Holy Blood, Holy Grail

by Baigent, Michael

  THE STUART DYNASTY

  According to the "Prieuré documents" Newton was succeeded as Sion’s grand master by Charles Radclyffe. The name was hardly as resonant to us as Newton’s or Boyle’s or even Andrea’s. Indeed, we were not at first certain who Charles Radclyffe was. As we began to research him, however, he emerged as a figure of considerable, if subterranean, consequence in eighteenth-century cultural history.

  Since the sixteenth century the Radclyffes had been an influential Northumbrian family. In 1688, shortly before he was deposed, James II had created them earls of Derwentwater. Charles Radclyffe himself was born in 1693. His mother was an illegitimate daughter of Charles II by the king’s mistress, Moll Davis. Radclyffe was thus, on his mother’s side, of royal blood—a grandson of the next-to-last Stuart monarch. He was a cousin of Bonnie Prince Charlie and of George Lee, Earl of Lichfield—another illegitimate grandson of Charles II. Not surprisingly, therefore, Radclyffe devoted much of his life to the Stuart cause.

  In 1715 this cause rested with the "Old Pretender," James III, then in exile and residing at Bar-le-Duc under the special protection of the duke of Lorraine. Radclyffe and his elder brother, James, both participated in the Scottish rebellion of that year. Both were captured and imprisoned, and James was executed. Charles, in the meantime, apparently aided by the earl of Lichfield, made a dashing and unprecedented escape from Newgate prison and found refuge in the Jacobite ranks in France. In the years that followed he became personal secretary to the "Young Pretender," Bonnie Prince Charlie.

  In 1745 the latter landed in Scotland and embarked on his quixotic attempt to reinstate the Stuarts on the British throne. In the same year Radclyffe, en route to join him, was captured in a French ship off the Dogger Bank. A year later, in 1746, the Young Pretender was disastrously defeated at the Battle of Culloden Moor. A few months thereafter, Charles Radclyffe died beneath the headsman’s ax at the Tower of London.

  During their stay in France the Stuarts had been deeply involved in the dissemination of Freemasonry. Indeed, they are generally regarded as the source of the particular form of Freemasonry known as Scottish Rite. Scottish Rite Freemasonry introduced higher degrees than those offered by other Masonic systems at the time. It promised initiation into greater and more profound mysteries— mysteries supposedly preserved and handed down in Scotland. It established more direct connections between Freemasonry and the various activities—alchemy, Cabalism, and Hermetic thought, for instance—that were regarded as Rosicrucian. And it elaborated not only on the antiquity but also on the illustrious pedigree of the "craft."

  It is probable that Scottish Rite Freemasonry was originally promulgated, if not indeed devised, by Charles Radclyffe. In any case Radclyffe, in 1725, is said to have founded the first Masonic lodge on the continent, in Paris. During the same year, or perhaps in the year following, he seems to have been acknowledged grand master of all French lodges and is still cited as such a decade later, in 1736. The dissemination of eighteenth-century Freemasonry owes more, ultimately, to Radclyffe than to any other man.

  This has not always been readily apparent because Radclyffe, especially after 1738, kept a relatively low profile. To a very significant degree he seems to have worked through intermediaries and "mouthpieces." The most important of these, and the most famous, was the enigmatic individual known as the Chevalier Andrew Ramsay.13

  Ramsay was born in Scotland sometime during the 1680s. As a young man he was a member of a quasi-Masonic, quasi-Rosicrucian society called the Philadelphians. Among the other members of this society were at least two close friends of Isaac Newton. Ramsay himself regarded Newton with unmitigated reverence, deeming him a kind of high mystical "initiate"—a man who had rediscovered and reconstructed the eternal truths concealed in the ancient mysteries.

  Ramsay had other links with Newton. He was associated with Jean Desaguliers, one of Newton’s closest friends. In 1707 he studied mathematics under one Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, the most intimate of all Newton’s companions. Like Newton he displayed a sympathetic interest in the Camisards—a sect of Cathar-like heretics then suffering persecution in southern France, and a kind of cause célèbre for Fatio de Duillier.

  By 1710 Ramsay was in Cambrai and on intimate terms with the mystical philosopher Fénelon, formerly cure of Saint Sulpice—which even at that time was a bastion of rather questionable orthodoxy. It is not known precisely when Ramsay made Charles Radclyffe’s acquaintance, but by the 1720s he was closely affiliated with the Jacobite cause. For a time he even served as Bonnie Prince Charlie’s tutor.

  Despite his Jacobite connections Ramsay returned to England in 1729, where—notwithstanding an apparent lack of appropriate qualifications—he was promptly admitted to the Royal Society. He also became a member of a rather more obscure institution called the Gentleman’s Club of Spalding. This "club" included men like Desaguliers, Alexander Pope, and, until his death in 1727, Isaac Newton.

  By 1730 Ramsay was back in France and increasingly active on behalf of Freemasonry. He is on record as having attended lodge meetings with a number of notable figures, including Desaguliers. And he received special patronage from the Tour d’Auvergne family, the viscounts of Turenne and dukes of Bouillon—who three quarters of a century before had been related to Frederick of the Palatinate. In Ramsay’s time the duke of Bouillon was a cousin of Bonnie Prince Charlie and among the most prominent figures in Freemasonry. He conferred an estate and a town house on Ramsay, whom he also appointed tutor to his son.

  In 1737 Ramsay delivered his famous "Oration"—a lengthy disquisition on the history of Freemasonry, which subsequently became a seminal document for the "craft."14 On the basis of this "Oration" Ramsay became the preeminent Masonic spokesman of his age. Our research convinced us, however, that the real voice behind Ramsay was that of Charles Radclyffe—who presided over the lodge at which Ramsay delivered his discourse and who appeared again, in 1743, as chief signatory at Ramsay’s funeral. But if Radclyffe was the power behind Ramsay, it would seem to have been Ramsay who constituted the link between Radclyffe and Newton.

  Despite Radclyffe’s premature death in 1746, the seeds he had sown in Europe continued to bear fruit. Early in the 1750s a new ambassador of Freemasonry appeared—a German named Karl Gottlieb von Hund. Hund claimed to have been initiated in 1742—a year before Ramsay’s death, four years before Radclyffe’s. At his initiation, he claimed, he had been introduced to a new system of Freemasonry, confided to him by "unknown superiors." 15 These "unknown superiors," Hund maintained, were closely associated with the Jacobite cause. Indeed, he even believed at first that the man who presided over his initiation was Bonnie Prince Charlie. And although this proved not to be the case, Hund remained convinced that the unidentified personage in question was intimately connected with the Young Pretender. It seems reasonable to suppose that the man who actually presided was Charles Radclyffe.

  The system of Freemasonry to which Hund was introduced—a further extension of the Scottish Rite—was subsequently called Strict Observance. Its name derived from the oath it demanded, an oath of unswerving, unquestioning obedience to the mysterious "unknown superiors." And the basic tenet of the Strict Observance was that it had descended directly from the Knights Templar, some of whom had purportedly survived the purge of 1307-14 and perpetuated their order in Scotland.

  We were already familiar with this claim. On the basis of our own research we could allow it some truth. A contingent of Templars had allegedly fought on Robert Bruce’s side at the Battle of Bannockburn. Because the papal bull dissolving the Templars was never promulgated in Scotland, the order was never officially suppressed there. And we ourselves had located what seemed to be a Templar graveyard in Argyllshire. The earliest of the stones in this graveyard dated from the thirteenth century, the later ones from the eighteenth. The earlier stones bore certain unique carvings and incised symbols identical to those found at known Templar preceptories in England and France. The later stones combined these
symbols with specifically Masonic motifs, attesting thereby to some sort of fusion. It was thus not impossible, we concluded, that the order had indeed perpetuated itself in the trackless wilderness of medieval Argyll—maintaining a clandestine existence, gradually secularizing itself and becoming associated with both Masonic guilds and the prevailing clan system.

  The pedigree Hund claimed for the Strict Observance did not, therefore, seem to us altogether improbable. To his own embarrassment and subsequent disgrace, however, he was unable to elaborate further on his new system of Freemasonry. As a result his contemporaries dismissed him as a charlatan and accused him of having fabricated the story of his initiation, his meeting with "unknown superiors," his mandate to disseminate the Strict Observance. To these charges Hund could only reply that his "unknown superiors" had inexplicably abandoned him. They had promised to contact him again and give him further instructions, he protested, but they had never done so. To the end of his life he affirmed his integrity, maintaining he had been deserted by his original sponsors—who, he insisted, had actually existed.

  The more we considered Hund’s assertions, the more plausible they sounded and he appeared to have been a hapless victim — not so much of deliberate betrayal as of circumstances beyond everyone’s control. For, according to his own account Hund had been initiated in 1742, when the Jacobites were still a powerful political force in continental affairs. By 1746, however, Radclyffe was dead. So were many of his colleagues, while others were in prison or exile—as far away, in some cases, as North America. If Hund’s "unknown superiors" failed to reestablish contact with their protégé, the omission does not seem to have been voluntary. The fact that Hund was abandoned immediately after the collapse of the Jacobite cause would seem, if anything, to confirm his story.

  There is another fragment of evidence that lends credence not only to Hund’s claims but to the "Prieuré documents" as well. This evidence is a list of grand masters of the Knights Templar, which Hund insisted he had obtained from his "unknown superiors."16 On the basis of our own research we had concluded that the list of Templar grand masters in the Dossiers secrets was accurate — so accurate, in fact, that it appeared to derive from inside information. Save for the spelling of a single surname, the list Hund produced agreed precisely with the one in the Dossiers secrets. In short, Hund had somehow obtained a list of Templar grand masters more accurate than any other known at the time. Moreover, he obtained it when many documents on which we relied—charters, deeds, proclamations—were still sequestered in the Vatican and unobtainable. This would seem to confirm that Hund’s story of "unknown superiors" was not a fabrication. It would also seem to indicate that those "unknown superiors" were extraordinarily knowledgeable about the Order of the Temple—more knowledgeable than they could possibly have been without access to privileged sources.

  In any case despite the charges leveled against him, Hund was not left completely friendless. After the collapse of the Jacobite cause he found a sympathetic patron and a close companion in no less a person than the Holy Roman Emperor. The Holy Roman Emperor at this time was François, duke of Lorraine — who, by his marriage to Maria Theresa of Austria in 1735, had linked the houses of Hapsburg and Lorraine and inaugurated the Hapsburg-Lorraine dynasty. And according to the "Prieuré documents" it was François’s brother, Charles de Lorraine, who succeeded Radclyffe as Sion’s grand master.

  François was the first European prince to become a Mason and to publicize his Masonic affiliations. He was initiated in 1731 at the Hague—a bastion of esoteric activity since Rosicrucian circles had installed themselves there during the Thirty Years War. And the man who presided over François’s initiation was Jean Desaguliers, intimate associate of Newton, Ramsay, and Radclyffe. Shortly after his initiation, moreover, François embarked for a lengthy stay in England. Here he became a member of that innocuous-sounding institution, the Gentleman’s Club of Spalding.

  In the years that followed, François de Lorraine was probably more responsible than any other European potentate for the spread of Freemasonry. His court at Vienna became, in a sense, Europe’s Masonic capital and a center for a broad spectrum of other esoteric interests as well. François himself was a practicing alchemist with an alchemical laboratory in the imperial palace, the Hofburg. On the death of the last Medici he became grand duke of Tuscany and deftly thwarted the Inquisition’s harassment of Freemasons in Florence. Through François, Charles Radclyffe, who founded the first Masonic lodge on the continent, left a durable legacy.

  CHARLES NODIER AND HIS CIRCLE

  Compared to the important cultural and political figures who preceded him, compared even to a man like Charles Radclyffe, Charles Nodier seemed a most unlikely choice for grand master. We knew him primarily as a kind of literary curiosity—a relatively minor belletrist, a somewhat garrulous essayist, a second-rate novelist and short-story writer in the bizarre tradition of E.T.A. Hoffman and, later, Edgar Allan Poe. In his own time, however, Nodier was regarded as a major cultural figure and his influence was enormous. Moreover, he proved to be connected with our inquiry in a number of surprising ways.

  By 1824 Nodier was already a literary celebrity. In that year he was appointed the chief librarian at the Arsenal Library, the major French depository for medieval and specifically occult manuscripts. Among its various treasures the Arsenal was said to have contained the alchemical works of Nicolas Flamel—the medieval alchemist listed as one of Sion’s earlier grand masters. The Arsenal also contained the library of Cardinal Richelieu—an exhaustive collection of works on magical, Cabalistic, and Hermetic thought. And there were other treasures, too. On the outbreak of the French Revolution monasteries throughout the country had been plundered and all books and manuscripts sent to Paris for storage. Then, in 1810, Napoleon, as part of his ambition to create a definitive world library, confiscated and brought to Paris almost the entire archive of the Vatican. There were more than three thousand cases of material, some of which—all the documents pertaining to the Templars, for example—had been specifically requested. Although some of these papers were subsequently returned to Rome, a great many remained in France. And it was material of this sort—occult books and manuscripts, works plundered from monasteries and the archive of the Vatican—that passed through the hands of Nodier and his associates. Methodically they sifted it, catalogued it, explored it.

  Among Nodier’s colleagues in this task were Eliphas Levi and Jean Baptiste Pitois, who adopted the nom de plume of Paul Christian. The works of these two men, over the years that followed, engendered a major renaissance of interest in esoterica. It is to these two men and to Charles Nodier, their mentor, that the French "occult revival" of the nineteenth century, as it has been called, can ultimately be traced. Indeed, Pitois’ History and Practice of Magic became a bible for nineteenth-century students of the arcane. Recently reissued in English translation—complete with its original dedication to Nodier—it is now a coveted work among modern students of the occult.

  During his tenure at the Arsenal Nodier continued to write and publish prolifically. Among the most important of his later works is a massive lavishly illustrated multivolume opus of antiquarian interest devoted to sites of particular consequence in ancient France. In this monumental compendium Nodier devotes considerable space to the Merovingian epoch—a fact all the more striking in that no one at the time displayed the least interest in the Merovingians. There are also lengthy sections on the Templars, and there is a special article on Gisors—including a detailed account of the mysterious "cutting of the elm" in 1188, which, according to the "Prieuré documents," marked the separation between the Knights Templar and the Prieuré de Sion.17

  At the same time Nodier was more than a librarian and a writer. He was also a gregarious, egocentric, and flamboyant individual who constantly sought the center of attention and did not hesitate to exaggerate his own importance. In his quarters at the Arsenal Library he inaugurated a salon that established him as one of the most influenti
al and prestigious "aesthetic potentates" of the epoch. By the time of his death in 1845 he had served as mentor for a whole generation—many of whom quite eclipsed him in their subsequent achievements. For example, Nodier’s chief disciple and closest friend was the young Victor Hugo-Sion’s next grand master according to the "Prieuré documents." There was François-René de Chateaubriand —who made a special pilgrimage to Poussin’s tomb in Rome and had a stone erected there bearing a reproduction of "Les Bergers d’Arcadie." There were Balzac, Delacroix, Dumas père, Lamartine, Musset, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, and Alfred de Vigny. Like the poets and painters of the Renaissance, these men often drew heavily on esoteric, and especially Hermetic, tradition. They also incorporated in their works a number of motifs, themes, references, and allusions to the mystery that, for us, commenced with Saunière and Rennes-le-Château. In 1832, for instance, a book was published entitled A Journey to Rennes-les-Bains, which speaks at length of a legendary treasure associated with Blanchefort and Rennes-le-Château. The author of this obscure book, Auguste de Labouisse-Rochefort, also produced another work, The Lovers—To Eleonore. On the title page there appears, without any explanation, the motto "Et in Arcadia Ego."

  Nodier’s literary and esoteric activities were quite clearly pertinent to our investigation. But there was another aspect of his career that was, if anything, more pertinent still. For Nodier, from his childhood, was deeply involved in secret societies. As early as 1790, for instance, at the age of ten (!), he is known to have been involved in a group called the Philadelphes. 18 Around 1793 he created another group-or perhaps an inner circle of the first-that included one of the subsequent plotters against Napoleon. A charter dated 1797 attests to the foundation of yet another group—also called the Philadelphes—in that year.19 In the library of Besançon there is a cryptic essay composed and recited to this group by one of Nodier’s closest friends. It is entitled "Le Berger Arcadien ou Première Accents d’une Flute Champêtre" ("The Arcadian Shepherd Sounds the First Accents of a Rustic Flute").20