The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (18 page)

Only in Scotland and Portugal were the claims of the French king and the orders of the pope completely ignored. The Templars lucky enough to escape France and flee to such safe havens would survive. Scotland, at odds with England, was one of the safest refuges to the escaping Templars, and many fled there to the open arms of Robert the Bruce and the Sinclair family, which had been instrumental in organizing them centuries earlier.
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The pope would get his way in banning the Templars, but many survived and took much of their wealth underground. The properties of the Templars, their lands, and some of their monies were seized by Philip, and he decided, of course, that these confiscated lands all belonged to
him. Most of the Templar wealth, however, was not to be found. As agents of the French king searched the cities and the countryside for Templars and their wealth, the resistance grew more well organized. In the course of fighting a war, the Templars had built up a fleet so substantial that some ports banned it because the citizens were afraid it would rival the trading ability of their own fleets. The principal ports of La Rochelle and nearby Le Havre, which would later become significant in the Atlantic trade, were the last of France that many of the escaping knights saw.

When the agents of the French king reached the Templar precept in Paris, they expected to find massive hoards of gold, the backbone of the Templar bank. Instead they found very little. The Templars had been tipped off, and a wagon train laden with whatever had been stored in Paris was secreted and quickly made its way to La Rochelle. In the port city it was loaded on Templar ships and disappeared from the clutches of the greedy king and from history. Only legend tells us where the treasure fleet of the Parisian Knights Templar might have gone. These legends, in fact, do not agree with each other, variously saying that the treasure reached Mediterranean seaports, Portugal, Ireland, Scotland, and possibly even Scandinavia. All were possible. While the only Templars arrested in Scotland admitted they had escaped by sea, they refused to reveal any of the ports that had granted the Templars safe passage or landing. Nor does history record any such official guarantee of safe conduct granted by any nation.

The only ports where the Templar fleet and the escaping Templar knights might be considered welcome would be places that were hostile to the pope. Scotland at the time was reeling from the murder of John Red Comyn in the church of the Grey Friars, and Bruce and others had earned excommunication for the sacrilegious act. But the larger ports of Scotland, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and even Aberdeen were being watched by English spies. In fact, these ports were blockaded part of the time by the English king, who was trying to find and capture Robert the Bruce. In England the enemies of the Templars were disappointed as well. The treasury of the London temple simply disappeared. How much of this wealth made it safely to Scotland and the guardianship of the Sinclair
family is unknown, but part of it was used to buy weapons for Robert the Bruce.

Where could a fleet of treasure-laden ships and hundreds of knights seek safety? Very likely it was in the same places that Robert the Bruce was hiding. While legends of a king in hiding would equal those of Robin Hood in their re-creation, there were some very likely candidates for the sanctuary of Bruce. The most likely places were in Kintyre, a peninsula extending from Argyll, and some of the islands off the Scottish coast, including Jura and Islay. These were in the hands of the MacDonald clan, loyal to Bruce and openly hostile to invaders. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of
The Temple and the Lodge,
had searched the western Highlands looking for both the hiding place of the Bruce supporters and the Templars.
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One tale of “an island in a lake” brought them to Loch Awe and modern graves, but in nearby Kilmartin they found a concealed churchyard full of ancient stones decorated in Templar fashion.

Farther north, the Hebrides and the Orkney Islands would be even more suitable for hiding an entire fleet. Scapa Flow in the Orkneys was where the Germans scuttled a fleet of seventy of their own ships at the end of World War I, rather than surrender them to the British.
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In World War II, the British fleet itself hid there, six hundred years after the Templar fleet might have enjoyed the isolated harbors of these remote islands as a sanctuary. Across from Scapa Flow is a landmark called Saint John’s Head, where a distinctive rock structure rises 1,141 feet from the sea, one of the highest cliffs in the British Isles. Saint John, the beheaded prophet, featured very prominently in the Templar legends. The feast day of the holy prophet is their sacred date and remained sacred among the Freemasons and Masons that succeeded the Templars. Hundreds of years later, when English and Scottish lodges finally went public, their charter dates were set on Saint John’s feast day, June 24.

Because Saint John the Baptist played such an important role in Templar iconography, it is interesting to note that this predecessor of Jesus, the voice crying out in the desert, was beheaded for his religion. Templars were charged with worshiping an idol of a skull named Baphomet.
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Some historians have claimed that this is Muhammad, the
prophet of Islam. Others suggest that Baphomet might have been a corruption of
abufihamet,
Arabic for “Father of Wisdom,” or the person or deity represented on the Shroud of Turin.
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After the publication of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail,
Dr. Hugh Schonfield discovered a very complicated form of cryptography that he called the Atbash cipher.
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Using that method, he translated the word
Baphomet
into “Sophia.” This form of cryptography may indicate that the Nazarenes, the followers of the earthly Jesus, and the Templars were in touch with each other. The decapitated head came to play a role in Templar mythology.

We will later see that Jesus of Nazareth may actually be a misnomer for Jesus the Nazarene, the Nazarenes being a group connected with the Essenes who yearned for a more strict observance of their religion. John the Baptist may have actually become more revered than Jesus himself among the remnant members of this group. There are those who believe that because John was decapitated the Templars took to revering him even more highly than Jesus. The Feast of Saint John, June 24, is the most sacred day in the Templar year.

The Orkney Islands were not yet the property of the Sinclair clan in 1307. They belonged to the Norse chief Malise, whose daughter William Sinclair later married. The Norse had been raiding the islands around Scotland and Ireland well before they are known to have attacked the coast of Ireland in the eighth century. Norse raiders gave way to Norse settlers; one group of settlers was the Mores, a powerful Norse family that settled the isles and sent a branch to France in the tenth century. The French branch of the More clan became the St. Clairs and later the Scottish Sinclairs. At the time that the Templars were being hunted by church and state, Scotland’s first families were being hunted by the English. It was at this time that the clan of Sinclair chose to obtain the support of another of the sea kings, the Gunn clan.

The Clan Gunn and the Sinclairs

Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in 1136, is one of the first historians to have compiled a history of the British Isles. He names a certain King Gunhpar (latinized as Gunuasius) as the regent of Orcadum in his list
of six kings who fought alongside Arthur against the Saxons.
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Geoffrey latinized the name of his kings, as was the European practice of the time. “Gunuasius” might have become “Gunn” in such early times. Perhaps this Gunn was the ancestor of the knight Sir James Gunn. The realm of this ancient sea king would certainly include a navy adept at crossing the choppy North Atlantic seas that surround Scotland in an icy band.

In the study of names and heraldry, the prevalent belief is that all families descend from one famous ancestor. Robert Bain says members of the Gunn clan were all descended from Olave the Black. This Norse Olave would have sailed to the “Sutherlands” (southlands), in Norse terminology, after the fifth century. In
Clans and Tartans of Scotland,
Bain declares that it was a son of Olave, named Gunnar, who became the first of the Gunn clan.
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The name Gunnar derives from the word
gunn,
meaning “a long, strong reed.” A gunn, interestingly enough, was a “spear.”

A third historical text agrees with Geoffrey. In
Scottish Clans and Tartans,
Ian Grimble says the Gunn name was already ancient when the Norse arrived in the Orkneys.
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In fact, the name was Pictish. The Pict language still remains for the most part undecipherable and essentially lost to the world. The origin of the Picts is uncertain, and history does not even document them by that name until
A.D.
279, when Eumenius records them in the context of Caesar and Rome’s attempt to take Scotland. In
A.D.
305, a certain Constantius Chlorus campaigned against the “Caledonians and other Picts,” and the son of Constantius tried his hand against them in
A.D.
343.
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The blue-painted diminutive warriors chased the Roman legions away.

When the Romans were leaving Britain, the “Scotti,” actually an Irish people, were colonizing Scotland. Picts and Scots then coexisted with other tribes lost to history, including the Attacotti and Verturiones. While Rome regarded all the forces it encountered as primitive, in the same way as American settlers regarded the natives they warred against as primitive, this view discounts much. The Picts were renowned for their silverwork and adopted chariots after meeting Roman legions in battle. It was their ability to assimilate that deprives history of a correct understanding.
They were also capable sailors, skilled in the ability to build skin boats and travel great distances in them. It is very likely that the Picts and the Norse had contact with each other from very early times. Whether the Gunn clan was Pictish or Norse, they were a sea power to contend with in the north.

In a very well researched body of work on King Arthur and the personages of the Holy Grail romances, Norma Lorre Goodrich makes the case that Guinevere was a Pictish queen.
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At the time, the matriarchal Picts gave women the prerogative of picking and discarding a husband at will. Her lack of faithfulness to her husband was viewed in Grail literature as immoral, but Goodrich sees it simply as custom. Queens as well as kings of the Picts rode into battle. And kings as well as queens married to cement political alliances. A Queen Guinevere of Pictish Orkney allied with Arthur against the Britons would fit closely with a Pictish King Gunn, Geoffrey’s Gunuasias of Orcadum, in granting their ancestors, the Gunn clan, the title crowners of Caithness.

Centuries later, when the Norman Sinclairs made Scotland and the northern isles their property, the Norse chieftain Malise might have already been related to the clan Gunn. Through a Sinclair-Norse marriage, this alliance was further strengthened. When William Sinclair took over as earl of Caithness and added the Orkneys to the Sinclair domain, he did so only with the consent of the Pictish-Norse clans in the north. It was this powerful seagoing alliance that admitted the Templars to their realm.

The Templars and Scotland

The Templar fleet, under agreement with Sinclair, sailed directly from France to the Orkneys. The Orkney sea king alliance was hostile to the ever growing power of France and the papal authority that claimed more than its share of Europe’s wealth. Moreover, an independent Scotland was in need of an ally as badly as the Templars were in need of safe haven.

Shortly after Bruce had himself crowned as King Robert (weeks after the murder of John Red Comyn and six years before the victory at Bannockburn), the army of King Robert and Scotland suffered a serious loss to the English at the Battle of Methuen in June of 1306. Bruce was forced into hiding, which would last throughout the winter.
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A rival Balliol earl captured Robert the Bruce’s wife, fulfilling the prediction she had made upon seeing her husband crowned earlier that year: “It seems to me that we are but a summer king and queen, whom the children crown in their sport. The prediction would have worse consequences than she had imagined. Robert the Bruce’s daughter, Marjorie, was captured as was his brother Nigel, on the run with Robert—he was beheaded.
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When Robert came out of hiding, his string of personal disasters was still not over. Brothers Thomas and Alexander were also captured. The Bruce supporters were reduced to the status of a band of outlaws. With ragged clothes and shoes of rawhide, they would go hungry except when thievery or the kindness of strangers and friends provided. In 1307 it was simply the remnants of the Bruce clan and a few supporting clans that made up the entire nationalistic movement of Scotland.

The rest of the movement shared the disasters that Bruce suffered. The earl of Atholl was hanged for his support of Bruce. Simon Fraser, who had joined with Sir William Wallace in revolt against the king, was impaled on London Bridge. Bishop Wishart and Bishop Lamberton, who gave moral support for the cause, were put in chains. Isabel of Buchan and a sister of Robert the Bruce were exposed in lattice cages and hung out in the city of Berwick for everyone to ridicule.
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For the cause of an independent Scotland, this winter was comparable to the winter that George Washington and his ragtag band spent at Valley Forge. For Bruce, however, it was forces beyond his control that would save him.