Politics and the Bayeux Tapestry: the inside story of the blockbuster loan to the British Museum

Not many 11th-century embroideries get plastered across the vast billboards on Piccadilly Circus. In fact, I can think of only one – the Bayeux Tapestry. On 26 February this year, the British Museum managed to secure a full 15 minutes of primetime advertising overlooking Eros to announce details of its blockbuster Tapestry exhibition, kicking off in September.

I went along to witness this event at London’s landmark traffic junction. It’s hard to judge whether people walking past were more surprised to see the Tapestry flashing across the big screens, or former chancellor (and now British Museum chair of trustees) George Osborne standing on the street staring up at it.

The Tapestry has been living rent-free in my head since January 2018, when I got a wake-up call from Radio 4’s Today programme asking me on to discuss the impending announcement of the loan of the Tapestry to the UK by France’s President Emmanuel Macron. They had my number because I’d written an article for BBC History Magazine (now renamed HistoryExtra Magazine) some years earlier canvassing experts on whether a loan like this could ever come to pass.

Overexcited by that turn of events, I partnered up with the British Museum’s in-house Tapestry expert, Michael Lewis – curator of the forthcoming major exhibition, scheduled to open in September – to write The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry. Leaping into action, we had the book written and on sale by spring of 2021, just in time for… nothing much at all to happen. For several years, the proposed loan was challenged and delayed, the idea being eclipsed by bigger geopolitical trends, according to Lord Peter Ricketts, the UK government’s Bayeux Tapestry Envoy. When I interviewed him for the HistoryExtra podcast, he explained that period of radio silence.

“The first hint of President Macron's interest in loaning the tapestry came at the Sandhurst Summit in 2018 with Theresa May,” he recalled. “But then everything went rather quiet, mainly because of Brexit and all the difficult politics around that and Covid. It wasn't really until relations began to improve that the idea was rekindled – particularly at a meeting between [then Labour Culture minister] Chris Bryant and his counterpart, the French culture minister Rachida Dati at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025. There, they essentially agreed at a political level that Macron’s idea should be pursued.”

Macron’s mission

I’ve been following the politics of the loan since 2018, and it’s clear that progress has been driven by President Macron. While several UK prime ministers have come and gone since Macron’s first statement, he has remained an ever-present in discussions – and, it seems, an enthusiastic champion of the idea.

“I think this really has come from Emmanuel Macron himself,” Lord Parkinson, Conservative heritage minister from 2021 to 2024, told HistoryExtra in an interview last year. “I think he’s aware that he made this very kind suggestion [of loaning the Tapestry]; he wanted to deliver on his promise, and this summit has allowed him to do that”.

“I do think Emmanuel Macron has been the driving force,” agrees Lord Ricketts. But, he notes, it was circumstances in Bayeux that kickstarted the loan conversation as much as it was about politics. “Over the decades, there have been sporadic discussions about the tapestry coming to the UK,” he continues. “I think the key thing was the decision that the museum where the Tapestry is now exhibited was going to be knocked down and rebuilt as a more modern museum. That meant the Tapestry was going to go off display and into storage.”

Those sporadic discussions occurred five times in the 20th century, when requests were made to loan the Bayeux Tapestry to Britain. The first was in 1931, for a ‘French exhibition’ at the Royal Academy of Arts in Burlington House, London. It was repeated in 1953 for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, and again in 1966, on the 900th anniversary of the battle of Hastings, when both the Victoria and Albert Museum and Westminster Abbey hoped to display it. In 1972, when France sought to have the Rosetta Stone exhibited in Paris, Britain enquired about receiving the Mona Lisa and the Bayeux Tapestry in return. And in 1980, the British Museum again requested a loan, but to no avail.

• Read more | The Bayeux Tapestry: a political football for 900 years

The story of those negotiations, and the reasons why they didn’t get anywhere, are outlined in an updated chapter of the brand-new edition of The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry. Often the conversations faltered because it wasn’t clear whether the UK representatives should be talking to people in Bayeux or in the French government. Even the possibility of a reciprocal royal visit by the Queen Mother to Bayeux in 1981 wasn’t enough to get a deal over the line. This time, we have envoys to make sure that both sides are talking to the right people. Ricketts’s role is to be the ‘docking point’ of contact between the UK and French administrations, working in partnership with his French counterpart, Philippe Bélaval.

Damage prevention

Nevertheless, concerns have been raised. A petition in France objecting to the loan has garnered more than 70,000 signatures, and the celebrated English artist (and Normandy resident) David Hockney has also come out in opposition. The principal worry is that the venerable artefact could be damaged in transit.

Similar concerns were voiced when previous loan requests were made. However, it is important to note that, since those earlier negotiations, the Channel Tunnel has opened, providing a much smoother transit route than sea or air.

“We are talking now about how the tapestry will come, not whether it will come,” according to Ricketts. “Whether it will come was decided when Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer signed that agreement last July. That's a formal government agreement, and that will be implemented.”

“The question now is the practical logistics of getting it here safely,” he continues. “Both sides, of course, are equally attached to ensuring the preservation and the protection of this incredibly fragile and precious object.”

• Read more | Is the Bayeux Tapestry in “mortal danger”?

“Clearly, everyone wants to avoid the risk of any kind of incident while it’s travelling. So I think the date on which it travels will be kept private. It will be very carefully protected and guarded by the gendarmerie on the French side and the British police when it arrives in Kent to be safely conveyed to London. And of course, from the moment it's in British hands, it will be extremely carefully protected, whether it’s moving or once it’s in the British Museum.”

Those arrangements sound rather more stringent than those proposed in 1953. Plans for the loan then had progressed to the point at which British bureaucrats and police officials discussed transport arrangements. Two armed officers were to join the vehicle carrying the Tapestry when it arrived by ship in Southampton, and two motorcyclists were to provide an escort from there to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Back then, the Tapestry was insured for £250,000 – but, as was noted, “it is regarded as irreplaceable”. That sum today is £800 million.

Different perspectives

We should expect a more sophisticated transport operation with the Bayeux Tapestry in 2026 than the plans from 1953. Even so, the concerns raised in France indicate that not everyone is sanguine about the loan. This might be a reflection of the fact that the embroidery is seen differently by the French to us in Britain. Back in 2018, I spoke to the Tapestry museum curator in Bayeux, Antoine Verney, who sadly has passed away recently. In his experience, he said, the British tend to recognise the Tapestry as marking the end of a period, while the French consider it more as the start of a story of Anglo-Norman expansion.

Verney also noted a very different level of knowledge about the Norman conquest story. For the British, the one date everyone knows is 1066; for the French, it is 1789. “A lot of French people think that Hastings is actually in Normandy,” Verney told me, “and that the battle took place in the Hundred Years’ War rather than the 11th century.”

According to Ricketts, President Macron clocked this too. “I think Emmanuel Macron understood something that's essential to this loan, which is that the tapestry is far more fundamental to the British national story than it is to the French,” he observed. “It's not central to the development of modern France in the way that 1066 and the Norman invasion is here. So the loan of the tapestry would be a hugely powerful cultural event that would underline the links between the two countries at a time when they'd been going through some pretty rocky times after Brexit, and also with war in Europe [in Ukraine]. It’s a good time to remind the people of the two countries how much we share.”

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It’s also a good time to remind people in both France and the UK about the Tapestry itself. Though it is justly famous already, the forthcoming exhibition – and the major media operation launched around it, Piccadilly Circus billboards and all – is going to propel the Tapestry even deeper into the popular consciousness. Sure, there is some risk in moving the embroidery, but the reward is that it gets a generational boost in awareness in France and Britain. That ought to secure a long-term flow of visitors not just to the British Museum but also back in Bayeux when the Tapestry returns there in time for the 2027 Year of the Normans, celebrating a millennium since the birth of Duke William.

Ricketts even reckons that the French will come to Britain to see it. “I think it will certainly bring an awful lot of French people to London to see it,” he states. “We already know that a large number of French schools are interested... We are producing a lot of materials for schools in French as well as in English.”

“You can see it in a more vivid way than you ever were able to in Bayeux, as we’re showing it at full length,” he adds. “Then, of course, when the tapestry goes back, the Bayeux Museum will be reopening, providing a very modern setting there as well. I think the impact it has in the UK will immediately feed back into France.”

The loan is a political gesture born of a need to reboot cross-channel relations. It would be remarkable indeed if a 950-year-old embroidery could help to smooth political differences today – but, with the vivid potency of its imagery, the Bayeux Tapestry reaches parts that other medieval sources cannot hope to. That’s why this exhibition is so exciting, so important, and so timely.

Lord Peter Ricketts was speaking to Dr David Musgrove on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.