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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 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 did he change the nature of the school, setting it firmly in the new mould, but he combined his duties with those of archdeacon of Surrey and chaplain to Frederick Prince of Wales; he also had sixteen children; and perhaps it was the multiplicity of his occupations that prevented him from seeing that an unscholarly boy in the lower school was making no progress.

Nine seems pitifully young to go to a public school, even in the eighteenth-century sense; but Banks was by no means the youngest at Harrow. One of his better-known contemporaries, Samuel Parr, who became the “Whig Johnson” and an eminent Latinist, went when he was five. Parr was typical of the older Harrow; he was a local apothecary’s son and a free scholar, and he went on to Emmanuel College, Cambridge (though to be sure his allowance was so small that he could not stay up long enough for a degree). And there were other children scarcely older than little Parr. This was possible because at that time Harrow still retained John Lyon’s system of school dames, village women who looked after the very little boys and taught them reading and scripture. But though they were no doubt kind, and although Samuel Parr and the great Orientalist William Jones flourished under their care, neither they nor the masters could make anything of a scholar out of Joseph Banks. He was an exceedingly active boy, much given to play, and no persuasion could keep him to his book; although he was by no means a fool he never learnt to spell, nor did he ever master the use of capital letters or punctuation; his Latin left much to be desired, and he knew no Greek at all. In 1756, when he was thirteen, his father took him away and sent him to Eton.

There was much to be said against Eton: it lay in low, damp, unhealthy ground rather than upon a salubrious hill; in many respects it was more like an ill-managed bear-garden than a school; and even then there were people who felt that Etonians spent more time than was necessary in thanking God that they were not as other men. But with all its faults it was not in a state of transition. Eton had settled into its “public school” stride at least as early as the seventeenth century and in any case from the very beginning its founder, Henry VI, had laid down that as well as the seventy poor and indigent scholars there should be as many as twenty commensals “sons of noblemen and special friends of the College” and an indefinite number of other commensals who were to dine at the third table in Hall with the choristers and scholars.

In 1756 the Collegers, or most of them, still slept in the Long Chamber that had been provided for them in the fifteenth century, and the two sorts of boys, the Collegers and the fee-paying Oppidans, the descendants of the commensals, lived reasonably well together. The unscrupulous rapacity, not to say the downright dishonesty, of successive provosts and fellows had already deprived the Collegers of much of the food and many of the benefits intended by the founder, but the boys had not yet been so reduced that their Long Chamber was a byword for squalor, cruelty, bullying and sexual immorality, notorious to such a degree that candidates for election were hard to find and a scholar was looked upon as an inferior being: that belonged to the later part of the century.⁵

Long Chamber can never have been a comfortable berth for the half-starved little boys, the fags, even when the Lower Master lived at the far end of it, within earshot of their screams; but in Banks’s time College was still regarded as a reasonably desirable place for one’s son; apart from anything else there were the closed scholarships to King’s College, Cambridge, and the possibility of becoming a Fellow of Eton, even the Provost, both places being reserved, at least in theory, for former Collegers and members of King’s. Somewhat earlier than this, Robert Walpole’s father, a wealthy man but with a keen eye for a job, falsified his son’s age to get him in; and it was not considered extraordinary that the particular friend of Charles James Fox (nearly contemporary with Banks) should be a Colleger named Hare, the son of a Winchester apothecary.

Banks came to Eton at a fortunate time. Dr Barnard had been the headmaster for some years, coming after a disastrous person who believed that respect, Latin, and even Greek could be driven into boys with a birch. Barnard was no great flogger, though he was an admirable disciplinarian; he was also an uncommonly amiable man,^* at ease in any society, particularly that of Windsor Castle, and he succeeded in bringing the school’s numbers up to 522, more boys than had ever been seen before and more than were ever to be seen again in the eighteenth century. The school, then, was flourishing; and although the same could hardly be said for the other and originally more important side of Henry VI’s foundation, the splendidly endowed chantry in which Mass should be said for the soul of Henry V and eventually for that of the founder, it nevertheless existed, living on in spite of the Reformation and many other crises, providing comfort for the provost and fellows if for nobody else. They were not a strikingly distinguished body of men at this time, but they were there, a visible link with an ancient past, giving a certain air of learning and even of civilization.

In the middle of the eighteenth century Eton could do with all the civilization it could come by. Until 1747 the school had the custom of chasing a ram (supplied by the butcher) and beating it to death with clubs made for the purpose; but, and here I quote from Christopher Hollis’s Eton, a History, “It was a few years after this [1730, when the Duke of Cumberland had joined in the fun] that the ram broke loose from the hunt, ran up the High Street over Windsor Bridge and through the market with the boys in hot pursuit until eventually they caught it and beat it to death. This was disapproved of not because of the public killing or of the cruelty to the ram but on the curious grounds that the exercise might make the boys too hot and thus endanger their health. Therefore for the future, as a reform, the ram was hamstrung and made to hobble round and round School Yard with the boys in pursuit and beating it until it was dead.”

But though the ram was abolished before Banks’s time there was still badger baiting, bull baiting, bear baiting, cock fighting and – why not? – small boy baiting. William Pitt, the first Lord Chatham, who was there from about 1720 to 1726, said that “he had scarce observed a boy who was not cowed for life at Eton; that a public school might suit a boy of turbulent, forward disposition, but it would not do where there was any gentleness”; and many, many other witnesses could be brought to show that in a rough and often cruel century Eton and public schools in general were also rough and often cruel.

Yet there was another side to it. Gray, Horace Walpole, Richard West and their friends can hardly be said to have had turbulent, forward dispositions, nor were Gray or West devoid of gentleness; yet they looked back on their schooldays with pleasure.

No doubt a very great deal depended on a boy’s house, and no doubt Banks fell lucky. He was of course an Oppidan, and at that time the Oppidans were divided among thirteen houses, ten kept by Dames and three by Dominies: none of these housekeepers, female or male, had any teaching duties at all; their function was to provide board and lodging. Housemasters in the modern sense there were none, for although some assistants were allowed to have a few boys living with them this was not the same thing at all, and the domestic authority that they later came to possess was then exercised by the Dames alone. And in the nature of things a kind, attentive Dame with plenty of inherent authority ruled over a happy house.

But even if Joseph Banks had chanced upon an overworked, harassed, inept Dame incapable of keeping the rougher, more brutal boys in order, it is probable that he would have come through fairly well. He was not a sensitive plant; he was thoroughly used to public school life and he was not given to any offensive degree of application; he was big for his age, uncommonly strong, active and brave – some years later he showed remarkable courage when he was faced with angry cannibals in the Antipodes. Then again he was quite good-looking, and generally speaking people liked him, particularly when he was young. Even though he was not of a particularly aggressive disposition, and even though there was a fair amount of gentleness in his nature, Eton suited him: he made many friends, and in a tolerably extensive view of his correspondence I have not found him say an unkind word about his time there.

Yet on the other hand he did not suit Eton. At least he did not suit Eton particularly well, and there were complaints that he was not profiting from his education as much as he should. These complaints were certainly justified, for as Lord Brougham, the son of one of Banks’s school friends, observed in his Lives of Men of Letters and Science who Flourished in the Time of George III, “My father … always said that his friend Joe cared mighty little for his book, and could not well understand any one taking to Greek and Latin.” Though indeed when one considers the official education offered by the school it is difficult to see how any but a gifted boy, already well grounded in Latin and Greek, could possibly have profited from it. Masters were few and their classes were intolerably big: Dr Barnard took the whole of the sixth and fifth forms as a single division of more than a hundred boys, and he led them through Homer or Virgil in one part of a fair-sized room while in the rest of it, under other guidance, the remove and the fourth form were going through Virgil or Homer. When a couple of hundred boys are gathered together under one roof there is bound to be a certain amount of din: even under such a devoted flogger as Dr Keate somewhat later “the boys occupied their time by singing songs and choruses”, and this cannot have helped reflection. Things were much the same in Lower School, where the first, second and third forms met, except that some of the voices were higher pitched. It was no doubt great fun, particularly for the undetectable boys at the back, but it did not bring them forward very fast nor was it much use to them in their other tasks. For quite apart from the formal lessons, prayers, roll-calls and the like, the upper boys were required to produce three exercises a week: an original theme in prose of not less than twenty lines, a copy of verses of not less than ten elegiac distichs and five or six stanzas of lyrics on the same subject – all in Latin, of course, except that the sixth formers were to hand up one of their copies in Greek hexameters.

It is probably true to say that unless he were exceptionally endowed no boy, unhelped by anything but the official teaching in class, could perform these exercises and still have time for cricket, the river, fives, or bowling his hoop. But many boys came to Eton bringing their own tutors with them, while most of the assistant masters taught boys privately; and a great deal of the real learning took place outside Upper or Lower School. There was of course a large quantity of hack verse in the common domain, and exercises could also be bought or begged; but as far as real learning was concerned the tutor was generally of the first importance. This was certainly the case with Banks, who owed what classical acquirements he ever possessed to Edward Young, an assistant master, under whom he did at least learn to spell Latin a good deal better than ever he spelt English and to write a reasonably grammatical piece of Latin prose. Mr Young wrote a long letter⁶ to Joseph’s father at Revesby on 6 February 1757 beginning

Sir

I have received the Favour of your letter, and am very glad Master Banks was detained by nothing worse than the Badness of the Roads and weather. I began indeed to be afraid he was kept at home either by his own or your Illness; being well satisfied you would not suffer him to be absent from School so long without some very substantial Reason. I will take care to explain the Affair to Dr Barnard and Dr Dampier according to your desire.

It gives me great pleasure to find You think Master Banks improved. To be able to construe a Latin Author into English with Readiness and Propriety is undoubtedly no less necessary than to be able to turn an English one into Latin. They ought indeed to go hand in hand together. And I hope we shall by degrees bring Master Banks to a tolerable Perfection in the former; tho’ the Point, which I have hitherto been chiefly labouring, is to improve him in the latter, because of his great Deficiency in that Respect when He came to us.

Then, after a piece about the difficulty of parsing Greek without some knowledge of Greek grammar, the importance of the fourth form, and attention to one’s book, Mr Young asks Mr Banks to

take the Trouble to write to Him, to show the great Necessity there will be for Him to exert particular Diligence at that Time; and I will likewise take all Opportunities of inculcating the same to Him. For You can’t but be sensible that there is a great Inattention in Him, and an immoderate Love of Play … which we must endeavour to get the better of in some degree, or it will be a constant Obstacle to his Improvement. This sometimes occasions Quarrels between us; tho’ in other respects we agree extremely well together; as I really think Him a very good-tempered and well disposed Boy.

At just about this time an artist painted a portrait of Master Banks; it hung at Revesby for a great while, but when the Abbey was demolished it came down to the Hon. Mrs Clive Pearson and it is now at Parham Park, together with the splendid Reynolds. The picture is attributed to Lemuel Francis Abbott, though an eminent connoisseur once suggested to me that it might be one of Zoffany’s earliest works in England – the dates would just fit – and a connection of this kind would go some way to explaining Banks’s very surprising notion of taking Zoffany with him in the Resolution on Cook’s second great voyage. But whatever his name, the painter was evidently a most accomplished man, and the impression the work gives of being a big picture is by no means due only to its considerable size of some seven feet by four and a half. On the upper left-hand part of the canvas there is the base and the first three or four feet of one of those prodigious columns so usual in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pictures together with the inevitable curtain in great folds across the corner: the background is a fine cloud-swept sky. And in front of this high drama, on quite another plane of reality, sits a slim, thoughtful, very pleasant-looking boy in fawn-coloured breeches with one white-stockinged leg stretched out across the foreground, making a good diagonal, a fawn waistcoat, a frilled and ruffled shirt and a green coat with gilt buttons; his auburn hair falls over his shoulders on either side and it comes low over his forehead, but it does not look in the least affected. He is sitting rather sideways in a brass-studded leather chair with his left elbow on its back and his right hand resting on a print that in its turn lies upon a cloth-covered table which also holds some books and plants. Beneath it there are half a dozen dim folios, and to the boy’s left, on the floor, stands a fair-sized and most prophetic terrestrial globe. His face is turned almost to the spectator, but he is looking down, obviously in thought, deep thought.

The “good-tempered and well disposed” side of Mr Young’s pupil is certainly there, but there is no trace of the great inattention, nor yet of the immoderate love of play, for a great change had come over Joseph Banks. He had not suddenly acquired a taste for Virgil, Horace or Tully; he had not become a classical scholar; but he had become a botanist, and the print under his right hand in the picture is in fact a botanical print. The moment of his change – one might almost say of his vocation – was clearly marked and abrupt, and once it had occurred his strong natural intelligence at last had something to feed upon. Latin and Greek had not been a nourishment that his mind could assimilate, and Latin and Greek were virtually the only subjects taught at Eton – taught, furthermore, in a pronunciation that guaranteed incomprehensibility abroad, whereas an Irishman or even a Scot could prattle away from Poland to Peru. It is true that on holidays the younger boys had two hours of writing and arithmetic, while the fifth form learnt geography or algebra; and of course French, dancing, fencing and drawing could be taken as extras outside school hours, though it does not appear that Banks ever learnt them (he possessed no word of French at any time, nor could he draw), and had it not been for botany his mind might never have blossomed at all.

The story of his conversion is contained in a Hunterian Oration delivered to the College of Surgeons on 14 February 1822 by Sir Everard Home, a friend of Banks’s and a surgeon himself. The relevant passage runs:

When fourteen, his tutor had, for the first time, the satisfaction of finding him reading during his hours of leisure. This sudden turn, which his mind had taken, Sir Joseph explained to me in the following manner; one fine summer evening he had bathed in the river as usual with other boys, but having staid a long time in the water he found when he came to dress himself, that all his companions were gone; he was walking leisurely along a lane, the sides of which were richly enamelled with flowers; he stopped and looked round, involuntarily exclaimed, How beautiful! After some reflection, he said to himself, it is surely more natural that I should be taught to know all these productions of Nature, in preference to Greek and Latin; but the latter is my father’s command and it is my duty to obey him. I will however make myself acquainted with all these different plants for my own pleasure and gratification. He began immediately to teach himself Botany; and, for want of more able tutors, submitted to be instructed by the women, employed in culling simples, as it is termed, to supply the Druggists and Apothecaries shops, paying sixpence for every material piece of information. While at home for the ensuing holidays he found, to his inexpressible delight, in his mother’s dressing room, a book in which all the plants he had met with were not only described but represented by engravings. This, which proved to be Gerard’s Herbal, although one of the boards was lost and several of the leaves torn out, he carried with him to school in triumph; and it was probably this very book that he was poring over when detected by his tutor, for the first time, in the act of reading.

He now exulted over his former preceptors, being not only independent of them, but in his turn, whenever they met with a new plant, told them its name and the qualities ascribed to it.

In parenthesis I may say that I do not believe in the literal truth of Banks’s reflection nor in his exulting. Both are contradicted by everything one learns from his correspondence and his journals, but they may well be characteristic of Home, who left no pleasant reputation behind him: indeed, the DNB directly accuses him of having “destroyed Hunter’s manuscripts after utilizing them”.

From now on his life had an aim, and it was not botany alone, though that remained his chief love and delight, but the whole range of natural philosophy short of mathematics. Lord Brougham says, “My father described him as a remarkably fine-looking, strong and active boy, whom no fatigue could subdue, and no peril daunt; and his whole time out of school was given up to hunting after plants and insects, making a hortus siccus of the one, and forming a cabinet of the other. As often as Banks could induce him to quit his task in reading or in verse-making, he would take him on his long rambles; and I suppose it was from this early taste that we had at Brougham so many butterflies, beetles, and other insects, as well as a cabinet of shells and fossils.”

During the remaining years of Banks’s time at Eton his herbarium grew, but so did his resistance to Greek, which became something of a legend; he kept out of serious trouble however and in any case the remaining years were cut short. A little after his seventeenth birthday he was at Revesby, and there he was inoculated with smallpox, that being the somewhat dangerous means of immunization against the disease before the discovery of vaccination: the first inoculation did not take, and by the time the whole thing was over and he was well again his parents did not think it worth while sending him back to school. He went to Oxford instead, his name being put down on the books of Christ Church as a gentleman-commoner at the end of 1760.

A little while before this Gibbon had spent “fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life”. His remarks about the university, so admirably and so memorably expressed, have coloured the general view ever since: the idle, port-drinking fellows, the worthless tutors, the dissipated, neglected undergraduates are sometimes held up to be wholly typical of mid-eighteenth-century Oxford. Yet Gibbon was only sixteen when he was expelled; he had been as unprepared as he was unsuited for university life; and he was particularly unfortunate in his tutors. Port was certainly drunk and there were certainly idle dons, while a good many undergraduates undoubtedly played the fool; but there was another side to Oxford. A university whose press brought out Hyde’s Historia Religionis Veterum Persarum, Chandler’s Marmora Oxoniensia and Heath’s Notes on the Greek Tragedians, to name only a few of the books published in Banks’s time, and which contained Blackstone, Warton and Lowth, to mention only three of the dons, could not be described as a hive of drones. No one can deny that the examinations were often ridiculous (this was of course long before the day of the honours degree) or that there were professors who thought it no part of their duty to teach; yet on the other hand when the Chancellor’s Latin Prize was instituted “a prodigious number of men”⁷ entered, and when the set subject was electricity, Christ Church was expected to win; and even Gibbon admits that “Under the auspices of the late deans, a more regular discipline has been introduced, as I am told, at Christ Church; a course of classical and philosophical studies is proposed, and even pursued, in that numerous seminary; learning has been made a duty, a pleasure, and even a fashion; and several young gentlemen do honour to the college in which they have been educated.” Furthermore, when Banks fetched Israel Lyons from Cambridge to act as a private tutor in botany he lectured to as many as sixty pupils (“with great applause” says Nichols in his Literary Anecdotes) – sixty voluntary, paying pupils in a university that probably did not possess a thousand solvent undergraduates, and this at a time when science, apart from mathematics and astronomy, had little standing.

Dr Sibthorp, who held the Sherardian chair of botany, was one of the professors who did not teach, or who at any rate did not lecture, perhaps regarding his chair as a place for research rather than one from which he should read out information available to all literate students since the invention of printing; but although he may not have been a distinguished botanist (Robert Brown, correcting Brougham’s memoir, observed that of his botanical activities “there is nothing to be said”⁸) he did bring up a most distinguished son, the author, or at least the prime collector and designer, of the splendid Flora Graeca. He was not at all opposed to Banks’s idea of finding a teacher: indeed, he gave him a letter of introduction to John Martyn, the Professor of Botany at Cambridge, an unusually learned and enterprising man, who produced Israel Lyons the younger, the son of Israel Lyons the elder, a Polish Jew who kept a silversmith’s shop and who gave private lessons in Hebrew.

It was perhaps typical of the age that the younger Lyons (he was only four years older than Banks) should have been so much esteemed not only by the Professor of Botany but also by the Master of Trinity and other notable men at Cambridge. It is true that he had been devoted to botany from childhood and that he had already published A Treatise of Fluxions which impressed mathematicians, but a later, more snobbish century might well have kept him down. Mid-eighteenth-century society was intensely conscious of rank – noblemen had extraordinary privileges – but in some ways it was much more democratic than ours. Joseph Ames, for example, began life as an apprentice plane-maker and went on as an ironmonger all his days, yet because of his skill as an antiquary he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and the colleague of some of the highest in the land; the Musical Small-Coals man had very grand friends indeed; and one could cite many more instances. Professor Martyn himself had lived by his pen, translating French botanical works and contributing to the Grub Street Journal at intervals of collecting plants until he managed to get to Emmanuel College at the age of thirty and so to the chair of botany.

Banks’s journey was successful: he brought Lyons back to Oxford and the mathematical botanist did very well there. How much of this success was owing to Banks’s position and how much to his personality one can but guess; but there is no doubt that Banks was a most amiable young man. He had a great number of friends of all ages; and some years later Reynolds painted a portrait of him that shows why he was so generally liked. It is a particularly brilliant Sir Joshua: I remember how it stood out on a wall of perfectly respectable paintings at an exhibition at Sotheby’s in 1983, and how much I was struck by the sitter’s face – a timeless and entirely human face that happened to be in the context of the 1770s but that might just as well have belonged to the days of Aristotle or Pliny or Darwin, the face of an eager, intelligent, disinterested enquirer, the kind of face that might be seen in the Royal Society today, if there were any Fellows under thirty. This painting too shows Banks sitting at a table, turned slightly from it to face the viewer; but now he is on the other side and it is his left hand that is upon a sheaf of papers, while the terrestrial globe is behind him. He is wearing a dusky-red fur-lined coat and a brown waistcoat, and again his eyes are directed downwards, in thought. He is of course no longer the slim, handsome boy of the first portrait, but although the waistcoat does betray an incipient paunch, there is no hint of the massive, black-browed, dewlapped, important and authoritarian Bull of Revesby (as those who disagreed with his views on draining the Fens called him) ⁹ that he was later to become, at least in outward appearance.

As for his position at this particular time, in 1760, he was like Gibbon a gentleman-commoner, one of that “pert and pampered race, too froward for controul – privileged prodigals” denounced by an angry correspondent in the Gentleman’s Magazine.¹⁰ These people were not as pampered as noblemen (a category that included the nobiles minorum gentium, knights and baronets) who might wear gold tassels and gowns of any colour they pleased – Lord Fitzwilliam of Trinity Hall walked about in a pink one, adorned with lace – but in a university that still had servitors and that still made them aware of their inferior station, a gentleman-commoner in his velvet cap and silken gown was a person of some consequence. He was necessarily richer than the ordinary undergraduate and this gave him much more freedom; he could easily pay the fines for cutting lectures or meals in hall, for neglecting matins or vespers (twopence a time) or St Mary’s on Sunday (a shilling if detected), and, as the angry correspondent calculated, he could buy absolute liberty for about thirteen shillings a week. He was fairly sure to have influential connections, and he might even have church livings in his gift now or in the future; he was, potentially, a man of some weight.

This became more obviously the case with Banks in 1761, when his father died. The Bankses were not a long-lived race – Joseph III died at twenty-five, Joseph II at forty-five and Joseph I at sixty-two – yet even so, and despite the fact that his health had been poor for some years, William Banks’s death at the age of forty-two was unexpected.

The Lord of the Manor of Revesby, Member of Parliament for Grampound and Deputy-Lieutenant for Lincolnshire remains a shadowy figure; he was no doubt a most attentive landlord and his chief interest in life was the draining of the Fens, but in later years Joseph, his son, wrote an account of his end in which there is no mention of kindness given or received, no emotion of any kind, and it is possible that they were not very good friends.

One certain result of William Banks’s death was that his son, on reaching the age of twenty-one, would come into estates in Lincolnshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Sussex yielding six thousand pounds a year. This was not quite the “ten thousand a year and a deer-park” that accompanied the ideal husband up until quite recent times, yet it was still a great deal of money; what is more, there were already deer at Revesby, and with high farming and improved drainage coming in the fenland estate was eminently improvable. There is not much point in trying to establish any simple figure by which this six thousand could be multiplied to give the modern equivalent, but a few comparisons may give a certain sense of its value. Philip Miller, the very highly skilled gardener in charge of the Chelsea Physic Garden, a man whom Linnaeus called “not only a prince of gardeners but a prince of botanists”, had fifty pounds a year. Mr Peregrine Langton lived in a handsome country house on two hundred a year, employing two manservants and two maids and keeping a carriage and three horses (he was, it must be admitted, an admirable manager; but there was no meanness, says Boswell, no skimping). Dr Johnson’s three hundred a year kept him in London, together with the blind Mrs Williams and her maid, Francis Barber and his wife Elizabeth and her child, a Mrs White, Miss Carmichael, the widowed Mrs Desmoulins, and at least to some extent Mr Levett, while at the same time he maintained a cousin at Coventry and shared the cost of keeping another relative in a private madhouse. At the same period Lord Shelburne, who lived as splendidly as anyone, told the Doctor “that a man of high rank, who looks into his own affairs, may have all that he ought to have, all that can be of any use, or appear with any advantage, for five thousand pounds a year”, a figure confirmed by Mrs Thrale who speaking of her husband in Thraliana said “If he got but 2/6 by each Barrel [Thrale brewed 80,000 of them] eighty Thousand half crowns are 10,000 pounds and what more would mortal Man desire than an Income of ten Thousand a year – five to spend, & five to lay up.” A farm labourer might earn twenty-five pounds, counting his extra money for harvest and haysel; an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy had nineteen shillings a month; and Lieutenant James Cook, being in command of the Endeavour, had the unusually large sum of five shillings a day.

Values and prices, together with the extremes of wealth and poverty, have changed so much in these few generations that one is often puzzled; but in this case there is no sort of doubt that six thousand a year, with no income tax to pay, was a most desirable sum.

There were of course very much richer men – some of the coal-mining dukes were enormously wealthy^* – just as there were men of very much higher social standing; yet even so, most people would probably have placed Joseph Banks well up among the top five per cent.

Some young men, after a decent period of mourning, would have borrowed money to be repaid when they came of age, and would have run rather wild. Joseph Banks did not do so: he was in regular residence at Christ Church throughout 1761 and 1762 and for most of 1763. It is usually said that he then went down, but the college records (quoted by Professor Beaglehole in his edition of the Endeavour journal) show him in residence for twenty-one weeks in 1764 and for a little while in 1765.

Like many of his kind he took no degree, but there is no doubt that he worked hard, if only at botany. Much of this sobriety was owing to his love for plants – for natural philosophy in most of its forms – and for the congenial company at Oxford; but a glance at John Russell’s portrait of Mrs William Banks will convince most people that she had a good deal to do with it.

Not only does the picture show a strong-minded, determined woman, but we also learn from Banks himself that she was above ordinary weaknesses: in a letter to an unknown correspondent quoted by Bowdler Sharpe¹¹ (who I am afraid improved the writer’s English) he said, “I have from my childhood, in conformity with the precepts of a mother void of all imaginary fear, been in the constant habit of taking toads in my hand, and applying them to my nose and face as it may happen. My motive for doing this very frequently is to inculcate the opinion I have held, since I was told by my mother, that the toad is actually a harmless animal; and to whose manner of life man is certainly under some obligation as its food is chiefly those insects which devour his crops and annoy him in various ways.”

Strength of mind and the habit of command can, it is said, be found in women of modest means; but money does seem to foster these qualities and it may not be irrelevant to observe that Mrs Banks, together with her sister the Countess of Exeter, was the co-heiress of the wealthy Thomas Chambers of London.

After her husband’s death she left Revesby for the time being and moved to Chelsea, taking Turret House, an elegant Queen Anne building with an immense arcaded court in Paradise Row, just by the Physic Garden, which in those days, before the embankment, ran right down to the river – indeed, the Society of Apothecaries, to whom the garden belonged, had their bargehouse at the bottom, together with those of the Tallow-Chandlers and the Vintners, the Thames being still an important thoroughfare, crowded with boats, and reasonably full of fish.

At that time Chelsea was still green with fields; there were market gardeners and nurserymen too, and it was also quite a fashionable suburb. Lord Orford lived close to Turret House – his father, better known as Sir Robert Walpole, had built an immense greenhouse in his garden – and when Lord Sandwich, an old friend and fenland neighbour of the Bankses, returned to office in 1763, he spent much of his time in Chelsea. And apart from friends and acquaintances of this kind, Mrs Banks, who like her daughter Sophia was a deeply religious woman, had the Moravian Brethren half a mile up the river, in the splendid Lindsey House at the far end of Cheyne Walk, beyond what is now Battersea Bridge and what was then a ferry. Lindsey House had belonged to the Lincolnshire Berties, now Dukes of Ancaster, but in 1750 it was bought by Count Zinzendorf for the Moravians, a religious community originating in Bohemia and ultimately deriving from Hus that sent missionaries to the West Indies, Greenland and North America. Some of these missionaries were interested in botany, and they gave Joseph Banks specimens from Labrador that are still to be seen in his herbarium, now housed in the Natural History Museum.

But there were of course many, many more North American plants in the Physic Garden, just over the way. The man in charge of the establishment was Philip Miller, who succeeded his father in 1722; he was a very able man indeed, and in the forty-eight years of his reign he increased the number of plants from one thousand to five thousand, having correspondents and fellow collectors in many parts of the world. He was a friend of Linnaeus himself, who said of his well-known Gardener’s and Florist’s Dictionary “Non erit lexicon hortulanorum sed botanicorum”, in spite of the fact that Miller, whose mind had been formed by Tournefort and Ray, did not fully adopt the Linnaean system or nomenclature until his eighth edition, in 1768, thirty-two years after their first meeting. (Banks, coming to botany well after the publication of the Systema Naturae, the Fundamenta Botanica and the Genera Plantarum, was a Linnaean from the start; and although he would occasionally use an earlier, much longer name, his taxonomy was entirely based on the sexual system.)

It appears that in his old age Miller became so positive and froward that the Apothecaries dismissed him, but at the time when the Bankses were living in Chelsea he was a highly respected figure, the head of a famous garden and eventually a Fellow of the Royal Society, sometimes serving on the council: Joseph Banks could not have had a better neighbour and guide; and after Miller’s death (in poverty, alas) Banks bought his herbarium, so that something tangible remained.

Lord Sandwich was also something of a botanist, but his interest in the sexual system was of a very much wider nature: in earlier days he had been a member of Sir Francis Dashwood’s Hellfire Club at Medmenham Abbey together with John Wilkes, among others, and he had the reputation of being a sad rake. But in the eighteenth century this would hardly have been held against him to any serious extent; it would certainly not have made him unpopular. Yet unpopular he was, in spite of having been an excellent First Lord of the Admiralty from 1748–51, helping Anson carry through some most important reforms, so that when the Seven Years War broke out in 1756 the Navy was reasonably well equipped to fight it. The trouble was that in 1763 he was made First Lord again and then almost immediately afterwards one of the two principal Secretaries of State, being succeeded at the Admiralty by Lord Egmont (who gave his name to Port Egmont in the Falklands and thence to the Port Egmont hen, Stercorarius antarcticus, the southern skua); and as Secretary of State he was much concerned with the prosecution of Wilkes, his former playmate. Wilkes, an unusually disreputable, unusually charming and learned man and a member of parliament under Pitt’s leadership, was refused various posts, including that of ambassador to Turkey; he therefore joined the opposition, badgering the ministry in a newspaper called The North Briton. In the forty-fifth number he attacked George Ill’s message to parliament: he was arrested on a general warrant and clapped into the Tower. This was in 1763. The judges held that as a member he was immune from arrest and that in any case general warrants were illegal. Wilkes had the appearance of an oppressed martyr; he was already popular and his victory made him even more so; in his glee he reprinted number forty-five, but at the same time he struck off a few copies of a more or less obscene Essay on Woman, written by his friend Thomas Potter, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The ministry took proceedings at once: Wilkes was expelled from the House and condemned in the King’s Bench on the charge of publishing an impious libel. And since he was not in court to receive sentence (he was recovering from a wound received in a duel) he was outlawed. A good deal happened after this, but the main point is that he was elected member for Middlesex (a popular constituency with hundreds of voters) again and again, his supporters roaring “Wilkes and liberty”, and again and again the House refused to let him sit. Eventually he did return to Parliament: he also became Lord Mayor of London, one of the few Lord Mayors ever to have edited Catullus and Theophrastus and to have been an outlaw. Throughout the whole affair Sandwich appeared as the enemy of the immensely popular if somewhat demagogic Wilkes: Sandwich was witty, intelligent, and good company, but he was no match for the brilliant Wilkes and his great host of supporters, some of them highly literate and with newspapers and caricaturists at their command – no match, that is to say, in a public controversy of this kind. It was above all held against him that he should have brought the Essay on Woman before the House of Lords, complaining of improper notes attributed to the Bishop of Gloucester, as though he were a Moravian missionary rather than a former member of the Hellfire Club. The idea seemed to be that if a man had once frequented a group of dissolute companions then he must support those companions for ever after, however much their political ideas might have diverged. The prosecution and the persecution of Wilkes were hopelessly mismanaged by a succession of ministries, but nearly all the odium fell on Sandwich. He was nicknamed Jemmy Twitcher, after the character who betrayed his friend Macheath in the Beggar’s Opera; and indeed he was so much disliked that when his amiable mistress Martha Ray was shot dead outside Covent Garden theatre by the Rev. Mr Hackman, a rejected lover, his unpopularity actually increased.

At Turret House however quite another face of things was seen. Sandwich was not only good company, but like Joseph Banks he was devoted to fishing. They had fished together in the Fens, and now they fished together in the Thames and the Serpentine. In fact Lord Brougham says that they formed a plan for suddenly draining that sheet of water, not for mere fun but in order to learn more about the nature of the fishes – Sandwich had been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1740. This particular plan fell through, but others they made did not, and upon the whole it may be said that Lord Sandwich was a very good friend to Banks.

In 1764 Joseph Banks came of age and he entered upon his landed estates, which, with agriculture and stock-raising and rural economy, provided one of the great interests of his life. He also established himself in a house of his own in London, and here, where he was entirely his own master, it was much easier for him to invite people, to come and go, and to entertain. Until he adopted a filing system in 1776 he did not keep many letters, or at least few have survived, and the dates of his earliest meeting with some of his friends is necessarily a matter of conjecture; but to this period must belong his introduction to the Bishop of Carlisle, Dr Morton of the British Museum, Dr Watson, Mr West, joint-secretary to the Treasury, and the Rev. Mr Kaye, the gentlemen who proposed him for membership of the Royal Society. He also became acquainted with Thomas Pennant (and later, by means of Pennant, with his much more amiable friend Gilbert White of Seibourne and Gilbert’s brother Benjamin, a publisher and bookseller at the Horace’s Head in Fleet Street), with the Hon. Daines Barrington, John Lightfoot the botanist, and in some ways the most important of all, Daniel Carl Solander.

Solander,¹² the son of a parson, was born in 1733 at Piteå, an uninviting place in Swedish Lapmark, on the Gulf of Bothnia, about eighty miles south of the Arctic Circle. Linnaeus passed through Piteå on his tour of Lapland the year before Solander was born, and the first thing he saw was two beheaded Finns and one quartered Lapp, exposed after their execution for murder; and speaking of the region in his diary he said “Never can the priest describe Hell, this is much worse; never can the poet describe Styx, as this is much uglier.”

In 1750, when Solander was seventeen, he was sent to Uppsala university, where his uncle was Professor of Jurisprudence: the eighteenth-century torpor, so usual in European universities, does not appear to have spared Uppsala, but new life had been stirring for some years, and in 1750 Linnaeus had the chair of botany, while Wallerius had that of chemistry and Rosen von Rosenstein that of medicine. Linnaeus was by far the most famous of the three: not only was he a passionate and very highly gifted botanist, but he was working at an unusually favourable time. The Societas Regia Litteraria et Scientiarum (which had financed the Lapland journey of his youth) and the Royal Academy of Science were active and influential; the court was well-inclined (the king and queen both had splendid natural history collections, which Linnaeus catalogued; for although he was famous primarily as a botanist, his investigations covered all the three kingdoms of nature), and there were many people who were willing and even eager to learn about botany, a science less forbidding than chemistry or medicine. Of course botanists had been writing about their subject from the time of Theophrastus on, and quite recently John Ray and Joseph Pitton de Tournefort had produced admirable taxonomies, yet they had been known to few but specialists and now they were swept away by the Linnaean system – so much so that the general opinion, fully shared by Linnaeus though not by all botanists, was that the Systema Naturae and his other publications had brought order out of chaos. Linnaeus classified by stamens and pistils, and by observing their various arrangements one could identify the plant, an absolute prerequisite for any meaningful discussion: the system was artificial in that it ignored natural affinities, but it was accessible and clear; it worked, and it held the field until the days of A.-L. de Jussieu and A.-P. de Candolle, while his binominal nomenclature is with us still. Yet perhaps even more important than his publications was the fact that Linnaeus was an inspired teacher and that he raised both the study and the status of botany to heights unknown before his day. It is said that in ordinary times Uppsala had five hundred undergraduates; when he held the chair of botany the number rose by a thousand. He filled his students with his own passionate love of the subject, and many of them, travelling to remote parts of the world, have had the plants they discovered named after them, so that a botanical catalogue is not unlike a list of Linnaeus’s pupils – Tärnstrom, Kalm, Osbeck, Lagerström, Sparrman, Alströmer, Thunberg at once come to mind, and there are many others. This century, opening wide to science, was the time for immortality; yet it is an odd kind of immortality, too, for one does not always remember that Volta and Ampère were living men, nor that it was Linnaeus and his friends who placed their contemporaries Magnol, Dahl and Alexander Garden in the botanical firmament with an “ia” added to their names.

It is small wonder then that Solander, having studied classics and law for a while, wished to move over to the scientific side and join Linnaeus’s numerous band of disciples. Linnaeus had stayed with Solander’s parents at Piteå during his Lapland journey and he persuaded them to let the youth make the change and read for a medical degree.

The great man did not regret his intervention: Solander had a remarkable aptitude for natural philosophy and he soon became one of Linnaeus’s favourites, both as a student and a person. As early as 1752 he helped his master in the cataloguing of the royal collections as well as those of Count Tessin: some time later he made two botanical journeys of his own, the first into the Kjöllen range north-west of Piteå and so over into Norway, and the second in the Torneå basin in Lapland. He also published Caroli Linnaei Elementa Botanica, a shortened version of the system; and he indexed the sumptuous great catalogues and saw them through the press, acting as the professor’s right-hand man. Indeed, the two were so close that Linnaeus, who had four handsome daughters, hoped that in time Solander would become his son-in-law and his successor. Solander was also his choice when his correspondents Peter Collinson and John Ellis asked him to send a student to England. Collinson was a wealthy Quaker merchant trading with North America, an ardent botanist who had brought many American plants to England, and a Fellow of the Royal Society: he wanted a skilled young man to catalogue his garden according to the Linnaean system. Ellis was also a Fellow and a botanist with interests in the West Indies (he was agent for Dominica) and the Orient (he published Directions for bringing over Seeds and Plants from the East Indies), but his great love was zoophytes, particularly the corallines, upon which he was an authority. He was also a very sensible man in other directions, and he advised Linnaeus to tell Solander to improve his English before coming over.

As it happened Solander had plenty of time to do so, since illness and bad weather and the fact that the Seven Years War was in progress put off his departure for more than a year, and when he arrived in 1760 he spoke the language remarkably well. In any case he was, like so many Swedes, an excellent linguist: his Latin was of course fluent, since it was the medium of instruction at Uppsala, and he also knew German and Dutch.

Linnaeus had asked Ellis to take care of “my beloved pupil”, and both Ellis and Collinson did so. Solander could not have had a better introduction to the English world of natural philosophy in general and of botany in particular. His early letters to Linnaeus, often accompanied by seeds and plants from English naturalists, or books, such as the Flora Anglica in which William Hudson, sub-librarian at the British Museum, had adopted the sexual system, show that he had soon met a great many people, including Philip Miller of the Physic Garden and J. Empson of the British Museum, G. Brander, FRS, a director of the Bank of England and also connected with the Museum, Richard Warner the botanist, George Edwards, FRS, the author of a valuable History of Birds, and Sir William Chambers the architect (a Swede by birth) who had just finished the pagoda in the royal gardens at Kew – a significant mixture of Fellows of the Royal Society, people belonging to the British Museum, and great men owning great gardens or closely concerned with them. He had also travelled over much of southern and south-western England, viewing the country, its plantations and its gardens, or, when he was with John Ellis, its shores, its zoophytes, sponges and sea anemones.

He was well received, not only because he was Linnaeus’s pupil and because he was well introduced but because he was himself amiable. Sir James Smith, who eventually bought Linnaeus’s vast collections, founded the Linnean Society, and compiled A Selection from the Correspondence of Linnaeus, said of him that “he was esteemed … for his polite and agreeable manners, as well as his great knowledge in most departments of Natural History”. And some time later Fanny Burney called him “very sociable, full of talk, information, and entertainment”, while Mrs Thrale said “The Men I love best in the World are Johnson, Scrase, and Sir Philip Jennings Clerke. The Men I like best in the World are Burney, Solander, and the Bishop of Peterborough”, and Sir Charles Blagden, later secretary of the Royal Society and a close friend of Banks and Solander for many years spoke of him as “the mildest, gentlest, most obliging of men”.

He was no less dear to Linnaeus, who arranged for him to have the chair of botany at St Petersburg in 1761 and who the next year offered to name him as his successor at Uppsala. After some hesitation Solander declined both offers: he had decided to stay in England.

There was no communication between Solander and Linnaeus from the autumn of 1762 until 1768, and this breach is sometimes attributed to the marriage of Linnaeus’s eldest daughter Elizabeth Christina to a soldier. Dr Rauschenberg, who has made a deep study of Solander, does not believe the explanation, and certainly it does seem a little strange, since Solander never appears to have taken any interest in women at all.

However that may be, Solander certainly began to cut his ties with Sweden: he was a most indifferent correspondent all his life, but now he quite stopped writing to his widowed mother as well as to Linnaeus.

At this period his friends were busily trying to get him a post at the British Museum, which had opened in 1759 and which was struggling along with high ideals and an income of nine hundred pounds a year. Many friends were concerned, since in the eighteenth century as much influence as possible was required for even a modest official appointment; and it is said that Collinson went so far as to ask Lord Bute to speak to the King. These solicitations were successful, and Solander joined the meagre staff in February 1763. The appointment was modest enough, in all conscience, yielding rather less than sixty pounds a year, and at first there was no working-place apart from the public rooms; but the work itself was interesting, and Solander was ideally suited for it: he spent his days classifying, describing and cataloguing plants, insects, mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles, fossils and indeed almost anything that could be said to belong to the realm of natural philosophy and therefore to possess an inherent order that was susceptible of being brought to light. This eventually included the rather sparse collection of objects from the Pacific brought home by Commodore the Hon. John Byron, RN (the poet’s grandfather, known in the service as Foulweather Jack) after he had sailed round the world in that fine copper-bottomed ship the Dolphin, a voyage more remarkable for its rapidity (a mere twenty-two months) than for any discoveries in the South Seas. But this is to anticipate, since the Dolphin, having taken possession of the Falklands in 1765, did not reach home until 1766.

Before this time, that is to say in 1764, Banks and Solander had become acquainted, as it was natural that they should, having so many friends and so many interests in common. In these earliest years, however, the acquaintance did not develop into that close friendship which was to be so important to both men in later times: Banks was much taken up with Revesby and his other estates – farming was, after all, a form of applied botany – with Oxford and with settling into independent life. And, since the war was now over, he was also much engaged with those friends who had been concerned with the fighting and who had now come home.

^* There is a pleasant anecdote of Dr Barnard in Thraliana. “To return to Mr Pepys. He told me one Day a comical Thing concerning his quitting Eton School: Dr Barnard under whom he was educated, had it seems a way of talking to the Boys who were taking Leave of him at once so tender and so full of Admonition that many of them had been known to shed Tears at parting – says Pepys to his Companion who went home the same Day, I dread going up to the Doctor, I am afraid of being made to cry, – believe me replies his Friend I am more afraid than You – for I have the Misfortune to cry loud.”

^* Lady Mary Coke says that the Duke of Marlborough had £50,000 a year, even without any coal.