338 



GARDENS OLD AND NEW. 



A GREEN WALK. 



incendiaries." This he left to his uncle, Sir John, 

 who, however, shortly found the fire he had helped 

 to kindle uncomfortably hot ; for though an active 

 Parliamentarian, he was of that civilian type which 

 could not brook the predominance of the army, his 

 opposition to which brought upon him, in 1648, the same 

 impeachment which had befallen his more loyal nephew 

 the year before. Nothing very serious seems to have 

 happened to either of them, and Lord Maynard lived 

 to see Charles II. restored, at whose coronation he 

 claimed, and was allowed, his doubtful right, as lord 

 of Easton, of acting as caterer and larderer. The 

 Maynards for some generations were prolific enough ; 

 but when the fifth Baron died in 1745, it was the 

 eighth and youngest son of the third Baron who 

 succeeded to the title and estates. He was made 

 a Viscount in 1766, but as he, also, was childless, he 

 succeeded in getting his patent made out with special 

 remainder to a third cousin, who followed him in 

 1775, and was husband to the notorious "Nancy 

 Parsons " very much a " woman with a past." She 

 was the daughter of a Bond Street tailor, but her 

 "rare powers of attraction," which Gainsborough's 

 brush enables us to revise in his portrait of her now 

 in the Lansdowne Collection, soon brought her into 

 sub-social prominence, and it was her connection with 

 the thir.l Duke of Grafton when he was Prime 

 Minister which made her a subject of interest to the 

 gossips of her day, such as Horace Walpole. Again 

 in this case, there was a lack of Maynard heirs, and the 

 title descended to a nephew, with whom it expired 

 1865. He left two grand-daughters, of whom 



ii 



the younger is Lady Algernon Gordon-Lennox. 

 But the elder was made sole heiress to the estates, 

 and having, in 1881, married Lord Brooke, she 

 became, in due course, Countess of Warwick. Her 



interest in gardening showed itself in her founding 

 and maintaining a college for the training of women 

 in that art. But she also desired to set the impress 

 of her age and of her personality on the grounds of 

 her own and of her husband's inheritances, and both 

 at Easton and at Warwick Castle great garden works 

 have of recent years been carried out from the 

 designs and under the superintendence of Mr. 

 H. A. Peto. 



When Morant assures us that " Easton Lodge 

 stands high, having a beautiful northern prospect, of 

 which the capital point of view is the noble church of 

 Thaxted," we must remember that this was an Essex 

 man's description of an Essex elevation. It is truer 

 to say that the house is set on gradually rising 

 ground, and is, therefore, rather exposed, as are all 

 the Essex table-lands. For both protection and 

 distinction, therefore, it largely depends on the fine 

 timbering of a park of 800 acres which surrounds it, 

 and whose groups and specimens of oak, of horn- 

 beam and of Scotch fir are brought into some scheme 

 and discipline by the great trio of avenues that con- 

 verge upon the house. Although Morant, describing 

 his own eighteenth century day, says that Easton 

 "does not lack the modern improvements of shrub- 

 beries and serpentines," yet Capability Brown was 

 evidently not given a free hand, or the avenues 

 would not have been allowed, and the serpentine 

 " improvements " would have had full sway. As a 

 matter of fact, Easton was, five years ago, deplorably 

 deficient in pleasant garden surroundings, those in 

 existence consisting of the very moderate-sized square 

 of grass, cut up with the rather commonplace flower- 

 bed arrangement, which appears in one of our 

 illustrations. Beyond that lay an uncompromising 

 croquet-ground bounded by the iron rail of the park. 



