by Jane Brown
After another night at Testwood, they set out in stormy weather to cross the bleak heathland of the northern New Forest, continuing through Ringwood and Wimborne Minster, and then on the Dorchester turnpike for a dozen miles or so until they turned north for the town then called Middleton.38 Milton Abbas or Middleton was a community of more than a hundred families, a wool town where a cottage industry of spinning thrived. Their approach from the south revealed two streets, Broad Street and Newport Street, lined with cottages and gardens, and the High Street, equally lined with shops and small houses, breasting the rise to the monumental Market Cross in the square. There were inns, the Red Lyon, the King’s Arms and the George with its own brewery, but whether it was advisable for the coach party to stay at any of them was doubtful, for Lancelot was headed for a meeting with Lord Milton, an already unpopular landlord. Middleton had grown alongside the Benedictine abbey founded by King Athelstan in about AD 938. At the Dissolution it had been bought by the Tregonwells, who had remained until 1752, when the estate had been sold to Joseph Damer, the eldest son of John Damer of Winterbourne Came House, near Dorchester. Joseph Damer, now Lord Milton, was very soon at loggerheads with the Middleton worthies when he complained of the grammar-school boys who stole his fruit and frightened his pheasants; it was a running feud, and boys were expelled for dropping stones down his chimneys, stealing eggs and cucumbers and appropriating the housekeeper’s cockerels for fighting. He was resorting to an Act of Parliament to move the school into Dorchester, and eventually succeeded.
Lancelot had been to Milton Abbey before, in the summer of 1763, but he had arrived from the north-west through Hilton, following Lord Milton’s instructions, and came on horseback. If he was lucky enough to arrive with the setting sun, this view is breathtaking, the long low house washed pale gold against its green backdrop and dwarfed by the huge and pinnacled bulk of Abbot Middleton’s church. From this direction there was no inkling of the town’s existence at all. The reverse view, back from the west front, or from the west door of the church, is stupendous: the buildings are marvellously sited on a col, or ridge, between two valleys that sidle off, giving alternate views. A dry valley called Delcombe Bottom widens into Broadfield, then narrows and stretches for 2 miles north-north-west to high ground east of Bulbarrow (at 902 feet, the second-highest hill in Dorset). Delcombe Manor at the head of the valley was used as an eye-catcher. West of Broadfield was a combe, where a ride was made around the edge of the woodland, to the menagerie. Farther west the Hilton valley ended at the village, with the church tower as an eye-catcher.
Lancelot’s first plan for Milton Abbey was to level the great lawn that afforded these views, to make thick plantations on the hills and sculpt their outlines to enhance the valley forms, and make the drives that enabled this landscape to be enjoyed. It was purely a landscape project and a fine one – it was more than a park, it was the capture of a substantial stretch of Dorset downland for the eye’s delectation.
Independently of these marvellous views, Milton Abbey – in ways similar to Petworth House and Corsham Court – was pressed on one side by town buildings; Middleton’s streets and houses were to the south and did not impede this first landscape scheme. Lord Milton had paid Lancelot £200 for his plan and initial visit, the contract for the works had been drawn up and agreed in November 1764 and now it was time to set things in motion. Lancelot had ordered the purchase of 1,120 pounds of Dutch clover seed for the great lawn.
On his earlier visit the Abbey House was being encased ‘in a beautiful modern manner’, in the opinion of Bishop Pococke, to the plans of John Vardy. Lord Milton now found the Gothic effect too ‘theatrical’ and was looking for another architect. Would Lancelot take over? In the ensuing discussion Lord Milton also raised the question of a lake; the only water supply came from the Hilton-valley ‘rivulet’ and the only possible fall for the water, and hence the lake, was to the south – the way Lancelot’s coach had just travelled, through the Middleton streets. Maybe the schoolboys did their worst at that moment, or maybe Lancelot was flippant (for he certainly could be), and the dreadful words were spoken either in anger or in jest: in order to have a lake, you will have to move the village! It was not an unusual thing to do, for Lancelot had come fresh from Audley End where Sir John Griffin Griffin was carefully and fairly (it must be said) moving aside a street of cottages for his park; and back in Northumberland, at Kirkharle, the village where Lancelot had been born was swept away. However, Middleton was more than a hamlet or village, it was a medieval town on the scale of Petworth or Corsham, which no one had dreamed of demolishing. Surely it was a joke? On that note, the King’s Master Gardener took to his coach and sped away.
They returned to the Dorchester turnpike and travelled on through the town, westwards, making for Exeter – an industrial town, full of woollen manufactories and mills and numerous smiths making spades, nails, horseshoes and gun-barrels – and on south towards Newton Abbot. After about 10 miles they came to the Starcross turning and, shortly, the entrance for Mamhead. Here was more than a whisper of Drake’s glorious Devon, a seventeenth-century house of greater antiquity, set on the eastern slope of Great Haldon ridge with views to the Exe estuary and the sea. The estate had come to Wilmot Vaughan on his marriage to a Miss Nightingale, and they were considering rebuilding as well as improving the grounds. It would be nice to think that Lancelot bridled at the idea of demolishing the romantic old house, but he liked the Vaughans and promised to supply new plans.
Back on the Newton Abbot road at Ideford they passed through the demesne of Ugbrooke, an eleventh-century retreat for the Bishops of Exeter, but since 1604 home of the Cliffords of Chudleigh. At Ugbrooke there was almost an architectural competition for rebuilding, as the 4th Lord Clifford had asked for designs from Robert Adam, John Carr and James Paine, and Lancelot clearly thought he had a chance. It was a brief look, then back on the road, through Newton Abbot and on to Totnes – another town busy with mills, weavers and smiths – where the coach continued southwards, taking the rather obscure turning for Ashprington, and in the village the rough track up to Sharpham House. Even today this countryside of the South Hams seems a world away from the rest of England; how remote must it have felt on a misty December afternoon in 1764? Something out of the ordinary must have brought Lancelot this far – unless, of course, he had not imagined that the long, winding and rutted roads of the south-west could seem so interminable.
Gossip as well as invitations had brought him this far, for all three projects – Mamhead, Ugbrooke and Sharpham – promised new houses to be built as well as parks to be improved. Sharpham was an old and mainly Elizabethan house on a bluff overlooking the River Dart, with views inland to Totnes and, on the other hand, down the winding estuary towards Dartmouth and the sea. It was, and is, one of the most covetable settings of the Devon (if not the entire English) coastline. The new owner was one Captain Philemon Pownoll, rich with prize money from his capture of the Spanish treasure ship Ermiona in the war. As it turned out Sir Robert Taylor built the new Sharpham as a Palladian villa, and if Lancelot was left with the landscape – tradition and field evidence (the line of the drive, groups of trees and other features) suggest that he was – then even he would have despaired of outshining the Dart estuary.
It transpired that south Devon was just too far, and he had overreached himself. No payments are recorded for Sharpham. At Ugbrooke the house eventually built – a square house with castellated corner towers – is credited to Robert Adam, as his earliest castellated design for a country house. Lancelot’s plan for the park was carried out in the early 1770s: the drive approaches, the planting of evergreen oaks, chestnuts and cedars that loved the marine microclimate and the damming of the Ugbrooke to form two irregular lakes, separated by a picturesque rocky cascade. However, not unusually, these lovely effects were attributed to the owner, Lord Clifford, by Father Joseph Reeve, family chaplain and tutor to the Clifford children, who sought to emulate Alexander Pope:
’Ti
s yours, My Lord,39 with unaffected ease,
To draw from Nature’s stores and make them please:
With taste refined to dress the rural seat,
And add new honours to your own retreat.
To shade the hill, to scoop or swell the green
To break with wild diversities the scene,
To model with the Genius of the place
Each artless feature, each spontaneous grace.
Lancelot was understandably attracted to south Devon, the landscape being already so lovely as to be a joy to improve. But his volatile health and the great distances involved defeated him also at Mamhead – where again Robert Adam worked on the house – at least for the time being.
Turning homewards through Exeter, the December days darkening, their road was the more northerly turnpike through Honiton to Ilminster. Lancelot knew well, as did most of the nation, that a Somerset squire Sir William Pynsent was leaving his estate in gratitude to the saviour of the nation, Lord Chatham; Lancelot was to take a look, but with discretion, for Sir William was not yet dead (he died the following month, January 1765). Burton Pynsent, valued at £4,000 a year in rentals, was superbly sited on the narrow ridge that runs south-west from Langport through Curry Rivel to Fivehead. The house, at almost 250 feet, had spectacular views, and on the north side the ridge dropped dramatically down into West Sedge Moor, only about 20 feet above sea level. Lancelot was probably not the only ‘spy’ that Lord Chatham sent to see if Burton Pynsent was worth having, but he at least could give an expert’s report.
From Langport the old road eastwards eventually rejoined the turnpike heading for Wincanton, where inns were plentiful. A diversion to Longleat would have been possible, but hardly inviting in the December gloom; by now it was nearing the 20th of the month, and it was still a long haul home through Amesbury, Basingstoke and Staines. The Thames must have been a welcome sight, the pinnacles and chimneys of Hampton Court even more so, with the relief of being home for Christmas. Can there be any doubt that, at the end of this landmark year, the festival was well celebrated with family and friends at Wilderness House – the darkpanelled rooms coming alive in the dancing lights from log fires and candles and wine glasses, the celebrated arrivals of roast sirloin and the newly fashionable turkey (for which Mrs Martha Bradley’s The British Housewife of 1756 gave instructions for stuffing and roasting) to be followed by plum puddings, syllabubs and unnumbered delicacies, orange flower cakes, and sugared peaches and raspberry wines (these last made from Biddy Brown’s perquisites from the palace fruit gardens)?
Lord Spencer’s Wimbledon
However, the workaholic Lancelot had one more task for the year, a short journey across to Wimbledon, where a new phase of work was to start on the park.
It was curious to have been discussing William Pitt’s windfall of Burton Pynsent, for twenty years earlier when Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough died, only her rather frail ten-year-old grandson John Spencer stood in the way of Pitt as her nominated heir to Wimbledon and Althorp. Pitt lost out (though he had £10,000), for the boy had survived to become a very rich, but timid and retiring man, tall, with ‘russet-coloured’ hair;40 his friend Lord Palmerston bemoaned, ‘the bright side of his character appears in private and the dark side in public … it is only those who live in intimacy with him who know that he has an understanding and a heart that might do credit to any man’. This was evident in John Spencer’s marriage,41 famously made in 1755 at the moment he came of age, in an upstairs room at Althorp house while the party was in full swing downstairs, because he and his bride, nineteen-year-old Margaret Georgiana Poyntz, were deeply in love and need wait no longer. Elizabeth Montagu thought her ‘a natural good young woman, no airs, no affectations, but seemed to enjoy her good fortune by making others partakers and happy with herself.’
Lancelot’s Drummonds account shows that Lord Spencer, created Earl Spencer in 1765, who tended to pay on drafts on Hoare’s Bank, paid £800 in 1759 and £1,000 a year in 1760–3, with a final £1,000 in the autumn of 1766; this is also shown in the account book. (Payment as early as 1759 suggests that Lancelot may have done something at Spencer House, overlooking Green Park.) In 1779 the rail fences at Wimbledon were renewed and painted white; the final account sum of £750 paid in 1781 was apparently for Althorp42 House in Northamptonshire. Now, in late 1764, the new contract was agreed (£1,760) and work was to start immediately in January 17765).
Even when Lancelot saw it, Wimbledon House (now the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club, the golf course and the park) spoke of the ephemerality of gardens. Wimbledon had belonged to the Cecils, then Charles I acquired it for Henrietta Maria; the gardens were a cavalcade of baroque fashions – lime walks, orchards, vineyards (Vineyard Hill Road remains), fountains, knots, embroidered parterres, a green-painted circular banqueting house and a maze were just a few of the lost delights. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough had bought the mouldering estate from a bankrupt South Sea company director, Theodore Janssen, in the 1720s and had ‘designed’ her own house, with a little help from Lord Burlington, Henry Herbert, the 9th ‘Architect’ Earl of Pembroke, and architect Roger Morris, and from Charles Bridgeman for the garden. The park was enormous, at 1,200 acres, stretching from the edge of Wimbledon Common (Parkside) on the west to the Durnsford road (almost to the River Wandle) on the east. The house, and Wimbledon village and church, were all on the high land at the south end of the park (the present Ridgeway and Wimbledon Hill); according to Dorothy Stroud, the house ‘stood close43 to what is now the upper end of Home Park Road [junction with Arthur Road] from where there is still a fine view towards inner London’. Even so, the Duchess Sarah’s house was apparently damp, and on old maps springs are marked on the slopes of the park, which must have been the prompting for Lancelot’s lake in the valley. Some of his cedars and pines survive in gardens around the remnant park that remains.
Lancelot’s work at Wimbledon was completed in two years; in 1768 Thomas Richardson (shortly to survey the Kew and Richmond gardens) made a survey of Wimbledon as Lancelot had improved it, but the survey also shows the approach of residential development in this desirable area. Lancelot made a garden in 1767 for Sir Ellis Cunliffe off what is now Parkside Gardens, where a remnant lake survives. Nearby on Putney Heath, for ‘Baron Tracey’, the 6th Viscount Tracey, he recorded ‘waiting on the Baron three times and a plan’, for about twenty-five guineas in 1774, but the exact site of this garden is unknown.
This Wimbledon park landscape, the mecca for hundreds of thousands of tennis fans – and the eyes of the world – each summer, must be the most complex of Lancelot’s places, a green palimpsest of fabulous history, where he joins a glorious cavalcade of heroes, heroines and villains.
fn1 Turner, see here, suggests that Lancelot also worked at Downham House, Santon Downham, Suffolk, on the Little Ouse in sandy Breckland – a shooting lodge – for the latter, again with no charge.
fn2 Bute bought the Hoo from Francis Herne, MP for Bedford, who acquired Flambards, or Flamberts, at Harrow-on-the-Hill, where Lancelot worked; this park was spectacular, flowing down the steep hill to the east, into the spacious and empty meadows crossed by tributaries of the River Brent, with ‘Wembly’ in the distance. Lancelot tamed the soggy meadows and made a lake, which survives amidst the green-striped games-pitches of Harrow School.
fn3 Sir John was to outlive Lancelot by fourteen years, becoming a noted supporter of Pitt the Younger and rising in ranks and titles to the House of Lords, and though additions and alterations were his lifelong passion, he remained faithful to the essentials of Lancelot’s scheme.
fn4 The Serles’ house, Great Testwood, has now gone, but the river landscape remains wonderful, and the salmon-leap survives.
9
BROWNIFICATIONS! (HAMPTON COURT 1765–7)
While from the Thames1 the balmy zephyrs spring,
And fan the air with odif’ruous wing;
While every grove resounds with warbling notes
From soarin
g lark the trembling music flotes.
There Sion lifts her venerable pile
Where hospitality still wears a smile,
Where taste and elegance and grandeur shine,
And every virtue decks brave Piercy’s line!
Sidney Swinney, verse epistle to Lord Irwin, 1767
THE TAG OF his royal appointment boosted Lancelot’s business (which was attracting a poetic form of its very own) and the pattern of frenetic travelling set in 1764 continued through the next year, into his fiftieth year (1766) and beyond. The coldest months were no break, for there was so much essential winter work: the pruning and moving of trees, laying of hedges and planting in open weather, and the crucial structural work of fencing and staking out to be organised. In February 1765 he took the long journey to northernmost Norfolk, to Sir Edward Astley’s Melton Constable Hall, where he collected £200 for the first stage of work. It promised well, but the land was flat and a lake was made ‘with uncommon difficulty’; Sir Edward paid out £200–300 for the next four years for planting and plans for a number of ornamental buildings, but the schemes faltered and Lancelot’s work was overlaid by other hands.
