Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783
Page 39
At the beginning of February he was spending time in town, staying with his daughter Bridget Holland and her family at their house in Hertford Street in Mayfair. It was an ordinary business trip, which enabled him to visit his clients at their London houses; on the Wednesday evening, 5th February, he dined with Lord Coventry at his house in Piccadilly, and while he was walking the short distance home he collapsed from ‘an apoplexy’, and the next day he died.
In death Lancelot slipped back into the world from which he came; the King’s Master Gardener was no more, and there were no honours, no public orations or life-charting obituaries, no list of those attending his funeral, nor was there any statue erected. His family and those he loved ushered him to his rest at Fenstanton – ‘my body I commit to the Earth to be decently buried’ – as his Will had stated, and as the curate Thomas Johnson entered in the modest calf-bound register of burials with the date, 16th February.
All his other wishes were faithfully carried out: his last Will was dated 26th March 1779, appointing his son-in-law Henry Holland as an executor instead of John Drummond, who had died in 1774, but otherwise mainly full of those ponderous clauses reciting the rights of male heirs as yet unborn, as Lance, Jack and young Thomas Brown were not as yet married. A final codicil written around midnight after his collapse (5th February changed to the 6th) diverted £2,000 of the £3,000 allocated for Biddy’s house to Lance, stipulating that the house could be bought out of ‘ready money’ – that is, his Drummonds account. Lance Brown was now MP for Totnes, which had cost his father £1,000 (the corporation needed favouring) and presumably they foresaw an expensive progress in politics. The codicil was proved by Henry Holland the elder and the lawyer Edison on 19th February.
The family’s belongings at Wilderness House were packed up, and Biddy Brown moved to her new house in Kensington, where Lance, Thomas and Peggy were still with her at various times. Lance had his house in Elsworth, where Peggy liked to spend much of her time in the country. They all made sure that Biddy, though frail, had plenty of society, and one letter she wrote to Peggy (whom she persists in calling Margaret) in the summer of 1784 tells of her visit to the elder Hollands in their new cottage on the Hans Town estate in Chelsea, which the younger Henry was developing. ‘My time has been36 filled up,’ she wrote, adding the list of her visitors, who included her Holland grandchildren; Bridget, who acquired her coveted silver candlestick, was now the mother of a young ‘Bidy’, and of Harry, Mary, Harriet and Lancelot (with Charlotte and Caroline to come).
Biddy Brown died on 26th August 1786, and was buried at Fenstanton. Affections for their mother had kept the family together, but now a division opened; Bridget and Henry Holland were entirely preoccupied with their lives in Chelsea, but the younger Browns all gravitated to Huntingdonshire.
Lance Brown had kept his Totnes seat until the election of 1784, when he surrendered it for the rising star, William Pitt, though Pitt was invited to stand for Cambridge University, a seat he had always wanted, and where he was elected. Lance, rather at the mercy of Lord Sandwich’s ebullient control of local politics, was elected for Huntingdon. His House of Commons career was not marked by enthusiasm, he never made a speech, and he voted against Pitt’s 1785 proposals for equality of trade with Ireland. Less than a year after his mother’s death, in May 1787, Lance lost his seat (through Sandwich’s machinations) and went abroad, travelling in Switzerland and northern Italy, where the ‘good climate and amusement in seeing the various characters of different countries’ suited him, and proved that he was at least in small part his father’s son. In 1788, in Lausanne, he married Frances, the daughter of the Rev. Henry Fuller, and sister of John Fuller of Rose Hill in Sussex. The following year, prompted by rumblings of the revolution in Paris, Lance wrote to Lord Sandwich from Toulon, complaining that:
for a term37 of years I have consulted your interest more than my own; the best part of my life has been dedicated to your service, and my seats in Parliament all taken at your request, have cost me much money … yr Lordship has frequently told me that you had no person whom you wished to push forward in a political line except myself [and] this is the time I should have the greatest expectation.
In the meantime, Peggy Brown seems to have continued living in Lance’s house at Elsworth, where she was according to her mother’s last letters. Peggy, who had cried on her father’s shoulder over the end of her engagement to a Mr Gee in early 1782, had now met a prominent local businessman and partner in a Huntingdon bank, James Rust of Brampton, and they were married in Fenstanton church on 29th September 1788. The signatures of the witnesses at the ceremony were ‘Susan Brown’ and ‘M. E. Cowling’ – two new names in our story. Who were they? Susan or Susannah Brown is found easily enough, for she was the daughter of the Rev. Charles Dickins, rector of neighbouring Hemingford Abbots, and had recently married Peggy’s younger brother, Thomas Brown.38 Thomas, now twenty-seven and a ‘clerk’ or curate, seems to have fulfilled his sunny expectations as Lancelot and Biddy’s youngest child; coming down from Oxford in the summer after his father’s death, he had settled at Fenstanton. In the year after his marriage, 1789, he was appointed to the living of Conington, an ancient village halfway between Fenstanton and Elsworth, where he served the parish for forty years. Thomas and Susannah had three children: Susan and her brothers named Lancelot and Thomas, who were both ordained priests.
For ‘M. E. Cowling’ – Mary Elizabeth Cowling – clearly at least a close friend of Peggy’s, we have to look a little farther. Mary Elizabeth lived to be ninety, and she died in 1846, and so she was born in 1756, or thereabouts. She was married to Peter Cowling junior, his father of the same name being well known in Fenstanton as a local worthy, a prosperous owner of hostelries that drew their trade from the Great North Road, and a Huntingdon magistrate. Cowling junior had come under the Hinchingbrooke wing of patronage, though in his case it was apparently from the estranged Countess of Sandwich – to whom he dedicated the travel diary he wrote of a European tour taken in his early twenties. He was twenty-five in 1788, recently married, but no record of his marriage to Mary Elizabeth can be found in the Huntingdonshire or Cambridgeshire registers. It is of course possible that Peter Cowling was a friend of Lance Brown, and that the wedding took place abroad. The Cowlings had a son named Peter Lancelot Cowling, who was baptised on 15th October 1790. Was he named for Lance, who could have stood godfather, or was he named for his two grandfathers?
The only clue comes in Mr Inskip Ladds’s dotted line! S. Inskip Ladds was the church architect for Fenstanton, and in or around 1910 he was concerned about the state of the Brown monument; he sketched a family tree, a rough sketch, which survives in his papers in the Norris Museum in St Ives, and after recording Lance, Jack, Peggy and Thomas as the surviving children of Lancelot and Biddy, he extended a dotted line to Mary Elizabeth Cowling. Mr Inskip Ladds was much in tune with local life, the Cowlings’ niece, Miss Mary Anne Cowling had only died twenty-five or so years before, well within living memory – and living memory clearly informed him that Mary Elizabeth Cowling was Lancelot’s natural daughter. Thus the connection between the Cowlings and the Browns, who lie together in their vault beneath Fenstanton’s chancel, is explained.
Many other questions come tumbling: where was Lancelot in or about 1756, and where did he stay long enough to forge a relationship and father a child? Was there a connection to his self-confessed twenty-five years ‘of happiness’ at Burghley – just the kind of great-house community where such a thing could have happened and been treated with discretion? There was Croome, but that has always seemed a ‘foreign’ country; he was in Cambridgeshire a great deal, or passing through, and the existence of Mary Elizabeth as a sturdy and appealing ten-year-old in need of a secure future surely becomes a powerful reason for his purchase of the Fenstanton estate, which has always seemed an illogical enterprise. Fenstanton, conveniently placed between Cambridge and Stamford (and Burghley) was well away from Hampton Court and London gossips, and from h
is wife and family, whom he would not have wanted to hurt for the world. And yet Fenstanton was always his secret; it seems most likely that Biddy Brown never went there until she was taken in her coffin.
It is important to add that there is no mention of Mary Elizabeth or anyone connected to her in Lancelot’s Wills: the draft of 1769, and the final version, little changed, of 1779. It would have been in character for him to have regularly taken care of her upbringing, perhaps with those useful £100 notes. If, when he was sharing confidences with his daughter Peggy in his last years, he had told her his secret (perhaps Mary Elizabeth’s mother had died?), it explains Peggy liking to live in Huntingdonshire; Thomas was perhaps in on the secret too, but Mary Elizabeth does not emerge into family life until after Biddy Brown’s death – Lancelot would have been very definite about that. What is certain is that Mary Elizabeth Cowling had a comfortable life in Fenstanton; her husband Peter died in August 1824 at the good age of seventy-one. She was a widow for twenty-one years, living with her son, who became the Rev. Peter Lancelot Cowling, MA.
There is something poignant about the flurry of marriages after Lancelot and Biddy were safely buried. Captain Jack Brown married in 1789, his marriage settlement dated 17th December of that year, and his bride was Mary Linton of Stamford; the witnesses were his brother Thomas and her brother, John Linton of Freiston in Lincolnshire, a marshland village west of Boston. The Lintons owned several properties in south Lincolnshire, and these were joined to the land that Jack had inherited from his mother. Jack’s name cannot be found in connection with any ship in the naval records, but he was gazetted as a Rear-Admiral of the Blue on 1st June 1795, and continued to rise steadily after short intervals; he was made a Vice-Admiral of the Red on 9th November 1805, a few weeks after the victory at Trafalgar. Shortly before his death he became a full Admiral of the Blue, and died on 2nd May 1808, making him fifty-seven years old.
Lance’s political career had stumbled on: he was elected as a county member for Huntingdonshire in May 1792 to keep the seat warm for Sandwich’s heir, the minor Viscount Hinchingbrooke, who came of age two years later. When Lance’s nemesis the Earl died in 1792, he found himself appointed executor of his lordship’s complex affairs. Lance’s wife Frances died in December of 1792, after less than four years of their marriage, and was buried at Fenstanton. Lance, who suffered much from the disdain of the Huntingdonshire gentry – one anonymously calling him ‘a mere mushroom sprung from a dunghill in Stowe gardens’ – rose to be a Deputy Lieutenant and was given a minor court appointment as a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. He used his influence to obtain Thomas his living at Conington, and good brotherly relations were also maintained with Jack, who took over the lease of Stirtloe House, a Georgian house prettily situated on the outskirts of Buckden, on the opposite side of the Great Ouse west of Fenstanton, after Lance’s death in 1802.
Their sister Peggy Rust lived comfortably with her husband James in and around Huntingdon; they had four children, and Peggy died in 1806 and was buried at St Mary’s, Huntingdon.
Lancelot’s loyal friend, executor and business colleague, Henry Holland senior, followed up the outstanding accounts. Work was carried on for a while at Kew, Sandleford, Wynnstay and Nuneham Courtenay, managed by Samuel Lapidge and William Ireland from the yard at Hampton that Lancelot had leased. Lapidge and Ireland later worked for Humphry Repton. The elder Holland died in 1785 and was buried at All Saints church in Fulham, with his wife Mary, who had died a few weeks after Lancelot.
Lancelot gave 100 guineas, ‘with all my Drawings with my Sincere Blessing’, to his son-in-law, Henry Holland. Holland’s architectural career had prospered on its own merits: his house in St James’s for Brooks’s club was much admired, and when the Prince of Wales became a member of the club in 1783 it led to Holland’s appointment as architect at Carlton House; this in turn led to him working at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, Woburn Abbey, Althorp and other prestigious places. As well as being a stylish architect, Henry Holland had his father’s good business sense as a developer, and his ambitious Hans Town development off London’s Sloane Street included a house in large grounds for himself, Bridget and their family, where Lancelot had designed a small lake. Bridget Holland was rather like her mother, with her own quiet dignity, and Henry was of the same retiring character, grumbling that he found himself ‘more an object of39 public notice than suits me’. He was not interested in landscapes, and it is shocking to see his sketched proposals for gardens round the houses at the Spencers’ Althorp and at Southill in Bedfordshire, and even for Brighton Pavilion, which exhibit the stilted spottiness that later marked the Victorian formal revivals; fortunately he worked with Humphry Repton. Henry Holland died in 1806, and Bridget survived him, in very comfortable circumstances, until 1823. They were both buried in All Saints churchyard at Fulham, with Henry’s parents, and a tablet in the church records Bridget as the daughter of Lancelot.
Neither of Henry and Bridget’s40 sons followed their father’s or grandfather’s professions; Henry (1775–1855) became a prosperous sail-maker in Aberdeen, and Lancelot (1781–1859) became a professional soldier, and a colonel in the Coldstream Guards. Colonel Lancelot Holland and his wife Charlotte Peters (1788–1876) had fifteen children, most of whom married and had large families of their own. The most intriguing was their daughter Henrietta (1829–1912), who married a farmer named Henry Wise, and it seems they realised that they were both descended from royal gardeners.
Lancelot’s proudly held title as the King’s Master Gardener at Hampton Court died with him. It was fortunate that he probably never knew of the rumblings of official disapproval of his prosperous private practice, and the instigation of a review, which proposed the appointment of a Surveyor-General or Comptroller of royal gardens. This eminence, though ‘bred a gardener’ and responsible for the production of vast amounts of fruit, vegetables and flowers, was on a par with the royal surveyors of the Office of Works (buildings) and of Woods & Forests. At Hampton Court the Head Gardener continued to live in Wilderness House for another hundred years, until it was converted to a grace-and-favour apartment. At Kew, the distinguished Superintendent William Aiton died in 1793, and was succeeded by his elder son, William Townsend Aiton, as ‘Gardener to His Majesty’41 with responsibility for Kew and Richmond, and soon for Kensington and St James’s. The younger Aiton, John, was appointed ‘Foreman’ at Windsor in 1804, with a vastly extended territory (as Lancelot had imagined all those years before) and a salary of £2,000 a year. W. T. Aiton became a great favourite of the Prince Regent, later George IV, and was appointed ‘Director-General of the Royal Gardens’ in 1827. William IV abolished the post.
However, it was another of the Prince Regent’s favourites, the architect John Nash, who most nearly succeeded Lancelot in a practical way. Nash designed Regent’s Park and the ceremonial way, Regent Street, and when George IV decided to turn the Queen’s House into his Buckingham Palace, it was Nash (with a little help from Director-General Aiton) who revamped (and vulgarised) Lancelot’s layout of 1762, and did the same with his St James’s Park.
Henry Holland’s stout defence of his father-in-law – that ‘no man understood so well what was necessary for the habitation of all ranks and degrees of society’ – was written to Humphry Repton in the summer of 1788. Repton seems to have looked for a talisman, some sort of connection with Lancelot (whom he never met), to carry him into his new career as a landscape gardener, the term he had just invented. Repton was thirty-six, and he had led a life of sudden inspirations and mixed fortunes; he now ‘boldly ventured forth42 once more, and with renewed energy and hope push[ed] off my little bark into a sea unknown’. He compared himself to Lancelot beginning at Hammersmith at much the same age. Holland sent Repton ‘the maps of43 the greatest works in which his late father [in-law] had been consulted, both in their original and improved status’.
Lancelot’s eldest child, Bridget Holland, from a miniature, c.1775, and her husband Henry Holland by John Opie.
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These drawings have never been found, but it is worth considering what they might have been. They would not have been for any of the places – Berrington, Cadland, Claremont or Broadlands, for instance – in which Holland had an interest on his own account. ‘Original and improved status’ implies the surveys and the overlays with Lancelot’s designs, but were they only the office copies and of workaday quality? Watercoloured surveys on vellum or heavy paper were expensive and precious, and most of these remained in their respective estate offices; Lancelot’s overlay, finished by Spyers or Lapidge, would have gone to the client. Was Repton simply looking for contacts? He was such a modern man; instead of Lancelot’s imperative and exhausting galloping over half of England looking for work, Repton had written a circular letter offering his services. Whereas Lancelot’s headstrong naïvety over geography sent him dashing from one side of the country to another, Repton began close to his home; he had settled at Hare Street in Essex and concentrated upon East Anglia and the Home Counties. Of Lancelot’s places, Repton’s44 list of commissions includes (* indicates the drawings that Holland may have sent):Brocklesby* and Holkham* (by 1791), Redgrave*, Heveningham*, Thorndon and Belhus, Tewin, Panshanger, Ashridge, Taplow, Wycombe Abbey, Stoke Park, Aynho* and Nuneham Courtenay*. Repton made specific forays that appear Lancelot-inspired, to Himley*, Ingestre* and Shugborough in Staffordshire, and to Longleat*, Bowood* and Corsham* in Wiltshire. He saw Harewood*, and Wimpole* and even far-away Moccas* on the Wye.