President Macron’s loan of the Bayeux Tapestry to the British Museum is the perfect way to mark King Charles III’s first state visit of his reign. It ticks all the boxes.
It’s the greatest relic of Anglo-Norman royal history, probably commissioned in the 1070s by Odo of Bayeux, William the Conqueror’s half-brother, who became the Earl of Kent after the Conquest. And the tapestry’s extreme beauty – strictly speaking, it’s an embroidery – appeals to the King’s aesthetic side.
It features the King’s direct ancestor – the monarch who, more than any other, created England, with a Norman infusion of blood and mighty Romanesque churches, cathedrals and castles.
What’s more, the tapestry is coming home. Experts suggest the tapestry was made in Kent – Odo’s heartland – before finding its way to Bayeux.
Macron has been pondering this perfect present since 2018 when he first said the tapestry would come here for a 2022 exhibition. Conservation worries put the present on hold.
Strictly speaking, Macron’s present is really a loan: it will be swapped temporarily, going on display between September 2026 and July 2027, with museums in Normandy receiving Anglo-Saxon treasures from the Sutton Hoo ship burial. The exhibition is expected to be a once-in-a-generation blockbuster, attracting millions to the British Museum, perhaps even eclipsing the popularity of the museum’s most popular show, its 1972 Tutankhamun event. After a successful holiday here, the artefact will certainly return to Bayeux.
In so many ways, the Bayeux Tapestry’s return is like the mooted return of the Elgin marbles to Athens, currently being brokered by George Osborne, the museum’s chair.
Like the Elgin marbles, the tapestry is of vital national importance to its original home, if indeed it was first stitched in England. Like the marbles, it has ended up in a different country. And now, just as is mooted with the marbles, the tapestry is being loaned back to that original home.
Osborne is a good historian. We sat in seminars together in the early 1990s at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a Demy – Magdalen’s word for a scholar. He, more than anyone, will appreciate the delicious similarities between Macron’s masterstroke and his own plan to see the Elgin marbles back in Athens.
Osborne is forbidden by statute from actually giving them to Greece; the British Museum Act of 1963 prevents the museum from disposing of its holdings. Parliament would have to make changes to the act in order for that to happen – not something that’s high on its priority list in these febrile times.
Could the tapestry loan be a precursor to a marbles deal – a way of showing the Greeks the rules of engagement, without contravening the act?
There is one big difference: once the Bayeux Tapestry arrives in London, neither the King nor Keir Starmer – nor anyone in England, for that matter – will fight to keep it here.
It isn’t just the Elgin marbles that hold a place in Greek hearts, it is the raging desire to have them back. Any Greek prime minister who gets them back, even on loan, will be a national hero. Any Greek prime minister who then sends them back to the British Museum will become a national pariah.
Any loan agreement with the Greeks will thus not be worth the paper it’s written on. Paving the way with the Bayeux Tapestry loan – which offers a contemporary blueprint for how such things can be done – is a shrewd political move by those who want Greece to have the marbles back for good. It isn’t beyond the wit of government lawyers to construct an arrangement that gives the appearance of being time-limited when it is essentially permanent.
After its blockbuster exhibition, the Bayeux Tapestry will return to Bayeux, and it may well come back here one day. If the Elgin marbles go to Athens, however, they will never return.
Harry Mount is author of ‘How England Made the English’ (Penguin £12.99)
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