by Jane Brown
Repton did not rely on plans, he only ever drew small layouts, and as he was a talented and practised watercolourist, his method was to sketch the scene. As well as coining the friendly term ‘landscape gardener’, he developed the idea of a bound set of proposals (as Lancelot had provided for Belvoir), which he called his Red Books. Each Red Book had ‘before’ and ‘after’ sketches, and an ‘open letter’ to the client, full of optimism and flattery, which inspired confidence.
Repton’s character was both sympathetic and generous, and he was careful of the good name of his profession, which implied respect for his forebears, including Lancelot; Lancelot became a landscape gardener in retrospect. Repton worked on a different scale: for instance, at Ashridge where Lancelot had planted the sweeping beech woods of the Golden Valley, Repton’s contribution was the ornamental sequence of gardens (including the Monk’s Garden, with the gardeners robed as monks) ranged around Wyatt’s Gothick palace. Repton did well out of two families that would not employ Lancelot: the Bedfords at Woburn and Endsleigh in Devon, and the Portlands at Bulstrode and Welbeck. (In his book on Repton, Stephen Daniels suggests that Lancelot did go to Bulstrode; if so, it would have been under Mrs Montagu’s late influence.) Otherwise Repton’s clients owned much smaller properties, which he cleverly organised into clusters, within commuting distance of London, Bristol, Leeds, Norwich and Ipswich. Repton was not a contractor, he was anxious not to soil his hands, but rather to keep a professional distance and avoid tiring supervisory visits. Even so, after a few years he found the travelling too exhausting and – modern man that he was – decided to write his memoirs. In doing so, as Dame Sylvia Crowe has observed, he ‘codified’45 the art of landscape design for his successors. Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe46 thought that ‘Repton humanised Brown’s conception of landscape’, though ‘he compromised it as a work of art’.
Jellicoe hit the mark: Repton’s ‘common-sense approach and his ingenious method of the presentation of ideas’ were easily applied in education, they were ‘media-friendly’. Repton’s books, Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (1795), Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1803) and finally Fragments of 1816 passed on the grail, even if it was a lesser chalice. Repton felt he had to apologise for Lancelot’s lack of education and the fact that he did not draw; he did not criticise Lancelot’s work, but then he did not praise his achievements. Repton had troubles enough of his own: his unhappy, brief partnership with Nash, his debts and ill health, the vain hope of commissions (and of the patronage of William Pitt the Younger) and difficulties over his publications; he died suddenly, of a heart attack, at his home in Hare Street in March 1818. But Repton was fortunate in his sons, John Adey and George Stanley Repton, who guarded their father’s legacy.
fn1 Sandbeck Hall and Roche Abbey have been rent asunder by subsequent history, especially mine-workings, and the effective contrasts are now impossible to gauge. The once ‘dressed valley’ is virtually derelict, and the abbey, now managed by English Heritage, is rather too tidy for romantic effect; the archaeologists, with their changed priorities, now curse Lancelot for dismantling the cloister and levelling part of the footprint of the building in the Picturesque cause.
fn2 Talacre at Prestatyn, Clwyd, has also been suggested as a Brown site; it was owned by Barbara Mostyn of Kiddington in Oxfordshire.
AFTERPIECE
This tree is planted in memory of
Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown 1716–83
Lord of this Manor
Who planted a million others
Notice on Hilton Green, near Fenstanton, Huntingdonshire
THE AVUNCULAR PRESENCE of the King’s Master Gardener had always attracted attention, and with his death his absence left an emptiness, a momentary silence, in hundreds of villages and gardens and country communities. In thirty-five years of hard work he had transformed thousands of acres of landscape, but the reality of his everydays was to give employment to men and women – often of the lowliest labouring kind – for whom his schemes were a means of survival. It has been said that ‘architecture is the art1 of organising a mob of craftsmen’ which leaves park-making as the art of organising a noisy crowd of the unskilled; much of Lancelot’s success was that he was a superb ‘man’ manager, though there were also many women, boys and girls employed on lighter tasks. The loyalties of his foremen, and his known record – from his concern over Christmas payments at Stowe to his sympathy for Mrs Montagu’s philanthropy amongst her workers at Sandleford – suggest that he was a fair and considerate taskmaster. His was not a fleeting presence and time and again his heavy tread would be heard at the garden door or on the estate office step – as at Burton Constable every September during the 1770s – and once a place was gathered into his network it was never forgotten, and he would always call in, if passing, to see how things were. Up and down the country roads of Britain Lancelot had become a familiar figure, at the inns and posting houses along his regular routes, at gate lodges and keepers’ cottages and amongst tenant farmers. The foresters and woodsmen, the charcoal burners, the blacksmiths and wheelwrights, the lime-burners and brick-makers – all such scattered countrymen were familiar with his arrivals, for invariably he brought them work. But lodge-keepers and blacksmiths are not the historians of their times.
Without Lancelot, his trees continued to grow; his lakes evolved into rich habitats for wading birds and water rats, for eels, chub, dace and grayling, as well as trout, carp and the lazy, shovel-mouthed pike. Fish were attracted to the active water around his dams and cascades, and literally thousands of country fishermen spent happy days on lake and river banks.
For perhaps fifty years his parks served the contented state of mind of the country sportsmen, who revelled in a challenging pastime and nothing more. Lancelot’s clumps and coverts were home to deer, badger, fox and hare (rabbits were not yet running amok) and a balance was maintained. ‘How happy was the lot2 of the old-fashioned sportsman,’ wrote Ralph Nevill in Sporting Days and Sporting Ways (1910):
in September there was partridge shooting … steadily pursued till came the pheasant shooting, from its shining beauty, on the first of October, to its happiest variety in November; woodcock, till frost had driven both the sportsman and the birds from the woods; snipe, while the bogs were wet and when the rippling spring still ran through sparkling icicles.
Finally, the wildfowl, ‘most exciting of sports, when the spirits were buoyant and the eye clear’. This was a golden age, ‘the conscious pride of art,’ writes Nevill, in matching the instincts of a trained dog ‘against the finer instinct of the bird’, and vastly different from the mass slaughter of ‘battue’ and shooting-flying that was to come with the mid-nineteenth century.
Behind their walls Lancelot’s kitchen gardens thrived, and nearer the house his lawns grew into flower-rich carpets, banquets for bees and butterflies. His lawns hosted the first cricket matches and gave space for the modern passions for archery, tennis and golf and other outdoor games to grow.fn1 Some of his clients called in William Emes or Humphry Repton to continue the ‘improving’, but most left Lancelot’s work to mature, before the next heir and the next fashion – the early-Victorian revival of formal flower terraces – arrived.
And yet, it was true that he worked for the narrowest elite of society in pursuit of an esoteric taste. ‘Voguish philosophies did little’ for the great oracle of Lancelot’s age, Samuel Johnson, who dealt swiftly with estates and the mania for tulips as fashionable luxuries, in his Dictionary. Not one landscape nerve seemed to find a place in Johnson’s mighty brain: he had visited Lancelot’s Luton Hoo on 4th June 1781, by coincidence the royal birthday, James Boswell3 having obtained a ticket for entry and crowing over his friendship with Lord Mountstuart. The conversation went:
Johnson did, slightly, relent, concluding that Luton Hoo was ‘one of the places I do not regret having come to see’, and then they adjourned to drink the King’s health in an inn in Luton.
Irrelevance was a
n awful fate, but the world was turning away from the English countryside and all that it represented. At Kew, Lancelot’s lovely riverside gardens for the King and Queen had been subsumed into Sir Joseph Banks’s Royal Botanic Garden, now devoted to economic botany; Banks, the great panjandrum of all things scientific and horticultural, had returned from the other side of the world, his dreams peopled with hibiscus-draped Tahitian girls, his ambitions directed towards the commercial production and trading of tea, cotton, coffee and opium. Within weeks of Lancelot’s death, Banks was receiving reports from Benjamin Franklin, the American Ambassador in France, that the Montgolfier brothers had successfully flown their hot-air balloon and ‘opened a Road4 in the Air’, as Banks observed. If Franklin was the advance guard of newborn America finding its way in the world, then he was soon joined by his countryman, Thomas Jefferson, on shuttle diplomacy between France and England. Few people, and certainly not Banks, would have suggested to Jefferson that he should see Brown parks on his brief tour of this country, but Jefferson was keen on architecture and landscape design as a bellwether of his new country’s status, and he had admired Lord Chatham. Jefferson visited Pitt’s former South Lodge on Enfield Chace, noting in his diary, ‘the water very fine’;5 he saw Moor Park, Stowe and Wotton Underwood, where he admired Lancelot’s L-shaped water, which ‘affords 200 brace of carp a year’; he found Caversham ‘well disposed’, and much to admire at Blenheim: ‘the water here is very beautiful, and very grand. The cascade from the lake a fine one’. Jefferson was a stern critic, and made some harsh comments on the standards of maintenance, but it is pertinent that he spent most of his time looking at Lancelot’s works. At home in Virginia, his house and gardens at Monticello were an intended blueprint for American tastes, and – with the extension of his groves and walks into the grounds of the University of Virginia – became a far-reaching influence on campus and park design in nineteenth-century America.
Lancelot’s influence also slipped into Europe. During the 1770s and into the 1780s Georges-Louis Le Rouge published a series of pattern-books – called cahiers – showing Nouveaux jardins à la mode, in the irregular or natural style. He illustrated Stowe, Claremont and Lancelot’s Kew, but most interestingly also rather bowdlerised layouts of the Queen’s House and Lord Holderness’s Sion Hill. Lancelot’s ‘edge of the cornfield’ effect, of a path winding through woodland, but allowing glimpses of a sunny field of corn or grasses, was much in evidence. (Le Rouge’s later editions adopted the title Jardins anglo-chinois, William Chambers having persuaded him of the Chinese love of their native landscape as the origin of the natural style.) Naturalism found favour in France, with exiles returning to ruined gardens after the Revolution as well as with republicans who wanted nothing to do with the ancien régime of Versailles-like formality. The term le jardin anglais, quickly applied to any patch of naturalism, owed much to Lancelot’s style, but also something to the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great’s passion: ‘I am at present6 madly in love with English gardens,’ she had written to Voltaire in 1772, ‘with curved lines, gentle slopes, lakes formed from swamps, and archipelagoes of solid earth’. She added that she hated straight lines and fountains that tortured water. Evidence of her passion was demonstrated at her country estate, Tsarskoe Selo, where she employed British gardeners, and in her commission to Josiah Wedgwood for her Imperial Russian dinner service, usually known as the ‘Frog Service’7 from its emblem, with more than 900 pieces decorated with English scenes. Lancelot’s places that were pictured include Alnwick Castle, Audley End, Blenheim, Burghley, Chatsworth, Claremont, Harewood, St James’s Park, Milton Abbas, Roche Abbey, Sherborne, Stowe, Syon, Trentham, Warwick Castle, Wrest and Wimpole Hall (this last with views of Lancelot’s lake painted by Lady Amabel Polwarth).
* * *
At home, the literary associations multiplied, and so many were wrongheaded; one of Lancelot’s last jobs was for the 2nd Earl Harcourt at Nuneham Courtenay near Oxford. Harcourt had written to William Mason:
Poor Brown!8 I have really been much concerned & hurt at his unexpected death; for, exclusive of the admiration I naturally feel for true genius in every art, I respected the man’s private character, & ever found him obliging, good-humoured, & accommodating in the highest degree; while I felt an affection for him, and liked his company, in spite of his puns.
Lancelot’s work there fell foul of a mistaken belief that Nuneham was the ‘Sweet Auburn’, the deserted village of Oliver Goldsmith’s much-loved lament of the same name. The Deserted Village was first published in 1770 when Goldsmith was just over forty; he was brought up and educated in Ireland and on the Continent, and had only arrived in London, destitute, some fourteen years earlier, to toil at hack journalism and reviewing. He had hardly seen England until, during the 1760s, he began to travel about, and certain places were impressed upon his mind. One of them was Nuneham, and no wonder, for it occupies an undulating green ground, high on a river cliff of the Thames, looking out over the plain of Radley towards Foxcombe and Boar’s Hills. But it was not so much ‘the loveliest village of the plain’ (hardly an apt geographical description) that Goldsmith remembered as the fact that Simon Harcourt was building his new village to rehouse forty families out of their hovels in the hilly park, and was also rebuilding the ‘ruinous’ old church ‘that topp’d the neighbouring hill’. Harcourt’s modernisation somehow sparked a memory in the poet’s mind – though Harcourt’s was certainly not the ‘tyrant’s hand’ that Goldsmith blamed, for he was a soft-hearted man who died in 1777 in rescuing his dog from a well. Goldsmith was, of course, aiming for another target:
Ill fares the land,9 to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay,
and in remembering, in poignant line after poignant line, the playfellows of his youth, he was seeing his beloved ‘plantationed’ Ireland through ‘the softening and beautifying mist of years’. (Both Scott and Macaulay later carefully identified the features of ‘Auburn’ in Goldsmith’s home, Lissoy, County Westmeath.)
However, Lancelot’s gentle works at Nuneham, deftly levelling, planting and displanting the hilly park to organise the views, were derided as destroying the evidence of The Deserted Village.
In reality, the threesome of Lord Harcourt, William Mason – whose flower garden was being made (and has been restored) – at Nuneham and their poetical friend, William Whitehead, seemed to be having too much fun to notice. Whitehead composed a satire in which Dame Nature and Lancelot compete for the beauties of Nuneham, and she eventually concedes to Lancelot, curtseying and blushing, but murmuring as she leaves:
I may have my revenge10 on this fellow at last
For a lucky conjecture comes into my head,
That, whate’er he has done, and whate’er he has said,
The world’s little malice will balk his design:
Each fault they’ll call his, and each excellence mine.
Two years after Lancelot’s death William Cowper’s epic The Task was published. Cowper was sickly and depressive; he had once lived in Huntingdon, and was now at Olney, not far from Stowe, and must have known what Lancelot was like. Book III of The Task is called ‘The Garden’ and finds the poet ‘a stricken deer that has left the herd’, viewing the world from the safety of his garden (where he is ruthless with his pruning knife) and bemoaning the rural landscape’s surrender to city values and gamblers’ wiles:
Were England now11
What England was, plain hospitable and kind,
And undebauch’d.
He despises improvement, or seems to, introducing ‘The omnipotent magician, Brown’ as a villain; but then it is Cowper himself who is spellbound:
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,
Sinuous or straight, now rapid and now slow,
Now murmuring soft, now roaring
in cascades,
Even as he bids.
There is ambiguity here: Brown the destroyer of nature, or her wondrous dresser? Cowper’s denouement is that the vain lord who has spent all his money on improvement has to leave for the City and political patronage, or even go into the army to recoup his fortunes, but becomes prey to the shark, the leech and the sycophant. Lancelot’s works are the ruin of England?
There was plenty of the world’s malice in what was called the ‘Picturesque Controversy’ of the 1790s, most of it directed towards Repton; the arguments were mainly over pictorial composition, as if a landscape’s prime user was the painter at his easel with his static view, rather than everyone else passing through, for whom the picture composed and recomposed – the ‘moving picture’. In 1794 Thomas Hearne illustrated Richard Payne Knight’s poem The Landscape with a rather childish insult to Brown, contrasting the bare slopes and naked water of a Brownian park with the lush greenery of the Picturesque version, the house shrouded in bushes, the water course sprouting rocks and greenery. Knight expressed the Picturesque people’s hatred of Brown’s lawns, and how the goddess Nature:
wrap’t all o’er12 in everlasting green,
Makes one dull, vapid, smooth, unvaried scene.
But he reserved his most malicious couplets for Lancelot’s lakes, turned into symbols of oppression:
As the dull, stagnant pool, that’s mantled o’er
With the green weeds of its own muddy shore,
No bright reflections on its surface shows,
Nor murmuring surge, nor foaming ripple knows;
But ever peaceful, motionless, and dead,
In one smooth sheet its torpid waters spread:
So by oppression’s iron hand confined,
In calm and peaceful torpor sleep mankind;
Unfelt the rays of genius, that inflame
The free-born soul, and bid it pant for fame.fn2
The response to Knight was swift, in Uvedale Price’s An Essay on the Picturesque, published by Robson of New Bond Street, also in 1794. But Price was equally mean to Lancelot: he compared Claude, who began life as a pastry cook, to ‘Mr Brown the gardener’13 who ‘formed his style upon the model of a parterre & transferred its minute beauties, its little clumps, knots & patches of flowers, the oval belt that surrounds it & all its twists & crincum crancums to the great scale of nature’. Did Claude’s pastry edges appear in the scenes he painted, asked Knight? And, seemingly contradicting himself, he condemns spacious lawns:
