Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  As Lancelot discovered, the River Humber guards the East Riding, and particularly the seigneury of Holderness like a moat, from lesser mortals of the south. As his coach hauled out of the town for some 10 miles along the Holderness road, he could breathe the salty tang of the sea, mixed with the airs of a low-lying countryside, with windmills and hayfields; the stacks were new made, some rounded and peaked, others gabled like barns. Beyond Sproatley, Burton Constable Hall was suddenly in full view, not shyly peeping from the trees, but proclaiming itself a magnificently tall and winged Elizabethan mansion of brick (reminiscent of Temple Newsam at first glance) standing proud in a flat countryside. It was the home of an ancient Catholic family who had weathered persecutions and wars. William Constable, who had inherited his house in 1747 when he was twenty-six, remembered what he found as his ‘park’, low-lying (60 feet above sea level), ‘400 or 500 acres8 of Wilderness of Old Thorns, old decayed forest trees, whins or gorse higher than a man on horseback, rushes, hillocks, deep ridge and furrow, rivers and swamps’. In the midst of this wildness there were consolations: ‘plenty of red and fallow deer’ and some ‘wild’ white cattle, similar to those at Chillingham in Northumberland.

  William Constable listed his ‘amusements’ as ‘the Management9 of my affairs, Agriculture, Gardening, Botany, Embellishing my place with taste and propriety and Magnificence. In which I Employ the best Artists of the Kingdom.’ It is said that the embellishing was prompted by his engagement to a distant cousin, Ann Fairfax of Gilling, but this was broken off in about 1755 and for a time William lost interest.

  The great head gardener, Thomas Knowlton of Londesborough, well into his sixties and ‘freelancing’, had made a kitchen garden out of old formal gardens, and in 1760 he was paid for a design for the menagerie, soon built in the park, at one end of a swampy area that William Constable had turned into a long lake. Knowlton was proud of ‘2 stoves with10 a Little Green house in the middle of them 206 feet long’ – the ‘greatest’ he knew. Constable employed a collector, Thomas Kyle, to travel around England collecting exotic fruits and rare plants, and to pick up ideas: Kyle reported on the ‘gardenesque’ notion where ‘hollies and laurels11 are planted round the Higher trees which Hides their Stems’, as practised most notably at Painshill in Surrey. Constable also, as he had said, collected ‘Artists’: the architect Timothy Lightoler had submitted designs for the kitchen garden, possibly the park, and the stable block. This last, a handsome four-square range, survives to Lightoler’s credit, completed in 1771, the year before Lancelot arrived.

  Thomas White,12 a Shropshire farmer’s son with a fine feeling for trees, a surveyor and draughtsman (who worked for Lancelot at Temple Newsam and Harewood and in Staffordshire), was paid ten guineas in January 1769 for a watercoloured plan, which survives at Burton Constable, entitled A Plan of Alterations Designed for Burton Constable the seat of Will[iam] Constable Esq by Thomas White 1768. This shows the hall and surrounding buildings and gardens nestling in a foetal manner, protected by a semicircular ha-ha, in the centre of a very large park, lightly sprinkled with trees, hesitantly clumped. Lightoler’s new stables are included, south of the hall; to the west is a new, outlying kitchen garden beside the road to Old Ellerby, and the lake has become exceedingly long and serpentine. The roads around the park are planted with belts and clumps of trees. It is a perfectly respectable layout with Brownian themes, but lacking verve. (Lancelot thought well of Thomas White and his keenness to get on, and he may have sent him to make this preliminary plan and survey, as was his habit, but White saw an opportunity on his own account.)

  At this point William Constable and his sister Winifred had become consumed in plans for a grand tour, and they left in late November 1769.72 William comes vividly to life in a pastel portrait of the following year by Jean-Étienne Liotard – his sensual and intelligent face sandwiched between the fur hat and fur collar of a costume ‘after the manner of Rousseau’13 – whom they met in Lyons. They returned home in July 1771, having spent £7,000 on their trip and books, paintings, antiquities and sculptures: William, in his own estimation, had become ‘a Collector, a bit of a Vertu’, and his interests were extended to archaeology, anthropology, the sciences of electricity and astronomy. Having sorted his treasures, his energies were renewed for making his home fit for a virtuoso. Lancelot’s reputation had clearly gone before him, and William listed his expectations:

  How to Clump my Avenues.14 Whether the Pales may stand in E Front & opposite to N Wood – to make my Gallery into a Library & Philosophical Room – High Roads from the Stables to the Kitchen Garden – How to Fence the Kitchen Garden, south Border etc., Whether the Road to the House would not be better Higher Up – Whether more Clumps would be proper in the East Front – consult about Water in the park, mention springs – Stake out Everything in W Front Single trees as well as clumps, which kind of Evergreens for the W Front?

  When Lancelot arrived, some things became immediately clear to him: that William Constable had great difficulty in walking (and, like Henry VIII, would require a hoist to get him onto a horse), and that he could not accompany Lancelot farther from the hall than his wheeled chair would take him (he wore out a succession of specially made wheeled chairs, and one remains at the hall). His Steward, Raines, was to take notes, as verbatim as possible, which were faithfully written up, and thus we have a detailed record, almost A Manual of Brownifications, not too distantly removed from one that Lancelot might have written himself.

  He did not arrive at Burton Constable with pre-conceived notions, but addressed William Constable’s requests with meticulous care: ‘how to Clump my Avenues?’ The task was how best to restore an outdated landscape. It was sixty years since Kip and Knyff’s Britannia Illustrata had first presented their fantastical picture of the great houses of England, each surrounded by a starburst of avenues, whether real or imaginary, whose fingers touched across whole counties into a Pythagorean landscape. A well-grown and maintained elm or beech avenue was a truly wonderful thing, and Lancelot had restored and repaired Queen Anne’s avenue at Burghley and the great avenue to Yardley Chase at Castle Ashby, planted at William III’s suggestion, amongst others. But many avenues were too far gone, gap-teethed and broken by wind and weather, and William Constable was understandably ashamed of his relicts. Lancelot never destroyed a healthy and well-shaped tree without heart-searching, nor did he like lopping or heavy pruning, but he did move large trees if he thought this possible. A fine tree could be left as a single specimen. Even less good, or ‘bad’ and spindly trees, elms and ash, might be cut to 6 inches and allowed to shoot, growing on the strongest shoot. The best way with broken avenues was to remove the rubbish and incorporate the survivors into uneven numbered clumps using oak, elm and beech, and ash and larch as ‘nurse’ plants: the clump thus became a utilitarian as well as a decorative device, and a refuge for wild animals and birds, as well as game.

  Steward Raines wrote Lancelot’s words down seemingly verbatim, so that his instructions are clear:

  Trench the ground15 before you plant;

  Three things must be attended to, space, clean-ness and shelter;

  Small clumps are nothing, pimples on the face of Nature, make your Clumps large and massy!

  They needed fencing if they were outside the ha-ha. On return visits Lancelot stressed, ‘Clumps must be weeded and thinned’, especially by taking a useful crop of ash and larch poles from the ‘nurse’ trees.

  Obviously the siting of the clumps – both new ones and judiciously using existing trees – was his art, perfected by the endless walking and staking, and integrated with choosing the path and drive-lines that governed the views. The walks were of gravel, domed in the centres for good drainage, and 6 feet wide; drives were to be 8 feet wide, and the road across the park in a south-westerly direction towards Ellerby, crossing the lake by a bridge, was to be 12 or 15 feet wide. Steward Raines, with a garden boy carrying stakes in tow, followed the striding Master Gardener. The path lines were always purp
oseful: Lancelot suggested a tea pavilion or an ornamental arch (but William Constable grew parsimonious before these were built); views were opened (by cutting) and closed (by planting); and occasionally came that eureka moment as Raines’s pencil flew, ‘by breaking the side16 of the hill to the R and the top of the hill to the L from the place where Mr B stood will make some opening of Light which may be pleasing’; followed by ‘Tom’ (for the boy surely had a name), ‘an extra large stake to mark where Mr Brown is standing’.

  Burton Constable. Lancelot’s works for William Constable during the 1770s:

  House, with gardens including Knowlton’s stoves etc. enclosed by ha-ha.

  Lightoler’s new stable block with shelter belt.

  Old, and present drive approach, apparently not changed to

  Lancelot’s preferred new entrance.

  New walled kitchen gardens beside road to Old Ellerby.

  The Menagerie.

  Bridge and dam where Lancelot extended the lake.

  On the east entrance front where William Constable queried ‘Clumps’ Lancelot gave the house wings of planting. He did move the drive back, if that is what Constable meant by ‘higher up’, and the pale fence was replaced by a sweeping fosse, a ha-ha, around the east front (the fence returned later) and entirely around the north and west sides as well. The copied instruction was ‘the lawn before17 the house was to be eaten with sheep which must be kept from the shrubberies’ – that is, the wings of planting.

  As for the water, Lancelot did indeed consult: ‘lower the surface18 of the water in the lake by 6 or 8 inches in order to keep the adjoining grounds drier, round off the edge of the lake, not so sharp as at present’ (this was the lake that Constable had made himself). It was to be extended southwards so doubling its length, and was to be considerably widened: ‘make a clay wall19 along the east side (of this extension) and the opposite, west side if necessary, by making a trench 1½ feet wide and so deep until you come to the clay, then make a dam across the (outlet) drain and pen up all the water you can get this winter’. This was in 1775; the next year two islands were to be made from the spoil: ‘the islands to be20 about 2½ or 3 ft above the level of the water, the islands to be planted up’; and two years later he changed his mind, ordering one island removed and the other enlarged. Raines recorded, ‘Mr Brown will send21 the design’ for the bridge that masked the controlling dam between the two lakes, which ‘would cost £3–400, the plinth and cornice of stone, the rest of brick’. This fine five-arched bridge survives.

  Lancelot provided the sparkle to the Burton Constable landscape (he also made the south entrance court with his favourite crenellated walls); he seemed to be practising his new approach, that of the visiting consultant who criticised or praised on a regular basis, and so eased his ideas into reality. This depended upon good men on the ground, and William Constable was fortunate in Steward Raines, and one James Clarke, who rejoiced in the title Director of Groundwork: ‘in levelling and uniting22 grounds, forming swells … [and] plantations and the whole executive part of beautifying and finishing a place with the most accurate neatness Mr Clarke excels’. Thomas White, whose proposals had by no means been disgraced, continued profitably to supply trees and other plants.

  After his first visit to Burton Constable in the autumn of 1772, Lancelot was still travelling far and fast. A note from Croome in November told him that ‘since the water has been let into the River it has been found that the Head (dam) is faulty, in many places’. Repairs were beyond the skill of the home workforce, so could Benjamin Read come to help? Lord Coventry also mentioned the hoped-for plan for the model farmhouse, ending cheerfully that he heartily gave the invitation ‘to a Christmas gambol’.23 Whether Lancelot gambolled we do not know, but he visited Fisherwick, near Lichfield, where the young Arthur Chichester, 5th Earl of Donegall, had ambitious rebuilding plans; and he inspected Oakly, on the edge of Ludlow, on behalf of Lord Clive. He also appears to have made his first visit to the Earl of Derby’s Knowsley Park24 in Lancashire, for he definitely stayed with his friends the Jodrells in Manchester, taking them a gift of venison. A warm letter from ‘your much oblig’d friend’ James Jodrell, on 21st December, mentions the ‘fortunate swain’25 – meaning Henry Holland, who was newly engaged to Lancelot’s daughter, Bridget: ‘we drank your health as the Founder of our feast, nor did not forget the rest of your family, who always share in our best wishes’.

  After more ill rumours about Lord Chatham’s health, Lancelot had exchanged anguished letters with Hester; the anguish was mostly on his side, for he saw some ‘sinister purpose’ in the gossip. Hester, ever sympathetic, and dancing in her phrases, assured him ‘that my Lord has enjoyed26 quite a good state of health’ at Burton Pynsent, though she understood only too well ‘there are ever restless and intriguing spirits, who employ themselves in framing dark schemes’. They were thankfully far removed ‘from the scenes of Public Action’ and spending times of greatest cheerfulness with their friends and neighbours in the country. Her only ailments were the results of attending too many country dances with her ‘Young People’.

  Lord Chatham’s health was to continue improving, but not so Lancelot’s. The New Year of 1773 opened with Lord Exeter’s little note choosing the three-arched bridge for Burghley, and ending with the wish ‘that many happy New Years attend the family at Hampton’.27 Two days later another came from Lord Brooke at Warwick, wanting a character reference for a gardener, and with ‘the compliments of the Season to his old friend Mr Brown’.28 Lancelot was too poorly to reply and a message was sent to the Duke of Northumberland, who knew the gardener in question and provided the reference; the Duke was sorry to hear Lancelot was unwell, and hoped to see him at Syon before too long.

  He was not to be at Syon for many weeks, for as the letters piled up unanswered and his world went on without him, fifty-seven-year-old Lancelot was seriously ill. Whether it was his usual pleurisy and pneumonia, or something else entirely, we cannot know, but he was laid low well into the spring, if not the early summer. It was an agonising lowness for all concerned, for he was hardly an easy patient; out of his feverish wanderings came more lucid moments when he was obsessed with fears that he could not, would not, be strong enough to work and travel and collect his fees, that he could not keep his royal appointment, let alone the tied house they all depended upon. In such stark dawns the demons rose, cackling at the insubstantiality of his profession.

  A letter from George Brown, unaware of Lancelot’s illness, told of his concerns that their sister Mary was in debt to a woman who was making threatening demands; George seemed to have the matter in hand and understood that Lancelot could do little from so far away; he promised a gift of ‘a piece of hung beef’.29 Kindly Lord St Quentin at Scampston sent Yorkshire hams, and his best wishes, and so it was with gifts that Bridget’s wedding was celebrated, observed by her father through the opiate haze of his illness.

  Henry Holland and Bridget were married by special licence in the fashionable select vestry church of St George’s in Hanover Square on 11th February 1773. This seems to have been managed by the Holland family, for though Mary and Henry Holland still regarded Fulham as their home, they were now living at 31 Half Moon Street off of Piccadilly, while the firm was building whole streets in Mayfair. It does indicate that Lancelot was too ill to take much part, and that even if he had wished for some royal blessing on his eldest child – marriage at Hampton Court or at St Anne’s at Kew – he did not have the strength to arrange this. Henry Holland was twenty-seven, Bridget six months younger: as they had grown up together since they were five, it seems both fathers made them wait until Henry was confident in his architectural skills. Lancelot’s weakness added an urgency for a younger man’s help, and an heir to take advantage of all his good contacts, and so his ‘partnership’ with the young Henry Holland was forged with the marriage (there never had been any formal partnership with Holland senior). Lancelot settled his investment share on property in Carrington Street, Mayfair,
on Henry and Bridget, who soon moved into a house that Holland’s had built, no. 17 in adjacent Hertford Street. On 5th March 1773, a note from Drummonds30 confirmed the transfer of £5,000 worth of 3% Consolidated Stock to his son-in-law, whether as part of the marriage contract or a partnership agreement, or even payment for work at Claremont, is not clear.

  More than a dozen letters survive from the six months of December 1772 to early June 1773. They were put aside for Lancelot’s recovery, and then perhaps forgotten, remaining with his descendants for years, until Mr G. R. M. Pakenham lent them to Dorothy Stroud, who in turn gave them to the British Museum Library. This cache allows us to glimpse the minutiae of the King’s Master Gardener’s life: Lord North,31 now Prime Minister and living at Bushy Park House (by courtesy of Lady North being appointed Ranger of Bushy Park) has already been noted requesting fruit from Hampton Court gardens. Lord St Quentin, at the very flat Scampston in North Yorkshire, wrote to say that he was conscientiously following instructions: ‘I have made the32 sunk fence on both sides of the gateway to the most charming effect’ and ‘filled in the angle of the water at the west end, made an island where the water was too broad, widened it north of the bridge, according to your plan … which answers prodigiously well’. He promised to call.

  Edward Hussey Montagu33 of moated Ditton Park in Buckinghamshire also promised to call on his way to Clandon in Surrey at Easter; Ditton was a small job, and Clandon materialised in 1780. On 12th April Lord Donegall of Fisherwick wanted a reference for a gardener named Turner from Ickworth, and sent his ‘regards to Mrs Brown’.34 The next day, Lord Clanricarde, for whom Spyers was surveying Warnford Park in Hampshire, wanted special permission for his family to visit Kew whilst the King and Queen were away.