By Neil McKenna, Amazon, July 2004, Customer Reviews

If anything, the title of Anne Sebba’s new book is a little misleading.The Exiled Collector: William Bankes and the Making of an English Country House only suggests part of a much richer and more facsinating life. The exile in question happened in 1841 after Bankes was caught in compromising circumstances with a guardsman in London’s Green Park. Bankes fled to Europe fearing for his life and spent the next fourteen years based in Venice buying works of arts and architectural embellishments for his family seat, Kingston Lacy in Dorset, running the house by remote control. The house still exists and is under the care of the National Trust.

But as Anne Sebba reveals in this entertaining and readable biography, there were many sides to William Bankes: he was a friend and contemporary of Lord Byron; a friend of the Duke of Wellington; an explorer, a traveller and an egyptologist. He was a self-taught connoisseur, travelling through war-torn Spain cannily buying paintings by Spanish artists. He was also a lover of men. Anne Sebba’s portrait of Bankes is vivid and immediate, and mercifully unencumbered by the dead hand of dry scholarship. Good books should always whet the appetite, and leave you a little hungry for more. My appetite has certainly been whetted. A terrific tale, well told.

By Lucasta Miller, Weekend Telegraph, 10 July 2004

‘ I have heard of Purse=pride and birth=pride and now we have place=pride,’ wrote Byron in 1811 of his Cambridge friend, William Bankes. Even before he had taken possession of his family seat, Kingston Lacy, the young Bankes was passionate about its decoration, trawling the shops of  Leicester Square for carved wooden bedheads and other fashionable gothic furnishings. Yet the great irony about this obsessive collector was that he would spend the last years of his life in exile, forbidden by law from visiting the home he loved after he was caught in flagrante with a guardsman in Green Park.

Bankes was born in 1786 , scion of a Dorset family whose forebears included the redoubtable Mary Bankes, who held Corfe Castle against besieging roundheads during the Civil War. Caring parents had given him a happy childhood – apart from his years in the piranha pool of Westminster School and he went up to Trinity in a spirit more of hedonism  than ambition. Fitting up his rooms in the manner of a Roman Catholic chapel complete with choristers – “what the devil does Mr Bankes do with those singing boys,” asked a contemporary- campness seems to have been in his sensibility even then.

Nonetheless there was nothing effete about the swashbuckling way in which he approached the next stage of his life, a version of the  grand tour that went impressively further than might have been expected of the average aristocratic youth.  Travels in Spain- from which he took home spoils of the recent Peninsular war including some splendid Murillos – were followed by explorations in Egypt and the Levant where he disguised himself as an Albanian, drank the local  tipple Booza, fell in with the extraordinary  Italian adventurer and  Muslim convert, Giovanni Finati and fell out with Lady Hester Stanhope. Bankes also transformed himself  into a serious Egyptologist making pioneering discoveries  and sending home the rather unweildy souvenir of a huge granite obelisk, which was eventually erected on the lawn at Kingston Lacy.

Back in England, Bankes’s career in politics  – he sat twice as a Tory MP, more out of noblesse oblige  than personal ambition, was less distinguished  than that of his high-minded father. He was clearly a better raconteur than orator ( the verdict of a fellow MP on his maiden speech:” ranting, whining, bad actor  in a barn speaking a full tragedy part mixed up with  the drawls and twangs of a Methodist preacher.”)  It was in 1833 during his second period  in Parliamnet that he was first arrested in suspicious circumstancesin a public lavatory with a certain Private Flowers. On that occasion he was acquitted  owing partly to the roster of VIPs  he called as character withnesses ( the Duke of Wellington for example recalled in defence that when Bankes was robbed  of his watch in Madrid he made “so manly a resistance  that I gave him one of mine.”)

After the embarrassment  of this escapade, Bankes retired from  public life. With the death of his father, he was then master of Kingston Lacy  and began to turn his  mind and money to remodelling it with  the help of the earchitect Charles Barry, adding for example a luxuriant staircase of Carrara Marble. His reputation as an arbiter of tastebecame such that  in 1841 his opinion was sought on the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament. But then disaster struck- he was daught in the act of indecently exposing himself which led  to his being outlawed after fleeing to the continent on his lawyer’s advice. At that time  sodomy was still a capital offence.

His property was settled on his brothers to avoid it being sequestered  by the state and  Bankes settled in Venice. from where he continued to collect. commission and design beautiful objects to send back to the house he was forbidden to see again . Family legend has it that he did indeed make one such journey, possibly with the help of local smugglers , before his death  in 1855. This is the first biography of  William Bankes and it shows that his story- poignant and colourful by turns – well deserves to be told.

Financial Times Magazine, 03 July 2004

When William John Bankes- scholar of ancient Egypt, Member of Parliament, art expert and travel writer- fled into exile in 1841 at the age of 54, he lost more than his homeland and his dignity. He also lost his remarkable house, Kingston Lacy in Dorset, which he had spent years embellishing and furnishing with works of art as well as planting a two-mile avenue of trees in memory of his mother. Bankes had been caught in flagrante with a young guardsman in a London park. Facing the death sentence, he took the time honoured route of Englishmen in such circumstances: grabbed his hat, jumped bail and sailed for the more understanding climate of the continent.

Anne Sebba’s fascinating book is more than the portrait of another rich gay dilettante in Venice buying up everything he can get his hands on, however: it is the portrait of an obsession- for collecting, and for a house in which to house that collection.

Although Bankes could not legally go back to Kingston Lacy, he never stopped treating it as if he lived there, or one day would again. For 15 years he travelled all over Italy issuing drawings and plans and commissions to baffled stonemasons, sculptors, gilders, frame-makers and painters . Meanwhile he bombarded his family and steward with letters containing meticulous descriptions of what was to be done with the objects when- if -they finally arrived in Dorset.
Sebba illuminates this bizarre but brilliant project by bringing Bankes out of the footnotes to which history consigned him and back to life. His house still stands: his collection is in it.

By Christopher Lee, LITERARY REVIEW, July 2004

When William John Bankes began to travel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the rest of the world was poor. Thus the Englishman could get  by on very little and put his learning, and especially his Protestant arrogance, to good use. Whilst at Cambridge, where he encouraged choristers in certain rituals (or so it was said), and when not corrupting Byron, Bankes became well grounded in the Classics. After Cambridge, everyone travelled. War tourism was fashionable and Bankes headed for the Iberian  Peninsula. Wellington, a friend of the family, found him well motivated and tenacious. He then moved on, shopping for trinkets in a zigzag through Europe, to the Balkans, Asia Minor and Egypt.

IN 1815 Bankes was little more than an informed tourist. Within five years he was recognised as a leader of the celebrated school of English amateur explorers.  He then became a precise epigrapher; his recordings of hieroglyphics in Egypt  were sophisticated for the time. Henry Salt, then the British Consul in Cairo and himself a good Egyptologist, thought Bankes gifted and a scholar “possessing a fund of anecdote and good humour.”

Bankes was also brave, or foolish, or, when he needed to be, both.He penetrated further into the desert than most Europeans to sketch and record the stone cuttings of tombs and monuments and was only the second European to visit Abu Simbel (Jean-Louis Burckhardt, who developed enormous regard for Bankes, had been the first and had discovered the temples of Rameses 11).

For seven years, Bankes roamed ruins and monuments, many of them never seen before by Western eyes. He met (and fell out with) Hester Stanhope, was swindled  by the wretched James Silk Buckingham and was adored by Giovanni Finati, whose own celebrated writings on discovery were based on Bankes’s work – with  the latter’s approval.

Bankes returned to England and was the talk of London. The obelisk he had sent to Kingston Lacy, his house in Dorset, was far more important an artefact than Cleopatra’s Needle, which arrived in this country much later. So what went wrong?

A dalliance with a guardsman in Green Park in 1841 exposed him as a sodomite (which at the time was  a hanging offence.) As a result he went into self-imposed exile.

Arriving in Venice,  Bankes became a celebrated patron of stonecutters, copyists, marblers, masons and painters. He had whole ceilings sent to Kingston Lacy. Huge carvings arrived. Stewards had strict instructions as to where everything should be installed  how every room shoul be alteresd how every wall should be removed and set elsewhere. He knew what he wanted the house to look like outside and in. However, he was abroad and outlawed so all this was done from memory with the most detailed  drawings imaginable, he effected a complete makeover of the family seat although he could never return to live there.

This is a rich biography of a complex figure whose family owned  Dorset from Portland to the lower slopes of the Cranborne Chase. The writing sparkles because Anne Sebba has seen the adventure in Bankes’s life.

When I lived in Dorset, I used to drop into Kingston Lacy to admire the interiors , the grand cedar walk , the Egyptian Obelisk, the rare breeds that roamed the cow pastures and the National Trust tearoom. When the house was re-opened in 1981 one consultant to the NT said  it felt ” like a stagnant pool with no air.” Of course it did. Bankes had created a monument  to his whole and to his own long, uncertain journey. He had  built his own pyramid.

By Jane Ridley

Jennie Churchill was the wife of the most celebrated political enfant terrible of his day, Lord Randolph Churchill, and the mother of Winston, the most famous Englishman of all. Little wonder that, squashed between these two alpha males, Lady Randolph Churchill has usually been seen as a walk-on part. Raven-haired and fiery-eyed, “Black Jane” is alleged to have slept with 200 men. She is chiefly remembered for being a bad mother to the infant Winston, leaving him to the tender mercies of Nannie Everest. Anne Sebba’s gripping new biography is a sharp and intelligent reassessment of Jennie’s life, and it nails a number of myths.

Jennie was one of the three daughters of Leonard Jerome, an extrovert New York financier whose roller-coaster fortunes so upset his bourgeois wife Clara that she left her husband in New York and fled with her daughters to Paris . Brought up on the fringes of the disreputable court of Napoleon III, Jennie learned early about bad behaviour. She also learned how to dress, buying her clothes at Worth, the outrageously expensive Paris designer. Jennie was a compulsive shopper, and throughout her life she spent money like water, always expecting Daddy to pick up the tab.

At the age of nineteen, Jennie fell in love with the dashing Lord Randolph Churchill. There’s no doubt, as Sebba shows, that this was a coup de foudre, but right from the start there were tensions. The Marlboroughs were downwardly mobile dukes, badly in need of a cash-rich heiress, and they were disappointed to discover that Leonard Jerome had just lost a fortune. Pre-nup bickering between the families figured badly for the marriage. Jennie’s first child, Winston, was born at Blenheim after six months of marriage. The Churchill story is that he was premature, but Sebba shows convincingly that he was a healthy, normal baby, and probably conceived – rather shockingly – before marriage, though there’s no doubt he was Randolph’s son.

Randolph Churchill was brilliant in a manic sort of way and he could be charming, but he was also the rudest man in Britain , with a vile temper, and right from the start the marriage was rocky. He quarrelled with his friend and patron, the Prince of Wales, over the Aylesford scandal, when Randolph , desperate to prevent his brother Blandford from eloping with Lady Aylesford, tried to blackmail the Prince, and he and Jennie were forced into social exile in Ireland . Randolph spent most of his time away from Jennie – Sebba even speculates (no more than that) that he was gay, as his companions were always men. Whatever the truth about that, Randolph was undeniably ill from very early on in the marriage. Whether in fact he had syphilis is still controversial, and denied by some members of the Churchill family. But as Sebba sensibly points out, the fact is that he thought he had it, and his doctors treated him for it and (later) told Jennie that he had it, so whatever was actually the matter, ‘He might as well have had syphilis’. It’s probable too that Randolph was not the father of Jennie’s second son, Jack. The likely father was a handsome but stupid peer named Lord Falmouth.

In spite of his illness, Randolph managed to achieve extraordinary political success. Salisbury made him Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1886, but by then he was a sick man, unable to carry the workload. In a fit of pique he resigned – he didn’t even tell Jennie beforehand – and after that the marriage unravelled. Randolph was verbally abusive, though probably not violent, and there were constant worries about money as Jennie continued to spend and Randolph seemed incapable of earning anything. No one blamed her for being unfaithful to Randolph . The love of her life was Charles Kinsky, a glamorous Austrian diplomat who dumped her cruelly. There were many others, and the men grew younger as she grew older, but as Sebba shows, many of Jennie’s alleged “lovers” were in fact just friends. Perhaps her most important friend was the Prince of Wales. Sebba, probably rightly, discounts the possibility of a sexual relationship, though in the absence of Jennie’s letters to the Prince, it’s impossible to be certain. To her credit, Jennie was always loyal and tender to Randolph . The end was terrible. Lurching like a drunk, unable to speak or swallow and prone to violent rages, Randolph was a pathetic wreck. Bravely, Jennie accompanied him on a last, gut-wrenching world cruise. She survived partly because of her close relationship with her sisters, Leonie and Clara – all three of the Jerome girls married bounders who had hoped, in vain, to attach themselves to dollar transfusions from American cash cows.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is Sebba’s account of Jennie’s relationship with Winston. When he was a small child there’s no doubt that Jennie neglected him, parcelling him off to Nannie Everest. He wrote pathetic letters from his first prep school, where he was beaten, and Jennie ignored him. So much, so bad. But, as Sebba perceptively shows, in later life Winston spun a myth about his childhood, claiming that famous men are the product of unhappy childhoods. Randolph, whom Winston hero-worshipped, treated him far worse than Jennie ever did, writing savagely cruel letters. As a teenager Winston wrote letters to Jennie from school, which, by the stiff-upper-lipped standards of the day, were both cheeky and demanding. Jennie never froze him out or cut him down, and Sebba rightly sees Winston’s whinging as a sign of the strength of the relationship. Like many mothers with terminally sick husbands, Jennie was extraordinarily close to her son. After Randolph ‘s death, she poured all her disappointed and frustrated ambition into Winston, and she pulled every string she had to secure his promotion as a soldier, or to publish his first books. Contemporaries thought the young Winston disgustingly pushy and spoiled, but Jennie’s unconditional love gave him the confidence to reach the top. He always came first.

Sebba suggests that Jennie felt drawn to younger men partly because they could never threaten Winston’s dominant position in her life. At the age of forty-six she made herself ridiculous by marrying the beautiful but dim George Cornwallis-West, who at twenty-six was the same age as Winston. This ended, predictably, in tears – George left her for another older woman, the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, earning the nickname ‘the old wives’ tale’. Jennie who never gave up, married at the age of sixty-four her third husband, Montagu Porch, another beauty, twenty-three years her junior.

Anne Sebba has written an immensely enjoyable book. Her prose is as smooth and elegant as expensive cashmere, and the book reads like a novel, which is as it should be, for Lady Randolph Churchill was a character larger than life.