Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  Yet nature cannot furnish out the feast,

  Art he invokes new horrors still to bring.

  Now mouldering fanes and battlements arise,

  Arches and turrets nodding to their fall,

  Unpeopled palaces delude his eyes,

  And mimic desolation covers all.

  Gray’s indictment goes further: that where Lord Holland creates horror and desolation in his miniature landscape, he would have destroyed Britain herself with his ‘egotistical dreams of destruction and control’:

  ‘Ah,’ said the sighing Peer, ‘had Bute been true69

  Nor Shelburne, Rigby’s, Calcraft’s friendship vain,

  Far other scenes than these had bless’d our view

  And realis’d the ruins that we feign.

  Purg’d by the sword and beautify’d by fire,

  Then we had seen proud London’s hated walls,

  Owls might have hooted in St Peter’s quire

  And foxes stunk and litter’d in St Paul’s.’

  fn1 Lancelot did not work for the 5th Duke of Devonshire, portrayed as taciturn, silent and cold to his lovely wife Georgiana Spencer, whom he married in June 1774. Chatsworth is rather reduced to a stageset in their tumultuous lives, crowded with relations and visitors, neighbours (and voters), who streamed across Paine’s bridge on summer days, dazzled by the great palace and its glittering windows, and by the prospects of the famed concerts and gambling parties. The gardens came into their own again with the 6th Duke and Joseph Paxton some fifty years later.

  fn2 The Court was almost completely destroyed by fire in 1836 and rebuilt in the present Victorian Gothic. It had a distinguished (though often secret) service record from 1939 until 1987 and is now a conference centre. The beech woods, the Chess and the waterfalls remain.

  fn3 The aesthetic virtues of the ‘Lakes’ were first praised in 1753 by Thomas Gray’s friend, Dr John Brown of St John’s College, Cambridge, who made an annual pilgrimage to Keswick. It was not until October 1769 that Gray wrote of the ‘blew mirror’ of Derwentwater, and ‘the shining purity of the Lake just ruffled by breeze enough to shew it is alive, reflecting rocks, woods, fields & inverted tops of mountains’. The Rev. William Gilpin, connoisseur of the Picturesque, had not yet travelled at this time; and William Wordsworth, ‘discoverer’ of the Lake District, was not born until 7th April 1770.

  fn4 In 1766 Thomas Wright purloined the design idea for an oval lake for St James’s Park but that was not carried out; John Nash eventually re-made the Park, largely based on Lancelot’s scheme, which is basically the park we have today. Buckingham Palace garden has the successors to the belts of trees planted around the boundary, with a gravel drive meandering through them, which has survived from Lancelot’s 1762–3 layout.

  fn5 Less than a decade later the lake was gone: the Coventry–Oxford Canal was completed in early 1790, and presumably the need for water lowered the water table, sucking the local springs dry, including the sources of the Aynho lake, and of the healing Astrop Wells not far away, which also dwindled into memory.

  fn6 Spyers was paid £57. 17s. The survey in pen and ink and watercolour over graphite (pencil) measures 20½ × 28½ inches and is clearly annotated in the top left-hand corner ‘A Survey of Blenheim Park before Mr Brown’s60 works’.

  fn7 The account book begins in 1764 with £,1,900; 1765, £1,400; 1766, £1,800; 1767, £1,000; 1768, £3,600; 1769, £1,200; 1770, £1,000, and 1771 ‘a balance of All Accounts to October 27th 1770,’ £2,550; Drummonds accounts show £1,000 paid in 1773. These sums included Langley Park, which began as a contract sum of £2,810, but probably escalated.

  8

  THE KING’S MASTER GARDENER AT HAMPTON COURT

  But your Great Artist,1 like the source of light,

  Gilds every Scene with beauty and delight;

  At Blenheim, Croome and Caversham we trace

  Salvator’s wildness, Claude’s enlivening grace,

  Cascades and Lakes fine as Risdale drew,

  While Nature’s vary’d in each charming view.

  —Anon. to Lord Irwin, 1767

  WHETHER BY ACCIDENT or design, Lancelot met George Grenville in June 1764 at Shortgrove, in Essex. Grenville was halfway through his two-year term as First Lord of the Treasury, and he and his wife Elizabeth were visiting her kinsman, Percy Wyndham O’Brien. Though Lancelot knew Shortgrove, in the Cam valley south of Saffron Walden, as belonging to Sir John Hynde Cotton of Madingley, it was either recently sold or let to O’Brien (later Earl of Thomond), for whom Lancelot was ‘dressing up’ the Cam and the small park. In conversation with George Grenville, he took his chance to mention his hopes for a royal appointment.

  When he moved on to Redgrave, near Bury St Edmunds, he sat down to pen a difficult letter to Grenville, dated 22nd June: ‘You, I am sure2 [are] not un[a]quainted that those people you do the greatest favours’ – here he stumbles over saying that they invariably ask for more, ploughing on, ‘My case is that at this time, which liberty I hope you will excuse, I would have made the request when I had the honour of seeing you … but my courage failed me.’ He finally reaches his point:

  I should be very happy to have the garden at Windsor Castle included in the Warrant … I know it is a very small thing but if ever the King should like to do anything there I think it would give me a better [protection] my having the place to be employed; I understand that there are about eight acres of ground which is to be kept, but this I do not know but by hearing: I know you will do it if you think it is proper but, if it is not, I do not desire it.

  George Grenville was swift to action, for The Gentleman’s Magazine of July 1764 carried the news of Lancelot’s appointment as Master Gardener at Hampton Court, though mistakenly it called him ‘Surveyor’, which was a courtier’s sinecure and quite another matter. The Royal Warrant, dated 16th July, gives the curious amount of £1,107. 6s. a year, plus £100 for ‘raising pineapples’3 and another £100 for ‘parcel fruits’, but Lancelot’s account book shows that he received the expected £2,000 a year, paid in four quarterly instalments of £500, without fail. The warrant also mentions the garden at Richmond, the King’s and Queen’s favoured retreat beside the Thames opposite Syon, adjoining the garden of the King’s mother, Princess Augusta, at Kew. Later in 1764 Lancelot was additionally appointed gardener at St James’s, which included the Queen’s House. Another £40 worth of responsibility was added for the care of the Treasury garden, part of which survives as the garden of No. 10 Downing Street.

  The history of royal gardeners was chequered: sixty years earlier in 1704 Queen Anne had appointed her trusty Henry Wise as deputy Ranger of St James’s Park, a high honour that allowed him the privilege of riding in the park. The mystique of the royal parks was already established in that the Rangerships were a prime gift of the sovereign, usually confined to members of the royal family: a deputy Rangership was the highest that a commoner could hope for, though deputies were usually courtiers. With the arrival of George I, the workaholic Wise assumed responsibility for everything, he and Charles Bridgeman being appointed ‘Chief Gardiners’ for the ‘ordering and keeping’ of Hampton Court, Kensington Palace gardens, Hyde Park, the King’s palace at Newmarket, Windsor Castle and St James’s. At George I’s death in 1727 Wise had retired to his house in Warwick, and Bridgeman was left with an inventory of niggling duties for George II: ‘supplying Horse Dung4 & all other sorts’, carrying the King’s summer fruit (much of this grown in the walled gardens at Hampton Court) and other ‘eatables’ to wherever the King was resident, ‘daily by relays of men’, along with the onerous pruning and tying tasks that were more usually the lot of apprentices.

  With Bridgeman’s death in 1738, the empire had fragmented into little kingdoms, and the name of Greening became prominent. Thomas Greening, a nurseryman at Brentford (Brayneforde), was gardener to the Duke of Newcastle at Claremont, but he also held responsibilities for Richmond, Kensington and St James’s – all these posts becoming available with his death i
n 1757, which gave the opportunity for Lancelot’s 1758 petition. Of Thomas Greening’s three sons, Robert was gardener to Princess Augusta at Kew; John quietly succeeded his father at Kensington and Richmond, and may have taken over from George Lowe at Hampton Court; the third, Henry, was a royal gardener for a time, but inherited a fortune, changed his name to Gott, was knighted and became a country squire.

  With the accession of George III, the merry-go-round started spinning once more, and John Greening apparently retired, leaving Richmond vacant for Lord Bute’s choice of John Haverfield; meanwhile Bute’s botanical colleague, the unfrocked apothecary John Hill, was given Kensington Gardens, and a modestly quiet man, John Kent, was at Windsor Castle. This was the rigmarole that preceded Lancelot getting Hampton Court and St James’s; at Richmond, which the King asked him to redesign, he worked in reasonable harmony with John Haverfield.

  Lancelot’s nervous plea to George Grenville for Windsor to be added to his charges stemmed from his disappointment at the fate of his schemes for the Queen’s House and St James’s Park, where his lack of official status meant that they were implemented (or not) by other hands. His ‘hearing’ – gardeners’ gossip – had been accurate about Windsor, for the 8 acres included a walled garden on the south of the castle giving onto the Long Walk, comprising a kitchen garden and the Garden House garden, soon to be enlarged by adding the garden of Burford House, originally built for Nell Gwyn. Apparently John Kent, the gardener in charge, was ailing, and Lancelot wished him to keep ‘the whole project5 … so long as he lives’. If Lancelot imagined, as he seemed to do, that the King and Queen would use Windsor, he was right, even though ‘every contiguous spot6 is open to public resort’, which was the main drawback; Queen Charlotte soon made the Garden House into Queen’s Lodge – a home for the family when the King hunted at Windsor – but the garden was not a priority and it was not added to Lancelot’s warrant. (The garden and Queen’s Lodge are the backdrop to Benjamin West’s portrait of the Queen, and her children, of 1779, but the garden appears to comprise just lawn.)

  Why did Lancelot want Windsor? Did he imagine that the King and Queen would require some private grounds, which would enable him to ‘improve’ part of the Great Park? After all, it was only at Windsor that the royal family made any semblance of living in the country, with a residence and attendant acres such as most of their courtiers enjoyed on their own estates. Unfortunately for Lancelot, since the King’s uncle – William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, Ranger of the Park and Keeper of Windsor Forest – had employed his soldiers returned from Culloden in earth-moving and planting in the southern part of the park (at Virginia Water), the Great Park was jealously guarded as a royal prerogative. At William Augustus’s death in 1765, the posts of Ranger and Keeper were divided between two of the King’s brothers, and Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, became the Ranger. The Sandby brothers, Thomas and Paul, who served William Augustus in Scotland, also came south to work at Windsor; Thomas was made deputy Ranger of the Great Park in 1765 and, with his brother as artist and draughtsman, they were firmly in control of improvements.

  Not for the first time, the one thing at which Lancelot excelled was the jealously guarded perquisite of a member of the family – it was becoming a hazard of his lonely profession. Lancelot was a phenomenon that the King and Queen did not really wish to understand: George III preferred architecture to gardens, and Queen Charlotte, when her childbearing allowed, was an avowed miniaturist, loving her botany and flower paintings, and eventually her private garden at Frogmore, where only her friends were allowed. The royal establishment seemed happiest with old-fashioned, string-around-the-trousers gardeners, bred to tending pineapple pits, like ‘old James’ who lived in a shed at Hampton Court. Lancelot could see little scope for his particular talents, and the implication was that he would continue his private practice, and that his royal recognition would give him added status amongst his clients. He assumed his honour with a characteristic appearance of amusement.

  Wilderness House at Hampton Court

  The Brown family’s move from Hammersmith Mall followed soon after the confirmation of Lancelot’s royal appointment, probably in the autumn of 1764. It was to make great changes in all their lives.

  The family had been completed with the birth of Margaret, known as Peggy, baptised on 2nd November 1758, and Thomas (an infant Thomas had been born and died in 1757), the baby of the family, baptised on 24th July 1761. That year their eldest son, Lance, had started at Eton College, boarding with Mrs Yonge, and Jack followed a year later. Had Lancelot not heard of William Pitt’s7 opinion, based upon his own miserable experience, that he ‘scarce observed a boy who was not cowed for life at Eton; that a publick school might suit a boy of turbulent forward disposition but would not do where there was any gentleness’. Pitt determinedly educated his children at home, as was to be the happy fate of young Thomas Brown. Presumably, from Lancelot’s point of view, he wanted the best for his older sons and could pay for it; after all, the Pitt children lived in a society of influential relatives, but Lance and Jack Brown’s playmates in Hammersmith were much less likely to be the kind of friends who could help them through life; hence their dutiful, if naïve father assumed that Eton would be the making of them. It is said that Lance’s Eton nickname was ‘Capey’,8 in allusion to ‘Capability’, thus revealing (out of the mouth of some noble babe) that a clique of Lancelot’s clients called him this – but between themselves and never to his face. (The Eton College archives give no source for the ‘Capey’ story, which could have been imaginative hindsight, as no contemporary mention of ‘Capability’ has been found so far.)

  The Browns’ new home, Wilderness House, was named for its position close to the huge Maze or Wilderness (in fact between the Wilderness and the walled gardens) on the north side of Hampton Court Palace, and inside the wall. The house was built in William III’s time, of dark-red Hampton bricks, and is shown clearly on Leonard Knyff’s spectacular bird’s-eye view of the palace and the Thames of 1702. Two years earlier it had been identified as the ‘Master Gardener’s House & Court’ in a plan by Wren, when the scheme (originally drawn by Hawksmoor in 1689) for a magnificent north entrance to the palace aligned on the Bushy Park avenue (and demolishing the Wilderness and the house) was still a possibility.

  Wilderness House was secluded from garden activity, with a private court, stables and a coach house; the Browns may have had a coach in their last years at Hammersmith, and certainly acquired one with their move. The ground floor of Wilderness House had small but elegant panelled rooms, with bedrooms above, and an attic storey. Lancelot complained of the condition as he found it: ‘the Offices are very bad, the Kitchen very offensive and the rooms very small and uncomfortable for one who at times am afflicted with an Asthma’.9 The house was refurbished, both at this time and later in his tenancy.

  One of the panelled rooms became his workroom, and there was a breakfast room as well as a parlour, or perhaps they called it the drawing room; remembering that Biddy Brown had come from a fine Georgian town house in Boston to a Vanbrugh pavilion ‘fit for a gentleman’ at Stowe, and latterly to a riverside terraced house in Hammersmith, she knew how to furnish Wilderness House in comfort and style. In his later letters Lancelot mentions the paintings he has seen in other people’s houses, and he is soon part of a circle of collectors in Hampton. They had family books – other than his architectural and gardening books in his study – and Bridget prided herself on her fine linen and china; Lancelot surely brought her some treasure from his travels, especially his visit to Staffordshire when he saw Josiah Wedgwood’s wares – perhaps a piece of early green glazeware or even creamware, ‘a species of earthenware for the table quite new in its appearance, covered with a rich and brilliant glaze’,10 which was available at the time. They owned for certainty one special silver-branched candlestick, requiring perhaps four expensive (one penny each) wax candles for an evening’s light for Lancelot to work by; his eldest daughter Bridget so loved th
is candlestick that he promised to leave it to her in his Will.

  In true fashion, the Browns were an extended family: Biddy’s niece, Philippa (‘Philly’) Cooke from Boston, lived with them, soon occupying a firm place in their affections. Their domestic staff, the cook and the young maids, were surely fortunate in their employers, though we know nothing about them, but mention is made of manservants, the brothers William and George Davis, who were with the Browns for the rest of Lancelot’s life. Either William or George may have been an outdoorsman, in charge of the stables, horses and stable boys. As Wilderness House was inside the palace wall, its surroundings were looked after by the Hampton Court gardeners. Lancelot did acquire a separate yard – apparently Henry Wise’s old garden yard – which he used for holding plant consignments and as a store.

  It was an enchanting, if otherworldly place to live in during the 1760s. While for Lancelot it was merely a different base for his travels up and down the country, Biddy Brown noticed the changes, and perhaps saw a repeating pattern in her life – her move from lively Boston to Stowe now paralleled in their move from busy Hammersmith to Hampton Court. Hampton Court had always been a community in the service of a potentate who loved a garden, from Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII to William III and Queen Mary, but since Queen Anne’s time it had seen only occasional use, and now George III had declared that he would never live there. Paintings, furniture and tapestries were gradually moved from Wren’s splendid court apartments, spirited away to other royal residences. The palace was now in the charge of a well-born resident housekeeper, Mrs Elizabeth Mostyn, who was paid £250 a year salary, but was allowed to pocket one shilling a head from visitors whom she conducted around, sometimes bringing her £800 in annual income. There was still a regiment of Foot Guards at the palace barracks, but the military presence was lessening and the Master General of Ordnance had little to command; and the courts of the Tudor palace were rapidly emptying of such luminaries as the Pastry Officer, the Scullery Sergeant and the Keeper of the Fish Larder, all of whom had had their proud titles on their doors since the time of Henry VIII. The armies of footmen and cooks, seamstresses and starchers, and the dairymaids, had all wandered away.