by Jane Brown
Soon the process of converting the Base and Clock Courts and the Master Carpenter’s Court into sheltered housing of the ‘grace and favour’11 kind would begin, and to this end the masons, carpenters and plumbers were continuously employed under the control of the Clerk of Works, William Rice, who was there all through Lancelot’s time. ‘Grace and favour’ was a popular idea; it was well known that Dr Johnson had applied for an apartment, but none was available; William Brummell, private secretary to Lord North and father of the famous Beau, was luckier and moved in during the early 1770s, becoming one of many strollers in the gardens who regularly raised his hat to the Master Gardener, and whom Lancelot acknowledged in return.
The gardens were a great attraction; every morning Lancelot would pass a knot of visitors waiting by the Lion Gates for admittance, which was granted to everyone of respectable appearance. It made a refreshing change to meet with more ordinary opinions and manners in one of ‘his’ gardens, where he had been used to lordly families and labourers, with few of ‘the middling sort’ in between. His neighbours’ and visitors’ appreciations of the gardens perhaps weighed with him when the King invited him (or so the story goes) to ‘improve’ the Great Fountain Garden,12 which he declined, ‘out of respect to himself and his profession’.
From Lancelot’s point of view, Hampton Court was irredeemably flat; but he did his homework, discovering the pride of his profession here, of all places, and so perhaps nostalgia did stay his hand. As he and Biddy took their walks down to the river on summer evenings, the tranquillity of the almost deserted palace brought out the ghosts; the red-robed Cardinal Wolsey arriving by water, as did Henry VIII and Elizabeth, thereby dictating the orientation of the river palace; King Henry and his love of games, his tilt yard and tennis court and his King’s Beasts, and Charles I’s commission to Francesco Fanelli for Arethusa, supported by four boys and dolphins. This statue, also called Diana (and probably meant to be Venus), was for the Privy Garden. Charles II had brought to Hampton Court the French gardeners André and Gabriel Mollet, who ‘drafted’ (designed) the patte d’oie (goose foot), the great splay of avenues eastwards out into the Home Park, so that John Evelyn noted in June 1662 ‘The Park, formerly a naked piece of ground, now planted with sweet rows of lime trees; and the canal water now near perfected.’13 William and Mary had loved Hampton Court most of all, King William setting his heart on the Great Fountain garden – thirteen fountains in their pools interspersed with beds of scrollwork, to match Wren’s new east front, and with Wren’s south front gazing out on their splendid Privy Garden, which was enclosed by Tijou’s gilded screen and river gates. That most persistent of ghosts, Henry Wise, had started work here in 1699 and managed to spend nearly £7,000 in just over three years, until the day when William III’s horse White Sorel (which Lancelot knew came from Sir John Fenwick at Wallington) stumbled on a molehill in Home Park, and England belonged to Queen Anne.
Four of the £7,000 was for ‘The Charges of planting all ye trees14 in Bushey Parke, Gravelling ye great Avenue of sixty foot wide, digging and making ye Bason and other workes’, for William’s great northern approach, a mile-long avenue from Teddington. Queen Anne cancelled the north entrance (diverting the money to build Blenheim), but encouraged Wise with his subsidiary lime avenues (10 miles of them) and his ‘Grate Avenew’15 of chestnuts: 274 horse-chestnut trees planted 42 feet apart, which he had begun planting on his forty-sixth birthday, 2nd August 1699. ‘Though forever it should lead nowhere,’ David Green wrote in his biography of Wise, ‘nothing could dim the glory of the trees themselves on Chestnut Sunday16 or indeed throughout all those many years.’ Bushy, largely a deer park, was hardly less flat than the Home Park; Wise had moved Arethusa or Diana to her place in the great pool that he had dug for her, and the chestnut avenues were complete in themselves. Apart from guarding all this, there was very little that Lancelot could do. If the King had insisted, he might have thought of some project, but the King did not. At Hampton Court it must sometimes have seemed that Lancelot and Biddy had joined ‘the quality rest home’ it was becoming. The only thing for Lancelot to do was to energetically return to his work.
Business Matters and the Account Book17
A rare and tangible connection with Lancelot at this time, offering a vignette of his work and finances, is his thick, vellum-bound account book, the only one known to survive. Accounts did not amuse him, for he was too large-hearted and active a man to have patience with details (and quite happy to deal in round £100 notes) and he must have managed this far by carrying figures and dates in his head or on papers folded into bulging pocket books. Any notebook was so battered at the end of each year that all he could do was extract the vital information and throw the rest into the fire. With his new status, in his new study, he intended a fresh start, and with a sharpened quill and a flourish he made the first entry, for the Earl of Bute: ‘December 1764, Received of his Lordship £200’. This was the first payment on a contract of £1,780 for the work at Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire.
The book is hand-ruled in left-and right-hand columns for the date, description of business and the amount; it is hand-stitched, but there is no maker’s or stationer’s mark; the left-hand column records amounts received, while the right-hand has details of the contract sums and other outgoings; the headings are uniform, giving name and place, (for example, Rowland Holt Esq. at Redgrave, Suffolk). Allowing for differing qualities of quills and inks, the handwriting is probably all Lancelot’s, though sometimes his heavy scrawl might indicate the end of a tiring day or an overly indulged supper. It was not in his character to allow his wife or children to know the details of his income; his daughter Bridget, who was eighteen in 1764, may have been allowed to rule the book, but little else. His sons never apparently showed any interest at all. The book is about half-full; it almost certainly never left his study at Wilderness House until it was taken by his executors at his death; all the ‘live’ accounts were followed up, settled and ruled off by them. It subsequently remained with the family and is on permanent loan to the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society.
The first tranche of accounts entered alphabetically, from the above mentioned B for Bute to W for Sir Armine Wodehouse, has sixteen names representing his portfolio of contracts active in these early 1760s. Briefly, in addition to that referring to the Earl of Bute the entries can be paraphrased thus:
The Duke of Bridgewater at Ashridge in the Chilterns, payments 1762–8 totalling £2,946. 11 s. 7d. (mostly passed to Hollands for building the house, say £500 for Brown).
Sir William Codrington at Dodington in Gloucestershire, south-west of Chipping Sodbury. (‘lakes and fine contouring in a narrow Cotswold valley’, two contracts, 1761–4 (£738) and 1765–8 (£630);
Sir George Colebrooke, Gatton, near Reigate in Surrey; Gatton was one of the most infamous of rotten boroughs, a tiny clutch of estate houses where the ‘election’ of two MPs was announced from a classical pavilion, ‘the Town Hall’, possibly Lancelot’s. May 1762 to March 1768, total £3,055, for lake system and serpentine woodland walks.
The Earl of Coventry at Croome, an ongoing commission, 1755–1763, but no contracts; £1,080 paid to Drummonds a/c + £1,300 paid by the Earl’s brother, J. B. Coventry, to Drummonds, 1756–8, this for Spring Hill House at Broadway, where Lancelot organised the building, and where John Bulkeley Coventry was living.
Ambrose Dickens, Branches, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, contract Lady Day 1763, for two years, £1,500. A note is added: ‘extras were charged at £58. 1/8d in 1765 which Mr Brown could not get’.
Granville, 2nd Earl Gower, Trentham, Staffordshire, second account opened September 1762 (the lake ongoing), but work resumes in the 1770s (see here).
Sir John Griffin Griffin, Audley End, Saffron Walden, Essex, first contract £660, 22nd April 1763–66; second contract disputed (see here).
Rowland Holt, Redgrave, in Suffolk, 4 miles west of Diss (Norfolk), £2,280 contract, 1763, mostly for conversion of th
e seventeenth-century house to Palladian style by Hollands (since demolished). ‘Lovely remote park with a lake, and boat house and orangery by Lancelot with Master Carpenter John Hobcroft’.
General Howard, Stoke Place, Stoke Green, Buckinghamshire. The General was related to Sir John Griffin Griffin of Audley End, and Lancelot worked here in 1765–7 making a lake with islands; £800 paid.
His Majesty the King – this is a record of the quarterly payment of £500 from March 1765 until January 1777 (‘when carried to here of this book’).
Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim, Oxfordshire and Langley Park, Bucks, ongoing commission (payment details as on here).
Lord Milton, Milton Abbey, Dorset, contract dated 14th October 1761, £1,400 paid, completed October 1763 (see here).
Lord Northampton, Castle Ashby, Northamptonshire, new contract dated 1761, but complicated by the purchase of the manor of Fenstanton in 1767 (see here ff.).
3rd Earl of Shelburne, Bowood, Calne, Wiltshire, and at Wycombe Abbey (then called Loaches), High Wycombe, Bucks, new contract 1762–6, totalling £4,105.
Sir Armine Wodehouse, Kimberley, Wymondham, Norfolk, first payment £200, 22nd January 1763, then £200–300 a year until 1767. 1777–8 new plans ‘for alteration of the water’, and a kitchen garden near the house and a greenhouse. (Three journeys to Kimberley were charged at Christmas 1782.)
On the basis of these entries, Lancelot’s gross income for 1764 can be conservatively calculated at £6,000 (excluding his royal pension, charmingly entered under K for King, which started in April 1765). That would equate to the stipend of the Bishop of Durham of the day, while a seat in Parliament could be had for £2,000, and a year at Oxford or Cambridge cost £90, a curate might have to manage on £50 a year and a school-teacher on a lot less. Twenty years earlier Lancelot had been earning £25 a year at Stowe.
Lancelot’s account for the Duke of Ancaster, Grimsthorpe Castle.
However, there are pitfalls in reading his accounts. He was working harder than these entries reveal, for Burghley, Petworth and Temple Newsam in Yorkshire (to name but three) were active at the time, but do not appear in the accounting window. The accounts in the book have to be read in conjunction with Drummonds Bank’s ledger accounts, and there is no sure way of knowing if Lancelot’s bank credits duplicate the account-book receipts or are additional. That £6,000 gross figure was more than halved by payments to his foremen and other craftsmen, for which he used his own bank account; the known payments to his foremen average £300 a year – with perhaps twelve foreman to pay in 1764 (one foreman supervising two sites where the distance was small) that would be £3,600. However, it seems that his housekeeping expenses were covered by the money he collected directly from clients, the surplus being paid into Drummonds, and that his bank balance was kept high enough to cover his wage bills; in 1760 he had just over £10,000 in the account, with recorded payments to eighteen men, including William Donn and Thomas White the surveyors/draughtsmen, John Hobcroft the master carpenter, Henry Holland the builder (£540), and foremen including Mickle (Dodington), Milliken (Chatsworth), Midgeley (Charlecote), Ireland (Luton Hoo) and Sanderson (Longleat). These foremen received £300–500; Nathaniel Richmond at Moor Park and Syon liked to charge one guinea a day.
In 1768 the credit in the account reached £32,000, but there were thirty foremen to be paid fairly large payments (more like £500 each) and possibly £3,000–4,000 or so due to be paid to Holland’s for building work. Lancelot’s ‘nest-egg’ was still substantial, and accruing – a far cry from his modest beginnings, though little enough when set against the majority of his clients, who were in the top bracket of income as landowners (the top ‘400’), with an income of £10,000–15,000 each year. Lancelot’s bank balance was his family’s future security, and the late 1760s were its peak. His earnings were the result of his self-sacrificial work rate, which the account book also reveals: he was travelling over half of England, riding out to Staffordshire and Worcestershire in the west, and back to Suffolk in the east; then to Luton, Oxford and Northampton, north to Leeds for Temple Newsam, and south to Dorset. He drove himself to limits that perhaps he felt he must exploit, but knew he could not sustain.
The foremen paid their own labourers, the rate of one shilling a day, six days a week, equalling £15. 12s. a year for senior men, although the rate was ninepence or even sixpence a day for old men, women and boys. These were the rates recorded at Wakefield Lawn in 1751, paid to the estate labourers, who would have had lodging and fuel in addition. The rates were about the same in 1779 at Wimpole, where the wages for six men in the gardens were estimated at £113. 16s. for a year, also with lodging and produce. At Wakefield Lawn there were about twenty-five labourers at a peak time when the Duke of Grafton and his friends were in residence, but these figures suggest that twelve to twenty workers were the usual number employed on improvement works, and certainly nowhere near the 100 or even 500 that worked for William Holbech at Farnborough Hall.
It is worth looking briefly at the pattern of Lancelot’s working. His preference was for contracts to be neatly packaged, or at least staged, into two-year periods, so that he could see the return on his costs. However, his personal involvement was inevitably longer: his first visit inspired the vision that might suit both the place and his client, though more prosaically he requested a detailed survey of the site, as at Croome and Burghley; a second visit might be necessary to fix his proposals, which were drawn on an overlay of the survey. William Donn and Thomas White, both accomplished draughtsman and surveyors who worked on Lancelot’s schemes in the 1750s and 1760s, seem to have drifted away to their own practices, to be replaced by Jonathan Spyers as Lancelot’s regular draughtsman (and sometimes as travelling surveyor), from 1764. Six months often elapsed between Lancelot’s first visit and the production of the plan of proposals (outlined by Lancelot in his flamboyant style, with the details drawn by Spyers), and then a visit was necessary to explain it and begin the setting out. Then came the contract, with another visit for signature and collection of his preliminary payment, if there was one, and introduction of the job foreman; the end of the first year required a visit, and collection of payment, and another a year later for the second payment. There might well be a clearing-up visit to deal with any problems or extra works, and at another year’s interval a final visit to check on tree and shrub plantings. Lancelot makes few mentions of planting orders in his accounts, and he preferred to use stock from the estate nurseries or – if ordering from Lee & Kennedy or John Williamson, or from James Wood at Huntingdon18 – expected the nurseryman to deal directly with the client.
Soon after the move to Hampton Court the name of Samuel Lapidge is mentioned; he was a foreman, but also the nearest to an assistant that Lancelot employed, for he acted as a clerk and courier and eventually became familiar with Lancelot’s accounts. John Midgeley, the foreman at Charlecote, Castle Ashby, Wynnstay and Ashburnham, stayed loyal to Lancelot all his life, as did William Ireland (Lancelot’s foreman at Burghley, Trentham, Cliveden and Luton); Lancelot wrote to Lord Bute, ‘I am very glad your Lordship has taken William Ireland.19 My order to him was to submit himself to your Lordship’s terms. Your Lordship, I do believe, will find him sober, industrious and honest.’ Michael Milliken, who had run the work at Chatsworth for five years, was moved to royal Richmond, reporting Lancelot verbatim to his wife (still at Edensor), ‘Milliken I sent for you20 here as I saide before to do you a service. This will be a great and lasting worke and where you will be known to his Majesty and other Great Men.’ The Millikens settled at Kew, where they lived happily till the end of their days.
Most loyal of all was Benjamin Read, who worked at Croome and Blenheim; in August 1767 Lord Cadogan sent his thanks to Lancelot for permission to take a party of friends around Blenheim, mentioning Mr Read ‘by whose attention21 and civility we saw it to the greatest perfection & indeed it beggars all description’. ‘The water is by much the finest artificial thing I ever saw,’ Cadogan continued, �
�meaning the banks and the advantageous manner in which you have set it off. I don’t like the bridge but think it might be altered by expense to answer well’, although he thought the park under-planted. Lord Cadogan owned Caversham Park at Reading, and he concluded his letter, ‘I had the mortification to find on my return that I had miss’d you here. I flatter myself you found Justice done to your works in the manner of keeping them.’
Lord Cadogan’s note prompts the suspicion that the account book has tip-of-the-iceberg tendencies and may not tell all; there is no account for Caversham. Charles, 2nd Baron Cadogan, had been a young soldier in Marlborough’s army and had married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Hans Sloane; he was an MP and a grandee and could well have met Lancelot at Stowe. Moreover his son, Charles Sloane Cadogan, the MP for Cambridge, was in April 1764 appointed Surveyor of Hampton Court and Bushy and therefore Lancelot’s immediate overlord.fn1
Lord Bute, Luton Hoo and Richmond Park
It was typical of Lord Bute to be at the forefront with the services of the new royal appointee: Bute was a serious plantsman, having been taught to plant trees on his holidays from Eton by his uncle, the Duke of Argyll, at Whitton, and had gone on to study botany at the University of Leiden. He was apparently happily married to Mary Wortley Montagu. But perhaps he had the volatility of the rich, for he vacillated between botany and politics, between retreating to his island home, Mount Stuart, and strutting the great stage in London; he was the perfect courtier, as painted by Reynolds in his Garter robes, in a short embroidered surcoat that displays his silk-stockinged and fabulous legs, with a lean and handsome face, deep-set eyes and wide, sensual mouth. Botany and gardening had brought him the friendship of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and the Prince’s death left him chief supporter (and reputed lover) of the widowed Augusta. He ruled the roost at Augusta’s Kew, where he had a house on Kew Green, having sold his mansion of Kenwood (Caen Wood as it was then) to Lord Mansfield. Catapulted into power and influence with the accession of George III, he found himself Prime Minister for a time, but soon resigned and bought Luton Hoo for his return to botany and gardening.fn2
