Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783

by Jane Brown

  ‘With Poet’s feeling and with Painter’s eye’

  Somewhat as a surprise, this phrase leaps out of the contract for work at Sandbeck Hall, on the border between Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire, home (at least his second home, after Lumley Castle in Durham) of Richard Lumley, 4th Earl of Scarbrough, a member of the royal household and deputy Earl Marshal of England. The first four articles of the contract are conventional enough: to make a ‘proper drain’ at the foot of the ha-ha wall (as at Burghley); to demolish all the old ponds (as at Charlecote and Chatsworth as well as Burghley); draining, levelling and planting the ground; and making good a pond for the use of the stables.

  Those magic seeds of Fancy, which produce

  A Poet’s feeling, and a Painter’s eye

  is a quotation from William Mason’s epic poem The English Garden, published in parts through the 1770s, which Lancelot surely perused, though he would have needed unbounded leisure and patience to read through it. The fifth and final article of his Sandbeck contract reads:

  To finish11 all the Valley of Roach Abbey in all its Parts, according to the Ideas fixed on with Lord Scarbrough (with Poet’s feeling and with Painter’s eye) beginning at the Head of the Hammer Pond, and continuing up the Valley towards [Laughton en le Morthen] as far as Lord Scarbrough’s Ground goes, and to continue the Water and Dress the Valley up by the Present Farm House until it comes to the separation fixed for the Boundary of the New Farm. N.B. The Paths in the Wood are included in this Description and every thing but the Buildings.

  Perhaps it was Lord Scarbrough who had read his Mason and realised that he owned the ruins of the Cistercian abbey of Roche at the end of his park, and that the ruin could be adapted as a fashionable feature. Or did Lancelot persuade him? The contract was written in 1774, to be completed in 1777: Lancelot was fresh from Wimpole, where great efforts were being made to build Sanderson Miller’s ‘ruined’ tower; in fact he had been all too conscious of the value put on his friend’s ‘ruins’ for all of his career. The recognition of Roche Abbey seemed nothing new, except for the context of the times – of a growing popularity for the mysterious and faintly horrific as elements of picturesque beauty. Roche seems to place Lancelot on the brink of the ‘new’ fashion: the ‘roche’ of Roche (like the ‘mont’ of Claremont) being the outcrop, in this case of magnesian limestone, that adds drama to the site. William Aislabie’s Studley Royal and Fountains Abbey (and rugged, rocky Hackfall) had been recently discovered by tourists and were becoming all the rage. The Rev. William Gilpin’s Essay on Prints had been published in 1768, and was much talked of, wherein he defined the ‘picturesque’ as ‘that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’ (though the word did not acquire a capital P for several years yet). Gilpin had taken his Tour to the Wye valley and south Wales, sketching and painting the ruined castles, and rocky outcrops cradled in ferns and the dark waters, in 1770. His views were hand-copied (the aquatints not published until 1782) and had a limited circulation, sending the painters and poets who saw them scuttling to gaze on Tintern Abbey and gasp at Coldwell Rocks: it seems likely that Lord Scarbrough – and possibly also Lancelot – had seen the King’s copy.

  At Sandbeck the achievement was in the spectacular contrast. James Paine’s imposing block of a mansion gazed out upon rolling parkland, grazed by particularly fat and contented-looking deer, cattle and sheep. The open park was surrounded by trees – not merely trees, but those lush green cloudscapes of trees that are the legacy of Sherwood Forest to Nottinghamshire and of the ‘Dukeries’ a little to the south of Sandbeck. From such sybaritic comforts the visitors could walk or drive – it was a good 2 miles – through the woodland paths to the tree-shaded and ivy-draped ruins in their narrow sequestered vale. The steep-sided valley that Lancelot dressed extended for about another 2 miles to the south-west, the paths keeping company with the stream that the monks had harnessed for their fishponds, until the tired ‘pilgrims’ – ‘we picturesque people’, as Gilpin dubbed those who shared his tastes – reached the comforts of Laughton, and the waiting carriages. Even Gilpin admitted that Lancelot had done well, writing in his Observations relating chiefly to Picturesque Beauty of 1776, ‘he has finished12 one of the valleys which looks towards Laughton spire, he has floated it with a lake and formed a very beautiful scene. But I fear it is too magnificent and too artificial an appendage to be in unison with the ruins of an abbey.’ As the beauty of Cistercian sites is invariably that they are by water (naturally a practical priority), this was a fatuous remark; what he really objected to, it transpired, was that Laughton Pond, where it had been enlarged by Lancelot, showed spade-marks and bare edges, whereas a few osiers and bushes would make it suitable in time.fn1

  Gilpin may have been codifying the Picturesque in the late 1770s, but the taste had been growing for fifty years. Lancelot was no novice, for he had worked through much of what Christopher Woodward has so nicely called ‘the springtime13 of the Picturesque’, meaning the first half of the eighteenth century. ‘It was as if the corpses of the abbeys and castles,’ writes Woodward in In Ruins, ‘had been given a second life by artists and “men of feeling”.’ John Aislabie had annexed Fountains Abbey into Studley Royal, and the terrace at Duncombe Park was built in 1758 to allow the ruins of Rievaulx into the views. Lancelot had said that he admired Sanderson Miller’s passion for building Gothic ruins, his own Edge Hill and his designs for Hagley and Wimpole, but one wonders whether he ever took his eccentric mentor quite seriously. Lancelot had also seen plenty of examples of William Kent’s rusticated exedras and rock-works, firstly in the Elysian Fields at Stowe, but he found these too fanciful for emulation; Brownian rocky cascades owe more to his native Northumberland’s tumbling rivers. Horace Walpole’s Gothic extravaganza at Strawberry Hill at Twickenham, which he began in the late 1740s, did not apparently attract Lancelot’s attention. On the other hand, James Gibbs’s Gothic Temple at Stowe (every detail of its construction noted by Lancelot) remained as an iconic image in his memory, inspiring his love of castellated effects, used at Blenheim and Burghley, and wherever else he thought the Gothic style fitted. The Picturesque – ‘as agreeable in a picture’, as Gilpin defined it – the lessons of Claude’s dispositions of his buildings and groupings of trees had been frequently discussed ever since the time Lancelot was carving out the Grecian Valley at Stowe.

  As for the Rev. William Gilpin, he was a familiar figure too: Gilpin had been a curate of some twenty-three summers when he visited Buckingham to preach, and so ‘discovered’ Stowe, when Lancelot was head gardener. Gilpin’s Dialogue upon the Gardens, published in 1748, had been the beginning of his ‘picturesque’ career, though he did not actually use the word for another twenty years, until his Essay on Prints. Gilpin’s real career was schoolmastering, and he and his wife Margaret were deeply committed to the care and education of the boys of Cheam School (where corporal punishment was rare, but justice, morality and gardening were the order of the days), until they handed over to their son, in 1777. The Gilpins were now installed at Boldre vicarage in the New Forest (in the presentation of Cheam old boys, the Mitfords of Exbury), which is how Gilpin managed to ride over to Cadland while Lancelot was working there. Boldre was a poor and scattered parish needing much attention, which Gilpin put to use in conjuring up his Remarks on Forest Scenery and Other Woodland Views (1791) from his daily journeyings.

  A ‘tour’ to the Wye valley and Wales

  Lancelot’s journeys of the late 1770s and early 1780s to distant places are poorly documented, for there are no surviving letters home to Biddy describing his night stops or the people he met, and so it is a matter of moving from the known into the unknown. From Berrington Hall and Leominster, he would drive into the south-western view, to Weobley, to find a crossing of the River Wye at Bredwardine or Monnington, and so to Moccas, beside the meanders of the Middle Wye.

  At Moccas, Robert Adam was building a red-brick, urban-looking villa on a knoll above the Wye, but the house fails – or at least
it does now – in an imaginative relationship to the magnificent river cliff on the opposite bank. It was an ill omen, an early example of the landscape advice coming too late, and Lancelot must have quietly cursed that he was not summoned early enough to do better with the possibilities of the park; the ancient little church, built in the days when people understood their native grounds, sat so prettily on its neighbouring hill. Should he have been warned, and walked away? Having come so far, and to this divinely beautiful place, he persevered.

  Moccas was an estate of almost 4,000 acres, ‘densely inscribed14 with old features’, a baronial deer park with huge pollarded oaks, an ancient British burial ground, the ruins of two castles and a scattering of old buildings, all seemingly made for picnic places, lovers’ trysts and eye-catchers. It was so historic and ripe for the picturesque, but as yet this landowner, even on the hallowed Wye, was unconvinced. Sir George Cornewall was a new-come owner, who had acquired his estate and name with his heiress wife, Catherine Cornewall: he seemed torn between being fashionable and his desire to impress his neighbours with his agricultural improvements; he was also borrowing to finance his determined expansion of his holdings, which were eventually almost 7,000 acres. John Lambe Davis had surveyed Moccas in 1772, and Lancelot based his proposals of 1778 on this survey. It was a consultant’s plan, for which he was paid a neat £100, and Sir George intended to use it as the framework for his developments, or not use it, or modify it, as he pleased. Lancelot had tried for sympathetic guidance. His plan focused on the drive coming from the west at Dorstone and crossing the park, passing the Lawn Pool, which sat within a huge meander of the river, before reaching the house. The present-day surveyor and expert on Brown parks, John Phibbs, suggests that ‘the visitor was15 presumably expected to stop the carriage, and even to walk to a particular viewing station’ – Lancelot’s purpose being to give pleasurable amusement, but also orientation, a sense of unity between resident or visitor with at least part of this complex landscape. But even Phibbs’s practised eye admits that ‘traces of such walks are seldom found today’ at Moccas. Sir George, in confusing Lancelot’s careful allotment of pasture or arable, and in juggling field boundaries rather than removing them, negated his £100 worth of advice.

  Sir George called in Humphry Repton in the 1790s, but treated him much the same. His neighbours, Uvedale Price from Foxley and Richard Payne Knight from Downton Vale, the loud and controversial doyens of the Picturesque, naturally arrived at Moccas, but also made little effect. Huge amounts of timber were sold from the park and estate – reputedly to the value of £20,000–30,000 before Sir George died in 1819, but the estate forester, Mr Webster, had also planted thousands of young oaks. Moccas became a famous landscape in the nineteenth century, distinguished by the attentions of the pioneering Woolhope Field Club, and by the Rev. Francis Kilvert in his Diary: his entry for 22nd April 1876 read, ‘I fear those16 grey old men of Moccas, those grey, gnarled, lowbrowed … misshapen oak men that stand waiting and watching century after century … “the trees which the Lord hath planted”. They look as if they had been at the beginning and making of the world, and they will probably see its end.’ Today, Moccas is a National Nature Reserve. It is only a pity that the legacy of Lancelot Brown, who was constitutionally incapable of destroying a rich habitat, unless he replaced it with a richer one, is not more appreciated.

  Lancelot fared better at Dinefwr (Newton House or Dynevor), deep in Carmarthenshire, just outside Llandeilo, in a brief commission carried out for the politician George Rice just prior to his death in 1779. The twelfth-century Dinefwr Castle, steeped in the history of Wales, was already a feature of the park for the seventeenth-century Newton House, the home of the Rice family and ornamental in itself. Lancelot sent plans for an entrance drive and a kitchen garden. The park retains his beech clumps, and the walk to the castle is known as Brown’s Walk. It is now owned by the National Trust.

  Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, 4th Baronet, of Wynnstay was a well-known Grand Tourist, patron of Batoni and dapper man about town, for whom Robert Adam built no. 20 St James’s Square, and whom Lancelot had surely known of for years, for he frequented Burghley, Castle Ashby and Charlecote amongst many other houses. In 1771, when he was twenty-three, he married, as his second wife, George Grenville’s daughter Charlotte, and so it was quite natural that he should commission Lancelot to work at Wynnstay,17 his home just south of Ruabon, where the park was crossed by the deep and rocky course of the River Belan, before it joined the Dee in the Vale of Llangollen. Lancelot made five journeys to distant Flintshire, with pitiably little result as Sir Watkin was rather volatile in his passions and finances. Loyal John Midgeley was the foreman on the ground, who patiently laboured at plantings around the house and in the pleasure grounds, and was finally allowed to make the series of rocky cascades on the Belan stream, leading to ‘a very fine18 piece of water’ held up by a dam. (The cascades and the lake were not finished until 1784 by a local surveyor, John Evans: there was an opening ceremony, ‘led by the gamekeeper and two bagpipers, it included 80 colliers, 100 carters, 200 labourers, 20 artificers, 150 gentlemen and farmers, who had helped with their carts, one wagon with a large piece of roast beef, another with a hogshead of beer with a banner To Moisten the Clay, Sir Watkin and Lady Williams-Wynn and their daughter in a phaeton drawn by six ponies, Mr Evans on horseback and Mr Midgeley with his levelling staff.’ )fn2

  Towards an English Picturesque

  North-east of Denbigh, at Lleweni Hall on the River Clwyd, Lancelot made one visit to advise Thomas Fitzmaurice, Lord Shelburne’s brother, in 1781; it was perhaps a consolation, for at Bowood he had been ousted in favour of the aged Charles Hamilton, creator of Painshill Park in Surrey, though by now a pensioner in Bath. However, Wiltshire was a nest of other possibilities, and they revealed the seeds of the Picturesque to be deeply embedded in the English psyche: Lancelot returned to Wilton in 1779, needing no second bidding to this iconic house, but as so often with famous places his plans for alterations appear to have become overlaid. Farther west was the Beckfords’ Fonthill, where he did not go, but a few miles to the south lay the lesser-known hexagonal ruins of the Arundells’ Old Wardour, wreathed in stories enough for several Gothic novels. Lord Arundell had long sought Lancelot’s advice with politeness and flattery, but had despaired of him being so busy and had called in Richard Woods of Essex. Woods had grumbled that his pay of a guinea a day was not enough:

  to keep myself,19 horses and servant, considering how many broken days in a year I have, for example take out Sundays, many days ill by getting colds etc., how many days and nights in town at expences, merely to wait on gentlemen without even charging anything for it, how many days in a year are spent at home only in answering letters, and add to that the great expense in a year for postage.

  Woods defines well the difficulties of his profession, or is he jealous? A guinea a day, he continues to Lord Arundell, and ‘I should soon be oblig’d to give over travelling, unless like a Tom Tinker. If the gentleman your Lordship is pleased to mention had done business upon those terms, I know not how he could have raised a fortune at £2,500 per annum.’

  Sadly, Lord Arundell chose to spend his money on James Paine’s vast new Wardour, for which Lancelot now supplied a landscape plan (1775), but little was carried out. The delights of the old castle ruin, the swan-shaped lake, the castellated banqueting house, and the grotto built later by the doyen of grotto-makers, Josiah Lane of Tisbury, the woods and the views are all considerable, but the apparent confusion between the works of Woods and Lancelot leaves only a muddled understanding.

  South of Salisbury is triangular Longford Castle, said to be built with a fortune in silver bars found in a Spanish galleon wrecked off Hurst Castle, and given three towers in honour of the Holy Trinity. It stands immediately beside the River Avon; Jonathan Spyers made a survey in 1778, and Lancelot proposed the park planting and removing the formal flower beds, which he felt cluttered the scene, and which were removed (but subsequentl
y replaced). The grand finale of the Wiltshire Gothic collection is Lacock Abbey, said to be the least-damaged survivor of the medieval houses (in this case a nunnery), because Sir William Sharington acquired it quickly enough after the Dissolution to prevent its damage. Lancelot would have seen more of the lovely timbered Tudor buildings (without their nineteenth-century overlay), but the tranquil walks beside the young River Avon, and the lines of the ha-ha, certainly evoke his presence. No evidence of his working for John Ivory Talbot is certain, but suspicions are growing.

  More Picturesque curiosities crowd these late years: a plan of 1779 for pleasure grounds in an old quarry at Whitley Beaumont in West Yorkshire, pre-dating a popular Victorian ‘restoration’ concept; Byram, also in West Yorkshire, visited in 1782, remains a mystery; haunted Woodchester, in its dramatic ‘lost’ Cotswold valley near Stonehouse in Gloucestershire, may yet reveal Lancelot’s work from 1782; Ickworth in Suffolk, where he submitted plans for the new house, eventually built as a Rotunda in the 1790s, conceals a Brown setting beneath acres of woods and later gardens.