Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  Lancelot, as he left, was further informed by Sir Walter’s Newcastle amanuensis, whom he had never met, that work was stopped at Wallington and Rothley until Sir Walter’s return, ‘and gives me some direction,37 in respect of the trouble he has already given you, which I hope I may have an opportunity of communicating to you before you leave this part of the country’. Lancelot had the last word, leaving a message for Sir Walter that he readily understood ‘the impropriety’38 of his request for the shooting, but ‘he would not take any payment … and any trouble he had been at was entirely at your service’.

  ‘A Miniature Picture from a Raphael’

  By now it has become clear that the King’s Master Gardener was at least watchful of his duties, and his stately figure clad in Lincoln green, with his ruddy, outdoors face and amused grey eyes, topped by his frizzled grey periwig and beaver hat (soon raised), had become a familiar figure in the royal gardens. The guards all knew him well, and the youngest dairymaids dropped their curtseys; if he encountered the Queen and her ladies, Lancelot smartly removed his hat, bowed and stopped to chat. His assumed right of passage into any or all of his gardens, which might have seemed pomposity to lesser mortals, was simply part of his job.

  At Queen Charlotte’s house at the head of the Mall the evidence on the ground is that he did supervise the layout of the serpentine drive all around the garden, and the original planting of the boundaries. Proof that he was a familiar figure there comes in a letter from Frederick Nicolay, Queen Charlotte’s music librarian and violinist in her orchestra, whose main duties were at the Queen’s House, although he lived in Hill Street in Richmond. ‘If you have five Minutes39 to spare when you come to Richmond,’ Nicolay wrote:

  I should take it as a great favour if you would give Yourself the Trouble to call at my House. I am in very great Distress and Trouble, which one Coup d’Oeil of yours into a large piece of Ground of mine (almost half an Acre) would soon relieve me from: I hope it is no Offence to wish for a Miniature Picture from a Raphael!

  Nicolay could only have watched the planting materialising at the Queen’s House, as well as perhaps work at Richmond Lodge, to appreciate the master in action.

  On the other hand, Lancelot suspected that any aggravations he suffered originated in the bureaucratic Office of Works, in charge of all the royal buildings and their budgets, though most definitely not of the King’s Master Gardener, who was the King’s servant and his own man. Lancelot’s quarterly imbursements came directly from the Chief Clerk at the Treasury in Downing Street. The two chief Architects of the Office of Works had been installed at Hampton Court when Lancelot arrived, Robert Adam and William Chambers. With Adam – who worked at Croome, Syon, Luton Hoo and Alnwick, to name but four of the places where they met – his working relationship was good: their styles were very different, each recognised the other’s worth, and Adam was known for his charm and ease of manner. William Chambers was the favourite of Princess Augusta, for whom he had laid out Kew Garden, a mixture of scientifically bedded garden, ferme ornée-style pastures for sheep and a lake, all embraced by a tangle of walks with no fewer than twenty-three ornamental buildings: temples, a mosque, the Orangery, the Ruined Arch and of course the Pagoda, this last being gloriously decorated with gilded dragons. Chambers was jealous of his royal territory; he had been the young George III’s drawing master and had moved easily into feeling himself to be royal architect. He worked at the Queen’s House, had built the King an observatory at Richmond for the royal observance of the transit of Venus in 1769 (for which Captain Cook had been despatched to the South Seas for a better view), and now the King was minded to commission Chambers for a palace at Richmond.

  Chambers also had a high opinion of his own talents, and little of anyone else’s (even Robert Adam was wary of him), and so when Lancelot strode into Richmond Lodge intent on transforming the flat riverside gardens, Chambers was perturbed. The foundations of the new palace were being dug, and the King was eager for progress on his gardens, having ordered a complete change from his mother’s very flat Kew – an emphasis on natural groves and glades, with undulations that were dug by under-employed royal guardsmen, and a ha-ha to protect the walks from paddocks for his rare breeds of cattle, sheep and goats. In this process the King banished the mouldering remains of his grandmother Queen Caroline’s follies, the Hermitage and Merlin’s Cave – the last-named with an elf-cap roof of thatch (much nibbled) built forty years earlier, and where the poet Stephen Duck had played the wizard. Much more fuss was made of the demolition of Merlin’s Cave than of the King’s clearance of the hamlet of West Sheen, which, in anticipation of Highland history, had to make way for sheep.

  Lancelot relied upon Michael Milliken, now happily installed as the gardener, to keep him informed. ‘Their Majestys40 came into the works on Saturday after you were gone,’ wrote Milliken:

  I told the King you stayed till two o’clock and that I had said to you that their Majestys seldom ever came after that time. He said He had been detained but should see you next Saturday. The King did not bid me inform you so. But I do it in case you should be engaged you can possibly put it off for that Day and I think he rather wishes to see you. He was much pleased with the Levels and asked if you was not so too. I told him you found no faults.

  The loss of Merlin’s Cave and the appearance of a new naturalness in the King’s garden was too much for Lancelot’s enemies; if there was no opportunity for attack at Richmond, they would try elsewhere. In late October of 1770 he opened a letter complaining of the state of Hampton Court gardens, ‘not in so good a condition41 as they ought to be … none of the Walkes being fit for use, and most of the other parts of the Gardens much neglected’. Lancelot was furious: ‘I believe I am the first King’s Gardiner that the Board of Works ever interfered with,’ he spluttered. He knew from experience these warnings, ‘under the Colour of Friendship’, and clearly believed that this letter, signed by William Robinson, Clerk Itinerant to the Board of Works, had quite a different source and an ulterior motive, ‘because I know both the Author’s meaning, & his Conduct on that Subject’. He answered:

  I know the Gardens are in exceeding good order, & I can assure you that I lay out an hundred Pounds a Year more than my Predecessor did, my wish & my intention is to keep them better & put them in better order than ever I saw them in, & have stopp’d at no Expense in procuring Trees & Plants, nor grudged any number of Hands that were necessary.

  He had been through the gardens ‘this day’ (5th November 1770) ‘and my Foreman told me that they had more hands than they knew how to employ’. The walks, he admitted, were in winter dress, for the gravel had had to be dug over three times, ‘otherwise it would have been as Green as Grass’. He ended with a flourish: ‘You will be so good as to inform the Gentlemen of the Board of Works that Pique I pity, that Ideal Power I laugh at, that the Insolence of Office I despise, & that real Power I will ever disarm by doing my Duty.’

  The following year, 1771, Thomas Richardson’s survey of the royal properties at Kew and Richmond was published, and the juxtaposition of Chambers’s Kew and Brown’s Richmond revealed a glaring truth – that Kew was a clumsy and ugly layout, and was completely outshone by Lancelot’s elegant riverside groves. The King’s bid for more land for his proposed new palace had fallen foul of local interests, notably the Selwyn family, who, having been ousted from West Sheen, had bought considerable properties along what is now the Kew road, and were certainly not inclined to be pushed out again to allow an extension of royal territory. Then fate took a hand, when Princess Augusta died in February 1772 and the King realised he could unite his Kew and Richmond properties. There was now adequate accommodation for the royal family, and so Chambers’s new palace was cancelled. All unwittingly, Lancelot had acquired an enemy in William Chambers, who now plotted his revenge.

  Richmond and Kew Gardens, survey 1771 by Peter Burrell and Thomas Richardson revealing the pedestrian layout of Kew Gardens by Sir William Chambers, and the elegance of
Lancelot’s riverside groves for George III.

  fn1 William Patoun was one of a circle of clever amateur painters living at Richmond, d. 1783; Benjamin West (1738–1820), born in Pennsylvania, settled in London in 1763 and became George III’s favourite painter.

  fn2 Garrick died in 1779, but Eva Garrick lived to be ninety-eight and maintained her garden until 1822. Hampton House was badly damaged by fire in 2008, but the tunnel is still there, as is the Temple and the lawn by the river, the latter slightly diminished by road-widening.

  fn3 The Lovibond sale of 1176 was where Horace Walpole bought Sir Peter Lely’s A Boy as a Shepherd, now in Dulwich Picture Gallery. It seems that conversations with Garrick and Lovibond inspired Lancelot’s interest in paintings – portraits especially – which began at about this time.

  fn4 The Duchess immediately placed a statue of a hermit in the cave, called the ‘Nine Year Hole’ because of thieves’ treasure buried there for nine years, and it soon became a great attraction, and featured in an illustration for Josiah Wedgwood’s ‘Green Frog Dinner Service,’ made for Catherine the Great.

  fn5 Stroud, see here, implies that Lancelot worked on Wallington Hall’s gardens, damming the Wansbeck into a long lake, and adding ornamental buildings including a ‘Chinese Temple’ and a Sanderson Miller-style Gothic tower. Nick Owen, regretfully, finds no evidence that Lancelot ever worked at Wallington (George Brown, as master mason, worked on garden walls and buildings and on James Paine’s ‘whoops-a-daisy’ bridge: the view of this bridge from the walled garden is very cleverly devised). The surviving plan for these works could have been the work of the head gardener Thomas Duffield, whom we know had been busy with the theodolite; if Duffield was as competent as the plan implies, it was no wonder he was jealous of Lancelot. Duffield was pessimistic about the Rothley Lower Lake plan, which he thought ‘cannot be executed under £2,000 which is a large and difficult sum to be raised’. He asked Sir Walter to consider postponement.

  fn6 The former farm buildings of Kirkharle Hall are now converted into the shops and workshops of Kirkharle Courtyard, where there is an exhibition telling the story of Lancelot’s life. John and Kitty Anderson have initiated the brave project for the making of the lake that Lancelot designed for Kirkharle’s park. At adjacent Wallington Hall, owned by the National Trust, the Rothley drawings are on display.

  11

  ‘ALL OVER ESTATES AND DIAMONDS’

  No man that1 I ever met with understood so well what was necessary for all ranks and degrees of society; no one disposed his offices so well, set his buildings on such good levels, designed such good rooms, or so well provided for the approach, for the drainage, and for the comfort and convenience of every part he was concerned in. This he did without ever having had one single difference or dispute with any of his employers. He left them pleased, and they remained so as long as he lived.

  Henry Holland on his father-in-law, 1788

  LANCELOT’S INNOCENT INVESTMENT in the Fenstanton estate turned rapidly into a poisoned chalice, for he had hardly drawn breath before he found himself ‘pricked’ or nominated to serve as High Sheriff from February 1770. The workings of the political machinery were slowly revealed; he had been at Trentham at least twice during the negotiations and had discussed them with Lord Gower; Gower was a government colleague of the Earl of Sandwich, whose home was at Hinchingbrooke outside Huntingdon, from where he ran the political life of the county as a very tight ship, as befitted his famously colourful role as First Lord of the Admiralty. For administrative purposes, the counties of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire were conjoined twins and provided sheriffs in alternate years (with the Isle of Ely), but they were sparsely populated, especially little Huntingdonshire, and candidates were hard to find. ‘The nomination2 of the Sheriff is absolutely in my hands,’ Lord Sandwich had explained to Lancelot’s client, Sir John Hynde Cotton of Madingley a few years earlier, ‘have you no friend that will undertake that office for you, it will be a great stroke in your favour, & more for the appearance of it than the reality, as a pocket sheriff of your nomination will sufficiently show the support you have from above.’ (Sir John seems to have found his pocket sheriff in the prosperous farmer Edward Martin the younger of Fenstanton.)

  Officially, in the eighteenth century, the Sheriff’s position in ‘county dignity’3 came third, behind the Lord Lieutenant (George Montagu, 4th Duke of Manchester) and his deputy (his cousin, John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich), but in practice the Sheriff was below the ‘social grade’ of a Justice of the Peace, ‘hence a sort of tacit4 conspiracy to let the office fall either on the minor gentry, or on a young man who had come early to his father’s estate, or else a commercial gentleman recently settled in the county’, who in this way ‘paid his footing’. Clearly for Lancelot, with a more than full-time profession, and not even living in the county as far as we know, the onerous task of administering the courts and prisons, entertaining the assize judges and ‘answering for the behaviour of a host of minions over whom he had no control’ was out of the question; and yet his name does appear in the list of High Sheriffs, serving from 9th February 1770 until 6th February 1771. How did he do it? Part of the answer comes in correspondence between Lords Sandwich and Gower, who concocted a plan whereby ‘Brown should be relieved5 of the burden,’ and that the relief should come as a favour from Lord Sandwich. ‘It might not be amiss,’ Sandwich concluded in his letter of 19th November 1769, ‘if you was to send Mr Brown to apply to me, as it might occasion the beginning of a Huntingdonshire connection between us.’

  No official records or accounts for the shrievalty in that year can be found, but there is evidence from a surprising source, Uvedale Price, who was diverted during his Essay on the Picturesque, etc., to write: ‘I remember hearing,6 that when Mr Brown was high sheriff, some facetious person observing his attendants straggling, called out to him “Clump your javelin-men” – a piece of ridicule that might have served as a lesson that such figures should be confined to men drilled for formal parade not to “loose and airy shapes of vegetation”.’ So, Lancelot did appear in the Assize procession, and the witty observer indicates that it was in Cambridge. (The Cambridge Chronicle, 19th February 1770, reports that Lord Chief Justice Wilmot on the Norfolk circuit was at Huntingdon on 10th March, and in Cambridge on Tuesday 13th.) Otherwise Lancelot’s solution was disarmingly simple, and shows the wisdom of naming your eldest son after yourself. Lance Brown was fortunately of age, just (twenty-two in early January 1770), and completing his law studies at Lincoln’s Inn (he was called to the Bar in 1772), and was the perfect ‘pocket sheriff’ of his father’s nomination. Lance was apparently on Lord Sandwich’s staff at Hinchingbrooke – the locals did not know one Lancelot Brown from the other – and this is how things were managed, and how Lance found his taste for politics. Lance lived in Elsworth (perhaps as a tenant of Sandwich), an airy village on the downs south of Fenstanton, where his sisters Bridget and Peggy were soon visiting, and before long his name appeared in the county list of Justices of the Peace.

  ‘By Lincoln I lie in the Road’

  Burton Constable in the East Riding of Yorkshire has a unique claim to fame, in that Lancelot turned up there with clockwork regularity in September (once in August) for six or seven years during the 1770s. One explanation is that he left Biddy at Boston for a family holiday, and then returned for her; otherwise his punctuality is a wonder. The jovial and corpulent William Constable ranks as one of his most interesting clients: Lancelot proposed his first visit in the late summer of 1772, ‘if possible’, to which Constable replied, ‘Permit me to hope7 that the If is merely possible. Was I young and provident I would not press, but feeble and keen in my wants a year seems to me an age. Mr Lascelles flatters himself with seeing you in September. By Lincoln I lie in the Road and most sincerely hope and wish you may think so.’

  Lancelot would be a fool, had he thought the journey that easy. For as Yorkshire gossip clearly flew across the 60 miles from Edwin Lascelles at Hare
wood, west of York, to Burton Constable, within sight of the North (German) Sea, so it appeared that Lancelot was expected to fly over the wide Humber estuary. The road from Lincoln ceased at the water’s edge, and his coach and its contents had to be surrendered to the New Holland ferry crossing to Hull; it was a journey he grew to hate, more than once ‘a most shocking passage’, as he later reported to Biddy. The Humber, if not storm-tossed and murky, was crowded with shipping, for Hull was the busy transit port for the Russian and Baltic trade, and for the coastal carriers and barges that freighted inland up the Humber to the Ouse and York, then via the Trent and Aire to Leeds. Through the crowded wharfways his coach would be jostled by heavy loads of Swedish steel; the air of the town was thick with pungent smells, from maltings, oil and cake mills, brickworks and limekilns; but the merchants’ houses, where fortunes were made in the names of Kirkby, Sykes, Thornton and Wilberforce, were worthy of Lancelot’s notice, for he was bound for the countryside where those fortunes were spent.