The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (32 page)

The thirteen-year-old James IV became king. He would be remembered as a Renaissance man who tried to keep peace with England. In 1503 he married the twelve-year-old Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII and sister of the man who became Henry VIII (in 1509). At this point, the Reformation was making Christian Protestants turn against Christian Catholics. Protestant Henry VIII and Catholic France went to war. Scotland, loyal to France, invaded England in 1513. At the Battle of Flodden the Scots were beaten badly, and for the Sinclairs it was a major personal blow.
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Forty Sinclairs had marched to Flodden with their earl and king; only one would survive. Since that disastrous day, no Sinclair has ever worn the color green—the color worn that day—to battle again.
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James IV allegedly died at Flodden as well, although the body purported to be the king’s was missing his ever present iron chain of expiation (worn around the waist as a symbol of piety), leading many to speculate that James had survived.

War and the massive building and rebuilding projects of the Sinclairs were beginning to take a toll on the family’s seemingly inexhaustible resources. The Sinclairs had once been the puppeteers running their country’s affairs from behind the scenes; now the weak kings were pushing them to the front. It cost them dearly in terms of their own lives and their property. Oliver Sinclair was a favorite of James V. His protection of Sinclair and his marriage to Mary of Guise ensured his loyalty to the
side of the Catholics, but the religious revolution that was under way in the form of the Reformation was causing trouble between England and Scotland. Henry VIII tried to convert his relative to the Protestant side, but James would not repudiate his faith. In 1542 the Battle of Solway saw Scotland defeated and Oliver Sinclair captured. James V was horrified and declared that all was lost with the loss of Oliver. At the same time that he heard of the defeat at Solway, he also heard of the birth of his daughter, Mary. He predicted the dynasty was over and himself died shortly afterward.
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His daughter Mary would become known to history as Mary, Queen of Scots.

While the new queen was under the protection of the Sinclairs, Oliver was furloughed from prison in England. He was allowed a short visit home, but instead he disappeared from Scotland and history—forever.
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The year was 1545. The regent, Mary of Guise, worked closely with (still another) William Sinclair. She would go far to show the Sinclairs that their alliance was with the House of Guise-Lorraine. In the same year that Oliver was supposed to report back to prison in England, the Sinclair family was ordered by Reformation bishops to turn over the treasures of the Scottish Catholic Church. Since the family had commissioned and paid for many of these religious objects, they had taken them under their protection. The property of the Catholic Church also included relics that the Sinclairs had brought back from the Crusades, including a piece of the True Cross. The Reformation mobs everywhere were looting Catholic churches and stealing and destroying such relics. The Sinclairs refused to allow this to happen at Roslin.
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The same year that Oliver disappeared, so did the sacred objects under the care of the Sinclair family.

William Sinclair allowed only the Guise family to be privy to his greatest secret. Mary of Guise proclaimed a “bond of obligation” to William, stating, “We shall be loyal and true masters to him… . His counsel and secret shown to us, we shall keep secret.” What secret? Andrew Sinclair, biographer of his ancestors, asserts that the secret was that there was a room beneath the chapel at Roslin that contained a repository with the sacred relics.
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After devastating vandalism by Protestant mobs and twentieth-century excavation that uncovered many secret vaults, no such relics have turned up. It is more than likely that every
castle and every cathedral in medieval times had a hidden tunnel or chamber. The absence of one would be uncommon. William Sinclair and Sir Oliver Sinclair harbored a much greater secret. That secret was Oak Island. Oliver, commander of both the army and the navy, had set sail for the concealed vault and secluded country of the Sinclairs in 1545, never to return.

The fortunes of the Sinclairs in Scotland and the Guise family in France would be hurt badly in the religious wars that followed. William Sinclair was made Lord Justice General by Queen Mary of Scotland and traveled back and forth to France. Mary of Guise died in 1560. François, duke of Guise, was assassinated in 1563.
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Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed by Queen Elizabeth I in 1587 while her own son stood idly by. His lack of concern earned him both the throne of Scotland and, later, the throne of England when Elizabeth died. The year after Mary’s execution, François of Guise’s son, the new duke, and his brother, the cardinal Guise, were both assassinated on the orders of Henri III of France. In 1589 the Guise family, in turn, had Henri III assassinated.
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The religious wars caught up to the Sinclair family in Roslin as well. In 1615 the head of the family, William Sinclair, was ordered condemned to death for allowing a Jesuit priest to conduct the Catholic Mass at Roslin. The priest was hung and William pardoned to an exile in Ireland; mobs destroyed the Sinclair home and chapel.
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This act by the Sinclairs seems to indicate that despite the paganistic-Masonic trappings of Roslin, they were devout to the Catholic religion and loyal to their faith. They were also loyal to their role as guardian of secrets and treasures whose care they had inherited. The massive Templar treasure that included objects once looted from Jerusalem was not dissipated, nor was all the Sinclair wealth spent. It disappeared. The relics, as well as the treasures of the Scottish Church, were never uncovered. Everything had vanished; so had Oliver Sinclair. The Sinclairs had been transferring the objects in their care for more than a half a century to their vault in Nova Scotia. In 1545 that transfer was completed. The only document we have mentioning the “secret” is that order from Mary of Guise. How much did Sinclair allow the Guise family to know? At some point a parting of the ways took place between the French families
that made up the Ordre de Sion, later known as the Prieuré de Sion, and the Scottish Sinclair family. The schism was not complete, but the Scottish contingent appears to have taken control of the Templar treasure hoard.

The Guardian Families in France

The Guise family and the Sinclair family remained united by a greater bond, the secret Prieuré de Sion. This group was truly an elite network of a very small number of French families.
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The first grand master of that group, after the split with the Templars, was Jean de Gisors. He took control after the “cutting of the elm” in 1188, which symbolically divorced the Templars from the Prieuré de Sion, and for the first time the Templars and the Prieuré de Sion were not controlled, at least in name, by the same person.

The second grand master was Marie de St. Clair, who had descended from the Scottish branch at Roslin. Her maiden name was Levis, indicating that St. Clair, too, had married into the kingship line of David.

The third grand master was Guillaume de Gisors, who had started another secret society, the Order of the Ship and the Double Crescent. He was related to the St. Clairs and connected to the temple at Paris from which the vast Templar fortune had disappeared into history. His sister married into the des Plantard family, who gave their name to the Plantagenet dynasty. The Plantards, too, claimed descent from the Davidic bloodline, the word
plantard
being French for “flowering shoot.” In the Apocalypse, John had said that he was the root and stock of David; so, too, were Levis and Plantards. Two members of the de Bar family held the grand master title next. One of them, Jean de Bar, had owned the land around Stenay where the last Merovingian king had been murdered. The de Bars were related to the family of René d’Anjou and to the Coucy family of Picardy. The lords of Picardy were described alternately as kingmakers or challengers to the throne as the subjects of Barbara Tuchman’s study of the medieval world,
A Distant Mirror.
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The sixth grand master was again a St. Clair, this time from the French
side of the family. He was a minor figure, but it shows the relatively tight circle that was in control of the Prieuré de Sion. The ninth grand master was a major figure in medieval history, René d’Anjou, whose multitude of titles included the count of Guise. He was the most important force behind the Renaissance of Europe and was called the “Good King René” by his subjects. He was married at the age of twelve, to Isabella of Lorraine in a political alliance. While most court-arranged marriages do not last, René was dedicated to Isabella for thirty-three years, until her death. René composed music, learned languages, studied mathematics and geology, learned the law, and reformed his own lands. As the true Renaissance man, he brought to his domain new and modern trends in learning and science. He took part in one mania of the day, which was the collecting of relics. His prize possession was a cup that had been used at the marriage at Cana (which may have united Jesus with Mary Magdalene). He claimed to have obtained the cup in Marseilles.

René d’Anjou was a member of several secret orders, including a revival of the de Gisors’ Order of the Ship. One member of that order was the father of Leonardo da Vinci’s patron. Da Vinci, too, became a grand master in the Prieuré de Sion. In an age of chivalry, d’Anjou was a promoter of the pageantry and the chivalric display of his times. He participated in the Tarascon festivals, in which the town celebrated Martha’s driving away the dragon that had plagued the town. He also staged what were called
pas d’armes,
medieval combinations of plays and tournaments. Often the theme would evolve around the central idea of the earthly Garden of Eden, Arcadia, and an underground stream. Well before Jacopo Sannazaro’s poem was published, the Arcadia theme was important to d’Anjou. Each year his mistress played the role of shepherdess.

It was the work of Nicolas Poussin that captured the ideals of the Arcadia theme, replete with trappings of a mystical and idyllic life. And it was his painting
Les Bergers d’Arcadie,
(The Shepherds of Arcadia) that took Father Saunière to the Louvre in Paris to find clues to his treasure hunt in Rennes-le-Chateau. That clue brought him to a tomb that he deemed so important he obliterated the engraving on it. The message that took Saunière to Paris to seek the work of Poussin was “Poussin
holds the key.” That key was a code employing pentagonal geometry, which was used to conceal the directions to the treasure in the village of Rennes-le-Chateau. The lines forming the pentagon had at their central point the forehead of the shepherdess. What made the shepherdess so important to Poussin and to René d’Anjou?

The painting itself depicts three shepherds and a shepherdess looking at an ancient tomb. Two of the shepherds have their fingers extended, pointing to part of the tomb with the message “Et in Arcadia ego.” The shepherdess could be Mary Magdalene (as she was the wife of the shepherd Jesus). Mary showed the apostles the tomb after discovering Jesus was not there. Now in Poussin, she is saying, he is here, and he is dead (il est mort). That specific tomb is six miles from Rennes-le-Chateau, and it held further secret codes and clues to the mystery of Father Saunière.
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In 1448, when d’Anjou established his Order of the Crescent, the revival of Order of the Ship and the Double Crescent, William Sinclair was in the early stages of building Roslin and starting the construction at Oak Island. Related by marriage, brought together by the secret societies in which they both participated, united by a religion under siege, it is tempting to speculate that there might have been correspondence from William Sinclair to d’Anjou, telling him of the land the natives call “Acadie.” It is also tempting to speculate that the reports of Sinclair’s western explorations found their way to another man in the service of d’Anjou, young Christopher Columbus. And it is tempting to read more significance into another coincidence.

René d’Anjou’s daughter, Iolande de Bar, had taken over as grand master of the Prieuré de Sion after her father. She hired Georges Antoine Vespucci as tutor to her son. Another Vespucci, Amerigo, gave his name to the map of the “discovery” of America, brought back by Columbus. Iolande’s son was also named René, and he inherited several titles, including duke of Lorraine. The younger duke, as well as the Vespucci family, were patrons to both Leonardo da Vinci and the artist Sandro Botticelli. The patrons of Botticelli included the Medicis, Gonzagas, and Estes, who were all contemporaries and peers of the Zeno family in Venice. Botticelli incorporated the Arcadia theme into his own work and played an active role in the Prieuré de Sion.

Like Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci counted the Estes and Medicis among his patrons and grew in stature and prominence with their help.
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When he was a struggling painter he became acquainted with the wealthy Florentine family of Vespucci—he had followed Amerigo Vespucci’s grandfather around the streets to sketch his face. As a reward for his talent, Vespucci helped Leonardo gain admittance into the inner circles of the rich families in northern Italy. One such family was that of Ludovico Sforza, whose father was in René d’Anjou’s order. Leonardo also served as grand master to the Prieuré de Sion from 1510 to 1519. In 1515 da Vinci took employ with this viceroy of Milan and Languedoc. While he started his career as an artist—and art is central to his greatness—he was also an inventor, physicist, geologist, and engineer. It was in the latter capacities that he was employed. As a military engineer, he designed an underwater suit and was able in the art of hydraulics. Water always played a role in his scientific pursuits—from its use as a power supply to its harnessing for agriculture to its potential application to weaponry. Da Vinci was a student of botany as well.
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