The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  The Hungerford chapel at Salisbury before its demolition, 1788

  More than a decade earlier, Horace Walpole had decried the loss of the Hungerford chapel at Salisbury Cathedral. This exquisite, traceried temple to the family name had been destroyed during the renovations of the cathedral in the late 1780s. "I shall heartily lament with you, Sir, the demolition of those beautiful chapels at Salisbury," Walpole wrote to the antiquarian Richard Gough. "It is an old complaint with me, Sir, that when families are extinct, chapters take the freedom of removing ancient monuments, and even of selling over again the site of such tombs. A scandalous, nay, dishonest, abuse, and very unbecoming clergymen!"53 The Hungerford family, in most eyes, was already extinct by the close of the eighteenth century. Smithson was not to be counted as an inheritor of the Hungerford line. And when Sir Richard Colt Hoare penned his history of the Hungerfords in 1822, he neglected even to mention Smithson's mother, listing her siblings Lumley and Henrietta Maria as the only Keate descendants of their branch, ironically ensuring Smithson's further obliteration. Smithson was not, of course, to be found in the lists of the offspring of the Duke of Northumberland either. On the pages of history being recorded around him, James Smithson did not see himself inscribed.

  In late April 1803 Smithson finally set sail for the Continent, his servant and baggage in tow.54

  EIGHT

  The Hurricane of War, 1803-1807

  I left England on a trip to Paris, was overtaken by the hurricane of war, and cast away onto this desolate country.

  —James Smithson in Germany to Lord Holland,

  November 1805

  BY THE TIME Smithson crossed the Channel in April 1803 England had been consumed for over a year by all things French. As soon as peace was proclaimed, fashionable society had raced over to see the changes that "twelve years of virtually uninterrupted cataclysm"—as Henry Yorke described it in his Letters from France—had wrought on the aristocracy's favorite country. They were astonished at the latest fashions: tailcoats, wide lapels, and tight cravats for the men, and for the ladies diaphanous high-waisted Grecian gowns that left little to the imagination. They marveled at the new Musée Napoléonienne at the Louvre, bursting with antiquities and masterpieces plundered from Italy. Above all they went to see the man himself, Napoleon. Once a month he held receptions at the Tuileries palace, and on Sundays throngs of carriages crowded the road en route to Josephine's entertainments at Malmaison. Those not so fortunate as to gain an audience still had plenty of opportunity to see Napoleon, as Smithson's brother had, at one of his frequent reviews of the troops.1

  Much of the country had been ravaged by a decade of revolution. Monasteries and churches lay in crumbled ruins, tombs and religious monuments mutilated and sacked. The roads were miserable, save that from Calais to Paris—which Napoleon had shrewdly overhauled for Cornwallis' arrival to the treaty negotiations at Amiens. But Paris itself glittered. The English discovered in the capital a flourishing neoclassical wonderland. Old buildings had been recast as new, with names redolent of optimism and celebration: the Palais Royal—the center of English pleasure-seeking—found fresh life as the Tribunat, and the old Cafe de la Rotonde in the leafy garden courtyard was rechristened the Pavilion of Peace. The site of the gruesome guillotine had been renamed the Place de la Concorde. Eager to put memories of the Terror behind them, the populace and their English visitors reveled in luxury. Bonaparte's installation of himself as Life Consul inaugurated a new type of court existence, fully as ravishing and opulent as that of the ancien regime. Life in Paris was dedicated once more to frivolity. Theatres were packed to the rafters, and the political cafes—where speeches had once stirred fiery pledges of sacrifice, and pamphlets had raised men's thoughts to revolution—lay empty and forgotten.

  Smithson hardly had time to savor the changes, however. Already when he set sail in April 1803 tensions between the two countries were running high. The peace was a fragile, poorly brokered one, and in the eyes of England the price was steep. After nine years of war and many victories at sea, England had handed back virtually everything to France. All it retained was Spanish Trinidad and Dutch Ceylon—though Smithson was delighted at news of the latter, which meant he might be able to procure some of the reddish crystals (corundum) the Dutch used "as a substitute for emery" found in profusion on the island.2 The English eyed with suspicion the French factories that continued to churn out munitions and the shipyards filled with the clamor of workers. Napoleon still had troops stationed in the Netherlands, and he continued aggressively to expand France's borders into Italy and Switzerland, annexing Elba and Piedmont. Reports from India and the Levant hinted at intrigues there as well. Through the sale of the territory of Louisiana to the Americans (the Louisiana Purchase) he brought $15 million into his coffers and simultaneously eliminated the threat of the United States having cause to join England against him. England in consequence reneged on their promise to relinquish Malta, in order to retain some advantageous position against any possible attack Napoleon might launch against Egypt or India. Less than a month after Smithson arrived in France the truce between England and France finally ruptured. "I was so unfortunate as to get into France just at the time that it became necessary to leave it," he wrote to a friend in Italy, "and indeed was out of it only two days before the English were so traitorously arrested."3

  Within days of Britain's declaration of war on May 18, 1803, Napoleon retaliated by announcing the unprecedented arrest of all English males between the ages of eighteen and sixty in France. Napoleon's order contravened every tradition of conduct between nations at the time; it was a gross violation of international faith and goodwill, and it set the stage for the modern state of total war. In the eighteenth-century conception of warfare, only crowns were at war and only crowns' armed and paid forces were fighting. Gentlemen like Smithson had always been able to travel above the fray. With Napoleon's edict, people like Smithson for the first time became an inseparable part of war.4

  The net thrown captured hundreds of English indiscriminately, shopkeepers together with peers. Lord Elgin en route back from his post at Constantinople—without the Parthenon marbles, which were traveling separately by sea—was arrested, despite brandishing his passports and pleading diplomatic cover. Lord Yarmouth, the future founder of the Wallace Collection, in Paris picture-hunting with his wife, children, and eight servants, likewise found himself shipped off to Verdun—without his wife, who was left in the hands of the Governor of Paris, General Junot, and promptly became the general's mistress. Doctors and clergymen, historically exempt from capture even if they were accompanying the military, were also rounded up. Most were taken to walled fortress towns which, on account of Napoleon's extensive land grabs, now lay well within France's new borders. Verdun soon became the most famous depot, a reputation gained not for any cruel punishments meted out there but because of the lavish lifestyles the detainees managed to lead. The English continued their gambling, horse races, and parties; Yarmouth kept on collecting paintings, with help of a Parisian dealer. By the end of 1803 Napoleon had decreed that all gentleman prisoners should be sent to Verdun. Throughout the wars the town always had an especially high concentration of English wealth. English shopkeepers, arrested alongside their traditional clientele, set up their stands, transforming the walled city into a mini-Bath or Tunbridge Wells. Many of those arrested spent years immured there, some until peace was declared in 1814.

  Smithson was one of the few lucky ones. He left France shortly before the declaration of war, setting out for the Low Countries. Soon thereafter he removed himself to a further safety in Germany, "in what I swear to you seemed at the time an excess of precaution," he told one friend.5 In those weeks before the recommencement of hostilities, everyone believed the English would be given ample warning for departure. Argus, one of the English language papers in Paris, assured its readers it was safe to remain in France, even after the departure of Lord Whitworth from the embassy; France after all, they argued, was no lo
nger ruled by a Robespierre.6 But Smithson, like Bertie Greatheed, clearly heard "the buzz of war."7 Time soon showed, in fact, that his zealous self-preservation was not an overreaction.

  Smithson was a voracious tourist, and from the marks he made in his guidebook it seems he did pause for some sightseeing as he moved swiftly over the Rhine. The tradition of observation begun when he was still in his teens he retained all his life. He filled dozens of little pocket diaries. But these all vanished in the Smithsonian fire, and the stories they contained have been lost forever—tales perhaps from the first days of balloon flight, of the streets of Paris during the Revolution, of Vesuvius erupting or meteors "from the moon"; accounts of laboratory accidents, sudden discoveries, or even Smithson's reflections on fame, his family, and the future. His collection of books is all that remains, and from the myriad faint pencil markings in his guidebooks have to be gleaned a shadowy sense of the mind of the traveler.8

  Smithson's marginalia reflect his Enlightenment obsessions with utility, improvement, and novelty. Outside the towns he tracked the natural resources that fueled men's fortunes—like the marble quarries of Nancy and the iron mines of Dinant—and he looked for specimens that might augment his own growing collection. He made notes on the windmills surrounding Lille, busily churning out colza oil, and the well-known pin factory at Venloo. Often it was the use of local clays or stones that gave each region its distinctive architectural flavor, and Smithson was quick to identify monuments that had been built in a particular vernacular style or tradition. He traced every town's source of water: the lavish fountains at Dieppe that gushed night and day, drawing water from a league away through subterranean aqueducts; the cisterns at nearly every house in Calais, where there were no fountains; and how at Bruges, which had no fountains either, the city was threaded with canals whose waters raced onward towards the sea. Ever on the lookout for ways to improve his health, he took care to note those mineral waters that were especially prized.

  Historical events, both recent and long past, also drew his attention. At Cologne he inspected the swords that the villagers used to battle Charles of Burgundy in 1474; at Mayence he noted with interest the special currency that had been coined during the 1793 revolutionary siege against the Austrians. He took in art, admiring the high-style artifice of Rubens' The Descent from the Cross in Antwerp Cathedral and the fantastical Chateau de Retz built by the dues of Valois. And he sampled the gastronomic delights of each locale: the wild chicory root that was drunk instead of coffee around Liége, the duck pâté of Amiens and the white-raspberry jam of Metz. He savored the excellent haricots of Soissons, the little cakes of Nanterre, and the wine from the town of Worms so delicious it was nicknamed "the milk of our Lady."

  Smithson seems finally to have been attracted by anything unusual. A distinctive ivory Christ on the cross in the Eglise des Capucins at Brussels was depicted in death with shocking realism, his mouth gaping open instead of the more customary and decorous closed position; this drew from Smithson a long dash in the margin. In the crypt of the Cordeliers at Brive, Smithson was fascinated to learn that the bodies exhumed from the tombs were discovered intact, the earth in which they lay having desiccated them without destroying them. He was equally titillated at the possibility that one of the cadavers was "la belle Paule," the famous teenage beauty from Renaissance Toulouse, so exquisitely formed that parliament had decreed she must show herself to the public at least once a week in a place that would permit the multitudes to gaze upon her.

  Most of all Smithson desired information, and when his sources disappointed him he did not hesitate to unleash a disparaging critique. "No Proof," and "Nonsense," he scribbled next to the description of the astronomical clock in the cathedral at Strasbourg, which the author explained no longer worked because there were no longer men smart enough to fix it. The clock had long been considered one of the most sophisticated mechanical creations in existence; philosophers like Locke had famously employed it as a symbol of the Newtonian universe in action, with God as clockmaker and master of the intricate inner workings, and humans capable only of admiring the rotating calendars, the allegorical paintings, and the mechanical rooster which sprang to life at the ringing of the hours. Smithson, of course, had devoted his life to discovering the secrets of matter itself, in company with many brilliant colleagues; it is not surprising, he found the guidebook's statements preposterous.9

  Amidst his touring—his taking in of pictures, sculpture, and architecture, and the natural marvels of mineral deposits, sources of springs, or particularly interesting crops—Smithson continued to muse on the notion of philanthropy. In his guidebook he was drawn to the story of the foundation of the Hospital of St. Mathias, in the ancient Roman town of Tréves, the last principal town before entering the Low Countries (now Trier in Germany).10 Two centuries earlier a marmiton, or kitchen boy, had served the monks of the Abbey of St. Mathias. He left the abbey and attached himself to a nobleman, or seigneur, who eventually left the scullion all his worldly goods. The marmiton then returned to the abbey to establish a foundation for the poor, the Hospital of St. Mathias. In highlighting the story Smithson underscored the word "seigneur"—lord, or gentleman. It was a word he frequently used to describe himself, signing his letters "James Smithson, Seigneur Anglais." At Treves Smithson seemed more interested in the role the nobleman played in the establishment of the foundation than that of the lowly kitchen boy. At the time of the guidebook's publication in 1802, more than two-thirds of the city's inhabitants were dependent upon the generosity of the convents. Here was an excellent example of a seigneur, like himself, whose money—enjoyed during a lifetime—had later transformed a community.

  Fresh from London where he had been immersed in the foundation of the Royal institution, Smithson was probably filled with ideas for instruments to improve society. It is conceivable he was thinking already of a forum for his own riches. He was nearing forty, unmarried and without an heir, and through his investments he was amassing a tidy fortune. Smithson's community—his family, in a sense—were his fellow savants, the people who, like him, considered themselves citizens of the globe. They believed, as Smithson wrote, that "It is in knowledge that man has found his greatness and his happiness."11 They perceived themselves to be the future leaders of the world, a meritorious elite, engaged in a constant, ongoing dialogue on the advancement of society—wrestling with schemes for the amelioration of the poor, the diffusion of educational opportunity, the abolition of the slave trade, the improvement of agriculture, and the increase of patronage for scientific research.

  By late 1803 Smithson was in Kassel, the capital of lower Hesse, a land of thickly forested hills and fertile valleys rolling golden in wheat at harvest time. Kassel, straddling the River Fulda, was a royal city, born out of a prince's Enlightenment aspirations. The houses of the new town, neat and classical, were all of stone. Wide, clean allees radiated out in all directions, lined with pollarded trees and illuminated by a thousand street lights. Nearby were the fashionable pleasure grounds of Wilhelmshohe, the Versailles-like summer palace of the electors, high on a hill overlooking the city, where Smithson searched for specimens while strolling among the gothic ruins and Italian follies.

  Kassel was a place friendly to the English, an area historically loyal to the Hanoverians. Much of the electorate's wealth had come from George Ill's hiring of Hessian mercenaries to execute his battles, especially in the American colonies. It was also a city extremely well suited to a mineralogist and collector, harboring a number of scientifically minded residents, multiple private mineral collections, an observatory, and the colossal Muséum Fridericianum. One probable friend of Smithson's in Kassel was his fellow Royal Society member, the Irish chemist and mineralogist Richard Chenevix. Another Smithson friend here might have been Johann Gottlieb Groschke, the translator of Martin Klaproth's works and a member long before, with Smithson, of the Society for Promoting Natural History.12

  Smithson seems to have based himself in Kassel through
out much of 1804. He already wished to be back in England, but the simplest way home, across the Channel, remained off-limits: "A feeble constitution makes it preferable for me to wait in Germany rather than expose myself to the rude and disagreeable passage home via the North Sea, a route I was once forced to undertake."13 Napoleon's advances, furthermore, meant that no end to Smithson's wait lay in sight. A few months before, on December 2, 1804, in an extraordinary ceremony at Notre-Dame that borrowed elements from Charlemagne's coronation, Napoleon, wearing royal red robes and ermine, had crowned himself Emperor with a laurel wreath of gold. For Wordsworth, who like Smithson had ardently embraced the Revolution in its first years, this act was the final blow, "the dog returning to his vomit."14 Smithson, too, had come to believe that the

  French republic sprouted up much too quickly, and on too recent ruins to be of any duration. A plant of so rapid a groth [sic] could have but very little root. It could be but a mushroom which would not survive the gloomy day w[hic]h produced it … The amiable part of the French character, the desire, nay the ambition, to please, is unfortunately a good resulting from an innate propensity to dependance [sic] and was it not so, french impetus is too great not to pass thro' liberty to anarchy, and recoil back from anarchy to despotism.15

  His aspirations for the Revolution's transformation of society had faded, but Smithson, happily, was cynical enough not to miss an opportunity to profit from his perceptions of the French character. Before he had left for Europe he had wagered a friendly bet with Lord Holland over whether monarchy would return to France. With Napoleon's coronation he saw that his little one-guinea gamble was going to bring him one hundred in return, and he promptly wrote off to Lord Holland in Spain to collect on it.16