Cracking the Poussin Code: the key to the Shepherd's Monument at Shugborough: ever since the publication in 1982 of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the mysterious Shepherd's Monument at Shugborough in Staffordshire has attracted numerous bizarre interpretations. Eileen Harris investigates its real meaning, following a trail that leads via Poussin's vision of Arcadia to Pelham's Urn at Esher Place, Surrey

Apollo, May, 2006 by Eileen Harris

If sales of The Da Vinci Code are anything to go by, using Old Master paintings to go Grail-hunting is now second only to football as a universal pastime. This esoteric art-cult was launched in the 1970s by Henry Lincoln, who claims that Poussin's famous painting in the Louvre Et in Arcadia Ego is the 'key' to the Holy Grail. (1) Some cryptic inscriptions discovered in 1891 by the Abbe Beranger Sauniere (1852-1917) in the parish church of the obscure Pyrenean village of Rennes-le-Chateau set Lincoln chasing after arcadian shepherds not only in the galleries of the Louvre but also in the gardens of Shugborough in Staffordshire, the seat of the Anson family, Earls of Lichfield. The Shepherd's Monument at Shugborough (Fig. 1) incorporates a marble relief by Peter Scheemakers derived from Poussin's painting, above a tablet of cryptic letters.

This quest provided Lincoln with a best-selling masterpiece of mumbo-jumbo, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, published in 1982. In 2003 it begat The Da Vinci Code, the success of which gave the commercially astute manager of Shugborough the idea of attracting visitors to the house by inviting the famous World War II code-breakers of Bletchley Park to decipher the inscription on the monument. In a blaze of publicity, he set up a code-breaking website (www.shugborough.org.uk) to encourage members of the public to try their hand at 'cracking the enigma'. Unfortunately, the publicity also encouraged vandals to damage the monument; (2) meanwhile the 'age old mystery' remains unsolved.

Mea culpa? In September 1971, three years before Henry Lincoln visited Shugborough for a BBC Chronicle film, 'The Priest, the Painter and the Devil', I published an article in Country Life attributing the rustic arch surrounding the Shepherds' Monument to the eccentric astronomer-architect Thomas Wright, dubbed the 'Wizard of Durham'. (3) This was intended primarily for architectural historians; it never occurred to me that it might also contribute to a 'Poussin Code' and the quest for the Holy Grail. There are, to be sure, several puzzling aspects of the Shepherds' Monument, apart from its architecture; but these have not, and, in my opinion, never will be explained by overlaying it with the Golden Section and other esoteric geometrical constructs, or by introducing Masonic numerology and occult religious symbols. The attention focussed on the cryptic letters has been equally futile. We still have no satisfactory explanation of this garden monument's raison d'etre.

The earliest known reference to it is a poem 'On an Emblematical Basso Relievo after a famous Picture of Nicolas Poussin, Representing Shepherds pointing to the following Inscription on a Monument in Arcadia: Et in Arcadia Ego' by Thomas Seward (father of Anna Seward, the 'Swan of Lichfield'). This was sent by Elizabeth Anson to her brother-in-law, Thomas, with a covering letter dated Monday, 20 September 1756. (4) Although Scheemakers' bas-relief carries the same message of mortality as Poussin's painting in the Louvre, it was put to somewhat different, more specific use as a memorial to a particular person.

The most notable death at that time--one mourned by the entire nation and most deeply lamented by the Anson brothers, Thomas, the owner of Shugborough, and his brother Admiral George, the celebrated circumnavigator; by George's wife, Elizabeth; by her father, Lord Chancellor, Philip Yorke, first Earl of Hardwicke; and by other members of her family--was that of the Right Honourable Henry Pelham, who died unexpectedly on 6 March 1754, on the eve of the General Election for which he been planning. Since 1746 the government had been run by a triumvirate: Henry Pelham as Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Treasury; his older brother, Thomas Pelham-Holies, first Duke of Newcastle; and Lord Chancellor Hardwicke. By marrying Hardwicke's daughter Elizabeth in 1748, George Anson, a lifelong friend of Newcastle, became firmly attached to the Pelham ministry and was duly rewarded by being made First Lord of the Admiralty in 1751. Thomas Anson, although he preferred 'the still paths of private life' and was not a political animal, was brought into Parliament in 1747 as MP for Lichfield by his brother and kept in check by Lady Anson. (5)

A monument was erected to Pelham in the grounds of his beloved retreat at Esher Place, Surrey, 'within a sunken dell ... called the Wood', on the hill near where William Kent's Belvedere once stood. (6) It consists of a large, freestone funerary urn set on a rectangular pedestal bearing an epitaph to Pelham in Latin by his grateful secretary, John Roberts (Figs. 4 and 5). On the three remaining sides are bas-reliefs accompanied by lines from Horace's Odes: a mourning woman leaning against a column surmounted by a vase, Debita Spargens Lacryma Favillam ('scatter the ashes with a deserved tear'); Charon, the ferryman, in his boat, with Mercury Psychopomp, the guide of dead souls, and the deceased bidding farewell to his wife, Linquenda Tellus Et Domus Et Placens Uxor ('Earth, home and a pleasing wife are to be left behind); and finally a reverse copy of Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego (Fig. 6) made from Bernard Picart's engraving of 1693-94, Desiderio Nec Pudor Aut Modus ('[our] grief has neither shame nor limit'). (7)