Green Retreats Green Retreats presents a lively and beautifully illustrated account of eighteenth-century women in their gardens, in the context of the larger history of their retirement from the world – whether willed or enforced – and of their engagement with the literature of gardening. Beginning with a survey of cultural representations of the woman in the garden, Stephen Bending goes on to tell the stories, through their letters, diaries and journals, of some extraordinary eighteenth-century women, including Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestocking circle, the gardening neighbours Lady Caroline Holland and Lady Mary Coke, and Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough, renowned for her scandalous withdrawal from the social world. The emphasis on how gardens were used, as well as designed, allows the reader to rethink the place of women in the eighteenth century, and understand what was at stake for those who stepped beyond the flower garden and created their own landscapes. stephen bending is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. Green Retreats Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-Century Culture stephen bending cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao˜ Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107040021 c Stephen Bending 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Bending, Stephen. Green retreats : women, gardens, and eighteenth-century culture / Stephen Bending. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-04002-1 (hardback) 1. Women gardeners – Great Britain – Biography. 2. Gardeners – Great Britain – Biography. 3. Gardening – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 4. Women gardeners – Great Britain – Correspondence. 5. Gardeners – Great Britain – Correspondence. 6. Women – Great Britain – Social conditions – 18th century. I. Title. SB469.9.B46 2013 635.082 – dc23 2013005956 ISBN 978-1-107-04002-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. This book is for my parents – two quite different gardeners; and in memory of Kevin Sharpe – a great friend, and a great loss. Contents List of illustrations [page viii] Acknowledgements [x] Introduction [1] part i 1 ‘Gladly I leave the town’: retirement [43] 2 ‘No way qualified for retirement’: disgrace [92] part ii 3 Bluestocking gardens: Elizabeth Montagu at Sandleford [135] 4 Neighbours in retreat: Lady Mary Coke and the Hollands [173] 5 ‘Can you not forgive?’: Henrietta Knight at Barrells Hall [204] 6 ‘Though very retired, I am very happy’ [242] Notes [247] Bibliography [278] Index [294] vii Illustrations 1 ‘Palemon and Lavinia’, 1780 (engraved by John Raphael Smith; painting by William Lawrenson). C The Trustees of the British Museum (2010,7081.2227) [page 2] 2 Badminton, Gloucestershire, from Britannia Illustrata (1708/9) [10] 3 View across the lake to the Pantheon, Stourhead, Wiltshire [11] 4 The Flower Garden, Osterley Park, Middlesex [13] 5 The Warrells, Wotton, Buckinghamshire [18] 6 ‘The Flower Garden’ (engraved by Matthew and Mary Darly) 1777. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University [26] 7 The Temple of Venus, West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire [28] 8 The Elysian Fields, Stowe, Buckinghamshire [29] 9 The Temple of Venus, Stowe [30] 2.1 South Lodge, Enfield (engraved by Charles Warren) c. 1800 [129] 3.1 Portrait of Elizabeth Montagu (engraved by Charles Townley; portrait by Frances Reynolds) 1784 [137] 3.2 Sandleford Priory, Berkshire [142] 3.3 ASurveyoftheEstateatSandlefordintheCountyofBerkshire belonging to Mrs Montagu 1781. Courtesy of Berkshire Record Office (BRO: D/ELM T19/2/13) [161] 3.4 Sandleford from the western fields [163] 3.5 Sandleford, Brown’s Lake [164] 4.1 Portrait of Lady Mary Coke (engraving by James McArdell; portrait by Allan Ramsay). C The Trustees of the British Museum (1863,0110.165) [174] 4.2 Lady Caroline Holland (by William Hoare of Bath) c. 1745. Courtesy of The Trustees of the Goodwood Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library [175] 4.3 Holland House c. 1800. C The British Library Board (Ktop XXVIII, image 10r) [177] 4.4 Richard Bentley, Sketch for a three-sided Chinese House at Holland Park. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University [179] viii List of illustrations ix 4.5 An Accurate Survey of the Park Pleasure ground & Inclosures adjoining to Holland House in the County of Middlesex the Seat of the Right Honorable Lord Holland Survey’d July A.D. 1770 By J[ohn] Haynes. C The Trustees of the British Museum (1880,1113.5568) [180] 4.6 View in watercolour of Kingsgate Bay on the Isle of Thanet in Kent (1800). C The British Library Board (Ktop vol. 18 image 30b) [185] 4.7 J. Osborn, Survey of Notting Hill, 1823. Courtesy of Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, Family & Children’s Service [192] 4.8 Notting Hill, view from the south, 1817. Courtesy of Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, Family & Children’s Service [193] 4.9 North Front of Notting Hill House, 1817. Courtesy of Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, Family & Children’s Service [202] 5.1 Portrait of Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough (attributed to Maria Verelst). C Lydiard House and Park [205] Acknowledgements In a 1997 job interview, after giving a well-worn presentation on eighteenth- century gardens and politics, I was asked by Cora Kaplan, ‘Where are the women?’ Fifteen years later I’ve come up with an answer of sorts, and to reach it I have been aided by many. At Southampton, Stephen Bygrave, Gillian Dow, Clare Hanson, John McGavin, and Peter Middleton; to Sujala Singh and Aashish Singh Dasmahapatra I owe especial thanks; Linda Bree and my two Cambridge readers offered some extraordinarily detailed and generous suggestions and support; to them I must add Jennie Batchelor, Rachel Crawford, Margot Finn, Cora Kaplan, Larry Klein, Karen O’Brien, Annie Richardson, and Michael Symes. My thanks also to St Gabriel’s School which was kind enough to give me access to Sandleford Priory. Over the years I have been aided immensely by a number of institutions. Along with leave from the Humanities Faculty at Southampton and from the AHRC, research fellowships from the Huntington Library and the Leverhulme Trust have played a crucial role in the completion of this project, not only allowing me time to do the research but sustaining a sense that such research was valued. x Introduction Gardens are places of pleasure and of punishment; they are places to read, to dance, to work, to laugh, to study, to labour, and to rest; they are places of horticultural competence and of happy amateurism; they are places to imagine, to make, to own and to visit; they are places which speak of elsewhere and places which signify home; they are places of retirement and of ostentation, they are places of transgression, of meditation, of excitement, boredom, seduction, luxury, and suicide. All but the last are the subject of this book.1 This, then, is a book about gardens; but more than that it is a book about eighteenth-century women and the gardens they created, inhabited, and imagined. It starts from the assumption that the shaping of physi- cal space is the shaping also of identity, and that gardens are microcosms, speaking of and reacting to a world beyond themselves. It starts also with an anecdote. In the summer of 1761 Sarah Lennox could be found in the hay fields of Holland Park: dressed in her finest clothes, and with one eye on the turnpike road, she was a shepherdess in search of a prince (Figure 1). This was no pastoral daydream, however, for the prince in ques- tion was the newly crowned George III and for a time – with the aid of her pastoral trappings – it seemed that she might succeed in becoming the queen of England.2 Ten years later, disgraced by an extra-marital affair and by the scandal of divorce, she had swapped the landscape of pastoral for a landscape of disgrace.3 Where before she had been a beautiful shepherdess waiting for her handsome prince, now she was a penitent waiting for abso- lution; and where once she had inhabited the splendid gardens of Holland Park, now, wearing plain clothes and a doleful expression, she was ban- ished to an old manor house and country obscurity in the recesses of her brother’s estate at Goodwood. Forced by her family to exchange the pastoral for the penitential, Sarah Lennox traversed the extremes of how her society imagined a woman in a garden; at each extreme she knew only too well the conventions, the expectations, and the costs. If this language of pastoral romance and shameful retirement, of shep- herdesses, piety, and penitents, of old manor houses and Edenic gardens seems the fanciful stuff of fiction, the staple of poetic effusions, and in short 1 2 Introduction Figure 1 Palemon and Lavinia, 1780 (engraved by John Raphael Smith; painting by William Lawrenson). C The Trustees of the British Museum (2010,7081.2227) Ostensibly an illustration of Thomson’s pastoral lovers in The Seasons, the image was popularly thought to represent George III and Sarah Lennox.