CHAPTER 39
These are just some of the possible interpretations of the Grail legend, but, as we have seen, there is another. The idea of an important bloodline is not limited to whether or not Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had children. He himself was a member of his mother Mary’s family, which, of course, included her brother, Joseph of Arimathea and his family. Joseph’s children were cousins of Jesus and, therefore, from the same family tree. I was beginning to understand that this was probably what the inner mystery of the Rosy-cross was originally all about. The rambling rose of the ancient British Royal family had been grafted with the genetic stock of Mary’s family at the time Beli (Arviragus) married Anna (Genuissa). Jesus had been one bloom from the stock of Mary, but the hope was always that the ‘rose bush’ of Britain, ie the royal family tree, would bear further roses of this type. These would not be the red roses of the Rosa gallica that came from the grafting of the Norman lineage onto the ancient bloodstock of England nor, indeed, the white roses-of-the-field that were from the native briar stock of the old British. The rose of Mary, celebrated by the Rosicrucians, would be golden – the Rose of Sharon.
The hope was that blooms from this stock would manifest to produce saints and saintly kings. Such people would prove worthy to be custodians of the ‘Grail’, ie the Holy Ghost force that was originally manifested by Jesus and was later poured out on his apostles. However, it was also understood that only those people with the right blood – that is, descended from the family of the Virgin Mary – could safely handle such a force. In addition, they first had to prove their worthiness by undergoing trials and tribulations that would put off other men. If they passed these tests, then they were shown the Holy Grail itself: not a silver dish this time but rather a numinous vision of a cornucopia. This, at least, is how it appears in the medieval Grail legends.
It seemed to me now that this understanding of the Grail mystery and its connection with rose symbolism was the deepest secret preserved at Coity. The medieval Lords of this tiny Principality – the Turbevilles, Berkrolles and Gamages – knew that they were descended from Iestyn ap Gwrgan, the last King of Glamorgan; they were aware that through him they could trace their family tree back to Caractacus and the other pre-Roman kings of Britain. However, they also seem to have known that they carried the genes of Joseph of Arimathea, the Virgin Mary’s brother, who brought the Holy Grail to Coychurch, the real Glastonbury in the real Vale of Avallach.
Throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, the Welsh aristocracy worked hard at rebuilding the fortunes of their families. Prominent among these were the Herberts of Abergavenny and the Mathews of Llandaff, who also claimed descent from Iestyn. For these lords of the Welsh Renaissance, their moment came in 1485. In that year, history took one of its more unexpected detours and Henry VII, Welsh by birth but only part Welsh by ancestry, took the throne of England.
Henry VII opened the door to a new understanding between England and Wales that was to have profound consequences. However, his son, Henry VIII, took things much, much further. Aware of how the pre-Augustine Church in Britain had been independent of Rome, he had few qualms about defying the Pope and declaring himself Head of the Church of England. It is doubtful that he would have dared do this had he not believed that the ancient British Church, as founded by Joseph of Arimathea, had primacy.
During the reign of Elizabeth I, men of Welsh descent, such as Sir Henry Herbert and Dr John Dee, were able to formulate a new kind of philosophy that was both patriotic in an Arthurian way and progressive in that it favoured science, exploration and a more open-minded attitude towards religion. One strand of this philosophy was the idea of personal development through one’s own efforts rather than relying on the intervention of Jesus Christ as saviour. These ideas had their roots in Pelagianism. This was a ‘heresy’ that was formulated in the late 4th and early 5th centuries by a British monk called Pelagius. He taught that as there was no Original Sin as such, Christians did not need saving from it. In his opinion, sacraments administered by others were of little use, and Jesus Christ was to be viewed as a guide and example rather than a saviour. Salvation could not be attained by piggy-backing on his achievements: rather, it was the individual’s responsibility to carry his or her own cross and walk the path to calvary for him- or herself. Pelagianism was declared a heresy by the Council of Carthage of AD 418, but this carried little force in Britain, where teachers such as Pelagius derived their authority from their own achievements rather than their ranking in the Church hierarchy.
These ideas fitted well with the new Protestantism sweeping Europe in the 16th century, and they found their focus in the Rosicrucian pamphlets of the early 17th century. By now, James VI of Scotland had been crowned James I of England, heralding another major change. A descendant of Robert the Bruce, James was aware of an ancestry that claimed he was himself descended from Kings David and Solomon of ancient Israel. There is also good evidence to suggest that, like Elizabeth I, he believed that the British nations were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. He was also an initiated Freemason and believed that he ruled by Divine Right. As I have written about all of this extensively in my books Secrets of the Stone of Destiny and London: A New Jerusalem, I will not go further into these subjects here. However, this is the milieu that Sir Robert Sidney and his wife Lady Barbara found themselves immersed in, and it fitted well with ancient teachings about a Welsh King Arthur.
Although the marriage of Robert Sidney and Barbara Gamage took place in 1584, it was not until the accession of James in 1603 that he was raised to the peerage as Baron Sidney of Penshurst. James favoured the Sidneys in a way that Elizabeth never had, giving Robert his uncle’s extinct titles. Was this because, whereas Elizabeth was somewhat jealous of the Sidneys and resented their getting married without her permission, James recognized something else: Divine Right? (Figure 5)
Figure 6: Wounds panel from the Coity Chest.
This seems to me to be the hidden message of the Lady of Penshurst stone. The cross on it is similar in shape to the one with the pierced heart at its centre on the panel of the Coity Chest. This is exactly the same as the one on the Edward IV Roll mentioned earlier that is now kept in a library in Philadelphia. This cross is part of the attributed arms of King Arthur – a white floriated cross on a green background with a picture of the Virgin and child charged in the chief corner dexter. Seeing this gave me another idea: what if the Lady on the stone was also meant to represent the Virgin Mary?
Figure 7: Attributed arms of King Arthur (after Edward IV Roll).
In that case, maybe the design on the stone as a whole was a covert representation of the attributed arms of Arthur. That made sense; for the way the cross emanated from her heart could be a symbol for the emergence of the family of the Virgin. The stone could have been yet another secret symbol for the descent of the Coity Lords from both King Arthur and the blood of the Virgin’s family. This raised another question: why was the stone in Penshurst?
According to the booklet on sale in Penshurst church, the two memorial stones now hanging in the bell tower were found in 1854 buried under the north aisle. It has been suggested that they are somehow connected with the French Huguenots. On the other hand, because the stones are reckoned by some to be 13th century, a more recent theory is that they are connected to the Albigensian crusade, which took place in Southern France between 1209 and 1229. In fact, there is no evidence for either of these theories. It seems much more likely to me that the stones were brought to Penshurst from Coity, either by Lady Barbara herself or later on in the 17th century. As the Lady of Penshurst stone is only part of a coffin lid, we can infer that this was broken at a time when iconoclasm was widespread. In this context, it is significant that the parish guide to St Mary’s Church of Coity reveals that following the Reformation, a ‘commission’ of local nobles robbed Coity of many of its treasures. It lists Robert Gamage, Esq. among the Commissioners, so it seems likely that it was at this time that the Lady of Penshurst stone came into possession of the Gamage family, then Lords of Coity. As to its burial under the north aisle, we can assume this was done during the period of Puritan rule during the 1640s and 1650s that followed the Civil War between Crown and Parliament. At that time it was commonplace for Parliamentarian soldiers to smash images of the Virgin Mary and other saints in an orgy of iconoclasm that has left most older churches disfigured to this day. It seems likely that the stone was buried to preserve it, perhaps on the orders of Algernon Sidney, who was an officer in Cromwell’s New Model Army, and the younger son of the 2nd Earl of Leicester. Algernan was eventually executed in 1683, and it is possible that the secret of the stone’s hiding place went with him to the grave.
Returning to Penshurst Place, as I browsed the shelves of the gift shop, I came across something else that seemed important. It was a simple postcard printed from the portrait of a young woman. Her name was Dorothy and she was the eldest daughter of the 2nd Sidney Earl of Leicester, and therefore a granddaughter of the 1st Earl and his wife Lady Barbara Gamage. Dorothy was by all accounts a very attractive lady, so much so that the poet Edmund Waller wrote poems to her, addressing her as ‘sacharissa’ or ‘most sweet’. Enjoying the attention, she flirted for a while with his affections, but eventually she turned down his proposal of marriage as he was simply too poor and too lacking in social skills. When she eventually did marry in 1639, it was to a fellow aristocrat, Henry Spencer, 3rd Baron Spencer of Wormleighton. In the Civil War that followed shortly afterwards, he was an ardent royalist, distinguishing himself well in 1642 in the Battle of Edgehill. For his services to the Crown, he was rewarded with the title of Earl of Sunderland, making his wife, Dorothy, a Countess like her mother. This was about as good as it would get for Dorothy, for in the following year her young husband was killed in the First Battle of Newbury. He was only 23 years old, and his widow was not yet 26.
This might have been the end of the story had not their short marriage produced two children. Their son, the 2nd Earl of Sunderland, was very prominent in the Government of Charles II, although less so with his brother James II, whose Catholicism he disapproved of. He regained his position of influence at the court of William and Mary, reconciling them to Mary’s sister Anne. His son, the 3rd Earl of Sunderland, was another Robert Spencer. He made an advantageous marriage to Lady Ann Churchill, the younger daughter of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who famously led the army that defeated the forces of Louis XIV in 1704 at the battles of Blenheim. Their second son, Charles Spencer, eventually inherited both the Dukedom of Marlborough and the Earldom of Sunderland. From him are descended all the later Dukes of Marlborough and also Sir Winston Churchill, Britain’s most famous Prime Minister.
This was quite an eye-opener for me, for it meant that Sir Winston Churchill had been a man ‘of the blood’. Like King Arthur, who also rescued Britain at a most dangerous time, he was descended from Anna, the cousin of the Virgin Mary, who was most likely the daughter or granddaughter of Joseph of Arimathea. This was startling enough, but there was more to come. The third son of Sir Robert Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland, and Lady Ann Churchill was the Honourable John Spencer. He too had a son, another John Spencer, who was raised to the peerage in 1761 and, in 1765, was created 1st Earl Spencer. Descended from him are all the later Earls Spencer and, of course, Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, who was the daughter of the 8th Earl Spencer. This means that her sons, Prince William, Earl of Cambridge, and Prince Harry, are also descended from the Coity/Avallach lineage. Furthermore, as I write this, it has been announced that William’s wife, Catherine Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, is expecting a baby. This child, who should live well into the 22nd century, represents yet another rung in the Avallach-Coity descent.*
If you follow down all the generations descended from Beli and Anna, they must have millions of descendants, some aristocratic but many more who are commoners. Because of the major migrations from Britain that took place in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, many of these will be living in diverse places such as the USA, Canada and Australia. However, what is special about Prince William is that he is in the direct line of succession to the throne of Great Britain. When and if he is crowned, he will be the first known descendant of the Avallach Dynasty to rule over Britain since the death of King Cadwallader in AD 689. It is curious, therefore, that one of his names is Arthur, for if he chooses to use this, he will be the first king of this name to sit on the throne of Britain since the death of the famous King Arthur of legend. In a very real sense he will be the ‘Once and Future King’: probably a descendant of King Arthur son of Maurice and of Beli and Anna.
Thus it is that, through the hastily arranged marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, there was a fresh grafting of the Damascene rose onto the briar stock of the Royal family. That the marriage itself ended in disaster cannot take away the significance of this. With her genes, Lady Diana brought something of significance to the House of Winsor: a deeply emotional nature that expressed itself as extraordinary empathy for the world’s poor and dispossessed. These qualities seem to have passed on to the next generation, for Prince William, the Earl of Cambridge, and his wife have made clear their determination to carry on Diana’s charitable work. Because of this, it is just possible that she unwittingly saved the British monarchy through the power of love. Of course, we have yet to see if William will turn out to be a second Arthur. However, as his grandmother Queen Elizabeth II entered Westminster Abbey for his marriage, she could be forgiven a moment of self-congratulation. Diana, now the Lady of the Lake, might have gone to her island in Althorp Park, her coffin draped in the fateful arms of le Despencer, but the Blood of Avalon flows now in the next generation. In that fateful crash in the Paris tunnel, the rambling rose may have been pruned at an inopportune moment. However, it is resilient and ready to produce more blooms. Some are white, some red, but who knows, maybe soon there will be one of the kind we have all been waiting for: a golden Rose of Sharon.*
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* See Chart 16: The descent of Diana, Princess of Wales, from Barbara Gamage, page 240
* See Chart 17: The Coity ‘Rosicrucian’ lineage in brief, page 242