The Exiled Collector: William Bankes And the Making of an English Country House

by Anne Sebba

On August 30th 1841 William John Bankes, former Tory MP, pioneer Egyptologist and renowned traveller, was caught in compromising circumstances with a guardsman in London's Green Park. Bankes paid a heavy price for his 'moment of madness': less than two weeks later, well aware that sodomy carried the death penalty, he had fled into exile, eventually settling in Venice. The government declared Bankes an outlaw, a vindictive and archaic procedure that entitled them to seize his house, Kingston Lacy in Dorset.
The Exiled Collector is the story of how Bankes, friend of Byron and the Duke of Wellington, eventually turned his personal tragedy to posterity's benefit. Based in Venice, he continued to collect obsessively for a house he no longer owned. He found fulfillment through designing, commissioning and creating as well as collecting for the house he loved, but was able to visit only in secret at the end of his life.
Based on extensive research from previously undiscovered archives, this is the first biography of William Bankes. It recounts his dramatic life story, examines the psychology of collecting, the pain and creativity of exile, and affords insight into the minds of a ruling elite in early Victorian Britain.

Genres: Biography

Hardcover

First published July 1, 2004

About the author

Anne Sebba began her writing career at the BBC world service, Arabic section, while still a student. After graduating from King’s College, London in Modern European History, she worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in London and Rome, the first woman Reuters accepted on their Graduate Trainee Scheme. In 1975 she moved to New York with her husband and first baby returning two years later with a second baby and first book. From then on she was launched into a freelance career as a journalist, biographer, cruise lecturer and occasional broadcaster and is now also an officially accredited Nadfas lecturer. She has worked for many writers’ organisations including PEN Writers in Prison Committee and the Society of Authors chairing its Management Committee from 2013- 2015 and followed her bestselling biography That Woman, a life of Wallis Simpson, based on the discovery of 15 secret letters which Wallis wrote to her second husband Ernest Simpson, with Les Parisiennes : How the Women of Paris lived, loved and died in the 1940s published in the UK and US in 2016.

Reviews

[Leesa Harwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Kingston Lacy and am lucky enough to live just down the road so visit frequently. When I discovered that one of my distant ancestors married into the Bankes family I paid a bit more attention to the family members he would have known.
During a recent visit to the house one of the National Trust volunteers talked about William Bankes and recommended this book.
It took a while for me to read. Not because it is hard-going, but because it is something to savour and enjoy. Anne Sebba has meticulously researched William’s life and tells his story beautifully. Kingston Lacy is what it is today because of William. Its story and his intertwine over decades, and his exile was a physical separation from the house but not a spiritual or emotional one.
His character is just as complex, imposing and glorious as the house itself. It’s hard to see where one stops and the other starts.
I loved this book. Thanks to the volunteer who recommended it. I’ll see Kingston Lacy through a more technicolour lens when I visit again.

[Serendipity · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book because I work at Soughton Hall that the Bankes family owned and William Bankes once lived. Loved the history and left me thirsty to know more about this fascinating story!

[Robin Braysher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kingston Lacey is a beautiful house in Dorset and, although it shows the evidence of a number of hands at work, it is largely a memorial to William John Banks. Following a visit, where some of WJ's story was told, it made sense to read the full story. For me, the most successful and interesting part of the book covers WJ's travels in the Iberian Peninsula (during the war) and in the middle and near east. His later life abroad - although rather lacking detail - is also interesting, along with the final part on how the National Trust came to acquire the house and what it has done with it. Descriptions of the changes he made to the house and descriptions of balustrades etc., I found rather dry. He does not come across as especially likeable, but he clearly had a remarkable eye for art, antiquities and design (even down to the level of doorknobs!). No mere acquirer of luxury items, he designed features and gained an understanding of manufacturing processes, which was unusual. Ultimately, though, my sympathy for him is limited: he was a reactionary, high Tory, his social position and influence got him out of his first criminal case, and he had unlimited free time and vast amounts of money with which to indulge his passions for art etc., which came from the blood and sweat of English labourers and - through his mother's fortune - enslaved Africans.

One slightly odd feature is that in the early part of the book describing the siege of Corfe Castle (part of the Bankes estate), the author describes the Parliamentarian commander as a 'rebel', which seems a very partisan term - even if that's how the Bankes family would have seen him! I know where my Civil War sympathies lay, but I think I would be equally surprised if a modern book described King Charles I as 'that tyrannical man of blood'. Surely Parliamentarian and Royalist are the usual modern terms, no matter the author's preferences?

[Suzanne Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very accessible and fascinating account of Kingston Lacy’s self exiled William Banks. His love of his home and determination to continue to improve it was incredible. I also learned he was a great explorer of Egypt and the Middle East with a close association with Burckhart, the Swiss explorer, who was also the first westerner to see Petra for centuries.