Holy Blood, Holy Grail (26 page)

And it was actively opposed to Cardinal Mazarin. In all these respects, it conformed almost perfectly to the image of the Prieure de Sion as presented in the “Prieure documents’. If Sion was indeed active during the seventeenth century, we could reasonably assume it to have been synonymous with the Compagnie. Or perhaps with the power behind the Compagnie.

Chateau Barberie

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According to the “Prieure documents’, Sion’s opposition to Mazarin provoked bitter retribution from the cardinal. Among the chief victims of this retribution are said to have been the Plantard family lineal descendants of Dagobert II and the Merovingian dynasty. In 1548, the

“Prieure documents’ state, jean des Plantard had married Marie de Saint-Clair thus forging another link between his family and that of the

Saint-Clair/Gisors. By that time, too, the Plantard family was supposedly established at a certain Chateau Barberie near Nevers, in the Nivernais region of France. This chateau supposedly constituted the Plantards’ official residence for the next century. Then, on July 11th, 1659, according to the “Prieure documents’, Mazarin ordered the razing and total destruction of the chateau. In the ensuing conflagration, the Plantard family is said to have lost all its possessions. ‘3

No established or conventional history book, no biography of Mazarin, confirmed these assertions. Our researches yielded no mention whatever of a Plantard family in the Nivernais, or, at first, of any Chateau Barberie.

And yet Mazarin, for some unspecified reason, did covet the Nivernais and the duchy of Nevers. Eventually he managed to purchase them and the contract is signed July 11th, 1659,”4 the very day on which Chateau

Barberie is said to have been destroyed.

This prompted us to investigate the matter further. Eventually we exhumed a few disparate fragments of evidence. They were not enough to explain things, but they did attest to the veracity of the “Prieure documents’. In a compilation, dated 1506, of estates and holdings in the Nivernais a

Barberie was indeed mentioned. A charter of 1575 mentioned a hamlet in the

Nivernais called Les Plantards.”5

Most convincing of all, it transpired that the existence of Chateau Ba~berie had in fact been definitively established. During 1874-5

members of the Society of Letters, Sciences and Arts of Nevers undertook an exploratory excavation on the site of certain ruins. It was a difficult enterprise, for the ruins were almost unrecognisable as such, the stones had been vitrified by fire and the site itself was thickly overgrown with trees. Eventually, however, remnants of a town wall and of a chateau were uncovered. This site is now acknowledged to

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have been Barberie. Before its destruction it apparently consisted of a small fortified town and chateau. ‘6 And it is within a short distance of the old hamlet of Les Plantards.

We could now say that Chateau Barberie indisputably existed and was destroyed by fire.

And, given the hamlet of Les Plantards, there was no reason to doubt it had been owned by a family of that name. The curious fact was that there was no record of when the chateau had been destroyed, nor by whom. If Mazarin was responsible, he would seem to have taken extraordinary pains to eradicate all traces of his action.

Indeed there seemed to have been a methodical and systematic attempt to wipe Chateau

Barberie from the map and from history. Why embark on such a process of obliteration, unless there was something to hide?

Nicolas Fouquet

Mazarin had other enemies besides the frondeurs and the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. Among the most powerful 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, had become 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 rumoured 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’.

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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 pol arising 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 mobilised the Compagnie de 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.”

In 1665, the year of Fouquet’s imprisonment, Poussin died in Rome. During the years that followed, Louis XIV persistently endeavoured 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

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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.

He returned to France in the early 1640s 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.”

We had already traced the motifs of the underground stream Alpheus, of

Arcadia and Arcadian shepherds, to Rene 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

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work dates from 1630 or 1635, five or ten years Fig. 1 The Plantard Family Crest

“ A_

~~n’-aK~ca t/

I~-T~ ----~-r _ -T

~( _ I ~ I I ; I

~ III’I~II

I~I~. lipI

I I ~_ I

/ ‘~/~ I I I, (~-~’y’ , I I I ~ I I i i~~ r~ ~ ~ ~. I l ii I I I~~ I ~ ‘~ ~I y\ ‘ % I’i_

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~1 d o~ aaWc earlier than the more familiar version of “Les Bergers d’Arcadie’.

The phrase “Et in Arcadia Ego’ made its public debut between 1618 and 1623 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.”

In the “Prieure 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 “Prieure documents’” it is cited as such as early as 1210 by one Robert, Abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel.z 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 .2’

Whatever the origin of the phrase, “Et in Arcadia Ego’ seems, for both

Guercino and Poussin, to have more than a line of elegiac poetry.

Quite clearly it seems to have enjoyed some important secret

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significance, which was recognisable 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 “Prieure 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 communication.”

In its context, this 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 recognised as “hereditary Grand Masters of Scottish Masonry’z3 This is the earliest specifically Masonic document on record. According to Masonic

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sources, however, the hereditary Grand Mastership was conferred on the

Sinclairs by James II, who ruled between 1437 and 1460 the age of Rene 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