by Jane Brown
The Norfolk prize would have been the Cokes’ Holkham, but little came from a visit to its chatelaine, the widowed Margaret, Countess of Leicester, for whom Lancelot is supposed to have enlarged and ‘softened’ the park. He may have felt that merely continuing Kent’s work was not enough (and what little he did was overlaid by Thomas William Coke, with William Emes and Humphry Repton). Remote and lovely Kimberley, north-west of Wymondham, was progressing, as also was Redgrave, near Diss; and Bedingfield family tradition has it that he worked at Ditchingham, just north of Bungay, as well as 5 miles to the north at Langley near Loddon, where he did visit in 1765.
The pace did not lessen. Catching his clients for critical decisions was always difficult, as Tottenham Park, in Savernake Forest near Marlborough, illustrates. Lancelot’s March expedition was carefully planned, to begin with Lord Bruce at Tottenham and continue to Blenheim, then across to Croome and back via Dodington. Lady Bruce at Tottenham was Susanna Hoare, the sister of Henry Hoare of Stourhead, who had already made sketch suggestions for Tottenham, and Jonathan Spyers had spent three weeks surveying the ground, so that Lancelot was armed with his preliminary ideas. In the first week of March, Lord Bruce cancelled – he was a great favourite of the King and Queen and so subject to peremptory commands. Lancelot did not hesitate to express his ‘real mortification’2 that he would not see the Bruces, for they ‘were the objects of my western expedition’ – but he would come anyway, dismiss the unsatisfactory foreman (who is unnamed), and make one Winckles, the bailiff, ‘Master of the work’. And so Sunday 17th March found him at Tottenham, arriving in time to make an afternoon tour ‘in a storm of snow’.3
Tottenham, as Lancelot knew it, was an enticing proposition; Lord Burlington had designed it for his sister Juliana – who was married to the Lord Bruce of the day (the uncle of Thomas, 2nd Baron Bruce, Lancelot’s client) – as a neo-Palladian forest lodge, hardly more than a picnic house, square with a Venetian-windowed room in each corner, and flanked by free-standing pavilions that were the kitchens on one side and stables on the other. After about ten years Lord Burlington had added corner wings, making ‘a miniature Holkham’,4 as John Harris called it, entered by a straight drive out of the woods of Savernake Forest, through huge rusticated gate piers that guarded the walled courts. After dinner and a night stop with the agent Charles Bill, on the Monday morning (18th Mar 1765), with the weather ‘tolerably favourable’5 (his temper hardly so), Lancelot ‘allowed lining out and finally settled the serpentine walk all round the garden, marked such trees as were proposed to be taken away and gave general directions to Winckles upon everything that occurr’d’. ‘In general,’ reported Charles Bill to Lord Bruce, ‘he approves of what has been done except the taking away [of] a few large trees in one or two places. If the high bank and trees had been taken down, great would have been the fall indeed. Brown would have excommunicated us all …’
Lord Bruce did not escape lightly, either. Lancelot wrote of his being obliged to keep his dates at Blenheim, Croome and Dodington:
which will take me up at least eight or ten Days. I wish your Lordship could stay a few days longer in the country … I have been calculating my time entirely for your Lordship and it will be an extreme mortification to me not to meet your Lordship. I beg your Lordship will contrive as much about this matter as possible because I have been contriving to make everybody meet me at their respective places which puts it out of my power to alter my rout[e].
Feathers ruffled, he arrived at Blenheim, not to fritter his frustrations away, but to get down to serious engineering, as the landscape architect Hal Moggridge appreciates and explains: ‘Brown was6 [therefore] faced with and managed to overcome a very difficult technical problem, the critical fixing of the finished height of the dam with its sluice and cascade that governs the level of the lake, including the preservation of part of the medieval causeway which crossed the valley … in the form of a long island.’ In addition, Lancelot was making the artificial river below the cascade, 1½ miles long and curling back towards the Evenlode: ‘a long side cut and embankment borrowed from canal technology was employed – a quite difficult operation … and all the more impressive given that this was made at the very start of the Canal Age’.
Away from the serious water engineering, Lancelot, rather unaccountably, wished Blenheim to have a legacy of his favourite castellations: he transformed the rather elegant Georgian High Lodge into a castellated Gothic folly, and designed an enormously long screen ‘with pointed windows, battlements and turrets to conceal the granary, carthorse stables, cart sheds and carter’s house at Park Farm’.7 He later assured the Duke of Marlborough that he had taken account of the practical needs of grain storage, as well as that ‘the Effect of the Building would be very proper for the situation’. Most audaciously of all, he proposed that a long stretch of park wall on the Woodstock boundary should be castellated, along with the tops of prominent buildings in the town. Neither the Park Farm nor Woodstock screens were ever built.
The second alphabetical tranche of entries in Lancelot’s account book confirms the business of 1765, and that his efforts were often unrewarded: Sir Edward Astley at Melton Constable appears, but nothing was apparently forthcoming from Holkham, Ditchingham or Langley near Loddon. The Knightleys of Fawsley in Northamptonshire8 – the account opened with £150 paid in July 1765 – were great hunting and sheep-farming neighbours of the Spencers. Lord Spencer’s Wimbledon account is entered, followed by Lord Palmerston’s Broadlands at Romsey, where the rebuilding work sends the figures soaring into many thousands, the money passing through Lancelot’s account before he paid it on to Hollands. Two ‘jobbing’ contracts of small payments, for General Keppel at Derham (Dyrham) near Enfield and Lord Waldegrave at Navestock, show that he was keeping his friends on the Essex/Hertfordshire borders warm. Then he ‘flies’ across country to Sir Henry Bridgeman’s contract for £765 for Weston Park in Staffordshire; it is impossible to keep up with him.
Early August found him at Bowood, where there was a happier working atmosphere with William, 2nd Earl Shelburne, than with his father; Lord Shelburne (later 1st marquess of Lansdowne) was close in politics and friendship to Lord Chatham, and his new wife, Sophia Carteret, was very interested in landscape gardening: ‘Mr Brown9 the gardener came to dinner,’ she noted in her diary for 5th August, ‘and spent the evening giving directions to his men.’ These directions concerned the lake, for on 16th June of the following summer she noted, ‘As soon as breakfast was over we took a walk and were vastly pleased with the effect of the water which flows into a magnificent river and only wants now to rise to its proper height, which it comes nearer to every day.’10
Later in that August 1765) Lord Bruce was discovered making amends – ‘I am very obliged to your Lordship for the venison,’ wrote Lancelot on the 26th, ‘which arrived in perfect order11 and very good.’ Lord Bruce wanted to settle his account, and not for the first time the question of money spurred Lancelot’s temper, for he hated to be thought disorganised:
I have been hurried beyond measure of late … Mr Bill has twice hinted to me that your Lordship wishes to have my account. All I can say on that matter is that I should be extremely sorry to make any demand that is not very agreeable to your Lordship; for my journeys and plan, the admeasurement of the ground I suppose one hundred and ten pounds, but I shall be very happy if your Lordship will satisfy yourself.
Lord Bruce was soon appointed tutor to the princes George and Frederick, and subsequently Comptroller of the Queen’s household, so Tottenham came into the embrace of royal obligations.
From Tottenham and Bowood it was logical to continue into Bath, where Lancelot found some amusement on his brief visits. This time he went to see the King’s Sergeant-Surgeon, Sir Caesar Hawkins, who had bought Kelston Park overlooking the Avon valley (the Hawkins’ had sixteen children, all being portrayed by Thomas Gainsborough at the time). Lancelot earned £500 for work at Kelston in 1767–8.
A great deal of intrigue
surrounds a payment of £100 that Ralph Allen of Prior Park made into Lancelot’s Drummonds account at Christmas 1760; the sum would appear to be for a consultation and a plan, but no connection between Lancelot and Prior Park has been found. At that time Ralph Allen, known for his good humour and generosity, and Sir John Sebright of Beechwood (where Lancelot worked) were controlling Bath politically in William Pitt’s favour, presenting him with the Freedom and a gold casket, as well as the parliamentary seat. The £100 might belong to any of these connections.
And there was still Lord Chatham’s business: Sir William Pynsent having died in the January of 1765, the Pitt family had come into their country estate, despite a challenge to the Will from the family. Needless to say, his lordship was in seventh heaven, exclaiming ‘how the passion12 of dirty acres grows upon a West Saxon of yesterday, and that I meditate laying rapacious hands on a considerable part of the county of Somerset’. He planned a new children’s wing for the house, a library for himself and a ‘bird room’ for Lady Chatham; he intended to farm, and experimentally at that, to improve the roads of the area and plant hundreds of trees. He was obsessive about the privacy for which Burton Pynsent was so well sited, but this was to be enhanced with evergreens, especially cedars and cypresses, many sent from Lancelot’s friends in Hammersmith – for all the nurseries in Somerset ‘would not furnish a hundredth part of his demands’13 – and with pines and maples from Nova Scotia via Plymouth. Of course Pitt wanted to do all the interesting designing and laying out himself, but Lancelot was only too happy to help.
‘I called [at]14 your Builder’s in Bath but found he was set out for your house the same day I arrived at that place,’ Lancelot wrote on 10th September. ‘I shall have some other opportunity of talking and giving him best advice in my power concerning the construction of pillars, scaffolding etc., as Agreeable to my promise.’ His experience of Lord Cobham’s column at Stowe had perhaps inspired the idea for the memorial that Lord Chatham wished to erect to Sir William Pynsent. Lancelot sent the design:
which I hope will merit yr approbation … the figure I have put on the pedestal is Gratitude conveying to posterity the name of Pinsent; which indeed he himself has distinguished & without flattery done in the most effectual manner by making you his heir. On this topic I could say more but may my silence convey my respect, and that your King and your country may be long, very long, very long blessed with yr unparalleled abilities, is the constant wish of Lancelot Brown.fn1
The Burton Pynsent column, Somerset, designed and constructed by Lancelot for the Earl of Chatham, drawn by Barbara Jones.
Late September found Lancelot in Staffordshire, but still wrestling with his conscience over Lord Bruce and Tottenham. Unsurprisingly he was ill: ‘I have been15 so much out of order that I have not been able to write nor do anything else,’ he wrote on 21st September, presumably from Weston or perhaps Trentham. He had sent his assistant Samuel Lapidge to assess the work done at Tottenham, but it was clearly still worrying him:
he writes me word that the surveying and map[p]ing bill with the man’s [Spyers’] expenses at 6d per acre comes to near twenty-five pounds and as to my journeys and plans I have no fixed rule about it nor is it possible to do it but to charge less or more according to the size and trouble. All I can say upon it is that I should be very sorry to diminish my friends, and very sorry to increase my business, for I have so much to do that it neither answers for profit nor pleasure, for when I am galloping in one part of the world my men are making blunders and neglects which [make] it very unpleasant.
Tottenham was a place where prides clashed – Lancelot’s against the steward Charles Bill and bailiff Winckles, who felt it necessary to protect their own positions; but all the angst eventually illustrates a subtlety of Lancelot’s working, as steward Bill continues describing the view from the large study window:
Mr Brown complained16 of its being a straight line thro’ a perfect avenue – he directed the cure of it by rounding off the plantation of laurels at the entrance of it on the left hand. There is a fine Beech there, and he directed the scrub trees to be cleared away a little from behind it which would also enlarge the entrance to the narrow avenue.
This was a subtle trick, saving the fine beech and masking the blatant opening of the avenue, leaving it as a surprise when one had gone round behind the laurels.
Lancelot was attentive to Tottenham through 1766 and beyond, his visits gradually lessening as work was completed in 1773. He is so often accused of destroying avenues, but here he incorporated the Savernake rides, including an avenue 2½ miles long, into his scheme. The house was released from its walled court to stand upon a forest lawn; a rose garden, pleasure grounds and a new kitchen garden were made, but no lake. Much of Tottenham’s charm was in the fairytale juxtaposition of a house surrounded by sunshine and flowers, but in the heart of a deep, dark wood – all lost today because of private enclosure against the public access to much of Savernake Forest.
Staffordshire’s ‘lake district’
In March 1766 The Gentleman’s Magazine printed the words of a popular song celebrating canal promotion.
In Lancashire17 view what a laudable plan,
And brought into fine execution
By Bridgewater’s duke; let us copy the man,
And stand to a good resolution:
If the waters of Trent with the Mersey have vent,
What mortal can have an objection!
So they do not proceed, to cut into the Tweed,
With the Scots to have greater connection.
The ‘long side-cut and embankment’ from early canal technology used at Blenheim did indeed come from canal country, and the connections are intriguing. Croome and the Coventrys were Lancelot’s most likely introduction to the young Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, who in 1758 became engaged to the widowed Duchess of Hamilton, the former Elizabeth Gunning, sister to Maria, Countess of Coventry. Lancelot was summoned to Ashridge,18 the Duke’s vast estate of high commons and beech woods in the Chilterns above Berkhamsted, which included the villages of Little Gaddesden, Ringshall and Aldbury.
Ashridge was a monastery of the Bonhommes, willed by Henry VIII to his daughter Elizabeth 1st, and the home of the Egertons since 1604; as living quarters it was rather chaotic, with a medieval great hall rising above a gaggle of Tudor outbuildings, the most manageable and prettiest part being the three-storey north gate-house. Adjoining this gate-house Hollands built a house of Totternhoe stone, of seven bays with a hipped roof, looking like any comfortable village manor house of that time. This house is shown on George Grey’s estate map of 1762, casting its modest gaze out onto Ashridge park, the deer-grazed lawns dividing around an oval clump of trees, all seeming like Lancelot’s softened setting for the house, before the old straight rides stream off in all directions through limitless acres of undulating woods.
All became lost in disappointment and diversion, for the young 3rd Duke proved strait-laced and forbade his fiancée to see her sister, Maria Coventry, who was behaving badly. Sisterly affections stood firm and Elizabeth and the Duke parted (she married the Marquess of Lorne) and he turned his attentions to his passion for canals, conceived on his Grand Tour when he had seen the Canal du Midi at Carcassonne. Lancelot continued extensive plantings at Ashridge, especially in the Golden Valley north of the house, but it is now difficult to identify his work. Ashridge was to be completely rebuilt in nineteenth-century Gothic glory by the Wyatts father and son, using the fortune from the Bridgewater canal ventures, and Humphry Repton made faux-monastic gardens: seeing all this, John Claudius Loudon felt that the park lacked a lake, and that the required water could be steam-pumped up from the Gade valley to these Chiltern heights.
The Duke of Bridgewater’s first canal, to carry coal from his mines at Worsley to Salford, was started in 1759 and opened in 1761. The Duke had met and taken to ‘the careful, solid millwright’ from Derbyshire named James Brindley, and Brindley was soon employed surveying the line for the
Trent & Mersey Canal to link the potteries with Manchester and Liverpool, being promoted by the Duke in a partnership that included Lord Gower from Trentham and Thomas Anson of Shugborough;19 the Trent flowed through both of their parks. Lancelot was familiar with these places, and it might be said that he had a tendresse for south Staffordshire, Izaak Walton’s watery country. The Pitt connection had introduced him to Lord Gower, and the affable Admiral Anson at Moor Park had sent him to his family home at Shugborough, where his brother was spending a good deal of the Admiral’s prize money on improvements. Did Lancelot work at Shugborough? There they do not think so, but then the records are admittedly poor. There was a lake, with an island and two bridges, all lost after serious flooding in 1795, with a pagoda (also lost) and the Chinese House, built from a drawing brought home by the Admiral, but similar to the one at Stowe and of the same date, about 1747. There are other Stowe-like monuments, to a cat and an enigmatic shepherd, both by Thomas Wright. An explanation may lie with the huge Triumphal Arch set on high in the park, which was turned into a monument to the Admiral, who died, aged sixty-five, in 1762, and his much younger wife, Elizabeth Yorke (sister to Philip Yorke and his wife, Marchioness Grey of Wrest), who died just before her husband. This double bereavement brought a stultifying sadness to Shugborough. It has to be said that Shugborough lacks the graceful cohesion that Lancelot would have brought to the layout, but then, with its wreathing rivers, the Trent and the Sow, it is a place he must have longed to ‘beautify’.
Just to be tantalising, there is at Shugborough a huge landscape painting showing the house in its well-watered plain, bathed in summer sunlight, with the Triumphal Arch, and with neighbouring Tixall Hall and its gatehouse, and – the third of this trio – Ingestre Hall, and even the diminutive Ingestre pavilion20 on the skyline; Lancelot worked at both Tixall and Ingestre. Ingestre is an understated masterpiece, where he made sense of the fragmented efforts of the Chetwynd family, and it has a Wren church in which it is easy to see another pattern for his churches at Croome and Compton Verney. He did not touch the surroundings of the Jacobean hall, but the balustraded terrace became a viewing platform for his ‘intended lawn’, with views to the north and west rising gradually to the edge of a bowl. The skyline was already ornamented with eye-catchers: Sanderson Miller’s tower (similar to his own at Edge Hill and those at Hagley and Wimpole) and the classical Pavilion, dated 1752 (possibly also Miller’s). This Pavilion, Lancelot cursed, sat at an awkwardly oblique angle as seen from the Hall, staring eastwards and closing the vista of an old drive that forged its way across the valley and river towards Hixon and eventually Uttoxeter, but belonging to an earlier age. Lancelot’s solution was to surround both tower and Pavilion in a wilderness/plantation of walks, a miniature park-within-a-park, with an oval pond, all enclosed by a ha-ha and intended as a destination for picnic teas. The Pavilion was used for these Arcadian adventures for many years; the tower, tainted by a murder, was demolished in the mid-nineteenth century. The larger park was defined with a sweep of planting that echoed the line of the ha-ha, and beyond this the old axials of the seventeenth-century avenues to Weston and Hopton were retained.
