Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  The only trouble – and the downfall of Lancelot’s dreaming design, and his ability to ‘do wonders32 on a plain surface’ as they expected – was that in visualising the Backs as a serene and serpentine park, he had imagined King’s Fellows’ building, by his old friend Jemmy Gibbs, as the ‘mansion’ to which the park design made obeisance, thus relegating Trinity college to the stable block and Clare to the offices. There was a furore, with mutterings and oathings, and the design was rejected. Lancelot had been inadequately briefed, for he had completely underestimated the prides – the overweening prides – of the individual colleges and their determined independence. By way of apology the university presented him with a silver tray, embossed with its coat of arms. But there were those who regretted the loss of the ‘general satisfaction and delight’ of his scheme, for ‘the eye would33 certainly have been pleased with walks more winding, with a greater variety of trees, with something more of a winter garden of ever-greens, and of light underwood near the banks of the river’.

  Lancelot’s commission for the Backs originated in 1770, the year of a disastrous flood in Cambridge and neighbouring counties. Thomas Gray was still at Pembroke college, where the Fellows burying their nonagenarian master, Dr Long, realised to their horror that he was being lowered into a watery grave. Gray and William Mason perhaps proposed Lancelot’s skills at drainage as the solution to the Cam’s habitual cascading into college cellars. In retrospect, the plan for ‘Some Alterations’ was not entirely wasted, the Brownian messages being subliminally absorbed by those who passed it in the old library lobby: in the nineteenth century when the Queen’s Road was made (named for Queen Victoria), the Backs gained a western boundary and, with much reallotment of lands, the college territories expanded westwards again, into the next block between Queen’s Road and Grange Road. The green ‘pieces’ alongside the Cam, too flood-meadowlike for development, were used for exercise and then, as organised sports took over, they were softened into lawns and paddocks – these for the ageless brown cows that seem to shuffle there eternally. In the 1970s, when the dominant Cambridge elms succumbed to Dutch elm disease, the estates Bursar of King’s college, B. R. Arkwright, proposed a joint and long-term approach to the management and planting of the Backs, a combined approach that still survives. The Backs are now a World Heritage Site; though the back drives to Trinity, Clare and King’s colleges are as straight as ever, there is a Brownian softening, which provides the setting for the architectural fireworks of the buildings.

  It is unlikely that Lancelot was worried by his difficulties in Cambridge. He hurried westwards to Wimpole, where there was much to detain him, for he had been involved with Wrest and Wimpole – combined in the lively presence of the Marchioness Grey – for a decade, and there was clearing up to be done.

  It was about 10 miles from Cambridge to Wimpole as the crow flew, but longer if the coach became entangled in the lanes around Haslingfield and Barrington, for this was not a country of direct roads. Wimpole was easily reached from London, or from the north, as it was right on Ermine Street, a few miles beyond Royston, or 15 miles south of Huntingdon – and a perfect example of how travel was stuck in a north–south, Roman rut, but it was so difficult going across the grain from east to west. Once reached, Wimpole seemed the abode of some benevolent giant, an agricultural giant who loved husbandry and blessed his fields with sleek, fat cattle and monstrous woolly sheep. It had been a Harley house, owned by Edward, 2nd Earl of Oxford, before Lord Chancellor Hardwicke bought it in 1740; the combined efforts of ambitious owners had resulted in the red-brick hulk of a house, settled into the centre of a huge park.

  At Wimpole, Lancelot had inherited Charles Bridgeman’s array of avenues and vistas, which seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. Fortunately, Bridgeman’s schemes had ceased to the north of the house, where a chalk escarpment, 250 feet high, made a dramatic effect. At the foot of the scarp, where it met the gault clay, was a line of springs that fed the Halden stream, a tributary of the Rhee and eventually the Cam. This was the ‘enchanted ground’ where the Marchioness had ‘danced’ with Lancelot, as they explored its possibilities on his visit in September 1767. Now the works were almost complete, with upper and lower lakes made along the course of the stream (where wet woods had existed) and the controlling sluices between them hidden by a seven-arched bridge. The sense of enclosure on the north had been created with The Belts, a series of wide plantations sheltering a serpentine drive. All that remained was the finishing of the round-towered Gothic castle that Sanderson Miller had sketched more than twenty years earlier as an eye-catcher for this north part of the park. This began as the ‘Semblance of an old Castle’, a ruin in the view, but Lord Hardwicke had changed his mind and asked James Essex to adjust the design to make it habitable. Lancelot was left with the construction, necessarily more robust, and watertight, and the Marchioness Jemima was disappointed, complaining that ‘Mr Brown has34 quite changed from our plan’. She added, ‘that is, he had “Unpicturesqued” it by making it a continuous solid object, instead of a broken one’.

  The Marchioness Grey had by no means relinquished control of her own Wrest Park, where her eldest daughter, Lady Amabel, lived with her husband Lord Polwarth. Jemima and Amabel both seemed amused and usually delighted at Lancelot’s visits; after his sudden appearance at Wrest in November of 1778, described by Lady Amabel as the visit of ‘a great Man’, which ‘as happens sometimes with great Men’ ended in very little, and lunch, Lancelot was left conversing with Lord Polwarth. His lordship, rather sickly and ineffectual, happier hunting hares and planting his own trees, thought Lancelot ‘a very odd mortal, but entertaining for a little while’. They might have talked of Southill, the Bedfordshire estate a few miles north of Wrest, where Lancelot worked briefly in 1777 for George Byng, Lord Torrington. Torrington’s finances were very bad, he was shortly declared bankrupt and Lord Polwarth was renting Southill for £100 a year. Soon plants were in transit from Southill to Wrest (they were paid for), perhaps the very ones that Lancelot had originally planted. Lord Polwarth died in 1781, and Southill was eventually bought by the brewer Samuel Whitbread, in 1795, who employed Henry Holland to work on his house.

  A last word on Wrest: all through that lunch, as Lady Amabel tried to tease Lancelot into activity, he made some interesting protestations. He could not be persuaded to make any sketch, ‘a Pencil & Paper35 he thought would do more Harm than Good, the Trees should be mark’d upon the Spot’, he favoured letting in the south-west sun, and even a view of the Old Park, and also felling ‘the high Trees’ near the house, to let in ‘a free-er Current of Air to the old part of the House’. Detailed considerations such as these are always lost in the passing of the years, and with overlays from clumsy hands, but it is well to observe Lancelot’s fine sense of when to act and when to stay the axe.

  fn1 All three places, Paultons and the Stonehams, had their real Brownian enchantments, though little is recognisable now. Paultons is a well-maintained, but greatly altered amusement park.

  fn2 The building of Berrington was delayed for some unclear reason, and so Cadland, was built first; Claremont, Cadland and Berrington were the triumph of the Holland/Brown oeuvre in understated elegance, but sadly Holland’s Cadland house is no more, the site now covered by the Fawley Oil Refinery.

  13

  THE OMNIPOTENT MAGICIAN

  Lo! He comes,

  The omnipotent magician, Brown appears.

  … He speaks. The lake in front becomes a lawn,

  Woods vanish, hills subside, and valleys rise,

  And streams, as if created for his use,

  Pursue the track of his directing wand.

  William Cowper, The Task, Book III, 1785

  LANCELOT WAS NOW well into his sixties (his sixtieth birthday had been in the summer of 1776) and there was no sign of him slowing down. His world was a duller place without Lord Chatham, and also David Garrick, who died in January 1779. Garrick was buried on i st February, in Westminster Abbey and
with great splendour; most of the noble pall-bearers were Lancelot’s clients. He had been working for one of them, Lord Palmerston at Broadlands, for thirteen and a half years, and the summer was to see the clearing up; 1779 also saw a settling of the account at Burghley, where he had been working since 1754. With two such momentous jobs withdrawn from his schedule, he might at least have taken a holiday, but on the contrary, he was driving farther and faster. He seemed to relish new opportunities in areas of the country that were quite fresh to him; his affection for the sporting estate was as strong as ever, but he also ventured to the wilder shores of romantic settings that others called the ‘picturesque’.

  There was rejoicing at Wilderness House in the autumn of 1779 with the safe return of Captain Jack Brown from active service in the coastal waters off New England. The war had moved to the south, where General Cornwallis was still optimistic of victory. Not so the British admirals, for Lord Howe had come home, saying that it was impossible to hold on to the American colonies, and the enthusiasm for trying was rapidly receding. Jack could have come home with Admiral Howe, for his service at sea for more than seven years had merited his captaincy – listed in The Commissioned Sea Officers of the Royal Navy on 25th March 1779 (but there is no subsequent record of his name being attached to any ship, though he steadily rose in rank).

  * * *

  My Dear Peggy

  Annexed to this you have a draft for Mr Cloase for the payment of his men which you will give him as soon as you receive this. If Jack is1 with you tell him Lord Palmerston & myself were ten hours between London and this Place – I believe where we stop[p]ed to Dine, it mite [sic] take three Quarters of an hour. We came all the way as hard as four horses could lay feet to the ground, a Servant went on before to order Horses, and is comparing the goodness of the Road not one third of that way between London & Exeter, I will give2 up the Sea to him, but the Land he had best leave to me.

  It will not be very long before he will be convinced how wrong he was, and how improper his behaviour was when he maintain’d an impossibility. My Love to him & those that are with you, I remain my Dear Child your affectionate Father

  L. Brown.

  * * *

  Lancelot’s letter, in full opposite, is transcribed above; the letter is undated but was written in the autumn of 1779 from Broadlands at Romsey in Hampshire.

  The advent of Jack, well built, weatherbeaten and twenty-eight years old, who had raced up from Devon upon landing, was wonderful – at least at first. But father and son had been apart for so long they had forgotten how to behave, and they were both considerably changed and both used to giving orders. Differences of opinion were inevitable, especially on the eternal subject of how fast a journey could be made. Lancelot wrote from Broadlands at Romsey in early November, to Peggy, ‘If Jack is with you tell him Lord Palmerston & myself were ten hours between London and this Place.’ They had taken three-quarters of an hour for a meal, otherwise ‘we came all the way as hard as four horses could lay feet to the ground’, with a servant sent forward to arrange the changes of horses. Had Jack challenged his father on his slowness, using colourful ship’s language, for Lancelot was undoubtedly hurt: ‘It will not be very long before he will be convinced how wrong he was, and how improper his behaviour was when he maintain’d an impossibility. My Love to him and those that are with you.’ But Lancelot’s love was preceded by his thunderous phrase, ‘I will give up the Sea to him, but the Land he had best leave to me.’

  His outburst left Lancelot mellowed, and at Broadlands he was docility personified, bringing a ‘very sober3 and very honest’, though ‘old man’ from another job, to finish the levelling of the hedges. Lord Palmerston had paid £21,150 for his new house and grounds, at least three-quarters of this amount for Henry Holland’s building and decorating. In closing the account, Lancelot wrote on 17th November:

  There Remains due to workmen & myself under five hundred pounds which shall be delivered to your Lordship with the Papers and Accounts when your Lordship comes to Town and [I] shall then with an unfeigned Heart return your Lordship my Thanks for numberless Civilities, kind usage and pleasant imployment.

  As a work of the Brown and Holland partnership, Broadlands had not the same restrained elegance of composition as the trio of Claremont, Cadland and Berrington, but it sat (and sits) splendidly enough (perhaps more of a stately matron as opposed to three exquisite brides) on its lawns beside the River Test.

  At Burghley, Lord Exeter had paid over a total of £8,122. 16s. 3d. to Lancelot since 1769, as in the account book (though there were the lost amounts for 1754–68). Lancelot saw his lake was almost filled, and promised that he would submit plans for the new entrance hall and staircase at the south-east corner of the house, which would lead directly up to the first-floor sequence of painted George Rooms. The promise slipped his memory for his plans were not sent for two years, by which time Lord Exeter had made other arrangements; on the other hand, Lancelot’s design for the Gothic banqueting house was not implemented until 1787, when it was built by the Stamford masons John and Robert Hames. Lord Exeter, outwardly still the cheerful potentate, had private worries in that the glamorous marriage between his heir, Henry Cecil,4 and Emma Vernon has disintegrated and was to end in divorce. (Henry Cecil retreated into the Shropshire countryside, calling himself John Jones, where he fell in love and married a country girl, Sally Hoggins. On Lord Exeter’s death in 1793, ‘John Jones’ disappeared and Henry Cecil returned to Burghley, with Sally becoming known as ‘the cottage countess’.

  Harewood ‘diligently overseen’

  Lancelot’s coach seemed to be on the Great North Road more frequently than ever. Having left Burghley, there was still activity at Harewood, to the north of Leeds. Lancelot had known Harewood, then called Gawthorpe, some twenty years earlier when Edwin Lascelles had rejected William Chambers’s designs for his new house, briefly considering Lancelot’s ideas, before settling on John Carr of York. Carr had been pushed aside when the charming Robert Adam came to restore the church, but Carr and Adam had ‘boxed and coxed’5 over the house (the interiors remain some of Adam’s most beautiful) and the gardener, Mr Sparrow, had started to naturalise the setting by damming a tributary of the River Wharfe to make a lake. Edwin Lascelles’s second wife, the former Jane Colman (widow of Sir John Fleming, who insisted on being called Lady Fleming), was keenly interested in both interiors and gardens, so Lancelot returned in 1774 to enlarge and reshape the lake, add an island and do a great deal of planting. It was not always smooth running, Lascelles having refused to make a payment in 1778 because, as he wrote on 28th March, ‘I have always said6 and did insist upon it that the ground was Scandalous Lay’d, and beggarly sown, and that several other parts were slovenly run over and badly finish’d, particularly by the Island.’ Lancelot quickly repaired the damage to the grounds and his client’s temper – the importance of the work can be judged by the size of the bill, over £6,000, finally settled in 1781.

  While Lancelot was at Harewood he heard all about the wedding of Lady Fleming’s elder daughter, seventeen-year-old Seymour Dorothy Fleming, married in 1775 to Sir Richard Worsley. This sent him, a few years later, journeying to the Isle of Wight, to the Worsleys’ house, Appuldurcombe, set in an arcadian landscape on the south of the island near Ventnor. It was a single visit, charged at £52. 10s., and one of those instances of Lancelot’s famed speedy assessment of the place, which left Sir Richard with the blueprint for a sweeping drive and the sites for his eye-catching monuments. By judiciously cutting back the surrounding woods, leaving clumps that either stopped or channelled the views, there was the illusion of magic, or at least sleight of hand. Sir Richard was an apt pupil, and was deeply interested in his home landscape and its historical connections – he was at the time compiling a pioneering topographical history of the island, which was published in 1781. However, his marriage ended in a sensational divorce the following year, and Sir Richard left on an extended expedition to the Mediterranean and farther eas
t, buying up antiquities, paintings and jewels, which were found in Appuldurcombe House7 when he died in 1805. His heiress was Henrietta Pelham at (Lancelot’s) Brocklesby, whose husband became the 1st Earl of Yarborough, a keen yachtsman and member of the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes. Appuldurcombe was used for sailing holidays until his death in 1846, after which it was sold, left uninhabited in the early twentieth century and eventually in ruins. It now belongs to English Heritage, and the tantalising ghost of Lancelot’s landscape may still be seen.

  At Harewood – where Reynolds’s portrait of Lady Worsley, wearing the red riding-dress uniform of the Hampshire Militia, still hangs – the outcome could not have been more different. Lancelot’s park has been ‘diligently overseen’8 by generations of the Lascelles family, and it must rank as Lancelot’s most painted park, apart from Petworth. The planting he did in the 1770s was sufficiently mature to show effectively when Girtin and Turner, friends who travelled and painted together, arrived in 1797. Thomas Girtin’s Harewood House from the South-east, a large canvas view looking to the sunset – the house lit on its distant hill, the light catching the lake’s surface, the dark massings of trees filling the vales, the clouds rolling across the crags and Wharfedale fading into the distance – illustrates J. M. W. Turner’s remark, ‘If Tom Girtin had lived,9 I should have starved.’ Turner, taking the same view, stood back to include some deer and a group of spindly trees in the foreground. Thomas Malton and John Varley, as well as the Lascelles ladies, also painted the park; most endearing of all, George Richmond, who arrived in September 1855 to paint a portrait of Louisa, Lady Harewood, had ‘a sudden reaction to Capability Brown’s wonderful vista’ and ‘dashed down’10 the view from his bedroom ‘while he was changing for dinner’. Richmond’s view looks into the Turner and Girtin views, and the trees – like threading, interlocking, fingers of dark green – take their places below the sunlit heights. As all these paintings tell the same story, they must be telling of Lancelot’s landscape rather than of their own painterly visions.