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

poetry. If de la Rue had a prejudice it was, perhaps, in favour of the ‘Anglo-Norman’ period,
reflecting as it did a cross-Channel collaboration of the sort he himself enjoyed, but it is quite
wrong to describe him as having ‘a strongly anti-French intellectual agenda’, or as far as I can
see any ‘agenda’ at all. 23 More generally the reception of his papers at the Society of
Antiquaries, submitted as they were over eighteen years from a country with which Britain was
throughout at war, indicates how little national hostilities weighed with the antiquarian
community.
The Douce-de la Rue letters, with their many references to mutual antiquarian friends,
enemies and acquaintances on both sides of the Channel also show how correspondence was
piquing mutual curiosity. De la Rue had at this time no outlet for his researches comparable to
the meetings of the Society of Antiquaries and Archaeologia, while Douce and his fellow
antiquaries were tantalized by the material flowing into Paris. It was this support network that
made possible the most prominent Anglo-French antiquarian project of the period, the
documentation of the Bayeux Tapestry and the associated debate as to its date and origins. This
was a truly bi-lateral effort which, though it involved fierce disputes on points of history,
demonstrated that what Hicks calls ‘the basic French-English antipathies’, far from dominating
the discussion, barely marked it at all. 24 The Tapestry, which had been the subject of several
studies in English, notably in Andrew Ducarel’s Anglo-Norman Antiquities of 1767, was taken
from Bayeux to Paris in 1803 and used to great effect as propaganda by Napoleon, who
displayed it in the Louvre (then the Musée Napoléon) encouraging obvious analogies between
the Conquest and his own forthcoming invasion of Britain.
This led to an exchange of letters in the Gentleman’s Magazine between 1803-4, at the
height of the invasion scare, which was indeed conducted on nationalist rather than scholarly
lines, and added no new information. The serious, antiquarian debate began with de la Rue’s
paper, which was read to the Society of Antiquaries, by Douce, on 12 November 1812 and
published in Archaeologia in 1814. It expounded de la Rue’s view that the Tapestry was made in
England, some time after the events it depicted. There, for the moment, the discussion had to
23 Hicks, The Bayeux Tapestry, p.117.
24 Hicks, The Bayeux Tapestry, p. 134.
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