buildings were damaged, sculptures were torn down and the priceless stained-glass windows of many French cathedrals were smashed to pieces. In 1793 a bonfire took place in Paris in which 347 volumes and 39 chests of historical documents were summarily consigned to the flames. Other precious historical papers were used to make cannon cartridges. The atmosphere of destructive paranoia soon reached Bayeux. In 1792 a local contingent was called up to fight in the French Revolutionary Wars. In all the haste, it was forgotten that one of the equipment wagons needed a protective covering. As soon as this was realised, someone helpfully suggested that there was an old stretch of vainglorious embroidery made by Queen Matilda and kept in the cathedral. It seemed that this would suffice admirably for the purpose. The agreement of the local administration was obtained and a motley crowd of soldiers marched into the cathedral. They perfunctorily seized the tapestry and placed it on their wagon. The local commissary of police, a Bayeux lawyer called Lambert Léonard-Leforestier, was informed of the matter only at the last moment. Knowing all too well the incredible artistic and historical value of the town’s tapestry, he immediately issued an order for its return. Then, showing remarkable courage, Léonard-Leforestier rushed to where the tapestry was being held and personally harangued the crowd until they agreed to hand it over in return for a stout piece of canvas. It was a close escape. Evidently, however, there were still some revolutionaries who nursed an ongoing desire to destroy the Bayeux Tapestry. In 1794 there was a proposal to cut the tapestry into shreds in order to decorate a carnival float in honour of the ‘Goddess of Reason’. By this time, however, the tapestry was in the hands of a local art commission and they were fortunately able to take steps to prevent its destruction.
From Baudri onwards, no one seems to have guessed that there was an English viewpoint ingeniously stitched into this ostensibly Norman work. No one even dreamt that the Norman story was being subtly undermined at every turn. On the contrary, it seemed to Frenchmen and Englishmen alike that the Bayeux Tapestry was a primitive celebration of the defeat of Anglo-Saxon England, happily embroidered by the wife of the victorious conqueror. Predictably Napoleon Bonaparte looked upon the tapestry as useful propaganda. In 1803 he was planning his own invasion of England and in order to drum up further enthusiasm for this enterprise he issued an order that the Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde should be brought to Paris for public exhibition at the Louvre (or Musée Napoléon as it was then called). The tapestry had been kept at Bayeux Cathedral for as far back as written records could attest. Grave concerns were expressed by the townspeople at the prospect of seeing the work depart, perhaps never to return. In spite of their misgivings, the local authorities felt constrained to comply with First Consul’s directive and so it was that for the first time in hundreds of years the Bayeux Tapestry left the small town of Bayeux and was taken to Paris.
The Paris exhibition was a great success. Crowds flocked to see this curious exhibit and it quickly became a topic of conversation in fashionable society. A play was even written about the tapestry, during the course of which the eponymous Queen Matilda is seen busy at work and a fictitious boy called Raymond complains to her that he, too, wants become a soldier-hero and to be depicted in embroidery.8 Whether Napoleon saw this play is not recorded, but the First Consul is said to have brooded over the embroidery itself for some time. Like William the Conqueror, he was making vast and detailed preparations to invade England. His forces were formidable. At this moment Britain stood more gravely exposed to invasion from northern France than at any time since 1066. Napoleon’s fleet of 2,000 ships lay assembled between Brest and Antwerp and his grande armée of between 150,000 and 200,000 soldiers was encamped at Boulogne. The historical parallels became even more apposite when, in late November 1803, a comet-like object was seen passing across the skies of northern France and southern England; the parallel with the ominous appearance of Halley’s Comet in April 1066, itself vividly depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry [scene 29], did not pass without mention. Was this another portent of the defeat of England? A description of the 1803 ‘comet’ was hastily printed and inserted into the brochure of the Paris exhibition. Yet despite the nicely timed appearance of another passing celestial body, Napoleon Bonaparte was not to repeat the success of William the Conqueror. This time Britain stood prepared; the invasion never came. Napoleon could not risk the Channel crossing without control of the sea, and an indomitable navy stood guarding the southern coast. Napoleon’s invasion plans were in due course abandoned in 1805. By this time the tapestry was once more back in Bayeux. Contrary to the fears of many townspeople, the work was duly returned to Bayeux in early 1804, but this time it was passed into the hands of the town’s secular, rather than religious, authorities. Never again has it been displayed in the great edifice of Bayeux Cathedral.
With peace restored between Britain and France by 1815, the Bayeux Tapestry ceased to be of interest to propagandists and it returned to the more genial province of international scholars and artists. As people began to appreciate just how narrowly it had escaped destruction, attention turned to the question of the tapestry’s continued preservation. There was concern that the contemporary method of exhibition – which involved repeatedly coiling and uncoiling the tapestry with a machine – was itself causing damage, though the authorities were lamentably slow to respond to this concern. It was in this context that the Society of Antiquaries of London commissioned Charles Stothard, an eminent draughtsman, to produce a set of drawings in order to record the complete embroidery. Stothard worked on the project for the two years between 1816 and 1818. His drawings in particular, as well as those of previous artists, have been immensely valuable to researchers in tracking the appearance of the tapestry down the years. Stothard was not only a fine artist. He wrote a short commentary on the tapestry that was learned and perceptive, one of the best that had yet been written.9 Moreover, by closely examining the surviving evidence where the tapestry had deteriorated, Stothard was able, here and there, to reproduce in art what he believed to have been the tapestry’s original appearance. In due course his work helped to guide the hands of subsequent restorers. To his great credit, Stothard realised the urgency of making such a record. ‘Within a few years,’ he noted, ‘the means of accomplishing it will no longer exist.’
And yet the endnote of Charles Stothard’s involvement with the Bayeux Tapestry turns out to be one of human frailty. Working for long periods alone with this unique work of art, so vividly redolent of the greatest event of his nation’s past, Stothard succumbed to the temptation to remove a small piece of the upper border for himself, approximately 21/2 by 3 inches in size. In December 1816 he managed to return to England with his souvenir undiscovered. Five years later, before it had become known what he had done, Stothard tragically fell from a scaffold at the church of Bere Ferrers in Devon and was killed. Through Stothard’s heirs, the little fragment found its way to what is now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where it was exhibited, quite openly, as ‘A Piece of the Bayeux Tapestry’. In 1871 the museum decided that it ought, in all propriety, to return the stray piece to Bayeux. The missing fragment was gratefully received but by then the damage had been done and repairs effected. It was decided that Stothard’s souvenir should remain in the little glass case in which it had arrived from London, complete with its English description, but that it should be displayed adjacent to the place where the fragment had originally been cut away. This was all well and fine, except that hardly a day would pass without a visitor accosting the keeper and asking him about the fragment and its curious English label. Eventually the keeper became so exasperated that Stothard’s piece was removed from display and it was placed for safe keeping in the municipal archives, where it still remains.10 A story also circulated that Mrs Stothard had been the culprit – on account, some said, of ‘the weakness of the feminine character’; but no one now doubts that Charles Stothard himself had been the thief. He was not alone in wanting to depart with a memento. A thief on a lesser scale was the Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin – and it would be naive to assume that there were no others. Dibdin visited the tapestry shortly after Stothard departed in 1818. In a book of his travels he reported, with an air of perfect normality, that having gained access to the tapestry with some difficulty, he managed to obtain for himself ‘a few straggling shreds of the worsted with which it is worked’.11 What became of these scraps is unknown. In 1842, when the tapestry was removed to