by Jane Brown
Undoubtedly Lancelot had worried about their son Jack, whose commission on the sloop HMS Savage had been confirmed to them by Lord Sandwich the previous August. Eventually Biddy persuaded Lancelot to write for news: the reply came in Sandwich’s big, assertive scrawl, on 21st April 1773, saying that Jack was at New Providence in the Bahamas and ‘going on very properly’.35 Their letter to him had been passed on, and he thought the enclosed £150 a ‘very handsome’ allowance.
On 8th June the Earl of Craven importuned from Benham, near Newbury, hoping ‘you can possibly spare36 a day next week’. Lord Craven was under the thumb of his beautiful wife, Elizabeth Berkeley, and continued, ‘Lady Craven wishes to make some alterations here and to begin immediately.’ Lancelot was already working for the Earl on the park at Coombe Abbey near Coventry, but it seems likely that he took the job of the new house at Benham for the sake of his new partner, the architect Henry Holland: they jointly submitted drawings in September 1773 for a handsome house with a portico, with the River Kennet winding through Lancelot’s park and crossed by a Chinese bridge. Craven was a sporting sort of a fellow, and finished his letter with mention of his horse-racing friend Jenison Shafto, who ‘is here and desires his compliments and will be glad to pledge you in the Wooden Vessel’. This was one of the Northumberland Shaftos, probably from Benwell outside Newcastle, where he knew both John and Lancelot Brown as young men. Their meeting is celebrated in a sketch by Richard Cosway, which does no favours to Lancelot, who appears an overweight and bemused convalescent.
‘Walls so thick as to keep out the devil’
All the time Lancelot was ill, Claremont was progressing; this house and comparatively small park should rank as one of his most glittering prizes. Robert Clive37 had returned in triumph in the summer of 1760, the hero of Plassey, with skin burnt ‘the colour of mahogany’ and rumours of a fabulous diamond ‘worth upwards of £100,000’, and he had seen Claremont. When he returned from his third tour of duty in July 1767, even richer, he had found the Duke of Newcastle ailing, and when the Duke died the following year, Clive had been quick to help the Duchess with a mortgage. He soon bought Claremont for £25,000.
Clive was a native of Shropshire, and had left there in an idle sort of way when he was coming up to twenty, to work as an East India Company clerk, but found a talent for soldiering, donned the Company uniform and made his name defending Arcot. At the end of this first tour he had married the musical and cat-loving Margaret Maskeleyne; they came home in 1753, and their son Edward was born the following year. Margaret’s brother Edmund Maskeleyne was the astronomer, with whom she stayed at Greenwich during Clive’s subsequent absences. His second tour began as Deputy Governor to George Pigot at Madras, but they soon diverted to the defence of Calcutta and victory at Plassey followed. In gratitude, Mir Jafir, the Nawab of Bengal, ‘followed tradition’ and gave Clive a fortune in diamonds, jewels and gold, whose value it was impossible to calculate. So on that second return he had bought 45 Berkeley Square as a London home, and rented Condover Hall near Shrewsbury whilst he looked around; he is revealed as having a touching affection for his native countryside. He also paid a reputed £90,000 for Walcot, an estate in the beautiful Welsh border country about 5 miles north-east of Clun.
In the traditions of Lancelot’s profession, Claremont was a very special place, a coup: it was not out in the wilds, but a civilized distance just across the Thames from Hampton Court and through Esher village. Named by the Duke of Newcastle for his preliminary title, Earl of Clare, the ‘mont’ was a sandy outcrop above the valley of the River Mole, spotted by Sir John Vanbrugh for himself when it was simply known as Chargate Farm. Vanbrugh built a ‘small box’,38 which he loved dearly, but being permanently short of money could not afford to refuse the offer to buy it made by the then-Earl, Thomas Pelham, the rising man who became Duke of Newcastle in 1715. The small box was enlarged with spreading wings; the park was arrayed with double – nay, quadruple – avenues, and a massively walled garden similar to the kitchen garden at Blenheim, with a ‘Van’ miniature White Cottage, or ‘Mr Greening’s house’ (as it is still known), for the head gardener. Vanbrugh’s towering Belvedere, equipped with a Butler’s Pantry and Hazard Table, topped the outcrop behind the house, from where St Paul’s dome and Windsor Castle could be seen. The Duke had Charles Bridgeman make the pleasure garden, a fantastic tiered amphitheatre covering 3 acres and dug to perch improbably on the west-facing slope of the Belvedere’s ridge, above a round, spring-fed pond. In the manner of Blenheim and Stowe, Claremont had a decidedly military character, the pleasure gardens being ‘defended’ with brick and earthwork ramparts and ornamental bastions. Vanbrugh’s walled kitchen garden, again like Blenheim’s, was (and is) a fortification in itself, with rugged walls and arches.
Richard Cosway’s sketch of himself (left), Lord Craven, Jenison Shafto and Lancelot (right), probably made shortly after Lancelot’s serious illness in 1773.
After Vanbrugh’s death in 1726 William Kent had loosened the pond into a lake, with an island and latticed bridge, a cascade and a fishing house: the Newcastles were fond of water fowl and kept swans, geese, turkeys and Chinese pheasants, and pea-fowl, as the peacock was the Pelham family crest. The surrounding ramparts were softened into a haha. Most people would have forgotten, though Lancelot remembered, that Claremont was as famous as Stowe in the 1740s and 1750s, but as the Duke declined, so did his house and park. For Lancelot, to get his hands on Claremont was still momentous, and he found reminders of Stowe as he had first seen it, which reignited his pride in his professional traditions. Was it his informed reading of the landscape that won Lord Clive over? Or even Lancelot’s appreciation of Clive’s native Shropshire? Or Holland’s Mayfair connections? Clive had had William Chambers work on his Berkeley Square house (and on his family’s Shropshire home, Styche Manor, as well as Walcot Hall) and yet Chambers was rejected for Claremont, much to his fury. Henry Holland may have had something to do with it, for his father’s Pall Mall houses were the first homes of those pinnacles of fashion, Boodle’s club and Almack’s Assembly Rooms, and Henry was in line for the newest clubland venture, Mr Brooks’s in St James’s Street:
Liberal Brooks,39 whose speculative skill
Is hasty credit, and a distant bill.
Lord Clive, though far from a macaroni, loved being well dressed in rather flamboyant clothes, and the haunts of the gentlemen of St James’s were the shrines of aspiration.
It was decided that the rambling and crumbling house at Claremont was too low and damp, and it would be demolished, to build again higher up. The new house was positioned, with genius, by Lancelot; from the south it appears to be on top of a hill, but it is in fact built into the end of the Belvedere’s ridge, and the ‘offices’ are cut into the hillside and connected to the house via a sunken court, screened with planting. Lord Clive particularly wanted the effect of an unbroken sweep of lawn all around and below his windows, for clear views. None other than Macaulay reported the local whisperings, ‘that the great wicked Lord40 had ordered the walls to be made so thick in order to keep out the devil, who would one day carry him away bodily’.
Lancelot’s Claremont account was opened in January 1771 with a handsome £4,000, and another £3,000 in the August. Bricks and slates were recycled from the old house, but additional thousands of bricks were made from clay deposits in the park, the ground carefully made good afterwards. When the interiors were started in 1772, it seems that Lancelot had time to study the park and give his instructions before he succumbed to his lowness at the New Year. He treated Claremont with sensitivity and gentleness: Vanbrugh’s avenues had been dismantled by Kent, so the remaining trees were formed into clumps, with a great deal of thick shelter planting around the boundaries of the small park. He modified the ha-ha and the park roads into elegant curves. In the pleasure garden he attended to the overgrowth of Bridgeman’s and Kent’s planting by rationalising the walks, and it appears, though it is difficult to know for certain, that he foun
d the amphitheatre so overgrown with self-seeded trees and shrubs that he left it so. It was an outdated curiosity (and was virtually lost, until it was restored by the National Trust in 1975–9).
Claremont was the perfection of Lancelot’s house and garden ensemble ideal. His name and celebrity had won the commission, along with his honed skills for positioning the new house in its landscape, for setting the orientation of the rooms and for the convenience of the service quarters (especially for the servants) and efficiency of the drainage. The contracts were in his name, and he managed the money and signed off agreements and drawings. His control is evident in a letter from Sir John Lambert, the agent for the Parisian suppliers of the pier glasses for the grandest rooms, when after confirming the measurements Sir John ended with: ‘always ye Greatest41 Veneration for yr Universally Known Talents’.
Henry Holland’s modesty about his own role at Claremont has led to the misunderstanding that Lancelot was the architect, in our meaning of the role, and this has burnished misunderstandings about Lancelot’s role in earlier buildings. In his tribute to his father-in-law at the head of this chapter, Holland has explained, as Lancelot never did, that the levels, the proportions of the rooms and their outlooks, the approaches, the drainage as well as his estimations of each client’s standards of comfort were all his contributions to a building – except that he could not present them in a stylised drawing, conforming to theories plucked from architectural treatises. Lancelot worked these things out on the ground, and often utilised pattern-book drawings to enlighten his clients. The triumph of Claremont, which lies behind Henry Holland’s words, is that Lancelot poured out his abundance of knowledge and experience to inform Holland’s drawings, at least as far as these ‘outside’ matters were concerned. With the interiors Holland was on his own, and confident of his studies in France and his love of French style.
The total paid into the Claremont account by June of 1774 was £27,612. 16s. 11d. It seems, and is to be hoped, that the Clive family moved into their new house later that summer. ‘Local legend’ has it that Lord Clive had a large and comfortable bedroom on the top floor, and that when he was woken by the wind rattling the windows, he wedged them tightly with golden guineas.42 The chambermaids were only too happy to liberate the guineas! Lancelot apparently told Dr Johnson that Lord Clive ‘had shewed him at the door of his bedchamber a large chest, which he said he had once had full of gold’.43 Lancelot was apparently unnerved that he could bear it so close to his bedroom. It is worth adding Johnson’s related comment, ‘a man had better have ten thousand pounds at the end of ten years passed in England, than twenty thousand pounds at the end of ten years passed in India, because you must compute what you give for the money’.
Claremont, Surrey, Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg made their home here after their marriage in 1816, and they are shown here in Lancelot’s maturing park, with a handsome young cedar.
Claremont had hardly started before Lord Clive discovered that the 1st Earl of Powis was being forced to sell his favourite Oakly Park at Ludlow, in order to concentrate his resources on Powis Castle. Lancelot visited Oakly twice, finding a fertile and undulating park hemmed in by the River Teme, just west of Ludlow town, and full of possibilities, and Lord Clive bought it in 1771 or early in 1772. Shropshire society being small, and its denizens unlikely to miss the momentary doings of a native son returned, a letter was soon wending Lancelot’s way: ‘Two of Lord Clive’s sisters44 are now at my house and my Lord himself did me the honor to call on me two days ago, but I was so unlucky as to be from home.’ This came not from a breathless matron, but from the distinguished fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and biographer of Handel, John Mainwaring. Dr Mainwaring lived at Caer Caradoc at Church Stretton (where he was rector), at the apex of a small triangle between Oakly and Walcot, and in matters of taste felt all Shropshire belonged to him: he was glad, he continued in his letter of 21st August 1772, that Lancelot thought so highly of Oakly, ‘rude and savage though it now is’, for he was certain that Lancelot could make it ‘the glory of the County if not of England itself’, and he was confident Lord Clive would agree.
Oakly sounded a wonderful opportunity, but it was to be lost in overwork and illness: if Lancelot did have the chance to return in the summer of 1774 (and Oakly does show signs of eighteenth-century features, though of an uninspired kind), all was soon completely lost. On 24th November, at the age of forty-nine, Lord Clive was found dead at his house in Berkeley Square. It was apparently from an overdose of his usual medicinal drugs, but whether intentional or accidental we cannot know. The Claremont account was closed with an additional £3,000 paid by his executors, and the account for Oakly was settled, giving no details. (Lady Clive chose to live at Walcot; she sold Claremont in 1786, and it eventually became the home of Princess Charlotte and then of her widower, Leopold of the Belgians, and a favourite royal retreat.)
A good half of 1773 was lost to his illness, but Lancelot was out and about in July and August, and back to quartering the countryside in September, going to Burton Constable and then heading for Dorset and Devon. On the way west he called at Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, in response to Lord Arundell’s letter of 16th August, introducing himself and his idea of improvements. He had seen, he said, ‘several specimens’45 of Lancelot’s fine taste and flattered himself that Wardour ‘will be worthy of your attention’. Flattery was the order of the day, and perhaps measured to match the miles, for Lord Lisburne, a Lord of the Admiralty, had written from Mamhead in distant Devon, ‘I should be glad46 to make what Improvements the scene is capable of under the Direction of a Genius whose Taste is so superior, & unrivalled’. Lancelot spent two days at Mamhead (where he had been on his 1764 expedition) in September, taking in the sea airs and spectacular views over the Exe estuary. He was warmly received by the Lisburnes, who still wished to build a new house, and in fine weather they planned drives and rides, woods and water in the up-hill and downdale parkland, already rich in Spanish chestnuts, American oaks, acacias and cedars collected by the previous owners, the Balle family.
Returned home, Lancelot sent his plan and proposals to Lord Lisburne; he had over exerted himself and was ill again. Lord Dacre of long acquaintance, in a shaky hand, wrote on 7th November: ‘sorry to find you47 have been and are so ill’ and was disappointed not to see him at Belhus, where he ‘dare not move a step without your advice’. He hoped they would meet in London during the winter. Lord Lisburne’s reply came on the same day: Lancelot had made an error in the siting of the proposed new house, ‘which may be material48 & occasion you more Trouble & difficulty than I could wish’. Was this his kindly way of saying that the lines of communication were just too long for Lancelot to work in Devon? (Robert Adam, twelve years Lancelot’s junior, rebuilt Mamhead in 1777–8.) Work at Wardour Castle had to be deferred.
In December 1773 the prospect of an interesting client materialised in a letter (dated the 18th) in a tall, thin, clear hand with imperious and commanding tone but gentle manner, expressing the hope ‘that the amendment49 in your state of health’ would enable ‘re-establishment’, for ‘it is my ambition to benefit by your lights [though] upon a matter of so little importance’. This was ‘Black Dick’, the sailors’ friend, Admiral Richard, Lord Howe, writing of his home at Porter’s Park at Shenley in Hertfordshire (which had once been Nicholas Hawksmoor’s home). He supposed Lancelot must avoid the severest weather, and he would be guided by ‘your own convenience’. The Howe brothers, William and Richard, were popularly imagined to be the offspring of George I, so this was practically a royal commission, and Lancelot would have liked the idea. Did he and Black Dick walk through Porter’s Park together? Little more is known and even less survives; the Boston Tea Party took place on 16th December 1773 and, once the news reached England, Admiral Howe’s ‘matter of little importance’ faded before events, as he was despatched across the Atlantic.
As Lancelot resumed his routine of travelling in 1774, it became im
mediately clear that Biddy had made him promise to write home regularly so that at least they knew where he was; she sweetened the pill by suggesting that their youngest daughter Margaret – Peggy as she was always known – would love to hear of his progresses. Indeed, it is Peggy, aged fifteen, who now emerges as her father’s devoted message-carrier and helper, the one child who seems really interested in his work and who treasured his letters. While Samuel Lapidge was close at hand to carry out the serious business instructions, Peggy often ran the short distance from Wilderness House to Lapidge’s Hampton lodging, to get answers to her father’s concerns about lost or delayed drawings. In return her ‘affectionate Friend50 and Father’, as he signs himself in a letter from Lord Bute’s of 20th March 1774, was seeking out exotic birds on her behalf, for Peggy was a fowl-fancier, a popular female interest of the day (as it was for Philippa Hayes at Charlecote). A pea-hen is due to come from the Duke of Northumberland, writes Lancelot, and though at Lord Bute’s he is told this is ‘an improper time’ for chicks, he adds, ‘I shall find some for you before I am much older.’
Visiting Lord Bute at Luton Hoo was a sad business. Lancelot’s magnificent park was blithely maturing and growing, innocent of the wiles of man, but the handsome courtier, dropped from all contact with his onceadoring George III and hated by the anti-Scottish faction in government, had succumbed to a certain paranoia: ‘I have now lived51 with my door locked these 8 years past,’ he wrote in 1774, ‘broken and at an end I see no body, I no longer know those I was once intimate with nor they me … but spend the poor remains52 in my own way, & the greater part of it, in the inexhaustible researches into the works of nature.’ Luton Hoo had been damaged by fire three years before and, though Robert Adam was restoring it (Mrs Delany visited that year and admired Adam’s sensational library), his plans were never completed. It might be imagined that Lord Bute would have retreated to his Scottish island, but his interest had taken him in the opposite direction, and was now centred upon a patch of Hampshire cliff – Highcliffe near Christchurch, which was rich in chalkland flora, perfect for his ‘inexhaustible researches’. He planned to build at Highcliffe, the matter he was discussing with Lancelot on this visit. The only account sum for Highcliffe is £140 for a site visit and plan, paid in 1777, but the house appeared in William Watts’s Views of Seats (1784): ‘a little box’ with a long façade to the sea view, proving that Brown & Holland did build it. Rev. William Gilpin did not like it, and thought it ‘a pompous pile’, and soon after Bute’s death in 1792 (from the lingering injuries after a fall from the cliff whilst botanising) it was pulled down.
