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 were concerned in this particular sale; much more land was added later.
If Joseph Banks I had relied on peace and quiet and a safe tenure he was right. George I and his supporters remained firmly in power, and Banks himself was elected to Parliament for Grimsby in the Whig interest, and afterwards for Totnes, probably (since the seat was in the gift of the Treasury) through the influence of his great neighbour Lord Lindsey, whom George I made Duke of Ancaster.
He settled down to life in the country, buying still another series of manors called the Marsh Estate, actively improving the fenland, and delighting in Revesby. But it was here that he met his death in 1727; while he was climbing about among the rafters of a new wing he fell, and the infected wound proved fatal.
He left the memory of “a pleasant, very facetious companion”,3 and like many lawyers he was something of an antiquary. His bust stands in Revesby church, a commanding figure with a double chin; and if one makes abstraction of the elaborate full-bottomed wig it is possible to see a likeness to his famous descendant, particularly in the Wedgwood cameo of about 1780. He died before he had time to carry out all his kindly intentions, but his son Joseph Banks II carefully observed his wishes, rebuilding the church (some of the material seems to have come from the Cistercian remains; but the whole was replaced by a Gothic structure in 1891), building almshouses on Revesby green for ten farmers who had grown poor through no fault of their own, and setting up a foundling hospital in London: he also gave John Norton, believed to be Joseph I’s natural son and left out of the will by mistake, £300.
Joseph II was member for Peterborough during part of one parliament, but he does not appear to have taken any real interest in politics. On the other hand he was chosen a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1730, which, though it was of much less significance than it became in his grandson’s day, nevertheless suggests the probability of some intellectual interests, if no more. He had eight legitimate children. The eldest boy, Joseph III, was looked upon as the heir of Revesby, but he died before his father, whereupon the second boy, William (our Sir Joseph’s father) took his place. This William, born in 1721, was a barrister; as second son he had succeeded to the Overton estate of his maternal grandfather and had therefore taken the name of Hodgkinson; but now he reverted to Banks and, primogeniture being what it was, he increased very much in importance, so much so that it was quite natural for him too to buy a seat in Parliament. In 1741 he married Sarah Bate in the chapel of Burleigh House (her sister had married the Earl of Exeter, which explains the chapel: they were both wealthy heiresses). The next child, Elizabeth, ran away with James Hawley of the Lincolnshire family, and by marrying him established a link that eventually carried some of the Banks land to that family. The next, Robert, was bound apprentice to a Bristol merchant; but William relinquished the Hodgkinson estate in his favour, it returning to Joseph IV at Robert’s death. The next was Eleanore Margaret, a famous beauty, the “Peggy Banks” of Horace Walpole’s letters, who married the Hon. Henry Grenville: her daughter Louisa married Lord Stanhope, also of Lincolnshire; and this was another connection that affected the inheritance of the estate.
SIR JOSEPH BANKS’S ANCESTORS, based on J.W.F. Hill, The Letters and Papers of the Banks Family of Revesby Abbey (Lincoln Record Society, vol.45, 1952), and continued to show the eventual heirs of his estates.
By 1743, when Joseph Banks IV, our Joseph Banks, was born to William and Sarah, the family had been established in the county for nearly thirty years. It was not a great while as these things go (their neighbours the Dymokes of Scrivelsby had been King’s Champions since 1381), but they had been exceptionally well introduced. Joseph I had early formed a professional connection and then a friendship with Lord Lindsey, the head of the great Bertie family of Lincolnshire, and in 1715, the year the Bankses came to live at Revesby, Lord Lindsey was not only given his dukedom by the new king but was also confirmed in his office of Lord Lieutenant, so his kindness counted for a very great deal. Then again by the time of his death Joseph I had become the lord of no less than fourteen manors, apart from other large holdings in the county. His successors had added to the estate and they too had spent much time and energy in improving the fenland by draining. They were quite high in the social scale – Joseph II served as sheriff in 1735 and William was made a deputy-lieutenant – and with the Hodgkinson inheritance they were growing uncommonly rich; but up until this time they seem to have had little idea of education. Their letters were often sadly illiterate; and they were still at the stage when it was normal for a younger son to be apprenticed to a tradesman.
Joseph IV was the first to have what had for some time been seen as a necessary training for boys of the upper and upper middle class. The early years of his life he spent at home, at Revesby; the house had given Joseph I and even more Joseph II and his young bride a great deal of trouble, since they spent years adding to it, living among builders and rubble and contention, but now, although it was a rather heavy, graceless mass it was at least settled and mature, like the gardens and the deer-park that surrounded it – 340 acres or almost exactly the size of Hyde Park in London. In addition to this there were vast woods behind, vast fens in front, quantities of horses in the stables, cricket on the village green, and almost unlimited water for one fond of fishing.
Young Joseph Banks was very fond of fishing, as he was of most country pursuits, and this must have been very like Paradise. It is true that a private tutor came to give him lessons, but they seemed to make little impression upon his mind, which was no doubt one of the reasons that a more regular education was decided upon.
In 1752, when Joseph Banks was nine, his father sent him to Harrow, to the Free Grammar School of John Lyon at Harrow. Although by this time the process by which the free scholars were edged out and their building taken from them was well under way, the place was still quite recognizable as the foundation John Lyon had contemplated: a school in which thirty (later forty) boys belonging to the parish could be educated at no cost to their parents, while two might go on to Oxford and two to Cambridge with modest scholarships. But in his simplicity the Elizabethan yeoman had not seen that the clause by which he allowed the schoolmaster to increase his stipend of thirty pounds a year by taking in some paying pupils from elsewhere, “foreigners”, was tantamount to the introduction of a flock of cuckoos into his nest – slow-growing cuckoos, it is true, but powerful ones and casuistical too, since they presently found that John Lyon did not really mean that his school should be for poor boys at all, and that Free was to be understood as Paying.4
The transition from grammar school to public school, both in the modern sense, was in progress at Harrow, but when Banks arrived something like a quarter of the boys were still free scholars: it is impossible to give an exact figure, since the records are imperfect, but in 1721, when the school numbered 140, or slightly more than in 1752, there had been the full complement of forty. Yet on the other hand by 1752 the foreigners, the paying boys, already included a Scottish duke, an English peer and a baronet, presently to be joined by an Anglo-Irish earl, for this was in Dr Thackeray’s reign. Thackeray had been at Eton both as a boy and a master, and with the governors’ approval he had at once set about introducing Etonian ways. It is said that he was no great scholar, but in other respects he was a man of remarkable powers, for not only
