About 17 miles from his town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields   the Duke of Newcastle, a leading politician and several times  Prime Minister in the 18thc, developed a country retreat in Surrey which is now one of the earliest surviving English landscape gardens.

Its creators are a roll-call of the great and good of the day  starting with Sir John Vanbrugh, Charles Bridgeman and William Kent and later Capability Brown and Henry Holland as well as the work of the Duke’s gardeners, Thomas and John Greening.

Referred to by the Duke as   “Dear Claremont” it was already being described in 1727 – long before its completion – as “the noblest of any in Europe”.  Its high status continued right up until the First World War after which it fell into decline until the house became a school and much of the garden  was acquired by the National Trust.  The estate still retains many of its original features, and the grounds  are  now Grade I listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.

The story of “Dear Claremont” doesn’t, however start with the Duke but with his friend, the architect and playwright,  Sir John Vanbrugh. Around 1709  Vanbrugh bought  the lease of Chargate Farm near Esher in Surrey with around 60 acres of ground. He had already designed Castle Howard, and was busy working on Blenheim but Chargate was different because he was doing it on his own behalf. The “situation being singularly romantic”  gave him the opportunity to experiment.

The house was probably finished by 1711, but no sooner was it completed than Vanbrugh, who was always hard-up, sold it to the young Thomas Pelham-Holles.  It was something of a symbiotic relationship because Vanbrugh agreed to stay on and act as  architect for further work, and in doing so he was able to continue to indulge his love of semi-military imagery with bastions, terraces and battlements, but now with Pelham’s money to pay for them.

Pelham had just inherited immense fortunes and vast estates including Halland in Sussex, Nottingham Castle and Newcastle House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields from both his uncle and his father so he was at 21 already  one of the greatest landowners in the kingdom.  He and Vanbrugh knew each other because they were  fellow members of the Kit-Cat Club, an influential group of mainly Whig politicians, writers and artists which included  Joseph Addison, Lord Cobham from Stowe, the Earl of   Lincoln from Oatlands and John Dormer from Rousham, many of whom were laying out new parks and gardens  at this time.

There are portraits of the members of the club at the National Portrait Gallery, but for more information see Ophelia Field’s book 

The following year, 1715, Pelham was created Earl of Clare and changed the name of the estate from Chargate to Claremont. Within months he was elevated again this time becoming Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He was to go on and hold major political office all his life,  eventually  becoming Prime Minister for  most of the period from 1754 and 1762.

His estates gave him an income of around £30,000 a year at a time when a middle-class family could survive very comfortably on less than £300.  Despite that the Duke was overspent to the tune of  £20,000 by the time of his marriage to Lady Henrietta Holles, granddaughter of the Duke of Marlborough in 1717. Part of that debt may have been because no sooner had he acquired Chargate than he set about  extending the house and buying more land until he had about 1600 acres there. Luckily his wife bought that amount as her dowry.  This meant that the Duke could not only let Vanbrugh continuing building, but probably on his advice, could also afford to call in Charles Bridgeman, the future royal gardener,  to develop the gardens and parkland.  As a result Claremont began to develop rapidly.

 

There is an early plan probably dating from before  1714, but showing the planned garden layout and the fantasy brick Belvedere where work had started in 1715.

 

Originally open at ground level, the Belvedere was designed by Vanbrugh to  stand on a prominent  mount,  replacing an earlier wooden summer house.   It had a kitchen and is said to have been used for entertainment and meetings of the Kit-Cat club. Newcastle installed a telescope on the roof to take advantage of the extensive views which stretched as far as St Paul’s cathedral and Windsor Castle.

His new gardens were quickly celebrated in  a poem of 1715, while work was still underway.   Claremont  by Dr Sir Samuel Garth running to some seventeen pages of flowery verse praised the landscape of “rising hills and gentle valleys, close Groves, and opening Glades” where “nature borrows dress from Vanbrugh’s Art.”

The scale of the work – including new stables and other service buildings as well as  a six acre walled garden with a garden room just outside its wall- can be seen in Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus published in 1725, although it was drawn in 1717 before the next stage of building was carried out.

The kitchen garden was  divided into 3 sections by rather grander than usual brick walls and the duke’s steward reported that  “abounds with everything than can be wanting for profit or pleasure”.  Fruit trees were trained against the walls and grown as standards – with more than 300 apple tees, the same number of pears, and about 200 each of plums, cherries and vines. Hothouses contained peaches and nectarines and their fruit was sent as gifts to friends and acquaintances including the king and his mistress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we’ll see later, much of the estate was sold off in the 1920s for housing developments, and, as can be seen in the aerial view below, this included the kitchen gardens.

Bridgman planted. two quadruple avenues across the site [easily seen on the Colen Campbell plan above] , which survived until the 20thc sell-off  and in the top left corner of that plan you can also see  the Round Bason  he designed which was later modified by William Kent to form the present larger irregular lake. However for some reason there is no sign of the amphitheatre begun at the same time on the hill opposite.

 

Bridgeman was very fond of amphitheatres and included them in his designs for both Cliveden and Stowe but the one at Claremont is much grander – it covers 3 acres – so unsurprisingly, given the scale   work wasn’t finished until 1718 three years later.  The Duke referred to it “Mr Bridgeman’s Hill”, and behind it as part of the circuit walk around the garden there was “Bridgeman’s Walk”.

Bridgeman almost certainly took his inspiration from the work of Reanaisance architectural writer Serlio in his Tutti l’Opera d’Architectura et Prospetiva of 1545.

 

At the same time all that was going on the house was further vastly extended between 1717 and 1720. The long arcaded wings stretched to 300 ft, there was “a great room” 74 x 45 ft with access to the gardens, and  a pair of staircases sweeping up the central front.

 

But the collapse of South Sea Bubble in 172o  which was partly blamed on William Aislabie the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a member of the Kit-Cat club and a friend of Newcastle, had a serious impact on the duke’s investments and together with his usual extravagance caused a reining in of expenditure on the estate. However by 1734 things had recovered enough for William Kent, who had already worked for other members of the Kit-Cat club, to be asked to make significant  alterations to Bridgeman’s original layout.

The extent of the changes can best be seen in an engraving by John Rocque, one of series of illustrated maps of great houses around London. which show how in the late 1730s Kent  enlarged and naturalised  Bridgeman’s  Round Bason, removing the obelisk but adding an island – Belisle – and  a temple/pavilion  The temple was designed to be more than just a temporary stopping place, and had a kitchen as well as a central  room with a fireplace. It’s known from the Duke’s extensive surviving correspondence that he used the temple as a writing room, so it’s not surprising that he  told his  wife: “My dearest.. [you] will admire this charming place more than you can imagine.”

 

Kent also planted groves of trees, laid out serpentine paths, and added several more small  buildings as well as a cascade at the head of the lake.  At the same time he turned the garden room into a house for  John Greening,  the Duke’s gardener. This has been further extended and still survives as  The White Cottage (listed at Grade II*).  Lists of trees that Kent ordered and sketches for more work, although probably not executed, still survive.

The importance of the Greening family to the success of the Duke’s plans cannot be be underestimated. As my friend Val Bott points out Thomas Greening  was working there in the 1720s, taking his son John when he was old enough. John was given a senior role in 1747 when he married and when his father was looking for a quieter life! He gradually became Newcastle’s steward and helped manage other estates but he also gained the contract for Hampton Court and for other royal estates. For decades he kept the family home in Esher on the edge of the Claremont estate, trained his sons and maintained a stinking nursery there. He wasn’t just a toiler but also a creative man. John’s older brother Robert was proud of his achievement in making the lake work at Claremont when he was still very young.  [For more on the Greenings see  this entry on Val’s website]

 

It was all part of a process summed up by Sir William Robinson in a letter to the Earl of Carlisle at Castle Howard in 1734: “There is a new taste in gardening just arisen …after Mr Kent’s notion of gardening, viz to lay them out, and work without either line or level ….The celebrated gardens of Claremont, Chiswick and Stowe are now full of labourers, to modernize the expensive works finished in them, even since everyone’s memory…”

Claremont was at this point widely recognised as one of the most fashionable gardens of the day not just in Britain but the whole continent.  Its “terraced heights”  where “from courts and senates Pelham finds repose” were even mentioned specifically  in James Thomson’s famous [but very long] poem The Seasons.

The Duke had the landscape recorded in a number of paintings  which show the estate in considerable detail. However, according to the National Trust these were sold at Sotheby’s some tome ago and are not available digitally.

The Duke’s papers and accounts show how Claremont was also used  for spectacular entertainment as well as quieter more personal enjoyment. It was, for example,  visited by Queen Caroline and Fredrick Prince of Wales in 1738 who walked in the garden ‘till candlelight, being entertained with very fine French horns, then returned to the great hall, and everybody agreed never was anything finer’. The evening entertainment ended with cards and country dances.  George II also visited while In 1749 his daughters breakfasted at the temple on Belisle. At some point too the Duke started a menagerie which included zebras, antelopes from India, an African bull, and a wide range of exotic birds including Chinese pheasants.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work continued after Kent’s death in 1748, under one of his former assistants Stephe Wright, notably including a grotto formed from the former cascade.

Built from brick and stone and with 5 wide arches it was decorated with “glass cinders.” Within decades it fell into disrepair and by 1850 was reported ruinous. It has since been partially restored.

The other major change from this period is that Bridgeman’s amphitheatre, apart from the sloping paths up the sides, was planted up with evergreens which would have completely altered its character.

 

The Duke’s financial problems continued and eventually he mortgaged Claremont to Robert Clive better known as Clive of India, although he continued to live there until he died in 1768.  Clive then brought the estate from the duchess for £25000, paying  a further £2,900 for the contents plus all the garden furniture, tools and equipment.  This change in ownership echoed  the changes in fashions in garden design.  Clive, who enjoyed an annual pension from Bengal. of £27,000  commissioned Henry Holland to demolish Newcastle’s vast mansion and build a new house on a different site, although using much of the material from the old house. A further 1.5 million bricks were made from 2 acres of clay-pits in the grounds. Holland worked in partnership with his future father-in-law Capability bRown, who was a competent architect as well as landscape designer.  Brown was also asked to  redesign the surrounding parkland, and while he is often accused of sweeping all formality away t here, he merely simplified the layout, leaving much of the rest  intact including  Vanbrugh’s walled garden.

Despite the fact that his coat-of-arms are above the door Robert Clive never actually lived at Claremont, because on his death in 1774 neither the house nor grounds were finished.  His executors argued with Brown and Holland about bills and in the end his son and heir had to economise. The kitchen garden which included 2 pine houses and a melon ground  were let to a market gardener, before the new Lord Clive opted to sell the whole estate. It was bought in 1786   by Lord Galway, for just £11,000 – just one third of the building costs – and then almost immediately resold to Lord Delaval of Seaton Delaval, for more than twice as much. Delaval gave it to his daughter and her husband  the Earl of Tyrconnel. but it was sold again several times in the early years of the 19thc until finally in 1816 it was bought by the government and became home for about 100 years to royalty. More of that in another post next week.