I was listening to Radio 3’s Composer of the Week recently where the subject was Thomas Linley,  an English contemporary of Mozart I’d never heard of.  The music was impressive but  then I caught mention of a visit that Linley  paid to Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire in 1779 which ended in tragedy.  [More on that below]

It set me thinking about my own visits there and spurred me to write this post which I’ve been promising to do ever  since I included an amusing account of a visit to the ducal owner of Grimsthorpe in a much earlier post…

[as usual the photos are mine unless otherwise acknowledged]

Grimsthorpe Castle stands in 3,000 acres of parkland, about four miles from Bourne and it’s  been in the hands of the same  family since 1516  when 11th Baron Willoughby de Eresby married Maria de Salinas, one of Katherine of Aragon’s lady-in-waiting and received the  “park of Grymsthorp” as a wedding gift from  Henry VIII.  This had been recorded in the Domesday Book as having the greatest concentration of woodland in Lincolnshire.

In a rare example of female equality both the title and estate passed to their daughter  Katherine but because she was only 14  she was too young to inherit immediately. The solution [end of female empowerment] was for her  to become   the fourth wife of Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, a favourite of Henry VIII,  so that he could take over her property.

The small mediaeval castle on the site was not thought a suitable ducal residence and after the Dissolution  Suffolk was given the lands of  nearby  Vaudey Abbey. He proceeded to used the buildings as a quarry  to enable him to rebuild.  One tower of the original castle was incorporated – today known as King John’s Tower, into his new building, but despite faulty construction,   the south facing garden  frontage of the house is much as Brandon left it, although  the windows have been enlarged.

Duchess Katherine’s second marriage was to Richard Bertie and their grandson, Robert Bertie, became thirteenth Baron Willoughby de Eresby and inherited the estate in 1601.  By then much of the surrounding land had been emparked as two separate deer parks, one for Red and the other for Fallow deer. Described by John Leland as “a fayre parke betwixt Vauldey and Grimsthirpe”, there remain a large number of ancient trees from the Tudor period in the 580 hectares of woodland with Oliver Rackham suggesting that Grimsthorpe is not only the oldest but the largest surviving formally designed park in the country.

Robert was created Earl of Lindsey by Charles I in 1626 and planted the impressive Four Mile Riding across the estate.  This was originally  a double oak avenue and  still runs from the Castle to the boundary of the Park, linking the house with the distant woodland. The formal pattern of this and other  ridings remain, though some have been replanted with chestnut.  Todd Longstaffe-Gowan writing in Country Life in May 1998 argues it was more impressive than any of the ceremonial approaches to royal palaces and longer than any of the great post-Restoration avenues, making it amongst the greatest drives ever created in Britain.

More oak ridings and woodland were planted after the Restoration when Robert Bertie, third Earl of Lindsey inherited the property in 1666.  He also  had the main frontage of the castle refaced in  a simplified classical style.  At the same time his wife  Elizabeth oversaw the laying out elaborate parterres and gardens on two sides of  the house as well as   four blocks of woodland  just outside the garden, and ponds  and woodland on the wider estate.   In fact it sounds as if she more than oversaw the work since Stephen Switzer makes great play of the fact that   ” she was a continual Attendant and Supervisor of her Works without any regards to the rigid Inclemency of the Winter-Season, and not only so, but also in the Measuring and Laying out the Distances of her Rows of Trees, she was actually employed with Rule, Line etc.”  George London, one of the founders of Brompton Nursery also worked at Grimsthorpe around 1690 and the gardens of that period can be seen  in a  painting of around 1700.

The Best Garden, as it was known,  on the east front  was walled with  a large bowling green, wide terraces and a matching pair of pavilions in the corners. Overall there was  a strong symmetrical north-south axis through the main north front and  continuing through with the gardens on the south side leading to Lady Lindsey’s four blocks of woodland divided by broad pathways, and reached through a gate and passing round an octagonal arbour.

William Brogden suggests that  at this point Grimsthorpe   “could have been held up for comparison with a composition from Andre Mollet, or Dezalier D’Argenville, and shows that the Willoughbys were as modern and up-to-date as any Continental.”

 

 

 

The 4th earl, confusingly yet another Robert,  succeeded in 1701 and ten years later  [by then Marquess of Lindsey] called in George London’s former apprentice the young  Stephen Switzer (1682-1745). This was probably on the recommendations of both George London and John Vanbrugh who was a lifelong friend of the marquess.    Switzer had been working as London’s foreman at Blenheim and obviously closely with Vanbrugh when all the work there was stopped by the Duchess of Marlborough when she  dismissed Vanbrugh in 1710.

It must have been a bit of lifeline for Switzer to be working at Grimsthorpe by 1711 on  his first major independent commission.

Switzer  soon found himself working with Vanbrugh again, because in 1715 George I elevated Robert to become  Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven and presumably to celebrate his promotion Vanbrugh was asked by his old friend to rebuild the castle.

It is one of the architects masterpieces although work only commenced in 1723 after the duke’s death and in the end, despite Vanbrugh drawing up plans for all four fronts, only the splendid Baroque north front, topped by the new ducal arms, was actually built.

 

 

The front court also designed by Vanbrugh has two corner pavilions and a series of semi-circular niches with  an array of statues, including what looks to me like one of George I [4th from the left  below]. It is approached through magnificent iron  gates and railings surmounted by the family’s arms. According to Arthur Collins 1741 Peerage of England these consist of  a shield with three battering rams “bar-ways arm’d and garnish’d, Azure” topped by  “the bust of a King [named Barbican]…Crown’d Ducally” and supported by “a pilgrim vested in russet with his staff and pater-noster, and a savage wreathed about the temples and middle with Ivy”.

At this point its worth pointing out that most early images don’t really show that the castle and its garden are on a ridge running north to south with the land on either side falling away gently, offering extensive views, especially to the west over the valley.  This might explain some of what Switzer did or rather didn’t do.   There was  surprisingly little alteration to the existing layout apart from simplifying the parterres. Instead he strengthened the link between the formal gardens and the woodland outside, by removing both the gate  and the octagonal arbour, thus  taking away the visual obstruction between the two. He then created a new semi-circular approach into the woodland, which led the eye down the central ride, as can be seen in William Stukely’s sketch of 1736.  This area is now known as The Groves.

The  four square blocks of  woodland planting were extended and more walks laid out within it  extending outward from the central clearing, with  a new avenue laid out  which extended further through more woodland until it disappeared seemingly into the far distance.    Now there is a statue of Charles II [I think] as an eye catcher in the centre of the ride. At an angle to that main ride   Switzer introduced another – Grime’s Walk –  which ran  along the western edge of the ridge and led to a mount topped by a gazebo viewing point.

Switzer then added  a new garden perhaps imitating something  he’d seen at Blenheim and based on plans by the French military engineer Vauban. The low walls of this mock fortification were surrounded by a ditch with the central area wooded with walks cut through leading  to military style bastions offering  viewpoints out over the lower land on either side.   Animals were kept out by means of a ditch but as you can see there were ways into the field if required.  Switzer’s work was  to remain in place until at least the 1830s.

These were all parts of  what Switzer  called his system of ‘Rural and Extensive Gardening’. The idea was to have wooded walks into, round and overlooking fields using existing field banks, boundaries and ditches as paths and terraces.  The “Hedge-Rows” should be  “mix’d with Primroses, Violets, and such natural sweet, and pleasant Flowers” so ” the Walks that lead through afford as much Pleasure as… the most elaborate, fine Garden.”  He also wanted to incorporate views of water such as fishponds but if that wasn’t possible then ‘one woul’d carry some Arm of the Garden to view them’.

Grimthorpe is  what his biographer William Brogden calls “the first complete essay in landscape design”  and perhaps was the first sign of what was later to become the Ferme Ornee or ornamental farm.

For more on this see David Jacques article on The Ferme Ornee. 

The next stage of work at Grimsthorpe was down in the wide valley to the east below the castle where there were the survivals of Vaudy Abbey’s fish ponds, some deer pools and other stretches of canalised water.  Thanks to the diligent research of Steffie Shields we can be fairly certain that it was here in 1739 that the young Lancelot Brown started his career as an engineer.  He built a dam for a 10-acre pond, and tried to sort out a water supply to the castle from the springs at  Vaudey.  The estate accounts for 1741 and 1742 show money being spent on draining land and remodelling some of the existing water features.  Brown was not at Grimsthorpe very long, before being appointed head gardener at Stowe,  but Steffie’s digging in the archives suggests that he continued to do some work at Grimsthorpe and used some of the same team from there to work at Stowe for the next year or so.

For more information see “Mr Brown Engineer’: Lancelot Brown’s Early Work at Grimsthorpe Castle and Stowe”, by Steffie Shields, in Garden History  Winter 2006which is freely available via JSTOR.   Also Capability Brown at Grimsthorpe on the website of the Landscape Institute. 

After Brown left the Duke  called in a local surveyor and engineer, John Grundy,   to consolidate most of these features  into a single much larger ‘Great Water’. However  the banks were left unplanted and remained so until the early 19thc, leadingJohn Byng, the notoriously grouchy travel diarist [who regular readers will have met before] to complain in 1789  of the “ugly water upon and near which is neither Tree nor Shrub…”

Agricultural commentator   Arthur Young visited in  the late 1760s on his Six months Tour of the North, [published 1769] and reported that “In the vale before the house is a noble piece of water, with two pretty yachts upon it…but two circumstances are much wanted to render it complete; the principal end of it appears in full view, instead of being lost behind a hill or a plantation which … would add infinitely to its beauty and magnificence, for the conclusion of a water being seen, is painful at the very first view.  The other point is, the break in the water by the road, for in fact it is two lakes, and one being higher than the other, a real bridge cannot be thrown over; at present it is a causeway, but might it very easily be made to appear so like a bridge, as to deceive even those who pass it, and this would be attended with a great effect.”

That message was not lost on the Duke and in December 1771 Capability Brown returned to Grimsthorpe with his surveyor Samual Lapidge to draw up more plans.  Over the next three weeks, and for a fee of £105,  they produced a full survey and at least four drawings although only two have survived. One was a plan for a new deer enclosure, New Park, with an enclosing tree belt for game cover around fields south of the park. The other was for ‘a Sham Bridge to be placed at the head of that water the road to Grimsthorpe goes over’ ie to replace the existing causeway between the two lakes. It would have been impressive with 11 arches spanning 350 feet, but it was never built.

It was on this Great Water, [perhaps even in one of the two yachts that Young noticed]  that  the young musical virtuoso Thomas Linley junior went for a sail with two friends on 5 August, 1778, just three months after his 22nd birthday. He had  performed in public by the age of seven when  ‘his singing, playing on the violin and dancing the hornpipe are all beyond expectation.”  Aged 12, Linley went to study  in Florence, where in 1770, he met and befriended another youthful prodigy Mozart.  Charles Burney bracketed Thomas and Wolfgang together as ‘the most promising geniuses of this age’ and ‘Linley was even nicknamed ‘the English Mozart’.

And of course Grimsthorpe has moved with the times. The 17thc stable block  now  houses a shop while  the 18thc coach house is now that impoortant feature of all historic hoiuses a tea room, although I confess that much as I love tea and cake it’s still not as impressive as Vanbrugh’s Great Hall inside.

As Todd Longstaffe-Gowan said in his Country Life article “that the great domain of Grimsthorpe still ranks among “the most extensive in the kingdom” and possesses such a rich and varied semi-natural landscape, is a credit to the conservative nature and uninterrupted pace of its stewardship.”

 

For more information, other than the links in the text,  a good place to start is the estate’s website, although it doesn’t say much about the gardens. There are a lot of early postcards and photos of the gardens on a local history website which are well worth a look, and of course the estate has a facebook page with lots of images.