Stonehenge (7 page)

9. From William Cunnington and Richard Colt Hoare’s
Ancient History of Wiltshire
, 1810–12, a plate illustrating the four most important theoretical reconstructions to date. Their book marked the beginning of modern archaeology in Britain and the effective end of antiquarian enquiry at Stonehenge.

With Cunnington and Colt Hoare, however, it could be said that the antiquarian investigation of Stonehenge came, more or less, to an end. For the ‘philosophical antiquary’, as John Britton put it, there was no more to be done without written records. The stones remained enigmatic:

It would certainly be gratifying to ascertain the time of their formation – the purposes to which they were applied, – as well as the rites, ceremonies, and civil polity of the people who raised them. These may be considered the greatest desideratum of antiquarian research; but will probably ever continue such: for it is not likely that any document will be found to elucidate those points, or that such evidence will be adduced as shall be demonstrative, explicit, and unequivocal.

Not everyone was so pessimistic or so cautious. Godfrey Higgins went into print in 1827 with an ‘attempt to shew the druids were the priests of oriental colonies who emigrated from India and were … the builders of Stonehenge’. The statistician John Rickman confidently explained to the
Society of Antiquaries in 1839 that the whole structure dated from around the third century
AD
, with diagrams to show how it was built. But while, for the more circumspect antiquary, unequivocal evidence about Stonehenge in prehistory remained elusive, antiquarianism made considerable contributions to the historiography. As early as 1725 Thomas Hearne had published
A Fool’s Bolt soon SHOTT at Stonage
, by John Gibbons, a seventeenth-century response to Inigo Jones, and the Camden Society republished the history of Polydore Vergil in 1846. Britton preserved many of Stukeley’s papers and his
Memoir of John Aubrey
of 1845 brought more of Aubrey’s work into print than ever before, although the manuscript of the
Monumenta Britannica
still lay, unknown to Britton, in the Bodleian Library.

Meanwhile, as antiquarianism, romanticism and then the works of Walter Scott all encouraged a more colourful and engaged relationship with the past, Stukeley’s Druids began to escape from the pages of
Stonehenge
and to manifest in the outside world. In 1781 at the Kings Arms public house in Poland Street, London, Henry Hurle was inspired to found the Ancient Order of Druids, a Freemason-like body from which the modern Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids is indirectly descended. Then, on 23 September 1792, the
Gentleman’s Magazine
reported the first ‘revived’ assembly or Gorsedd of Bards, which met for the autumn equinox in a modestly improvised stone circle, on Primrose Hill. Bards, whom Toland had mentioned more or less in passing as ‘another order of learned men’ contemporary with the Druids and ‘not yet quite extinct’ in Wales and the Highlands, had also begun to take on a life of their own and would from now on be permanently embedded with the Druids. If the Welsh bardic tradition had been largely mythical and moribund until the eighteenth century, by the turn of the nineteenth it too had become fact, brought into reality, of a sort, by Edward Williams. Williams, better known by the name he adopted, Iolo Morganwg, was a gifted Welsh-language poet, a forger of early Welsh literature and an enthusiastic laudanum addict whom we shall meet again. Several of his forgeries had a surprisingly long life as historic documents and another of his inventions which still survives is the Gorsedd of Bards. It began with his celebration on Primrose Hill, was taken up later in Wales and, from an initial meeting in the Ivy Bush Tavern in Carmarthen in 1819, it grew into the present-day literary and musical association, with its three ranks of Ovates, Bards and Druids – derived from Caesar. The Gorsedd and its stone circle have become an integral part of the annual Eisteddfod, the Welsh festival of literature and music, which is now the largest of its kind in Europe.

10. The ‘Grand Conventional Festival of the Britons’ from
Costumes of the Original Inhabitants of the British Isles
, by Samuel Rush Meyrick and Charles Hamilton Smith, 1815. This was pre-history as imagined by readers of Walter Scott.

The year that the first Gorsedd met the French Revolutionary wars broke out. For most of the next twenty-three years the Continent was closed and, unable to take a Grand Tour even if they wanted to, the British turned their eyes to their native landscape and its antiquities in search of the Romantic and the Picturesque. Guidebooks, topographical prints and antiquarian literature of all sorts proliferated. Toland’s
History of the Druids
was reprinted.

By the middle of the nineteenth century Stonehenge and Druidry were indissolubly linked in the mind of every cultivated person. Two hundred years of antiquarian enquiry had transformed the monument. The antiquaries of the seventeenth century had found it a mystery and derelict, ‘well nigh disanimated by time’. They woke it from its sleep of long
forgetfulness and left it still a mystery but animated, populated, central to the understanding of Britain’s earliest history and to its cultural imagination. In short, they made it what it is today.

‘I saw Stonehenge today – the soul of architecture laid bare.’

John Summerson in a letter to Gavin Stamp, 1982

Whatever else it may or may not be, Stonehenge is certainly architecture. It is a building aesthetically conceived. The sarsens are more elaborately worked on the inner than the outer face. The lintels curve, following the circle of the uprights, and the trilithons rise in height towards the middle. It may be, too, as Stukeley and others have thought, that the uprights taper to compensate for the effects of perspective. Inside and outside, symmetry and centrality, these are architectural ideas, and if Stukeley was the most lyrical admirer of Stonehenge as art, Inigo Jones was its first apologist. He began his treatise with a eulogy to a building ‘different in Form from all I had seen before’; ‘likewise of as beautiful Proportions, as elegant in Order and as stately in Aspect, as any’. Yet despite the fact that his
Stone-Heng Restored
was the first book published on the subject and the one that gave the Altar Stone its name, Jones, like John Wood, author of the other principal architectural account of Stonehenge, has had a poor press. He has been accused since Charleton and
Aubrey’s day of bending the monument to fit his theories and his treatise has in recent years been dismissed as ‘valueless’, ‘phoney’, ‘tiresome’ and ‘a travesty’. This is to judge it by the wrong criteria. Jones and Wood, although they did undertake measurements and suggest dates, were not antiquaries or archaeologists. They were architects and they sought to place Stonehenge in the history of architecture. They undoubtedly used it as a magnifying glass to enlarge their own artistic ideas, but in so doing they carried it with them from the past into the future. Both men in their day revolutionised town planning. Between them they transformed the streets of London, Bath and indirectly many other towns and cities. Thanks to them, a vision of Stonehenge is built into the urban fabric of modern Britain.

Inigo Jones’s was by far the more impressive career. It was he who brought the Italian Renaissance to British architecture and thereby ‘determined the course of … almost three centuries’. He also designed the Banqueting House in Whitehall for Charles I. Despite which, many gaps remain in our knowledge of him. He was born in London in 1573, the son of a joiner, also called Inigo. Why the Jones family favoured this exotic Spanish Christian name, and indeed what happened in the first thirty or so years of the younger Inigo’s life, remain obscure. He began his career as a joiner like his father before, travelling in ‘the politer Parts of Europe’, Italy, France and possibly Denmark. Italian architecture made a deep impression on him. He became fluent in the language and brought back the most important architectural texts of the Renaissance, the works of the Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius, Palladio’s
Quattro Libri dell’Architettura
and many others. His friend the antiquary Edmund Bolton, author of
the Boadicea-Stonehenge theory, was hopeful that through Jones ‘sculpture, modelling, architecture, painting, acting, and all that is praiseworthy in the arts of the ancients will soon find their way across the Alps into our England’. Jones didn’t manage quite so much, but he did make a transforming contribution first to British theatre, as a designer of masques, and later to architecture.

How such a sophisticated man, who had seen the Colosseum for himself, could have thought that Stonehenge was an example of Roman architecture is something that has puzzled many people since 1655, when
Stone-Heng Restored
was published. Described by the architectural historian John Summerson as an intelligent book with a ludicrous conclusion,
Stone-Heng
is most profitably read as a glimpse into the mind of a great architect at a critical moment in architectural history. In its pages we see Jones revolving his thoughts about his art and its meaning at a time when to think in such terms at all was in itself original. Jones was not only the first English classical architect, he was largely responsible for creating the very concept of ‘architecture’, a word hardly used in his lifetime. Buildings, which had changed in detail but not much in fundamentals since the Middle Ages, were put up by builders and surveyors. When, in 1615, Jones became in effect the royal architect, his title was Surveyor of the King’s Works. Decades later it was still the case, as his pupil John Webb indignantly complained in his
Vindication
of Jones’s
Stone-Heng
, that ‘some English Monsieurs’ thought of architecture merely as ‘a mechanick art and unfit for Gentlemen’. In the process of dignifying Stonehenge, Jones’s treatise was seeking to dignify architecture itself, placing it among the arts, high above the lowly world of trade. This of course meant elevating the
architect as well. He must be a scholar and a gentleman, as described by Vitruvius: ‘perfect in Design, expert in Geometry, well seen in the Opticks, skilful in Arithmetick, a good Historian, a diligent hearer of Philosophers, well experienc’d in Physick, Musick, Law and Astrology’. When Jones looked for the creators of Stonehenge, he was looking for a civilisation that could produce such men. This enabled him to dismiss the Druids, for he was familiar with the classical texts and he knew that they contained ‘no mention’ that Druids ‘were at any Time either studious in Architecture … or skilful in any thing else conducing thereunto’. In fact the only civilisation Jones could imagine giving rise to serious architecture was Rome. The argument, like the monument, was circular, the conclusion implicit in the conception. Nevertheless, en route to his inevitable verdict Jones did invoke some of the facts, chiefly that no Roman writers mentioned Stonehenge, which persuaded him, easily enough, that ‘there was no such thing in Britain, before the Romans arrived here’.

When it came to Stonehenge itself Jones sought to understand it first through its ‘beautiful Proportions’. Proportion was the defining characteristic of Vitruvian architecture, in which the diameter of the column was the basic module. By multiplying or dividing it, structures of perfect design and pure mathematical clarity could be achieved. In his own work Jones became obsessed with proportion, believing that through it architecture could combine the measurable with the metaphysical. The ideal Vitruvian architect, as he noted, was as well versed in Astrology as in Arithmetick and a strong vein of mysticism ran through the Renaissance Neoplatonism that Jones, like Stukeley in his pre-Druid days, espoused. He believed in sacred geometry, a proportional system that
reflected the Platonic ideal, the underlying harmony of the universe, a geometry that might indeed do more than reflect it, might actually reanimate it. The idea was not peculiar to Jones. Mathematics and mechanics, or ‘menadrie’, were closely allied with magic in the works of such Elizabethan scholars as the celebrated Dr Dee and although Dee was long dead he was an influence on Jones. He had written about Vitruvius before Jones was born and his Preface to
Euclid’s Geometrie
is quoted in
Stone-Heng
. Overall the book expresses the sensibility of a mind on the brink of modern science, belonging intellectually to both the old world and the new. On the one hand Jones had no hesitation in finding Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Merlin story ‘meerly fabulous’, not least because he knew from professional experience that large stones can be lifted by engineers, that obelisks had been moved by the Romans, as easily as ‘to raise a May-pole’. He was similarly dismissive of Camden’s suggestion that the sarsens were made of cement, pointing out that the stone occurred naturally on the Marlborough Downs. At the same time there linger in
Stone-Heng
, as in Aubrey’s writings, echoes of the old magical interpretation of the world and it is in fact these, rather than the points on which Jones is, by modern lights, ‘right’, that give his treatise its interest and its importance.