dragged Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, from the Tower of London and killed him.
Bloomsbury
JAMES PIERREPONT GREAVESS ADDRESS, 49 Burton Street
Greaves was an early nineteenth-century educationalist and theologian who promoted piety among his followers while urging them to embrace the latest fashionable dietary and sexual fads such as vegetarianism, water-drinking and celibacy. Greaves was later described by G. J. Holyoake, pioneer of the co-operative movement, as ‘the most accomplished, pleasant and inscrutable mystic this country has produced’. In the 1830s he opened a school on Ham Common near Richmond, Surrey, based on the healthy notion that ‘Pure air, simple food, exercise and cold water are more beneficial to man than any churches, chapels, or cathedrals.’ Thomas Carlyle, the great essayist and historian, was not convinced and denounced Greaves as a ‘humbug . . . few greater blockheads broke the world’s breads in my day’.
TEMPLE OF THE OCCULT, 99 Gower Street
Frank Dutton Jackson, a fake cleric, and his wife, Editha, set up a Temple of the Occult in the heart of Georgian Bloomsbury in the early years of the twentieth century. Here Jackson, describing himself as Theo Horos, debauched hundreds of young girls in mock religious ceremonies conducted under low lights in a haze of incense smoke. He told one girl, Daisy Adams, he was Jesus Christ and that she would give birth to a divine child. He and Editha, who claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Ludwig I of Bavaria, were eventually prosecuted. They were tried at the Old Bailey where Jackson pleaded: ‘Did Solomon not have 300 legal wives and 600 others?’ He was nevertheless convicted of raping and procuring girls for immoral purposes.
The Spectator magazine occupied the building from the 1920s to 1975, and it now belongs to the Catholic chaplaincy.
→ The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, p. 71
UNIVERSITY CHURCH OF CHRIST THE KING, Byng Place
This superb Gothic revival church was built in 1851–4 in the medieval Early English architectural style for the Catholic Apostolic sect. Its first preacher, Edward Irving, was expelled from a nearby Presbyterian church for encouraging the congregation to ‘speak in tongues’ – talk spontaneously in ancient biblical languages. In the church basement is a room filled with ceremonial cloaks, including one reserved for the return of Jesus Christ.
Canonbury
CANONBURY TOWER, Canonbury Place
This ancient and unusual-looking brick tower, north London’s oldest building, was where Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister and vicar-general, organised the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.
In April 1535 the authorities ordered ‘all supporters of the Pope’s jurisdiction’ were to be arrested. On 20 April they arrested the priors of Charterhouse, Beauvale and Axholme, and Dr Richard Reynolds of the Bridgettine monastery of Syon near Brentford. One of Cromwell’s agents discovered that the abbot there had persuaded a nun, to whom he was confessor, to submit her body to his pleasure ‘and thus persuaded her in confession, making her believe that whensoever and as oft as they should meddle together, if she were immediately after confessed by him, and took of him absolution, she should be clear forgiven of God’.
Those arrested were charged with denying that the king was the supreme head of the English Church and were sentenced to death. A month later they were hanged at Tyburn. Later that year came the more infamous executions of Bishop Fisher and Thomas More (→ p. 52) for refusing to accept the Oath of Supremacy. At the end of the decade, with the dissolution of the religious houses practically complete, the king handed the Canonbury Manor to Cromwell. Unfortunately, the vicar-general had only a year to live: he was executed on trumped-up charges of treason in 1540.
In the eighteenth century Canonbury Tower and the surrounding estate were rebuilt in a restrained but elegant Palladian style to the exact dimensions of Solomon’s Temple, for reasons unknown but possibly connected with the earlier sojourn of polymath Francis Bacon – philosopher, science pioneer, Lord Chancellor and Rosicrucian – who worked there at the end of the sixteenth century.
In 1795 Richard Brothers, the false messiah who prophesied that he would lead the Israelites back to Palestine from across the world, was imprisoned in the tower for eleven years for sedition.
Canonbury Tower is now a Masonic research centre.
→ Richard Brothers, Prince of the Hebrews, p. 75.
The Rosicrucians
An ultra-secret, international, quasi-religious body, the Rosicrucians claim to possess mystical wisdom handed down through the generations. They have strong connections with Canonbury Tower, which some believe to be the location of their secret international headquarters. The group may have been founded by Christian Rosenkreutz, a fifteenth-century mystic who supposedly travelled extensively in the East before returning to Europe armed with the entire body of knowledge that would be useful to the world, the knowledge handed by God to Noah before the Flood and then to Moses on Mount Sinai – ‘the knowledge that was, the knowledge that is, the knowledge that will be’.
Rosenkreutz then handed this information to German alchemists based in Kassel, choosing that city as it was the most scientifically advanced in the world at that time, and they in turn cryptically outlined their findings in a series of pamphlets published early in the seventeenth century which spoke of a secret brotherhood working for the good of mankind.
In 1622 the Rosicrucians announced themselves to the world, when one morning the citizens of Paris awoke to find the walls of their city covered with posters bearing the following message:
We, the deputies of the principal College of the Brethren of the Rose Cross (Rosicrucians) are among you in this town, visibly and invisibly, through the grace of the Most High to whom the hearts of all just men are turned, in order to save our fellow-men from the error of death.
In England Francis Bacon, James I’s Lord Chancellor and the foremost scholar of his day, worked on the sect’s findings at Canonbury Tower, while all over Europe leading philosophers, scientists, mystics and scholars waited for an invitation to join the organisation. When none came – officially – they formed their own Rosicrucian societies, which have continued to the present day. But which are the real Rosicrucians and which are imposters no one is willing to assert.
The City
The ancient heart of London, just one square mile in size, is the setting for the country’s main cathedral, St Paul’s. During the 1666 Fire of London eighty-six churches were destroyed here. Although over the subsequent centuries the City’s population has withered away the area still has the greatest concentration of religious buildings in England – thirty-nine churches and one synagogue, Bevis Marks, Britain’s oldest. In 1847 Lionel de Rothschild was elected MP for the City of London but was unable to take his seat as new MPs were required to take the Christian oath, something which as a Jew he refused to do. A compromise wasn’t reached until 1858.
ALDERSGATE, Aldersgate Street at Gresham Street
Aldersgate was one of twelve traditional gates of the City of London (along with Aldgate, Moorgate, Newgate and others). Each represented one of the tribes of Israel, as medieval leaders thought this would give the city divine legitimacy. In 1603 when James VI of Scotland journeyed to London for the first time to take the throne as James I of England he entered through Aldersgate. The king later had the structure rebuilt with statues of Old Testament prophets Samuel and Jeremiah, and accompanying biblical texts. These told his subjects he was God’s anointed monarch, a direct descendant of King David, and that the British were the chosen people, descendants of the lost tribes of Israel and now holders of Christianity’s mantle, who at the Lord’s second appearance would gather together as one family from whom ‘the elect’ would be chosen.