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,