BANKES, William John (1786-1855), of Soughton Hall, Northop, Flints.

Bankes, who was blessed with good looks, easy charm and independent wealth, travelled extensively in the Middle and Near East between 1815 and 1819, after his first and unsuccessful bid to secure ‘parliamentary reputation’. Lord Teignmouth, Reminiscences, i. 300. In Egypt, ‘scratching the back of the Sphinx’, he penetrated further than any European before him. A serious scholar, who made a significant contribution to nascent Egyptology, he recorded detailed sketches and notes of inscriptions and monuments and acquired a modest collection of antiquities. These he added to the art treasures which he had bought during an earlier period with Wellington’s army in the Peninsula. His most spectacular prize was a large obelisk discovered at Philae in 1815, which he eventually had erected in the grounds of the family home at Kingston Hall, Dorset (to which he had been heir since his elder brother’s death in 1806). See P. Usick, Adventures in Egypt and Nubia. The Travels of William John Bankes (2002); Oxford DNB; V. Bankes, A Dorset Heritage, 124-54; Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 17-18, 118-19, 122; Northants. RO, Agar Ellis diary, 1 May 1820, 5, 10, 12 July 1821, 30 Mar.1824. On his way back to England in the winter of 1819 he visited his friend, admirer and Cambridge contemporary Byron at Venice and Ravenna. Byron, who recalled him as ‘my collegiate pastor, and master, and patron’, and commended him to friends in England as ‘a wonderful fellow’, urged him not to hide his light under a bushel when he got home:

You may rely upon finding everybody in England eager to reap the fruits of ... [‘your labours’], and as you have done more than other men, I hope you will not limit yourself to saying less than may do justice to the talents and time you have bestowed on your perilous researches.

Byron later told Lady Blessington that Bankes ‘is very clever, very original, and has a fund of information: he is also very good-natured; but he is not much of a flatterer’. Byron Letters ed. R.E. Prothero, i. 152; iv. 200, 377, 401, 403; Byron: A Self Portrait ed. P. Quennell, 505, 542; Conversations of Byron with Lady Blessington (1850), 172. (For his part Bankes considered Byron to be ‘capricious and profligate to the greatest degree, without principle of any sort’; but he ‘could not help liking him’, even though he ‘would not have trusted him with his own sister’.) Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 173-4, 327. According to Bankes’s doting mother, the duchess of Devonshire wrote to Lady Bessborough ‘to say they all regret his leaving Rome [and] that he has not only seen more than any other traveller in the same time, but possesses the power of relating what he sees in a peculiarly lively, agreeable manner’. Dorset RO, Bankes mss D/BKL, Mrs. [Henry] Bankes’s diary, 23 Mar. [1820].

On his return to England in April 1820, when he effortlessly resumed his station among the fashionable and the clever, Bankes was lionized. Mrs. Arbuthnot was enchanted by his ‘very delightful and agreeable’ conversation, and Maria Edgeworth found him ‘exceedingly entertaining’. The former rated his ‘humour’ above that of the celebrated wits Luttrell and Rogers, though she conceded that he could be ‘coarse and sometimes tiresome’. Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 103, 113; ii. 232-3; Edgeworth Letters, 277, 381, 390. Rogers himself reckoned that he had seen even the legendary Sydney Smith ‘overpowered by the superior facetiousness of William Bankes’. Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers (1856), 288. Henry Fox*, however, was irritated by Bankes’s ‘unceasing’ prattle, delivered in a ‘tiresome’ and ‘painfully unpleasant’ voice, though he admitted that he was ‘full of knowledge and originality’. Lady Lansdowne, too, thought he talked ‘too much’. Fox Jnl. 106, 170. In August 1821, according to Mrs. Arbuthnot, he contemplated going back to Africa the next year to trace the Nile to its sources, being ‘quite determined to return to Europe by the Cape of Good Hope’. He did not do so, and in the summer of 1822 found distraction in an affair with the ‘very young and very handsome’ wife of the 5th earl of Buckinghamshire which Mrs. Arbuthnot, his confidante in this matter, feared would ‘end by his getting into a scrape’:

She is about to be separated from her husband, not about Mr. Bankes, but because their tempers and tastes do not suit, and she is excessively anxious to induce Mr. Bankes to go off with her and to take her with him disguised as a boy into Africa ... I have ... implored him not to listen to a scheme fraught with such ruin to both and, as he is not so blindly and madly in love as she is, I hope he will resist the temptation ... She is very clever and eccentric, which suits him exactly.

She subsequently separated from Buckinghamshire and continued to pester Bankes to abscond abroad with her, but he demurred, ‘feeling that it would ruin her and himself too’. Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 113, 170-1, 173.

Four months later Bankes stood on a vacancy for his university as an opponent of Catholic relief, pledged to ‘the most steady and decided opposition to any measures tending to undermine or alter the established church’. His opponents, both friends of relief, were the Whig lawyer James Scarlett* and a young nobleman, Lord Hervey*, who, as Lord Liverpool’s nephew by marriage, enjoyed the backing of government, to the disgust of Bankes’s cantankerous father. Two days before the election, according to Lord Colchester, the premier ‘spoke of Lord Hervey’s success as certain’ and of ‘Bankes’s chance as ridiculous’; but Bankes beat Hervey by 138 votes and Scarlett by 200 in a poll of 919. Ibid. i. 196; Colchester Diary, iii. 261-2; Cambridge Chron. 8, 15, 22, 29 Nov., 6 Dec. 1822. He owed his success to ‘the interest of the country clergymen’, who attended in droves to support ‘No Popery’; but, as even his opponents conceded, he was ‘an excellent canvasser’ of the residents and achieved ‘great things by his good humour, and pleasant stories about Africa and the East’. Charles Shore, who had started for the seat but retired, noted that Bankes’s ‘colloquial facility proved very serviceable to him’, as he was ‘quite at home in the college hall and combination rooms and capable in an easy good-humoured way of keeping up the ball of conversation with Whewell, Sedgwick, or any other professed talker’. Add. 51659, Whishaw to Lady Holland, 27 Nov. [1822]; Palmerston-Sulivan Letters, 153-4; Teignmouth, i. 301-3. Professor Sedgwick, indeed, voted for Scarlett but wrote of Bankes as

a very extraordinary man ... [who] possesses a wonderful fund of entertaining anecdote. When an undergraduate he was half suspected of being a Papist, and he almost frightened Dr. Ramsden to death, by building in his rooms an altar at which he daily burned incense, and frequently had the singing-boys dressed in their surplices to chant services. For a long time, while in the East, he wore a long beard, and passed as a faithful follower of the law of Mahomet ... I don’t think we can depend on him as a man of business, though as a literary character, and a man of large fortune, he is a very proper person to represent us in Parliament. J.W. Clark and T.M. Hughes, Life of Sedgwick, i. 256-9.

Soon after his victory it was reported, to the malicious delight of many, that Bankes, the ‘newly-erected pillar of orthodoxy’ and ‘wonderfully travelled high-churchman’, was to face an action for his crim. con. with Lady Buckinghamshire, whose vengeful husband had retained Scarlett as his counsel. For whatever reason, Bankes was spared this humiliation. Buckingham, Mems. Geo IV, i. 401; Maxwell, Clarendon, i. 37; Cent. Kent. Stud. Stanhope mss U159 C228, Carrington to Lady Stanhope, 2 Dec. 1822.

He was mentioned among potential movers and seconders of the address in January 1823, when Charles Arbuthnot* thought ‘he would do well’. Add. 38744, f. 49. Nothing came of this, and he voted silently with government against tax remissions, 3, 18 Mar., and repeal of the Foreign Enlistment Act, 16 Apr. His speech of 17 Apr. against Catholic relief, which he said would ‘overthrow the Protestant establishment’, was strongly reminiscent of the fiasco of his parliamentary début, on the same subject, in 1812: it was with ‘some difficulty’ that he obtained a hearing; and his words, delivered in a ‘low’ tone, were repeatedly interrupted with cries of ‘question’. The Times, 18 Apr. 1823. Two backbenchers told Hudson Gurney* that it was ‘a total failure, colloquial, flimsy and very bad’; and George Agar Ellis* noted that he had ‘drivelled out some commonplaces’. Gurney diary, 18 Apr.; Agar Ellis diary, 17 Apr.; Fox Jnl. 165; Lady Holland to Son, 17-18. Bankes, who was credited at this time with assisting Lady Caroline Lamb with her novel Ada Reis, was a teller for the government minority against inquiry into the prosecution of the Dublin Orange rioters, 22 Apr. On 14 May he declined the private invitation of his Trinity contemporary John Cam Hobhouse*, a radical Whig, to attend the following day’s meeting to support Greek independence. He professed support for the cause, but balked at the venue (the Crown and Anchor) and the chairman (Lord Milton*), which gave the impression that it was ‘a party meeting’ called for ‘a party object’. Add. 36460, f. 35. He condemned Lord Nugent’s bills to give British Catholics the same civil rights and franchises as their Irish counterparts, 28 May, 12, 18, 23, 30 June, when he hoped the home secretary Peel would not ‘live to regret’ supporting them. He voted against Scottish parliamentary reform, 2 June, and inquiry into chancery delays, 5 June. He objected to a detail of the Irish tithes composition bill, 6 June, and on 16 June 1823 opposed it root and branch, as one of a minority of 36.

Bankes supported Martin’s bill to prevent the ill-treatment of cattle, 9 Mar. 1824, and deplored the ‘spirit of levity with which the question had been treated’. He backed his father’s successful call for inquiry into the costs of building the new Westminster law courts, 23 Mar., and objected to a provision of the game laws amendment bill which transferred the ownership of game from the lord of the manor to the landowner, 25 Mar. On 9 Apr. 1824 he caused merriment when welcoming the allocation of £500,000 for the erection of new churches:

It certainly ought to be a main object with government to provide for the union of sexes (sects) [laughter]. That union had been an object much attended to in Ireland. It was an union that it was of the greatest consequence to keep up [renewed laughter]. He apprehended, from the laughter ... that he had inadvertently committed some verbal inaccuracy.

Wilmot Horton described Bankes’s ‘lapsus - union of sexes for sects’ as ‘the funniest thing I have heard ... you never heard children laugh more’; but his father reckoned that he had actually said ‘sects’ and not ‘sexes’. TNA 30/29/9/6/19; Dorset RO D/BKL, Bankes jnl. 9 Apr. [1824]. Bankes supported the suppression of the Catholic Association, 15, 25 Feb. 1825. With his speech against Catholic relief, 1 Mar., he got ‘into one of his worst hashes’, as Gurney noted, by reading ‘in the wrong place, to great hooting and laughter’, extracts from a speech of O’Connell, the effect of which was to contradict his own argument. Gurney diary, 1 Mar. [1825]. When he presented the Cambridge University petition against relief, 15 Mar., he called for the views of the Anglican clergy to be treated with ‘attention and respect’. He presented a similar petition from the authorities of Norwich cathedral, 18 Apr. The Times, 19 Apr. 1825. He voted against the relief bill, 21 Apr., acquiesced in going into committee on it, 6 May, but threatened ‘open and manly’ resistance to its third reading. After this, which he silently opposed, 10 May, either he or his father moved unsuccessful amendments designed to negate the bill. He voted against the Irish franchise bill, 26 Apr., 9 May, when, to more laughter, he condemned the motion to provide for the secular Catholic clergy of Ireland as ‘an incident, after which the established church of England could hope to exist no longer’. Ibid. 10 May 1825. He voted for the duke of Cumberland’s grant, 30 May 1825. He thought colonial assemblies should be forced to adopt measures to improve the conditions of slaves, 1 Mar., but voted with ministers on the Jamaican slave trials, 2 Mar. 1826. On the presentation by Burdett of the Irish Catholics’ petition for relief, 25 Apr. 1826, he declared the hostility of its opponents to be ‘unalterable’.

In 1826 Bankes stood again for Cambridge University along with the other sitting Member, Lord Palmerston, a pro-Catholic member of the government, and two other office-holders, Copley and Goulburn, who were both hostile to relief. Copley, the attorney-general, who started with the avowed aim of unseating Bankes, was the clear favourite, and the second seat seemed to rest between Palmerston and Bankes, who failed in his bid to persuade Goulburn, the weakest candidate, to stand down. Bankes’s personal standing in Cambridge had suffered as a result of his risible performances in the House: Sedgwick, for example, now dismissed him as ‘a fool ... brought in last time by a set of old women’, who, ‘whenever he rises ... makes the body he represents truly ridiculous’. Clark and Hughes, i. 268-9, 275-8. On the second day Bankes got ahead of Palmerston. According to Hobhouse, who plumped for the latter

he told me afterwards that he should be nearly even with P. all this day, and the next day pass him easily. He is exactly the same rattling, grinning fellow as ever and he talked at the hall table today the same sort of nonsense as he used when a pupil at college. One of the fellows, Macfarlane, who was sitting next to him, actually left his place, and coming to me told me he could not endure Bankes’s chattering any longer. Add. 56550, f. 96.

In the event he finished that day 35 behind Palmerston, and at the close of the poll was 124 in arrears of him. Bankes and his family believed that ministers had conspired against him to ensure Palmerston’s return; and after the election he personally remonstrated with Liverpool, challenging him to square ‘his own professed desire that the Roman Catholic claims might be successfully resisted’ with his ‘having set up a man of straw in hostility to him’. Cambridge Chron. 2, 9, 16, 23 June 1826; Colchester Diary, iii. 441-2. He was confident of success on the next vacancy, but on Copley’s appointment as lord chancellor in 1827 he was beaten by 101 votes in a poll of 857 by Tindal, the new solicitor-general, a fellow member of Trinity and opponent of Catholic relief. Bankes was trounced in his own college by 191-78, and his enemies were confident, correctly so, that he would ‘not deem it expedient to offer himself again’. Cambridge Chron. 11 May 1827. He had meanwhile in October 1826 been successfully sued for libel, to the tune of £400, by James Silk Buckingham*, whom he had accused of the unauthorized appropriation of drawings he had made in the East for publication in his Travels in Palestine (1822). The Times, 20 Oct. 1826. Soon afterwards he blotted his copy-book with Mrs. Arbuthnot, who ‘almost thought he was drunk’, by ‘engrossing as much as possible all the conversation’ at a dinner party given by the duke of Wellington for Sir Walter Scott. Scott himself noted that Bankes ‘gave us with unnecessary emphasis and at superfluous length his opinion of a late gambling transaction’, and consequently ‘spoiled the evening’. Arbuthnot Jnl. ii. 57; Scott Jnl. 238-9.

In March 1829 Bankes was returned for Lord Ailesbury’s pocket borough of Marlborough to oppose Catholic emancipation, having ‘declined sitting for Truro’. Bankes jnl. 166. He cast a silent hostile vote, 27 Mar. On the 30th, when he was called from a posse of aspiring speakers, he condemned emancipation as ‘plain, unqualified, unconditional surrender’ and damned Wellington and Peel for their betrayal of the Protestant constitution: ‘they have stolen upon us in the night, and thrown a firebrand into the body of the church ... [which] will ... soon extend to the rafters and the roof, and leave the building a black and empty ruin’. Hobhouse deemed it ‘a most successful speech’ in ‘a poor debate’, while Bankes’s father wrote that he had delivered ‘a very animated, and in some parts a very clever attack upon the bill’. Broughton, Recollections, iii. 314; Bankes jnl. 166. Gurney reckoned that he was ‘better than usual, but solemn and got up’, but James Abercromby* thought his ‘very bitter’ condemnation of Peel was ‘almost too personal’. Gurney diary, 30 Mar.; Brougham mss, Abercromby to Brougham [31 Mar. 1829]. Bankes was active in support of his brother George’s unsuccessful bid for the vacant university seat in June 1829. Arbuthnot Corresp. 120; Clark and Hughes, i. 342. The following year he published his translation of the Life and Adventures of Giovanni Finati, with whom he had travelled in the East. He was one of the disaffected Tories who voted for Knatchbull’s amendment to the address, 4 Feb., but he voted with government against parliamentary reform proposals, 11, 18, 23 Feb. 1830. He divided against Jewish emancipation, 5 Apr., and the abolition of the death penalty for forgery, 7 June, and was in the minority for an amendment to the sale of beer bill, 1 July 1830.

Following his return for Marlborough at the general election of 1830, ministers listed Bankes as one of the ‘moderate Ultras’. After Huskisson’s accidental death (which he witnessed), he indicated to Arbuthnot that ‘many Tories are well disposed who would have gone at once into opposition if an overture had been made to Huskisson’, but that they would have ‘no objection’ to a junction with his associates. Bankes mss HJ1, Bankes to father, 18 Sept. [1823]; Add. 40340, f. 236. It was thought that he would side with government if there was a showdown on reform when Parliament met, but he absented himself from the crucial division on the civil list, 15 Nov. 1830. Countess Granville Letters, ii. 67. He nevertheless had the gall to ask the outgoing lord chancellor for a living four days later. Ellenborough Diary, ii. 440. His declaration of opposition to the bill promoting the Ffestiniog railway, which would traverse his ‘large and ancient property’ in Merionethshire, 7 Mar. 1831, was ruled ‘out of place’ by the Speaker. On 21 Mar. he attacked the Grey ministry’s reform bill as a rash ‘experiment’ which could not provide a final settlement. He described it as being riddled with anomalies and accused its framers of indulging in party political gerrymandering in the composition of the disfranchising schedules. His father recorded that this ‘very beautiful and animated speech ... deserved all the commendation which it received’. Bankes jnl. 173. Bankes voted against the second reading next day. He exploited the embarrassment of Palmerston, a member of the cabinet, in having to present the Cambridge University petition expressing alarm at the bill, 30 Mar. On 15 Apr. he complained of the injustice of Marlborough, a flourishing town, being deprived of a Member, while the Whig minister Lord Landsdowne’s borough of Calne, a meaner place, was to retain both. When Hobhouse dared him to say outright whether he was charging ministers with chicanery in this instance, he repeated his allegations of ‘partiality’. Wilts. RO, Marlborough (Burke) mss 124/1/175. He voted for Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment, 19 Apr. He moved the adjournment of the debate on electoral corruption at Liverpool, 21 Apr. 1831, and was a teller for the majority in the subsequent division. He came in again unopposed for Marlborough at the ensuing general election.

Bankes presented a constituency petition against the reform bill, 24 June 1831, and denied Long Wellesley’s charge that it had been got up by Ailesbury’s agents and the corporation with the aid of bribes from a misappropriated charitable trust fund. They continued their squabble, 5 July. Later that day Bankes spoke against the second reading of the reintroduced bill, giving what Hobhouse described as ‘one of the most extraordinary exhibitions I have ever seen. He whined, clasped his hands, and put himself into attitudes’. Broughton, iv. 120. He divided against the bill the following day. He voted for using the 1831 census as a basis for disfranchisement, 19 July, when he also called for justice to be done to Appleby. He conceded the extinction of his family borough of Corfe Castle, 20 July, but denied that it was ‘decayed’. He was in the minority against the partial disfranchisement of Chippenham, 27 July, and protested against the same fate befalling Marlborough, 30 July. He objected to the proposal to sit on Saturdays to speed progress on the bill, 12 Aug., on the ingenious ground that if Jews were admitted to the House they would thereby be presented with a crisis of conscience. He grudgingly welcomed the award of a third county Member to Dorset, 13 Aug., though he thought that on a comparison with Cumberland, the territory of Graham, a member of the cabinet, it was entitled to four. In any case, he doubted the wisdom of the three-Member concept, for ‘the more votes you place in a man’s hand, the less careful will he be as to the candidate on whom he shall bestow them’. He was in small minorities against the Irish union of parishes bill, 19 Aug., and for the preservation of existing voting rights, 27 Aug. He voted against the issue of a new writ for Liverpool, 5 Sept., the passage of the reform bill, 21 Sept., and the second reading of the Scottish bill, 23 Sept. 1831.

Herries singled out Bankes as being ‘most to blame’ for his family’s reluctance to become actively involved in the Dorset by-election of September 1831, which Lord Ashley eventually won for opposition. Bankes himself admitted to Mrs. Arbuthnot in December that he had been ‘no party to the original embarking in that election’, but, urging her to prevail on her kinsman Lord Westmorland to subscribe for the defence of Ashley against a petition, he argued that ‘defending the seat is a very different thing’, vital to the credibility of the party. Arbuthnot Corresp. 149, 158. He subsequently presented the petition of Dorset voters to be admitted as parties to the defence, 8 Feb. 1832. He voted against the second reading of the revised reform bill, 17 Dec. 1831. He persuaded Althorp and Croker to consider Knight’s amendment aimed at ensuring that the bill did not become law until the new constituency boundaries had been settled, 23 Jan. 1832. He joined in objections to the ambiguity of the clause concerning the suspension of polling in the event of riot, 15 Feb., voted against the enfranchisement of Tower Hamlets, 28 Feb., repeated his complaint of Cumberland’s preferential treatment over Dorset, 9 Mar., and voted against the third reading, 22 Mar. He divided against government on the Russian-Dutch loan, 26 Jan., 12 July, was in the majority against inquiry into military punishments, 16 Feb., and voted for an investigation of smuggling in the glove trade, 3 Apr. He paired against the second reading of the Irish reform bill, 25 May. He vainly suggested the annexation of the Isle of Purbeck to the revamped Wareham constituency, 22 June, but was pleased to accept Russell’s proposal to include Corfe Castle in it. In the debate on the grant for a National Gallery, 23 July 1832, he agreed with Althorp that it was hardly worthwhile to bring Cleopatra’s Needle to England and objected to the idea of removing an obelisk from the Temple of Sesostris, which would entail virtual destruction of the building: he would ‘never consent to ornament London at the expense of Thebes’.

Bankes was returned unopposed for Dorset at the 1832 general election. On the evening of 6 June 1833 he was arrested along with Thomas Flowers, a guardsman, with whom he had been observed loitering for several minutes in a public urinal in the churchyard of St. Margaret, Westminster. They were charged with meeting ‘for unnatural purposes’ and tried in king’s bench on 2 Dec. 1833, when Wellington headed a phalanx of peers and Members of Parliament who testified to Bankes’s good character. The evidence, though highly suspicious, was entirely circumstantial, as none of the prosecution witnesses had seen any physical contact between the two. They were both acquitted and released ‘without the least stain on their characters’. Although doubts lingered in certain quarters, Wellington professed to

consider Bankes as he is described by the verdict: and if I had a party of persons at my house with whom he had been on terms of intimacy I should ask him to meet them. If Bankes is wise however he will not expose himself to the world for some time ... A little patience will set everything right. L. Crompton, Byron and Greek Love. 46, 347, 358; The Times, 3 Dec.1833; Wellington Pol. Corresp. i. 358-9, 364, 370, 376-8; Add. 57371, f. 37.

Bankes’s public career was damaged, and he retired from Parliament at the dissolution in December 1834. The same month he succeeded to Kingston Hall, which he extended and embellished in the purest Italian style. J. Hutchins, Dorset, iii. 236-9. His luck ran out on 31 Aug. 1841, when he was arrested and charged with indecently exposing himself with a guardsman in Green Park. According to the police, he initially tried to pass himself off as an unemployed servant called Harris and, when he had been properly identified, offered to take bail in that name and retire to the country if the truth was suppressed. He was released on bail of £800 and two sureties of £100 and summoned to answer the charge at the next session of the central criminal court. Hobhouse wrote:

Gibson Craig ... told me that W. Bankes had been again caught with a soldier!!! Monstrous madness. I had thought myself obliged to refuse appearing as a witness to his character on the former occasion because I could say nothing which could be of service to him, but he has since been as much in society as if nothing had happened and this season gave a great ball to all the women of fashion in London.

Bankes, unable this time to face the music, forfeited his bail and fled to Europe, after making over all his property to his brother George and brother-in-law Lord Falmouth. The Times, 3, 25 Sept. 1841; Broughton, vi. 14; Add. 56564, f. 116. He spent his last years as an outlaw and died in Venice in April 1855. Gent. Mag. (1855), ii. 205-6.