John Williamson from Kensington, included evergreen honeysuckles, Alexandrian laurels (Danae racemosa), lilacs, laburnums, shrub roses, syringas, viburnums and cherries; poplars, maples, planes, aromatic pines and six cedars of Lebanon were probably used as the background planting, for the Church Walk Wilderness was walled from the north and only offered views out through open groves on the river side.
Frances Hertford lived until the summer of 1754, and though she was frail and reclusive at Percy Lodge, she was ever the keen and passionate gardener and would have made a considerable effort to visit Syon to advise her daughter (who was not such a great gardener). It is therefore just possible that Lancelot met her, and saw through her eyes the art of alternately (but not regularly) concealing and revealing the views from a meandering path through trees and flowering shrubs. Syon’s Church Walk Wilderness, securely walled and treed ‘at one’s back’ (the boundary concealed), became the pattern for many of Lancelot’s meandering perimeter walks, with views into the park and the greatest sense of space – freedom alternated with the seclusion. If the ‘park’ is a cornfield, as it was at Richings, or even a hay meadow as at Syon, then gardening shifts subtly to art, the ‘edge-of-cornfield’ effects employed by Stubbs and Gainsborough.
Richings, Iver, Buckinghamshire, Lord Bathurst’s garden acquired by the Earl and Countess of Hertford and re-named Percy Lodge, where they made their serpentine flowery walk which overlooked the cornfields.
Key:
A, House;
B, Parterre;
C, Menagerie;
D, Terraces;
E, Labyrinth;
F, Gardener’s house;
G, Melonry;
H, Stables;
K, Kitchen gardens;
L, (many) lawns and groves
Canal;
Cross paths;
Wildernesses;
Rond-points;
Fountains;
Lawn borders;
Footpath, or edge of the cornfield walk.
At Syon (where he was first paid in February 1754) Lancelot elaborated the original Church Walk, and continued the effect on the east side of the house and around the eastern perimeter, the serpentine walk leading to the boathouse where the river barge was kept. In due time his beloved Thames was properly served; grading of the river bank is indicated on Roque’s plan:
a fine lawn26 extending from Isleworth to Brentford. By these means also a beautiful prospect is opened into the King’s gardens at Richmond, as well as up and down the Thames. Toward the Thames the lawn is bounded by a ha-ha and a meadow; which his lordship ordered to be cut down into a gentle slope, so that the surface of the water may now be seen … the most beautiful piece of scenery imaginable is formed before two of the principal fronts [of the house] for even the Thames itself seems to belong to the gardens, and the different sorts of vessels which successively sail as it were through them, appear to be the property of their noble proprietor.
Syon, surprisingly, also acquired a lake. Or at least a linear river – the water (and fish) brought from the Thames and controlled by a sluice. The water appears to be taken upstream at Isleworth, through Syon Park by a long water crossed by the entrance drive and partly underground, before it is let out into the Thames by Brentford. A surviving sketch of the view from Syon House’s entrance door, looking north to where the (then) drive crossed the water, indicates that Lancelot and Robert Adam discussed the position of the bridge. Today, the Syon reach is the only unembanked stretch of the Thames in Greater London, and so the lower slopes of the park are left as rough meadow and allowed to flood.
The Comet’s Tail
Lancelot was forty in the summer of 1756; it was a summer of invasion scares, with the countryside running with rumours and alarms that enlivened his rides – his ‘circuits’, as he now called them – out into Essex, to Cambridge and Burghley, down to Sussex or out westwards to Croome. As the summer drifted into autumn, so Britain found herself at war, the backdrop of his work and conversations for the coming years. The ‘Seven Years War’, as it came to be called, was a transforming experience for England, and for the English. In 1756 there were overseas territories, chiefly the thirteen American colonies, ‘Protestant and Anglophone’;27 after the 1763 Treaty of Paris the empire embraced Catholic Quebec and mystical (as well as mysterious) territories in West Africa, India, South-East Asia, the West Indies and the southern seas. Insecurity has often been suggested as a reason for the popularity of the English landscape style, and the need to acquire, fence and beautify a patch of England in case the great world became too unbearable.
The war began in governmental chaos – in fact, little government at all – hence the brief Pitt–Devonshire ministry (1756–7). (Lancelot would soon be working for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth.) In the spring of 1757 publicly expressed anger forced vacillating ministers to action, and Admiral Byng was court-martialled for the loss of Minorca, and shot, despite Pitt’s plea for mercy. Pitt was dismissed by George II, then called back again, becoming Secretary of State in uneasy alliance with the Duke of Newcastle. He was not so much a one-man party as a one-man war cabinet; the Duke and the Treasury ruled from Downing Street, while Pitt took over the running of the war from his house in the north-east corner of St James’s Square (no. 12, now Chatham House) or from Hayes Place. He was apparently personally in contact with the commanders in the field in Europe and North America, with the admirals at sea and with that ‘heaven-born general’28 Robert Clive, after his victory at Plassey in June 1757. And yet, in the midst of all this, Pitt found time to sanction a petition for Lancelot to have a royal appointment and pension.
Only Pitt could have quickly summoned the fourteen prestigious signatories to this petition, all of them his own friends and colleagues, and visitors to the house in St James’s Square. There seem to have been two petitions, one of 1757 (lost in the crush of papers on Pitt’s desk or between London and Hayes?) and another of March 1758. The petition was artfully drafted, asserting that:
well-wishers29 of Mr Browne [sic], whose Abilities and Merit we are fully acquainted with, do most earnestly request the Duke of Newcastle to promote his speedy appointment to the care of Kensington Garden agreeable to his Grace’s very obliging promises in that respect, the delay having already occasion’d great loss to Mr Browne in his Business and great inconvenience to many Persons for whom he is Employ’d.
Many of the amiable signatories are familiar: Admiral Lord Anson of Moor Park and First Lord of the Admiralty; Pitt’s brothers-in-law, Richard, Earl Temple of Stowe, and George Grenville of Wotton Underwood; Pitt’s friend Lord Ashburnham (for whom Lancelot was soon working); Charles Egremont from Petworth; Lord Coventry from Croome; Lord Exeter from Burghley; Lord Brooke from Warwick; and the Earl of Northumberland from Syon.
The remaining five are less predictable: the Duke of Ancaster, Vis
count Midleton and three earls, Hertford, Holderness and Stamford. Lancelot had of course missed out to the Grundys at the Duke of Ancaster’s Grimsthorpe Castle (did the Duke regret this?), but he was working at Ancaster House in Richmond at this time. George, 3rd Viscount Midleton, then MP for Ashburton in Devon and a Pitt colleague, was employing Lancelot at Peper Harow in Surrey (it is thought that plantings of cedars, oaks and beeches here are by him, but that Lancelot’s widening of the River Wey and an island made in the process were lost; Lancelot was paid £450 in 1757–8). The new Lord Hertford at Ragley30 was a Seymour heir, and Lancelot passed close to Ragley on his way to Croome:Walpole reported on 20th August 1758 ‘Brown has improved both the grounds and the water though not quite to perfection’, though nothing has been found at Ragley to substantiate this.
Robert D’Arcy (Darcy), 4th Earl of Holderness, is a unifying figure. Of steady character, Secretary of State, Pitt’s ally and his sometime opposite number in the Northern Department, he was also a patron and friend of David Garrick, and the owner of Hornby Castle in Yorkshire and known to Lancelot’s brother, John Brown, in his work as agent for the Duke of Portland. D’Arcy also owned Sion Hill House, a small park on the opposite side of the Brentford road from Syon House and beside the lane to Osterley Park. Lady Holderness was born Mary Doublet of Groeneweldt, and she had brought her Dutch gardener with her and ‘kept a prodigious amount of kitchen gardening [in the] Dutch style’.31 Lord Holderness’s expertise in the use of ‘clean dressed hay seeds, white clover and trefoile’, and as a grower of prize Newbury cabbages, was later praised by the travelling agronomist Arthur Young. Lancelot went to Sion Hill to make their pretty park, which was essentially two paddocks joined by a wilderness of woody shrubs and small trees, the whole surrounded by a wide perimeter belt of planting, trees and shrubs in clumps, sheltering a meandering walk. Lady Northumberland was a frequent visitor, and noted ‘the walk round the field taken off with a rope & a border32 of flowers on ye country side’, with prospects of the hayfield ‘entirely rural and pleasing’. Frances Hertford’s Church Walk Wilderness had clearly migrated across the road, courtesy of Lady Northumberland and Lancelot (who was paid £1,525 for work from September 1756 to April 1762).
