The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (19 page)

In France in the same year, the Templars knew their relationship with the French king was deteriorating. The writing was on the wall, but only the resistance of the pope to Philip’s orders delayed the arrests. Finally, when the secret orders were issued, many Templars were already prepared. Negotiations between the Sinclairs, who had already been allied in spirit with their St. Clair relatives and who had had an instrumental role in founding the Templars, paved the way. The Templar fleet sailed
to the isles surrounding Scotland. Just as fortuitous as the arrest of the Templars was the death of the English King Edward on his way to Scotland. The king’s death provided temporary relief for Bruce; the money and arms that the Templars brought to Scotland would save the day.

Templar legend says that the fleet sailed to the support of Scotland, but some historians have their doubts.
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The most compelling evidence outside Templar legend is the fact that the English king complained that the Templars were at least funding weapons purchases for Scotland through a neutral Ireland. In any case, Bruce was again commander of his country’s army and no longer an outlaw. After losing family members, friends, most of his wealth, and many of the fighting men that supported him, the leader of the Scottish independence movement made an amazing comeback. Suddenly Bruce could march through Scotland, consolidating his support and punishing his enemies. He seized their lands and captured their forts, executing his worst enemies. Halfhearted English incursions under the new king were either avoided or defeated. By 1313 Bruce was raiding England and had captured the Isle of Man as the result of a seaborne attack. It had been a remarkable five years.

The next year Bannockburn decided the issue of Scottish independence as well as the issue of the Knights Templar, who fought for the cause of Scotland and its leading families, Bruce and Sinclair. Outside Scotland the persecution of the Templars proceeded under the direction of Philip and the pope. It climaxed with the burning to death of the grand master Jacques Molay, which followed the mass executions of individual Templars. When the grand master finally reached the stake, he brought a curse to the pope and the king of France, saying that neither would survive for one year after his death. Neither did.

The order did not die with Molay. In Spain the orders of Calatrava and Montesa allowed the Templars to continue their work as a force for their country and religion. In Portugal, Templars were admitted to the newly formed Knights of Christ, from whose ranks came the intrepid Prince Henry the Navigator. Vasco da Gama was also a member of the same order. England alone came to the aid of the persecution because King Edward understood that the Templars were supporting the Scots against him. He ordered that Scotland arrest all the Templars within her
realm; this decree would have been received as a joke, of course, as the Templars were the saving force behind Scottish independence.

Scotland lived in relative peace after the decisive battle of Bannockburn. The Templars were given homes, lands, and a “cover” as mason guilds. After all, they had been essential in constructing forts from Europe to Jerusalem. Younger Templars had an occupation, and older Templars were allowed to retire and derive income from modest grants. There were two succeeding orders that the Templars could join. One was the hidden Royal Order of Scotland, of which the king was grand master. The second order, according to Andrew Sinclair, was the Order of Heredom, meaning “sanctuary.” The Sinclair family presided as protectors over this second order.

War against the Islamic Moors in the west and the Saracens in the east diverted Europe’s attention from making war on itself. In 1329 Bruce died. His last request was that his heart be buried in Jerusalem. On crusade against the Moors, Sir William Sinclair, Sir James Douglas of the Black Douglas clan, and Sir William Keith rode together into battle. Sir James, believing all was lost, threw Bruce’s heart into the fray, asking the heart to lead them, as always. The Moors beat the Scottish Christian contingent badly. Keith, who was the only knight of the three to survive, recovered the heart and brought it back home to Scotland, where it was buried at Melrose Abbey. It might have been chivalry’s greatest moment.

Descendants of these knights continued to lead the fight to preserve Scotland’s independence in a war that never ended. They also continued to fortify their own power and wealth, by conquest or alliance. The Douglas clan amassed great tracts of land for themselves in the course of these constant wars. Walter, high steward of Scotland, married Marjorie, Bruce’s daughter, to continue the new royal line. Marjorie, who’d been first imprisoned in the tower and later pardoned to a nunnery, remanied a captive for eight years before she returned home at the age of twenty. Bruce’s brother Edward survived and later became king of Ireland. Nigel, Alexander, and Thomas were all beheaded. Four years after the marriage of Walter and Marjorie the Scots were badly defeated at Halidon Hill, but the Douglas clan never ended its war against its neighbors, nor did clan cease fighting against clan.

After the death of King Philip, France entered into alliance with Scotland, which came to hurt Scotland’s ability to preserve her independence. The alliance meant that France’s continuing wars with England forced Scotland to be at war. The barons that ruled Scotland fought with each other over property and over their need to support or ignore France. James I of Scotland was a Stewart (actually a Douglas who took on the new family name as a result of his family’s “stewardship” of Scotland). He started a new dynasty of kings that temporarily persuaded the clans to settle their differences. His methods, however, made enemies. Sir Robert Graham and eight men killed their king the Scottish way, with daggers. James’s child, James II, inherited the throne. The child, of course, ruled in name only. It was the Celtic Douglas clans, at that point divided into “Red” and “Black” factions, that were the most powerful lords outside the Sinclairs, who traditionally chose not to take a visible leadership role.

The curse of Scotland was that the hard-earned decisive victories on the battlefield were always quickly lost by betrayal, infighting, and assassination. MacDonalds and MacLeans of the north fought on the side of Bruce, but once war was over they turned against their own king, a member of the divided Douglas clan. Douglas power was finally broken when William Crichton, the leader of one faction, killed the young Douglas children, stabbing the fourteen-year-old earl and his younger brother. In 1449 James II pretended that he wanted to reconcile with his former Douglas clan. He invited the head of the clan to Stirling castle, where he killed him. James himself became a victim of treachery. After being thrown from his horse in a battle of the Wars of the Roses, he called for a priest. The hooded figure arrived to give him the last rites, with a dagger.

While newly independent Scotland was seemingly self-destructing under the selfish agenda of rival Douglas clans, Sinclair and the Templars consolidated their power in the north. Orders such as the Templars were spurred on by the romantic notion of chivalry that captivated Europe. Romantic texts of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table had been written and rewritten during the time of the Crusades, and the military religious orders needed to live up to the heroic visions of their orders.

Officially, the holdings of the Templars were acquired in 1312 by their rival order, the Knights Hospitalers. Unofficially, the holdings were kept separate. Thirty years after the decree that the Templars be disbanded, the rival order did not possess the property of the Templars. When they finally took possession, they were still kept separate. The order would find itself at odds with local lords. In 1324 and 1334 they were forced to appeal to parliament to obtain title. In Scotland it was even more of a mess. By 1338 the knights of Saint John had not received title to even a single property. Over five hundred properties were listed in Scottish records as “terrae Templariae” and administered by local lords. In different form, the remnants of the Templar organization held together under the few knights who led in the Scottish war for independence. A handful of families inherited the mantle of leading and preserving the Templars.

One family was the Setons. It was a Seton who held the title of master of the Hospitalers in 1346. Another had married Robert the Bruce’s sister after his role in the murder of John Red Comyn in the church of the Grey Friars. In the sixteenth century, when the Masonic order that had inherited the Templar order was again threatened by treachery, it was a Seton who led the action to preserve them.
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The treachery that came to threaten the surviving Masons was the result of religious warfare burning through Europe in the wake of the Reformation. France was trying to remain Catholic as England had gone Protestant. Scotland again became the battlefield. The Setons tried to keep the French and Scottish unity intact, their country Catholic, and the Masonic-Templar organization in the background. It was a big job.

Mary, Queen of Scots, was the daughter of Mary of Guise of France and James V of Scotland. Their marriage had been supported by those who wanted to preserve Scotland from falling back into the clutches of the English. The other two children of James V were poisoned to eliminate their ascension to the throne. The new queen of Scotland (she became queen six days after she was born, in 1542, on the death of her father) was moved to France for safekeeping in 1548 because of the wars being fought. Protestant British excursions were met and resisted
by forces that included German and Italian mercenaries who fought alongside Catholic France.

The Seton role was to protect Mary, while she was in France, against the treachery of her enemies which often included her own family. When Mary married Francis II in 1558, a daughter of George Seton and his French wife would serve as maid of honor. Two months after the wedding the king, Henri II, died as the result of a joust and Francis II became king. Remarkably, Nostradamus had predicted the death of the king, describing his wounds exactly. Francis II died the next year.

The mother of Francis was Catherine de Medici, who did not favor Mary as the queen of France. Instead, she ordered that Mary return the family jewels and go home to her estate in Scotland. England did not look kindly on Mary either. She was a foreigner and, even worse, a Guise. The Guise family was very Catholic and infamous in their defense against Protestants. Later, in 1562, the duke of Guise fired upon a Protestant prayer meeting, igniting open warfare between the two Christian religions. While the royal family and the leading houses of Guise and Lorraine wished for France to remain Catholic, Protestant ministers stirred the populace away from the Church.

The connecting thread between the prominent families of Scotland was what later came to be called the Scots Guard, an openly military establishment, no doubt united through Masonry as well as country, that included Setons, Sinclairs, Stewarts, Lindsays, Hamiltons, Douglases, and Montgomerys. This force had been fighting together since Bannockburn, both for Scotland and France but possibly more for itself. It was a Montgomery whose lance had pierced the eye of young Francis as Nostradamus had predicted and caused, in turn, the Guise-Lorraine alliance to be at odds with the Valois dynasty for the French throne. France was still not ruled by an all-powerful monarchy. The king was forced to rely on the cooperation of leading families who were more than minor powers. The struggle between the Guise and Valois families to control France weakened both and brought the Bourbon dynasty to the throne.

The Sinclairs had always had a strong connection to the Guise family through their own French relations, the St. Clairs. But the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, was determined by her enemies and not by her
family. The Sinclairs had fought for the kings of Scotland, but it was a descendant of the first kings who abandoned both Scotland and his own mother. Upon learning of the Sinclair plot to enlist France in the cause of Mary, the forces that be ordered her execution. Neither the queen of England, Elizabeth I, nor Mary’s son, James, claimed to be aware of the execution, but it would not have taken place without their consent. Elizabeth had signed Mary’s death warrant, and at first held off from ordering her execution. It was claimed that her jailors at Fotheringhay Castle proceeded with the execution on their own.

The Sinclairs and the Templar Treasure

Despite the constant warring and struggle, and possibly because of it, the Sinclairs in Scotland grew, prospered, and undertook remarkable actions to preserve the Templars and the guardianship of the organization. The wealth of the Templars had not been depleted by the war against England, and the guardianship of Templar relics was the responsibility of the Sinclairs.

The castle and chapel complex at Roslin is one of the wonders of the medieval world, built by Sir William Sinclair in the mid–fifteenth century. Besides being the world’s high temple of Masonry, it served as a hiding place for the treasures of the Templars brought from their London and Paris temples.
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In modern times secret vaults have been found, as have stairways that lead to nowhere and even cave entrances behind waterfalls—but no treasure.

It is said that when Sir William Sinclair decided to build the chapel, he imported stonemasons for the work. More likely, these “masons” were Templars already under his protection. The very unusual building was much more than a temple, and it was much later that anyone became aware of just how complicated the construction was. It could hide a treasure and an army, and probably did. Sinclair designed and planned the work himself, unusual in light of his rank and obligations.

The connection between Templars who built forts around the world and Freemasons whose guilds were first formed near Edinburgh in 1475 is obvious. This “trade” organization’s members included those
knights who fought in the Crusades and the knights who fought for Bruce: Sinclairs, Setons, Stewarts, Hamiltons, and Montgomerys, not an ordinary “stonemason” among them. Under the guise of a trade guild the Templars survived intact, and the Sinclairs, once among the founders of the Templars, became the hereditary protectors of that guild. With the enterprise of both were secrets that had been kept for a thousand years and an immense treasure protected from the greedy hands of the enemy.