by Steven Sora
Where could a fleet of treasure-laden ships and hundreds of knights seek safety? Very likely it was in the same places that Robert the Bruce was hiding. While legends of a king in hiding would equal those of Robin Hood in their re-creation, there were some very likely candidates for the sanctuary of Bruce. The most likely places were in Kintyre, a peninsula extending from Argyll, and some of the islands off the Scottish coast, including Jura and Islay. These were in the hands of the MacDonald clan, loyal to Bruce and openly hostile to invaders. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of The Temple and the Lodge, had searched the western Highlands looking for both the hiding place of the Bruce supporters and the Templars.20 One tale of “an island in a lake” brought them to Loch Awe and modern graves, but in nearby Kilmartin they found a concealed churchyard full of ancient stones decorated in Templar fashion.
Farther north, the Hebrides and the Orkney Islands would be even more suitable for hiding an entire fleet. Scapa Flow in the Orkneys was where the Germans scuttled a fleet of seventy of their own ships at the end of World War I, rather than surrender them to the British.21 In World War II, the British fleet itself hid there, six hundred years after the Templar fleet might have enjoyed the isolated harbors of these remote islands as a sanctuary. Across from Scapa Flow is a landmark called Saint John’s Head, where a distinctive rock structure rises 1,141 feet from the sea, one of the highest cliffs in the British Isles. Saint John, the beheaded prophet, featured very prominently in the Templar legends. The feast day of the holy prophet is their sacred date and remained sacred among the Freemasons and Masons that succeeded the Templars. Hundreds of years later, when English and Scottish lodges finally went public, their charter dates were set on Saint John’s feast day, June 24.
Because Saint John the Baptist played such an important role in Templar iconography, it is interesting to note that this predecessor of Jesus, the voice crying out in the desert, was beheaded for his religion. Templars were charged with worshiping an idol of a skull named Baphomet.22 Some historians have claimed that this is Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Others suggest that Baphomet might have been a corruption of abufihamet, Arabic for “Father of Wisdom,” or the person or deity represented on the Shroud of Turin.23 After the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Dr. Hugh Schonfield discovered a very complicated form of cryptography that he called the Atbash cipher.24 Using that method, he translated the word Baphomet into “Sophia.” This form of cryptography may indicate that the Nazarenes, the followers of the earthly Jesus, and the Templars were in touch with each other. The decapitated head came to play a role in Templar mythology.
We will later see that Jesus of Nazareth may actually be a misnomer for Jesus the Nazarene, the Nazarenes being a group connected with the Essenes who yearned for a more strict observance of their religion. John the Baptist may have actually become more revered than Jesus himself among the remnant members of this group. There are those who believe that because John was decapitated the Templars took to revering him even more highly than Jesus. The Feast of Saint John, June 24, is the most sacred day in the Templar year.
The Orkney Islands were not yet the property of the Sinclair clan in 1307. They belonged to the Norse chief Malise, whose daughter William Sinclair later married. The Norse had been raiding the islands around Scotland and Ireland well before they are known to have attacked the coast of Ireland in the eighth century. Norse raiders gave way to Norse settlers; one group of settlers was the Mores, a powerful Norse family that settled the isles and sent a branch to France in the tenth century. The French branch of the More clan became the St. Clairs and later the Scottish Sinclairs. At the time that the Templars were being hunted by church and state, Scotland’s first families were being hunted by the English. It was at this time that the clan of Sinclair chose to obtain the support of another of the sea kings, the Gunn clan.
The Clan Gunn and the Sinclairs
Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in 1136, is one of the first historians to have compiled a history of the British Isles. He names a certain King Gunhpar (latinized as Gunuasius) as the regent of Orcadum in his list of six kings who fought alongside Arthur against the Saxons.25 Geoffrey latinized the name of his kings, as was the European practice of the time. “Gunuasius” might have become “Gunn” in such early times. Perhaps this Gunn was the ancestor of the knight Sir James Gunn. The realm of this ancient sea king would certainly include a navy adept at crossing the choppy North Atlantic seas that surround Scotland in an icy band.
In the study of names and heraldry, the prevalent belief is that all families descend from one famous ancestor. Robert Bain says members of the Gunn clan were all descended from Olave the Black. This Norse Olave would have sailed to the “Sutherlands” (southlands), in Norse terminology, after the fifth century. In Clans and Tartans of Scotland, Bain declares that it was a son of Olave, named Gunnar, who became the first of the Gunn clan.26 The name Gunnar derives from the word gunn, meaning “a long, strong reed.” A gunn, interestingly enough, was a “spear.”
A third historical text agrees with Geoffrey. In Scottish Clans and Tartans, Ian Grimble says the Gunn name was already ancient when the Norse arrived in the Orkneys.27 In fact, the name was Pictish. The Pict language still remains for the most part undecipherable and essentially lost to the world. The origin of the Picts is uncertain, and history does not even document them by that name until A.D. 279, when Eumenius records them in the context of Caesar and Rome’s attempt to take Scotland. In A.D. 305, a certain Constantius Chlorus campaigned against the “Caledonians and other Picts,” and the son of Constantius tried his hand against them in A.D. 343.28 The blue-painted diminutive warriors chased the Roman legions away.
When the Romans were leaving Britain, the “Scotti,” actually an Irish people, were colonizing Scotland. Picts and Scots then coexisted with other tribes lost to history, including the Attacotti and Verturiones. While Rome regarded all the forces it encountered as primitive, in the same way as American settlers regarded the natives they warred against as primitive, this view discounts much. The Picts were renowned for their silverwork and adopted chariots after meeting Roman legions in battle. It was their ability to assimilate that deprives history of a correct understanding. They were also capable sailors, skilled in the ability to build skin boats and travel great distances in them. It is very likely that the Picts and the Norse had contact with each other from very early times. Whether the Gunn clan was Pictish or Norse, they were a sea power to contend with in the north.
In a very well researched body of work on King Arthur and the personages of the Holy Grail romances, Norma Lorre Goodrich makes the case that Guinevere was a Pictish queen.29 At the time, the matriarchal Picts gave women the prerogative of picking and discarding a husband at will. Her lack of faithfulness to her husband was viewed in Grail literature as immoral, but Goodrich sees it simply as custom. Queens as well as kings of the Picts rode into battle. And kings as well as queens married to cement political alliances. A Queen Guinevere of Pictish Orkney allied with Arthur against the Britons would fit closely with a Pictish King Gunn, Geoffrey’s Gunuasias of Orcadum, in granting their ancestors, the Gunn clan, the title crowners of Caithness.
Centuries later, when the Norman Sinclairs made Scotland and the northern isles their property, the Norse chieftain Malise might have already been related to the clan Gunn. Through a Sinclair-Norse marriage, this alliance was further strengthened. When William Sinclair took over as earl of Caithness and added the Orkneys to the Sinclair domain, he did so only with the consent of the Pictish-Norse clans in the north. It was this powerful seagoing alliance that admitted the Templars to their realm.
The Templars and Scotland
The Templar fleet, under agreement with Sinclair, sailed directly from France to the Orkneys. The Orkney sea king alliance was hostile to the ever growing power of France and the papal authority that claimed more than its share of Europe’s wealth. Moreover, an independent Scotland was in need of an ally as badly as the Te
mplars were in need of safe haven.
Shortly after Bruce had himself crowned as King Robert (weeks after the murder of John Red Comyn and six years before the victory at Bannockburn), the army of King Robert and Scotland suffered a serious loss to the English at the Battle of Methuen in June of 1306. Bruce was forced into hiding, which would last throughout the winter.30 A rival Balliol earl captured Robert the Bruce’s wife, fulfilling the prediction she had made upon seeing her husband crowned earlier that year: “It seems to me that we are but a summer king and queen, whom the children crown in their sport. The prediction would have worse consequences than she had imagined. Robert the Bruce’s daughter, Marjorie, was captured as was his brother Nigel, on the run with Robert—he was beheaded.31
When Robert came out of hiding, his string of personal disasters was still not over. Brothers Thomas and Alexander were also captured. The Bruce supporters were reduced to the status of a band of outlaws. With ragged clothes and shoes of rawhide, they would go hungry except when thievery or the kindness of strangers and friends provided. In 1307 it was simply the remnants of the Bruce clan and a few supporting clans that made up the entire nationalistic movement of Scotland.
The rest of the movement shared the disasters that Bruce suffered. The earl of Atholl was hanged for his support of Bruce. Simon Fraser, who had joined with Sir William Wallace in revolt against the king, was impaled on London Bridge. Bishop Wishart and Bishop Lamberton, who gave moral support for the cause, were put in chains. Isabel of Buchan and a sister of Robert the Bruce were exposed in lattice cages and hung out in the city of Berwick for everyone to ridicule.32 For the cause of an independent Scotland, this winter was comparable to the winter that George Washington and his ragtag band spent at Valley Forge. For Bruce, however, it was forces beyond his control that would save him.
In France in the same year, the Templars knew their relationship with the French king was deteriorating. The writing was on the wall, but only the resistance of the pope to Philip’s orders delayed the arrests. Finally, when the secret orders were issued, many Templars were already prepared. Negotiations between the Sinclairs, who had already been allied in spirit with their St. Clair relatives and who had had an instrumental role in founding the Templars, paved the way. The Templar fleet sailed to the isles surrounding Scotland. Just as fortuitous as the arrest of the Templars was the death of the English King Edward on his way to Scotland. The king’s death provided temporary relief for Bruce; the money and arms that the Templars brought to Scotland would save the day.
Templar legend says that the fleet sailed to the support of Scotland, but some historians have their doubts.33 The most compelling evidence outside Templar legend is the fact that the English king complained that the Templars were at least funding weapons purchases for Scotland through a neutral Ireland. In any case, Bruce was again commander of his country’s army and no longer an outlaw. After losing family members, friends, most of his wealth, and many of the fighting men that supported him, the leader of the Scottish independence movement made an amazing comeback. Suddenly Bruce could march through Scotland, consolidating his support and punishing his enemies. He seized their lands and captured their forts, executing his worst enemies. Halfhearted English incursions under the new king were either avoided or defeated. By 1313 Bruce was raiding England and had captured the Isle of Man as the result of a seaborne attack. It had been a remarkable five years.
The next year Bannockburn decided the issue of Scottish independence as well as the issue of the Knights Templar, who fought for the cause of Scotland and its leading families, Bruce and Sinclair. Outside Scotland the persecution of the Templars proceeded under the direction of Philip and the pope. It climaxed with the burning to death of the grand master Jacques Molay, which followed the mass executions of individual Templars. When the grand master finally reached the stake, he brought a curse to the pope and the king of France, saying that neither would survive for one year after his death. Neither did.
The order did not die with Molay. In Spain the orders of Calatrava and Montesa allowed the Templars to continue their work as a force for their country and religion. In Portugal, Templars were admitted to the newly formed Knights of Christ, from whose ranks came the intrepid Prince Henry the Navigator. Vasco da Gama was also a member of the same order. England alone came to the aid of the persecution because King Edward understood that the Templars were supporting the Scots against him. He ordered that Scotland arrest all the Templars within her realm; this decree would have been received as a joke, of course, as the Templars were the saving force behind Scottish independence.
Scotland lived in relative peace after the decisive battle of Bannockburn. The Templars were given homes, lands, and a “cover” as mason guilds. After all, they had been essential in constructing forts from Europe to Jerusalem. Younger Templars had an occupation, and older Templars were allowed to retire and derive income from modest grants. There were two succeeding orders that the Templars could join. One was the hidden Royal Order of Scotland, of which the king was grand master. The second order, according to Andrew Sinclair, was the Order of Heredom, meaning “sanctuary.” The Sinclair family presided as protectors over this second order.
War against the Islamic Moors in the west and the Saracens in the east diverted Europe’s attention from making war on itself. In 1329 Bruce died. His last request was that his heart be buried in Jerusalem. On crusade against the Moors, Sir William Sinclair, Sir James Douglas of the Black Douglas clan, and Sir William Keith rode together into battle. Sir James, believing all was lost, threw Bruce’s heart into the fray, asking the heart to lead them, as always. The Moors beat the Scottish Christian contingent badly. Keith, who was the only knight of the three to survive, recovered the heart and brought it back home to Scotland, where it was buried at Melrose Abbey. It might have been chivalry’s greatest moment.
Descendants of these knights continued to lead the fight to preserve Scotland’s independence in a war that never ended. They also continued to fortify their own power and wealth, by conquest or alliance. The Douglas clan amassed great tracts of land for themselves in the course of these constant wars. Walter, high steward of Scotland, married Marjorie, Bruce’s daughter, to continue the new royal line. Marjorie, who’d been first imprisoned in the tower and later pardoned to a nunnery, remanied a captive for eight years before she returned home at the age of twenty. Bruce’s brother Edward survived and later became king of Ireland. Nigel, Alexander, and Thomas were all beheaded. Four years after the marriage of Walter and Marjorie the Scots were badly defeated at Halidon Hill, but the Douglas clan never ended its war against its neighbors, nor did clan cease fighting against clan.
After the death of King Philip, France entered into alliance with Scotland, which came to hurt Scotland’s ability to preserve her independence. The alliance meant that France’s continuing wars with England forced Scotland to be at war. The barons that ruled Scotland fought with each other over property and over their need to support or ignore France. James I of Scotland was a Stewart (actually a Douglas who took on the new family name as a result of his family’s “stewardship” of Scotland). He started a new dynasty of kings that temporarily persuaded the clans to settle their differences. His methods, however, made enemies. Sir Robert Graham and eight men killed their king the Scottish way, with daggers. James’s child, James II, inherited the throne. The child, of course, ruled in name only. It was the Celtic Douglas clans, at that point divided into “Red” and “Black” factions, that were the most powerful lords outside the Sinclairs, who traditionally chose not to take a visible leadership role.
The curse of Scotland was that the hard-earned decisive victories on the battlefield were always quickly lost by betrayal, infighting, and assassination. MacDonalds and MacLeans of the north fought on the side of Bruce, but once war was over they turned against their own king, a member of the divided Douglas clan. Douglas power was finally broken when William Crichton, the leader of one faction, killed the young Do
uglas children, stabbing the fourteen-year-old earl and his younger brother. In 1449 James II pretended that he wanted to reconcile with his former Douglas clan. He invited the head of the clan to Stirling castle, where he killed him. James himself became a victim of treachery. After being thrown from his horse in a battle of the Wars of the Roses, he called for a priest. The hooded figure arrived to give him the last rites, with a dagger.
While newly independent Scotland was seemingly self-destructing under the selfish agenda of rival Douglas clans, Sinclair and the Templars consolidated their power in the north. Orders such as the Templars were spurred on by the romantic notion of chivalry that captivated Europe. Romantic texts of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table had been written and rewritten during the time of the Crusades, and the military religious orders needed to live up to the heroic visions of their orders.
Officially, the holdings of the Templars were acquired in 1312 by their rival order, the Knights Hospitalers. Unofficially, the holdings were kept separate. Thirty years after the decree that the Templars be disbanded, the rival order did not possess the property of the Templars. When they finally took possession, they were still kept separate. The order would find itself at odds with local lords. In 1324 and 1334 they were forced to appeal to parliament to obtain title. In Scotland it was even more of a mess. By 1338 the knights of Saint John had not received title to even a single property. Over five hundred properties were listed in Scottish records as “terrae Templariae” and administered by local lords. In different form, the remnants of the Templar organization held together under the few knights who led in the Scottish war for independence. A handful of families inherited the mantle of leading and preserving the Templars.
