for £250, which the Keeper thought too much. In the same year, 1884, the New South Wales government bought a large number having to do with Australia, and in 1886 those that Lord Brabourne still retained were sold by auction, fetching very little money and going all over the world, sometimes to serious libraries, sometimes to autograph collectors. In 1919 and 1929 the great mass of papers that had remained at Revesby suffered the same fate; but very fortunately the twenty-three bound and indexed volumes of the Dawson Turner copies had somehow come into possession of the British Museum’s Department of Botany as early as 1876, so that when Warren Dawson began his enormous task first of finding and cataloguing and then of calendaring the correspondence he had a respectable body of material at hand. Respectable that is to say in bulk and general fidelity; less so in textual accuracy. Banks had a highly personal approach to writing, with a fine disregard for convention in the use of capitals, spelling, and punctuation; but unhappily almost all his editors and copiers, including the Miss Turners, have seen fit to put him right.* As Warren Dawson says, “This method of presentation may convey the purport of the letter to the present-day reader, but it completely effaces all the characteristic mannerisms of the writer”, and wherever possible I have gone back to the originals.
Warren Dawson, of course, ranged far beyond the Dawson Turner copies; indeed it is said that to the two thousand of these copies that he used he added no fewer than five thousand from elsewhere, and quite apart from his own important collection he lists more than a hundred sources from which he gathered the scattered leaves; but then, having travelled and searched in sometimes very remote libraries, he had to decipher what he had found. When Joseph Banks was young he wrote a round, unformed hand, quite easily legible apart from its strange use of capitals and so on, but with age his writing grew steadily harder to make out, and even one so accustomed to it as Warren Dawson found that “the letters written in the last years of his life, when physical infirmity also made itself felt, are often very difficult to read”. For those less steeped in Banks the difficulty starts much earlier, and there is one word in an important letter of 1794 that I still cannot make out, though I have tried to catch it by surprise ever since the Yale Library was kind enough to send it to me; and it is not impossible that my transcripts may sometimes be mistaken.
The many other writers who have helped me are most gratefully acknowledged in sequence as their books, articles or letters are cited: the acknowledgements do not take the form of footnotes but rather of references, chapter by chapter, at the end of the book.
And finally it is a great pleasure to record the kindness of the Royal Society, in whose splendid library I met with so very much help; while in the Botany Library of the British Museum (Natural History), which is reached by passing through a long passage lined in part with Banks’s own herbarium itself, I met with even greater kindness, guidance and advice, because there I asked for more. The British Library and the London Library, the lion and the unicorn without whose support scholarship could scarcely stand, were naturally of essential importance; and indeed I may say that I never turned to any learned society, any library or any scholar without receiving the most generous and disinterested assistance.
* Warren Dawson, The Banks Letters, XXVIII.
* Usually on the grounds of “making it easier for the reader”, who is presumably rather backward.
Chapter 1 ORIGINS, EDUCATION, BOTANY
JOSEPH BANKS was born in London on 15 February 1743, and even before he possessed a Christian name the world learnt a good deal about him from the list of births in The Gentleman’s Magazine:
Feb 2 The Lady of Isaac Hill, Esq; deliver’d of a Son.
5 Lady of Col. Sabine – of a Son & Heir.
12 Lady Conway – of a Son.
15 The Lady Petre, Relict of the late Ld Petre – of a [blank] Wife of Wm Banks, Member for Grampound, Esq; – of a Son.
17 The Princess of Orange, – of a Princess.
In the first place the baby was important enough to be mentioned: only seven others were thought worthy of print in that month. In the second his father was obviously a wealthy man, since his constituency was a notoriously rotten borough whose fifty-odd electors had to be well paid for their votes. And in the third the editor did not think that the mother should be described as Mr Banks’s lady but only as his wife.
It is easy to exaggerate the importance of this last point – the usage was by no means rigid – but the distinction, though perhaps unintended, does in fact suit the position to a certain extent. The Bankses were a recent family, a good example of English social mobility: William’s grandfather, the first Joseph Banks (1665–1727) and the first of his name to rise to any prominence, was an attorney. This was not a very glorious calling – Pope’s “vile attorneys, now an useless race” come to mind – but it was one that in able hands could prove more profitable than most; and Joseph Banks I was exceptionally able. He was born at Giggleswick in Yorkshire, the son of Robert Banks, who was either a lawyer or a soldier (the evidence is conflicting); and at the age of sixteen he was articled to a busy, thriving attorney in Sheffield. He was diligent and hard-working and before he was forty he was managing several important estates on his own, spending part of the time at Sheffield and part of the time at his country house at Scofton in Nottinghamshire, not far away.1
He was rising fast in his profession. In December 1701 for example2 the Right Honourable the Lady Mary Howard of Worksop, Mother and Guardian of the most Noble Thomas Duke of Norfolk Lord of the Manors of Ecclesfield, Cowley and Hansworth in the County of York sent Greeting in our Lord everlasting to all Xtian people to whom these presents should come and gave them to know that reposing especial trust and confidence in the skill and fidelity of Joseph Banks of Sheffield she appointed him steward of the Court Barons and Copyhold Courts of the said manors.
In August 1705 the Duke confirmed the appointment and in October of the same year yet another Duke, his grace of Newcastle, entrusted his manors of Mansfield, Clipstone and Edwinstone to the same hands. The Duke of Leeds followed suit.
Banks’s professional activities took him to Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire (among other things he was Register of Sherwood Forest, an appointment he owed to the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Lieutenant of the county), Derbyshire and Lincolnshire. He was very well acquainted with the estates in those parts and with the financial position of their owners – like many attorneys he arranged loans – and in 1709 he made his first great purchase, the Holland estate in south Lincolnshire, an immense tract, mostly of fenland, near the mouth of the river Welland, that cost him £9900. This however did not exhaust his purse: when he married Mary Hancock, the daughter of a dissenting minister, in 1689, he had £400 with her, but now that he had a daughter of marriageable age he was able to give her a fortune of £10,000, Sir Francis Whichcote, a Lincolnshire baronet, being her husband. Then a little later his son, Joseph Banks II, who was born in 1695, also came to be married; it was an advantageous match with the heiress of William Hodgkinson, a wealthy merchant and mine-owner of Overton in Derbyshire, and for his part Joseph Banks I not only settled much of his Holland estate on his son but also installed the young couple at Revesby Abbey, which he bought in 1714, the year of their marriage. Although it was 1715 before he could take full possession, this was far and away the most important and most profitable of all his transactions. The Abbey had been founded by the Cistercians in Stephen’s reign; it stood on the southern edge of the Wolds where they give way to the fenland, and since Henry VIII’s time it had passed through various hands, coming eventually to the Howards, who built the great house in about 1670, setting it at some distance from the monastic ruins. Banks made his purchase in troubled times, when Whigs and Tories were very strongly opposed, the Protestant succession by no means a certainty, and the Jacobite rising of 1715 clearly foreseeable; this may help to account for the remarkably low price of £14,000 for the house, the lordship of the manor and the two thousand acres that