Holy Blood, Holy Grail (25 page)

Countries and parts of modern Lorraine. As a result of these factors,

Europe was taken aback by the unprecedented action of a Catholic cardinal, presiding over a Catholic country, dispatching Catholic troops to fight on the Protestant side against other Catholics. No historian has ever suggested that Richelieu was a “Rosicrucian’. But he could not possibly have done anything more in keeping with “Rosicrucian’ attitudes, or more likely to win him “Rosicrucian’ favour.

In the meantime the house of Lorraine had again begun to aspire, albeit obliquely, to the French throne. This time the claimant was Gaston d’Orleans, younger brother of Louis XIII. Gaston was not himself of the house of Lorraine. In 1632, however, he had married the duke of Lorraine’s sister. His heir would thus carry Lorraine blood on the maternal side; and if Gaston ascended the throne Lorraine would preside over France within another generation. This prospect was sufficient to mobilise support. Among those asserting Gaston’s right of succession we found an individual we had encountered before Charles, Duke of Guise. Charles had been tutored by the young Robert Fludd. And he had

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married HenrietteCatherine de joyeuse, owner of Couiza and Arques

-where the tomb identical to the one in Poussin’s painting is located.

Attempts to depose Louis in favour of Gaston failed, but time it seemed was on Gaston’s side; or at least on the side of Gaston’s heirs, for Louis XIII and his wife, Anne of Austria, remained childless. Rumours were already in circulation that the king was homosexual or sexually incapacitated; and indeed, according to certain reports following his subsequent autopsy, he was pronounced incapable of begetting children.

But then, in 1638, after twenty-three years of sterile marriage, Anne of Austria suddenly produced a child. Few people at the time believed in the boy’s legitimacy, and there is still considerable doubt about it. According to both contemporary and later writers, the child’s true father was Cardinal Richelieu, or perhaps a “stud’ employed by Richelieu, quite possibly his protege and successor,

Cardinal Mazarin. It has even been claimed that after Louis XIII’s death,

Mazarin and Anne of Austria were secretly married.

In any case the birth of an heir to Louis XIII was a serious blow to the hopes of Gaston d’Orleans and the house of Lorraine. And when Louis and

Richelieu both died in 1642, the first in a series of concerted attempts was launched to oust Mazarin and keep the young Louis XIV from the throne.

These attempts, which began as popular uprisings, culminated in a civil war that flared intermittently for ten years. To historians that war is known as the Fronde. In addition to Gaston d’Orleans, its chief instigators included a number of names, families and titles already familiar to us.

There was Frederic-Maurice de la Tour dAuvergne, Duke of Bouillon.

There was the viscount of Turenne. There was the duke of Longueville

-grandson of

Louis de Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers and alleged Grand Master of Sion half a century before. The headquarters and capital of the frondeurs was, significantly enough, the ancient Ardennes town of Stenay.

The Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement

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According to the “Prieure documents’, the Prieure de Sion, during the mid-seventeenth century, “dedicated itself to deposing Mazarin’.

Quite clearly it would seem to have been unsuccessful. The Fronde failed,

Louis XIV did mount the throne of France and Mazarin, though briefly removed, was quickly reinstated, presiding as prime minister until his death in 1660. But if Sion did in fact devote itself to opposing Mazarin, we at last had some vector on it, some means of locating and identifying it. Given the families involved in the Fronde families whose genealogies also figured in the “Prieure documents’ it seemed reasonable to associate Sion with the instigators of that turmoil.

The “Prieure documents’ had asserted that Sion actively opposed Mazarin.

They also asserted that certain families and titles Lorraine, for example, Gonzaga, Nevers, Guise, Longueville and Bouillon had not only been intimately connected with the Order, but also provided it with some of its Grand Masters. And history confirmed that it was these names and titles which had loomed in the forefront of resistance to the cardinal. It thus seemed that we had located the Prieure de Sion, and that we had identified at least some of its members. If we were right, Sion during the period in question, at any rate was simply another name for a movement and a conspiracy which historians had long recognised and acknowledged.

But if the f rondeurs constituted an enclave of opposition to Mazarin, they were not the only such enclave. There were others as well, overlapping enclaves which functioned not only during the Fronde but long afterwards. The

“Prieure documents’ themselves refer repeatedly and insistently to the Compagriie du Saint-Sacrement. They imply, quite clearly, that the Compagnie was in fact

Sion, or a fapade for Sion, operating under another name.

And certainly the Compagnie in its structure, organisation, activities and modes of operation conformed to the picture we had begun to form of Sion.

The Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement was a highly organised and efficient secret society.

There is no question of it being fictitious. On the contrary, its existence has been acknowledged by its contemporaries, as well as by subsequent historians. It has been exhaustively documented, and numerous books and articles have been devoted to it. Its name is familiar enough in France, and it continues to enjoy a certain fashionable mystique.

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Some of its own papers have even come to light.

The Compagnie is said to have been founded, between 1627 and 1629, by a nobleman associated with Gaston d’Orleans. The individuals who guided and shaped its policies remained scrupulously anonymous, however, and are still so today. The only names definitively associated with it are those of intermediate or lower-ranking members of its hierarchy the ‘front men’,. so to speak, who acted on instructions from above. One of these was the brother of the duchess of Longueville. Another was Charles Fouquet, brother of Louis XIV’s Superintendent of Finances.

And there was the uncle of the philosopher Fenelon who, half a century later, exerted a profound influence on Freemasonry through the Chevalier Ramsay. Among those most prominently associated with the Compagnie were the mysterious figure now known as Saint

Vincent de Paul, and Nicolas Pavillon, bishop of Alet, the town a few miles from Rennes-leChateau, and Jean Jacques Olier, founder of the Seminary of

Saint Sulpice. Indeed Saint Sulpice is now generally acknowledged to have been the Compagnie’s ‘centre of operations’.9

In its organisation and activities the Compagnie echoed the Order of the

Temple and prefigured later Freemasonry. Working from Saint Sulpice, it established an intricate network of provincial branches or chapters. Provincial members remained ignorant of their directors’ identities. They were often manipulated on behalf of objectives they themselves did not share.

They were even forbidden to contact each other except via Paris, thus ensuring a highly centralised control. And even in Paris the architects of the society remained unknown to those who obediently served them. In short the Compagnie comprised a hydra-headed organisation with an invisible heart. To this day it is not known who constituted the heart. Nor what constituted the heart. But it is known that the heart beat in accordance with some veiled and weighty secret. Contemporary accounts refer explicitly to ‘the Secret which is the core of the Compagnie’. According to one of the society’s statutes, discovered long afterwards, “The primary channel which shapes the spirit of the Compagnie, and which is essential to it, is the Secret. “

So far as uninitiated novice members were concerned, the Compagnie was

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ostensibly devoted to charitable work, especially in regions devastated by the Wars of Religion and subsequently by the Fronde in Picardy, for instance, Champagne and Lorraine. It is now generally accepted, however, that this

“charitable work’ was merely a convenient and ingenious facade, which had little to do with the Compagnie’s real raison detre. The real raison detre was twofold to engage in what was called ‘pious espionage’, gathering ‘intelligence information’, and to infiltrate the most important offices in the land, including circles in direct proximity to the throne.

In both of these objectives the Compagnie seems to have enjoyed a signal success. As a member of the royal “Council of Conscience’, for example,

Vincent de Paul became confessor to Louis XIII. He was also an intimate adviser to Louis XIV until his opposition to Mazarin forced him to resign this position. And the queen mother, Anne of Austria, was, in many respects, a hapless pawn of the Compagnie, who for a time at any rate managed to turn her against Mazarin. But the Compagnie did not confine itself exclusively to the throne. By the mid seventeenth century, it could wield power through the aristocracy, the parlement, the judiciary and the police -so much so, that on a number of occasions these bodies openly dared to defy the king.

In our researches we found no historian, writing either at the time or more recently, who adequately explained the Compagnie du

Saint-Sacrement. Most authorities depict it as a militant

arch-Catholic organisation, a bastion of rigidly entrenched and fanatic orthodoxy. The same authorities claim that it devoted itself to weeding out heretics. But why, in a devoutly

Catholic country, should such an organisation have had to function with such strict secrecy? And who constituted a “heretic’ at that time?

-Protestants? Jansenists? In fact, there were numerous Protestants and Jansenists within the ranks of the Compagnie.

If the Compagnie was piously Catholic, it should, in theory, have endorsed

Cardinal Mazarin who, after all, embodied Catholic interests at the time.

Yet the Compagnie militantly opposed Mazarin so much so that the cardinal, losing his temper, vowed he would employ all his resources to destroy it. What is more, the Compagnie provoked vigorous hostility in

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other conventional quarters as well. The Jesuits, for instance, assiduously campaigned against it. Other

Catholic authorities accused the Compagnie of ‘heresy’ the very thing the

Compagnie itself purported to oppose. In 1651 the bishop of Toulouse charged the Compagnie with ‘impious practices’ and hinted at something highly irregular in its induction ceremonies” - a curious echo of the charges levelled against the Templars. He even threatened members of the society with excommunication. Most of them brazenly defied this threat an extremely singular response from supposedly ‘pious’ Catholics.

The Compagnie had been formed when the “Rosicrucian’furore was still at its zenith. The

‘invisible confraternity’ was believed to be everywhere, omnipresent and this engendered not only panic and paranoia, but also the inevitable witch-hunts. And yet no trace was ever found of a card-carrying “Rosicrucian’ nowhere, least of all in Catholic France. So far as France was concerned, the “Rosicrucians’ remained figments of an alarmist popular imagination. Or did they? If there were indeed “Rosicrucian’ interests determined to establish a foothold in France, what better facade could there be than an organisation dedicated to hunting out “Rosicrucians’? In short the “Rosicrucians’ may have furthered their objectives, and gained a following in France, by posing as their own arch-enemy.

The Compagnie successfully defied both Mazarin and Louis XIV. In 1660, less than a year before Mazarin’s death, the king officially pronounced against the Compagnie and ordered its dissolution. For the next five years the

Compagnie cavalierly ignored the royal edict. At last, in 1665, it concluded that it could not continue to operate in its ‘present form’.

Accordingly all documents pertinent to the society were recalled and concealed in some secret Paris depository. This depository has never been located, although it is generally believed to have been Saint Sulpice.”2 If it was, the Compagnie’s archives would thus have been available, more than two centuries later, to men like Abbe smile Hof fet.

But though the Compagnie ceased to exist in what was then its ‘present form’, none the less it continued to operate at least until the beginning of the next century, still constituting a thorn in Louis XIV’s side.

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According to unconfirmed traditions, it survived well into the twentieth century.

Whether this last assertion is true or not, there is no question that the

Compagnie survived its supposed demise in 1665. In 1667 Moliere, a loyal adherent of Louis XIV, attacked the Compagnie through certain veiled but pointed allusions in Le Tartuffe. Despite its apparent extinction, the

Compagnie retaliated by getting the play suppressed and keeping it so for two years, despite Moliere’s royal patronage. And the Compagnie seems to have employed its own literary spokesmen as well. It is rumoured, for example, to have included La Rochefoucauld who was certainly active in the Fronde. According to Gerard de Sede, La Fontaine was also a member of the Compagnie, and his charming, ostensibly innocuous fables were in fact allegorical attacks on the throne. This is not inconceivable. Louis XIV disliked La Fontaine intensely, and actively opposed his admission to the

Academie Fran~aisc. And La Fontaine’s sponsors and patrons included the duke of Guise, the duke of Bouillon, the viscount of Turenne and the widow of Gaston d’Orleans.

In the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement we thus found an actual secret society, much of whose history was on record. It was ostensibly Catholic, but was nevertheless linked with distinctly un-Catholic activities. It was intimately associated with certain important aristocratic families families who had been active in the Fronde and whose genealogies figured in the “Prieure documents’. It was closely connected with Saint Sulpice. It worked primarily by infiltration and came to exercise enormous influence.