Paul Doherty: The Grail Murders

Oh, we did, to the most joyous Yuletide ever, leaving behind The Great Killer to sup wine from what he thought was the Grail. The Lord Cardinal sent us letters of the most fulsome praise and heavy purses of gold, but Henry never forgot and neither did the Templars. Sir Edmund Mandeville mysteriously died the following spring after attending a banquet at Sheen. I believe Agrippa was in attendance at the time. Southgate never recovered from his wounds and, although moved to the care of the nuns at Syon, died shortly afterwards. I am not too sure about the details but, the previous afternoon, Doctor Agrippa had come to enquire about his health. The Santerres waited a year and applied for a pardon, offering gold by the cupful, but strangely enough Henry refused to be bribed and I believe they died mysteriously in foreign parts.

Templecombe was seized and stripped of all its possessions, turned into a veritable ruin, but the King found nothing there. Years later, when he launched his great attack on the abbeys and monasteries, Glastonbury was singled out for special attention. Abbot Bere died in 1524 and was succeeded by Richard Whitting. Fat Henry sent special agents to seize Glastonbury's most precious treasures but Whitting was cunning and spirited these away and, for that, paid the supreme penalty. He was brought to London and tortured but would say nothing. Accordingly, he was taken back to Somerset and, after a mock trial, he and two of his monks, one of them being the scholarly Eadred, were dragged through Glastonbury on hurdles and then hanged on the summit of the Tor in November 1539. The secrets of Glastonbury died with them and only the good Lord knows the whereabouts of the Grail.

So this bloody tale is done. I stare through the window and watch the moon's silver light bathing the hard-packed snow in a shimmering light. All have gone. Sometimes I dream of Rachel, cool and serene in her cellar prison; Mandeville and Southgate, arrogant in their power, and those two sombre mutes, Cosmas and Damien, who served them so well and suffered so barbarously. The circle is complete. Mathilda's son has come back to return the ring I gave his mother an eternity ago in the dark shadows round Templecombe. Oh, for a cup of claret to warm the heart and hold back the tears about the past! Even my little clerk is sniffing. I know he wants to stay, to lust after Phoebe's generous tits. He shakes his head, stands by the window and looks out at the winter sky.

'Do you think, sir,' he whines, 'that there really is a supreme intelligence above us? A wisdom guiding our affairs?'

'I sincerely hope so, because there's bugger all down here!'

I have just finished studying Sir Roger Shallot's next memoirs about his turbulent visit to Florence in sixteenth-century Italy. It's difficult to accept his almost incredible story but the same was true when I first edited his memoirs about the Grail Murders.

Sir Roger can be economical with the facts but there is a great deal of truth in these memoirs. Buckingham was executed for the reasons and in the manner described in this book, whilst the survival of the secret order of the Templars is a well-documented fact, referred to in Graham Hancock's recent book The Sign and the Seal.

The remnants of both Templecombe and Glastonbury can be visited today. At Templecombe in the 1960s a secret painting of Christ was discovered, copied perhaps from the shroud which the Templars once owned. This, in turn, gave rise to the spurious legends that the Templars adored a decapitated head, the source of great power.

Glastonbury did hold the remains of Arthur, and the site of his tomb at Glastonbury can still be visited. The origins and mysteries of that abbey, as described by Shallot, are well documented in various books. Excalibur has lain hidden for ever but the Grail was probably secretly guarded by the monks at Glastonbury which accounts for Henry VIII's vicious persecution of the abbot and his community when that abbey was dissolved in the 1530s. The abbot and certain of his companions were barbarously executed on the summit of the Tor as Shallot describes. The Grail itself was probably spirited away to the abbey of Strata Florida in Wales. According to one source, it was last seen in the 1920s in a bank vault at Nanteos, three miles from Aberystwyth. Consequently, Sir Roger Shallot may not be the great liar we sometimes suspect him to be!