Chapter 1
26 SEPTEMBER 1741, BURGHLEY HOUSE, NEAR STAMFORD IN LINCOLNSHIRE, ENGLAND
He founded a family and a great estate and . . . he would have recognised in his famous great grandson [Joseph Banks, the botanist] a man after his own heart . . . refined by education and the influences of inherited wealth, into an insatiable curiosity and scientific zeal, with results of lasting benefit to mankind.
SIR FRANCIS HILL, THIRD CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM, AND A LEADING HISTORIAN OF LINCOLNSHIRE 1
NATURE TURNED ON A spectacular show for Sarah Bate’s2 wedding, with breathtaking colour everywhere the young bride looked. A carpet of green grass stretched as far as the eye could see over the vast wool estates, and autumn was gently changing the forests to a tapestry of yellow, gold, orange and bronze. Sarah was a strong, forceful woman with a love for God and nature,3 and as she took her wedding vows alongside William ‘Billy’ Banks,4 a boyish barrister and Member of Parliament, she could not help but be overwhelmed by the glory of her surroundings.
Burghley House was one of the grandest homes in England, a Tudor mansion with more than a hundred rooms, panelled hallways that seemed to go on forever, intricately carved staircases, and soaring ceilings decorated by Italian masters. The house was so vast and ornate that labourers had taken thirty-two years to build it from Northamptonshire limestone.5 It lay just outside the town of Stamford, Lincolnshire, but well beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest and most connected families. Burghley was the home of Sarah’s aunt,6 who had married the Eighth Earl of Exeter. It had been in Exeter’s family since construction began in 1564 for the First Baron Burghley, Sir William Cecil, Lord High Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I and the man who had persuaded Her Majesty to remove the head of her troublesome cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. Cecil was also a keen gardener with a ‘special flair for acclimatizing exotic trees and shrubs’.7
That was from a darker chapter of English history. The young bride and groom were married during a new age of so-called enlightenment ushered in by thinkers such as Isaac Newton8 and Jonathan Swift. Although British plantation owners were still rooted in the Dark Ages, crucifying or burning alive rebellious slaves in Jamaica,9 British and other European scientists and philosophers were challenging the old order. They were spreading their ideas of enlightenment through books, journals and pamphlets, and with impassioned words everywhere from university halls to literary salons and the 550 coffee houses that had become popular throughout London.10
Burghley House illustrated in 1782.
In this time of profound social, scientific and economic change, wealthy families still controlled most of the land in Britain, and on this day in 1741 a large number of them had come together to celebrate the pairing of two members of the landed gentry. The female guests wore bodices with strips of whalebone, and hooped petticoats under their luxuriant dresses of British wool, Indian cotton, and Chinese silk and velvet. The men wore knee-length breeches with stockings, waistcoats and frockcoats over linen shirts, as well as buckled shoes. Some had three-cornered hats, though the majority showed off their lavish wigs with thick curls of real human hair, unlike the wigs worn by the poorer classes who relied on hair from horses or goats.
Sarah was the 22-year-old daughter of merchant William Bate and granddaughter of Thomas Chambers, a wealthy Londoner who owned a Derbyshire foundry11 and was Governor of the Company of Copper Mines, otherwise known as the English Copper Company.
William Banks MP, also twenty-two, came from generations of wealthy English landholders and politicians, whose riches had snowballed over the previous half-century like compounding interest. The family was of Swedish origin, and William could trace his roots to the fourteenth century when Simon Banke had married an heiress of Newton, Yorkshire, during the reign of King Edward III.12 By the mid-1600s, Robert Banks13 was an attorney of substance, and his fourth son Joseph Banks I14 was born and baptised at Giggleswick in Yorkshire. 15 He would become the great-grandfather of the esteemed botanist of the same name.
In 1681, at the age of sixteen, Joseph I went to Sheffield, a town that was growing on a foundation of iron being mined at Hallamshire in the foothills of the Peak District. As well as making money from investing in the forges, Joseph profited from trading at Sheffield’s large grain market. In 1689 he married Mary Hancock, daughter of a Congregational Church pastor. Mary brought £400 to the marriage at a time when £100 a year was considered a handsome income. The young couple lived in part of Sheffield’s grand Shiercliffe Hall,16 and Joseph not only was one of the few inhabitants of Sheffield who had his own private carriage but he also had leave from the Duke of Norfolk to drive it through the nobleman’s private wood on his way to town.17 He lent money out at five per cent interest and, during the reign of Queen Anne, became agent for the Dukes of Norfolk, Leeds and Newcastle.18 The Duke of Newcastle made him Clerk of the Peace for Nottingham and Register of Sherwood Forest. In 1702 he bought the Holland estate in south Lincolnshire from Sir George Humble for £9900. Much of the property was fenland near the mouth of the River Welland, and for many decades the Banks family devised ways of draining their properties to create more arable land.
In 1711, with a bulging property portfolio and in uncertain political times, Joseph paid the bargain price of £14,000 for Revesby Abbey, a ruined twelfth-century Cistercian monastery with a dilapidated country mansion adjacent and four hundred hectares of marshy fenland. The property gave him an annual return of £900.
An ambitious man,19 Joseph then spent most of his life at Boswell Court off Fleet Street in London, sitting as a Member of Parliament, first for Grimsby from 1714 to 1722 and then for Totnes from 1722 to 1727 during the reign of the German-born King George I.
Joseph has been described as an ‘honorable, shrewd, vigorous and kindly north countryman’,20 but he was also used to getting what he wanted and quite prepared to interfere in parliamentary elections. To his agent George Stevens, whom he whimsically called ‘Honest George’, Joseph wrote on one occasion demanding he make his tenants vote for his son-in-law21 Colonel Francis Whichcote.22 The agent was also instructed to supply a list of the tenants and to state ‘how they vote’.23 The tenants apparently voted in the way Joseph wanted, as Whichcote24 was returned as Member of Parliament for Cambridgeshire in 1718.
Among his friends, Joseph counted prominent historians such as the politician Browne Willis25 and Dr William Stukeley,26 the physician and clergyman who pioneered the examination of such prehistoric monuments as Stonehenge.
By the end of his time as the Member for Totnes, Joseph had acquired vast landholdings of fourteen estates throughout England, while he had grown so fat that it was not easy to find a horse to carry him.27 He died, aged sixty-two, after a fall while climbing among rafters during an inspection of a new wing at Revesby on 27 September 1727.
His son Joseph Jr28 spared no expense for his funeral, outlaying £224 8s, about ten years’ wages for a farm labourer, to pay for the grand send-off.
Joseph Jr inherited most of his father’s wealth, though the old man left many expensive gifts to friends. He also directed his son to provide almshouses for ten farmers who had landed on hard times, to provide each of them with £50 a year, and to rebuild their local church. He left £500 for the Lord Mayor of London to build a children’s hospital.
A Carrera marble bust of a bewigged Joseph I, complete with double chin, is still on display inside Revesby’s St Lawrence Church.29
Joseph Jr gave a beloved Revesby servant, John ‘Jack’ Norton, £300 out of the estate, believing this man to be his father’s natural son.30
ON 11 APRIL 1714 JOSEPH JR married nineteen-year-old Anne,31 the only daughter of wealthy merchant and mine owner William Hodgkinson of Overton, Derbyshire. They eventually had six children.32
Joseph failed dismally in his first attempt to win a seat in Parliament, floundering in the polls for Dunwich, Suffolk, in 1727. However, the following May he won Peterborough and represented it for the next six years. His move to Westminster required new lodgings, so he bought a London house, at the time occupied by the Prussian ambassador,33 on the east side of St James’s Square, next to the mansion of the Duke of Norfolk.
While the Banks family fortunes continued to grow and the population of Great Britain expanded to ten million for the first time,34 Joseph turned his attention to the natural world, wondering what made it turn and tick. He became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and a member of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society35 in Lincolnshire, which had grown from a meeting at a coffee house36 to include members such as Stukeley, Isaac Newton and Hans Sloane37, the man who provided the foundation collection for the British Museum. Joseph linked his family name with science forever on 10 December 1730, when he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He was proposed for election38 by Sloane, Stukeley and Roger Gale,39 an English scholar who sat in the House of Commons from 1705 to 1713.
On 28 November 1660 the Royal Society had come to life at a meeting following a lecture at Gresham College in London by Christopher Wren, who was then Gresham’s newly appointed Professor of Astronomy and on his way to creating heavenly architectural designs. The Society soon received royal approval and from 1663 it was formally known as the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. It attracted the greatest brains in Great Britain.
By the time Joseph Jr was elected a fellow, it had already produced Robert Hooke’s lavishly illustrated Micrographia,40 astounding readers with drawings that showed magnifications of the previously unseen microscopic world: the exquisitely detailed powerful legs, armourplated body and hooked claws of the flea.41 The diarist Samuel Pepys, another fellow, was intrigued by the lavish illustrations and famously sat up until 2 a.m. reading Mr. Hooke’s Microscopicall Observations, describing it as ‘the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life’.42 The same year, 1665, saw the first issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, now the oldest continuously published science journal in the world.43 Three decades later the Society published Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica,44 stating Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation.
Joseph’s election to the Society came in the same year as his wife’s death. He consoled himself with marriage the next year to Catherine Collingwood Wallis45, the widow of a neighbour who was also one of his tenants,46 and he fathered two more47 children.
By his late thirties, Joseph was plagued by gout48 and trying to find comfort from the treatments of a pioneering medico, Dr William Oliver, and his healing waters in Bath. Joseph still oversaw the education of his children, though, and after his son William Banks completed his secondary education at London’s Westminster School, he was entered at seventeen into the Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court entitled to call their members to the English Bar as barristers.
After having twice been a widower, Joseph Jr died aged forty-six.
William had already inherited the estate of his maternal grandfather William Hodgkinson,49 and for a while took his surname, dispensing with it when he became heir apparent of Revesby. The Hodgkinson surname passed to his younger brother Robert.
Like his father and grandfather, William also served as a Member of Parliament, taking one of the two seats of Grampound in Cornwall in the British general election during the summer of 1741. There were only about fifty or so constituents eligible to vote, and William’s money helped him secure his seat. Grampound became a notorious ‘rotten’ borough, with much buying and selling of votes.50
WHEN THE AUTUMN OF 1741 ARRIVED, William, now a 22-year-old barrister and Member of Parliament with a fortune in property, stood inside the Burghley House chapel taking his vows with Sarah Bate.
While William maintained his nearby Revesby estate with the help of servants and tradesmen, he and Sarah moved to a home at Bruton Street, Mayfair, as he concentrated on his parliamentary duties. Seventeen months after the wedding, Mrs Sarah Banks was excited with expectation at the imminent birth of her first child, and the young couple moved four hundred metres away to 30 Argyll Street in Soho.
Sarah watched on 3 February 1743 as a mighty windstorm whipped through the great city, over the dome and spires of Christopher Wren’s masterpiece St Paul’s Cathedral, and lashed all manner of craft moored on the Thames. Ships creaked and groaned under the force of the bitter winter gale and were driven from their moorings. Barges and boats were overturned, and people drowned.51 At the same time England was awash with reports of wars. British troops were marching into Germany while five hundred men were aboard a man-o’-war to augment the British settlement in the Bay of Honduras. Then, off Gibraltar, a British brigantine was set upon by two great Spanish warships. The popular monthly periodical The Gentleman’s Magazine reported on the battle in its issue for February 1743.52
That magazine also gave a rundown on the current state of the British nobility, listing seventy-one earls, sixty-one barons, twenty-six dukes, fifteen viscounts, four countesses and two marquises.53 But another type of nobility was emerging in this Age of Enlightenment, with men of art and science capturing the public imagination. George Frideric Handel had just debuted his masterpiece Messiah in Dublin,54 and it was about to be performed for the first time before a London audience at the Covent Garden theatre.55 Benjamin Huntsman had just developed his technique for crucible steel production at Handsworth, South Yorkshire, while the Swedish scientist Anders Celsius had established the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory and proposed the temperature scale that bears his name.
But a scientist of even greater renown was about to make his debut. On 24 February 174356 at Argyll Street, Sarah Banks gave birth to a child who would, in the words of another great natural scientist, Sir David Attenborough, become the ‘great panjandrum of British science’.57
Just seven families from all of Britain were deemed worthy of mention in The Gentleman’s Magazine when it listed notable births for that month.58 The son of ‘Wm Banks’ was named Joseph and baptised on 9 March by the Reverend Mr Cox in Christopher Wren’s St James’s Church, Piccadilly.59 Twenty months after his birth, he was joined by a sister, Sarah Sophia Banks,60 who would be his lifelong shadow and collaborator. Their love for the natural world would be fuelled by the delights of the Revesby estate.
In November 1744, William Banks, the new deputy lieutenant of Lincolnshire, took his young family to Revesby for their first Christmas there, paying a local builder the equivalent of more than a million dollars in modern terms for renovations. The children would revel in country life over many years.
The following year, though, William was gripped by a fever that left his legs paralysed. The infirmity prevented him from seeking re-election for Grampound after 1747. Instead, he devoted himself more and more to matters around Lincolnshire, and young Joseph and Sarah grew up cocooned with a fortunate childhood in a privileged world of the English upper classes. Their family was close enough to the land to be down to earth, but there was so much property in their portfolio that they would always be well-heeled in the city, too.
Revesby House as illustrated in Views of the Seats of Noblemen and Gentlemen, in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, published 1818.
The great house at Revesby had spent decades under renovation, and in 1749 William oversaw major alterations to the gardens there. In agricultural circles he was regarded as an expert, giving advice on various matters to other landholders, including the subject of distemper among horned cattle.61 Young Joseph spent his early days in a perfect environment for a busy boy with an enquiring mind. The garden and deer park around the house grew almost as large as London’s Hyde Park, 140 hectares, and there were woods and fens that seemed to go on forever, along with a village green where cricketers were flocking to a game of increasing popularity. All around, there were also water courses in which Joseph could fish – until his father realised the boy was spending too little time with the books his tutors assigned.
So it was that in April 1752, William sent Joseph to board at the Harrow School in London, more than two hundred kilometres away. It was a heartbreaking time for a nine year old torn from his family and separated from the wilds that he held dear. In a place that would earn a reputation for sexual abuse and sadism, Joseph Banks fared badly.62