Painshill Park at Cobham was the result of one man’s dream. Three centuries later it inspired author Margaret Buntrock to give the tale a tantalizing new twist
Like many a journalist before me, I have always wanted to write a novel. All I needed was a subject: something familiar, yet bold and ambitious.
For years inspiration eluded me. And then, one lucky day, during a lecture on Painshill Park – the beautiful 18th century landscape garden near my home in Cobham – the light bulb finally went off.
Painshill, I was astonished to learn, was the obsessive creation of one man: the Honourable Charles Hamilton.
Lacking land and finance, the MP and garden enthusiast borrowed money to buy a patch of sandy, unproductive Surrey scrubland and turn it into a kind of romantic theme park, flooding fields to create a huge lake, forming islands, building bridges and dotting the landscape with follies.
He even conjured up a crystal grotto in the style of a giant fairy cave. Oh, and he managed to establish a flourishing vineyard too.
Curiosity fully aroused, I began to research his story for myself. Hamilton, I discovered, had three wives – not that unusual in those days of high mortality, especially as he lived to be 82.
What was remarkable though was the mist surrounding wife number one: a woman unknown to history, even by name, and whose existence is only evident from the description of Hamilton as a widower before his second marriage.
A real-life mystery and a novelist’s dream.
So I set about interweaving the story of Painshill with this other, intriguing strand of history, immersing myself in the 18th century and reading all I could find about the garden and its inspiring creator. Millicent, as I chose to call the first Mrs Hamilton, became a creation of my own, her very anonymity affording me completely free rein.
The scene was set: Pains Hill – its title spelling derived from how the garden was originally known – began to take shape.
A fictionalized account of a tale particular to Surrey, but rich in historical significance for a world beyond the leafy lanes of home.
Born in Dublin in 1704, Charles Hamilton was the 14th child of the 6th Earl of Abercorn. Westminster School, Oxford, the Grand Tour: his was the archetypal upbringing of privilege.
And it was painting lessons in Italy that inspired him to create his horticultural masterpiece, aiming to reproduce the romantic landscapes depicted in Italian art of the time.
Like any other tourist, he brought home a pile of souvenirs. But whereas today we might return with a designer handbag or leather wallet, Hamilton plumped for Greek and Roman statues – lots of them.
One of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, was reputed to be the tallest in England.
Inspiration and adornment, however, were not enough
Contemporary creators of grand gardens had inherited vast estates, such as Stourhead and Stowe, on which to fashion their ideas. They also had deep pockets to pay for them.
Hamilton had neither: as a ninth son, he inherited far too little to service his breathtaking designs.
Instead, he relied on his friend, the politician Henry Fox, who would later resign as Paymaster of the Forces beneath a cloud of financial suspicion. Another gift for a storyteller.
And yet, despite the difficulties, Painshill cut a pioneering dash. In the UK we take our landscape parks for granted, as if the broad lawns, water features and winding paths are all integral to the environment.
But in 1738, when Hamilton set to work, such creations marked a dramatic break from the previous century with its formal, symmetrical beauty and rigidly straight lines.
The new, informal English style, based on an idealized view of nature, was soon influencing design at home and abroad. “In all, let Nature never be forgot,” wrote Pope in 1731. Hamilton took the exhortation to heart.
In the novel, a parallel plot brings the story into the 1990s, with a young female historian researching Hamilton’s life. Obsessed with solving the mystery of his first wife’s life and death, she is unaware that an old adversary is stalking her.
Thus the novel becomes a psychological thriller, as Hamilton, historian and stalker are linked by the theme of obsession. For Hamilton, that obsession came at a price.
Pushed towards bankruptcy, he was forced to sell up in 1773 and retire to a house in Bath.
Painshill passed through various private hands before falling into neglect after World War II. The garden became a wilderness, its structures in ruins, the lake silted up and sprouting trees.
Not until the 1970s did Elmbridge Borough Council rescue it from oblivion, purchasing much of the estate.
Then, in the 1980s – with Painshill now Grade I listed as a garden of global importance – the work of restoration began.
Bridges, follies, vineyard: one by one the old landmarks reappeared. Today the transformation is total, the garden familiar to Netflix viewers as a setting for the first season of Bridgerton.
As Henry Thoreau might have said, Painshill Park is awake in its dreams.
