Stonehenge (9 page)

Born in Bath in 1704, the son of a builder, John Wood lived in an age in which architecture was widely accepted as a polite art and Britain, after the Act of Union in 1707, was
a legally established entity. Yet many of the questions that interested Jones, about national and architectural origins, the compatibility, or otherwise, of Christian and classical pasts and the meaning of buildings, still hung in the air and although Jones had been dead for more than half a century, his influence was everywhere. The first volume of Colen Campbell’s
Vitruvius Britannicus
appeared in 1715, establishing Jones and Palladio as the two great models for English architecture. The neo-Palladian was the architectural gospel of Wood’s day and Jones was its prophet. When it came to Stonehenge, however, Wood’s attitude to his hero was mixed. Like most people, he could not accept Jones’s conclusions and when he surveyed the site for himself he realised that Jones’s plan was wildly inaccurate. Wood’s
Choir Gaure …Described, Restored and Explained
can nevertheless be seen as a kind of sequel to
Stone-Heng
, taking up the themes of sacred geometry, ancient history and symbolism as they appeared in the Hanoverian age, as classicism became tinged with the first intimations of a Romantic sensibility.

Wood’s plan was the most accurate to date and is still useful to archaeologists. Despite this, however, he has been largely dismissed as an obsessive and a fantasist. Unlike Jones, Wood was a prolific author. It is not difficult to know what he thought, though why he thought it is more complicated. Like Stukeley, he believed Stonehenge and the other stone circles in the south-west of England were the works of the Druids. He, too, had read John Toland and been convinced by him. He had also read Stukeley and been less impressed. Wood may have had personal reasons for disliking Stukeley, which we shall come to later, but more importantly he had his own theory to propound. This was, put simply, a vast extrapolation
from Caesar’s passing reference to Britain as the centre of Druidic learning. This hint expanded in Wood’s mind into a whole civilisation in which the British Druids ‘had not only publick edifices for the exercise of their religion and learning; but such as were truly magnificent’. The secrets of the Druid priesthood, which Caesar says were never written down, must therefore be ‘locked up’, ‘emblematically’, in their temples.

The stone circle at Stanton Drew, eight miles south of Bristol, was, Wood found, a temple to the moon, representing ‘almost all those Bodies that compose the Planetary World’. It was also, he explained, a Druid university. The philosopher Druids met at Avebury and the priests, who initiated their disciples at Okey Hole (a variant spelling of Wookey Hole), ‘performed the offices assigned to their orders’ at Stonehenge, which was a temple to sun and moon. Wood unrolled a vivid canvas before his readers, a landscape peopled with figures from the writings of Toland and Aylett Sammes, whom he, like Stukeley, found it convenient to take reasonably seriously. Here at the centre of proceedings is the Druid priest ‘array’d in sacred robes, – his Egg about his Neck’, participating in the ‘mistletoe solemnity’. There is Hercules in the guise of Ogmius, who, Wood thinks it ‘extremely probable’, helpfully transported the greywether stones from the Marlborough Downs. In among them are some older aspects of the Stonehenge tradition. There is a surviving echo of Jones’s Neoplatonism, ‘what the Antients called the harmony of the Spheres’, which Wood thinks is reflected in the arrangement of the stones. There is Joseph of Arimathea, who came to Glastonbury ‘in the very heart of all the Druidical Works’ and there is the Renaissance heliocentric universe, which the Druids understood, until their learning was suppressed by St Augustine.

Reading
Choir Gaure
, it is tempting to think that Wood is making it up as he goes along, but this is not quite true. His study of Stonehenge was only one part of a greater overarching system or ‘superstructure’ of beliefs which he had already set out in an earlier book,
The Origin of Building
, published in 1741. His purpose in all his work was ‘to make the Account [of architectural history] consistent with Sacred History, with the confession of the Ancients and with the course of great Events in all parts of the world, and with itself’. He was looking, like Jones and to some extent Stukeley, for an architectural equivalent of the unified-field theory and he found it in the existing argument that all classical architecture was derived, or ‘plagiarised’ as he put it, from the design of the Tabernacle and the Temple of Solomon, designs handed down by God to the Jews. Architecture had not developed, as the pagan Vitruvius said, it was revealed fully formed to Moses.

The work that underpinned his
Origin of Building
, and indeed much of the eighteenth century’s conception of prehistory, was Isaac Newton’s
Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended
, published in 1728. Newton, Stukeley’s friend, whose character as the founding father of modern physics is so oddly shot through, to the modern mind, with mysticism, casts a long shadow over Stonehenge. His number theory, his study of the Hebrew cubit, his belief that buildings were symbolic and that the Temple of Solomon, as he hypothetically reconstructed it, was ‘a hieroglyph of Jewish history’ all gave a solid, scholarly impetus to Wood’s own meditations and were no doubt one reason why Stukeley was so enraged by him, and yet so unable to forget him. The Temple of Solomon, as a primary source for all architecture, had been invoked in Jones’s day. It was implicit
in his Whitehall designs and in Rubens’s ceiling. But the next century was more literal and more empirical. Newton and Stukeley both drew plans of what they believed the original temple to have been and in 1724 and 1725 wooden models were exhibited in London. In the same way the identification of the British monarch with Solomon, which had been a graceful allusion to a dead king in the ceiling at Whitehall, was also brought closer to reality in 1727 at the coronation of George II. The anthem composed by Handel for the occasion and sung at every coronation since, ‘Zadok the Priest’, makes it explicit: ‘And Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon King.’ Wood’s
Origins
and the extrapolations of his
Choir Gaure
are not then so absolutely strange. In Hanoverian Britain the identification of the king with Solomon extended to the identification of the whole nation with Israel, a chosen people menaced by the Assyrians in the guise of the French, the Jacobites or any other current foe. It was a popular theme in sermons long before Blake’s vision of Jerusalem ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’. Wood naturally rejected the name ‘Stonehenge’ in favour of the older, supposedly native Choir Gaur. He also calculated the Jewish cubit and, having made his survey of Stonehenge, found it, happily, to be the unit of measurement.

Of all the currents of thought that ran through Wood’s writings directly into his architecture, the most powerful was his intense devotion to his birthplace, the ancient spa town of Bath. There is no more telling proof of his admiration for Inigo Jones than his recounting of the local story that Jones’s mother was a native of Bath. When dealing with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of Stonehenge, ‘how ridiculous soever it may appear’, Wood could not but feel there must be some
truth in the idea that the stones had been a spa, used for therapeutic mineral bathing. By the same token, if Wood had a personal reason for disliking Stukeley, it may have been that in his
Itinerarium Curiosum
of 1724 Stukeley cast aspersions on the city as ‘a disgrace to the architects they have there’ and also on the story of the local king, Bladud, and the ‘silly account of his finding out these springs, more reasonably attributed to the Romans’. Wood’s builder father was one of those implicitly castigated in these remarks and Bladud was one of Wood’s favourite historical characters, the key to his whole interpretation of Druid history. Wood’s stinging aside on the inaccuracy of Stukeley’s own survey of Stonehenge, that it was partly due to his having employed one ‘Abraham Sturges a jobing [
sic
] Bricklayer and mason of Amesbury, whom he stiles an Architect’, has an unmistakably personal tone. Second only, perhaps, to Jerusalem, Bath was, to Wood, the celestial city. It was, however, as Stukeley said, generally thought to be Roman, a difficulty Wood overcame by discovering in its streets a more ancient groundplan dating from the time of Bladud, an ankh within a hexagon, ‘the Hieroglyphical Figure of the Antients’.

As an architect Wood wanted more than anything to build in Bath. In architecture the flights of imagination frowned on among antiquaries and historians are of the essence. He created, out of his visionary reading of Stonehenge, a scheme that was, as Summerson put it, ‘unique in the urbanism of Europe’, the most daring and influential thing that had been done since Inigo Jones’s Covent Garden. Bath as it was in Wood’s childhood had possibly deserved Stukeley’s strictures. It was a provincial place, only just expanding beyond its medieval walls, where the inhabitants were said to bathe naked in the hot springs and, periodically, deposit dead animals in them. It was the unsatisfactory nature of the accommodation in the town that led the Duke of Chandos to commission Wood’s first buildings in Bath, a group of lodging houses. Soon afterwards, before he had worked out his Druid theories, Wood proposed a plan for a vastly grander development along what he thought were Roman lines. This was to comprise a royal forum, a grand circus and an imperial gymnasium. It was a scheme that had apparently little to offer Georgian England and had less to do with Roman models than Wood imagined, but it represented a daring innovation in town planning, which had still not developed in London beyond the street and the square as introduced by Jones. In 1730 Wood exhibited a design for a ‘grand Circus’, an amphitheatre with three roads branching out from it. It was not taken up at the time and two terraces, North and South Parade, were as far as the forum ever got. But Wood’s determination to build his scheme persisted.

12. The Circus, Bath, designed by John Wood and begun in 1754. Wood’s planning was as original as Jones’s had been. The circus was a novel form that puzzled some of his contemporaries but was soon copied in London and elsewhere. Derived from Wood’s study of Stonehenge, Stanton Drew and other prehistoric monuments it is crowned with Druidic acorns.

While he waited for other opportunities he developed Queen Square on the edge of the city, marking Bath’s first step from provincial backwater to fashionable spa town. He built Gay Street, leading north from Queen Square, in the 1750s and he acquired a reputation as an architect of skill and sophistication. But he never abandoned his grand design and as he worked on his books and developed his historical ideas so the plan itself changed. Sacred geometry, the Druids and their mysteries took the place of the Romans who had first fired his imagination as a young man. When eventually the King’s Circus began to be built at the top of Gay Street in the last year of Wood’s life, it was, like Solomon’s Temple, a hieroglyph, an encoded history of its creator. The circus as built is sixty
Hebrew cubits wide. It has thirty houses, the same number as the outer row of stones at Stonehenge, and the façades are adorned with the three sacred orders, imparted by God to the Jews and thence to Bladud – the Doric, the Ionic and the Corinthian. They are all of equal size, instead of diminishing, an idea Inigo Jones had intended for his Banqueting Hall. Crowning the King’s Circus are great acorns, tributes to the Druids as ‘priests of the hollow oak’, while on the frieze that runs round all the houses are carved symbols: the sun, Janus, a hand grasping a sceptre, the four winds and many others.

Wood took some of them from Jones’s Whitehall Palace and many from a seventeenth-century emblem book by George Wither. His most recent biographers have suggested that the whole thing was an elaborate private joke and the symbols have no serious meaning. Private it certainly was, between Wood and the Divine Architect but more than a game. Wood turned a Jacobean convention into a Romantic device. The helmeted heads and dolphins on the King’s Circus proclaim a mystery while still retaining it. The meaning certainly eluded most of his contemporaries, who thought the circus looked generally Roman and specifically like the Colosseum turned inside out. ‘A pretty bauble,’ Smollett called it in
Humphry Clinker
, ‘like Vespasian’s amphitheatre turned outside in.’ But however it was seen, the circus, as a piece of planning, was a new creation. Others followed in London, beginning with George Dance’s St George’s Circus in Southwark, then Oxford Circus, Piccadilly and more in Exeter, Edinburgh and elsewhere, until it devolved at last over time into that favourite piece of British traffic planning, the roundabout. All could trace their origins back to John Wood and through him to Stonehenge.