by Jane Brown
I am sorry for Miss Secker and for the feeling of her Parents, but they are behaving properly. If you should turn Fool, which I think there is but little chance for, I believe I should do the same, with this precaution that I would take care that you should have the benefit of your Fortune your self, and not be a [beggar] in old age. Remember this is not Parental Pride, but it’s Parental protection to a Daughter that I Love Dearly.
On 30th April he reached Kimberley in Norfolk, then came across to Hawnes in Bedfordshire, before spending a final night at Luton Hoo. Gossip greased his journeyings, especially the national speculation as to Lord Chatham’s ability to save the hour, or not. Once back at Wilderness House, he wrote to Lady Chatham, ‘I am just returned19 from a long northern expedition on which I have spent many anxious hours, on account of Lord Chatham’s health, when however I had the comfort to find one universal Prayer, one wish that his Lordship’s life may be preserved to save this Devoted Sinking Country, but alas, I am doubtful it is too far gone even for his Lordship to redeem us.’ He asked her pardon for his passion – ‘I feel too much for the situation’ – and assured her of his being ‘devoted in Heart and Wish’. The letter was dated 9th May. Lord Chatham died two days later.
The King’s antagonisms and Cabinet controversies meant that the funeral was understated, if not meanly organised, except that for those in real grief these things would not have been noticed. The coffin lay in state in the Painted Chamber at Westminster and then, in pouring rain on the afternoon of Tuesday, 9th June, was taken the short distance across to Westminster Abbey. The crowd was huge and clamorous, but then the space for them to gather in was very small. The chief mourner, the tall slim figure walking behind the coffin, was nineteen-year-old William ‘the Fourth’, whom Lancelot had first known as a small boy at Hayes; Lancelot must have been reminded of the tall ‘commanding’ Mr Pitt,20 who talked a lot and loudly and expected to be listened to, whom he had first met all those years before, in the garden at Stowe.
To Grimsthorpe, Brocklesby and ‘a Godforsaken place’
In the early August of 1778 came news of a tragedy at Grimsthorpe, of the drowning of Thomas Linley,21 the musical prodigy already spoken of as England’s Mozart. Grimsthorpe was a musical house, and the Duke and Duchess of Ancaster had discovered Linley, aged seven, performing at Covent Garden. They had sent him to Florence to study the violin with Pietro Nardini, and there he met and became friends with Mozart – they were both fourteen. Returned to England, Linley was revealed as a prolific prodigy, composing oratorios, anthems, songs and scores – including the music for Sheridan’s comic opera The Duenna (Linley’s sister Elizabeth was to marry Sheridan) – and by his early twenties he seemed set fair to become – in Mozart’s opinion – ‘one of the greatest ornaments of the musical world’. However, on his annual visit to Grimsthrope that August, Linley and some friends set out for a sail on the lake, a squall blew up and capsized the boat; while the others clung to the rigging, Linley, in boots and greatcoat, jumped in to swim for help and sank after about 100 yards. No one could rescue him or, when rescued, revive him. The tragedy was widely reported; on 12th August, the day after Linley’s funeral, the Duke himself died, aged sixty-five, his death, they said, hastened by the tragedy.
It was a cruel fate, and Lancelot was mortified. He had lost out to the Grundys at Grimsthorpe early in his career, it will be remembered, and only in the past six or seven years had he gone back, planning the planting around the castle, and for a causeway to carry the road between the two lakes. The work was being done by the Duke’s own estate workers, and John Grundy’s lake wasn’t his responsibility, though he surely blamed himself for not checking the depth of the water and accumulation of mud for the dangers of which he was well aware. He called with his double condolences as he passed in late August, and then headed for the Pelhams’ Brocklesby farther north in Lincolnshire, where he had been earlier in the year.
Apart from his regular visits during the 1770s, Brocklesby was familiar, forming a stately architectural trio with the Queen’s House and Wotton Underwood. From a work point of view it was a moving target, Lancelot was never sure if he was working on the house or the grounds, and his coved-ceiling gallery, à la Stowe and Corsham, was ‘a great deal of trouble’, as he recorded in his account book. His plans for the park were ambitious: for a lake, seven-arched bridge, temples and an extensive ha-ha, an asymmetrical kitchen garden with melon ground and stoves, and a greenhouse facing onto a flower garden with bizarrely petal-shaped beds. The ruins of Newsome Abbey were to be brought into the views from the pleasure gardens. But Lancelot touched the heart of Brocklesby with his interest, on Peggy’s behalf, in Sophia Pelham’s fowls; she was the former Sophia Aufrere, whom Charles Pelham had met while she was travelling with her parents, marrying her in 1770 when she was seventeen and he was twenty. Sophia was painted by Reynolds feeding her chickens.
On 1st September (his letter to Biddy reporting ‘a most shocking passage over the Humber’) he arrived at Burton Constable. On their round, Steward Raines noted that ‘Mr Brown’s directions’ included ‘Make the lake22 3½ or 4 feet deep at most – better so than deeper’.
Leaving Burton Constable, he turned west towards Beverley, across the flat wetlands – the carrs – of the River Hull valley, making for Great Driffield. Through the narrow streets of the little market town he continued north-westwards to Garton, and on top of Garton Hill turned sharply onto the Malton road. It is a surprising turn still, as if one has stepped onto the plane of some gigantic chequerboard, the regulation fields of gold, green or brown stretching out across the distances of the Wolds: in unpleasant weather it can seem ‘a Godforsaken place’.23
Lancelot must have questioned the prospect as he first saw it, a seeming wasteland of thin, stony soil, grass tracks and scrappy fields, given over mostly to sheep and huge rabbit warrens. As he progressed along the ridge (to the high point of some 500 feet above sea level, where Sir Tatton Sykes’s 120-foot Gothic memorial now stands) the bareness softened into well-hedged fields, with young trees that thickened into belts and woods as he dropped down into the valley of Sledmere. He recognised an ancient countryside, strewn with the relicts of peoples that passed long ago, the trackways, and the settlements of Kemp Howe and Cottam to the north and of Wharram Percy a few miles to the west.
His destination was Sledmere (sometimes spelt Sledmire), a church and a large mere (‘Sledmere’ meaning a pool in the valley), a small village and the Sykes’s ‘new house’, which was about twenty years old. The house was cleverly sited north of the mere, looking across it towards the dramatic valley that would form a park. Sledmere exuded an empathetic air, for its late squire Richard Sykes, with his family’s Hull-made fortune, had actually given his planting priority over his building: his consciousness that ‘landscape’ mattered dated from the time of William Kent’s death in 1748, for Kent was a local Bridlington boy made good. As a kind of salutation, Sykes had attacked his treeless landscape, with the help of John Perfect, sometime twice-Mayor of Pontefract, doyen of five generations of famous nurserymen who had arisen from the fabled liquorice-growers of Pontefract. (Perfect had revealed the secret of liquorice-growing in a long letter, which Switzer published in The Practical Husbandman of 1733; he had supplied plants, but not liquorice, for Harewood, Studley Royal and Nostell Priory, and was happy at Sledmere, as Sykes recorded in December 1749: ‘Mr Perfect likes24 this Air very well.’) With Perfect, Richard Sykes had planted thousands of young trees, mainly beech, in a widely splayed ‘avenue’ southwards from the house, so enclosing a hundred acres of parkland. The mere, shaped into a regular oval, was the feature of a great lawn, protected from the farther parkland by a ha-ha wall ‘with triangular, rectangular and semi-circular buttresses’. Richard Sykes and Perfect had established tree nurseries – ‘my trees come forward and grow almost beyond all imaginary expectations and [give] great pleasure when I view them,’ he recorded in his notebook – as well as a kitchen garden; and, using up old sa
sh windows as frames, he grew and enjoyed ‘upward of a hundred Pine Apples’ and melons, and wall fruit, peaches, nectarines and plums.
All this Lancelot had learned on his first visit. Richard Sykes (a martyr to gout and a connoisseur of port) was long dead, and his heir was his brother, the Rev. Mark ‘Parson’ Sykes – not a gardener, for ‘his primary interest25 was making money’ and clerical politics. The Parson’s son Christopher had married Elizabeth Tatton in 1770, a marriage of love and good fortune that was to ensure Sledmere’s future: they lived in a house on the 5,000-acre estate, and Christopher Sykes, a keen, improving husbandman, had summoned Lancelot. ‘The Great Brown26 came to Sledmere this morning early,’ he had written in his notebook on 18th September 1777, and had stayed for most of the day. The year before, Thomas White had already submitted a ‘General Plan for the Improvement of the Grounds at Sledmere’, which proposed filling the mere, sweeping away Richard Sykes’s young avenue and encasing the house in plantations, with vistas opened to three model farms built as eye-catchers, unifying beauty and usefulness. White had overstepped the mark, hence Lancelot’s appearance, with his habitual reluctance to destroy good trees; and, as Christopher Sykes made clear, the mere was to remain a feature.
Lancelot’s first visit had been a crash course in teaching Christopher Sykes a new understanding of his own home and land; they acknowledged that the sites of White’s eye-catching farmhouses had been well chosen, but it was with Brownian verve that their attendant plantations were set streaming around the ridges of the new park, linking in with the splayed ‘arms’ of his uncle Richard’s avenue to form spacious groves. Sykes’s mind was now ‘thoroughly concentrated on the great task ahead’.
The next week he started staking out his plantations, making notes on the ‘small holes made27 in the turf … the holes are made in the autumn at three feet asunder, and eight or ten inches over, returning the soil into the hole at the time of making it with the turf downwards’. A month later he had several thousand holes prepared and was on the lookout for no fewer than ‘20,000 seedling Larches, 50,000 Scotch fir seedlings, 5,000 spruce [two years old], 10,000 one year old Spruce, 1500 Weymouth pine, 2,000 Silver fir, 10,000 Beech seedlings, 1,000 Sycamore and 10,000 seedlings of Birch’. Once they arrived, batches of seedlings were earthed into rows in the estate nurseries, until they found their proper places, sometimes several years later.
Now, for his second visit, Lancelot had been expected on 31st August, but arrived on 5th September, spending the day with Christopher Sykes riding over the estate, and dining at his house at Wetwang. Sykes had ‘built fourteen28 dwelling houses with several Barns and Stables’ that summer. These included the eye-catcher Castle Farm, a mile south-east of Sledmere House, designed by John Carr of York, and – proving himself an apt pupil – Sykes had designed the others himself: Life Hill to the south-west and Marramatte to the north-east; these were functional farmhouses, but with ornamented gable ends to fit them to the park scene. Lancelot’s visit was essentially a fine-tuning exercise, for which he sent a revised plan. That autumn and winter, 1778–9, became ‘a veritable orgy29 of planting’, Sykes now ‘dreaming of creating a Paradise amongst the bleak hills of the Wolds’. Lancelot had clearly not been a disappointment. Sykes later addressed the local agricultural society on his plantings: ‘forty Wild Cherry, sixty Mountain Ash, 300 Yews, 358 Silver fir, 500 Weymouth pine, 600 Birch, 1,540 Oak, 6,400 Holly, 12,000 beech, 25,260 Spruce, 33,600 Ash, 42,122 Scotch fir and 54,430 Larch’. He was awarded the prize for the greatest quantity of larch planted: five guineas’ worth of books of his own choosing.
The emphasis on the larch, with the Scotch fir and spruce, indicates the influence of Thomas White, who had become enthused about the challenge of commercial forestry, meaning the planting of softwoods to secure future supplies of pit props for the collieries of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. The Society of Arts ‘logging’ scheme, which Lancelot had rejected as of no interest to himself or his landowners, was now in widespread operation, with medals being awarded for the greatest numbers planted. White’s career seems to have turned in this direction, for he was conifer consultant to a group of Midlands estates, and won eleven of the Society’s medals for his plantings (though three of these were for hardwoods). The commercial-forestry ‘bug’ did not seem to attack Lancelot, and everywhere he remained true to the planting of mixed hardwoods, though he happily used larch as a ‘nurse’ tree, and spruce – as well as yews and hollies – for the dark understorey. The planting of oaks, for the future of the navy, was still a patriotic duty and was widely pursued. The native Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris), with its beauties of bark and outline, and lingering Stuart symbolism, was a favourite second only to the cedar of Lebanon. In the one known instance of planting on his own account, on the stream-fringed green at Hilton in his Fenstanton manor, Lancelot ordered ‘160 Elms at 6d each’ from James Wood’s nursery in Huntingdon.
‘Wonders on a plain surface’
Cambridge, as Lancelot knew it, was a Gothic place, a town of crumbling medieval houses and unlit and unpaved muddy lanes, starkly contrasted with the colleges – walled as castles of privilege, their courts haunted by flocks of Fellows in their fluttering, raven-black gowns. Student numbers were low and academic standards even lower, and there was plenty of the licentiousness that the satirists came to love; but it has recently been shown that there were also rumblings of an innovatory kind, and though marked as ‘minor’ subjects, botany, geology and astronomy were paving the way for the later triumph of the natural sciences. The Duke of Grafton became Chancellor in 1768 and immediately offered £500 towards paving the streets, but being Cambridge, nothing could be done without reference to the House of Commons, or without appointing a committee of seventy worthies to see this through, and the paving and lighting took twenty years.
As things moved slowly, so memories lingered, and there was a corpus of appreciation for the old college gardens and gardening, which owed much to the Rev. Richard ‘Frog’ Walker, who had died in 1764, was a favourite memory as a fixture at Trinity College since Queen Anne’s time, ‘devoted to horticulture’30 and friend of Philip Miller, the long-serving Curator of Chelsea Physic Garden. Miller’s son Charles was appointed to be the first Curator of the Cambridge Botanic Garden, founded on 5 acres in Free School Lane, the property bought by ‘Frog’ Walker. Walker had cultivated exotic pineapples, coffee, cereus and jasmines in his greenhouse and stoves, in the garden that had formerly been Sir Isaac Newton’s, beside the Great Gate at Trinity. He had lived long enough to take part in the decision by Trinity to build a new bridge over the Cam, completed in 1765 to the design of James Essex (who was paid £50), whom Lancelot encountered at Wimpole. The bridge was part of a slow improvement spreading along the back entrances of the line of colleges: St John’s, Trinity, Clare, King’s and Queens’ – all had gradually established their claim to territories on the west side of the Cam, their back entrances, hence known as ‘the Backs’. Clearing and turfing of these ‘pieces’ of flood-plain land was carried out during the 1760s and early 1770s; it must be realised that this was more a competitive exercise than a cooperative one, with each college jealously guarding its independence.
In 1769 St John’s college employed a surveyor to enclose its lands, the business being in the hands of the newly admitted Senior Bursar, Professor John Mainwaring. Lancelot’s name appears in a College Order of 10th July 1772, when it was agreed that he should supervise the repair of the river bank. He had, of course, been prominent as High Sheriff in Cambridge just over two years earlier, his name was known even amongst the closeted dons, and Professor Mainwaring knew Lancelot was working for his fellow Salopian, Lord Clive. Six months later Lancelot was asked to do more and provide a scheme for the St John’s college gardens, in conjunction with the facing of the First Court in stone, under the supervision of James Essex. Lancelot estimated £800 for his works, and with these two expensive undertakings, ‘and no very great funds31 to support them’ in view, the Mas
ter William Powell proposed opening a subscription appeal, to which he contributed £500. Lancelot’s accounts have nothing concerning St John’s, nor do the college records show anything amounting to £800, only that £44 was spent on trees in 1776–8 and £62 paid to a gardener and a ‘workman’. By a College Order of March 1778 it was ‘agreed that a piece of plate of the value of £50 be presented to Mr Brown for his services in improving the walks’. It seems that his intentions for St John’s sank beneath his illness, which lost him the first half of 1773; when he tried to catch up he paid a visit, staking out the walks and plantations, which ‘transformed an entirely formal fellows’ garden’ of the seventeenth century ‘into a more natural one, along the lines of the present lawn and wilderness’, as Dr Boys Smith concluded in his history of the college grounds. Knowing this was a far more cursory task than he intended, Lancelot would have waived his fee, protesting that it was his honour to have been of service. The silver cup actually cost £52. The St John’s Wilderness, Brownian in character, remains enchanting.
The university, undoubtedly prompted by the Duke of Grafton, gave Lancelot a further commission for ‘Some Alterations’ in 1779. The resulting plan in the university library is now a dullish document (for long years it hung in the entrance to the old university library), buffed and grey with age, water-damaged at the lower right colophon corner. It shows the extent of the Backs from St John’s Wilderness to Queens’ college and Silver Street bridge. The formal courts are shadowy green shapes; Trinity’s pride, its avenue of limes, is broken and thinned to a casual sprinkling of trees; the causeways built by Trinity, Clare and King’s are private, gravelled walks, all formality discouraged and status transferred to the main ‘drive’, the public right of way along Garret Hostel Lane. The whole sweep of land is divided into four large paddocks, ‘lawns to be fed with sheep and cattle’, all sheltered from the west by a thick belt of trees. In Lancelot’s hands the Backs had become a linear park. He also suggested shifting the river’s course westwards outside Trinity college to lessen the sharpness of the bend at St John’s, something that Sir Christopher Wren had suggested for improving the view of his Trinity library from his St John’s bridge, and vice versa.
