Stonehenge (15 page)

In the interim the emergence of professional archaeology did not result in that outbreak of intellectual clarity, harmony and pure scientific reason which might have been hoped for. While a consensus formed in favour of Lubbock’s Bronze Age theory, it was by no means overwhelming. Fergusson was highly regarded and his views were influential, while catastrophists, those opposed to uniformitarianism, who believed in the creation and the Flood as single events, were still numerous. They included Henry Browne, whose theories were recounted to all visitors and upheld, after his death in 1839, by his son Joseph, who succeeded him. Most informed sources still thought that Stonehenge had been built with the help, or under the influence, of another race, with the Phoenicians still a popular choice. Charles Pearson, Professor of History at King’s College, London, a firm uniformitarian, nevertheless argued for the fifth century
AD
and saw Stonehenge as ‘a combination of the Roman circus or amphitheatre, with a development of the old sepulchral architecture, for the purposes of worship’. Outstanding among the more individual theorists was the Dean of Merton College, Oxford, Algernon Herbert, whose
Cyclops Christianus, or the supposed antiquity of Stonehenge
, appeared in 1849 and put a similar case to Charles Pearson’s but in terms ‘so wild and fanciful’ that even Pearson felt he could not subscribe to it. Herbert thought it ‘morally … impossible’ that the Romans should not have mentioned Stonehenge if it was there and went on to draw elaborate conclusions from some early chronicles and the symbolism of King Arthur’s Round Table.

Although stratigraphy was of no direct help in settling the questions surrounding Stonehenge while there were no digs, other new techniques, such as photography, were brought to bear. But like archaeology itself, these methods were no more reliable than those who deployed them and it was soon discovered that the camera can lie. Mr E. P. Loftus Brock, addressing the British Archaeological Association on his observations of ‘Sunrise at Stonehenge on the Longest Day’, described his attempt to assess ‘with some sort of scientific accuracy’ the truth or otherwise of the tradition that the sun rose directly over the Heel Stone at midsummer. With the help of Mr Howe of Newbury and his photographic apparatus, Mr Brock observed, or thought he observed, the dawn appear ‘exactly over the ancient gnomen’ and went home satisfied that the old story was ‘verified beyond all question’ not having noticed that the sun rises just to the north. In 1867 Colonel Sir Henry James, director general of another great Victorian enterprise, the Ordnance Survey, produced a full report on Stonehenge, with photographs and plans, intended as a model for his surveyors of how they might record ancient monuments. The accompanying text, however, belongs to the older tradition, comprising a lengthy series of ‘notes relating to the Druids’, and indeed until the 1920s prehistoric monuments were marked as ‘Druidic’ on Ordnance Survey maps. Flinders Petrie, the great Egyptologist, applied his ‘inductive metrology’ to Stonehenge and produced a more accurately measured plan than any to date. He renumbered the stones, establishing the system still in use today, and managed to demolish Stukeley’s Druidical cubit, but his results remained inconclusive. He found two units of measurement, one Phoenician and the other the Roman foot. What was really needed to resolve matters, he concluded, was ‘careful and intelligent digging’, and this the owner refused to countenance.

22.
The First Preaching of Christianity in Britain
, by J. R. Herbert, 1842, from an engraving of 1847 by Charles George Lewis. The converted Druid is seen removing his pagan crown of oak leaves prior to baptism. By the mid nineteenth century the connection between the Druids and Stonehenge was taken for granted by everyone from Darwin to Dickens.

Summing up the state of affairs in 1876, the antiquary
William Long – himself a supporter of the theory that Stonehenge was built by the Belgae, the inhabitants of northern Gaul – could only lament the ‘dissipation of Archaeological power and … profitless “beating of the air”’ which was still going on in ‘the endeavour to maintain positions which the writer humbly believes to be utterly untenable’. The main position he was anxious to undermine was that of the pro-Druid school. Sir Henry James was not their only supporter and although many antiquaries had given them up – even Algernon Herbert, whatever his peculiarities, was too well versed in the classical sources to countenance them – among the general public they flourished. Every child knew that they had built Stonehenge, especially those who read Dickens’s
Child’s History of England.
Published in
Household Words
from 1851 to 1853, it unfolds a blood-curdling vision of prehistoric times that harps alarmingly on the ‘strange and terrible religion called the Religion of the Druids’, which involved horrible torture, human sacrifice and ‘some kind of veneration for the Oak, and for the mistletoe’. ‘These Druids built great Temples and altars, open to the sky, fragments of some of which are yet remaining,’ Dickens explained. ‘Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, is the most extraordinary of these.’ Bellini’s opera
Norma
, which had its first performance in English at Drury Lane in 1837, casts its heroine as ‘a high-priestess of the Temple of Esus’, which is still usually presented as a version of Stonehenge and the Cuming Museum in south London is certainly not the only one to house a nineteenth-century collection that includes ‘Druid’ pottery beads. Even Darwin referred to Stonehenge in
The Formation of Vegetable Mould
as the ‘Druidical stones’, a phrase which must have disappointed some of his archaeological admirers, but in truth it had become generic.

Meanwhile the real Druids, or at least those who classed themselves as Druids in the nineteenth century, were flourishing, if not harmonious. The
Druid Magazine
for the year 5836 – or 1832 as it was reckoned by non-Druids – gave encouraging accounts of ‘respectable parties enrolling themselves under the banner of Druidism’ and of the Loyal Trafalgar Lodge at Monmouth processing to church through the town ‘headed by their band’. There was a dinner afterwards. Early nineteenth-century Druid activity was still largely modelled on Freemasonry and there was an emphasis on dining, proposing toasts and awarding medals to one another. The magazine ran an article on Stonehenge which took a predictable view of its origins and followed John Wood’s suggestions about its function in the ‘Druidical system of education’. Between the lines, however, conflict was discernible. In 1833 there was a breakaway movement among the Wessex lodges which led to the foundation of the United Ancient Order in 1834. The
Druid Magazine
began to refer to members indulging in ‘long, inconclusive and personal harangues’, evoking Tacitus’s descriptions of their Iron Age forebears on Mona, and by 1834 it claimed to represent the new Reformed Order of Druids. In 1836 there were bitter attacks by the editor on a rival publication launched by the Grand Lodge ‘for the purpose of crushing the efforts and impugning the motives of this magazine’. Complaints of ‘falsehood, vituperation and personal slander … dirty avocations [and an] … accumulation of bile and nastiness’ took the edge off the concluding wish for readers to pass ‘a joyous Christmas-tide, and a merry, healthful and prosperous New Year’. By 1837 the editor had been expelled from the Druids, ‘by an incompetent authority’, and after
1839, despite thorough constitutional revisions, the
Druid Magazine
seems to have ceased publication.

These differences were at least partly class-based, with the provincial lodges anxious to achieve financial benefits for their members which the more metropolitan Ancient Order rather despised. Another area of conflict was the question of whether they should be primarily a social and charitable society or whether they should embrace the mystical aspect of their tradition. Similar disagreements led to the foundation of the breakaway United Order of Druids (1839) and the Order of Druids (1858), which were variants on the same Masonic theme and, between schisms, dined, toasted and organised burial clubs and pension funds for one another. They all remained exclusively male, however, until 1900, when Lady Poore of Amesbury struck out for emancipation, declaring herself first Arch Druidess of the Isles at the head of her own women-only order. Yet despite all the arguing the first half of the nineteenth century was, as Ronald Hutton, author of the most recent study of the Druids ancient and modern, puts it, ‘the high summer of Druidry in the English and Welsh imagination’. As the Victorian age wore on and scholarship cast an ever harsher light on their founding texts, the Druids lost some of their grip both on the national mythology and on Stonehenge. Increasingly it was as modern Romans that the imperial British liked to see themselves and those who followed such well-respected authorities as Fergusson and Petrie felt justified in taking Stonehenge with them.

But as Victoria’s reign neared its end and the imperial certainties of the mid-century faded once again, Druidry acquired a different potency, one that relied even less on material facts than before. The study of evolution and
anthropology cast fresh light on old customs and traditions and from the 1860s onwards there was a growing enthusiasm for artistic revivalism, of which William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement was the most famous example. In 1878 the British Folklore Society was founded. Its first president was Edward Clodd, a Darwinian agnostic and a friend of T. H. Huxley whose books included
The Childhood of Religions
and
Myths and Dreams
, studies of comparative folklore over time and across cultures. For Clodd, who described himself as an ‘anthropological folklorist’, these long traditions were revealing of human nature, they were there to be studied rather than believed.

That same year in New York, however, the mystic and psychic Madame Blavatsky became one of the co-founders of Theosophy, a movement which drew diametrically opposite conclusions from the same evidence and set out not merely to study ancient cultures but to seek the common truth from them until they harmonised into the ‘pure colourless sunlight’ of Theosophia, or the wisdom of God. Emerson became a Theosophist as did Lady Emily Lutyens. Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and Bernard Shaw were all attracted by it, and it found echoes in the various Celtic revival movements at the end of the century and in the ‘spook’ designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School. It had its effects, too, on Druidism. The Ancient and Archaeological Order of Druids, founded in 1874, based its rituals on early Celtic literature. The last decades of the century were cloudy with spirit photographs, ectoplasm and seances. Such eminent public figures as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took an interest in spiritualism and the occult and the Druids could bask in a mystic aura of artistic respectability. The wilder excesses of Iolo Morganwg
were forgotten and T. H. Thomas, an artist who, under the name Ardlunydd Pen-y-garn, was elected Herald Bard in 1895, had his robes redesigned by the Royal Academician Sir Hubert Herkomer and commissioned new regalia based on ancient Celtic patterns from the Welsh sculptor Sir William Goscombe John.

By now the Druids were very real indeed and although there are not authentic accounts of their presence at Stonehenge until the twentieth century, solstice celebrations became a regular event. These were hailed by Flinders Petrie and others as another traditional revival, but were, in form at least, a completely Victorian innovation. They proved popular, however, and by the time Mr Loftus Brock was making his photographic observations there was ‘an enormous concourse of people, but little short of three thousand’, gathered to witness them. For the rest of the year the tourists came in growing numbers. Some still brought their sketchbooks. Herschel drew Stonehenge on 12 August 1865 with the aid of a camera lucida, an optical device that throws an image on to the paper, giving a result that is somewhere between drawing and photography. His record makes a revealing point of comparison with the twentieth-century restoration, showing the trilithon – stones 21, 22 and 122 – standing in a slightly different position from the present. But for most Victorians the fashionable thing was to have one’s photograph taken in front of the stones. The custodian who succeeded Joseph Browne in 1870 was a photographer, William Judd, and his photographic darkroom on wheels became a feature in its own right. The first known photograph of the monument itself is surprisingly late, a calotype, taken by W. R. Sedgfield in 1853, but had the site been less popular it might have been photographed much earlier. In March 1844 William Strange-ways wrote to his nephew William Henry Fox Talbot, the pioneer of photography who lived at Lacock Abbey, not far away, asking why he didn’t ‘go on purpose some day & take Stonehenge’. But Talbot had already been in 1829 and found ‘five carriages & thirty people, two tents pitched & a splendid cold collation’ which ‘wholly destroyed’ the effect. He was disinclined to go again.