by Jon E. Lewis
Gradually my sight became restored, and, one by one, the objects before and around me were visible.
The mailed knights stood as still as statues, and any movement of mine might have caused a serious if not a deadly wound from one or the other of their weapons, which shone with a bright, glaring and flashing brilliancy on every side. Had I desired it ever so much, movement or escape was an impossibility.
The light next appeared to become, through some invisible agency, slowly, very slowly of a dimmer character, and to burn with less radiance and dazzling glare; but whether this was actually the case, or some optical illusion, I am now at a loss to determine. I then perceived for the first time that I was kneeling before an altar on which burned a dull blue flame; that my left hand had rested on an open Bible, and my right – horror of horrors – on the face of a corpse.
“Death!”
How the word rang in my ears. With a horrifying glance I looked down towards the floor, and beheld another corpse, upon whose breast I had been compelled to kneel.
“Death!!”
Again the word rang in my ears. I raised my eyes to those around, saw no glance of encouragement beyond those helmeted faces, and could comprehend nothing but the bright, polished swords, presented at me on every side.
“DEATH!!!”
Still that pitiless word was present. A mailed knight stood beyond the altar, in the direction from which I had heard that solemn voice, and with his unsheathed sword he pointed silently to the ghastly object on which my right hand rested. Not a word emanated from his lips, but his sword’s point echoed the appalling, terrible word, “DEATH!”
Darkness appeared to spread itself before my vision. I felt my senses leaving me, and a nameless horror took possession of my whole soul!
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Abraham Lincoln, helmsman of the Union in the Civil War and emancipator of the slaves, was the first US president to be assassinated. That “Honest Abe” died at the hand of conspiracy is sure-fire certain; the only debate is over the size and motive of the plot.
Lincoln was mortally shot by a single bullet to the head from a Derringer .44 pistol while watching the play Our American Cousins from the state box at Ford’s Theater, Washington DC, on the evening of 14 April 1865. The killer, after administering the fatal lead injection, leaped eleven feet from the box down to the stage, landed badly, but raised himself to shout dramatically, “Sic semper tyrannis!” to the audience. The Latin tag, which means “Thus ever to tyrants!”, is also the state motto of Virginia.
Since the killer was an actor – indeed a familiar face at Ford’s – and the crowd was 1,000-strong, he was not difficult to identify. Pausing only to have his injured leg fixed by Dr Mudd, John Wilkes Booth – for it was he – lit out for the South. Federal authorities caught up with him a fortnight later at a barn at Garrett’s Farm, Virginia, where he was shot dead before he could surrender by an itchy-fingered Sergeant Boston Corbett.
A memo book was found on Booth’s body, which left no doubt of his guilt. Neither did the Federal investigators have much trouble in rounding up Booth’s co-plotters, John Surratt, Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, David Herold, Michael O’Laughlen, Dr Samuel Mudd and Samuel Arnold. After facing a military tribunal, Herold, Atzerodt, Powell and Mary Surratt were all hanged on 7 July 1865; the remainder were imprisoned, with the exception of John Surratt who escaped to Canada.
Such are the basic facts of the case. In orthodox histories, Booth is a Confederate “nut” who was motivated by racist indignation at Lincoln’s plan to extend the voting franchise to blacks and who sweet-talked a motley collection of acquaintances and Southern-sympathizers into helping him. However, for a century and a half, conspiracists have suggested that Booth et al were merely “trigger men” for vast dark forces, the conspiracists’ suspicions fuelled by the actions of some of the central characters. The behaviour of Sergeant Boston Corbett – who is the Jack Ruby of the Lincoln murder – is a case in point. Why did he not let Booth surrender? Was it because Booth might implicate someone high up the chain of the plot? Corbett was a religious lunatic, who had castrated himself to help his concentration on higher things, and was later locked up in an asylum. From which he then escaped and vanished without trace. Good going for a mad man, no?
If John Wilkes Booth and Boston Corbett were pawns in the assassination of Lincoln, there is no shortage of contenders for the title of the “Arch-Conspirator”, the cabal or the individual who masterminded the deed:
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In the febrile days after Lincoln’s death, Northern politicians loudly blamed Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy for the murder. Even accounting for Northern prejudice against the South, this theory has legs. Although General Robert E. Lee had recently surrendered the main Confederate army at Appomattox Courthouse, Davis was unwilling to haul up the white flag. Killing Lincoln was a means of keeping the Civil War going.
Booth did have incriminating connections to the Southern top table around Davis. Ideologically Booth was a die-hard “Rebel” of the Davis stripe. More: Booth was almost certainly a Confederate spy. Six months before the assassination Booth travelled to Montreal in Canada, where he conferred with Jacob Thompson, chief of the Confederacy’s secret service. Booth also made an unexplained deposit of $20,000 into his bank account on his return. And what better cover for a spy than the itinerant profession of thespianism?
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On the other hand, the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, pointed the finger of blame at someone inside the Lincoln camp – at no less than Andrew Johnson, the Vice President. Her evidence? Aside from being a Southerner – admittedly almost enough in itself to guarantee guilt in the paranoid aftermath of Abe’s death – he did know Booth socially. Booth had even called on Johnson on the afternoon of the assassination and left his card.
Yet the VeePee does not quite fit the frame as Mister Big, for one overwhelming reason: he was on the list of figures to be killed by the conspiracy on that April night. Luckily for Johnson, George Atzerodt, slated for the homicide, developed cold feet and went on a drinking bender instead. Why did Booth call on Johnson in the afternoon of that bloody Good Friday? Probably to determine his whereabouts so he could be butchered.
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In Otto Eisenschiml’s 1937 book Why Lincoln Was Murdered, another of the president’s men is outed as the master of the conspiracy. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton certainly had a motive, because he was wholly opposed to Lincoln’s soft, liberal Reconstruction policies for the South. Also Stanton, curiously, refused Lincoln’s request that Stanton’s Atlas-like aide, Major Eckert, accompany the party to the Ford Theater. Instead Abe got a buffoon as a bodyguard, who was in the pub at the fateful moment. Rather than taking a bullet for the president, John Parker was taking a shot of rye.
Another circumstantial piece of evidence against Stanton is Booth’s memo book, which the Secretary of War stashed away in his safe; when the memo book was later made public, at least eighteen pages were found to be missing. Chief of the National Detective Police, Lafayette C. Baker, testified that the journal had been complete when his men handed it over to Stanton …
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But then Baker himself is under suspicion. Three years after the assassination, the venal cop wrote what appears to be a rhyming confession: “In New Rome there walked three men, a Judas, a Brutus, and a spy. Each planned that he should be the kink [sic] when Abraham should die … As the fallen man lay dying, Judas came and paid respects to one he hated, and when at last he saw him die, he said ‘Now the ages have him, and the nation now have I.’”
Stanton is obviously Judas, but who Baker meant by Brutus is uncertain. Possibly it was Ward H. Lamon, Lincoln’s buddy and US marshal for Washington DC, who just happened to be elsewhere on the evening in question. As to the identity of the spy, Baker answered that himself: “But lest one is left to wonder what has happened to the spy, I can safely tell you this, it was I. Lafayette C. Baker 2–5-68.”
Shortly after composing his cryptogram, the previously healthy 44-year-old Baker died. His wife believed he was poisoned by government agents.
Of course, there is always someone who sees Jewish bankers behind every evil deed, and sure enough the Rothschilds have been nominated as the hands that steered Booth. Their reason? Because Lincoln had issued “greenbacks”, government notes to fund the war, thus robbing the Rothschilds of easy high-interest shekels. Equally, no conspiracy is complete without putting a secret society in its sights, and as soon as Lincoln’s heart stopped beating at 7.22 on the morning after he was shot, rumours began to circulate that the Knights of the Golden Circle, a circle of pro-South Northern Democrats, were up to their elegant necks in the deed. And there is always the super-ambitious alternative history in which plural plotters come together for one epoch shaping moment; in The Lincoln Conspiracy, David Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier Jr propose a heady, swirling scenario whereby Secretary of War Stanton linked up with Confederate spymaster Jacob Thompson, plus Northern speculators who wanted to keep the money-making war going and good ol’ Maryland boys who wanted to keep Negroes in their place, viz. down on the slave plantation. Just in case you thought that Booth was treated a little harshly for his part in delivering a bullet to Lincoln’s brain, he did not die staggering from a bullet in a blazing barn. No, no, no. In this left field conspiracy scenario, the body in the barn belonged to a James William Boyd, a Confederate fugitive, who unfortunately for him looked like Booth, the latter having been smuggled by Stanton out of the country. Some said to California, England and India. Yes, exotic India, not humdrum Indiana.
Like the controversy over the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that over the assassination of Lincoln shows no sign of slowing up. Unfortunately, the death of Lincoln is now so far in the past that any new evidence is unlikely to be unearthed. The truth lies buried with the bodies of the main actors in the drama.
Further Reading
David Balsiger and Charles E Sellier, The Lincoln Conspiracy, 1977
Otto Eisenschiml, Why Lincoln was Murdered, 1937
Theodore Roscoe, The Web of Conspiracy: The Complete Story of the Men Who Murdered Abraham Lincoln, 1960
LUSITANIA
On 7 May 1915 the British passenger liner Lusitania, under the command of Captain Turner, was sunk by a U-boat off the south coast of Ireland.
The loss of life was terrible. Since the ship was lying on its side, the starboard lifeboats could not be used, and 1,201 people died. Of these, 128 were citizens of neutral America.
Firing at a passenger liner was outside the accepted rules of war, and anti-German riots occurred in many countries. The President of the USA, Woodrow Wilson, wrote to the German government demanding “reparation so far as reparation is possible”. At the fourth time of writing, the Germans caved in, accepted responsibility and agreed to stop the sinking of passenger ships.
In the short term, German capitulation to Wilson’s demands was enough to prevent the USA entering the war on the Allied side. However, anti-German sentiment had been so effectively stoked by the sinking, that when Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 it was inevitable that the US would side with Britain, France and Russia.
Over time, military historians have come to suspect that the sinking was a set-up in which the Germans were deliberately encouraged by the British to sink the liner in the expectation that the negative publicity would lure the Americans onto the British side.
The suspicions were brought together in 1972 by Colin Simpson in The Lusitania. As Simpson detailed, the British failed to provide the Lusitania with any form of escort, although the Germans had placed advertisements in the newspapers of New York (from where Lusitania sailed) warning “that any travellers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk”. More, the Lusitania appeared to make no effort to avoid a U-boat attack although it was travelling through a zone where U-boats lurked. No less than twenty-three merchantmen had already gone to Davy Jones’s locker in the area.
A letter written by Winston Churchill, First Lord of Admiralty, to Walter Runciman, the president of Britain’s Board of Trade, seems damning evidence of the conspiracy: “It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany … For our part we want the traffic – the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.”
Furthermore, the radio exchanges between the Lusitania and the Admiralty from early May remain classified to this day.
Conspiracy or cock-up? The Lusitania was not “neutral shipping” and the fact that Churchill hoped that a ship got into useful trouble is not proof he planned the Lusitania sinking. In 1915, the minds of the Admiralty were concentrated on the Dardenelles campaign, and the sailing of one liner was a minor matter. Also, the ship was famously fast and well built, and the brass at the Admiralty likely presumed she was uncatchable at best, unsinkable at worst.
A foul-up would also explain the cover-up and locking-up of the radio traffic between the Admiralty and Lusitania: if the blunder had been made public, it would have been an embarrassment in front of the world.
Further Reading
Colin Simpson, The Lusitania, 1972
PAUL McCARTNEY
The Beatles, a.k.a. the Fab Four. John, Paul, George and Ringo.
Actually, make that the Terrific Three plus an imposter. According to a rumour broadcast in October 1969 by Detroit disc jockey Russ Gibb, Paul McCartney had died in a car crash in 1966, having been distracted by a lovely meter maid. As this would have destroyed The Beatles, Paul was replaced by a lookalike, William Campbell. (Or was it Billy Shears?) With a little plastic surgery here, a handy growth of facial hair there, William/Billy made a passable Paul and The Beatles kept on making money, money, money.
The Paul is Dead rumour swept the world. The evidence for Gibb’s proposition? Nothing less than The Beatles’ own lyrics and album covers. Racked by guilt, the remaining mop-tops could not stop themselves inadvertently hinting at Paul’s demise, in a sort of mass outbreak of Freudian slips. Thus on the sleeve of Sergeant Pepper Paul is standing next to a grave, while the hand of the statue of the Hindu god Shiva, “The Destroyer”, points directly at Paul. Then there’s the BEATLES wreath, and the doll in the red-lined dress, to symbolize Jane Asher, who died in the car with him. Inside, the sleeve depicts Paul wearing an arm patch with the letters OPD, standing for “Officially Pronounced Dead”. The lyrics are the clincher. In “She’s Leaving Home” the accident is revealed to have been on “Wednesday morning at five o’clock”, while “Good Morning Good Morning” confirms there was “nothing to do to save his life” and the climactic “A Day in the Life” acknowledges he “blew his mind out in a car”.
If the track “I’m so Tired” on The White Album is played backwards, the words become “Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him”.
But it is The Beatles’ 1969 Abbey Road that provides the mother lode of clues to Paul’s death. On the LP cover the four Beatles are pictured crossing the road in a funeral procession. Lennon is the priest (he’s wearing white), Harrison is the grave-digger (wearing denim), Starr is the funeral director (dressed formally). McCartney is the corpse: he’s out of step with the others, has bare feet, and is smoking a cigarette – the symbol of death in Sicilian culture. More, the licence plate on the car reads “LMW 281F”, which stands for “Linda McCartney Weeps”.
In 1993, Paul McCartney played sly homage to the long-running conspiracy theory about his premature death by titling his live album – Paul is Live!
On this album, as on all the other records made by Paul McCartney post-1966, Billy Shears/William Campbell sounded exactly like the pre-1966 Paul McCartney.
Funny that.
MARY MAGDALENE
She only had a walk-on part in the drama of the New Testament, but Mary Magdalene has become the star turn of modern conspiracy theory.
In the gospel accounts of Je
sus’s life, Mary (a.k.a. Miriam of Magdala) is the woman from Galilee who watches his crucifixion, and is the first person to see him after the resurrection. But lo! in the modern alternative theory Mary is Jesus’s wife and the mother of his children, whose descendants then walked the face of the Earth, specifically France, where they ruled as the Merovingian dynasty. The Holy Grail of legend is no longer the platter used by Jesus at the Last Supper, but Christ’s bloodline, which has extended down over the years to reach, inter alia, the Sinclairs in Scotland, Italian nobility and Princess Diana. Safeguarding the Holy Grail are two ancient orders: the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion. Although sworn to secrecy, Templars and Priory members have been unable to resist leaving clues to the existence of Mary’s marriage and motherhood, notably in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting, where it is not the apostle John that is depicted to the right of Jesus but Mary, while the V shape formed between the two acknowledges the symbol for femininity.
Obviously, all of the above contradicts the theology of the Catholic Church. To cover up Jesus’s intimacy with Mary – and so maintain its own power – the Catholic Church, it is suggested, cast Mary as a harlot and excised gospels featuring her. The Church also deliberately misinterpreted in medieval times “Sangreal” as “Saint Grail” rather than the correct “sang real ”, meaning royal blood.
If Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code takes the laurels for most popular exposition of the Mary Magdalene conspiracy, the vade mecum is the 1982 “non-fiction” bestseller Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. And this in turn owes something to Hugh Schonfield’s The Passover Plot (1965), while the British poet Robert Graves had speculated that Mary was Jesus’s wife as early as 1946 in King Jesus.
