Charles Waterton and Walton Hall

The BBC News website reported back in March that the park at Walton Hall, on the southern outskirts of Wakefield, has been added to the Historic Englands list of protected parks and gardens. The article can be read at 'World's first nature reserve' joins heritage list

Walton Hall was the ancestral home of the pioneering naturalist and proto - environmentalist Charles Waterton, and who created at Walton “the Worlld’s first nature reserve”. After his death in 1865 was inherited by his son and heir Edmund. Edmund Waterton was a significant antiquarian who accompanied us on the recent Marian Pilgrimage. Unfortunately his commitment to such studies led to his financial difficulties which resulted in bankruptcy and the sale of the hall and estate in 1876. Wikipedia has a history of the property at Walton Hall, West Yorkshire  and has biographies of father and son at Charles Waterton and at Edmund Waterton. That biographical account of Charles and his innovative ideas, as well as his idiosyncrasies, shows the range of his interests and something of his legacy.

The Watertons were a recusant family and descended from Robert Waterton, who died in 1425, and was not only a leading figure in the administration of the Duchy of Lancaster, but, by his second marriage, brother-in-law to a certain Bishop Richard Fleming of Lincoln, “my bishop” , and the original Clever Boy.

Charles Waterton is now, quite rightly, no longer just seen as the eccentric Squire of Walton Hall but as a pioneer and indeed as a visionary in natural history and environmental matters and as an explorer whose books influenced later generations, including Darwin and Wallace. True, there was an eccentric side to him, but it is often engaging, such as in sleeping with his foot outside his tent in South America in the hope that a vampire bat would bite him, a hope in which he was to be disappointed, or as when he built new pig sties at Walton and included window openings so his pigs could enjoy the view…

Charles Waterton in 1824

National Portrait Gallery

Image: Wikipedia 

Quite apart from his significant scientific contribution to learning and popular understanding of the natural world when I skimmed Brian Edginton’s biography of Charles Waterton I recall being impressed by its account of the recusant culture of Walton. Charles was born in 1782, in the lifetime of the Young Pretender, and when the hint of Catholic Emancipation was a glimmer of an idea that could trigger the Gordon Riots in 1780. One reason that may have sent Charles to manage family estates in British Guiana was that as a Catholic there was no public role for him in Britain. He had returned to Walton by the time of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and was to see the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850. For last fifteen years of his life there was Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. He and his son were products of that hidden scholarly world of the old Catholic gentry which remained discreet in its life long after 1829.

The preservation of Walton is important not just to the local environment of Wakefield but to the wider, much wider, environment that fascinated Charles Waterton.

Charles Waterton - aviator

Those of you who read my recent re-cycled post on Charles Waterton may be interested in this, which is from The Lion And The Cardinal on July 27:

EARLY CATHOLIC AVIATORS, part XI: CHARLES WATERTON



Richard Hobson:

Mr. Waterton had considerable inventive genius, especially in the actual formation of supposed extinct animals, and, generally, of the most horrid form and appearance, by a skillful union of separate portions of reptiles. By the way, his inventive powers, though more than forty years ago, had nearly carried his experimental ingenuity to a fatal issue. He had, for a considerable period, conceived some crude and ill digested idea, that the act of flying was within his grasp, and that, in a short time, he would become a second Pegasus in execution.

Under this surprisingly delusive impression, Mr. Waterton invented, and manufactured duplicates of a peculiar character of mechanism, as substitutes for natural wings, to be fixed on each arm, and to be united by their then surrounding the thoracic and dorsal portions of the trunk. How the Squire proposed to dispose of his lower extremities he did not explain to me, but I remember he stated that, a man's legs, however symmetrically formed, were inconveniently long and heavy for an atmospheric trip, except they could have something less yielding than air on which to rest, or to sustain the lever they represent, and, consequently, were too unwieldy and unmanageable to be of any service to the aeronaut in navigating the atmosphere; adding, that the only time, during his life, he had found his legs in the way, was, when he attempted to fly.

At all events, Mr. Waterton not only manufactured these fictitious wings which I have named, but he actually attached them, to his arms and trunk, and also formed and fixed the remaining mechanism which he conceived was necessary to be attached to the other parts of the body, so as to complete, and, as he imagined, perfect this really chimerical project; and in order to carry out his scheme into practical execution, he arranged to make his first essay from the eaves of a roof of a building in the farm yard, being an elevation of several yards, from whence his flight, it is true, would be of limited extent longitudinally, and where an abundance of litter would break the severity of a possibly uncontrollable and rapid descent.

Fortunately, however, when the Squire was clipped and heeled for his first attempt to become an aerologist, an intimate friend, Alicui toto pectore deditus, accidentally walked into the farm yard, and, happily, had sufficient influence over the would-be aeronaut to persuade him to take his first aerial flight from a much less elevated position.

Of course, it is needless to minutely detail the practical freaks which actually occurred in attempting to carry out this delusive conception, as the Squire afterwards unhesitatingly admitted to me that, unlike Pegasus, ho could neither fly to the top of Mount Helicon, nor further imitate him by then flying up to heaven. Also, that his affinity for the earth, to his great surprise, woefully outbalanced his attraction to the clouds, and that, on coming in contact with mother earth, he received, as he was wont to say, when jocosely using the Walton* dialect, such a "foul shak", as to be satisfactorily convinced that soaring in the atmosphere was not his forte, having, in his unwilling, unintentional, and disagreeably hasty descent, like Phaeton (who lost command of his horses) thoroughly lost all command of his wings, and thus narrowly escaped a broken neck, by pitching upon his head in spite of the faith he had entertained in his all-protecting wings.

See also:

Eilmer of Malmesbury
A Wise Man Known to Roger Bacon
Kaspar Mohr
John Damian
Faust Vrancic
Bartolomeu de Gusmão
Francesco Lana de Terzi
Louis-Sebastien Lenormand
Jan Wnek
Montgolfier Brothers

*Walton was Waterton's estate near Wakefield

Charles Waterton

The Lion And The Cardinal, always a wonderful source of visual images, had this rather splendid piece on Charles Waterton on June 9th, and I have ventured to copy and comment on it, as I have several reasons to be interested in this remarkable and endearing nineteenth century naturalist and pioneer concervationist.

First of all he was from Wakefield, my home area. Secondly I might have been born in what had been his home, Walton Hall on the outskirts of the city and which was used in the years before my birth as a maternity hospital as it was I was born in another hospital on the site of the battle of Wakefield - which may, conceivably, explain in some way my late-medieval interests.

Thirdly Waterton was descended from Robert Waterton (d.1425) and his second wife, Cicely, the sister of Bishop Richard Fleming, so he ties in with my thesis, however remotely - though I doubt if he will make it to more than a footnote.

Fourthly Waterton was a Catholic of recusant stock; his son, Edmund, wrote the earliest, or one of the earliest studies of English medieval devotion to Our Lady - a piece valuable in itself and a part of that process whereby historians have helped recover the Catholic life of pre-Reformation England.

Fifthly he played, I suspect, a small part in my conversion. Sometime after I came to Oxford I came across a copy of the modern biography of Waterton, and remember sitting in Oriel MCR reading about Waterton's funeral in 1865, and being struck by the way the Mass was conceived by Waterton and his family as a Thing of itself, something that stands in its own right as the act of propitiation and salvation. Though not a new idea to me as an Anglo-Catholic, I do recall the impact the way the concept was presented had on my mind, and I suspect confirmed and encouraged all those right instincts which eventually brought me to be in the same Communion as Charles Waterton.



Chelonian Research Institute:

The Victorian period was also a time of profound and cultivated eccentricity. For example, the English explorer Charles Waterton (1782-1865), a passionate aristocratic Catholic in a Protestant-dominated society, who sported a short crewcut in a society of Victorian hirsute extravagance, had his home in Yorkshire made into a museum with such exhibits as The English Reformation Zoologically Demonstrated, in which preserved reptiles were contorted into caricatures of famous Protestants. Waterton's idiosyncrasies were so profound and far-reaching as to border on actual insanity. But his was a fine madness - a creative and extraordinarily frolicsome spirit combined with genuine originality, true religious faith, a decidedly experimental approach to problem-solving, and a great capacity for affection, sympathy and passionate love. Perhaps it all had something to do with his ancestry - his documented ancestors included seven saints (Vladimir the Great; Anne of Russia; the Holy Martyrs Boris and Gleb; King Stephen of Hungary; Queen Margaret of Scotland; and Mathilde of Germany, not counting Sir Thomas More, executed in 1535, who was not canonized until 1935; nor Count Humbert III of Savoy, King Ferdinand III of Castile and Louis IX of France, whose relationships with Waterton hinge upon an alleged 15th-century marriage), and four historical individuals portrayed in the plays of Shakespeare.

Certainly, it seems that only England could have produced a Waterton. The Squire, as he was always called, set up a nature reserve, mainly for waterfowl, on his estate near Wakefield, and experimented extensively with jumping foxes to determine how high the walls should be to exclude these predators (the answer was nine feet). Having fallen off a ladder while climbing a tree when he was in his seventies, he concluded with his own peculiar logic that ladders were dangerous and he should thenceforth climb trees without them. And when his doctor told him to place his injured foot under running water, Waterton, on tour in America at the time, travelled to Niagara and stuck the limb in question under the famous falls, on the theory that, if one pill is good, two will be better.

And most touching of all was his marriage. Waterton was in the habit of travelling to Demerara (now part of Guyana) every few years, and it was on one of these trips that he attended the Baptism of a beautiful baby, the daughter of an Arawak princess (and fathered by an English colleague of his by the name of Charles Edmonstone). He fell in love with the infant, checked on her growth and progress in the course of periodic subsequent trips to Demerara, and finally, when she was seventeen, he took her to England and married her. The bride, despite her extreme youth, proved to be a dignified and respected lady of the manor, but tragically she died in childbirth just one year later. Waterton was so devastated that he actually slept on the floor every night for the rest of his life, with just a thin blanket and a wooden block for a pillow. His rationale was a serious one of self-penance; he felt responsible for her death from puerpural sepsis, attributing it to bacteria from dead specimens that he handled and kept in the house, and he earnestly wanted to earn the privilege of being re-united with her in Heaven. But his public statement about his new sleeping habits was, as ever, a joke. He explained that, at least when travelling, you never knew who had been the last user of a bed that was offered. While it could conceivably have been some lovely form divine like his late wife, it is just as likely to have been some horrid alderman... a rough-skinned, pimpled victim to turtle soup and Curacao (the liqueur, not the island).

Waterton's playful side inevitably intruded into his role as Museum Director, and he was responsible for producing not only the famous gallery of distorted Protestant reptiles, but also for a weird specimen, laboriously fashioned from the backside of a hirsute howler monkey into a somewhat humanoid countenance, that he dubbed The Nondescript. But more seriously, he developed a methodology for dry preservation and mounting of vertebrates that involved complete removal of the skeleton, muscles and viscera, stiffening and preservation of the integument with corrosive sublimate, and artistic replication and coloring of features likely to prove unstable if not so treated. The specimens are still in the Wakefield Museum, marvelously intact, and bearing mute testimony to the excellence of the Walton Technique.

Sally Shelton:

He abhorred scientific nomenclature, John James Audubon (whom he called a charlatan), Protestants, Hanoverians, Hanoverian Protestants, rats (the presence of which in England he blamed on the Hanoverian Protestants), and, late in life, Charles Darwin; he loved the natural world, birds, taxidermy, and practical jokes.

More information about Waterton from the Catholic Encyclopaedia is here, and about his books and biographies of him here, and here.


Taxidermic caricature of Martin Luther


The Nondescript


John Bull and the National Debt