Holy Blood, Holy Grail (20 page)

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assumed obsessive proportions in the minds of certain eminent political families of the period all of whom, directly or indirectly, figure in the genealogies of the “Prieure documents’. And the families in question seem to have transmitted the image to their proteges in the arts. From Rene d’Anjou, something seems to have passed to the Medicis, the Sforzas, the Estes and the Gonzagas the last of whom, according to the “Prieure documents’, provided Sion with two Grand Masters, Ferrante de Gonzaga and Louis de

Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers. From them it appears to have found its way into the work of the epoch’s most illustrious poets and painters, including

Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci.

The Rosicrucian Manifestos

A somewhat similar dissemination of ideas occurred in the seventeenth century, first in Germany, then spreading to England. In 1614 the first of the so-called “Rosicrucian manifestos’ appeared, followed by a second tract a year later. These manifestos created a furore at the time, provoking fulminations from the Church and the Jesuits, and elicting fervently enthusiastic support from liberal factions in Protestant Europe. Among the most eloquent and influential exponents of “Rosicrucian thought was Robert

Fludd, who is listed as the Prieure de Sion’s sixteenth Grand Master, presiding between 1595 and 1637.

Among other things, the “Rosicrucian manifestos’8 promulgated the story of the legendary Christian Rosenkreuz. They purported to issue from a secret, ‘invisible’ confraternity of

‘initiates’ in Germany and France.

They promised a transformation of the world and of human knowledge in accordance with esoteric, Hermetic principles the ‘underground stream’

which had flowed from Rene d’Anjou through the Renaissance. A new epoch of spiritual freedom was heralded, an epoch in which man would liberate himself from his former shackles, would unlock hitherto dormant ‘secrets of nature’, and would govern his own destiny in accord with harmonious, all pervading universal and cosmic laws. At the same

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time, the manifestos were highly inflammatory politically, fiercely attacking the Catholic Church and the old Holy Roman Empire. These manifestos are now generally believed to have been written by a.German theologian and esotericist, Johann Valentin Andrea, listed as Grand Master of the Prieure de Sion after Robert Fludd. If they were not written by

Andrea, they were certainly written by one or more of his associates.

In 1616 a third “Rosicrucian’ tract appeared, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz. Like the two previous works, The Chemical Wedding was originally of anonymous authorship; but Andrea himself later confessed to having composed it as a

“joke’ or comedy.

The Chemical Wedding is a complex Hermetic allegory, which subsequently influenced such works as Goethe’s Faust. As Frances Yates has demonstrated, it contains unmistakable echoes of the English esotericist, John Dee, who also influenced Robert Fludd. Andrea’s work also evokes resonances of the

Grail romances and of the Knights Templar Christian Rosenkreuz, for instance, is said to wear a white tunic with a red cross on the shoulder.

In the course of the narrative a play is performed an allegory within an allegory. This play involves a princess, of unspecified ‘royal’ lineage, whose rightful domains have been usurped by the Moors and who is washed ashore in a wooden chest. The rest of the play deals with her vicissitudes and her marriage to a prince who will help her regain her heritage.

Our research revealed assorted second- and third-hand links between Andrea and the families whose genealogies figure in the “Prieure documents’. We discovered no firsthand or direct links, however, except perhaps for

Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. Frederick was the nephew of an important French Protestant leader, Henri de la Tour dAuvergne, Viscount of Turenne and Duke of Bouillon Godfroi de Bouillon’s old title. Henri was also associated with the Longueville family, which figured prominently in both the “Prieure documents’ and our own inquiry.

And in 1591 he had taken great trouble to acquire the town of Stenay.

In 1613 Frederick of the Palatinate had married Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England, granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots and great-granddaughter of Marie de Guise and Guise was the cadet

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branch of the house of Lorraine. Marie de Guise, a century before, had been married to the duke of Longueville and then, on his death, to f ames V of

Scotland. This created a dynastic alliance between the houses of Stuart and

Lorraine. In consequence the Stuarts began to figure, if only peripherally, in the genealogies of the “Prieure documents’: and Andrea, as well as the three alleged Grand Masters who followed him, displayed varying degrees of interest in the Scottish royal house.

During this period the house of

Lorraine was, to a significant degree, in eclipse. If Sion was a coherent and active order at the time, it might therefore have transferred its allegiance -at least partially and temporarily to the decidedly more influential Stuarts.

In any case Frederick of the Palatinate, after his marriage to Elizabeth

Stuart, established an esoteric ally oriented court at his capital of Heidelberg. As Frances Yates writes:

A culture was forming in the Palatinate which came straight out of the

Renaissance but with more recent trends added, a culture which may be defined by the adjective “Rosicrucian’. The prince around whom these deep currents were swirling was Friedrich, Elector Palatine, and their exponents were hoping for a politico-religious expression of their aims

... The

Frederickian movement .. . was an attempt to give those currents politico-religious expression, to realise the ideal of Hermetic reform centred on a real prince .. . It .. . created a culture, a

“Rosicrucian’ state with its court centred on Heidelberg.9

In short the anonymous “Rosicrucians’ and their sympathisers seem to have invested Frederick with a sense of mission, both spiritual and political.

And Frederick seems to have readily accepted the role imposed upon him, together with the hopes and expectations it entailed. Thus, in 1618, he accepted the crown of Bohemia, offered him by that country’s rebellious nobles. In doing so he incurred the wrath of the papacy and the Holy Roman

Empire and precipitated the chaos of the Thirty Years War. Within two years he and Elizabeth had been driven into exile in Holland, and Heidelberg was overrun by Catholic troops. And for the ensuing quarter

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of a century Germany became the major battleground for the most bitter, bloody and costly conflict in European history before the twentieth century a conflict in which the Church almost managed to re-impose the hegemony she had enjoyed during the Middle Ages.

Amidst the turmoil raging around him, Andrea created a network of more or less secret societies known as the Christian Unions. According to Andrea’s blueprint, each society was headed by an anonymous prince, assisted by twelve others divided into groups of three each of whom was to be a specialist in a given sphere of study.” The original purpose of the

Christian Unions was to preserve threatened knowledge especially the most recent scientific advances, many of which the Church deemed heretical. At the same time, however. the Christian Unions also functioned as a refuge for persons fleeing the Inquisition which accompanied the invading

Catholic armies, and was intent on rooting out all vestiges of

“Rosicrucian’ thought. Thus numerous scholars, scientists, philosophers and esotericists found a haven in Andrea’s institutions. Through them many were smuggled to safety in England where Freemasonry was just beginning to coalesce. In some significant sense Andrea’s Christian Unions may have contributed to the organisation of the Masonic lodge system.

Among the displaced Europeans finding their way to England were a number of

Andrea’s personal associates: Samuel Hartlib, for example; Adam Komensky, better known as Comenius, with whom Andrea maintained a continuing correspondence; Theodore Haak, who was also a personal friend of Elizabeth

Stuart and maintained a correspondence with her; and Doctor John Wilkins, formerly personal chaplain to Frederick of the Palatinate and subsequently bishop of Chester.

Once in England, these men became closely associated with Masonic circles.

They were intimate with Robert Moray, for instance, whose induction into a

Masonic lodge in 1641 is one of the earliest on record; with Elias Ashmole, antiquarian and expert on chivalric orders, who was inducted in 1646; with the young but precocious Robert Boyle who, though not himself a

Freemason, was a member of another, more elusive secret society.”

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There is no concrete evidence that this secret society was the Prieure de Sion, but Boyle, according to the “Prieure documents’, succeeded Andrea as Sion’s Grand Master.

During Cromwell’s Protectorate, these dynamic minds, both English and European, formed what Boyle in a deliberate echo of the “Rosicrucian’ manifestos called an ‘invisible college’. And with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the ‘invisible college’ became the Royal Society” with the Stuart ruler, Charles II, as its patron and sponsor.

Virtually all the

Royal Society’s founder members were Freemasons. One could reasonably argue that the Royal Society itself, at least in its inception, was a Masonic institution derived, through Andrea’s Christian Unions, from the ‘invisible Rosicrucian brotherhood’. But this was not to be the culmination of the ‘underground stream’. On the contrary, it was to flow from Boyle to

Sir Isaac Newton, listed as Sion’s next Grand Master, and thence into the complex tributaries of eighteenth-century Freemasonry.

The Stuart Dynasty

According to the “Prieure 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 into 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 his mistress, Moll Davies. 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.

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In 1715 this cause rested with the “Old Pretender’, James III, then in exile and residing at Bar-leDuc, under the special protection of 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 axe 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 which 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 it 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.

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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.”

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