The Westbury Window

The contents of this book provide an astonishing insight into the mind-set of a Victorian entrepreneur. The Westbury Window is a stained glass work of art housed in the East Wall of the original Laverton Institute in the Town of Westbury, Wiltshire.

The Window is a palimpsest of perplexity designed to ridicule and confound but for its designer, Abraham Laverton (1819-1886), it became a positive dissertation about his time, his people, his living space, his politics, his religion and his obsession with all things astronomical and astrological. Above all it married the elements of alchemy to his sustained commitment to the esoteric, occult, cabbalistic, theosophic brotherhoods that directed his life.

Exploring the content of The Westbury Window revealed a tinderbox of controversies including:

• a new take on the Shakespearean authorship question
• a mocking of the tragic Edwin Henry Landseer
• harsh judgements of the self-obsessed Isaac Newton and James Watt
• new graphic evidence that Abraham Laverton (J.P., M.P.) was a Rosicrucian, Freemason and Knight Templar
• censure of Laverton after his death by his sister Charlotte who sanctioned a stained glass monument to him in the parish church
• unresolved coded messages in ‘pigpen’
• a mocking of the established church by caricaturing devil’s familiars
• a first recording of four legends including a maxim taken from the Qur’an
• an association with the Castle of King Arthur.

The real sensations are in the fields of mathematics and astrophysics that present evidence suggesting an understanding of time travel within this universe – but not beyond.