Alan Lester and Sunny Colclough
Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-1783) is the most famous ‘place-maker’ in British history. He has been called an ‘omnipotent magician’ who ‘swept away’ country houses’ walled gardens and geometrical planting between the 1750s and 1770s, replacing them with ‘open expanses of turf irregularly scattered with individual trees and clumps’, serpentine lakes, temples and other ornamental buildings.[1] ‘No gardener in history’ says one specialist, has ‘been the object of so much varied attention’ with ‘so many places throughout England involved’.[2] Brown’s stated aim was to supply ‘all the elegance and all the comforts which Mankind wants in the Country … hiding what is disagreeable and shewing what is beautiful’.[3]
A ‘Capability’ Brown landscape at Blenheim Palace: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/capability-browns-landscapes-were-designed-to-be-a-snobs-paradise/
During the tercentennial celebrations of Brown’s birth, in 2016, there were exhibitions on his work at Croome, Petworth, Weston Park, Compton Verney, Alnwick, Berrington Hall, Harewood House, Charlecote Park, Wimpole, and Bowood. The ‘classic’ Brown landscapes at Blenheim, Croome, Compton Verney, Longleat, Alnwick, Stowe, Berrington Hall and Highclere Castle were celebrated by Royal Mail in a series of eight postage stamps. In an introduction to one volume on him, King Charles wrote of his affection for the Englishness of his creations.[4]
But just how much of the ‘elegance and comfort’ that Brown created in these quintessentially English landscapes was obtained through colonial exploitation? That is what we sought to find out.
Sunny Colclough, an undergraduate at the University of Sussex, obtained a Junior Research Associate award, enabling her to undertake paid research with my guidance over the summer. I have long researched Britain’s colonial activities overseas whilst introducing students to historical geographers’ analyses of English landscapes as inscriptions that manifest but screen domestic class exploitation.[5] The shaping of our landscapes by overseas colonial exploitation at the same time has been a more recent, and much more controversial preoccupation.
A landmark paper examining joint estate management in Caribbean sugar plantations and English country estates was published in 1998.[6] But with the National Trust’s Report into the colonial connections of its properties in 2019, and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the relationship between colonial activities and English landscape change has become the focus of greater public attention. Unfortunately, much of this interest has been hostile, with certain politicians, lobby groups and newspapers attacking such enquiries as inherently unpatriotic. Nonetheless, we set out to pursue them further, with a preliminary enquiry to establish which of the iconic English places shaped by ‘Capability Brown’ in particular were associated more or less directly with colonialism.
Stowe: https://competitions.landscapeinstitute.org/capability-brown/garden/stowe/index.html
Colonial Wealth
Some of Capability Brown’s entanglements with the British Empire are already well-known. David Brown and Tom Williamson, scholars who released a major study of him during the tercentenary, explained that many of the landowning aristocracy and gentry employing Capability Brown had acquired wealth through investments in ‘the two great joint-stock companies’ of the early eighteenth century.
The first was the East India Company, founded as a trading venture in 1600. By 1759 Lord Clive was appealing to the British government that the company was developing ‘so large a sovereignty ‘in Bengal that it was ‘too extensive for a mercantile company’ and would require ‘the nation’s assistance’. After the Company’s victory at the Battle of Buksar (Buxor) in 1764, it was able to control all of the revenue (diwani) paid to Bengal’s rulers and remit £400,000 per year (equivalent to £68 million today, using the Bank Of England’s calculator) to the British Treasury. Pitt the Elder hailed it as a ‘gift from Heaven’, since it would offset the debt accrued during the Seven Years’ War. Another part of the taxation paid by Indians was handed to the company’s shareholders in Britain, who saw the value of their holdings rocket. Despite some volatility after the rapid stock inflation of the 1760s and a bail out accompanied by greater governmental regulation in the early 1770s, these shareholders had returns of around 8 per cent by the late 1770s and were guaranteed payments at 10.5 per cent from 1793. [7]
All this time, the company’s armies continued to conquer more territory and derive income increasingly through taxation in India and opium smuggling into China, while its employees embarked on lucrative trade on their own account. Adam Smith wrote of those who invested in the company for ‘a share not in the plunder, yet in the appointment of the plunderers of India’. In 1770 the company’s rent increases during a period of food shortage exacerbated the Bengal famine, which claimed up to 10 million lives. Two years after Capability Brown’s death, Edmund Burke would finally launch the indictment resulting in the impeachment of governor general Warren Hastings, as a ‘captain-general of iniquity’ and a ‘ravenous vulture devouring the carcasses of the dead’. [8] Hastings, though, was actually far more restrained than many of his subordinates.
The second ‘great joint stock company’ was the South Sea Company, founded in 1711 as a partnership between investors and the Crown to consolidate and reduce the cost of the national debt. It was granted a monopoly in the trafficking of enslaved people to South America. Its quota was 4,800 ‘units’ of enslaved people per year, a man being one unit, women and children less. Although the company’s stock famously collapsed in the 1720 ‘South Sea Bubble’, ruining thousands of investors, some of those who went on to employ Brown had made fortunes in the meantime, while others diversified into slave-trading and slave ownership more generally. By the 1740s, British ships were carrying more African captives to plantations in the Americas and Caribbean than those of any other nation, and they continued to dominate the ‘trade’ until its abolition in 1807. Those captives were put to work on plantations in the Caribbean colonies which became some of the eighteenth century’s greatest money-making machines, generating tobacco, cotton and sugar to supply new European tastes and contributing about 10 per cent of national income during this period.
Brown’s career really took off in the 1750s as these investments in Indian and American colonial activities were helping to catalyse profound social and economic changes within Britain. Economic historians have emphasised the English elite’s luck in developing ‘peculiar footholds’ in India, North America, and the West Indies, where appropriated land, enslaved labour, and cheap Indian calico production ‘freed’ British labourers to work in agriculture and especially urban manufacture.[10] Recent research has partially affirmed Eric Williams’ insight from the 1940s that ‘slave and plantation trades were the hub around which many other dynamic and innovatory sectors of the economy pivoted’. Large scale investment in the slave plantations of the Caribbean and shipping ‘brought innovation in the mortgage and insurance markets, in multiplex financial transfers and in the expansion of commercial credit that linked provincial merchants, manufacturers and banks with the resources of the London money market’.[10] As Williams had noted, this colonial economic stimulation had repercussions in the English countryside. There were ‘few, if any, noble houses in England … without a West Indian strain.’[11] There were many with an East India ‘strain’ too.
Capability Brown’s design for the great house at Harewood in Yorkshire was funded ‘with money derived from the Lascelles family’s extensive plantations in Barbados. By the 1790s these extended over more than 14,000 acres, were worked by nearly 3,000 slaves and were worth the incredible sum of £293,000.’[12] Dodington House, also landscaped by Brown, ‘was for five centuries home of the Codrington family, whose fortune was in part founded on the Caribbean sugarplanting endeavours of two Christopher Codringtons, father and son, in Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda’. But how many more of the properties that Brown refashioned were the result of Britain’s extending colonial tentacles?
Dodington House, Gloucestershire 1984, Ray Bird
The Project
When Sunny first enquired about the summer-long project I assured her, somewhat breezily, that it would be a relatively simple matter of collating all the properties Brown had worked on from published inventories and digitised account books, and cross-referencing them with sources that already noted the colonial connections of many country houses. These include the National Trust report and its counterparts from Historic England and English Heritage. The colonial connections of other owners could be identified through the database of slave-owners maintained by UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery centre, the East India Company at Home project and any further archives that Sunny might have time to access over the summer. It would not be comprehensive, but it would still be a worthwhile inquiry. Things turned out not to be quite so simple.
Within a few days of starting, Sunny enlightened me that deciding whether or not a property’s gardens were designed by Brown was not as straight-forward as I had assumed. Garden design exerts are constantly debating that very matter. John Phibbs points out that ‘a new understanding of Brown as the creator of something like an employment agency for foremen and gardeners for whose work he retained oversight … complicates the question of attribution.’ Brown also offered his clients varying levels of service, ranging from his own direct planning and supervision of the work through the provision of rough plans for others adapt, to subcontracting to other gardeners. Rather than adopting a binary Brown / not-Brown division of gardens, specialists estimate a degree of confidence with which each garden can be attributed to him in percentage terms.
Not only was it difficult to pinpoint ‘Brown’ properties; we also had to decide what we meant by colonial connections. They could range from direct reinvestment of profits from slave trading and plantation ownership and investments in the East India Company, through the use of inherited colonial wealth, to a prominent political role sponsoring and directing colonial exploitation. This blog focuses mainly on the most direct of these links: employers of Brown whose income came from colonial activities or who directly inherited wealth from such activities. The spreadsheet prepared by Sunny and a full explanation of her methods and sources are available in an appendix here for those who want to scrutinise the work. We appreciate that the study is a provisional one and welcome constructive feedback.
By our calculations, Brown is said to have had some kind of garden design or architectural input, however contested, into 340 properties. Seventy-nine, or 23 per cent, of these had connections with colonial wealth creation, including the use of inherited colonial income, but not including political or military roles in colonial conquest (see the appendix for Sunny’s attribution of the higher figure of 29% for ‘direct links’ including such roles). Thirty-nine properties (11.5%) had the most direct links with slavery (Brown’s employer deriving income directly, rather than inheriting, from slave-trading or slave ownership), and 17 properties (5%) had such similarly direct connections with the East India Company’s exploitation of India. If we include all kinds of colonial connections, only 26% (87 properties) had no traceable relationship with Empire.
Of the total of 340 possible ‘Brown-affiliated’ properties, 217 are attributed by the most recent expert compilers with 100 per cent confidence.[13] Among these were Addington Place in Croydon, Surrey, whose owner James Ivers commissioned Brown after inheriting it from his uncle, James Trecothick, a North American and West India merchant. He had built the house in 1772 with the proceeds from his estates in Grenada and Jamaica where he ‘owned’ respectively 262 and 253 enslaved people. Sir Lawrence Dundas employed Brown to design his estate at Aske Hall in Richmond, Yorkshire, while owning two slave plantations in Dominica and Grenada. Astrop House in Northamptonshire was built c. 1740 for Sir John Willes, who employed Brown while jointly holding a plantation in Antigua. Benjamin Way of Denham Place in Buckinghamshire employed Brown between 1770 and 1776, having been a deputy governor of The South Sea Company.
Astrop House, King’s Sutton: https://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/heritage-and-retro/heritage/historic-england-audit-into-villages-with-ties-to-slave-trade-includes-two-northamptonshire-landmarks-3128168
Turning to the eastern half of Empire, the best known of the East India Company ‘nabobs’ was Robert, Lord Clive, who launched the East India Company on the career of conquest, plunder and rent-extraction that coincided with the apex of Brown’s career. ‘Clive was the first nabob to raise people’s eyebrows when he purchased Claremont estate from the Duchess of Newcastle for £25,000 [£4.3M today] in 1760’.[14] He paid Brown at least £7,000 (£1.2M today) for designs at Claremont, Mount Clare or Oakly Park.
Francis Sykes purchased Basildon Park near Reading in 1771, having also returned from India as a ‘nabob.’ He had been appointed as Resident at Murshidabad, directing the Nawab in line with East India Company objectives. The personal as well as corporate wealth he amassed not only enabled him to acquire Basildon Park, but also estates in Yorkshire and Dorset, and to become Member of Parliament in Shaftesbury and then for Wallingford.
Some of Brown’s gardens manifested wealth derived from both the West and East Indies, from slave-ownership and from East India Company colonisation. Chute Lodge in Wiltshire was one of several ‘compact country houses’ designed for East India Company officials by Robert Taylor. Its owner, John Freeman, also inherited a plantation and its enslaved workforce in St Kitts from his uncle. Danson House, a Palladian villa near Bexley was constructed in the 1760s for Sir John Boyd (1718-1800), the son of a St Kitts planter and sugar merchant and Vice-Chairman of the East India Company, although here Brown is likely to have contracted the work out to one of his associates. One of Brown’s most lucrative commissions was for Sir George Colebrooke, 2nd Baronet, the owner of five slave plantations in Antigua, Jamaica and Grenada and an East India Company director with close links to Clive. Between 1762 and 1768 he paid Brown £3,055 (£0.4M) for improvements at Gatton Park in Surrey.
Gatton Park, Surrey: https://gattonpark.co.uk/events/summer-at-gatton-picnic-in-the-park/
Not all of the work advised by Brown was carried out. Humphrey Repton, often regarded as Brown’s successor, condemned the plans that Brown had devised for John Fuller, the owner of two Jamaican estates and around 3,009 enslaved people, at Rose Hill, Brightling in East Sussex, saying:
‘After so frequently admiring and defending Mr Brown’s plans for other places, it is with regret that I must condemn that proposed for Rose hill; which, had it been compleated, would have sacrificed all comfort to prospect, and for the sake of an extensive view, would have rendered the house almost uninhabitable … Mr Brown seems to have thought that a fine view from the windows was paramount to every other consideration … some parts of Mr. Brown’s plan having been misunderstood, whilst others have (fortunately) not been adopted.’
Regardless of how we might define the strength of each garden’s association with Capability Brown or the association of each property with various forms of colonial exploitation, the message of this small research project is clear: it is absurd to pretend that modern Britain can be disassociated from its colonial past, when even its most iconographic landscapes, shaped by its most influential place-maker, are so bound up with it. English landscapes of ‘elegance and comfort’ were often financed with double-sided coin: domestic class exploitation on the one side and the considerably more rapacious exploitation of enslaved and conquered subjects on the other.
[1] David Brown and Tom Williamson, Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men: Landscape Revolution in Eighteenth Century, Reaktion, 2016, 7. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, 1716-1783: The Omnipotent Magician is the title of Jane Brown’s biography, Chatto and Windus, 2011.
[2] A. Cross, ‘Brown sites and green lawns: Capability Brown’s Tercentennial Year: A Review Essay’, Journal of European Studies, 47(1), 2017, 67.
[3] J. Phibbs, ‘Brown, Lancelot [known as Capability Brown] (bap. 1716, d. 1783), Landscape Gardener and Architect’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2017, retrieved 23 Aug. 2024, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-3635.
[4] Tim Scott Bolton, A Brush with Brown: The Landscapes of ‘Capability’ Brown. With a foreword by HRH the Prince of Wales, Dovecote Press, 2016.
[5] For example, Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
[6] Suzanne Seymour, Stephen Daniels and Charles Watkins, ‘Estate and empire: Sir George Cornewall’s Management of Moccas, Herefordshire and La Taste, Grenada, 1771–1819’, Journal of Historical Geography, 24, 3 (1998) 313–351; Stephanie Barczewski, Country Houses and the British Empire, 1700–1930, Manchester University Press, 2017.
[7] John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company, Harper Collins, 1991, 362; H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1765-1833, Cambridge University Press, 86-9.
[8] Vinita Damodaran, ‘The East India Company, Famine and Ecological Conditions in Eighteenth-Century Bengal’, in Vinita Damodaran, Anna Winterbottom and Alan Lester (eds) The East India Company and the Natural World, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2015: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427274_5; Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781–1998, Jonathan Cape, 2007, 35.
[9] Brown and Williamson, Lancelot Brown, 18.
[10] Javier Cuenca Esteban, ‘Comparative Patterns of Colonial Trade: Britain and its Rivals’, in Leandro Prados de la Escosura, ed., Exceptionalism and Industrialisation Britain and its European Rivals, 1688–1815, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 35-68; Berg and Hudson, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, Polity, 2023, 6-7.
[11] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, University of North Carolina Press, 1994, quoted in Seymour et al., ‘Estate and Empire’.
[12] Brown and Williamson, Lancelot Brown, 18.
[13] Stroud, D. and Phibbs, J., 2016. A list of landscapes that have been attributed to ‘Capability’ Brown (Notes from the unpublished papers of Dorothy Stroud), www.capabilitybrown.org.uk. Available at: https://www.capabilitybrown.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/160901AttributionsA-Z5th-ed..pdf (Accessed: 12 June 2024).
[14] Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge University Press, 2010; S. A. Huxtable, C. Fowler, C., Kefalas, and E. Slocombe, eds., Interim Report on the Connections Between Colonialism and Properties Now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery, National Trust, 2020, 11-12.
