Stonehenge (8 page)

Jones’s own design for Charles I’s great palace at Whitehall, though it was never built, was based on theories of sacred geometry and the supposed dimensions of Solomon’s Temple. A triangle placed on the ground plan had its apex on the altar of the Chapel Royal, the whole design fitted exactly into a circle. When he came to measure Stonehenge, Jones was looking for a key that would unlock its meaning as the triangles and circles explained his Whitehall. ‘Nothing
more argues the ingenuity and acuteness of an Architect,’ Webb wrote in his
Vindication
, ‘than the accommodating of what he hath seen, or read, into the Subject whereof he is to treat and the occasion he hath in hand.’ Jones used a great deal of ingenuity to find what he was looking for on Salisbury Plain – ingenuity, but not dishonesty. Architects often draw buildings, their own and other people’s, not as they are, misshapen by time, marred by design faults, construction errors and lack of money, but as they ought to be. Jones found that the ideal, Platonic, Stonehenge was in the form of a central hexagon of trilithons surrounded by a double circular ‘portico’. The hexagon, like the circle, was one of the perfect centralised forms favoured by Renaissance architects. The ground plan, thus revealed, consisted of ‘four equilateral Triangles, inscribed within the Circumference of a circle… an Architectonical Scheme used by the Romans’. This could be divided by equilateral triangles into twelve sections, ‘such as the Astrologers use in describing the twelve celestial Signs in musical Proportions’. From this, Jones realised, he had discovered a temple to Coelus, the god of the heavens, ‘whom Antiquity reputed the very Stem whence all those Deities in succeeding Ages proceeded’.

However, when it came to finding an authoritative precedent for this very unusual Roman temple, Jones could only produce one model from Vitruvius and this, as critics swiftly pointed out, was a plan not for a temple but for a theatre. Here too it seems possible that Jones was not merely fudging, but accommodating his evidence to what he believed to be larger ideas. Perhaps he was thinking not only of Vitruvius but also of his contemporary Robert Fludd. Fludd had invented a memory theatre, an elaborate, semi-mystical mnemonic
system which he published in 1617 and dedicated to James I. This theatre, which purported to contain all the knowledge of the greater and lesser worlds of creation, was a diagrammatic building, based on a real theatre, possibly Shakespeare’s Globe. As a theatre designer himself, Jones may have been struck by the potential of the form for sacred and mystical rather than merely mnemonic purposes.

But perhaps the most intelligent aspect of Jones’s ludicrous conclusion was his suggestion that Stonehenge was not merely Roman but specifically a building in the Tuscan style, the most primitive and rustic of the classical orders. Here too he had his reasons. As well as being mathematically pure and culturally important, architecture, for the official architect of the Stuart court, must also be patriotic. When Jones’s employer, James VI of Scotland, ascended to the English throne in 1603 he had united, in name at least, the two nations. In 1604 James proclaimed himself monarch of Great Britain, a single Protestant kingdom, uneasily perched off the shore of a hostile Catholic Europe. It was an ideal easier to describe than to achieve. The very next year a search of the cellars of the Palace of Westminster discovered Guy Fawkes and thirty-five barrels of gunpowder. In a doomed but interesting attempt to win English sympathy, Fawkes later claimed that the reason he wanted to kill James was not because he was a Protestant, but because he was Scottish. At home, as much as abroad, the vision of Britannia Triumphans was a matter of physical and dynastic survival for the Stuarts. It loomed large in the iconography of James and Charles I, and nowhere larger than in Rubens’s great ceiling paintings in Jones’s Whitehall Banqueting House. This, the ‘greatest baroque ceiling north of the Alps’, presents a complex
allegorical scheme probably devised, at least in part, by Jones. In it James I and VI appears as the new Solomon, seated in a circular temple whose form symbolises concord. Britannia, we now see, as the imagery unfolds, is not at all a new idea dating merely from 1603, it is the revival of the ancient, original faith and national identity of these islands. This identity is of course Protestant and traces its descent back to a hazy dawn in which the foundation myth of the Trojan Brut, the story of Joseph of Arimathea’s visit to England and the sacred geometry of Solomon’s Temple all play important, if ill-defined parts.

In forming his conclusion that Stonehenge was Tuscan, Jones adopted the same approach. As James sought to promote Britannia, so Jones urged the cause of architecture, and there is no better way to establish a new idea in a culture than by asserting its extreme antiquity. Jones advanced his architectural vision by giving it a foundation myth. Not only was Stonehenge dedicated to the sun god, the most ancient ‘Stem’ of all religions, it was built in this most primitive – and at first sight unlikely – of the classical orders. By the time he came to make his notes for
Stone-Heng
, Jones had thought deeply about the implications of the Tuscan, Italy’s own native style. It was ‘… a plain, grave and humble manner of Building, very solid and strong’ that represented for him a kind of ur-architecture, the ‘first face of Antiquity’. In finding that ‘betwixt this Island of Great Britain, and Rome it self there’s no one Structure to be seen, wherein more clearly shines those harmoniacal Proportions of which only the best times could vaunt, than in this of Stone-Heng’, Jones made Britain the direct heir of Rome and gave modern architecture the blessing of the ancients. It wasn’t a very rigorous
argument, any more than Rubens’s paintings were rigorous. This was allegory, not logic. Even so, to give such importance to the question of style was as original as the discussion of architecture itself. If architecture was more than mere building, if it developed, as Vitruvius suggested, over time, then it must be possible to date it by its appearance. ‘Who, that hath right Judgment in Architecture’ Jones wrote in
Stone-Heng
, ‘knows not the Difference, and by the Manner of their Works how to distinguish Aegyptian, Greek, and Roman Structures of old, also Italian, French and Dutch Buildings in these modern Times? Who did not by the very Order of the Work, assure himself, the Body of the Church of St Paul London, from its Tower to the West End, anciently built by the Saxons: as the Quire thereof, from the said Tower to the East End by the Normans, it being Gothick work.’ Jones’s critical admirer Aubrey, in some of his unpublished notes, himself made an attempt to discriminate and date the various styles of ‘Gothick’. In this use of style to compare, differentiate and date buildings both men were pioneers.

To be sure, Jones’s
Stone-Heng
tells us chiefly about Jones, but his architecture may in turn tell us something about Stonehenge, for the Tuscan gave him a theme as well as an origin myth. According to Vitruvius, this simple style, with its plain, robust columns was a rustic form, calling for deep, sheltering eaves. Palladio had drawn out, as a more or less theoretical exercise, an illustration showing unmoulded beams and huge projecting cantilevers. It was never meant to be used as a design, but Jones took it up in one of his most influential works, the church and piazza at Covent Garden in London. This was not a royal commission. Jones was working for Francis Russell, the Earl of Bedford, who was developing his London estate. The scheme Jones devised was for a square with terraces of identical houses over an arcaded walk with a church at one end. An open square like this was revolutionary. It had sources on the Continent, but there had been nothing like it in Britain. In London, where the crockets and spires of Gothic churches rose among timber-framed houses and inns, leaning higgledy-piggledy over the winding streets, this wide, symmetrical space with regular façades spoke dramatically of the order and proportion that Jones so admired. These houses were the first examples of what became the Georgian terrace.

11. Inigo Jones’s piazza and the church of St Paul, Covent Garden, by Wenceslaus Hollar,
c
.1658. The scheme was a complete revolution in street planning and made use of the Tuscan style, the most primitive of the classical orders, in which Jones believed Stonehenge itself was built.

The church, however, posed a challenge, both symbolic and practical. St Paul’s Covent Garden was the first Protestant church to be built on a wholly new site since the Reformation. It had, in its form and its style, to proclaim the British faith, a faith as true and as old as that of Rome, but quite independent of it. It couldn’t be Gothic, for Gothic had been associated since the Reformation with Catholicism. It was also, from Jones’s point of view as an architect, hopelessly out of date. Then there was the practical aspect of the problem, which was money. As Webb pointed out in his
Vindication
, lay people often fail to take into account ‘how Architects are compell’d to struggle with Necessity, through want of fitting Materials; and divers the like Accidents’. The necessity that had to be struggled with in this case was the Earl of Bedford’s reluctance to pay very much. He had had to obtain special permission to build on the site at all and had only included a church for the purposes of what would now be called planning gain, so he wanted it to be as cheap as possible. Jones made a virtue of necessity and solved both problems at once by choosing for St Paul’s, and indeed for the
whole scheme, the rustic Tuscan, a style both more ancient and more novel than any other. He determined to build ‘the handsomest barn in England’ and with the massive portico of St Paul’s Covent Garden set this most primitive form of architecture at the heart of the most sophisticated piece of town planning of its day. Francesco Milizia, the eighteenth-century critic, described the result as unique in the whole of European architecture.

According to Webb, it was not until about 1637 that Jones began to think seriously about James I’s suggestion that he should produce an account of Stonehenge. By then James was dead. Jones had built Covent Garden and was working for Charles I on designs for the great palace at Whitehall, intended to outshine Philip II’s Escorial. He was an architect at the height of his powers and a personality no doubt of what Summerson described as ‘alarming force’, a man at the forefront of national life confident to a fault of his own judgement. His Stonehenge is a microcosm of all that he now believed about architecture, its nature and its origins. How long he worked at his notes is not known. When the Civil Wars began in 1642 there came an end to his royal surveyor-ship, as to much else. The image of Britannia and her united kingdom was shattered. Jones was taken prisoner by the Parliamentary forces in 1645, but survived the war unscathed and lived out the rest of his life quietly in London. At his death in 1652 he left his substantial property to his pupil John Webb, who had married a relative of his master. When Webb came to publish
Stone-Heng
three years later he said that he had ‘moulded off and cast into a rude Form’ the ‘few Indigested notes’ that Jones had left. The work did not, to put it mildly, ‘give a general satisfaction’. Few beyond Jones’s immediate
acquaintance took his conclusions seriously and as far as the investigation of Stonehenge itself was concerned the book’s chief result was to spur Charleton and Aubrey on to contradict it. In architectural history, however, where Jones had most wanted to place Stonehenge, he succeeded rather better. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s
Entwurff Einer historischen Architectur
(
An Outline History of Architecture
), published in Vienna in 1721, included Stonehenge in its first volume along with the Seven Wonders of the World. It would perhaps have been an unlikely inclusion without Jones’s endorsement. As late as 1817 Sir John Soane, who had a particular fascination with Stonehenge and had had his own, accurate measurements taken, was nevertheless still using Inigo Jones’s plan in his lectures at the Royal Academy. And in 1958, when the architects James Stirling and James Gowan were working on a scheme for the new Churchill College, Cambridge, they conceived the design, Gowan recalled, ‘in terms of something like Stonehenge’. Faced with an open expanse of land and no surrounding buildings, they were at first baffled. ‘What do you do?’ as Gowan put it. ‘There is one thing: you can take out your compasses and cut a piece of Platonic geometry into the site.’ Three hundred years after Inigo Jones, an architect looking at Stonehenge still saw Platonic geometry.

Beyond the world of architecture, however, even readers who admired Jones’s work could not swallow his argument, and got around their embarrassment by suggesting the book was really written by Webb. This seems unlikely. Webb was too loyal an admirer of his master to have distorted his intentions and, to judge by his
Vindication
, far too dull and chaotic a writer to have produced all of
Stone-Heng
, which is well organised and well written. No doubt he added the
antiquarian details for which his master had had less patience, but the treatise in essence is surely Jones’s. Perhaps its most perceptive reader was William Stukeley. Stukeley was one of those who thought too highly of Jones to believe that he had written
Stone-Heng
and directed his considerable irritation with the obviously inaccurate plan (which must certainly be Jones’s) towards Webb. Yet Stukeley, whose own response to Stonehenge was so deeply aesthetic, could see the connection between
Stone-Heng
and Jones’s architecture. The ‘walk’, as he described it between the outer circles on Jones’s plan reminded Stukeley of the ‘fine circular portico, which is one great beauty among many, in [Jones’s] drawings for Whitehall’, while the Barber Surgeons’ Hall, another of Jones’s buildings in the Tuscan style, long since demolished, was similar in proportions to what Stukeley called the ‘adytum’, or inner sanctum, the area within the trilithons. He felt very differently about the next architect to write about Stonehenge. John Wood’s
Choir Gaure
appeared in 1747, seven years after Stukeley’s own
Stonehenge
. Stukeley was horrified. These ‘whimsys of his own crackt imagination’, these ‘wild extravangancys’, were intolerable and where Wood was not insanely inventive he was a plagiarist. ‘The very best things in his book he has pillaged from me,’ Stukeley complained, ‘even the word trilithon’, and he was glad to be reassured by Roger Gale that he had ‘nothing to fear … it is a silly pack of stuff’. That was not quite true. Stukeley protested too much. Privately he re-read Wood’s work, for the two men had certain things in common.