The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Sunday 19 December 2004

A Winter's Grail Tale

Christmas is nearly upon us again, and the various royals will shortly be retreating to the country for their holidays.  By all accounts the Queen prefers tromping the wintry fields in Norfolk to curling up by the fire with a book and a nice cuppa.  Nonetheless this is the time of year when many good tales are told anew.   Hence, my Yuletide offering….    

It’s just over a year since The Da Vinci Code (a really grand page turner) was all the rage.   Whatever else, it did open up some longstanding esoteric theorizing to a popular audience, and provoked a lot of interest.  Some years ago I got sucked into this area of speculation when I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.   At the time I was intrigued but unconvinced, and decided to do some of my own poking about.  Like any good eccentric scholar on a quest, I discovered some fascinating bits that I am always eager to share.            

There are, of course, several parts to the Grail tradition, and much accompanying speculation.  The question of what the Grail object was, and whether it ever existed, is one aspect.  The connection to a variety of esoteric spiritual traditions of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim origin is another.  A third aspect is the question of the Grail family.            

After several years of occasionally manic research, I now believe that the dynastic secret of the Holy Grail legend stems from an interpretation of biblical prophecy offered by Adso, a monk at Montier-En-Der in France in the late 10^th century.  This Adso wrote a letter to Gerberga, the wife of Louis IV the King of the Franks, applying an old legend of an expected “last world emperor” to the lineage of Charlemagne represented by her husband.  The prophecy was that at the end of time a Christian king would arise who would conquer the Moslems in the Holy Land, and reign in Jerusalem.  Adso writes: 

… As long as the Kings of the Franks who now posses the [Holy] Roman Empire by right  shall last, the dignity of the Roman Empire will not completely perish because it will  endure in its kings.   Some of our learned men say that one of the Kings of the Franks will possess anew the Roman Empire.  He will be in the last time and will be the greatest and last of all kings.  After he has successfully governed his empire, he will finally come to Jerusalem and will lay aside his scepter and crown on the Mount of Olives….  (translation by Bernard McGinn in Apocalyptic Spirituality published by Paulist Press, 1979, p. 93.) 

Soon after Louis IV’s death in 954, the descendants of Charlemagne lost their hold on the French throne, being displaced by Hugh Capet.  So, the prophetic interpretation of Adso failed… or did it?  Adso’s theory quickly became the Left Behind series of its day, with popular plays spreading the interpretation across Europe, and eventually as far as Africa, where it was quoted in a letter from the Queen of Ethiopia to the King of Portugal written in the early 16^th century.             

Just over a century after Adso a descendant of Charlemagne named Godfrey de Boullion emerged ahead of more prominent figures to become the commander of the armies of the First Crusade.  The culmination of that crusade was the capture of Jerusalem by Godfrey’s forces in 1099.  At the time Godfrey refused the crown that was offered him, preferring to be simply the “Advocatus” of the Holy Sepulchre.  But after his death, Godfrey’s relatives had fewer hang-ups concerning regal titles and quickly agreed to become the Kings of Jerusalem.            

Fast forward again… late in the twelfth century stories of the Holy Grail began to be written in France.  The first was the tale written by Chretien de Troyes in the 1180s.  Other versions followed, especially the grand Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach which was completed early in the 13^th century.  One of the stranger facts concerning the emergence of these tales is that they are all closely tied to the family of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.   Chretien de Troyes wrote at the court of Eleanor’s daughter Marie, a child of her first marriage to the King of France.  Chretien actually wrote the first Grail story specifically for Philip d’Alsace, who was Henry’s cousin and also the husband of Eleanor’s niece.  Later versions of the Grail legend, especially those tied to Glastonbury Abbey in England, have similar connections.  Some in this stream may have had a political connection to Henry and Eleanor’s grandson, Arthur of Brittany.  Even Wolfram’s Parzival was written -- I now firmly believe -- with an eye to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV, who just happened to be Henry and Eleanor’s favorite grandson.  (There’s not room to present the full case here, but one telling indicator is that Wolfram tacked on the Lohengrin legend at the end of Parzival.  It concerns the marriage of Parzival’s son, the Swan Knight, to a princess of Brabant.  And, coincidentally, it was written just about the time Otto IV married a princess from Brabant.)  So, all the major streams of the Grail tradition seem to flow from Angevin sources closely connected to Henry and Eleanor.  Curious!            

The intended connection may lie with Henry’s grandfather, Fulk of Anjou, who years before Henry’s time had left Europe and his family to go on crusade, and ended up married to the daughter of Baldwin II, the King of Jerusalem.  Baldwin had no son, and so his daughter’s husband became the King of Jerusalem after him, and their descendants – Fulk’s second family – have either sat on or claimed the throne of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem ever since.  Hence the Kings of Jerusalem were close cousins to the Angevins in Europe.  And their other close European relatives, descending from the family of Godfrey de Boullion, were found in the Duchy of Brabant.            

I firmly believe that the legend of the sacred line of Grail Kings and their lineage is most probably about the Kings of Jerusalem and their European relations.  One early version of the Lohengrin legend actually makes Godfrey himself a descendant of the famous Swan Knight, and that legend also contains a significant play on words.  The Swan is a “cygne”, but is actually a “signe”, i.e. “a sign”.  The “Swan” Knight is thus probably to be understood as the Knight of “the Sign”.  It’s a pun.  And I think the sign that is meant is Adso’s long anticipated descendant of Charlemagne.   Godfrey and his relatives were very proud of their close descent from the last male heir of the old Carolingian dynasty.  And at the same time they, the Kings of Jerusalem and the authors of the Grail literature, were all very insistent that their sacred royal line could pass via female descent, contrary to the “men only” Salic law imposed by the Capetian dynasty in France.  Thus the Grail legend is very much about the Sang Real, the Blood Royal.  But it is not about the same blood royal that most of the recent speculation has focused upon.  There’s not a Merovingian, or a Magdalene, in sight.

The Blood Royal of this actual Grail lineage persists, via the female line, in the royal houses of Europe to this day.  Most prominently it persists in the House of Savoy (Italy), the House of Hapsburg (Austria), and in the Mountbatten-Windsor dynasty.            

The Italian royals, so stunningly represented in the younger generation by Prince Emanuele Filiberto, descend directly from the marriage of Anne de Lusignan of Cyprus, heiress to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, to Louis I of Savoy in the mid-15^th century.  Another main branch of this lineage in a line that allows for female succession is represented by the royal house of Bavaria, which also happens to claim to the British throne via the Stuart / Jacobite succession.  The heiress presumptive of the Bavarian line is Princess Sophie, the wife of Prince Alois of Liechtenstein.            

The Hapsburgs of Austria, currently headed up by the distinguished Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, are the principal descendants of the House of Brabant.  This comes via heiress marriages in Flanders and Burgundy that finally ended up with the marriage of Mary of Burgundy to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian I in 1477.  It is also notable that a junior branch of the House of Brabant in the male line became the House of Hesse, from which in turn springs the Battenburgs, and thereby the Mountbattens.            

And so, to Britain.  One of the few major errors that I would know to attribute to the late “character” and genealogical expert, Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, is a claim he once made that the British royals were not members of the Swan lineage.  While not directly descended in any male line, there are in fact numerous lines of female descent linking the royal houses of England and Scotland back to the family of Godfrey de Boullion.  Right off the bat, the English King Stephen’s wife was Godfrey’s niece and the heiress of Boulogne.  (A fact which may have helped motivate the rival Angevin’s propaganda via the Grail literature!)  In the same era the wife of David I, King of Scots, was a daughter of Judith of Boulogne, Godfrey’s cousin.  Direct links to the Plantagenets came via the “She-Wolf of France” who married poor Edward II, and again in Edward III’s beloved Queen Philippa, and so on.  Another direct link came via the marriage of Edmund Crouchback, the brother of Edward I, whose descendants intermarried with a variety of royal cousins and English nobles.  In fact, there is an absolute tangle of “Swan” ancestries among the wives of the Plantagenet and Stewart kings right down to the mother of Mary Queen of Scots, who first introduced the Savoyard lineage into the British mix.            

Without a doubt, today’s British royals are members of the real Grail family envisioned by the authors of the 12^th and 13^th centuries.  The Queen and her family are the descendants of the descendants of Charlemagne via Boulogne, Brabant, and Jerusalem.  Though the Apocalyptic anticipations of the monk Adso have long since faded from our cultural consciousness, they played their part by creating an important part of the setting for the emergence of the Grail legend, and that legend in turn played its part in the later emergence of things like the Order of the Garter, and the tradition of the Glastonbury Thorn that still blossoms at Christmas.  But perhaps the most delightful bit is that thanks to the diffusion of bloodlines over time there are literally millions of us scattered worldwide who share this ancestry with the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and Prince William.   Whether we know it or not, many of us are children of the Swan Knight, and heirs of the Fisher Kings of the Grail Castle.   Now there’s a tale. 

A Merry Christmas, and “a Guid New Year to ane and a’!”

- Ken Cuthbertson