Introduction

Summary

Thomas Whately (1726/28–1772) is generally remembered as a politician, although garden historians often see him only as the author of Observations on Modern Gardening. He was well known in public life and recognised also as a well-informed and cultured man with a literary bent. He was MP for Lodgershall, Wiltshire (1761–8), and for Castle Rising, Norfolk (1768–72). He served as Secretary to the Treasury in George Grenville's administration in 1764–5 and became close to Grenville, following him subsequently into opposition. Apart from politics, the two men shared a passion for landscape gardens, Grenville being the owner of Wotton, Buckinghamshire. Whately remained loyal to Grenville, defending his policies in print and, after Grenville's death, acting on behalf of his associates when Whately joined Lord North's government. He became a Commissioner on the Board of Trade in 1771, under-Secretary of State from the same year and ‘Keeper of the King's private roads’ in 1772, a few months before he died in only his mid-forties.

It is ironic that Grenville, steeped in an earlier generation of Whig opposition under his uncle Lord Cobham at Stowe (and one of the ‘Cobham Cubs’), should have fallen foul of the new Whig opposition, the ‘Rockingham Whigs’, who were concerned by the increasingly pro-royal direction the government was taking. In particular, George III and Grenville adopted a hostile attitude to the American colonists, as shown most markedly in the Stamp Act, which controversially imposed a tax on them: Whately claimed it would benefit them. The king himself, aware of Grenville's unpopularity, reluctantly replaced him with the second marquis of Rockingham, whose seat was at the politically charged landscape of Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire; his government, in turn, lasted only from 1765 to 1766 but repealed the Stamp Act. Whately, however, was commemorated by name in America with the naming after him of the town of Whately, Massachusetts.

Grenville was well acquainted with landscape design, both at his own property and at Stowe, which his brother Richard took over from 1749. There are apparent links with Stowe in the layout of Wotton.