by Jane Brown
Lancelot was at Alnwick Castle in the first week of July 1769, for he was given £300 on the 10th, as recorded in the castle accounts; the same amount received on the same day appears in his own account book, and though he lumps payments for Syon and Alnwick together, he could not have been in those two places at once. July 1769 is a certain start for work at Alnwick – indeed, £300 would have been his customary first payment on a contract, to cover his expenses for a long journey.
From Fenstanton it was about 34 miles to Burghley, or The George at Stamford, but with so far to go it is likely that the coachman pounded on up the Great North Road to one of the traditional intermediary stops, the Ram Jam at Stretton (or Colsterworth if they could not make Grantham). From Grantham, it was the long haul to Newark and crossing the Trent, then Retford and Doncaster; from Doncaster, it would be just under 40 miles to York via Selby, although as he had a sprinkling of commissions to the west – at Byram near Ferrybridge, at Temple Newsam on the road to Leeds, at Harewood on the Leeds–Harrogate road, at Allerton Mauleverer near Knaresborough and at Ripley Castle – there would be some diversions. There was then nothing to delay him through the long stretch of North Yorkshire until Aske Hall near Richmond, where he worked for Sir Lawrence Dundas; and then it was the Roman road to Piercebridge, Bishop Auckland and Durham, before the penultimate stretch to Newcastle. From the centre of Newcastle it was a slow 30 miles to the north-west to Cambo and Kirkharle, or a rather faster 40 miles to Alnwick via Morpeth.
It meant a great deal to be returning to the countryside of his birth. Northumberland is a large county, but not so large that the Percys of Alnwick did not pervade its cultural memory. In Lancelot’s youth these had been rather faded memories, for the Percys were at low ebb, their estates broken and rented out, their woods shorn of ancient trees; all this had changed with the coming of the new Earl and Countess in 1750. The Countess Elizabeth, with her Percy blood inherited from her grandmother, Elizabeth Percy, Duchess of Somerset, was especially determined to restore the family’s legendary pride. Her husband, born Hugh Smithson (in 1715), but changed to Percy, was the son of a royalist baronet of Stanwick Park near Catterick in North Yorkshire – a capable, dynamic and handsome man, excellently ducal material, though they did not know it at the time they married, in 1740. With the death of Elizabeth’s only brother, Lord Beauchamp, on his Grand Tour in 1744, then of her grandparents, the Duke and Duchess of Somerset, followed only too swiftly by that of her father in 1750, they found themselves Earl and Countess of Northumberland and, as we know, owning Syon and Alnwick. Thanks to Lord Northumberland’s vigorously interfering politics, and Lord Chatham and George III, they were now Duke and Duchess of Northumberland (and, thankfully, do not change their names again).
In Northumberland the Duke’s role was as improving landlord and a gardener on the grand scale, having earned Philip Miller’s dedication of his Gardener’s Dictionary of 1752 for his ‘knowledge and skill24 in every part of this subject’. The Duchess was a gem, undoubtedly Lancelot’s most spirited duchess; she was no beauty, and the genesis of her childhood name of ‘Poke’ is only too easily gathered from her portrait by Reynolds. But she was the product of an idyllic childhood, an only child for ten years, loved wisely and well by her parents; her mother Frances Thynne was married ‘out of the school-room’ and was just sixteen when Poke was born; as Countess of Hertford she had onerous court duties, and hated them, but managed always to put her daughter’s welfare first. The Hertfords had a touchingly restrained marriage, and they were both passionate gardeners, making their Virgilian groves at Marlborough Castle, filling them with poetic shepherdesses and hermits; the Duchess’s mother had a wildlife garden for partridges and butterflies and a love for all wild creatures – Thomson cast her for ever as ‘the gentle Hertford’. When not at Marlborough and necessarily in London, their taste was for romantic hideaways: their tumbledown house on St Leonard’s Hill in Windsor Forest, followed by Lord Bathurst’s beautiful garden at Richings, near Iver in Buckinghamshire, which they named Percy Lodge.
The Duchess was the product of all this, and of her habitual travels all over Britain, as well as to Germany, Switzerland and France; she had sought out Voltaire and visited Versailles, but was equally interested in a wider spectrum of people and buildings, in whatever caught her lively interest – her peers dubbed her ‘vulgar’. At Alnwick, in the summers, she had taken ‘upon herself the role25 of the Percy heiress in her homeland with great seriousness’ and with gusto and determination that everyone should enjoy the presence of ‘our duke and duchess’ in their lives. The castle was opened to visitors, she revived the local theatre and July fairs, and was particularly keen on the traditions of Northumberland pipers.
In all this she was aided and abetted by Thomas Percy, a brilliant cleric of modest Bridgnorth background who became the Northumberlands’ chaplain and tutor to their younger son, Algernon, in 1765; ‘For Percy,’ wrote his biographers, ‘made to feel at home26 from the start’ in Alnwick, ‘his new position must have been nothing less than enchantment: the scholar whose favourite subject was ancient English poetry had been magically transported to the very heart of the country where much of the poetry he liked best had its origin.’ Percy, who had the living of Easton Maudit in Northamptonshire from his Oxford college, Christ Church, owed his exceptional fortunes to his discovery of an old book of forgotten poems and ballads being used to light a fire in a friend’s house in Shifnal; rescued and researched, edited and polished, the ballads and heroic poems of the North Country were published – encouraged by Dr Johnson – as Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in three-volume sets (of which 1,100 sets were sold) in 1765. He began exploring immediately upon his arrival at Alnwick, pouring forth lyrical descriptions – of how he rode down from the castle into ‘a deep sequestered Valley’27 passing under a high cliff, with overhanging trees ‘watered at the foot by a clear running Brook, which after a shower affords one or two very fine Waterfalls’, then up over ‘wide swelling slopes’ from where he could see the sea, and up more onto heathland, with ‘the vast swellings of Chiviot’ appearing to the west; he found a ‘hermit’s cave’ and crossed over ‘the Flowery Head of Carmel’ – called by the country people Brisley (Brizlee) Hill – and down again to ford the Aln, ‘meandering in the most beautiful and whimsical irregularities’, until he reached his goal, the ruin of Hulne Priory, where – protected by the Percys in the twelfth century – Carmelite friars had lived peaceably gathering honey.
The Duchess was delighted with Percy’s outpourings, had his description printed and given to visitors, so prompting a taste for the picturesque at Alnwick.fn4
All this explains the atmosphere of conscious enchantment – his first real encounter with an early enthusiasm for the picturesque – that awaited Lancelot at Alnwick; he was also somewhat compromised by his status as a visiting celebrity, with the emphasis on the ‘visiting’. The established incumbent was Thomas Call, whom the Duke had brought from Stanwick, as ‘principal estate servant’28 responsible for the landscaping of Hulne demesne and especially the extensive tree-planting. Call had the ‘ear of his master’, wrote the Duke long letters full of his ideas and advice, and ‘his readiness to act without consulting others’ on the estate caused great ruffling of feathers; when the Duke and Duchess were away, Call was virtually in charge. What was there left for Lancelot to do?
Canaletto had painted the castle in 1752 showing it in a rocky, boulder-strewn and wild setting; now that there was exquisite wildness in plenty in Hulne demesne to the north-west, the castle – magnificent in itself – required a contrasting softness. Daniel Garrett and James Paine had made alterations in the castle, and Robert Adam was to decorate the state rooms. Lancelot planned a new causeway approach (the present approach) and a general smoothing of the castle mound. The extensively rolling contours down to the meadows beside the Aln that make for such a beautiful setting today have a definite Brownian look. The workmen rolling the causeway were depicted in a dr
awing by J. Vilet, and Thomas Call records payments to Cornelius Griffin’s men (Griffin was Lancelot’s foreman) in September 1770.
The extent of Lancelot’s softening of the landscape and planting of shelter belts and clumps extended beyond the Aln to the meadows and gently sloping fields of the North Demesne, effectively the castle’s park. Having made the immediate setting for the castle, he would naturally have regarded all the views out from the approach and from the castle ramparts – and the responding views back to the castle – as part of his scheme; the dramatic possibilities of the Hulne park would also surely have tempted him? Lancelot certainly knew Thomas Percy – it was rarely that he met a person who so nearly shared his own perceptions of landscape – and Percy treasured some of Lancelot’s sketches of Syon’s park, still in the possession of his descendants. Would Lancelot have done far more at Alnwick, but for the possessiveness of Thomas Call, and his own recurrently failing health? He was expected to provide Alnwick’s lake; in his ‘Letter’ Thomas Percy had noted how the Aln, as seen from Brizlee Hill, was to be received into a huge lake of 20 acres. In 1770 the Duke’s surveyor Thomas Wilkin, at Lancelot’s request, had shown the lake covering the whole of the marshy area known as Palmstrother. In the summer of 1771 Thomas Call and Cornelius Griffin accompanied the canal engineer, James Brindley (who was paid £450), on a site inspection to plan for the dam and cascades. Lancelot must have nominated Brindley because he was unable to be there, but Brindley too was ailing, and died later in the year. In the November a great flood came – the Tyne bridge at Newcastle was swept away, as was Alnwick’s town bridge, and the Aln swept through the valley below the castle, taking away the bridge (and the idea of a lake) in its wake. The bridge was rebuilt by James Adam, with the Northumberland lion on the parapet, but the lake was forgotten. The Duke’s pleasure boat, delivered in anticipation, was moored at the Lion Bridge.
Cornelius Griffin, still working for Lancelot, was taken ill in the summer of 1772 and died in early September at Alnwick. Urgent messages were sent to Lancelot, who was himself unwell at home at the time, and he arranged for a replacement; in 1773 Thomas Beisley, who had worked at Syon, moved to Alnwick – the Duchess noted that he had a team of seventy-eight men planting and creating pleasure grounds around the castle, which must have given Lancelot some satisfaction that his vision for the castle in its landscape was being fulfilled. Beisley was to stay for forty years, becoming Keeper of the parks and pleasure grounds. But it is unlikely that Lancelot was there himself, for his account with the Duke stutters to a close with £100 paid in full for 1771, and in February 1773, in a rather emotional scrawl, he notes £100 paid – the completion of the balance and ‘for my trouble’. The Duchess died in 1776 and the Duke placed memorials at several of her favourite places, most spectacularly the Gothic tower designed by Robert Adam on the top of Brizlee Hill. It is inscribed by the Duke: ‘Look about you29 I have measured all these things; they are my orders; it is my planning; many of these trees have been planted by my own hand.’ Such is the privilege of dukedoms.
On leaving Alnwick in 1769, Lancelot went to see his brother George at Cambo. His round of visits included seeing Sir Walter Blackett at Wallington and Lady Loraine30 and her son, the young Sir William, at Kirkharle – the grandson of the Sir William of his childhood. He discussed schemes for both places; in October, Ralph Forster, the agent at Wallington who had succeeded William Robson, was writing that ‘Lady Loraine is so very pressing for the loan of [the Wallington] Theodolite’, urging Thomas Duffield, the Wallington head gardener, to finish his job as best he could ‘and so let the Lady have the instrument for the present’. The following 3 March (1770) Forster was receiving instructions from Sir Walter in London, for Thomas Duffield and George Brown, ‘that he would have31 all the old and new plantations properly fenced, the roads and hedges taken care of, the head of the Low Lake at Rothley to be proceeded on in the Summer according to a plan which will be sent to them drawn by Mr Lancelot Brown’.
The plans duly arrived (and are still at Wallington). They are delicately drawn, but have a peculiarity in that they are isolated details: half a lake, an end of a lake, a five-arched rustic bridge, and alternate ideas for a Gothic, castellated fishing and picnic house. They present ideals of design, and are a great tribute to Lancelot’s visual memory, for the half a lake – Rothley lower lake – is fitted into the actual landscape and appears exactly as the drawing, but apparently with no contextual survey. (The detail for the head of the lake is marked with pricked survey lines; they are all in the same hand, most likely that of Samuel Lapidge or Jonathan Spyers.)
Lancelot was back in September the following year, staying with the Loraines at Kirkharle Hall; it was 3 miles to Cambo, the Wallington estate village, from where his brother George conducted him along the straight, well-made roads that were Sir Walter Blackett’s (and George Brown’s) pride, northwards from Scot’s Gap to Rothley Park. Rothley Crags form the most dramatic outcrop, upon which Sir Walter had built his most ambitious folly, ‘a vast ruin’d Castle32 built of Black Moor Stone’ designed by Daniel Garrett, the beginning of his detached and Picturesque park, rather in the manner of Hulne park at Alnwick. Beyond the Crags was a smaller outcrop, Codger Crag, for which Thomas Wright designed a miniature fortress (the walls survive), overlooking the valley where Lancelot’s lower lake was being dug. The spoil, piled on the northern bank, made the site for a planned fishing house, with a miniature enclosed garden. The eastern head of the lake, given a characteristic Brownian serpent’s-head curve, was to be made 25 feet wide – as a note instructs – ‘the earth to be taken away from the banks to give it this form’. And it was. Arthur Young saw ‘a very fine33 newly-made lake of Sir Walter Blackett’s surrounded by young plantations, which is a noble water; the bends and curves of the bank are bold and natural, and when the trees get up, the whole spot will be remarkably beautiful’.
The road to Rothbury was carried on the five-arched bridge, which dammed the water flowing in from the Donkinrigg and Hardwood burns to the west into a long Upper Lake, which appears to have filled to the natural contours (at least there is no word from Lancelot on this lake). Subsequently the Upper Lake was enclosed in woodland; Lancelot’s Lower Lake has remained open, for fishing, its beautifully graded banks roughened by time and grazing animals, but with relics of the softening waterside planting that he decreed.fn5
Back at Kirkharle in September 1770, Lady Loraine’s need for the theodolite is explained in a detailed survey that she had prepared for the surroundings of the hall. The survey, presuming that it showed the landscape in 1770, was of the park dominated by the old west–east avenues and straight lines of the formal gardens that Lancelot had known in his childhood; the Kirkharle burn ran through the park, passing close to the hall; the site of the old village, where Lancelot was born, was marked, but the little street of cottages was gone, rebuilt in the modern manner as substantial two-storeyed houses higher up the hill. Armstrong’s map of 1769 shows the chief of these houses as belonging to ‘Mr Brown’, which would have been Richard, still a bachelor and newly established as agent for the Duke of Portland, working from Kirkharle; his widowed mother Jane Brown had probably returned to live in the hall with her sister-in-law, Lady Loraine. (Richard Brown was shortly to move to Newcastle, where he wrote from a house in Big Market, and where he married and lived for the rest of his life.)
Quite what Lancelot did at Kirkharle in 1770 or thereabouts is the subject of much controversy. In 1983, on the 200th anniversary of his death, an exhibition in Newcastle34 revealed the recent discovery by John Anderson, the present owner of Kirkharle, of a design drawing showing the transformation of the Kirkharle burn into an S-curving linear lake. The field, or park, boundaries are softened with shelter planting, but there are no ‘circuits’ of serpentine drives through these plantations. One might argue that the climate in Northumberland was not conducive to pleasure drives. Another significant feature is a grand semicircular entrance drive sweeping in and out via two
lodge entrances; also shown is a walled kitchen garden north-west of the house, on the south-facing slope, a pool in the garden being filled by the passage of the Kirkharle burn. The plan is unsigned, and has a tentative air about its drawing style, but upon closer examination it is limited by the straight field boundaries that dominate the ‘park’ and were clearly not to be relinquished.
Uncertainties about the location of the hall buildings, and the general lack of sophistication in the plan drawing, have encouraged many people to believe this is Lancelot’s first work, his apprentice graduation piece, dating from when he left Kirkharle in 1739, when indeed he longed to make a lake, and spent hours looking at the boggy nature of the burn’s course through Kirkharle park, which would have indicated certain success. However, it is clear the the Kirkharle plan for the linear lake is in the same hand as the plans for Rothley lake so recently delivered to Sir Walter Blackett. The landscape architect Nick Owen, having patiently examined the evidence, suggests that the scheme was drawn up at Wilderness House as a result of Lancelot’s 1769 visit, and as a present for the young Sir William Loraine, Lancelot’s nephew by marriage, for his coming of age. Sir William was born on 1st June 1749.fn6
Unfortunately, despite what must have been a very warm and welcoming visit to Kirkharle Hall in 1770, his stay ended on a sour note. He had asked Sir Walter Blackett for some shooting, but on 18th September came a note from Sir Walter’s secretary in Newcastle (Sir Walter had been abroad for much of the summer and was now in Paris) ‘desiring me to35 acquaint you that such leave from him will be a very bad precedent, as it must open a gate to any gentleman that will ask him, and that the gentlemen of the county have been so obliged as not to shoot upon those moors but when he was at Wallington and they go out with him.’ It sounded ungrateful, but was in fact wise; the new Game Laws (and a new Act was passed that very year) made it illegal to shoot over another landowner’s land even with permission, if the owner was not present. Or rather, if the owner’s gamekeepers were not exactly sure who was in the party or who might be poaching. The matter was of great controversy, which Lancelot, had he been closely connected with shooting circles, would have known; George Stubbs had at that time, and equally innocently, produced a sequence of four ‘shooting pictures’36 of two friends with their dogs and guns spending a day out on the Duke of Portland’s land at Creswell Crags near Welbeck; no matter how respectable these solid citizens were, how innocent their desire for a day in the fresh air, theirs was an illegal activity. The paintings as popular prints were much about, causing consternation that an innocent citizen could be so easily turned into a criminal, and liable to extreme punishment, simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
