Those who broke the boy: The Sons of Charlemagne Book One

by Richard Hathway

  And it doesn’t stop there. I found a single line in a text about the Franco-Flemish wars of the late 1200’s and early 1300’s. Jan Borluut was commanding a group of seven hundred volunteers from Ghent at the Battle of the Golden Spurs in July 1302. He is said to have remarked to a Captain, when asked why he had no French prisoners to hand over at the end of the battle, that a Flemish General had taken them away. He claimed that the general wore a badge upon his uniform that bore half a black eagle on a yellow background and six fleur de lis on a blue background. The general was never found and Borluut’s testimony was dismissed as the excuses of a murderer. Borluut had previously been found guilty of manslaughter in Ghent so his name commanded little honour at the time. I’m sure if we keep digging we’ll find more examples.” Sally took a final swig of her coffee and gestured towards my plate.

  “Are you done Hun? Shall we get back to it?” I nodded

  “Yeah let’s go.” I said, piling up the plates and cups on the tray.

  “When we get back do you fancy starting on the East India Trading Company?” Sally asked as we were leaving Woode’s.

  “The what?” I replied pathetically.

  “The East India Company. The very embodiment of British imperial colonialism. If the Sons of Charlemagne were in Europe and Africa, I’d be willing to bet the farm they were there too.”

  “O.K” I said, “Point me in the right direction.”

  We crossed College Green quicker this time, both of us buoyed on by the discoveries of the other. Once back inside the stillness of the library Sally went back to the desk and I made my way back to the British history section. It was strange to feel so excited in such a contained atmosphere. I wanted to leap up and down and shout and dance and those feelings were all the stronger for knowing that I couldn’t. I took a few deep breaths on my way to the section I needed. By the time I dropped my bag on the floor and began on the first shelf I was beginning to calm down.

  Over the next few hours I read about The East India Company. Sally had warned me that, because it began in 1600, there may be few or no direct references to Sons of Charlemagne. If this group of mercenaries and merchants had indeed been operating since the nine hundreds it was logical to assume that they would have got better at hiding themselves. A crest of Charlemagne might have been a declaration of power on the Portuguese Gold Coast in the fourteen hundreds but it wouldn’t do to advertise so much in seventeenth century England. I needed to read between the lines, find connections and coincidences, look for improbable situations or people of power. I was prepared to find no concrete proof of The Sons in England. Almost immediately I did.

  Robert Cecil was the son of William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s spy master general. Under his tutelage Robert learnt the ways of court and state. He was elected as an MP in 1584 and, after his father’s death in 1598, became Secretary of State for Elizabeth. He continued in this role under James I when he succeeded Elizabeth.

  On 31st December 1600, a group of merchants incorporated themselves into The East India Trading Company. In January 1601, the company was given a letter from Queen Elizabeth. This letter was from The Queen of England to ‘The Kings of Samatria and the other places in the East Indies’. In essence, it was an introduction and an invitation to trade. Elizabeth intended to conduct her overseas trade in a more benign and benevolent manner than the Portuguese and Spanish, whom she saw as imposing themselves on foreign lands. The history of the East India Company would turn out to be very different indeed.

  I noted that it had been Robert, in his role as Secretary of State, who had written the letter. Had he, as part of a bigger plot, given different instructions to the first merchants to land in India in 1608? There seemed little evidence of the endeavour beginning in that way. There was plenty of evidence of cordial letters between Elizabeth and her new trading partners in the east. Despite a mistrust among parliamentarians of the Islamic world the company fared very well. Perhaps Robert Cecil was part of a longer game. Certainly, he was no stranger to political intrigue and plotting. In 1605, he was the man to discover the Gunpowder Plot, though it was rumoured he had orchestrated the whole thing in order to foil it. I was only just beginning with The Sons but funding and then preventing an act of terrorism as a means of consolidating power seemed right up their street. On further investigation, I found that the small and hunchbacked Robert walked with a cane that observers noted was embossed with a relief of a crown. His detractors ridiculed the ‘little man’ for having ideas above his station and for wasting his money on a relief that bore no likeness to the crown of England. One observer noted “It is a rather plain thing, square across the bottom and rounded in places at the top, a simple cross sits atop it and the whole image reminds one of a child’s drawing of Calvary. Perhaps Cecil sees himself more like Christ than a king, he certainly conducts himself as such!” That image struck me as familiar. I put down the book and went back to the European history section in the library. After a few minutes searching I found the book again. The first book I had picked up on Charlemagne had a drawing of his crown. I flicked through the pages until I found what I was looking for. I almost dropped the book when my eyes at last rested on the image. A crown made up of eight panels, each shaped with a rounded top like a church window. The panel that would be seen at the front was larger and from it a cross rose up. It was not fashioned in any elaborate style, just simple lines used to full effect. The whole thing was cast from gold and covered in pearls and gem stones. It was the same crown. Robert Cecil carried the crown of Charlemagne with him. I sank to the floor as it hit me. Sally and I weren’t investigating a criminal band of slave traders and soldiers for hire. We were investigating governments and royal families. Everywhere we looked there was the suggestion of The Sons of Charlemagne. How the hell could we beat them? What was the point of going to the police if they controlled governments? Was that how they’d covered up the death of the girl? Oh, Christ the girl! That beautiful girl that still twisted my heart when I thought of her. My feelings were not so intense or enveloping now but I still loved her, still needed to avenge her death. But how? I was just a twelve-year-old kid who’d only ever been as far as Mid-Wales on cold, terrible family holidays. I couldn’t beat an international conspiracy that stretched across the whole world and back a thousand years! I began to cry. I didn’t choose to, or mean to, the tears just came. They came slowly at first but there was an inevitability about them, like the first small crack in the dam or the distant roll of thunder. The grief, the fear, the regret and the weight of it all came crashing through.

  By the time Sally found me I was sobbing so hard my shoulders were shaking. I didn’t hear her arrive or sit down next to me. I jumped and pulled away when she put her arm around my shoulder. She pulled me back in and held me as I cried.

  “Shhhh,” she whispered in my ear, “I know, I know. I’ve felt it too. Maybe we need to stop and re-think things.”

  “W…w…ww..we can’t s..ss..s..stop,” I sobbed, “what…about..th..the girl?”

  “O.K,” Sally stroked me head and held me tight, “O.K Hun don’t worry about it now. Shhhh, just breathe Hun.”

  We sat like that for ten minutes and in truth, I never wanted it to end. Her warm embrace was so welcome and unfamiliar. It was like I had never realised I was cold until someone gave me a blanket.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “We haven’t found any actual proof, have we?” I said when I had stopped crying. “What if we’re only finding connections because we’re looking for them?”

  “That’s the only way to find the connections Hun.” Sally replied quietly.

  “I know but what if they’re not real? How come no-one has ever figured all this out? Maybe it’s all just coincidence and we just want it to be true? I mean we don’t have anything real, do we? We don’t have anything that the police would take seriously, nothing that proves that the girl was there, in the house, that she was killed?”

  Sally nodded slowly next to me but said nothing. Maybe
she was thinking the same thing, maybe she was thinking of how to reassure me. We sat in silence until she spoke.

  “O.K. maybe what we have is a whole bunch of shadows, but Hun they’re pretty convincing shadows. I don’t know why no-one has ever seen the connections. Hell, maybe no-one ever looked before. I hear what you’re saying about the girl and you’re right we don’t have anything concrete on the girl, but we have a way of getting it.”

  I turned to look at her. She turned to look at me and saw the confusion on my face.

  “You have that business card right?”

  I nodded and felt on the floor for my blazer. I took the card from the inside pocket and gave it to Sally. She took it and turned it over in her hand, looking at both sides.

  “See?” She said, showing me the card, “We have an address and a phone number. Now if that ain’t proof that this thing exists I don’t know what is. And here on the reverse there’s a number, her number we’re betting, right?”

  I nodded along.

  “Well then! Here we have proof that an organisation exists and that they catalogue things by number. If we can prove that the number relates to the girl we have our proof. All the history, all the pages we have with shadows, all of that is true or it aint but this,” she held the card up like a trophy, “this is proof of the girl!”

  Sally was right. If the pages of history were too vague, too much like a mad conspiracy theory for the police, then the card, the number, the people it related to, they were all real.

  “So, we stop looking at the history?” I asked. I felt a slight sadness at the question, I had begun to enjoy the pages of history, even the stillness and the smell of the library.

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Sally replied. “I’ve got a bit more to share with you that I’ve learnt this afternoon but maybe tomorrow, if you’re still able to get out of school, we go take a look at this address.” She was pointing to the card.

  “I can bunk off for the whole week,” I said, “and the bus I get stops at the top of Blackboy.”

  “Excellent,” Sally smiled, “tomorrow we’ll have ourselves a little field trip then!”

  “Cool.” I smiled back. Sally’s face dropped its smile and she became serious again.

  “These people are dangerous mind Hun. Whether all this,” she gestured to the books, “is true or not these people are dangerous. Even if they are only responsible for one slave girl, one murder and one cover up they are still very bad people. If they are part of this Sons of Charlemagne that we think we’ve found, they’re a whole heap more than that. Let me tell you what I’ve found.”

  We stayed sat on the floor and Sally took me on a whirlwind tour of Lord Palmerston and the German SS. I sat and listened intently and with every word became convinced again that the Sons of Charlemagne were real.

  Lord Palmerston somehow manged to serve for forty-six years in British government. This fact alone made him stand out, how could a man survive so long through changing political tides if not through having some very powerful backers. Starting out as a Tory, he switched to the Whig party and again to the Liberals when they were formed. As Foreign Secretary, a post he held for fifteen years, he was intimately involved with the politics of Europe during the turmoils of the 1830s and beyond. He was not afraid of upsetting other countries with his blunt demands and even openly disagreed with Queen Victoria over foreign policy. Was his surety born out of protection? He had an enviable strike rate when it came to diplomatic success, almost as if he had information that others did not. As Prime Minister, he oversaw the conclusion of the Crimean War but it was the Indian Mutiny of 1857 that had caught Sally’s eye. Prior to the uprising India was not a topic that parliamentarians were interested in. It was believed that the people were compliant and that the East India Company, corrupt and cruel maybe, was doing its job. India was not discussed in parliament or the papers. That vast continent that provided so much trade and wealth for the British Empire was largely forgotten. How could that be? Surely people were interested in a far off, exotic land full of wonders and stories? Sally had dug a little deeper and found a reference to an interview Lord Palmerston had given The Times in 1841. He had been asked about the ongoing opium war and why The East India Company was being allowed to antagonise China at the request of the British government. Lord Palmerston had allegedly replied, though he denied it later, that The East India Company was the British government and more besides and that any reporting of their affairs would be dealt with harshly. Was Palmerston using his position in government to keep the actions of the company, of The Sons, secret?

  Once the Indian mutiny began of course there was no way to keep it quiet. The only option was to see to it that however the chips fell, they fell in favour of the Sons of Charlemagne. The East India’s days were numbered but Lord Palmerston, faithful as ever, was there in the thick of it. After the mutiny, Palmerston was perfectly placed to bring in the Government of India bill that dissolved the East India Company and transferred the governance of India to the British crown. The company had done so much for the Sons of Charlemagne but its time was done. When The Sons had begun kings and earls and such ruled. Europe, over time, had evolved into a more democratic landscape. Levels of government and civil servants expanded and with it the numbers of men with influence. The Sons had taken full advantage of this burgeoning bureaucracy. They didn’t just have their fingers in all the pies, they made the ovens as well. Robert Cecil had created the opportunity for the East India Company to rise and now, because it was too big and too obvious, because it was necessary to avoid too many questions, Lord Palmerston was placed to dissolve it. He would make it seem like the natural progression of society and he would bury any evidence of the Sons of Charlemagne, just as he had done as Foreign Secretary.

  I wasn’t sure about the Lord Palmerston stuff, it all seemed a bit like grasping at straws to me. Sally noted my scepticism and conceded that there were no direct references to link him with The Sons but she was convinced that it all matched up. She said that by the time of Palmerston the Sons of Charlemagne were probably making sure not to have any directly relatable evidence on show. The crest of Charlemagne was ok in the fourteen hundreds above a castle in north Africa, a small embossed crown on a cane might have seemed acceptable for Robert Cecil but as the world grew smaller, and journals and newspapers became more numerous, secrecy of the highest order was paramount for those in the public eye. Sally’s arguments made sense so I accepted that Lord Palmerston may have been a Son of Charlemagne.

  Having people in high office was very useful to the cause but any organisation needs its foot soldiers as well. Sally had found a group that hadn’t minded getting down and dirty and wasn’t shy about displaying their loyalty. European conflict must have been such lucrative business over the centuries so it seemed only logical that The Sons would be involved in the two greatest wars of the twentieth century. Whilst she was sure if she looked hard enough she would find evidence from world war one, it was in world war two that Sally found The Sons.

  The German army had within it a legion of pro-fascist French fighters. They fought under the name of The Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism, or LVF. They fought in the Russian invasion in 1941 and Belarus in 1942. In 1943 the LVF were in the Ukraine and by 1944 they were attached to the 4th SS regiment fighting in France against the Allies. It was in September of 1944 that the remnants of the LVF and the French Sturmbrigade were joined into the new Waffen Grenadier Brigade der SS ‘Charlemagne’. Recruitment of French collaborators fleeing the Allied advance swelled its number and in February 1945 the unit was upgraded to a division and given the title 33rd Waffen SS Charlemagne.

  This new division was sent to fight in Poland but was heavily defeated at Hammerstein, leaving barely seven hundred men. After Hammerstein about four hundred of the SS Charlemagne were moved to a different battalion and the remaining three hundred and fifty, the most loyal and brutal, under Gustav Krukenberg, were sent to Berlin. These three hundred odd men, French men,
were entrusted with the defence of central Berlin and Hitler’s bunker. They wore the crest of Charlemagne on their uniform and fought hard to protect the centre of Hitler’s Reich from the Allies. The SS Charlemagne was responsible for destroying at least sixty-two of the one hundred and eight soviet tanks that entered Berlin. By May, and down to about thirty men, the SS Charlemagne were the last remaining defenders of Hitler’s bunker, even after The Fuhrer had committed suicide on April 30th.

  Perhaps this group of battle hardened Frenchmen had been designated ‘Charlemagne’ simply because they were the embodiment of French-German unity that Charlemagne had achieved. The crest they wore, the French Fleur de Ly’s and the German eagle, certainly spoke to that. Maybe though, just maybe, the name was more than that. The core group of three hundred and fifty that went to Berlin to defend Hitler were well trained and not given to surrender. They were well placed to protect the upper echelons of the Nazi party. With the connections that the Sons of Charlemagne had made over the centuries they were also able to get high ranking officials out of Germany and away to South America. Since the fourteen hundreds at Elmina Castle The Sons had been sailing west to Brazil.

  Sally finished by telling me about the Charlemagne Prize, given every year for “The most valuable contribution in the services of Western European understanding and work for the community, and in the services of humanity and world peace.” The prize is awarded by the city of Aachen, the birthplace of Charlemagne and it is asserted that the recipients reflect the history of European unification. Sally suggested it was all just a bit of clever political manoeuvring to have the Charlemagne name linked with good. If, Sally suggested, the Sons of Charlemagne were working in political circles this prize might be their public face. Like the chemical plant that’s poisoning the local water but sponsors the hospitals new cancer wing.