Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

centered on the Louvre as it was transformed into a public art gallery and on Alexandre Lenoir’s
state-funded Musée des Monumens [sic] Français where the tombs from St Denis and other
displaced monuments were gathered. Of both museums there will be more to say later, for they
came to exert a powerful fascination on British antiquaries. For the moment, however, France
was inaccessible to them. Significant Anglo-French collaboration began with the arrival in
Britain of antiquarian exiles.
One of the most productive of these was the Abbé Gervais de la Rue (1751-1835), who
was among about a hundred French clergy to sail from Le Havre for England on 7 September
1792. An antiquary from Caen, with a particular interest in Norman and Anglo-Norman
literature, de la Rue’s years in England were fruitful. He was in London until the summer of
1796, returning to France via the Netherlands sometime before May 1798. Working in London
and Oxford he assembled the Beaumont Charters, a sequence of documents relating to Norman
Abbeys (now in the John Rylands Library, Manchester University). 13 Equally importantly he
established relationships with English antiquaries which were to have far-reaching implications.
He got to know, among others, Isaac d’Israeli, Joseph Banks, the naturalist whose antiquarian
friends included Dawson Turner and the great bibliophile John Ker, third Duke of Roxburghe,
though de la Rue found, as did others, that ‘sa grace est un peu sauvage’ [his grace is somewhat
ill-tempered]. 14
De la Rue was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and it was probably via the
Society that he gained his first introductions in England. 15 The most significant of his friendships
was with Francis Douce. De la Rue and Douce shared an interest in ‘manners and customs’ and
their correspondence, now in the Bodleian Library, which lasted until a few months before
Douce’s death, ranged over de la Rue’s work on the Anglo-Norman poet Marie, his study of the
early troubadours, the works of Walter Scott, Gothic architecture and the Bayeux Tapestry.
13
Hicks, The Bayeux Tapestry, p.116 gives an outline of De la Rue’s career.
14
Douce/de La Rue letters. f19. Caen 18 vendemiaire an XI (10 October, 1802). The letters reveal much about his
and Douce’s range of acquaintance. I have preserved de la Rue’s spelling, including his cavalier attitude to
diacritical marks.
15
Evans, History of the Society of Antiquaries, p.198 describes Dom François Philippe Gourdin, an honorary fellow,
writing to the Society from Rouen in 1792, warning that he may soon need to take refuge in England. He arrived
shortly before de la Rue and may well have furnished introductions.
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