Nicola here, musing on the pleasure of discovering unexpected reads. Last week I visited Tredegar House, which is a fabulous 17th century mansion in Wales, once the home of the Morgan family. Like so many of these places, the house is magnificent and the family history riveting. There’s also a connection to Ashdown House, which made it even more interesting for me so I wandered around looking at the family portraits and admiring the rooms before heading off to the gift shop and the tearoom!
Most National Trust properties these days have a second hand bookshop and browsing through the 
history section I came across a non-fiction book about the Norman Conquest. It was a “retired” library book called 1066 The Hidden History of the Bayeux Tapestry. I hadn’t studied the Norman Conquest of England since I was at college and hadn’t read much about it in the intervening time, so this looked intriguing and I’m also a total sucker for books that promise to solve a history mystery or tell me some sort of secret I didn’t know. That night I sat down to read it, not really expecting a thriller-style read, and I was totally hooked. Even though it was non-fiction it read like a page-turner, putting forward a story that challenged the traditional interpretation of the Bayeux Tapestry as a piece of Norman propaganda and suggesting it had a secret hidden message showing the Anglo Saxon side of the story. It was pretty convincing and I loved it.
One episode in the book particularly caught my interest. It was talking about how the tapestry had survived from 1066 until the present day, which is pretty astonishing when you think about it. It had some fairly close escapes, most notably during the French Revolution when some of the people of Bayeux wanted to rip it up to use it to cover their carts! Soon after that, though, it became a propaganda tool again, this time for Napoleon.
In 1803, Napoleon was making vast and detailed plans to invade Britain. He had 2000 ships moored between Brest and Antwerp and 200 000 soldiers, the Armée d'Angleterre (Army of England), encamped at Boulogne. (He also considered invading by balloon and appointed a woman, Sophie Blanchard, as his Air Service Chief. Sophie was a professional pioneer balloonist and worth of a blog all of her own!)
Napoleon was very keen to draw on the Bayeux Tapestry as propaganda for the invasion of England. After all, it showed as a conquering French Army routing the perfidious English (even if it was actually the Normans who had triumphed in 1066 and they did not consider themselves to be French!)
In November 1803 he ordered the Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde, as it was known, to be brought to Paris for exhibition at the 
Louvre, then called the Musee Napoleon, for public exhibition. The exhibition took place in the Galerie Apollon from December 8th. This time the people of Bayeux had been keen to hold on to it but the local authorities felt they could not really refuse. Crowds flocked to see the exhibit and it soon became a fashionable topic of conversation in high society. Napoleon spent considerable time brooding over its message, apparently, walking around the gallery on his own, studying it. A souvenir exhibition brochure was produced to accompany the public display as well.
In late November 1803 a comet passed over France and Southern England just like in the tapestry. Napoleon could not believe his luck, and a description of the comet was hastily printed and included in the exhibition brochure: “Dover December 6 1803. Last night about 5pm we observed a superb comet which rose in the south west and moved towards the north. It had a tail about thirty yards long. The whole countryside was lighted for many miles all around and after it disappeared, one smelled a strong odour of sulphur.”
Meanwhile to exploit the full propaganda effect of the occasion, a play called Queen Mathilde’s 
Tapestry was written, a musical comedy that showed William the Conqueror’s wife Matilda stitching away whilst a fictious boy called Raymond sang about wanting to be a soldier-hero like those depicted in embroidery. All in all, Paris must have been full of Bayeux Tapestry fever that year!
In the end the planned invasion of Britain came to nothing. The balloon army idea didn’t work because of contrary winds and the combination of tides, winds and the British Navy blockade of the English Channel prevented the flotilla from invading. The Bayeux Tapestry was sent back home and it’s role in Napoleon’s propaganda war was over.
There’s a lot more fascinating stuff in the book but this episode really caught my imagination. I could imagine the cream of Parisian high society flocking to the Louvre to admire the ancient tapestry and maybe plan a new one for when Napoleon’s own invasion succeeded!
Which all brings me back to the book that started it all, and I was so happy to have found it. There’s something even nicer about it when you’re not expecting to find such an interesting book in the first place, or when a book surprises you! So my question is:
Have you ever stumbled unexpectedly across a really brilliant books somewhere, fiction or non-fiction? Or has a book you’ve picked up with one expectation turned out to be completely different?
