If any of Byron’s contemporaries at Cambridge had been asked to nominate The Man Most Likely To, it is a safe bet that it would have been William Bankes, and while things did not turn out quite as any but his immediate set might have guessed, that hardly detracts from his biographical appeal. Rich, clever and brave, a much lionised traveller, an inspired collector and generous patron, ‘Nubian’ Bankes would seem to have had it all, when a meeting with a guardsman in a convenience ‘that afforded accommodation for only one individual’ threatened him with disgrace and the gallows.
In the same year that a Captain Henry Nicholls was hanged for sodomy, Bankes was lucky to get away with an improbable acquittal, but caution had never been his longest suit. As a young man in Jerusalem he had dressed up in Albanian disguise to penetrate the forbidden Dome of the Rock, and something of the same taste for risk-taking seems to have characterised his private life, because even his near-run thing with Private Flowers was not enough to keep him away from Green Park and a second arrest as ‘a person of wicked, lewd, filthy and unnatural mind and disposition’.
Fleeing the country to escape his trial, and subsequently outlawed by a vindictive government, Bankes lived out the last 14 years of his life in exile, in Venice, collecting and commissioning new works of art to be sent back to England.
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