Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (32 page)

It was just as the police had said all along. Looking back at the police reaction to the various conspiracy theories suggested by the questioners on the 1985
World in Action
program, one can see clearly that what was made to seem like confusion on the part of the police was, in fact, incomprehension. For years, they were told by Tam Dalyell, Rob Green, various journalists, and TV producers that their theories of a walk-in burglar were just not credible, yet they were right.

At the time of writing, neither Dalyell nor Green has admitted his error. Dalyell, now retired from politics, has stuck to the objection that Hilda’s body could not have lain undiscovered from the Wednesday to the Saturday. On June 1, 2006, the
Shrewsbury Chronicle
reported that Rob Green, now living in New Zealand, was “heading to Britain armed with information he claims will shed new light on her case.” Green had appeared on New Zealand television stating that he had new evidence that he would present at Andrew George’s appeal. “His announcement,” said the
Chronicle
, “is set to revive conspiracy theories that the secret service was involved in the murder.” Green himself told an interviewer that he had “reason to believe” that the conviction was “an outrageous miscarriage of justice.” Quite how a twenty-one-year-old DNA sample could have been faked, and by whom, is not clear. It would have required, at the very least, a renewed twenty-first-century conspiracy, featuring an entirely new cast of conspirators. Certainly this notion seems not to have recommended itself to the three Appeal Court judges who, on Friday June 9, 2006, finally rejected Andrew George’s appeal against his conviction for the murder of the Shropshire rose grower.

The conspiracy theories, in this instance, seem to have faded away, for the obvious reason, one suspects, that their moment has passed. The particular set of demons that haunted the mid-1980s—the nuclear state with its thuggish minions—has vanished, to be replaced by others. But at the time, Hilda Murrell had been a powerful symbol. She had represented an ideal that the embattled campaigners of the period had of themselves. Politically defeated, marginalized even, they had an existence in their own minds that was simultaneously heroic and doomed. If they were unsuccessful, it wasn’t due to any deficiency in their cause or their actions, nor was it down to the fact that the majority of British (or American) people simply disagreed with them. It was explained, instead, by the strength and ruthlessness of the forces they were up against.

6. HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, HOLY SHIT

“What if, instead, you fed the computer a few dozen notions taken from the works of the Diabolicals—for example, the Templars fled to Scotland, or the Corpus Hermeticum arrived in Florence in 1460 and threw in a few connective phrases like, ‘It’s obvious that’ and ‘This proves that’? We might end up with something revelatory. Then we fill in the gaps, call the repetitions prophecies and—voilà—a hitherto unpublished chapter of the history of magic at the very least!” “An idea of genius,” Belbo said. “Let’s start straight away.”

—UMBERTO ECO, FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM

D
ifferent aspects of life seem to run on different timelines. Does punk really belong to the era of Jimmy Carter, or did
Baywatch
really begin in the same year as the French sank the
Rainbow Warrior
? The cultural and political worlds often seem autonomous. So, as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were being elected, as the Greenham women began their vigil, as Leonid Brezhnev, for sixteen years the top man in the USSR, lay dying, unconscious preparations were being made for the sensational trial involving thriller writer Dan Brown, which took place in London’s Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand in March 2006.

These proceedings involved three antagonists—two plaintiffs and a defendant—all of whom (remarkably, some may think) hailed from former English colonies beginning with the word “New.” Was it just coincidence that, in Court 61, Dan Brown of New Hampshire was defending himself against the charge of plagiarism, accused by Richard Leigh of New Jersey and Michael Baigent of New Zealand? Some conspiracists might have thought not, since theirs is a world that thrives on rebuffing coincidence. And thrives financially, too: as we’ll see, large amounts of money can be made by people able to spin far-fetched but portentous-sounding yarns about coincidences. But that same money can also be lost in the pursuit of absurd cases of law, as Messrs. Baigent and Leigh were about to find out.

Their claim was infringement of copyright: specifically, that Brown’s thriller
The Da Vinci Code
, a book that had by this point earned its author over $45 million, replacing
Harry Potter
as the most ubiquitous item on train, plane, and beach, used a plot that had been directly plagiarized from their own work of “history,”
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
. This book, published in 1982, had also made its authors (Baigent, Leigh, and a third man, Henry Lincoln) a considerable fortune, as had its sequels. But for Baigent and Leigh, it seemed, the money wasn’t the issue: they had more high-minded reasons for objecting to the Dan Brown phenomenon. “We are being lumped in with Dan Brown’s work of fiction and that degrades the historical implication of our material. It makes our work far easier to dismiss as a farrago of nonsense,” Michael Baigent was quoted as saying. And then he addressed a slightly different question. “Whether our hypothesis is right or wrong is irrelevant. The fact is that this is work that we put together and spent years and years building up. Issuing the writ is not something we have done lightly, but we feel that we have no choice.”
¹

Baigent’s claim that
The Da Vinci Code
undermined the authority of
The Holy Blood
’s “historical implication” sat uneasily with the idea of plagiarism. If Baigent and Leigh’s book was essentially history, then surely anyone writing what was clearly a novel would be entitled to use it, provided they didn’t quote great chunks of it without attribution or permission. So it wasn’t surprising that after three weeks, the judge, Peter Smith—described by journalists in the court as “portly and ruby-faced,” and clearly enjoying every moment of the proceedings—ruled in favor of Dan Brown, holding that Baigent and Leigh’s argument was “vague and shifted course during the trial and was always based on a weak foundation.” Baigent and Leigh’s costs were estimated at over a million dollars, and they were also told to pay 85 percent of Brown’s more than $2 million legal bill. A year later, an appeal by Baigent and Leigh was dismissed, by which time their costs had risen to $5 million.

In the course of the trial, Judge Smith’s textual analysis of the two works allowed a glimpse into the private process of authorship. It had been Brown’s wife, Blythe, an art expert, who had read
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
and who had offered her husband some kind of synopsis of its contents. Though Brown’s debt to the book is acknowledged in the character of Leigh Teabing, whose improbable name is an amalgam and an anagram of the surnames of the two authors, the judge concluded, “In reality, Mr. Brown knew very little about how the historical background was researched. He, in my view, simply accepted Blythe Brown’s research material when incorporating it into the writing of part two of
DVC
.”
²

This insight into the questionable thoroughness of Dan Brown’s research techniques seemed slightly at odds with Brown’s own reaction to the trial’s conclusion. Judge Smith’s findings were, he suggested, a great victory for artistic expression, because “a novelist must be free to draw appropriately from historical works without fear that he’ll be sued.” The author’s formulation accidentally echoed one of the great ironic newspaper headlines of our generation: “Da Vinci Case Pits History Against Art.”
³
Though, as the judge suggested, 40 million book buyers can never be wrong in the eyes of publishers,
The Da Vinci Code
is probably not great art. And in what sense can
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
be described as history?

Henry Lincoln and the TV Quest for the Holy Grail

At around the same time as the trial in London was closing, the movie of
The Da Vinci Code
was opening in cinemas across the world. Its thunderous trailer, shown a million times already, claimed that the film would tell the story of “the greatest cover-up in human history,” which readers of the book knew to be that supposedly perpetrated by the Catholic Church, which for two millennia had deceived its adherents into believing that Jesus was a bachelor and Mary Magdalene a whore. So intense had the controversy over Dan Brown’s theology become that bishops denounced the film, and the very day I tried to see it in the Indian city of Hyderabad, it was banned by the state government of Andhra Pradesh because it might lead to demonstrations and civil disorder. “The minority organizations,” said a state spokesman, “have pointed out that the film’s storyline attacks the very heart of the Holy Gospel, destroying the divinity of Jesus Christ.”

This may have been India, which is very careful about its minorities for good historical reasons, but even so, it seemed surprising that such an extreme stance should have been taken. Surely everybody knew how to distinguish a farrago of exciting nonsense involving psychotic albino monks and centuries-old secret societies from a genuine claim about historical truth? But perhaps the Andhra Pradeshis were right, after all, because, as we’ve seen, at least two groups central to the creation of
The Da Vinci Code
weren’t making the crucial fact-fiction distinction. Indeed, Dan Brown included this categorial foreword at the beginning of all editions of
The Da Vinci Code
: “FACT: The Priory of Sion—a European secret society founded in 1099—is a real organization. In 1975, Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale discovered its parchments known as the Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci.” Brown elaborated later in a television interview that while the murderous albino and the angry French police officer named Fache might have been made up, “all of the art, architecture, secret rituals, secret societies, all of that is historical fact.”

Meanwhile, Baigent and Leigh were adamant that there was also a historical basis to their work: in the publicity for their 1986 follow-up,
The Messianic Legacy
, they argued that “
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail—
the book in which the Priory of Sion was unveiled—rocked the very foundations of Christianity.” With pilgrimages being organized to the historical sites where this alternative history had supposedly been played out, and with Church employees being harassed by eager neo-heretics, it was perhaps little wonder that the popular triumph of
The Da Vinci Code
so irked the Catholic Church. But where had it all started?

Strangely, given the prominence in the court action of Baigent and Leigh, the story of
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
didn’t begin with them at all, but rather with their absent coauthor, Henry Lincoln. In his incarnation as popular historian, television presenter, and writer of serious books, Lincoln was the personification of a new breed of scholar unhampered by prejudices of the past. His goatee beard, longish hair, turtleneck sweaters, and mellifluous voice lent a plausible dignity to his inquiries and discoveries. When, as a teenager, I first saw him on the BBC
Chronicle
program in the early 1970s, I was both convinced and captivated by him. Here was the kind of hippie pedagogue I wanted to be taught by.

There were things, however, I didn’t know about him, though they weren’t hidden. His real name is Henry Soskin, and Soskin/Lincoln was not, in fact, in any proper sense, a historian, but an occasional actor and a successful scriptwriter for TV shows and science fiction programs such as the children’s series
Doctor Who
and the early medical soap opera
Emergency Ward 10
. In 1968, he appeared on the credits of the Boris Karloff movie
The Curse of the Crimson Altar
as cowriter. So Lincoln was, in his working life, a moderately successful storyteller.

And his greatest story began with words nearly as good as “Once upon a time . . .”: “In 1969, en route for a summer holiday in the Cévennes,” he writes in the preface to
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
, “I made the casual purchase of a paperback.”
⁴
This providential holiday reading,
The Accursed Treasure,
written in French by Gérard de Sède, was, according to Lincoln, a “lightweight, entertaining blend of historical fact, genuine mystery, and conjecture,” and told a tale of an obscure nineteenth-century country priest in the small Languedoc village of Rennes-le-Château who had found something extraordinary in his church, and who used his knowledge to amass vast wealth.

Most readers of
The Accursed Treasure
, English or French, would have enjoyed the story, lent the book to someone else, and then forgotten about it, but Lincoln was cut from a different cloth. The book contained, he noticed, a “curious and glaring omission”: although it depicted “cryptic documents” supposedly uncovered by the fortunate
curé
, it never actually bothered to decipher them. Yet, from the reproductions of two of these documents contained in the book, Lincoln himself was able to make a decryption. If he could manage that with a fairly cursory inspection, why hadn’t the author done the same? This incongruity nagged at Lincoln and from time to time motivated him to return to the documents. When he did so, they rendered up to him “tantalizing new glimpses of layers of meaning buried within the text.”