NICOLAS FOUQUET
Mazarin had other enemies besides the frondeurs and the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. Among the most puissant of them was Nicolas Fouquet, who in 1653 had become superintendent of finances to Louis XIV. A gifted, precocious, and ambitious man, Fouquet, within the next few years, became the wealthiest and most powerful individual in the kingdom. He was sometimes called the true king of France. And he was not without political aspirations. It was rumored that he intended to make Brittany an independent duchy and himself its presiding duke.
Fouquet’s mother was a prominent member of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. So was his brother Charles, archbishop of Narbonne in the Languedoc. His younger brother, Louis, was also an ecclesiastic. In 1656 Nicolas Fouquet dispatched Louis to Rome, for reasons which-though not necessarily mysterious—have never been explained. From Rome Louis wrote the enigmatic letter quoted in Chapter 1—the letter that speaks of a meeting with Poussin and a secret "which even kings would have great pains to draw from him." And indeed, if Louis was indiscreet in correspondence, Poussin gave nothing whatever away. His personal seal bore the motto "Tenet Confidentiam."
In 1661 Louis XIV ordered the arrest of Nicolas Fouquet. The charges were extremely general and nebulous. There were vague accusations of misappropriation of funds and others, even more vague, of sedition. On the basis of these accusations all Fouquet’s goods and properties were placed under royal sequestration. But the king forbade his officers to touch the superintendent’s papers or correspondence. He insisted on sifting through these documents himself—personally and in private.
The ensuing trial dragged on for four years and became the sensation of France at the time, violently splitting and polarizing public opinion. Louis Fouquet—who had met with Poussin and written the letter from Rome—was dead by then. But the superintendent’s mother and surviving brother promptly mobilized the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, whose membership also included one of the presiding judges. The compagnie threw the whole of its support behind the superintendent, working actively through the courts and the popular mind. Louis XIV—who was not usually bloodthirsty—demanded nothing less than the death sentence. Refusing to be intimidated by him, the court passed a sentence of perpetual banishment. Still demanding death, the enraged king removed the recalcitrant judges and replaced them with others more obedient; but the compagnie still seems to have defied him. Eventually, in 1665, Fouquet was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. On the king’s orders he was kept in rigorous isolation. He was forbidden all writing implements, all means whereby he might communicate with anyone. And any soldiers who conversed with him were allegedly consigned to prison ships or, in some cases, hanged.17
In 1665, the year of Fouquet’s imprisonment, Poussin died in Rome. During the years that followed Louis XIV persistently endeavored through his agents to obtain a single painting—"Les Bergers d’Arcadie." In 1685 he finally managed to do so. But the painting was not placed on display—not even in the royal residence. On the contrary, it was sequestered in the king’s private apartments, where no one could view it without the monarch’s personal authority.
There is a footnote to Fouquet’s story, for his own disgrace, whatever its causes and magnitude, was not visited on his children. By the middle of the following century Fouquet’s grandson, the marquis of Belle-Isle, had become, in effect, the single most important man in France. In 1718 the marquis of Belle-Isle ceded Belle-Isle itself—a fortified island off the Breton coast—to the crown. In return he obtained certain interesting territories. One was Longueville, whose former dukes and duchesses had figured recurrently in our investigation. And another was Gisors. In 1718 the marquis of Belle-Isle became count of Gisors. In 1742 he became duke of Gisors. And in 1748 Gisors was raised to the exalted status of premier duchy.
NICOLAS POUSSIN
Poussin himself was born in 1594 in a small town called Les Andelys—a few miles, we discovered, from Gisors. As a young man he left France and established residence in Rome, where he spent the duration of his life, returning only once to his native country. This was sometime in the early 1640s, supposedly at the request of Cardinal Richelieu, who had invited him to undertake a specific commission.
Although he was not actively involved in politics and few historians have touched on his political interests, Poussin was in fact closely associated with the Fronde. He did not leave his refuge in Rome. But his correspondence of the period reveals him to have been deeply committed to the anti-Mazarin movement and on surprisingly familiar terms with a number of influential frondeurs, so much so, indeed, that in speaking of them he repeatedly uses the word "we," thus clearly implicating himself.18
We had already traced the motifs of the underground stream Alpheus, of Arcadia and Arcadian shepherds, to René d’Anjou. We now undertook to find an antecedent for the specific phrase in Poussin’s painting—"Et in Arcadia Ego." It appeared in an earlier painting by Poussin, in which the tomb is surmounted by a skull and does not constitute an edifice of its own, but is embedded in the side of a cliff. In the foreground of this painting a bearded water deity reposes in an attitude of brooding moroseness—the river god Alpheus, lord of the underground stream. The work dates from about 1630, some ten years earlier than the more familiar version of "Les Bergers d’Arcadie."
The phrase "Et in Arcadia Ego" made its public debut about 1618 in a painting by Giovanni Francesco Guercino—a painting which constitutes the real basis for Poussin’s work. In Guercino’s painting two shepherds, entering a clearing in a forest, have just happened upon a stone sepulchre. It bears the now-famous inscription, and there is a large skull resting on top of it. Whatever the symbolic significance of this work Guercino himself raised a number of questions. Not only was he well versed in esoteric tradition, he also seems to have been conversant with the lore of secret societies, and some of his other paintings deal with themes of a specifically Masonic character—a good twenty years before lodges started proliferating in England and Scotland. One painting, "The Raising of the Master," pertains explicitly to the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff, architect and builder of Solomon’s temple. It was executed nearly a century before the Hiram legend is generally believed to have found its way into Masonry.19
In the "Prieuré documents," "Et in Arcadia Ego" is said to have been the official device of the Plantard family since at least the twelfth century, when Jean de Plantard married Idoine de Gisors. According to one source quoted in the "Prieuré documents" it is cited as such as early as 1210 by one Robert, abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel.20 We were unable to obtain access to the archives of Mont-Saint-Michel and so could not verify this assertion. Our research convinced us, however, that the date of 1210 was demonstrably wrong. In point of fact there was no abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel named Robert in 1210. On the other hand, one Robert de Torigny was indeed abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel between 1154 and 1186. And Robert de Torigny is known to have been a prolific and assiduous historian whose hobbies included collecting mottoes, devices, blazons, and coats-of-arms of noble families throughout Christendom.21
Whatever the origin of the phrase, "Et in Arcadia Ego" seems, for both Guercino and Poussin, to have been more than a line of elegiac poetry. Quite clearly it seems to have enjoyed some important
8 The Plantard family crest
secret significance, which was recognizable or identifiable to certain other people—the equivalent, in short, of a Masonic sign or password. And it is precisely in such terms that one statement in the "Prieuré documents" defines the character of symbolic or allegorical art:
Allegorical works have this advantage, that a single word suffices to illumine connections which the multitude cannot grasp. Such works are available to everyone, but their significance addresses itself to an elite. Above and beyond the masses, sender and receiver understand each other. The inexplicable success of certain works derives from this quality of allegory, which constitutes not a mere fashion, but a form of esoteric communications.22
In its context th
is statement was made with reference to Poussin. As Frances Yates has demonstrated, however, it might equally well be applied to the works of Leonardo, Botticelli, and other Renaissance artists. It might also be applied to later figures—to Nodier, Hugo, Debussy, Cocteau, and their respective circles.
ROSSLYN CHAPEL AND SHUGBOROUGH HALL
In our previous research we had found a number of important links between Sion’s alleged grand masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and European Freemasonry. In the course of our study of Freemasonry we discovered certain other links as well. These additional links did not relate to the alleged grand masters as such, but they did relate to other aspects of our investigation.
Thus, for example, we encountered repeated references to the Sinclair family—Scottish branch of the Norman Saint-Clair/Gisors family. Their domain at Rosslyn was only a few miles from the former Scottish headquarters of the Knights Templar, and the chapel at Rosslyn—built between 1446 and 1486—has long been associated with both Freemasonry and the Rose-Croix. In a charter believed to date from 1601, moreover, the Sinclairs are recognized as "hereditary grand masters of Scottish Masonry."23 This is the earliest specifically Masonic document on record. According to Masonic sources, however, the hereditary grand mastership was conferred on the Sinclairs by James II, who ruled between 1437 and 1460—the age of René d’Anjou.
Another and rather more mysterious piece of our jigsaw puzzle also surfaced in Britain—this time in Staffordshire, which had been a hotbed for Masonic activity in the early and mid-seventeenth century. When Charles Radclyffe, alleged grand master of Sion, escaped from Newgate prison in 1714, he was aided by his cousin, the earl of Lichfield. Later in the century the earl of Lichfield’s line became extinct and his title lapsed. It was bought in the early nineteenth century by descendants of the Anson family, who are the present earls of Lichfield.
The seat of the present earls of Lichfield is Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire. Formerly a bishop’s residence, Shugborough was purchased by the Anson family in 1697. During the following century it was the residence of the brother of George Anson, the famous admiral who circumnavigated the globe. When George Anson died in 1762, an elegiac poem was read aloud in Parliament. One stanza of this poem reads:
Upon that storied marble cast thine eye.
The scene commands a moralising sigh.
E’en in Arcadia’s bless’d Elysian plains,
Amidst the laughing nymphs and sportive swains,
See festal joy subside, with melting grace,
And pity visit the half-smiling face;
Where now the dance, the lute, the nuptial feast,
The passion throbbing in the lover’s breast,
Life’s emblem here, in youth and vernal bloom,
But reason’s finger pointing at the tomb!24
This would seem to be an explicit allusion to Poussin’s painting and the inscription "Et in Arcadia Ego"—right down to the "finger pointing at the tomb." And in the grounds of Shugborough there is an imposing marble bas-relief executed at the command of the Anson family between 1761 and 1767. This bas-relief comprises a reproduction—reversed, mirror-fashion—of Poussin’s "Les Bergers d’Arcadie." And immediately below it, there is an enigmatic inscription that no one has ever satisfactorily deciphered:
O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.
D M
THE POPE’S SECRET LETTER
In 1738 Pope Clement XII issued a papal bull condemning and excommunicating all Freemasons, whom he pronounced "enemies of the Roman Church." It has never been altogether clear why they should have been regarded as such—especially as many of them, like the Jacobites at the time, were ostensibly Catholic. Perhaps the Pope was aware of the connections we had discovered between early Freemasonry and the anti-Roman Rosicrucians of the seventeenth century. In any case some light may be shed on the matter by a letter released and published for the first time in 1962. This letter had been written by Pope Clement XII and addressed to an unknown correspondent. In its text the Pope declares that Masonic thought rests on a heresy we had encountered repeatedly before—the denial of Jesus’ divinity. And he further asserts that the guiding spirits, the "masterminds," behind Freemasonry are the same as those who provoked the Lutheran Reformation.25 The Pope may well have been paranoid; but it is important to note that he is not speaking of nebulous currents of thought or vague traditions. On the contrary, he is speaking of a highly organized group of individuals—a sect, an order, a secret society—who, through the ages, have dedicated themselves to subverting the edifice of Catholic Christianity.
THE ROCK OF SION
In the late eighteenth century, when different Masonic systems were proliferating wildly, the so-called Oriental Rite of Memphis made its appearance. 26 In this rite the name Ormus occurred, to our knowledge, for the first time—the name allegedly adopted by the Prieuré de Sion between 1188 and 1307. According to the Oriental Rite of Memphis, Ormus was an Egyptian sage who, around A.D. 46, amalgamated pagan and Christian mysteries and, in so doing, founded the Rose-Croix.
In other eighteenth-century Masonic rites there are repeated references to the "Rock of Sion"—the same Rock of Sion that, as the "Prieuré documents" quote, rendered the "royal tradition" established by Godfroi and Baudouin de Bouillon "equal" to that of any other reigning dynasty in Europe. We had previously assumed that the Rock of Sion was simply Mount Sion—the "high hill" south of Jerusalem on which Godfroi built an abbey to house the order that became the Prieuré de Sion. But Masonic sources ascribe an additional significance to the Rock of Sion. Given their preoccupation with the Temple of Jerusalem, it is not surprising that they refer one to specific passages in the Bible. And in these passages the Rock of Sion is something more than a high hill. It is a particular stone overlooked or unjustifiably neglected during the building of the Temple, which must subsequently be retrieved and incorporated as the structure’s keystone. According to Psalm 118, for example:
The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.
In Matthew 21:42 Jesus alludes specifically to this psalm:
Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.
In Romans 9:33 there is another reference, rather more ambiguous:
Behold, I lay in Sion a stumblingstone and rock of offence: and whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.
In Acts 4:11 the Rock of Sion might well be interpreted as a metaphor for Jesus himself:
by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth ... doth this man stand here before you whole. This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which is become the head of the corner.
In Ephesians 2:20 the equation of Jesus with the Rock of Sion becomes more apparent:
built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone.
And in 1 Peter 2:3-8 this equation is made even more explicit:
the Lord is gracious. To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, Ye also, as lively stones, are build up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. Wherefore it is also contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded. Unto you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner, And a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient; whereunto also they were appointed.
In the very next verse, the text goes on to stress themes whose significance did not become apparent to us until later. It speaks of an elect line of kings who are both spiritual and secular leaders, a line of priest-kings:
But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people ...
What were we to make
of these baffling passages? What were we to make of the Rock of Sion—the keystone of the temple, which seemed to figure so saliently among the "inner secrets" of Freemasonry? What were we to make of the explicit identification of this keystone with Jesus himself? And what were we to make of that "royal tradition" which—because founded on the Rock of Sion or on Jesus himself—was "equal" to the reigning dynasties of Europe during the crusades?27
THE CATHOLIC MODERNIST MOVEMENT
In 1833 Jean Baptiste Pitois, Charles Nodier’s former disciple at the Arsenal Library, was an official in the ministry of public education. 28 And in that year the ministry undertook an ambitious project— to publish all hitherto suppressed documents pertinent to the history of France. Two committees were formed to preside over the enterprise. These committees included, among others, Victor Hugo, Jules Michelet, and an authority on the crusades, Baron Emmanuel Rey.
Among the works subsequently published under the auspices of the ministry of public education was Michelet’s monumental Le Procès des Templiers—an exhaustive compilation of Inquisition records dealing with the trials of the Knights Templar. Under the same auspices Baron Rey published a number of works dealing with the crusades and the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem. In these works there appeared in print for the first time original charters pertaining to the Prieuré de Sion. At certain points the texts Rey quotes are almost verbatim with passages in the "Prieuré documents."
In 1875 Baron Rey cofounded the Société de l’Orient Latin (Society of the Latin—or Frankish—Middle East). Based on Geneva, this society devoted itself to ambitious archaeological projects. It also published its own magazine, the Revue de l’Orient Latin, which is now one of the primary sources for modern historians like Sir Steven Runciman. The Revue de l’Orient Latin reproduced a number of additional charters of the Prieuré de Sion.
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