Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  The remaining name on the petition, Lord Stamford’s, is enigmatic; he owned Enville,33 west of Stourbridge, set in a spectacular landscape between the Rivers Stour and Severn, with ravines, rocks and water enough to make a fantastically gothic garden. Lord Stamford was a gardening friend of William Shenstone and the Lytteltons at Hagley, and George Lyttelton would have taken Pitt to Enville. Perhaps they urged Lancelot’s employment, although his association with Enville lacks direct evidence.

  The Duke of Newcastle, who controlled patronage, was no fan of Lancelot’s, and the 1758 petition did not succeed. It was no doubt mired in greater matters, for 1759 was the ‘ever-warm and victorious’34 year – the year of victory at Minden, of General Wolfe’s capture of Quebec, and of the destruction of the French fleet in Quiberon Bay: the annus mirabilis when ‘in every quarter of the globe [Pitt] had young men after his own heart gaily carrying out his projects’. The weather colluded: ‘Can one easily leave the remains of such a year as this?’ wrote Walpole in late October:

  It is still all gold. I have not dined or gone to bed by a fire till the day before yesterday … we have not had more conquest than fine weather: one would think we had plundered East and West Indies of sunshine. Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing of victories. I believe it will require ten votes of the House of Commons before people will believe that it is the Duke of Newcastle that has done this, and not Mr Pitt.

  Restraint at Wrest

  ‘Even the great Mr Pitt himself visited Wrest,’ the Marchioness Grey35 had noted in her diary in 1758, and Lancelot was there the following year. Jemima, Marchioness Grey (her own title), was married to Philip Yorke, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’s heir, and they had first met Lancelot at Stowe, probably in 1748. The Marchioness, portrayed by Allan Ramsay with her perfectly oval head, fair complexion and huge brown eyes, was slight but sturdy in her constitution and level-headed in her outlook; she had two daughters, Amabel and Mary Jemima, and believed in a woman’s right of inheritance. She had inherited Wrest Park in Bedfordshire from her grandfather, the Duke of Kent, a rambling house of medieval origins and the garden that he had made between 1702 (when he inherited) and his death in 1740. The Duke had summoned many familiar names – William Kent, James Gibbs, Giacomo Leoni, Thomas Archer, Batty Langley and Thomas Ackres (who was George London’s executor and heir at the Brompton nursery). His grace had equally rejected most of their proposals: Wrest was famed for its long canal, the Great Water, culminating in Thomas Archer’s domed pavilion, a tea house with bedrooms, and a kitchen and two-seater privy attached. Each side of the canal were blocks of woodland, cut with paths, groves and cabinets de verdure, as illustrated by Switzer and Batty Langley (who is thought to have worked at Wrest). The principle was very similar to Moor Park, where the canal and plantings were (fatally) raised on a terrace, but Wrest was more spacious, laid on level ground and very watery. The garden was completely surrounded by canals and streams, and Jemima, who had grown up there, was used to getting her feet wet.

  Lancelot and the Marchioness were to be friends for a long time; twenty years later she recalled how he was in awe of the ‘mystery’ of Wrest’s old garden. There was no shortage of money or faithful gardeners in this veritably old-school establishment, and the ‘young mistress’ respected her grandfather’s ways. Wrest was the best garden of the old formality that Lancelot had seen. For him, it made sense of all the remnants of the works of London and Wise and Bridgeman that were ‘beached’ in the countryside, like so many crumbling hulks. Wrest resonated with the power of the Duke’s controlling mind; it was a precise echo from a former age. On this and following visits, the Marchioness repeatedly asked for his suggestions as to improvements, and Lancelot steadfastly refused to make changes. He did agree to help the drainage by loosening the fringe canals into naturally flowing streams, as the Marchioness noted: ‘the canals36 already joined are the circular canal, John Dewell’s (named after the gardener that made it) and the mill pond; the stream which they make is to be lost, that in the end will be turned into and concealed by some plantation’.

  Wrest Park made a deep impression upon Lancelot, fuelling growing pride in his profession. It further opened his eyes to the ways of water, fitting him all the more to understand Charlecote, Burghley and Chatsworth.

  fn1 In 1804 Arthur Young noted the fine and stately beeches, ‘but the soil agrees with all sorts of trees; the cedars are immense; the oaks very large; the ash straight and beautiful; the larch, spruce and Scots fir equally fine, but the beech uncommon’. The Sebrights remained at Beechwood until well after the Second World War, but little is known of the history of the landscape, now mostly farmland, or of the fate of Lancelot’s proposals.

  7

  ‘THE ONE GREAT ARGUMENT1 OF THE LANDSCAPE GARDENER’

  ‘And now for the Water,2 the Element that I trade in. The water is the eldest daughter of the Creation, the Element upon which the Spirit of God did first move, the Element which God commanded to bring forth living creatures abundantly; and without which those that inhabit the Land, even all creatures that have breath in their nostrils must suddenly return to putrefaction.

  Piscator in Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton, The Compleat Angler, 1653

  IT WOULD BE mistaken to presume that Lancelot, either in the cause of jingoism or noble equilibrium, thought of himself as selling privacy to his patrons. Few were likely to suffer from an excess of celebrity (except for the tall and outstanding Mr Pitt in the years after 1759), and country living in the eighteenth century was a sociable form of existence. Running a farm or estate was outdoor business, with sport and conversation:

  Gravely inquiring3 how ewes are a score,

  How the hay harvest and the corn was got,

  And if or no there’s like to be a rot.

  Some seclusion – privacy on the large scale – may have been desirable, but mostly the need was for shelter: shelter from the elements that raged across the land threatening men and women, beasts and crops. To Lancelot, his boundary belts and plantations were providing such shelter in the short term, even if their returns from the sale of timber were very much in the long term, a legacy to unborn generations. He was, as he well knew, harnessing the age-old skills of farmland and estate management, but with characteristic verve, and he was perhaps slowly realising that in the process he was transforming ordinary land into landscape.

  The word ‘landscape’ was then only just emerging from the Dutch landskip. (It has caused us trouble ever since; Nan Fairbrother coined the equation ‘Landscape = habitat4 plus man’ to explain it.) ‘Landscape’ is not a word that Lancelot uses, though he is soon assailed by poets and painters who do: interestingly, it is pride in the effects produced by his work that inspired patrons to commission paintings of the English landscape, as opposed to the Italian. Richard Wilson painted Lancelot’s Croome in 1758, and three large studies of his Moor Park a few years afterwards, as well as Chatsworth. (Joseph Farington, Wilson’s5 pupil, depicted ‘Richard Wilson painting from nature in Moor Park – 1765’.)

  As with shelter planting and painting, so it was with water; Lancelot’s work was in tune with the spirits of his age. Dr Johnson had encouraged the reprints of Izaak Walton’s and Charles Cotton’s Angler (as it was simply known) in 1750 and 1759. It was, along with the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, The Pilgrim’s Progress and perhaps, in the Brown household, Sir Francis Bacon’s Of Gardens, standard bookshelf fare. The Angler is not just a book about fishing, but ‘a transcript of old English country life, a study of the folk-heart’,6 wrote John Buchan. Because of its subtitle, ‘The Contemplative Man’s Recreation’, it finds ‘a place in the pastoral tradition’,7 and it has strong connections with Derbyshire, for Charles Cotton was a Derbyshire man. It is also a book about water – water in ponds, pools, rivers and lakes – and, as such, it has a startling relevance to Lancelot’s works. All of these themes coalesce at this time, with his grandest of flourishes, at Chatsworth.

  The mild-mannered 4th Duke of Devo
nshire inherited Chatsworth at the end of 1755, when he was thirty-five; a reserved, ‘amiable and straightforward man’, he held the line between Pitt and Fox, and when neither would serve with each other, out of a sense of duty he formed the Pitt–Devonshire ministry of 1756–7, though ‘the effort it cost him ruined his health8 and destroyed his peace of mind’. His wife, Lord Burlington’s daughter Charlotte Boyle, had died in 1754, leaving him with a six-year-old heir, and her inheritance of Chiswick House, Burlington House in Piccadilly and Londesborough in Yorkshire, and with money to spend on Chatsworth. Money, but little time, for he was to die in 1764, aged forty-four. In his brief interim he summoned Lancelot and much was accomplished.

  For Lancelot and his trusty steed, Chatsworth in the Derbyshire Peak District was miles from anywhere he knew, a long ride across the middle of England if he carried on from Burghley to Newark, then Mansfield and Chesterfield. Daniel Defoe had come from the east some thirty years earlier, and had been shocked as to how quickly the leafy valley roads gave way to ‘a vast extended moor or waste, which for fifteen or sixteen miles together presents you with neither hedge, house or tree, but a waste and howling wilderness, over which when strangers travel they are obliged to take guides, or it would be next to impossible not to lose their way’. And what could be more wondrous, Defoe continued, when from that ‘comfortless barren’ the traveller looks down into ‘the most pleasant garden, and the most beautiful palace9 in the world’.

  The Chatsworth house that Lancelot found was in the process of being ‘turned around’; not quite in the manner of a miniature palace on a musical box, for the house does not move, though almost everything else does. The Elizabethan house, built by Bess of Hardwick and her husband William Cavendish in the 1550s, faced east towards the old park hunting ground on the steep ridge that shelters the Chatsworth vale. The Cavendishes’ hunting tower, known as the Stand Tower, gave its name to the Stand Wood, the ‘wall of trees’ that covered the ridge: Defoe thought the ‘very high mountain’10 wisely and beautifully planted, for mill-stones were dug at the top and the usual way of transporting them was to roll them down in pairs on a wooden axle, which would ‘infallibly give a shock to the building’. The 1st Duke favoured the south front, which he had William Talman rebuild, facing out onto elaborate formal parterres planted by London and Wise. He ‘found building so delightful11 that he could not stop’ and so Talman rebuilt the east front, and then Thomas Archer was brought along to rebuild the west and north fronts. All was finished shortly before the 1st Duke’s death in 1707, the year of Johannes Kip’s engraving for Britannia Illustrata, which shows a deceptively flat array of segments and squares of clipped evergreens, very dull compositions, extending to the foot of the east ridge. Observers of the Illustrata in their town libraries would think that the Devonshires had tamed and flattened their whole valley, but Chatsworth in the flesh, so to speak, is sensuously undulating, which Lancelot would have discovered, much to his relief. Kip and Leonard Knyff are generally thought reliable amongst topographical artists, but Chatsworth’s undulations disconcerted them: Grillet’s Great Stepped Cascade, which was constructed in 1696 and is there still (albeit enlarged), is hardly visible as a puny runnel, having neither the force nor the fall to empower the Sea Horse Fountain, as was intended. Needless to say, other observers of the Illustrata have raised their hands in horror – did the ‘destroyer’ Brown really sweep all of that away?

  Chatsworth, Derbyshire, from Britannia Illustrata 1707, the house from the south, with the River Derwent and the numerous catchwater canals and pools, many removed after Lancelot had improved the drainage. He retained the formal gardens on the south front (they are there still) and also many of the evergreens, grown out after fifty years, on the east. These eastern slopes of Stand Hill were shown as much flatter than they are, giving greater status to what are merely regular plantings of clipped young evergreens: the insignificance of the stepped Cascade, hardly discernible (middle right) suggests the inaccuracy.

  The answer is ‘Not guilty’. Fortunately a painting by Thomas Smith of Derby of 1743, a good dozen years before Lancelot’s arrival, has come to light showing the 3rd Duke’s gardening under the influence of William Kent. The lawns to the east are cleared, except for one flower bed, and the once-clipped and regimented yews and hollies are growing freely on the hillside, flanking the Cascade, much as they still do.

  The 4th Duke now favoured the west front, where Archer’s window frames were gilded to catch the setting sun. Kip had shown this as the entrance front, but with the coaches coming in from the south to a court with a gravel turning-sweep, and a double stone staircase for visitors to climb to the house level. The Duke knew exactly what he wanted with his new approach from the west: by a writ of the Court of Chancery of 1759 he was allowed to close a number of roads and build a new public road and a new bridge, James Paine’s One Arch Bridge, at the south end of the park. This enabled his new entrance drive, contoured by Lancelot, to approach from the west, slowly dipping down to cross the Derwent, giving visitors a long view of the glittering west front, backed by the rising wall of trees of Stand Wood. This second new, private bridge was also designed by James Paine, who worked at Chatsworth for ten years and built the new stables, set away from the house to the north-east. Lancelot and Paine between them created the landscape setting for Chatsworth as painted by Richard Wilson: though perhaps Wilson was a little ungenerous to both, painting Paine’s bridge indistinctly (it might not have been finished), and reducing the formal terraced gardens of the south and west fronts, so carefully conserved by Lancelot, to hardly more than a painted line.

  The works were quickly in hand; in August 1761 Walpole reported that the Duke was ‘making vast plantations12 … and levelling a great deal of ground to show the river under the direction of Brown’. For the plantations of 1760–1 the accounts show 71,500 thorns, 15,000 rowan, birch and spruce and 10,000 oaks. The ‘vast plantations’ that Walpole saw were New Piece Wood and Calton Lees, a ‘master-stroke’ that closed the bowl of the Chatsworth demesne on the west. Thus, ‘crowning the long hill13 with trees to define the distant rim of the park’, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire wrote in 1990:

  gives the comfortable feeling of an enclosed space and, because you cannot see through it, seems to be far more heavily treed than it is. Brown planted the wood in wedge-shaped compartments, so when one section is mature and ready to be felled another is growing on and the line remains unbroken. All was planned to delight the eye from the house, making the best use of the contours in the wide expanse across the river.

  Having set the planting in motion, Lancelot, his instincts now primed from experience, explored the water systems. All that Walpole called ‘foolish waterworks’14 – the pools and basins of the formal gardens, and the apparently huge formal canal shown by Kip (1707) and by Thomas Smith (1743) on the west of the house, almost parallel to the river – were holding tanks for the copious storm-waters that poured off of the eastern ridge and, unless stayed in their rushing, would bring the Derwent into flood. Walpole had noticed how ‘the river runs before the door, and serpentises more than you can conceive’. At Chatsworth they have a certain sangfroid about the vast labours involved – ‘After the operation it serpentised not at all,15 and the danger of floods was over,’ wrote the Duchess; ‘the course of the river was straightened, so that the ugly ponds16 could be dispensed with,’ adds Charles H. Wood’s guide.

  ‘I am ever thankful,’17 wrote the Duchess, ‘that Brown did not play his usual trick of damming the river to make a soggy lake in full view of the house.’ Instead he conducted a serious exercise in drainage, secretly controlling the water and playing his part in an eternal campaign to keep the water moving, so that it does not have time to seep or sour. Drains – ‘a regular topic of conversation’ at Chatsworth – run for untold miles across the park and gardens, the very ancient stone soughs and modern clay-pipe drains, with Lancelot’s somewhere in between. He does not appear to have built brick culverts and channel
s as at Croome (where bricks were plentiful and cheap), but used stone, or terracotta ‘horseshoes’ about a foot long, laid on flat tiles or puddled clay. His drainage lines joined older ones, and nineteenth-and twentieth-century campaigns have added more still. The word is watchfulness, now as then: ‘in the spring of 1989,’ writes the Duchess, ‘a patch of rushes18 near the bottom of the cascade’ indicated a blockage; ‘when they opened the place they found a drain filled with a dense mass of roots 36 feet long from a nearby yew tree. Fine and shining like a mermaid’s hair, they stopped the flow of water as efficiently as a plug in a bath.’

  Lancelot can only have visited Chatsworth once or twice a year at the most, when he would have discussed and pegged out the markers for the drives and plantations, making adjustments on his return visit. There is no record of his fee at Chatsworth, so it is assumed that the Duke paid him out of his own pocket. His role was as consultant, a private arrangement between themselves (rather as with Lord Exeter at Burghley), but the accounts do reveal some of the amounts paid to Lancelot’s appointed foreman on the job, Michael Milliken (Melican), a Scottish gardener who was at Chatsworth from 1760 until 1765. Milliken had to tactfully lead his workforce to do his master’s bidding without crossing swords with the estate managers: Chatsworth was the single, corporate employer, with its estate village at Edensor, but also drawing craftsmen and labourers from the surrounding villages (Curbar, Baslow and Beeley) as well as from Bakewell. Lancelot knew that his foremen in general (but especially Milliken) had to have likeable qualities so as to earn the cooperation of the men and women whose families had served Chatsworth for generations, and who had a fierce pride in belonging: this is why Lancelot was the Duke’s man, something of a visiting celebrity, his bearing and the biblical authority of his dictates coming from on high, word being disseminated that Mr Brown was to be obeyed.