Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1716-1783
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1 Boyse: in Clarke, pp.94–111
2 ‘that the author of the Elegy’: Mack, p 415
3 ‘The Long Story’: Mack, p.417
4 Newnham Paddox: in Hinde, pp.29–31, referring to the Newnham Building Book in Warwickshire Record Office
5 ‘Walking in the Garden’: Jennifer Meir, ‘Development of a natural style in designed landscapes between 1730 and 1760: The English Midlands and the work of Sanderson Miller and Lancelot Brown’, Garden History, Spring 2002, 30: 1 pp.24–48. Two of Miller’s diaries survive, for October 1749–September 1750 and April 1756—January 1757, in the Warwickshire Record Office
6 ‘irregularities’: Jennifer Meir, ‘Sanderson Miller and the Landscaping of Wroxton Abbey, Farnborough Hall and Honington Hall’, Garden History, Summer 1997, 25:1, pp.81–106
7 ‘happy and devout’: see Peter D. G.Thomas, Lord North, 1976, p.4
8 ‘Pox take Bumstead’: Meir op. cit., Summer 1997, p.167, and National Trust, Upton House guide, pp.68–9
9 ‘tawny brown carapace’: see Alex Clifton-Taylor and A. S. Ireson, English Stone Building, 1983, p.23
10 ‘had dined here’: Meir op. cit., Spring 2002, pp.24–48
11 Jago: Meir op. cit., Summer 1997, pp.81–106
12 ‘rode with him’: Meir op. cit., Spring 2002
13 ‘In sturdy Troops’: ibid.; see also National Trust, Farnborough guide, 1999.
14 Charlecote ‘deserted on every side’: National Trust, Charlecote Park guide, 2007, p.34, quoting John Foxe (Foxe’s Booke of Martyrs), who was tutor to Thomas Lucy
15 ‘simple shrewdness’: Fairfax-Lucy, p.190
16 ‘abhorred marriage’: ibid.
17 ‘an excellent widow’: Fairfax-Lucy, p.192
18 ‘Fowls’ and ‘Fish’: Fairfax-Lucy, p.194, all Mrs Hayes’ comments quoted from her Memorandum Book in Warwickshire Record Office
19 ‘the best stone-carver’: Brown, 2006, p.166
20 ‘The view’: Hinde, p.38, quoting Correspondence of Horace Walpole ed. Lewis and Brown, 1941, Vol. IX, p.121
21 Gopsall sketches: these are in the British Architectural Library/RIBA Collection, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and also in Brown, The Art & Architecture of English Gardens, 1989, pp.49–51
22 ‘unhappy, Black day’: Gordon, p.85
23 ‘I am so shocked’: Gordon, p.84
24 ‘Lord Deerhurst’: Edward Turner, August 1748, in Dickins and Stanton (eds), p.160
25 ‘it has always been an Inn’: Dickins and Stanton (eds), p.162
26 ‘drawing a plan’: Meir, p.41, n.62
27 ‘totally changed’: Stroud, p.69
28 Medmenham ‘friars’: see Evelyn Lord, The Hell-Fire Clubs, 2008, pp. 137–48
29 ‘peculiar skill’: Stroud, p.208
30 ‘of a Mortification’: Mowl, p.245
31 ‘dog’/fox: see Hunt, 1987, p.112; also Richard Hewlings, ‘Wakefield Lodge and Other Houses of the Second Duke of Grafton’, Georgian Group Journal 3, 1993, p.48
32 Wakefield Lawn accounts etc. are in The Grafton Papers in Northampton Record Office.
33 ‘courting the Muse’: Thomson quoted in Cousins, p.46
34 ‘’Tis Nature’: Brown, 2006, p.157
35 ‘grave young lord’s: Gordon, Ch. VII, ‘The Grave Young Lord and His Grand Design’
5 Hammersmith, a Stage for Mr Brown
Present-day Hammersmith Broadway is hardly the place to stand and stare into the past, searching for signs of the village that the Brown family knew as their home for thirteen years, from 1751 to 1764. There are a few quiet back streets that have an antique air, St Paul’s church survives, though much enlarged from the brick chapel that they knew, and the Mall and the Thames are still geographically, if not atmospherically, in the same places. But really the Browns’ Hammersmith of strawberry fields and nursery gardens, and the river busy with all the paraphernalia of sailboats and fish wives, is gone for ever. Hammersmith dates its self-important bustle from the completion of the first suspension bridge in 1827, engineered by W. Tierney Clark, who was born the year that Lancelot died, 1783. After the bridge came the railways, the tramways and the Underground, and most recently the Great West Road Flyover, which dominates the Broadway. The Hammersmith & Fulham Archives – www.lbhf.gov.uk – smartly housed in the Lilla Huset Professional Centre, tucked beneath the flyover in Talgarth Road – admittedly have very little on the lost world of eighteenth-century Hammersmith. My day was saved with their History of Hammersmith based upon that of Thomas Faulkner in 1839, ed. Philip D. Whitting, 1965 (1990 reprint), which gives much of the background for this chapter and the next. I have long blessed the name of Miss Eleanor J. Willson for her Nurserymen to the World (1989) on the nursery gardens of the Surrey sands, and now I find that she was formerly Hon. Secretary to the Fulham and Hammersmith Historical Society, as well as the author of James Lee and the Vineyard Nursery (1961) and West London Nursery Gardens (1982); she has also contributed a chapter entitled ‘Farming, Nursery and Market Gardening’ to the History of Hammersmith, which has been invaluable.
1 ‘Danube, Seine or Po’/‘late years’: Defoe, Letter 2, p.174
2 ‘Servant to Mr London’: Whistler, p.62
3 ‘when Vanbrugh’: Whistler, pp. 30–1
4 ‘most beautiful’/‘never fail’: Harvey, p.79
5 ‘as fresh and Lively’: Brown, Tales of the Rose Tree, Ch. 3, ‘The King’s Botanist’s Tale’
6 ‘almost manic activity’: Laird, p.70
7 ‘black Virginian walnut-tree’: see A Walk Round Fulham Palace and Its Garden, Sibylla Jane Flower & Friends of Fulham Palace, 3rd edn 1995
8 ‘Apricock Boats’: Mr Spectator, Monday 11th August 1712, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 1965, Vol. iv, p.98ff.
9 vines: Willson in History of Hammersmith, p.95
10 Lee and Kennedy: Willson in History of Hammersmith, pp.92–3
11 Hitt: Harvey, p.83
12 ‘Whatever merits’: Gordon, p.105
13 ‘designing’: Gomme, p.3
14 ‘a good deal altered’: Gordon, p.105
15 ‘Mansion Mourns’: Gordon, p.97
16 ‘a few ideas’: Hinde, p.38, quoting Lewis and Brown (eds), Walpole Correspondence, Vol. ix, p.121
17 ‘It may look natural’: see Warwick Castle guide, 2002, p.48
18 ‘I have undone’/‘family beside it’: Hinde, p.39
19 ‘I must say’: ibid.
20 ‘a little burrough’: Stroud, 1984, p.61, quoting Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. P. Toynbee and L.Whibley, 1935, 1971, Letter 192
21 ‘a dramatic long sheet’: Meir, pp.128–9
22 ‘a Dunghill of Chalk’: Dacre to Miller, January 1748, in Dickins and Stanton, p.135
23 ‘with its elbows to the town’: Defoe, Vol. I, South-eastern Counties, Letter 2, p.148
24 ‘to reduce’: Laird, p.136
25 planting details: Laird, pp. 136–7
26 ‘siege to life’: Boswell, Vol. iii, p.288
27 ‘in great style’: Bolitho and Peel, p.48
28 ‘I am sorry’: Admiral Anson’s letter of 26th September 1753 is the first [f.1] of the ‘Pakenham Correspondence’ series acquired by Dorothy Stroud and later presented by her to the British Library. They are now catalogued as BL Add. Mss. 69795 and given folio numbers in date order.
29 ‘white Palladian palace’: Buchan, p.8
30 ‘sharpness of the edge’: Tom Williamson, ‘The Age of the Landscape Park’, in The Parks and Gardens of West Hertfordshire, T. Williamson, Anne Mallinson and Anne Rowe, 2000, p. 43
31 ‘artificial molehills’: ibid, p.42, quoting Walpole Correspondence, ed. Lewis and Brown, Vol. ix, p.285, letter to George Montagu of 4th July 1760
32 ‘hillocks’: ibid, p.43, quoting Whateley’s Observations on Modern Gardening
33 ‘dullish piece’: Buchan, p.8
34 ‘Brown has been here’: Dickins and Stanton, p.226
35 ‘The alteration of Burleigh’: Dickins
and Stanton, pp.334–5
36 ‘twenty-five years pleasure’: letter to Lord Harcourt, Harcourt Papers, ed. E. W. Harcourt, 1880–1905, Vol. viii, p.266
37 ‘the plums’: E. C. Till, A Family Affair, 1990, p.41
38 ‘sett the house dry’/‘sore work’: see E. C.Till, ‘The Development of the Park and Gardens at Burghley, Garden History, Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn 1991, pp.128–45, quoting Steward Peter Kemp’s reports of the 1560s
39 ‘bluff, blunt-featured’: Inglis-Jones, p.48
40 ‘peaceful potentate’: ibid.
41 ‘the Home Manors’: Till, A Family Affair, pp.6–7
42 ‘ran his estate’: ibid, p.8.
43 ‘the old Hall’: Dickins and Stanton, pp.334–5
44 Osterley Park: see Iain Browning, Palmyra, 1979, p.91
45 ‘short notes’: see Victoria Leatham, Burghley, The Life of a Great House, 1992, on the 9th Earl and Lancelot
46 ‘matchless vale’: Thomson, The Seasons, ‘Summer’
47 ‘Belhouse’/‘ten acre pool’: Dacre to Miller, in Dickins and Stanton, p.226
6 Lancelot and ‘The Great Commoner’
This chapter came as a great surprise to me, and I resisted its need to exist for a long time. Michael Symes’s paper ‘William Pitt the Elder: The Grant Mago of landscape gardening’ (in Garden History, 24: 1) suggested Pitt’s passion – but on Pitt’s side, his political biographers failed to grasp that gardening had any status as a life-force at all, even in the eighteenth century. Once I started to connect the politics to the garden history, and to Lancelot’s activities, the evidence for this relationship became a flood. Pitt’s was an unfathomable personality netted in class loyalties and patriotism, and only his love for Hester Grenville humanised him. I now feel that he was the puppeteer who made Lancelot’s career possible, and that, in his heart, Lancelot knew this.
1 ‘My House!’: Sanderson Miller’s ditty is given by Barbara Jones in Follies & Grottoes, 1974 edn, pp.398–9; also in Dickins and Stanton, p.348
2 ‘to the astonishment’: Hague, p.11
3 South Lodge/‘wandering Scythian life’: Ayling, p.103. Pitt acquired the lease of South Lodge with 65 acres from Lady Charlotte Edwin in 1747, and sold it in 1753 to a Mr Sharpe; see Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, 2 vols, 1913, vol. I, pp.192–4
4 ‘It vexes me’: Cousins, p.21
5 ‘your verdant hills’: Ayling p.105
6 ‘a company of gypsies’: Ayling, p.136
7 ‘continual rains’: Ayling, p.144
8 ‘well cobbled’: ibid.
9 ‘beautiful rural scene’: Ayling, p.106
10 ‘pleasure grounds’: John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, The Years of Acclaim, 1969, pp.7–8, quoting Christie’s Sale Catalogue of 7th May 1789, in Kent County Archives, Till Mss. U.468, Q5/1
11 ‘ever passionate husband’: Ayling, p.168
12 ‘through ye Laurels’: Laird, p.136
13 ‘Half Moon Wood’: Stroud, p.68
14 ‘digged right downe’: John Taverner quoted in Binnie, pp. 37–8
15 ‘Pittian’: Hague, pp.9–10
16 ‘hold no common ground’: Leslie Mitchell, The Whig World 1760–1837, 2007, p.1
17 Fox letter: BL Add. Mss. 69795 f.2
18 ‘vain toad’: Tillyard, p.51
19 Rhodes’s survey: see Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle, 1999, p.25
20 ill ‘on the Road’: see correspondence with Sir John Hynde Cotton, October–November 1756, etc., Cotton Papers, 588/E26 1–4, Cambridgeshire Archives
21 contract: ibid., November 16th 1756
22 ‘systematic’/‘truest taste’: Gerald Wellesley, 7th Duke of Wellington, Collected Works, 1990, p.144
23 ‘gentle Hertford’: see Brown, 2006, and Helen Sard Hughes, The Gentle Hertford, Her Life and Letters, New York, 1940. Frances Hertford’s letters are in Alnwick Castle Archives.
24 ‘a landscape of lawns’: Laird, pp.141–2
25 ‘a wild lane’: see Brown, 2006, pp.144–5
26 ‘a fine lawn’: Capability Brown and the Northern Landscape, comp. Gill Hedley, Newcastle, 1983, p.19
27 ‘Protestant and Anglophone’: Colley, p.101
28 ‘heaven-born general’: Ayling, p.262
29 ‘well-wishers’: Stroud, p.121
30 Ragley: Stroud, 1984, p.237;Turner, p.186
31 ‘Dutch style’/‘Newbury cabbages’: John Harris, ‘Le Rouge’s Sion Hill: A Garden by Brown’, in The London Gardener or The Gardener’s Intelligencer, No. 5, 1999–2000, pp.24–8
32 ‘a rope & a border’: ibid.
33 Enville: the archives held at Enville Hall have been catalogued online for the Historical Manuscripts Commission (ref. GB-2184-Grey) and are extensive. Harry Grey, 4th Earl of Stamford, lived at Enville until his death in 1768 and there are boxes of estate correspondence, day-books and accounts, etc., which may yield evidence of Lancelot’s work.
34 ‘ever-warm and victorious’: Ayling, pp.262–3, quoting Walpole, 21st October 1759
35 Marchioness Grey: her papers are in Bedfordshire & Luton Archives (L.30, etc.); see also Joyce Godber, ‘Marchioness Grey of Wrest Park’ in Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, Vol. XLVII, 1968; and English Heritage, Wrest Park guide
36 ‘the canals’: Godber op. cit., p.62
7 ‘The One Great Argument of the Landscape Gardener’
By now it has become clear that Lancelot’s great passion was for water engineering, and that the provision of a lake was his trump card. For some reason this has recently been regarded as a vice, a systematic imposition upon the landscape by one short of imagination. Our eyes, sated with flooded gravel pits and reservoirs, have to close – and open upon an eighteenth-century landscape with hardly any stretches of water in lowland England large enough to be called lakes, and furthermore upon many great houses at risk in their waterlogged parks. That the nineteenth-and twentieth-century agriculturists overdid the drainage of meadows and marshes is not a crime to be attributed to Lancelot.
1 ‘The one great argument’: Sacheverell Sitwell on Blenheim’s lake in British Architects and Craftsmen, quoted by David Green in Blenheim Palace guide, published by the Estate Office, 1950, p.3
2 ‘And now for the Water’: Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton, The Compleat Angler, ed. John Buxton, p. 32
3 ‘Gravely inquiring’: ibid., Foreword p.xxx
4 ‘Landscape = habitat’: Fairbrother, p.4
5 Wilson/Farington: see Leslie Parris, Landscape in Britain c.1750–1850, Tate Gallery, 1973, p.32. This theme can be pursued; Wilson painted Tabley House (1774) looking like a Brown landscape, though as far as we know it was not, and George Barret painted the lake at Burton Constable even as Lancelot was making it.
6 ‘study of the folk-heart’: The Compleat Angler op. cit., Introduction
7 ‘in the pastoral tradition’: ibid., Editor’s foreword, p.xxv
8 ‘amiable’/‘ruined his health’: Foreman, pp.14–15
9 ‘vast extended moor’/‘beautiful palace’: Defoe, pp.476–7
10 ‘very high mountain’: ibid.
11 ‘found building so delightful’: Chatsworth, ed. Charles H.Wood, 1973, p.30
12 ‘making vast plantations’: Stroud, 1984, p.104, quoting Walpole, Visits to Country Seat, Walpole Society, Vol. XVI, p.28; see also Tom Williamson, ‘Chatsworth’, Garden History, 29: 1, Summer 2001, pp. 82–90
13 ‘crowning the long hill’: Duchess of Devonshire, pp.148–9
14 ‘foolish waterworks’: Walpole, quoted by Tom Williamson, ‘Chatsworth’ op. cit., p.86
15 ‘serpentised not at all’: Duchess of Devonshire, p.148
16 ‘ugly ponds’: Chatsworth, ed. Wood op. cit., p.30
17 ‘I am ever thankful’: Duchess of Devonshire, p.148
18 ‘a patch of rushes’: Duchess of Devonshire, p.173; the new guide, Explore the Gardens at Chatsworth, ed. Simon Seligman, Chatsworth House Trust, 2005, has an explanatory two-page spread (pp.14–15) on the wate
r works
19 Mrs Travis: Duchess of Devonshire, pp.152–3
20 ‘His Grace’s waggon’: 1757–8 facsimile page of accounts, in Duchess of Devonshire, p.77
21 ‘To the Revd Mr Barker’: Duchess of Devonshire, p.151
22 letter of 2nd January 1765: Stroud, 1984, p.126
23 Gray on Chatsworth: Mack, pp.543–4
24 ‘a fayre house’: Olivia Staughton and Jeanne Upton (eds), Latimer, A History of the Village, 1999, p.4
25 ‘procured’ the view: Stroud, 1984, p.231, quoting George Johnson’s History of English Gardening, 1829
26 ‘little paradise’: quoted in Staughton and Upton op. cit., p.15ff., but see also Sir G. G. Scott, Recollections 1879.
27 ‘a little decorated’: Fairfax-Lucy, pp.201–2
28 ‘Wellsborn Brook’: 29th September 1757, Mrs Hayes, quoted in Fairfax-Lucy, p.213
29 ‘smooth flaxen sheets’: Fairfax-Lucy, p.195
30 contract articles: Fairfax-Lucy, pp.213–15, with a note to the effect that the original contract has been lost, but Mary Elizabeth Lucy (1803–90) quoted it in her journal and ‘though she was often careless, there is no reason to suppose she did not record the substance of it’
31 ‘£100 note’: Fairfax-Lucy, p.213
32 ‘of a much sweeter’/‘cold in Winter’: The Compleat Angler op. cit., pp.212–13
33 ‘a long serpentine’: Williams, pp.86–7
34 ‘a number of Expences’: Lord Dacre to San Miller, see Laird, p.149
35 ‘as much in the mud’: George Grenville to Miller, 1758 (eds), Dickins and Stanton, p.214
36 ‘deep shades’: Ayling, p.181
37 ‘most affectionate grandfather’/‘good dancing’: in Brown, 2006, p.52