Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  Some of the estate accounts have survived, and vivid pictures arise: of Mrs Travis19 and her team of women leading pony carts full of stone for the mill and new weir, being paid £52 for two years of patiently plodding; John Woodson and ‘partners’ were, under Milliken’s instructions, ‘draining, stubbing out old hedges and levelling the New Parke area west of the house’, and were paid £25 for the year to Christmas Eve 1760. The clearing and levelling continued: John Hayworth was paid £5. 10s. ‘for twenty quarter Hayseeds delivered at Chatsworth in May 1762 to sow the New laid down grounds’. Finally, in 1764, William Vickers and his team of oxen appeared, ‘to roll on ye Parke’ – another patiently plodding task, for which he was paid £6. 15s., a substantial sum. Ongoing maintenance was assured with the arrival – first recorded in 1762 – of a flock of Jacob sheep. (Swaledales, Mashams and Jacobs still being the mainstay of farming here).

  These long-ago labours are the foundation of Chatsworth’s luminous greenness, the way the light is reflected from the uniformly green ground in this almost perfectly oriented north–south valley. For Lancelot, the green ground was simply that: the essential base for his trees, which added the textures and ever-changing colours. The thousands of thorns, rowans and birches in the enclosing plantations would have been planted as whips; well-grown trees – beech, plane, birch and oak – would have been picked out, personally marked by Lancelot, and moved to more prominent stations in the park. To these he added the signature cedars, their planting places staked out; they most likely came from Sheffield or London and still grace the valley. Scots pine, beloved for their burnt-sienna cones in May, spruce and other ‘firrs’ also had to be sourced; ‘His Grace’s waggon’20 was sent to ‘Ashburn’ (Ashbourne) to collect ‘firrs’ for the plantations below Beeley Moor. For acorns they had to go farther; a man was paid 10s. 6d. for a journey to Yorkshire for ‘Acrons’, but Dutch oaks were most highly prized – ‘To the Revd Mr Barker21 for 8 Quart[ers] of Holland oaks £10; To 17 Q[uarters] Oates [sic] bought a[t] [King’s] Lynn … £25’.

  Michael Milliken’s personality must have suited well, for in 1764 he married Mary ‘Polly’ Lees at Edensor; she came from an estate family, her aunt or perhaps her grandmother being the Widow Lees who figures as part of Mrs Travis’s team of redoubtable stone-carters. More is revealed when, after the Duke’s early death when work came to a standstill, Lancelot wrote to Milliken on 2nd January 1765.22

  I intend employing you in his Majesty’s work at Richmond. I have spoken to the Lords of my intention and they approve as it will be doing you a service: I would therefore have you aprize Mr Barker of my intention with my compliments to him and I would have you give every information you can to Mr Travis and [tell] him about the finishing of the work that is to be done this season viz the finishing near the porters Lodge and Stables etc … I presume there can be but little carting done this winter time, but in everything consider the good of the work and the most prudent way of putting it in execution. Bring with you an exact acct. of the money you have recd. of Mr Barker from the beginning to the time you leave the work. I again repeat, do all the good you can whilst you remain at Chatsworth, because for the sake of the great good man that is you and on all other accts. I wish it as well my own self. My best compliments to the Family. If you are up in a fortnight from this time it will do very well, but if it will be of any use to the work stay longer. Let me hear from you and believe me your Friend.

  In the middle of the Chatsworth works, in August of 1762, Thomas Gray23 visited his friend the Rev. William Mason in York, and then rambled on to Derbyshire. The weather was ‘perverse’, but the sun’s rays occasionally managed to pierce the lowering skies. He found the Peak District ‘beyond comparison uglier than any other I have seen in England, black, tedious, barren, and not mountainous enough to please one with its horrors’ – and yet, Chatsworth:

  has the air of a Palace, the hills rising on three of its sides to shut out the view of its dreary neighbourhood, & are cover’d with wood to their tops; the front opens to the Derwent winding thro’ the valley, which by the art of Mr Brown is now always visible & full to its brim, for heretofore it could not well be seen [but in the rainy season] from the windows; a handsome bridge is lately thrown over it, & the stables taken away, which stood full in view between the house & the river, the prospect opens here to a wider track of country terminated by more distant hills; this scene is yet in its infancy, the objects are thinly scatter’d, & the clumps and plantations lately made: but it promises well in time.fn1

  There is a small footnote, in that Lancelot worked at another Cavendish house, at Latimer in Buckinghamshire, in the romantic and steep-sided valley of the River Chess, shrouded in Chiltern beech woods. The Latimer Court that Lancelot found was Jacobean, ‘a fayre house,24 builded with brick’ set in a ‘little paradise’ of orchards and gardens, with a dovecote, barns, stables, a coney warren and a church at the Court Gate – and a river running through the grounds. He widened the river (perhaps converting fishponds) into the Great Water, and Lower Water, with a series of cascades that still survive. He also did some planting, in the Chatsworth manner on the ridge behind the house and to screen the public road, and he apparently ‘procured’ the view25 to the west of Chenies church ‘to Latimer’, as there was a close connection through the Burroughs – William, rector of Latimer and Chenies, and his son Benjamin, rector of Latimer. In the cross-threading of history, Biddy Brown’s kinsman, the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, saw Latimer as a boy while staying with his uncle, rector in 1826 when the house was still owned by the Cavendish family; he found a ‘little paradise’:26

  the village, which was in two parts – one on the hill and the other below – was very picturesque with old timbered houses, and a glorious old elm tree of towering height on the village green. The hills, valley, river, trees, flowers, fruits, fossils etc all seem to be encircled in a kind of imaginary halo. I fancy I never saw such wild flowers, or ate such cherries or such trout as there.

  Lancelot must have enjoyed this Latimer, and the young Scott is witness that he did not remove the village on the hill beside the Court, although it was later moved.fn2

  Return to Charlecote

  On his ride scouting for work in the summer of 1750 Lancelot had come away from Charlecote, near Stratford on Avon, with great hopes, but progress had been slow because of George Lucy’s frequent absences. That there was progress at all was undoubtedly due to Lucy’s sprightly friend, the Dowager Countess of Coventry, and his housekeeper, Mrs Hayes, who both championed Lancelot’s cause. To give him his due, George Lucy had gone to great trouble, including being taken to Chancery by Parson Venour of Wellesbourne, to move the road to Warwick away from his gatehouse. He had commissioned David Hiorn from Warwick to build the new (present) road bridge over the River Dene, and Hiorn demonstrates his sympathy with Lancelot’s way of thinking: the bridge is to be ‘a little decorated’27 on the side towards the park, ‘the Balisters are only ½ round, and the wall at the back of them solid to the roadside, we have kept it as low as I believe in a flood it will admit of. If the Lake is opened and the banks sloaped as the line shows, I think it will have an agreeable Effect from the park side.’ The bridge had been completed in the autumn of 1757 and Mrs Hayes noted in her Memorandum Book that ‘Mr Brown began to make alterations upon Wellsborn Brook’,28 meaning that the brook – or the Dene, as it is now called – was ‘opened’ to flow leisurely into the Avon (perhaps via a sluice gate, as the cascade was not yet made).

  Then it seems Lancelot left and George Lucy went on his travels, and so it was almost three years before a contract was signed, in May 1760, for the rest of the work. The redoubtable Mrs Philippa Hayes – in charge of Charlecote, receiver of packages of the finest green teas, pistachios, Jordan almonds, ‘granulated’ loaf sugar, damask linen and ‘smooth flaxen sheets’29 from Lucy’s shopping expeditions abroad and at home – struggled to maintain the lifestyle to match these luxuries, despite the cursed mud (which George Lucy we
nt away to escape). Her ally, the Dowager Countess of Coventry, from Snitterfield (though much at Charlecote), now reinstated in the affections of Lord Coventry at Croome and witness to Lancelot’s success there, took the initiative, and Lancelot returned.

  Charlecote, he now appreciated, was the epitome of an older England; it needed tender care, but not modernising. His agreement was made up of five simple articles:30

  Article 1: to widen the river Avon [on the west side of the house], and lay its banks properly, giving them a natural and easy level corresponding to the ground on each side of the river.

  Article 2: To sink the fosse [i.e. ha-ha] quite round the meadow, of a proper width, to make sufficient fence against the deer. [Here the phraseology is back to front, ‘quite round the meadow’ meaning around the old formal garden north of the house, though dug in the surrounding meadow or park.]

  Article 3: to fill up all the ponds on the north of the house, to alter the slope and give the whole a natural, easy and corresponding level with the house. [That is, dismantling the remnants of the old canals and levelling all the old beds, borders and paths to create the present lawn, ‘shaped like the prow of a ship riding high above the green wash of the park’.]

  Article 4: the ‘opening’ of the banks of the Dene and making the cascade into the Avon.

  Article 5: to find all necessary trees, to replace any that might die, and sow all the altered ground with clean hayseed and Dutch clover. [Note the replacement of dead plants, not a modern concept.]

  Charlecote was a commission of unalloyed good humour on all sides, displaying the gentlest side of Lancelot’s art. His foreman here was the long-serving John Midgeley, and they returned together a little later on to alleviate the flooding of the stable-yard, and regraded the whole area to the south to make the house seem as though it was set on rising ground: more illusion than reality, but comforting all the same.

  In April 1761, when Lancelot took a short break in Bath after another asthmatic attack, he called upon George Lucy, ‘not upon business as he said, but to enquire after my health’. Lucy continued bemusedly:

  he told me he should not be at Charlecote till May, which I suppose will be June at the soonest. I did not well know how to construe this visit, I told him the time was elapsed for a second payment which he said was no matter as he did not want for money, but upon my offering him £100 note31 he pulled out his pocket book and carried it off with him

  There was another stream-fed pool in Charlecote’s park that Lancelot was forbidden to touch, for it housed Mrs Hayes’s carp and tench, and possibly eels, destined for the table. This pool dated from the previous century, and the making of such pools for fish was a time-honoured skill. The Angler quotes numerous Ancient Greek and medieval authorities, declaring that fish ‘of a much sweeter32 and more pleasant taste’ came from such a pool ‘refresht with a little rill’. The Angler’s fishing advocate Piscator went further:

  to which end it is observed; that such Pools as be large and have most gravel, and shallows where fish may sport themselves, do afford Fish of the purest taste. And note, that in all Pools it is best for fish to have some retiring place, as namely hollow banks, or shelves, or roots of trees, to keep them from danger; and, when they think fit from the extream heat of Summer; as also, from the extremity of cold in Winter.

  Piscator’s use of the word ‘Pools’ is symptomatic for the times, when lowland England was a land without lakes: ponds, meres, broads, dells, pits, kettleholes, pingos and lagoons, but hardly ‘lakes’, which were seen by travellers on the Continent, but not at home. The ‘lakes’ of Cumbria were called ‘meres’ or ‘waters’, and like those high in the Welsh mountains and the Highland lochs, they were known to very few people.fn3

  Charlecote Park, Lancelot’s work for George Lucy c. 1753–63. As there is no evident payment for this work, was it in return for Lancelot’s tenancy of the house in Hammersmith Mall?

  Charlecote house.

  Entrance court with gatehouse.

  Probable course of old road (surviving rights of way).

  Line of new road.

  New bridge built by David Hiorn, completed 1757.

  Dene brook ‘opened’ to flow elegantly into river Avon, with sluice and later cascade (Article 4 of contract).

  Avon widened and banks re-laid (Article 1).

  Ha-ha or fosse around the raised gardens (Article 2).

  Site of formal canals, filled and ground re-made (Article 3).

  Old fish ponds retained for domestic use, but Lancelot engineered water flows throughout the park.

  Lancelot’s lake-making had begun in good stewardship, for the drainage of boggy land: at home in Kirkharle the Loraines’ park had a prominent marshy stretch, which he had not had the chance to exploit, this memory of frustration adding to the satisfaction of draining the marsh at Croome. Then came the technical challenges of dam-building and controlling water levels, and when these were accomplished, the aesthetic delights of a stretch of water – as at Kiddington – took over. Along the way a fourth reason for lake-making was emerging, for no sooner was the lake filled and stocked, than the fishermen (and sometimes women) arrived. Fishing, with rod and line and usually only from the bank, was customarily allowed to local people, as well as those who worked on the estate (boating was only for the privileged). The new editions of The Compleat Angler highlighted the reality that if there was a truly national sport in the British Isles, it was fishing.

  Lancelot would never have thought of himself as the inventor of the ornamental lake – the term indicating a lake made with skill and forethought – but, at a conservative estimate, he left 150 of them scattered across English counties from Yorkshire to Dorset, and from the Welsh borders to East Anglia. None of his professional successors (until the corporate water undertakings of the twentieth century) can claim a fraction of this number. He did have a royal predecessor: it was Queen Caroline whose wish it was to join the fish ponds in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park into ‘a long serpentine’.33 The London Journal of 26th September 1730 announced that ‘next Monday they begin the Serpentine River and Royal Mansion in Hyde Park’; 200 men with barrows started digging, uncovering the elm baulks with which the Benedictine monks of Hyde Abbey had edged their fishponds. Four years later the waters of the West Bourn were let into the new lake, and soon, with much celebration, two yachts containing the royal family set sail. The royal mansion was never built, and after the Queen’s death in 1737 her Serpentine Lake was opened to the public and has been called ‘The Serpentine’ ever since.

  Following the Queen’s example, pools and ponds were loosened into lakes in fashionable gardens like Stowe and Claremont. At Henry Hoare’s Stourhead in Wiltshire, where the Temple of Flora had overlooked a formal basin, there was soon the lake. Even so, lakes did not come easily; the Duke of Devonshire did not want one at Chatsworth, and Lancelot had to be patient with the dithering Lord Dacre at Belhus in Essex for ten years: in 1761 Dacre was still protesting to San Miller, ‘I have a number of Expences34 on me this year and yet I doubt whether I shall have prudence enough to abstain from meddling with my water in the lower part of the Park; the truth is that I never ride that way without longing to do something.’ He knew only too well that ‘Brown is of the same opinion’, and eventually they did make the Long Pond out of the Running Water River, but his lordship must have doubted again, for Lancelot finally lost heart, or just became too busy elsewhere. The lake was finished by Richard Woods in 1770–1, but has now been cut through by the M25. Lancelot’s successful plantations for Lord Dacre now screen part of Aveley from the motorway. The northern part of his park is now Belhus Woods Country Park, part of Thames Chase, a community forest that embraces Thorndon (now a country park) where Lancelot had also worked, and his lake survives.

  George and Elizabeth Grenville’s Wotton Underwood in north Buckinghamshire, which Lancelot knew well from its family connections with Stowe and Petworth, was low-lying in the meadows crossed by streams that eventually found t
heir ways into the Rivers Thame and Thames: ‘most people think that we are as much in the mud35 as you can be,’ George Grenville wrote to San Miller in 1758. He was thanking Miller for his design for a five-arched bridge, as well as his ‘ability to foresee improvements on unpromising land’. At the same time (1757–8) Grenville also gave Lancelot three payments of £100 (those £100 banknotes again, as there is no formal account?), suggesting that the mud was the result of the lake-making. Lancelot would have needed all his water-divining skills to search the meadows for the wandering tributaries of the River Ray, to capture the water into Wotton’s lake system and retain it with two dams. The water forms a lake west of the house, with an island called The Plain. From here an artificial river winds northwards to a greater lake, which overflows into a natural stream and eventually returns to the Ray. This was an enormously complicated piece of water engineering, but then Wotton was worth it: with a handsome house modelled on the Duke of Buckingham’s house at the head of the St James’s Park mall, with (then) a fine formal garden of terraces and radiating avenues, the Grenvilles’ home was soon greatly admired for its ‘deep shades36 of oak, softening lawns and tranquil waters’. Hester Pitt liked to bring her husband and small children back for summer holidays at her old home.

  A Wiltshire Trio: Longleat, Bowood and Corsham