The Atlantis Blueprint (32 page)

Bertrand became Pope Clement V in 1305, and the king immediately began to plan one of the most amazing coups in history. It was to arrest all the Templars
—
15,000 of them
—
and accuse them of heresy. It could be compared to a modern king plotting to arrest all the officers in the army, navy and air force.

Incredibly, it succeeded. Sealed orders went out about four weeks before the swoop, and the Templars were arrested on Friday 13 October 1307.
*

The Templars were accused of homosexuality, worshipping a demon called Baphomet and spitting on the cross. Under appalling tortures
—
such as being held over red hot braziers
—
many confessed, including the Grand Master Jacques de Molay himself. But at their sentencing on 18 March 1314, Molay withdrew his confession, declaring that it had been forced from him by torture. The king was so enraged at having his plans thwarted that he immediately ordered Molay and his friend Geoffrey de Charney, who also withdrew his confession, to be roasted alive over a slow fire.

This took place on the following day, on an island in the Seine called the Ile de Palais. It is said that Molay summoned the king and the Pope to meet him before the throne of God within a year. Whether this is true or not, he certainly called upon God to avenge his death. Within three months, both were dead
—
Philip gored by a boar during hunting, Clement of a fever.

The irony is that, in a sense, Philip had committed this act of savagery for nothing. He had been hoping to replenish his treasury
—
depleted by war
—
with the wealth of the Templars,

It is also known that on the day before the Templars were arrested, 12 October 1307, eighteen ships sailed out of La Rochelle, the Templars’ port. No one knows what became of them; they vanished from history. But at least one of these ships seems to have made its way to Scotland, where part of the wealth it carried went into the building of a remarkable chapel called Rosslyn, near Edinburgh. (It is also worth bearing in mind that Hugh de Payens was married to a Scotswoman called Catherine de St Clair, whose descendants later built Rosslyn.)

Whether or not the wealth of Bérenger Saunière was part of a Templar treasure will never be known for certain, although Henry Lincoln is fairly sure he knows. What is certain is that there were two major Templar strongholds close to Rennes-le-Château – Bezu and Blanchefort – and that Philip the Fair failed to seize the wealth of either of them.

Back in 1969, after Henry Lincoln discovered Gérard de Sède’s book on his holiday in the Cevennes, he returned to London and succeeded in interesting a friend at the BBC in the story. The two of them went to Rennes-le-Château, and even on that first visit it began to look as if they were being observed. For example, in the neighbouring village of Rennes-les-Bains Lincoln found a spring called the Lover’s Fountain; close by was a rock bearing a heart pierced by an arrow, and underneath it were the words E. Calvé, 1891. Emma Calvé was the beautiful soprano who allegedly counted Saunière among her many lovers, and 1891 was the year he is supposed to have discovered the parchments. Lincoln photographed the
inscription, but when he returned on the morrow, to photograph it by better light, the inscription had been hacked from the rock.

Gérard de Sède had agreed to act as a consultant on the programme, and was able to provide the key to decoding the second mystery parchment. It was an incredibly complex code, which involved a technique known to cipher experts as the Vigenère process. The alphabet is written twenty-six times, the first beginning with A, the second B, the third C, and so on. The key words MORT EPEE are placed over the parchment, and the letters are transformed using the Vigenère table.

The ‘noble Marie de Blanchefort’ text (which Saunière had tried to destroy) is then used as another key phrase, and finally the letters are placed on a chess board and a series of knight’s moves produces a message that may be translated: SHEPHERDESS WITHOUT TEMPTATION TO WHICH POUSSIN AND TENIERS HOLD THE KEY PEACE 681 WITH THE CROSS AND THIS HORSE OF GOD I REACH THIS DEMON GUARDIAN AT MIDDAY BLUE APPLES
.

This, presumably, is what led Saunière to the treasure, although it is hard to see how.

The Marie inscription ends with the letters PS. This, Lincoln learned from de Sède, stood for an organisation called the Priory of Sion. In the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Lincoln found that a number of pamphlets and documents had been deposited since 1956, many written under pseudonyms such as Anthony the Hermit’. One spoke about a secret order called the Priory of Sion, giving a list of its Grand Masters, which included the alchemist Nicolas Flamel (reputed to have made gold), Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Claude Debussy and, more recently, Jean Cocteau. Saunière, we recall, had met Debussy on the trip to Paris. And according to these documents – collectively known as the
Secret Dossier
– the Priory of Sion was the inner hierarchy of the Knights Templar. And, the
Secret Dossier
claimed, the

Priory continued to exist even after the Templars were destroyed.

This suggested a new possibility, noted by another investigator, Lionel Fanthorpe, as well as by Henry Lincoln: perhaps Saunière had not found a treasure, only a secret – a secret worth a great deal of money.

Many known facts support this conclusion. According to Henry Buthion, who owned the hotel that was once Saunière’s Villa Bethanie, Saunière was often short of cash, and failed to pay 5,000 francs that he owed the makers of some expensive furniture he had ordered. He certainly died penniless, but that may have been because he simply allowed large sums of money to be paid direct to his housekeeper, Marie Denardaud. Still, a man with a hidden treasure does not run short of cash, even if he banks it.

Eventually, Lincoln’s television programme was made and broadcast under the title
The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem
.
⁸
By then, so much material had come to light that it was clear that a second programme was going to be required.

Perhaps the most intriguing clue of all came soon after the programme was transmitted. A retired Church of England vicar wrote to tell Lincoln that the ‘treasure’ was not gold or jewels, but a document proving that Jesus was not crucified in
AD
33, but had still been alive in
AD
45.

Lincoln went to visit him. The clergyman obviously wished he had kept his mouth shut, but he finally admitted that his information had come from an Anglican scholar named Canon Alfred Lilley. And – Lincoln’s heart must have leaped as he heard this – Lilley had maintained close contact with scholars based at St Sulpice, and had known Emile Hoffet, who had introduced Saunière to Debussy. This obviously raised a fascinating possibility. If Debussy was, indeed, a Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, could he have shared the belief that Jesus did not die on the cross? And was
that
Saunière’s secret, which so shocked the priest who listened to his final confession?

It certainly began to look more and more as if this was the answer. We may recall that when Saunière left Paris, he purchased some copies of paintings from the Louvre, among them
Les Bergers d’Arcadie,
which shows three shepherds and a shepherdess standing by a tomb bearing the words ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’.

While they were filming the first programme, de Sède told Lincoln that the actual tomb used in the painting had been discovered at Arques, not far from Rennes-le-Château. In fact, the tomb, although it had no Latin inscription, was otherwise identical, even to the stone on which the shepherd is resting his foot in the painting.

Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) was one of the most distinguished painters of his time; although born in Normandy it was in Rome that he won fame and spent most of his life. For a short time he had served Louis XIII and Richelieu. Poussin’s
Les Bergers d’Arcadie
came into the possession of Louis XIV after his agents had been trying, with great tenacity, to lay their hands on it for some time, yet when the king finally obtained it, he kept it locked away in his private chambers; rumour has it that he was afraid that it might reveal some secret if it was displayed more publicly. The painting itself seems to offer no clues as to why the king wanted it so badly, or why he subsequently kept it from the eyes of the world.

What we do know, however, is that in 1656 the king’s finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet, sent his own younger brother Louis to Rome to see Poussin, and that Louis then wrote to Fouquet:

What can he have been talking about? ‘Nothing on earth could ever bring a greater fortune’ sounds like a treasure, except that he also says it could ‘even turn to profit’, which suggests that he means something else after all. What is certain is that the king, who was only five years old when he came to the throne, nursed an increasing dislike of his brilliant and ambitious finance minister. Fouquet became immensely wealthy and, according to his assistant Colbert, managed this by cooking the books every afternoon. In 1661, Louis had him arrested, and he was eventually imprisoned. (Some historians have suggested that he was the famous Man in the Iron Mask, but he died twenty-three years before the mysterious prisoner.)

Is it possible that when Fouquet sent his brother Louis to see Poussin it was with treasonous intent?

The Merovingian king Dagobert II, born in
AD
651, was kidnapped as a child and taken to Ireland, while a usurping major-domo took his place. He returned to France – in fact, to Rennes-le-Château – married to a Visigoth princess named Giselle, and reclaimed the throne, but was murdered in 679 as he lay asleep under a tree. The Church certainly played some part in the assassination, but his major-domo, Pepin the Fat, was also involved. Pepin was the grandfather of the famous warrior Charles Martel, who turned back the Moslem invasion of France at the Battle of Poitiers. Martel’s son, Pepin the Short, seized the throne and inaugurated the Carolingian dynasty, fathering its most famous member, the great Charlemagne.

The descendants of Dagobert were understandably resentful about being deprived of the throne, and there was always a movement in favour of their restoration, rather like that of the Jacobites in England. Similar to the Jacobites, they were a lost
cause, but one Merovingian descendant achieved a fame that rivalled that of Charles Martel or Charlemagne. He was Godfrey de Bouillon (1058–1100), Duke of Lorraine, the man who led the First Crusade and recaptured Jerusalem – the knight who became the first King of Jerusalem.

There can also be little doubt that he was the founder – or one of the founders – of another dynasty, the Priory of Sion, or, as it was first known, the ‘Order of Our Lady of Sion’. Sion is another name for Jerusalem, and soon after the capture of Jerusalem an Abbey of Sion was built on the Temple Mount and its occupants were known as the Order of Our Lady of Sion. According to the
Secret Dossier,
the Order was founded in 1090, nine years before the fall of Jerusalem. Five of the nine original Templars were members. It seems probable that the Templar order sprang out of the Order of Sion.

Lincoln cites evidence to show that the two orders soon grew apart. It seems that the fabulous power and wealth of the Templars made them headstrong, ‘like unruly children’. Matters came to a head in 1187, when a Templar named Gerard de Ridefort led the knights into a rash encounter with the Saracens and lost Jerusalem – this time forever. At this point, it seems, the Order of Sion lost patience with the Templars, and broke with them. The Order now changed its name to the Priory of Sion. One of the major aims of the Priory was the restoration of the Merovingians to the throne of France. When the Templars were destroyed in 1307, the Priory continued to exist, no doubt because it was such a well-kept secret.

This could well explain why Louis XIV was anxious to get rid of Fouquet and to acquire Poussin’s painting. If the ‘secret that kings could not draw from him’ was the secret of the Priory of Sion, Louis may well have been worried. His uncle, Gaston d’Orléans, had been married to the Duke of Lorraine’s sister, and there was an attempt to depose Gaston’s elder brother, Louis XIII, in favour of Gaston, which would have meant that Merovingian blood would once again have flowed in the veins of the kings of France.

The attempt failed. But since Louis XIII was childless, it looked very much as if Gaston would nevertheless inherit the throne. Then, to everyone’s amazement, Louis XIII produced a son – at least his wife, Anne of Austria, did. Many people believed that Cardinal Richelieu was the true father, or perhaps that he employed a ‘stud’, who some suggest was Richelieu’s captain of musketeers, François Dauger, thus frustrating the designs of the Merovingians and the Priory of Sion.

François Dauger had two sons, called Louis and Eustache, and many people commented on their resemblance to Louis XIV, which would be understandable if, in fact, they were his half-brothers. Eustache was a ne’er-do-well, always in trouble. Both Louis and Eustache were eventually arrested, Louis for an affair of the heart, Eustache for general hellraising, but Louis was released and continued to rise in the world. Eustache disappeared, and may well have been the Man in the Iron Mask. (It was actually a velvet mask, and if indeed Eustache was the mystery prisoner, he may have been forced to wear it because of his resemblance to the king.) His offence may have been an attempt to blackmail the king– ‘Release my brother or else…’ – or he may have got involved with the Priory of Sion and the Merovingians, who would have been delighted to learn that Louis XIV had no right to be on the throne.