INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION

By the early spring of 1782 it was sixteen years since William had left France after his assessment of the demolition of the port at Dunkirk. He had sailed home from Calais in a fishing boat, in the company of the British ambassador to the French Court: Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond. The two men had had radically different lives. At the age of fifteen, Richmond had inherited the family estate at Goodwood, in Sussex, between Chichester and the South Downs. After a Grand Tour, marriage in 1757, and a short career in the army – he distinguished himself at Minden – he had set out to improve and to enlarge his estate. He had inherited 1,100 acres (450 hectares), but during his lifetime he increased this to 17,000 acres (6,900 hectares); he built new stables, designed by William Chambers, and he planted huge numbers of trees. Realising that his rapidly expanding property would be much more efficiently managed if he had proper records of the landholdings, in 1758 he engaged Thomas Yeakell as a salaried surveyor for the estate, a highly unusual (and probably unique) appointment. In 1770, Yeakell entered into commercial practice with William Gardner, a Sussex man who had started out as a surveyor three years before. They mainly worked for the Duke, but in 1778 they had published the first of the four sheets of their great map of Sussex: this was at a scale of two inches to the mile (about 1:32,000) and sufficiently detailed to show field boundaries. Its longitudes were measured from the meridian of Greenwich and its preparation probably incorporated some trigonometrical survey. Although it was never finished, this ambitious and highly professional scheme was to have a profound influence on the future direction of British cartography. It impressed Richmond so much that when he went to the Board of Ordnance in 1782, he took Yeakell with him, giving him the post of Chief Draughtsman in the Tower Drawing Room. Gardner was to join him later, subsequently becoming Chief Surveying Draughtsman.

Since his return from France, Richmond’s political career had been spent mainly in opposition. In the 1770s he espoused unpopular causes, resisting Lord North’s plans to reform the East India Company, criticising the conduct of the war in America, and supporting independence for the colonists.