FIFTEEN
What became of the head-shrine of Queen Margaret?
At the height of the purge of the Knights Templar in France it emerged that it was a common practice among monks of the Order to worship a reliquary in the shape of a head. Known as ‘Baphomet’, the interior of this sacred shrine was said to contain head bones that, when invoked, induced fertility, a curious boast given that the Order was betrothed to celibacy. Variously described in the prosecution transcripts, this object was never found. However, Tim Wallace-Murphy in The Templar Legacy and the Masonic Inheritance Within Rosslyn Chapel links Baphomet with the severed head of John the Baptist. Hugh Schonfield in The Essene Odyssey infers that Baphomet was a woman symbolising wisdom. Laurence Gardner in The Magdalene Legacy goes so far as to suggest that the head was not that of a man at all, but of Mary Magdalene. Notwithstanding, one of the accusations levelled against the Knights Templar was that they were followers of the idolatry of the head.
Yet why such a fuss should have been made about this is baffling since throughout the Christian world head-shrine worship was commonplace. In June 1566, the skull of Queen Margaret, now St Margaret, enclosed in its own reliquary, was brought to Edinburgh Castle from the Lady Chapel in Dunfermline Abbey at the request of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was expecting her child, the future James VI. St Margaret’s head-shrine, she had been told, was also associated with fertility. Two years later, when Queen Mary fled to England, the head-shrine was returned to the monks of Dunfermline, who by then had taken up residence at Craigluscar, a house in Fife that was owned by the Durie family, long-term retainers of the abbey. However, as the Presbyterian faith was rapidly gaining momentum, it was thought unsafe for such a valuable Catholic reliquary to be retained in Scotland. In 1597, it was therefore entrusted to John Robie, a young apprentice on his way to study at the Scots College at Douai, north of Paris, where it was venerated over the following two centuries.
So what did it look like, this head-shrine of St Margaret? Father Hay, who writes that he saw it in 1696, possibly at Douai – although it is equally possible that by then it was back in Scotland – describes it as a bust of silver ‘whereupon there is a crown of Silver gilt, enriched with pearls and Precious Stones. In the Pedestal, which is of Ebony indented with silver, her hair is kept and exposed to the view of everyone through a Glass Crystal. The Bust is reputed the third Statue in Doway for its valour [value]. There are likewise several Stone, Red and Green on her Breast, Shoulders and elsewhere. I cannot tell if they be upright, their bigness makes me fancy that they may be counterfitted.’
In terms of destruction, the Reformation has a great deal to answer for: throughout the land, many priceless Church treasures were either destroyed, hidden from sight or sent abroad for safekeeping. For protection, the remainder of St Margaret’s relics in Scotland, together with those of her husband King Malcolm, were taken to Flanders and eventually found their way into the possession of Philip II of Spain, who placed them in the Royal Monastery of the Escorial in two caskets entitled ‘St Margaret, Queen and St Malcolm, King’. It was from this source that Bishop Gillis of the Eastern District of Scotland obtained, in 1863, the relic of St Margaret that is today a treasured possession of St Margaret’s Convent in Edinburgh.
St Margaret’s Convent is an Edwardian villa in close proximity to the original seminary, established in 1834 as the first post-Reformation religious retreat of its kind in Scotland. It was here that I was shown two reliquaries of St Margaret by the appropriately named Sister Margaret. The larger of the two, that acquired by Bishop Gillis from Spain, is housed in an ornate bronze and gold basilica designed by the Anglo-French architect Augustus Pugin at some stage before his death in 1852. At the centre, contained within a glass vial, is a piece of the saint’s shoulder blade. It is claimed that the second, much smaller, reliquary contains tiny bones belonging to St Andrew and St Margaret, and the small case attached to the back displays a lock of hair allegedly cut from the scalp of John the Baptist. Unbelievers might find all of this a trifle bizarre in our modern world, but the veneration of saintly body parts has always been an integral part of the Holy Roman faith, admittedly a facet of that religion upon which, during the Reformation, its detractors declared open season.
‘Its amazing what turns up,’ said Sister Margaret, a kindly lady who welcomed me without asking why I was so interested. ‘For years we made use of some silver plates in Communion. Then we discovered that they had originated from Holyrood Abbey in the reign of David I.’ These are now on display at the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. There is no record, alas, as to what became of St Margaret’s bejewelled head-shrine. It simply disappeared from Douai and the most common explanation is that it was probably stolen or dismantled in 1789, in the early days of the French Revolution.1
A twentieth-century copy, which features artificial stones, is currently on display in the refurbished Abbot House in Maygate, Dunfermline, open to visitors throughout the year, but the myths surrounding it are manifold. Since Father Richard Hay is the last person we know to have seen the original, both as a novice and later when Canon Regular at Sainte-Genevie`ve’s in Paris, there is an outside possibility that he might just possibly have brought it back to Scotland with him when he returned to Edinburgh in 1719. Hay was present when the Protestant mob attacked Rosslyn Chapel and Castle in 1688. In his account of this, he seems more preoccupied with the destruction of the library, than what took place in the chapel. He was certainly aware of the vaults, and as chaplain to his stepfather, would, although not himself a St Clair, have been privy to family secrets. Knowing that the vaults remained undefiled, he possibly considered it best not to draw attention to them, or anything which they might feasibly have contained.
By the early eighteenth century, after one hundred years, it might have been thought safe to return the head-shrine to Scotland, especially if it was in Father Hay’s keeping and he was taking it to Rosslyn Chapel. Remember that during the short period before James VII and II was exiled from the British throne in 1690 by his daughter Mary and son-in-law William of Orange, Roman Catholics in Britain enjoyed a brief respite from persecution. James’s second marriage to the Catholic Mary of Modena, and the birth of a son and heir in 1688, the future de jure King James VIII, caused widespread optimism among British Catholics, not least in Scotland. Since, at this stage, Rosslyn Chapel was a neglected ruin, where better to conceal something truly precious until it could be revealed in all its splendour? And especially if there were other artefacts already hidden there. As the family historian, Father Hay would have known exactly what was there and where it was stored, but he is unlikely to have put it in writing.
Wealthy mediaeval families such as the St Clairs, their roots deeply entrenched in the nation state which their ancestors created, saw themselves, not without justification, as hereditary guardians of the past. Such sentiments may have become dissipated with the religious and political upheavals of the second millennium, but what is a millennium but a blip in time? Everything, as has been proved again and again, is cyclical. The oracles of the past knew this better than anyone. In spiritual terms the past, the present, and the future are as one.
As late as 1995, Keith Laidler, author of The Head of God: The Lost Treasure of the Templars, had come to Scotland to search for the Stone of Destiny when he sidetracked to visit Rosslyn Chapel. Having already concluded that the Holy Grail was nothing less than the embalmed head of Jesus, it did not take him long to decide that this was undoubtedly a place where something precious was hidden and, stepping inside, his eyes were drawn to the carving of a crucifix which, instead of showing the full body of Christ, features only his head. He also asserts that the carving of the Master, high up on the ceiling, has been tampered with to remove its beard, and that it is yet another interpretation of ‘the head’. This, he wrote, was the proof he had been looking for and from then on became convinced that the skull of Jesus, in all probability the same ‘Baphomet’ that was venerated by the Knights Templar, lies immediately below the Apprentice or Prince’s Pillar. For a brief diversion it was also suggested that the skull was actually concealed within the column. However, subsequent tests proved the stone to be solid.
Such theories are obviously anathema to the Catholic Church posing, as they undoubtedly do, a direct attack upon its teachings on the Resurrection. To add insult to injury, around such profanity has emerged the invention of the Priory of Sion, or Prieuré de Notre Dame de Sion, which has to be one of the most successful surrealist hoaxes of the twentieth century. Church authorities must sometimes regret the passing of a time when such heresy and its exponents were rather more easily disposed off.