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Capability Brown's account with Drummonds Bank, 1753-1783

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Peter Willis
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Extract

Apart from the records of individual clients, two main sources help us to understand Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s financial affairs: his account book in the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society in London, and his bank account with Drummonds in Charing Cross which stretches unbroken from 1753 (some four years after Brown left Stowe to start an independent career as a landscape designer) to his death in 1783. Thanks to the research of Miss Dorothy Stroud, the account book in the Lindley Library has long been familiar, but the material at Drummonds, now the Drummonds Branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, deserves to be better known.

Type
Section 5: Contributions to Architectural Biography
Information
Architectural History , Volume 27: Design and Practice in British Architecture , 1984 , pp. 382 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1984

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References

Notes

1 I am grateful to Miss Stroud for her advice during the preparation of this article. For details of Brown’s career see her Capability Brown (3rd edition, 1975).

Brown’s account book was presented by Mrs Margaret Morrice to the Royal Horticultural Society injune 1958 and put on loan in memory of her husband, H. A. W. Morrice. Microfilm copies of it may be seen in the Lindley Library there and in Newcastle University Library, MF 555. For assistance at the Royal Horticultural Society 1 am indebted to Dr Brent Elliott.

Mr and Mrs Maldwin Drummond, of Cadland, kindly advised me on my researches into the family’s history and read this essay in draft. At Drummonds Branch itself, Mr Brian C. Cooper, the archivist, gave me every possible help and arranged for Brown’s bank account to be photocopied; it consists of 318 folios spread through 31 annual ledgers.

I wish to thank Drummonds Branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland for access to their archives and for permission to publish the results of my research, which was supported by a generous grant from the Research Committee of the University of Newcastle.

2 Ledgers for 1752 and 1753 at Messrs C. Hoare and Co, 37 Fleet Street, London, where 1 benefited from the aid of the archivist, Mr MauriceJ. Lloyd.

3 See the list of architects, craftsmen, and clients with accounts at Drummonds in Geoffrey Beard, W. Georgian Craftsmen and Their Work (1966), pp. 192-93.Google Scholar

For the history of the Drummond family and its banking activities see Hector Bolitho and Derek Peel, The Drummonds of Charing Cross (1967).?

4 Alexander Allardyce, editor, Scotland and Scotsmen in the 18th Century, from the Manuscripts of John Ramsay, Esq., of Ochtertyre, 2 volumes (Edinburgh and London, 1888), II, 302-03.

5 Castle Ashby, Northamptonshire, MSFD1118 (parcel), letter from Brown to 8th Earl of Northampton, 7 September 1767.

Mr McKay, Peter H. Google Scholar in the estate office of the Compton estates at Castle Ashby, kindly provided a photocopy of the letter and gave me his observations on this article, in particular on Brown’s connection with Fenstanton.

See also Miss Stroud’s discussion in Capability Brown, pp. 108-09.

6 I owe this suggestion to Mr McKay, who tells me that Henry Drummond was one of the 8th Earl of Northampton’s trustees (effectively receiver in bankruptcy) in 1774.

7 For an explanation of this system see Adrienne Corri, ‘Gainsborough’s Early Career: New Documents and Two Portraits’, Burlington Magazine, cxxv, no. 961 (April 1983), 210, 212-13. Miss Corri generously commented on my interpretation ofBrown’s accounts at Drummonds.

8 For help in the identification of owners and estates I must thank Mr A. J. Holland at Beaulieu, Miss A. Travers at the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, and the staff at various county record offices, notably Miss R. C. Dunhill (Hampshire), Mrs P. Gill (West Sussex), Mr H. A. Hanley (Buckinghamshire), Mr A. D. Hill (Cambridgeshire), Mr P. I. King (Northamptonshire), Mr Brian C. Redwood (Cheshire), Mr F. B. Stitt (Staffordshire), and Mr Peter Walne (Hertfordshire).

9 See Peter Willis, ‘Capability Brown in Northumberland’, Garden History, ix, no. 2 (Autumn 1981), pp. 157-83, reprinted for the Northumberland and Newcastle Society (of Newcastle upon Tyne) in 1983.

10 Quoted in Humphry Repton, Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening . . . (1803), pp. 168-69.