Charles Waterton

Charles Waterton (3 June 1782 – 27 May 1865) was an English naturalist and explorer. He is best known as a pioneering conservationist.

Waterton was of a Roman Catholic landed gentry family descended from Reiner de Waterton. His ancestry is alleged to include eight saints: Vladimir the Great, Saint Anna of Russia, the Holy Martyrs Boris and Gleb, Saint Stephen of Hungary, Saint Margaret of Scotland and Saint Mathilde together with Saint Thomas More, Humbert III of Savoy and several European royal families.

He was a descendant of Ailric, King's Thane to Edward the Confessor, who held Cawthorne and much of South Yorkshire before the Norman Conquest. The heiress Sara le Neville inherited a vast estate from her grandfather Adam FitzSwain (the grandson of Ailric) and it passed to the De Burghes, then to the Watertons in 1435.

The Watertons remained Catholic after the English Reformation and consequently the vast majority of their estates were confiscated. Charles Waterton himself was a devout and ascetic Catholic, and maintained strong links with the Vatican.

"Squire" Waterton was born at Walton Hall, Wakefield, Yorkshire to Thomas Waterton and Anne Bedingfield.

He was educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire where his interest in exploration and wildlife were already evident. On one occasion Waterton was caught by the school's Jesuit Superior scaling the towers at the front of the building; almost at the top, the Superior ordered him to come down the way he had gone up. Waterton records in his autobiography that while he was at the school, "by a mutual understanding, I was considered rat-catcher to the establishment, and also fox-taker, foumart-killer, and cross-bow charger at the time when the young rooks were fledged. ... I followed up my calling with great success. The vermin disappeared by the dozen; the books were moderately well-thumbed; and according to my notion of things, all went on perfectly right."

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