John Scott of Amwell

John Scott (January 9, 1731 – December 12, 1783), known as Scott of Amwell, was an English landscape gardener and writer on social matters. He was also the first notable Quaker poet, although in modern times he is remembered for only one anti-militarist poem.

John Scott was the son of a successful London draper who later retired to Amwell House in the Hertfordshire village of Amwell and worked from there as a maltster. The family were Quakers and John's elder brother Samuel (1719–88) eventually settled in Hertford as a Quaker minister. Scott stayed at home and undertook the improvement of the grounds from 1760, modelling them on those of William Shenstone at the Leasowes, which he visited. Its principal feature was a grotto consisting of six subterranean rooms whose surfaces were covered in flints, shells and minerals,

His poem "The Garden" goes on to reject the formal style of garden for Shenstone’s ideal of a managed wilderness. On visiting it, the celebrated Samuel Johnson declared that "none but a poet could have made such a garden." The grotto continued as a tourist attraction into Victorian times but, having then fallen out of use, was restored in 1991 as “the most complete of the grotto-builder’s art”.

Scott lacked a full or satisfactory education and had only come to a knowledge of poetry through friendship with a bricklayer autodidact, whose daughter Sarah Frogley he eventually married in 1767. She died in childbirth the following year and in 1770 he married Mary de Horne, by whom he had a daughter. In 1773 he published his social Observations on the present state of the parochial and vagrant poor, a criticism of the Poor Law which was approved, although its recommendations did not gain parliamentary support. He was also celebrated as an expert on the turnpike roads, on which he wrote in 1773 and expanded in 1778 under the title A Digest of the Highway and General Turnpike Laws. He was an active member of three Hertfordshire turnpike trusts and his book was later praised as by "the ablest Turnpike Trustee of his time" Another political pamphlet, “The Constitution Defended”, was a reply to Samuel Johnson’s “False Alarm” (1770).

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