BANKES, Ralph (1631-77), of Corfe Castle and Kingston Lacy, Dorset

The ancestors of Sir Ralph Bankes had made their fortune through lead mining in Cumberland. His father, Sir John Bankes, had pursued a successful legal career which had seen his promotion to lord chief justice and privy councillor under Charles I, and enabled the purchase of considerable estates in Dorset, centred on Corfe Castle in the Isle of Purbeck.20Dorset RO, D/BKL, Box 8C/63, ‘Memorial of Sir John Bankes being sworn privy councillor’ (31 Jan. 1641). After the outbreak of civil war in 1642, Sir John Bankes attended the king, but his sympathies were somewhat equivocal. He wrote to Giles Grene* in May of that year voicing his concerns: ‘it grieves my heart to see these distractions; I have adventured for to speak my mind freely according to my conscience, and what hazards I have run of the king’s indignation in a high measure, you will hear of others’.21G. Bankes, The Story of Corfe Castle (1853), 134-6. Sir John’s views no doubt found sympathy among the moderate parliamentarians at Westminster, but his local position in Dorset was much less favourable. On Sir John’s departure for Oxford, the redoubtable Lady Bankes was left to hold Corfe Castle, which was besieged in 1643 by the local parliamentarians under Sir Walter Erle* and Sir Thomas Trenchard*. Sir John Bankes died at Oxford in December 1644, and Lady Bankes soon decamped to her Middlesex estates, leaving Corfe Castle to be garrisoned by the king’s army. It was eventually taken by Colonel John Bingham*, by means of subterfuge, in February 1646.22P. Little, ‘Lady Bankes defends Corfe Castle’, History Today lxv. 13-14.

From 1642, when he was 11, Ralph Bankes’s upbringing was dominated by the close involvement of his parents with the royalist cause. War brought financial ruin. The receipts of the Bankes estate dropped from £15,000 a year in 1640 to less than £2,000 in 1644.23Dorset RO, D/BKL, Box 8C/64, ‘Dame Mary Bankes’s acc. book: receipts 1633-48’, ff. 30, 48. After the sack of Corfe Castle, the family was in even worse straits. The estate was sequestered, and the county committee - led by Richard Brodrepp, John Whiteway* and the religious radical John Fry* - pressed the authorities in London to refuse Lady Bankes an allowance because of her activities during the war.24Bankes, Corfe Castle, 223. It seems, however, that there were others who were advocates of leniency towards Sir John Bankes’s widow and children. In particular, the family could count on some support from the compounding committee, thanks to the good offices of Giles Grene’s son-in-law, Roger Hill II*, and his friend and fellow Dorset MP, Denis Bond*.25Little, ‘Lady Bankes’, 14-16. Their efforts soon paid off. In July 1645, some months before the fall of Corfe, the Commons issued orders to allow Lady Bankes and her daughters free passage to London in order to compound.26CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 20. After the siege, Parliament delayed the sequestration of the estate until July 1646, and even then readily granted a fifth part of the revenue for the maintenance of Lady Mary’s children.27Dorset Standing Cttee. ed. Mayo, 68. Local parliamentarians followed suit: the confiscated estate was not assigned to those hostile to the family, but managed by the Bankes’s existing agents, John Hunt and William Ettrick, for the use of the county committee.28Dorset Standing Cttee. ed. Mayo, 68, 213-4. Finally, in the spring of 1647, the Committee for Compounding ordered the local standing committee to suspend the sequestration.29Dorset Standing Cttee. ed. Mayo, 205. Lady Bankes’s accounts for 1643 and 1644 show that considerable efforts had been made to provide ‘schooling and apparel’ for Ralph and his siblings during the war, and by the summer of 1647 he and his elder brother, John, had been sent on a tour of the continent, visiting Padua, Paris, Geneva and Rouen.30Dorset RO, D/BKL, Box 8C/64, ‘Dame Mary Bankes’s acc. books: disbursements, 1633-44’, ff. 56v, 57; Kingston Lacy Library, inscribed bks.

The apparent toleration shown towards the family in the late 1640s did not, however, preclude the unwelcome attentions of the enthusiastic county sequestrations committee during the commonwealth and protectorate. In September 1654 James Dewy I* interrogated William Ettrick and Thomas Hailey about the lordship of Corfe Mullen, which he suspected had been purchased by Sir John Bankes in order to shield the recusant Arundell family.31SP23/152, ff. 581-5. Even so, the commonwealth saw a return to a degree of normality: in 1653 the younger son of Sir John Bankes, Jerome, followed his father to Gray’s Inn, and in May 1656 he was joined by Ralph, now heir to the estate.32G. Inn Admiss., 264, 277. The rehabilitation of the Bankes family was perhaps aided by their refusal to become involved in royalist plots associated with Charles II’s Worcester campaign in 1651 and Penruddock’s western rising in 1655. Ralph Bankes’s activities after leaving the inns of court are obscure, but he reappeared in Dorset in time for the Corfe Castle election for Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament in the winter of 1658-9. Although Bankes presumably retained his status in the borough, the election was also marked by interference by important county figures such as Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper* and John Fitzjames*. The latter was certainly important in securing a seat at Corfe for John Tregonwell*, and he may have facilitated Bankes’s own return.33Alnwick, Northumberland MS 552, ff. 63, 64.

Bankes seems to have attended the 1659 Parliament for only a few weeks, from the end of March to dissolution in the middle of April. He was appointed to the committees for Irish and Scottish affairs on 1 April and to the committee to consider how to transact with the Other House on 6 April.34CJ vii. 623b, 627a. Other appointments may have reflected his family’s northern interests: he was named to committees on the Durham petition for the right to elect MPs (31 Mar.) and the petition of the disbanded Lancashire forces for the settlement of their accounts (13 Apr.).35CJ vii. 622b, 638a. Bankes’s political position is unclear, but he seems to have been opposed to the army interest even if he was not a firm supporter of the protectorate. On 12 April he was named to the committee to draw up the impeachment of the now notorious major-general, William Boteler*, and on 18 April he was included in a committee to propose ways of defending the protector and Parliament against intimidation from the army.36CJ vii. 637a, 642a.

The Restoration saw the revival of Bankes’s fortunes. He went to meet the newly-returned Charles II at Canterbury and was knighted on 27 May 1660; he was created gentleman of the privy chamber in June; and soon afterwards secured a lucrative match with the heiress of the venerable Brune family of Athelhampton.37Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 227; LC3/2, unfol.; Vis. Dorset 1677, 10. Of even greater significance was the fact that, although sequestered in the 1640s, the Bankes family’s lands had not been redistributed to new owners; thus the act of indemnity and oblivion of August 1660 did not present an obstacle to the recovery of the estate.38Bankes, Corfe Castle, 245-6. Bankes could therefore concentrate on building his new mansion at Kingston Lacy, near Wimborne Minster, and on re-possessing the family chattels and stores which had been purloined from Corfe Castle after the siege.39Bankes, Corfe Castle, 247-8. Initial investigations showed that many items had been acquired by the local parliamentarian gentry, including John Bingham, who was said to have acquired goods from the castle worth £1,000.40Bankes, Corfe Castle, 248, 251. Bankes wrote a sarcastic letter to the godly Sir Walter Erle, demanding compensation for other losses: ‘The Scripture which you profess (and we all ought) to make the rule of our actions, cannot justify you in such proceedings, nor can you bring any text from them which allows you to build with my timber’.41Bankes, Corfe Castle, 255-6. John Bingham proved slightly more co-operative, but Bankes was only able to recover a chair and a damaged bed from the castle furnishings, as £1,000 worth of goods had already been sold to the 2nd earl of Manchester.42Bankes, Corfe Castle, 259-60.

As well as the estate, Sir Ralph Bankes inherited something of his father's position in royal favour. As lord of the manor of Corfe, he was appointed lieutenant of the Isle of Purbeck and commander of the castle on Brownsea Island, which commanded the mouth of Poole Harbour as well as deputy lieutenant for the county, and during the 1660s was heavily involved in the organisation of the county militia, and in coastal defence.43SP29/8, f. 67; Dorset RO, D/BKL, Box 8C/64, bundle ‘Sir Ralph Bankes’. In 1671 Bankes put his lands into trust for his son and heir, with the feoffees including his mother’s relative Ralph Hawtrey†, his wife’s relative Robert Coker*, and his steward Anthony Ettrick†. By his will of 1675, Bankes, perhaps mindful of the fate of his Corfe belongings, instructed that his collection of books and paintings was to be passed down to his son intact.44PROB11/354/126. Sir Ralph’s son, John Bankes†, sat for Corfe Castle from 1698, thus continuing a family tradition of parliamentary service which lasted until the end of the nineteenth century.