The Age of Wonder (67 page)

4

As the impact of the new Romantic science spread through Regency England, Banks was much concerned with securing the reputation of the Royal Society. He had struggled to maintain its pre-eminence in British science, and had fought to prevent the splitting away of new, separatist bodies like the Geological Society (1807) and the Astronomical Society (1820). ‘I see plainly that all these new-fangled Associations will finally dismantle the Royal Society, and not leave the Old Lady a rag to cover her,’ he wrote in 1818.
³⁵
He accepted an honorary membership in the Geological, but pointedly resigned it two years later, making his displeasure at its independent policies known.

Banks felt that the new Astronomical Society would certainly steal his thunder with new discoveries. When the Duke of Somerset accepted the first presidency, Banks called him to breakfast, and convinced him to resign even before he had taken up the presidential chair. Other Royal Society members were sufficiently intimidated to send Banks notification of their invitations to join the Astronomical Society, with copies of their refusals annexed.
³⁶

But Banks was trying to hold back a tide of history. It was no coincidence that it was the young men from Cambridge, John Herschel and Charles Babbage, who were leading the astronomers away from the Royal Society. The increasing separation and professionalisation of the individual scientific disciplines had begun at the universities. It would become the general hallmark of Victorian science. Nor could Banks have imagined that it would be a woman who would first identify this development, and grasp its opportunities, in a short, incisive book,
On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences
(1834). It was written by Mary Somerville (1780-1872), whose husband was a Fellow of the Royal Society. Though she lived to be ninety-one, and would have an Oxford college named after her posthumously, Somerville herself was never elected.

Banks retained a noble Enlightenment vision of a unified science, but his Romantic instincts had steadily given way to conservative policies. Under him, the election of the Royal Society’s members had steadily ossified. Over 10 per cent were now clergymen (including a large number of bishops), and nearly 20 per cent were members of the landed aristocracy. The Council itself consisted of 40 per cent such members.
³⁷
Neither of these groups necessarily excluded true men of science, but among younger members there was a growing feeling of stifling consensus, cautious propriety and snobbish exclusion, which did not reflect the spirit of the age.

This was particularly felt in the increasingly flourishing philosophical societies of the provinces, and especially the great manufacturing cities of the Midlands and the North. To John Herschel and Babbage it seemed astonishing that a chemist like John Dalton, from Manchester, should not have been elected, or that Michael Faraday should have received no medal for his work. Many younger members now referred scathingly to Banks as a ‘courtier’. This did not prevent Babbage from asking him for a personal recommendation when applying for the Chair of Mathematics at Edinburgh in 1819 (difficult because he was not a Scot). Banks ended his letter of reference with genuine warmth: ‘Adieu my dear Sir, believe me Anxious for your success & with real Esteem and Regard’.
³⁸

Banks felt the pressures of age and unpopularity, and, increasingly weak and immobilised, wondered if he should continue. He secretly admitted that his eyes were no longer good enough even to look through a microscope. Gout inflamed his arm joints, and uric acid formed kidney stones which regularly passed through his urethra with agonising spasms. In November 1819 he wrote uncertainly to his confidant Blagden: ‘Our Election approaches. I almost feel uneasy at again offering myself a Candidate. If I am again elected it will be the 42nd time. Enough I think to satisfy the ambition of any man.’ Blagden noted that the President’s arithmetic was also weakening: it would be his forty-first election.
³⁹

His election was, in the event, a triumph. Confirmed by acclaim, he was ‘unanimously replaced in the Chair’. But it was not a good winter. ‘The cold Weather disagreed with me & I think paralysed all the activity of Science. Now the death of the late King [George III] & the dangerous indisposition of Geo IV has brought all things to a Stand Still.’
⁴⁰

Yet still Banks schemed and dreamed with his protégés. He had arranged for young Lieutenant William Edward Parry to mount a polar expedition through Baffin Bay, to make one more attempt on the elusive North-West Passage, from the Arctic to the Pacific oceans. The twenty-eight-year-old Parry, manfully suppressing his unseamanlike nerves, had been summoned to one of the by-now legendary breakfasts at 32 Soho Square, and left a vivid record of the event and Banks’s bluff and hospitable style.

At ten precisely Lady and Mrs [Sophia] Banks made their appearance, to whom I was introduced in form, and without waiting for Sir J (who was wheeled in, five minutes after) we sat down to breakfast. Sir J shook hands with me very cordially, said he was glad to become acquainted with a Son of Dr Parry’s, for whom he entertained the highest respect, and was glad to find I was nominated to serve on the Expedition to the North West. Having breakfasted, I wheeled Sir J into an anteroom which adjoins the library, and, without any previous remark, he opened the map which he had just constructed, and in which the situation is shown, of that enormous mass of ice which has lately disappeared from the Eastern coast of Greenland…He desired that I would come to him as often as I pleased (’the oftener the better’) and read or take away any books I could find in his library that might be of service to me. He made me take his map with me…Having obtained
carte blanche
from Sir J, I shall of course go to his library without any ceremony, whenever I have occasions…
⁴¹

Throughout his last spring Banks waited anxiously for reports of ‘our Polar adventurers’, and news of their progress. Parry’s specially constructed ship HMS
Hecla,
‘fitted as strong as wood & Iron can make her’, would take two years to pass through the ice, and Banks was dead before this young protégé returned. Parry was the first to sail right through the perilous Lancaster Sound, and had named a remote and icy promontory at the far end, adjacent to the Beaufort Sea, Banks Island, after his patron.
⁴²

One of Banks’s last pet projects was to find some brilliant young astronomer to set up a major observatory in South Africa, at the Cape, so the southern sky could be explored as William Herschel had explored the northern. He never gave up looking for this man, although in fact he was close by all the time.
⁴³

Banks became very ill with jaundice in the spring of 1820. His last letters were written from Soho Square to Blagden in Paris. In one of them, very brief and signed ‘in haste’, he showed that he had lost none of his ranging interests. He commented on a new thermometer used to calculate the strength of alcoholic spirits; on the notorious ‘Lancashire Black Drop’ opium, ‘said to resemble Morphium very much and produce the same effects of Depression’; and on two delightful Newfoundland puppies he was sending to Blagden on the Paris mail coach, very eager to meet him, but waiting for a suitable passenger to take them over.

They may never have met their new master. To Banks’s dismay and grief, Charles Blagden died, while drinking coffee with Berthollet and Laplace, a fortnight later. It was perhaps the greatest professional blow Banks had sustained since the death of his old shipmate and scientific comrade Daniel Solander.
⁴⁴

In late May 1820 Sir Joseph Banks wrote in a firm hand from Soho Square to offer his resignation to the Royal Society, being ‘so far impaired in sight and hearing’ as to be unable to carry out his presidential duties. The Society unanimously rejected his resignation. Possibly the last letter he read was from the Director of the Botanic Gardens at Glasgow. It enclosed a list of their most sought-after rare plants, including no fewer than ten in the family of Banksia. If he was childless, yet he had a numerous offspring.

Sir Joseph Banks died on 19 June 1820, nursed by his faithful and longsuffering wife.
⁴⁵
With his death, after over forty years as President of the Royal Society, there was the sense that a distinctive era in British science had come to an end. Within a decade this had sharpened into a growing feeling of uncertainty and crisis.

5

At first it seemed that Sir Humphry Davy, called back from his European wanderings, was the likeliest successor. Davy arrived in London on 16 June 1820, three days before the death of Banks. The presidency of the Royal Society was now vacant, and Davy saw this as the natural summit of his professional ambitions, as he told his mother in a confidential letter. He sent her a beautiful Italian shawl, posted down to Cornwall, and coral necklaces to his sisters. At this critical juncture he was alone in London, for Jane had remained in Paris. They were both aware that the second Continental tour had not healed the rifts in their marriage.

Yet it was now more than ever important to establish a workable
modus vivendi
with Jane. Davy urged her to return, and never considered divorce, largely because of the Royal Society. In a curious way they were both trapped by the requirements of their public lives. They agreed to accompany each other to official events, but to travel and entertain separately as far as possible. With this in mind, they sold the house in Grosvenor Street early that summer, and bought an even larger one in Park Street, on the more fashionable side of Grosvenor Square, nearer Hyde Park. Here, with large suites of rooms and separate staircases, Jane and Davy could conduct more independent lives, but still present themselves as the first scientific couple of the nation.

Davy threw all his energy into lobbying Fellows to support his candidature for the presidency, with private letters and discreet dinner invitations. His old friend Davies Giddy acted as his unofficial party manager. His high public profile, his knighthood and his reputation at home and abroad as the inventor of the safety lamp attracted what appeared to be an unassailable majority. Yet there were rumours of dissent. Aristocratic members were uneasy at Davy’s Cornish background (so different from Banks’s Eton and Oxford), while younger members, on the contrary, wondered if his social ambitions had overtaken his scientific ones.

An alternative candidate emerged. The shy, mild, supremely dedicated and meticulous chemist Dr William Hyde Wollaston (who had been appointed caretaker President) found himself being championed by the young Turks, and especially the group of Cambridge men including Babbage, Whewell and John Herschel. It was felt that Wollaston represented British science at its purest, while Davy, for all his fame, was a contentious figure. John Herschel expressed this view vigorously in a private letter to Babbage in June 1820: ‘The reasons for wishing that Davy should be opposed are grounded solely on his personal character, which is said to be arrogant in the extreme, and impatient of opposition in his scientific views, and likely, if power were placed in his hand to oppose rising merit in his own line, and not patronise it in others, and in particular to involve the Royal Society in controversies of much personal acrimony with other learned European bodies.’

These
caveats
made clear reference to Davy’s treatment of Faraday, and the awkward priority dispute with Gay-Lussac and the French Académie des Sciences.
⁴⁶
As Herschel did not know Davy personally at this stage, much of this was hearsay and gossip. Yet it was precisely the sort of thing that Wollaston dreaded, and, appalled at the notion of open wrangling between scientific men, he abruptly withdrew his candidature in favour of Davy. The vote was set for November 1820.

Davy and Jane now accepted an invitation to spend the later part of that summer (the grouse-shooting season) in Scotland with Walter Scott, recently made a baronet by the newly crowned George IV. They travelled to the manse at Abbotsford separately, but both enjoyed mingling with the Scottish aristocracy and literary men like Scott’s son-in-law John Lockhart and Henry Mackenzie (author of
The Man of Feeling
), who took a fancy to Jane and travelled in her carriage during the endless hunting expeditions. Davy managed to spend most of his days shooting on the moors, and his evenings in Scott’s smoking room. With considerable diplomacy Scott had also invited Wollaston, who proved himself a keen fisherman, so that he and Davy were soon on good terms, teasing each other with piscatorial arcanae.

Lockhart later wrote an amusing account of Davy striding out at dawn in his full fishing gear, his white wide-brimmed hat stuck with innumerable fly-hooks and his enormous green waders far in excess of what any tinkling Scottish burn could possibly require. Yet Davy would also recite from memory passages of Scott’s
Lay of the Last Minstrel,
while sipping whisky during a moorland picnic. Lockhart recalled one of the Scottish ghillies whispering to him when Davy and Scott had kept the party up with their ‘rapt talk’ round the log fire, long after midnight: ’
“Gude
preserve us! This is a very superior occasion! Eh Sirs!”-then cocking his eye like a bird-“I wonder if Shakespeare and Bacon ever met to
screw ilk other up
?”‘
⁴⁷

Back in London, Davy was elected President of the Royal Society unopposed in November 1820. In his acceptance speeches he tried very hard to smooth over old differences, and presented an uplifting vision of ‘The Progress and Prospects of Science’ to the assembled Society in December. He recalled the great tradition of ‘experiment, discovery and speculative science’, from the time of Hooke and Newton to that of William Herschel and Cavendish. If he was now in some sense their ‘general’ and leader, he announced, ‘I shall always be happy to act as a private soldier in the ranks of science.’ Perhaps there were some ironic smiles at that.