OF ALL THE aspects of creating designed landscapes, perhaps the one most regularly ignored is the intricacy of financing them. This is partly because art history, in regard to gardening at least, finds the philosophical and design aspects of gardens more interesting than how much they cost. It is also because, particularly before the mid-eighteenth century and the gentlemen improvers, it is almost impossible to find systematically costed accounts in the archives of either the clients or the practitioners, and therefore quite difficult to be precise about the money that changed hands. However, it is obvious that creating these landscapes was spectacularly expensive, and required a provision of goods and services which had to be paid for.

Yet the idea of Bridgeman's clients as consumers is completely missing from the writing about Bridgeman, and rarely makes more than a footnote in the writing about his predecessors and contemporaries. Most commentary on the rise of consumerism in the eighteenth century has tended to concentrate on the lower and ‘middling’ classes; as Weatherill puts it, the desire ‘to emulate those of higher social rank, in order to keep up appearances’ was the main driver of this significant change in behaviour (Weatherill 1988, 194). Clearly the emulation of the rich and powerful by the ‘middling sort’ is of less interest here, since Bridgeman worked exclusively for the rich and the powerful, the ‘propertied people’ who Langford characterises as trailing ‘their possessions before the gaze, fascinated, awed, resentful, of the unpropertied people who were their employees, servants, or merely spectators’ (Langford 1991, 11). Bridgeman's clients were drawn from the nobility with inherited wealth and land. These clients were the ‘rich who led the way’ and ‘indulged in an orgy of spending’ (McKendrick et al. 1983, 10); they were the powerful men, and occasionally women, who saw themselves as the arbiters of fashionable taste. However, Bridgeman's clients were clearly not immune to ‘the compulsive power of fashion begotten by social competition’ (McKendrick et al. 1983, 10). An understanding of ‘taste’ was a badge of belonging to, and remaining within, the elite.

Paradoxically, the notion of art and taste, which has largely concealed the understanding of Bridgeman's clients and consumers, was generated by them.

AS WITH MOST artists and designers, an effort has been made by subsequent academic writing to fit Bridgeman into the cultural and artistic context of his period. In the early eighteenth century, the period in which he was working, the elite – the rich, the intelligentsia, the literati – were preoccupied with defining themselves in the light of several essentially separate but closely related ideas. They discoursed in print, in correspondence and in conversation on the relationship between nature and the garden, the culture and politics of ancient Rome, the art, architecture and landscapes of Europe, and the development of a sense of Englishness which was distinct from the Europeaness of the near continent. So pervasive and persuasive did this discourse become that it has stood for the cultural life of the early eighteenth century ever since. Bridgeman was certainly more than peripherally involved in the elite and artistic circles where these topics were the badge of belonging, so perhaps it is no wonder that he was considered part of it. What is less clear is how it affected his work.

Bridgeman was both personally and professionally connected with those fashionable artistic circles. In 1726 he was elected a member of the Society of the Virtuosi of St Luke (c.1689–1743), ‘the Tip top Clubbs of all, for men of the highest Character in Arts & Gentlemen Lovers of Art’ (see Chapter 1), presumably following his appointment as Royal Gardener (Vertue, Note books, 3.120). His fellow members included architect James Gibbs and writer George Vertue, the painter John Wootton, the enamellist Christian Friedrick Zincke and the sculptor John Michael Rysbrack, all of whom were elected in the same year as Bridgeman. Sir James Thornhill was also a member. His importance in these artistic circles is also implicit in his appearance in the painting A Club of Artists (1735), attributed to Gawen Hamilton, in which he appears with, amongst others, George Vertue, Michael Dahl, James Gibbs, John Wootton and William Kent, and in his appearance in Hogarth's The Rake's Progress. He was on visiting terms with the poet Alexander Pope.

Through the Office of Works, these connections were reinforced. The Office of Works was in charge of building for the monarchy from the medieval period. By the early eighteenth century this effectively meant all work on the royal palaces, buildings and land.

THE PURPOSE OF the table is to present some indication of Bridgeman's workload by year, albeit partly estimated. In general, the evidence used for this is in estate accounts or bank accounts, although sometimes it is correspondence in which he is mentioned. X is used to show sites where there is dateable evidence. Since only the years for which there is documentary evidence are included, there are often empty cells interposed into what is a long period of documented work at a site. This does not necessarily mean that Bridgeman interrupted his work at the site; it simply means there is no documentary evidence for his presence during this particular year. At the bottom of the table, ✓ indicates probable dates for those significant sites where it is known that he worked but where there is no dateable documentary evidence for his involvement. Gunton and Scampston are omitted completely because there is no possibility of determining a date; so are minor and conjectural sites. M indicates sites where there is no evidence of a plan, but there are regular quarterly payments over a long period suggesting a maintenance contract only. I have included Bridgeman's work as Royal Gardener in this category, in addition to his design work at Kensington Gardens.

IN 1714 CHARLES BRIDGEMAN designed a garden for Sir Edward Rolt at his mansion at Sacombe in Hertfordshire. The plan for the landscape, held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford as part of the Gough Collection (BoL MSGD a4 fo.64), is in vibrant watercolour. Beyond the house and formal garden, it shows an axial walk leading to a rectangular canal which stretches out to the southeast of the house. At right angles, another walk stretches through woodland. There is a patte d’oie, one branch of which leads to a small theatre with an oval pond at its base, fed by a conduit from a triangular basin on slightly higher ground. The whole covers 42 acres (0.17km2) and much of it is still visible today, including the outline of the canal and basin in a ploughed field to the south east of the house; to a very large degree it correlates exactly with the plan (https://earth.google.com/web/search/Sacombe). Sir Thomas Rolt, Sir Edward's father, a former Governor of the East India Company, had bought the house and park in 1688. Sir Edward had inherited Sacombe in 1710 (Milledge 2009, 40). It is impossible to say how Bridgeman got the commission. Perhaps it was through a connection with Henry Wise, Royal Gardener between 1704 and 1727, and proprietor of the most prestigious plant nursery in England, Brompton Park Nurseries, for whom Bridgeman probably worked; Wise was clearly known to Rolt and had been paid £8.14s.6d by Rolt in 1714, perhaps for advice, perhaps for plants (Milledge 2009, 40). Possibly it was through Sir John Vanbrugh, the playwright and architect with whom Bridgeman had probably worked at Blenheim Palace and would subsequently work at Lumley Castle and Hackwood. Vanbrugh had designed a walled kitchen garden at Sacombe in the military style. Bridgeman's involvement in the project appears to have been long term, and highly lucrative. Between 13 June 1715 and 1720, the Sacombe estate accounts show that Bridgeman was paid substantial sums, in total amounting to £160,000, the greatest being the final payment of £534. He was still working at Sacombe in summer 1722, when the canal was being dug (Milledge 2009, 42), and was Rolt's principal creditor when his estate was taken into administration on his death from smallpox in the same year.

We have three reliable references to Charles Bridgeman before his triumph at Sacombe.

MUCH OF THE writing about Bridgeman, and in fact this is probably true about most other garden designers except perhaps the most modern, places him in a universe of art and philosophy where the mechanics of creating a landscape are of less relevance than the aesthetics and the ideas. Actually, though, the making of gardens is an intensely practical business. It is necessary to know what will grow and how to look after it while it does, and how to build the roads, paths, terraces, theatres and hydraulic installations that make up the skeleton of the garden. Without that, no art is possible. Bridgeman was a master of all the disciplines needed to construct what he had designed.

Any landscape must begin with an accurate survey. The business of surveying distances over a large area of land is complicated even with modern surveying apparatus; in the early eighteenth century it was far more so, although essential for the correct apportionment of land and the avoidance of dispute. Bridgeman was clearly a skilled surveyor. The methods he used must have been those of the estate surveyor whose work was the measurement of parcels of land on an estate for an employer or client. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries measurement of the area of these parcels was accomplished using a cord of predetermined length. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century this cord had largely been superseded, for measuring purposes, by Gunther's chain, introduced in 1620 by Edmund Gunther (Bendall 2009, 130). Leybourn describes this chain as ‘divided into 100 Links, one of these Links being made four times the length of the other. Now, if this chain be made according to Statute, each Perch to contain 16½ Feet; then each Link of this Chain will contain 7 Inches, and 92/100 of an Inch, and the whole Chain 792 Inches, or 66 Feet’. This chain would be ‘carried by two men, who working together will mark out each length of chain with sticks’ (Leybourn 1653, 45–49). The chain was relatively inexpensive. Bridgeman's contemporary, and rival in the question of drainage of the fens, Thomas Badeslade, was paid £ for one by Sir Robert Walpole in 1719. Bendall shows that this method of measuring distances was in use by surveyors working at the same time as Bridgeman.

THE TABLE BELOW shows the data which it has been possible to piece together regarding Bridgeman's income. The information presented comes from a variety of sources: from Charles Bridgeman and the English Landscape Garden, from the archive of the Office of Works, Work 6/114 (which deals with the reshaping of Kensington Gardens), from the yearly abstract of the Office of Works (Work 5/57, 5/58 and 5/59 1726–1739) and from Nicky Smith's work on Lodge Park (Smith 2006). I have included all the payments made to Bridgeman from the Office of Works, except those between 1726 and 1728 made to him and Wise jointly, because it is not clear how the payments were divided. I have recorded Bridgeman's payment for the work at Kensington Gardens as a single payment, even though it was paid in instalments during the course of the work (Work 6/114).