Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  Lady Amabel Polwarth at Wrest,

  to her sister Lady Grantham, 19th November 1778

  THE THOUGHT ARISES that Lancelot really enjoyed his times with people like the Digbys too much – they were his social life, the cause of his teasing of Biddy about the cheerful wife who never wished to leave home. Biddy Brown was certainly justified in wishing that her husband would stop for a while, for leisurely outings and pleasurable companionship. She would never have accompanied him to his grand clients’ houses, for she would have been very awkwardly placed and at the mercies of pompous dowagers and unctuous servants, as she knew full well. In her own home she entertained with grace, any of Lancelot’s clients from the Prime Minister Lord North, their neighbour at Bushy Park house (and perhaps even the King) downwards, and many lordly regards and compliments came her way. Lancelot, on the other hand, made a charmed progress, partly because of the freemasonry of gardening for whom the low green door in the garden wall led directly to the hub of any establishment, and partly because he was Lancelot. At Wrest, Lady Amabel (as quoted above) seemed to be caught mid-aperitif by his arrival, and quickly had to arrange for another place at the table. Lady Amabel had grown up with his sudden arrivals, and been well taught by her mother, Jemima, Marchioness Grey, but not everybody was so aware: Lord Chatham had to brief Lady Stanhope at Chevening:

  I will not fail2 to obey your Ladyship’s commands by writing to Brown. I do so with particular pleasure, persuaded that you cannot take any other advice so intelligent or more honest. The chapter of my friend’s dignity must not be omitted. He writes Lancelot Brown, Esquire en titre d’office: please to consider, he shares the private hours of [the King], dines familiarly with [the King’s] neighbour of Sion [sic: Syon], and sits down at the tables of all the house of Lords, etc. To be serious, Madam, he is deserving of the regard shown to him; for I know him, upon very long acquaintance, to be an honest man, and of sentiments much above his birth.

  When he was at home Lancelot had his comfortable cronies at Hampton and his strolls across the green to the Garricks’ hospitable house, where he had continued to make suggestions for the garden. David Garrick was contemplating his retirement, but having acquired sole ownership of the Drury Lane Theatre, had set himself a final task of refurbishing the interior, then still as Christopher Wren had designed it in the seventeenth century. His masterstroke was to employ Robert Adam, who designed the classical entrance portico and raised the height of the auditorium, so that the entire house seemed bigger and brighter; when the public arrived at the opening of the 1775 season it seemed like a new theatre, and it had no rival. Garrick was now in profit, by the increased value of the patent to run the theatre, which he was selling to Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his partners, and his final performances were announced. This was the background for their conversation when Lancelot returned from his Sherborne visit at the end of January 1776, and Garrick promised him tickets for a gala night. But, after telling Biddy, Lancelot must have written to refuse. ‘My dear Sir,3 You make Me and my Wife mad,’ spluttered Garrick’s reply of 5th February:

  you shall be prefer’d to the whole body of Nobility, if you will give me Notice but one day of your coming – I have kept places till 12 o’clock the two last times of my Playing, but you never sent – there is not a single place in the Whole house but what is Engag’d – Don’t use me so again for I love & esteem you and am moreover oblig’d to you.

  Was the obligation for the Hampton garden, or had Garrick needed reminding that Robert Adam would be the best architect for the theatre? Garrick’s many farewells, playing Hamlet and Lear, and Richard III expressly for the King and Queen, as well as lighter roles, had galvanised society. The writer Hannah More described one night:

  The eagerness of the people4 to see him is beyond anything … you will see half a dozen duchesses and countesses of a night, in the upper boxes: for the fear of not seeing him at all has humbled those who used to go not for the purpose of seeing but of being seen, and now they curtsy to the ground for the worst places in the house.

  Garrick insisted upon Lancelot and Biddy coming to the theatre. He gave them more dates, and then a hasty postscript: ‘My Wife is resol’vd5 to make room for You, as well as She can in her Box – Come to the Stage door & Enquire for her Box – Ye Ladies not in hats.’

  ‘The People that surround us threaten an Attack’

  The more serious matter of the day broke in upon Wilderness House with a letter from Jack.6 Lancelot had written more than six months earlier, in mid-July of 1775, after the news of British casualties at Bunker Hill reached London, and Jack had received that letter on 10th November when his ship HMS Nautilus took on supplies in Boston. His reply was written immediately, on the 14th, so it should have reached them in late January or early February. Nautilus had returned from chasing a rebel schooner that had gone aground near Marblehead, Massachusetts, only to be surprised by the crew manhandling their guns onto a nearby hill and firing on them, wounding two men (one of whom died) and damaging the sails and rigging. Jack found it ‘beyond conception how well they are prepared all along the Coast’, and though Boston seemed quiet, ‘how long it will continue so I cannot tell, the People that surround us threaten an Attack, but I believe they know us to be too well prepared to receive them. It is natural to suppose the Congress (who have Hancock and Adams to urge them on) and their Generals would wish an attack’. He wondered that the rebel army would refuse to fight, as ‘the deserters that come in dayly’ were starving and unpaid: on the other hand, ‘Our Troops are in general very healthy’, though he feared for the wounded with the onset of a harsh winter, and ‘the greatest inconvenience the immense price of provisions’ – the beef and mutton very poor, and very little of it. He sent his affectionate respects and duty. Jack had surely found his niche, however hard it was, and they could be proud of him.

  Lord Chatham, ‘though in a wretched condition7 of body and mind,’ dragged himself to Parliament in May 1776 for one last plea for the withdrawal of the ‘oppressive’ measures inflicted upon the colonists – America was ‘the source of all our wealth and power’, so what was the point of driving her into the arms of France? Lancelot would have supported his hero. In the small compass of the Browns’ concerns were the nation’s in miniature: too long and uncertain lines of communication, an underestimation of – though sneaking regard for – the colonists’ determination for their cause, and poor and inadequate supplies to the army and navy in the field. Add one proud king, George III, and his intolerance of ‘rebellious children’, and so he ‘in effect disowned the Americans as rebels and treated them accordingly’. On the following 4th July Congress’s Declaration of Independence set out the charges against him at length.

  One rather curious outcome of the King’s break with America was that, at home, he started going out more, ostensibly to bolster morale in his army and navy by the staging of magnificent reviews, at Coxheath in Kent, Warley in Essex, or at Portsmouth or Weymouth. Once, in London, someone had sent a missile (which turned out to be an apple) into his carriage, which had unnerved him; but after a quite different progress at Godalming when returning from his first fleet review – the women throwing nosegays until he was knee-deep in flowers and everyone singing ‘God Save the King’ – he was encouraged to let the populace see that he was not the ogre that the Americans had painted him. After his visit to Portsmouth, Hans Stanley, Governor of the Isle of Wight, wrote: ‘as he has lived8 so much in retirement, I thought he would have been embarrassed and reserved in so large a company … but Charles II could not have been more affable’. Consequently there was a flurry of activity amongst the King’s friends in the south with houses that he might choose to visit; more work for Lancelot.

  Stanley, a Chatham loyalist and friend of David Garrick, was also ‘Cofferer to the Household’ or Treasurer, hence his place in the royal entourage. He was a grandson of the great Sir Hans Sloane, President of the Royal Society and owner of Chelsea Manor, and his aunt Elizabeth was marrie
d to Lord Cadogan, Lancelot’s appreciative client at Caversham. Stanley was lively, a bachelor in his fifties, and gregarious, friendly with all Lancelot’s Hampshire clients and others. His family home was at Paultons Park, about 6 miles south-west of Romsey; through the park flowed a beautiful stream, a tributary of the Blackwater and the Test, which rose on the heathery heights of the New Forest. Lancelot seems to have persuaded this stream into a U-shaped ‘river-stile’ lake around the house – which stood on a knoll – with a pretty white lattice bridge, for which he was paid £640 in all. His taste for these curving, if not semi-circular, lakes (as also at Fisherwick) and Chinese-style bridges and pavilions was seemingly softening. Stanley also owned South Stoneham near Southampton, whilst his friend John Fleming was at North Stoneham.fn1

  Lancelot had worked around the fringes of the New Forest, and crossed its bleakest northern stretch of heathland on the road from Totton to Ringwood many times. He was paid £165 by Thomas Tancred at Cuffnells, outside Lyndhurst in 1780, but it is now difficult to see what was done; so it was at Cadland, where the Forest touched the shores of Southampton Water, that he really experienced the ancient forest. He was in awe of the abundant ‘old timber’ that made the New Forest ‘the oldest new place’9 he knew in England. The forest oaks could be 500 years old, and certainly dated from the early sixteenth century; the oldest, usually pollards, could be 16–23 feet in girth at a man’s breast-height. Huge silvery-skinned beeches were hardly younger.

  Cadland was easily reached from Broadlands or his friends the Serles at Testwood, over Eling bridge and southwards through the park-like forest landscape at Dibden and Hythe, then it was a matter of 3 miles through sandy lanes to Mr Drummond’s place. Lancelot’s friend and executor John Drummond had died in 1774, and he was now working for his cousin, the Hon. Robert Drummond, who was coming up to fifty and a partner in the bank. Drummonds were thriving, ‘enjoying the patronage of the Treasury and the contracts to pay the British troops fighting in America’, arranged for them by Thomas Harley, who bolstered the bank with his own healthy deposit account of around £300,000. This was of course Thomas Harley of Berrington, so it comes as little surprise that Robert Drummond’s house was the result of another masterly partnership in siting and building by Lancelot and Henry Holland. It was a pale house, as befitted its setting by the sea, built of bricks made at Exbury, the same as those used for Broadlands.fn2

  Robert Drummond was a passionate fisherman, and in addition to his house by Southampton Water he built a fishing cottage facing the Solent shore a few miles to the south, at a place called Bournehill. The ‘hill’ was hardly more than a knoll but gave just enough elevation for the pretty octagonal cottage or picnic house to have fine views across to the Isle of Wight. Lancelot contrived both shelter and views in his miniature park for Bournehill: the drive along the shoreline runs through belts of planting but these are judiciously broken to allow surprise views of the waves and gusts of salty air. The drive ‘circles’ the lawn in an irregular oval, with one large free-standing clump of trees, which undoubtedly utilised some of the ancient specimens. Lancelot noted in his accounts that the building of Cadland house and the fishing cottage amounted to £12,500, and that a balance for the outdoor work, presumably in both places, would be settled later. In July 1779 he was going through his account book, and promptly wrote to Robert Drummond, ‘I find you added10 for my trouble on the Out of Doors work, two hundred pounds, which is more than I can possibly accept from you by one hundred pounds’. Accordingly he returned £100, a perfect example of his integrity, and much appreciated by most of his clients.

  ‘Go you, and adorn England!’

  This exhortation from Lord Chatham, and Lancelot’s reply, ‘Go you, and save her’, are the much-quoted evidence of bystanders, illustrating their friendship. The exchanges took place variously on a stair at St James’s or outside the Blue Anchor inn at Staines – this being plausible if Lord Chatham was returning from Burton Pynsent and Lancelot was on his way westwards, in the autumn of 1777. What is certain is that Lord Chatham was concentrating all his failing energies on saving England from herself, for it was his view that war with America would be like England falling upon her own sword.

  Lancelot was playing the diplomat as he wrote to Hester Chatham in the second week of November, ‘Today, and indeed11 many opportunities have occurred of late, in which I have had very favourable conversations’ with the King; on an autumn afternoon at Kew he had met the King and dared to tread on tender ground:

  I then ventured to repeat [what Lady Chatham had already written to the King] that Lord Chatham was not changed in sentiment; that I was very sure what his Lordship had advanced was meant for the dignity of the crown, the happiness of his Majesty and the royal family, and the lustre of the whole empire; that I had always considered his Lordship in the light of being a friend to the whole, not parts of the empire; … because I knew, after forty years’ experience, that no man loved his country more; indeed, nothing could be so strong a proof of it, as his Lordship standing alone, unconnected with party or faction.

  The King, in sunny mood, heard him ‘favorably’ and responded, ‘no acrimony, nor ill will appeared’. Hester Chatham replied, in a letter of 13th November, strong in ink, script and sentiment:

  It is impossible12 not to feel sensibly the Animation of your Conversations in support of the rectitude of my Lord’s Principles, and of his Zeal for the Prosperity of the Whole Empire, and for the true, Solid Glory of His Majesty. You may be perswaded that your having been heard favourably and without Acrimony, affords real comfort and Happiness to my Lord, who is most undoubtedly actuated in all he does, or means to do, by the purest Motives of disinterested concern for the King, and the Country. You know that this is not Words, but an existing Truth, to which his conduct has been always consistent.

  Meanwhile, in a field by the River Hudson on 19th September, General ‘Gentleman Johnny’ Burgoyne’s troops were repulsed at Freeman’s Farm; three weeks later they were checked at Bemis Heights and withdrew the 7 miles to Saratoga, where on the 17th October they were surrounded and forced to surrender. These were the ‘three’ battles of Saratoga, of which London remained in ignorance.

  At home, Lady Chatham had told Lancelot:

  From the Stamp Act13 to this day, [my lord’s] judgments, he says, concerning America, have never varied. In the present terrifying Crisis, to be silent the first day, wou’d be want of Duty to the King, and utter insensibility to the public Calamities. The Ardent Wish of my heart co-operates entirely with him, that the Past may be redeem’d by happier Councils! You join, I am sure, in the same honest hope.

  On 20th November, Chatham told the House of Lords of ‘a rugged and awful crisis’14 to come. News of the defeat at Saratoga arrived on the 5th December; Lord North tried to resign, but the King would not let him, and the government dissolved into factional dementure. Chatham persisted in his belief that the colonists did not really want independence, if only they were treated properly. He was proved right, in that now it was a very different war, against France in alliance with the colonists, supported by Spain: Chatham, his voice shrill with passion, reminded the House that the Spanish used bloodhounds to hunt the Native Americans and asked: are these ‘hell-hounds’ to be unleashed ‘against our brethren and countrymen’? Once again, Lord Chatham was seen as the only possible saviour of the situation, and all through the dark months efforts were made to persuade him back into office. The road to Hayes was churned with coaches, including Lancelot’s – Hester Chatham’s words ringing in his ears: ‘The sentiments of15 Esteem and Friendship which my Lord, and my self, have for you are of the most unfeyn’d sort, which I beg you to believe.’ But he was on dangerous ground once more, for he went ‘piping hot from Lord Bute’ and the implication is that Bute was using Lancelot’s loyalties to find favour – and office – with Chatham, who would have none of it.

  Lancelot must have known and despaired of that fateful day, 7th April 1778, when Lord Chatham struggl
ed to the House of Lords, on the arms of his son William and son-in-law Lord Mahon, to make his last plea against war with the colonists, saying that he would never consent ‘to deprive the royal offspring16 of the House of Brunswick’ of ‘their fairest inheritance’. But if peace could not be made with France, then war it must be – ‘and if we fall, let us fall like men’. When the Duke of Richmond rose to point out that even the name of Chatham could not bring victory against France, Spain and America ‘without an army, without a navy and without money’, Lord Chatham, incensed, rose – and collapsed into the arms of those around him. He was carried into the Prince’s Chamber where he recovered, and two days later was well enough to be taken back to Hayes Place.

  Perhaps thinking there was no more to be done, Lancelot was on the road once more. On 12th April he reached Compton Verney, where his new church had a strong resemblance to Henry Flitcroft’s St Andrew’s at Wimpole. He was much amused by the presence of an ‘Old Woman’, the daughter of a Staffordshire gentleman, who was staying in the house, and whose foibles he relayed to his daughter Peggy. Next day he reached Trentham,17 where he worked on plans for Lord Gower’s new house with Henry Holland, and then they parted: Holland to Berrington, Lancelot back eastwards to Sandbeck in South Yorkshire, reached on 17th April and where he perhaps stayed for two days. At this point he is lost to us for a week, possibly at Byram near Castleford, or back at Temple Newsam, or at Harewood. Could he have been at Thoresby Hall? There are still many mysteries about the places where he worked. There is also a suggestion that he met Lance, who was looking for a parliamentary seat and was relying on his father’s funding support. On the 25th he arrived at Brocklesby in north Lincolnshire, where he acquired plovers eggs, which were boiled and packed in bran and sent off to his daughter Bridget Holland, for ‘she likes them,18 you know ones Children always likes what their Father likes’. He went into Boston and found the Wayet relations were all well, and presumably did not stay, for he made the short journey to the Rose & Crown at Wisbech, from where he wrote to Peggy, glad ‘that my Old Woman story was not unpleasing’. Peggy, aged nineteen, was confiding in her father about her friend Miss Secker’s bid for her independent income and her parents’ apparent refusal, to which Lancelot replied: