Biography

A controversial botanist, the son of Richard Markham, a clothmaker from Leeds. While at Edinburgh University (1782-), Richard adopted the surname Salisbury in order to inherit from a relative of his maternal grandmother and pay for his tuition. Salisbury later inherited his father's estate at Chapel Allerton, Yorkshire, which had a fine garden from which plant specimens were to end up at BM. However, considerable financial difficulties obliged him to sell his property, specimens and books, and at this time he wrote to Joseph Banks for assistance.

Escaping creditors in Yorkshire and a failed marriage, he acquired in 1802 the private botanic garden of Peter Collinson at Mill Hill, London. With his highly placed contacts, Salisbury became influential in the botanical community of London. Most significantly he was one of just seven men who met at Hatchard's bookshop in Piccadilly on March 7th 1804 to form a society for the improvement of Horticulture, and was perhaps the most active in developing the Horticultural Society of London (later the Royal Horticultural Society).

Salisbury had a very difficult personality, commented on by several contemporary writers, and financial problems beset his life. He sold the Mill Hill property in 1804 for a fraction of its value and spent a period in a debtor's prison as part of a ploy to convince the Lord Chancellor's Bankruptcy Commission that he was insolvent, thus escaping further claims by his wife's family.

Arguing with J.E. Smith and refusing to adopt the Linnaean System, the two became lifelong enemies. A scandal ensued over a paper Salisbury published on Proteaceae, using the pseudonym Joseph Knight, where he apparently published the results of a paper given by Robert Brown. The accusation of plagiarism and lack of allies led to a tacit understanding by botanists of the time that all published names by Salisbury were to be ignored. Ostracised by the botanical community, he later befriended a Fulham florist, Mathew Burchell, and made his son, the naturalist and explorer William John Burchell (1781-1863), his sole heir.

Despite his many failings, the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, with its principal of priority, obliged later botanists to re-examine Salisbury's work and revealed that he was an accomplished and painstaking botanist. He had an advanced manuscript on Proteaceae before Brown's paper was read, though he did include some of Brown's observations. Salisbury's names, though attributed to Knight, are now recognized. Burchell's collections, including Salisbury's herbarium, were bequeathed to K (1863) but his daughter gave manuscripts to J.E. Gray at the British Museum. Some specimens at BM may have been purchased by or given to Banks around 1802 but other material marked 'Hb. Salisbury' was probably acquired much later from K under the terms of the Morton Agreement after 1960.