Lady Emma Tankerville

Updated Blog by June Watson, Doctoral Candidate, Northumbria University, October 21, 2021 

The Tankerville Collection, Northumberland Archives Ref. NRO.424. The collection contains the private papers of the Bennet family, Earls of Tankerville, whose family seat was Chillingham Castle, Northumberland. The collection was deposited by the Tankerville family at Northumberland Archives in the 1970s. 

Lady Emma, 4^th Countess of Tankerville (1752-1836) 

Elite women who collaborated in the male world of early modern science during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment left little public trace of their existence and their voices were airbrushed out of historical accounts of the development of modern science. For those intellectual women who tried; their efforts were often ridiculed. (1) The recovery of Lady Emma Tankerville as a significant botanist and artist is important. She was an exceptionally gifted woman at the forefront of discovering new scientific knowledge in the early modern period and deserves recognition. 

The impact of social history and the scope of archival material has shown how little was understood about elite women involved in science and new knowledge exchange. Only men could attend university and patriarchal culture made it impossible for women to upstage men of science or publish their contributions. My research into the private Tankerville family papers in Northumberland Archives has uncovered some remarkable correspondence about this amazing woman. 

The family correspondence revealed the inner life of a female intellectual described by her husband’s colleague as having ‘the most merit of any woman in England; is very clever and a great wit,’ who had a leading role in the world of gentlemanly science of the period between 1771 and 1836. (2) Lady Emma Tankerville née Colebrooke was accepted into the close scientific and aristocratic social circle of Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, at his home 32 Soho Square, London. The house was previously her Colebrooke family London residence before her marriage in 1771. Banks personally named a new Chinese swamp-orchid in honour of Emma, the Phaius tankervilleae. Emma was recorded as the first person to successfully cultivate the orchid after its introduction to England in 1778 by John Fothergill. (3). The only other woman to receive this honour was Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III.  Sir Joseph Banks wrote to a friend in 1788, “Emma knows plants well and paints them exquisitely.” (4)  

Emma’s letters reveal a pious woman devoted to her husband and mother of eleven children. She took an active part in managing the family estate at Chillingham, Northumberland with the aid of her trusted steward John Bailey. At her main residence Walton House, she cultivated and experimented with exotic plants in her hothouses in her gardens overlooking the River Thames with head gardener William Richardson, (an estate purchased with her marriage settlement in 1771). (5) Her husband Charles shared her love of natural history and was a collector of rare shells. Charles was also instrumental in drawing up the rules of the game of cricket. (6) 

In 1803 letters reveal Emma and Charles predicted their vast family fortune would be at future risk due to the extravagance of their son and heir Charles Augustus, Lord Ossulston, later 5^th Earl Tankerville. His gambling took a significant toll on the family wealth. Significantly, after Emma’s death in 1836, her personal collection of 648 botanical drawings was locked away in the family archive. Walton House her beloved main home for sixty years was demolished by her son. In 1840 on the same site, he commissioned architect Sir Charles Barry to build him an Italianate styled house known as ‘Mount Felix.’ Emma’s premonition proved correct as her son ran out of money and the house had to be sold to pay the building costs. 

In 1932 all the contents of Chillingham Castle and her beloved botanical collection were auctioned, and the unoccupied castle fell into disrepair. Emma’s collection was bought at the sale by The Bentham-Moxam Trust and donated to the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. (7) 

The Tankerville Collection of 648 botanical drawings at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is one of their most important collections. Costly conservation work is required for the collection therefore it remains in a climate-controlled area unseen by the public. The lack of provenance has also blighted the use of the collection for research. Many drawings are by important artists of the period such as Georg Dionysius Ehret and Margaret Meen, however hundreds are unattributed. The drawings represented every flower cultivated by Emma at Walton and were said to be the largest and best collection in London at the time.  

My current exhibition has concentrated on the twenty-one botanical drawings painted by Emma during a stay on the island of Madeira between 1811-1812. What was especially exciting to discover whilst examining the drawings at Kew was Emma’s handwriting in pencil on the back of each drawing. She wrote about the potential economic and medical benefits of each plant and their uses as a food source, signed and dated each drawing, and scientifically classified each one according to Linnaean taxonomy. This information would enable her to have considerable influence acting as a go-between in metropolitan scientific and political circles. 

Madeira was a Portuguese island in the mid-Atlantic that was favoured by the wealthy in the late Georgian period as a place to recuperate from tuberculosis on account of its temperate climate. It was relatively safe under the protection of the British garrison stationed there who were helping Portugal defend the island from Napoleon. Emma accompanied two adult children to Madeira who were experiencing health problems. Tuberculosis was a common virus of the day that saw no barrier to class or race. Fortunately for Emma, the family members recovered, and she returned home to Walton with them in 1812, plus her twenty-one illustrations.

The Madeira Collection will be exhibited at the Alnwick Playhouse Gallery from Dec 1, 2021, until Jan 17, 2022 in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Northumberland Archives. Afterwards it will be exhibited at the Queen’s Hall, Hexham from March 7, 2022, until April 29, 2022. A booklet based on the Madeira drawings and my research will be available at the exhibitions. 

1. Londa Schiebinger, The Mind has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 5. 

2. Herbert Maxwell, (ed.), Creevey Papers: A Selection from the Correspondence and Diaries of the late Thomas Creevey, M.P. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), p. 36. 

3. Edward Smith, The Life of Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society with some notices of his Friends and Contemporaries (London: John Lane, The Bodle Head, 1911), p. 83. 

4. Ibid. 

5. ‘Walton House, the seat of Lord Tankerville,’ painted by John Hassell 1822. © Surrey History Centre, Ref. SHC/4348/4/30/3. 

6. ‘A  Catalogue of the Shells contained in the collection of the late Earl of Tankerville 1825,’ https://ia800204.us.archive.org/3/items.catalogueofshell00sowe/catalogueoshell00sowe.pdf. Auctioneers G B Sowerby F.L.S., Regent Street, London. Accessed: May 5, 2021. 

7. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. ‘The Tankerville Collection.’  

About the Author 
June Watson is currently a Doctoral Candidate at Northumbria University. She has a special interest in recovering women of science of the late eighteenth-century. Her dissertation ‘Recovering the Women of Science in the Post-Colonial World of Empire’ was highly commended by judges for the Women’s History Network M.A. Competition 2021. She will continue to research and restore women to the narratives of early science, by investigating their social networks and the global trading activities of their families. This will show how their social networks served as an influential power base, becoming inextricably interconnected socially and politically, exposing women’s wider engagement in other disciplines.