Holy Blood, Holy Grail (24 page)

According to the Dossiers secrets, the commandery at Gisors dated from 1306 and was situated in the rue de Vienne. From here it supposedly communicated, via an underground passageway, with the local cemetery and with the subterranean chapel of Sainte-Catherine located beneath the fortress. In the sixteenth century this chapel, or perhaps a crypt adjacent to it, is said to have become a depository for the archives of the Prieure de Sion, housed in thirty coffers.

Early in 1944, when Gisors was occupied by German personnel, a special military mission was sent from Berlin, with instructions to plan a series of excavations beneath the fortress. The Allied invasion of Normandy thwarted any such undertaking; but not long after, a French workman named

Roger Lhomoy embarked on excavations of his own. In 1946 Lhomoy announced to the Mayor of Gisors that he had found an underground

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chapel containing nineteen sarcophagi of stone and thirty coffers of metal. His petition to excavate further, and make public his discovery, was delayed almost deliberately, it might seem by a welter of official red tape. At last, in 1962, Lhomoy commenced his requested excavations at

Gisors. They were conducted under the auspices of Andre Malraux, French

Minister of Culture at the time, and were not officially open to the public.

Certainly no coffers or sarcophagi were found. Whether the underground chapel was found has been debated in the press, as well as in various books and articles. Lhomoy insisted he did find his way again to the chapel, but its contents had been removed. Whatever the truth of the matter, there is mention of the subterranean chapel of Sainte-Catherine in two old manuscripts, one dated 1696 and the other 1375.1

On this basis, Lhomoy’s story at least becomes plausible. So does the assertion that the subterranean chapel was a depository for Sion’s archives. For we, in our own research, found conclusive proof that the Prieure de Sion continued to exist for at least three centuries after the Crusades and the dissolution of the Knights Templar. Between the early fourteenth and early seventeenth centuries, for example, documents pertinent to Orleans, and to Sion’s base there at Saint-Samson, make sporadic references to the Order. Thus it is on record that in the early sixteenth century members of the Prieure de Sion at Orleans by flouting their “rule’ and “refusing to live in common’ incurred the displeasure of the pope and the king of France. Towards the end of the fifteenth century the Order was also accused of a number of of fences failing to observe their rule, living

“individually’ rather than “in common’. being licentious, residing outside the walls of Saint-Samson, boycotting divine services and neglecting to rebuild the walls of the house, which had been seriously damaged in 1562. By 1619 the authorities seemed to have lost patience.

In that year, according to the records, the Prieure de Sion was evicted from

Saint-Samson and the house was made over to the Jesuit s.3

From 1619 onwards we could find no reference to the Prieure de Sion not, at any rate, under that name. But if nothing else, we could at least prove its existence until the seventeenth century. And yet the proof itself, such as it was, raised a number of crucial questions. In

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the first place the references we found cast no light whatever on Map 6 The Duchy of Lorraine in the Mid-Sixteenth Century

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Sion’s real activities, objectives, interests or possible influence. In the second place these references, it seemed, bore witness only to something of trifling consequence a curiously elusive fraternity of monks or religious devotees whose behaviour, though unorthodox and perhaps clandestine, was of relatively minor import. We could not reconcile the apparently remiss occupants of Saint Samson with the celebrated and legendary Rose-Croix, or a band of wayward monks with an institution whose Grand Masters supposedly comprised some of the most illustrious names in Western history and culture.

Accordirig to the “Prieure documents’, Sion was an organisation of considerable power and influence, responsible for creating the Templars and manipulating the course of international affairs. The references we found suggested nothing of such magnitude.

One possible explanation, of course, was that Saint Samson at Orleans was but an isolated seat, and probably a minor one, of Sion’s

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activities. And indeed, the list of Sion’s important command eries in the Dossiers secrets does not even include

Orleans. If Sion was in fact a force to be reckoned with, Orleans can only have been one small fragment of a much broader pattern. And if this were the case, we would have to look for traces of the Order elsewhere.

The Dukes of Guise and Lorraine

During the sixteenth century the house of Lorraine and its cadet branch, the house of Guise, made a concerted and determined attempt to topple the Valois dynasty of France to exterminate the Valois line and claim the French throne. This attempt, on several occasions, came within a hair’s breadth of dazzling success. In the course of some thirty years all Valois rulers, heirs and princes were wiped out, and the line driven to extinction.

The attempt to seize the French throne extended across three generations of the Guise and Lorraine families. It came closest to success in the 1550s and 1560s under the auspices of Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine and his brother, Francois, Duke of Guise. Charles and Franqois were related to the

Gonzaga family of Mantua and to Charles de Montpensier, Constable of Bourbon listed in the Dossiers secrets as Grand Master of Sion until 1527. Moreover, Francois, Duke of Guise, was married to Anne d’Este, Duchess of Gisors. And in his machinations for the throne he seems to have received covert aid and support from Ferrante de Gonzaga, allegedly Grand

Master of Sion from 1527 until 1575.

Both Francois and his brother, the cardinal of Lorraine, have been stigmatised by later historians as rabidly bigoted and fanatic Catholics, intolerant, brutal and bloodthirsty. But there is substantial evidence to suggest that this reputation is to some extent unwarranted, at least so far as adherence to Catholicism is concerned.

Francois and his brother appear, quite patently, to have been brazen, if cunning, opportunists, courting both Catholics and Protestants in the name of their ulterior design.” In 1562, for example, at the Council of Trent, the cardinal of Lorraine launched an attempt to

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decentralise the papacy to confer autonomy on local bishops and 1 The Dukes of Guise and Lofraine

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restore the ecclesiastical hierarchy to what it had been in

Merovingian times.

By 1563 Francois de Guise was already virtually king when he fell to an assassin’s bullet. His brother, the cardinal of Lorraine, died twelve years later, in 1575. But the vendetta against the French royal line did not cease. In 1584 the new duke of Guise and new cardinal of Lorraine embarked on a fresh assault against the throne. Their chief ally in this enterprise was Louis de Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers who, according to the “Prieure documents’, had become Grand Master of Sion nine years before. The banner of the conspirators was the Cross of Lorraine the former emblem of Rene d’Anjou.s

The feud continued. By the end of the century the Valois were at last extinct. But the house of Guise had bled itself to death in the process, and could put forward no eligible candidate for a throne that finally lay within its grasp.

It is simply not known whether there was an organised secret society, or secret order, supporting the houses of Guise and Lorraine.

Certainly they were aided by an international network of emissaries, ambassadors, assassins, agents provocateurs, spies and agents who might well have comprised such a clandestine institution. According to Gerard de We, one of these agents was Nostradamus; and there are other

“Prieure documents’ which echo M. de We’s contention. In any case, there is abundant evidence to suggest that Nostradamus was indeed a secret agent working for Franqois de

Guise and Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine.s

If Nostradamus was an agent for the houses of Guise and Lorraine, he would have been responsible not only for providing them with important information-concerning the activities and plans of their adversaries, but he would also, in his capacity as astrologer to the French court, have been privy to all manner of intimate secrets, as well as quirks and weaknesses of personality. By playing on vulnerabilities with which he had become acquainted, he could have psychologically manipulated the Valois into the hands of their enemies. And by virtue of his familiarity with their horoscopes, he might well have advised their enemies on, say, an apparently propitious moment for

assassination. Many of Nostradamus’s prophecies, in short, may not

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have been prophecies at all. They may have been cryptic messages, ciphers, schedules, timetables, instructions, blueprints for action.

Whether this was actually the case or not, there is no question that some of Nostradamus’s prophecies were not prophecies but referred, quite explicitly, to the past to the Knights Templar, the Merovingian dynasty, the history of the house of Lorraine. A striking number of them refer to the Razes the old comte of Rennes-leChateau.” And the numerous quatrains which refer to the advent of ‘le Grand Monarch’ the Great Monarch indicate that this sovereign will derive ultimately from the Languedoc. Our research revealed an additional fragment which linked Nostradamus even more directly to our investigation. According to Gerard de Sede,e as well as to popular legend, Nostradamus, before embarking on his career as prophet, spent considerable time in Lorraine. This would appear to have been some sort of novitiate, or period of probation, after which he was supposedly ‘initiated’ into some portentous secret. More specifically he is said to have been shown an ancient and arcane book, on which he based all his own subsequent work. And this book was reportedly divulged to him at a very significant place the mysterious Abbey of Orval, donated by Godfroi de

Bouillon’s foster-mother, where our research suggested that the Prieure de

Sion may have had its inception. In any case, Orval continued, for another two centuries, to be associated with the name of Nostradamus.

As late as the

French Revolution and the Napoleonic era books of prophecies, purportedly authored by Nostradamus, were issuing from Orval.

The Bid for the Throne of France

By the mid-1620s the throne of France was occupied by Louis XIII. But the power behind the throne, and the real architect of French policy, was the king’s prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu is generally acknowledged to have been the arch-Machiavel, the supreme machinator, of his age. He may have been something more as well.

While Richelieu established an unprecedented stability in France, the

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rest of Europe and especially Germany flamed in the throes of the Thirty Years War. In its origins the Thirty

Years War was not essentially religious. Nevertheless, it quickly became polarised in religious terms. On one side were the staunchly Catholic forces of Spain and Austria. On the other were the Protestant armies of Sweden and the small German principalities -including the Palatinate of the Rhine, whose rulers, Elector Frederick and his wife Elizabeth Stuart, were in exile at the Hague. Frederick and his allies in the field were endorsed and supported by “Rosicrucian’ thinkers and writers both on the continent and in

England.

In 1633 Cardinal Richelieu embarked on an audacious and seemingly incredible policy. He brought France into the Thirty Years War but not on the side one would expect. For Richelieu, a number of

considerations took precedence over his religious obligations as cardinal. He sought to establish French supremacy in Europe. He sought to neutralise the perpetual and traditional threat posed to French security by Austria and Spain. And he sought to shatter the Spanish hegemony which had obtained for more than a century especially in the old Merovingian heartland of the Low