The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  ‘Guys in white robes,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘That’s the Victorian image of the druid, a kind of Gandalf figure, Merlin, gathering mistletoe and travelling unharmed between warring kingdoms. The idea of priestly mediators is probably accurate, but the rest is pure fantasy.’

  ‘Tacitus paints a pretty appalling picture,’ Jeremy said.

  Jack nodded, extracted a book from his khaki bag and flipped it open. ‘Tacitus’ father-in-law Agricola had been governor of Britain, so he knew what he was talking about. The Romans at Mona were confronted by a dense mass of enemy along the shoreline. Among them were the druids, who he says were “raising their hands to heaven and screaming dreadful curses”. After the Romans were victorious, they destroyed the sacred groves of the druids, places where they “drench their altars in the blood of prisoners and consult their gods by means of human entrails”.’

  ‘Sounds like a few modern priests I’ve known,’ Costas said wryly. ‘Power through terror.’

  ‘There are plenty of historical parallels, as you say.’

  ‘The Church in the Middle Ages, for one,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘Submission, obedience, confession, vengeance, retribution.’

  ‘All things the earliest Christians would have abhorred,’ Jack said.

  ‘And it wasn’t just male druids on Anglesey,’ Jeremy said.

  Jack opened the book again. ‘The thing that really terrified the Romans, that awed them to the point of paralysis, was the women.’

  ‘This gets even better,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘Hordes of fanatical women, “black-robed women with dishevelled hair like Furies, brandishing torches”.’ Jack put down the book. ‘It was the Romans’ worst nightmare. The image of the Amazon, the warrior queen, really kept the Roman male awake at night, and it wasn’t lust. Tacitus may have exaggerated this aspect of Britain to play on Roman fantasies about the barbarian world, a world beyond control, a world with no apparent method or rationale. But all the evidence suggests it was true, that the Romans in Britain really had walked into their own vision of hell, a world of Amazon queens and screaming banshees.’

  ‘Boudica,’ Costas said. ‘Was she some kind of druid?’

  ‘We know of one other British queen, Cartimandua of the Brigantes,’ Jack replied. ‘And queen usually meant high priestess. There was nothing unusual in that. The Roman emperor was Pontifex Maximus, the Egyptian pharaohs were priest-kings, the queens and kings of England are Defenders of the Faith.’

  ‘A redhead arch-druid warrior queen,’ Costas said weakly. ‘God help her enemies.’

  ‘And how does London fit into all this?’ Jeremy said.

  ‘That’s where we really get our teeth into the archaeology. ’ Jack took a plan from his bag and rolled it out on the floor, and Jeremy knelt down and held the corners. ‘Or rather, the lack of it. This shows the London area during the Iron Age. As you can see, there’s no clear indication of habitation on the site of Londinium, where we are now. A few finds of pottery, some of the silver coins the tribes began producing in the decades before the Roman conquest. Not much else.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Costas pointed to an object marked in the river Thames west of the Roman town. ‘Armour?’

  ‘The Battersea Shield. One of the finest pieces of metalwork ever found from antiquity, rivalling the best the Romans produced. You can see it in the British Museum. It probably dates to the century before the Romans arrived, and it may suggest what actually went on at this place.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Jack rested on his haunches. ‘Almost all the other major towns of Roman Britain were built on the site of Iron Age tribal capitals, often right next to the prehistoric earthworks. Camulodunum, where they built the temple to Claudius, was a colony for Roman veterans right on top of the Iron Age tribal capital of the Trinovantes. Verulamium was built next to the old capital of the Catuvellauni. It was an ingenious system, designed to stamp Roman authority on the heart of the tribal world, yet also to maintain the power base of the old tribal leaders who became the new magistrates. It was rule by devolution, maintaining the pretence of native authority, just as the British did in India.’

  ‘But London was the exception,’ Jeremy said.

  Jack nodded. ‘After starting as a river port, London became the provincial capital when it was rebuilt following the Boudican revolt. But something was going on here before the Romans arrived, something really fascinating. The Battersea Shield was almost certainly a ritual deposition, a valued object deliberately thrown into the river as a votive offering. There are other finds like this from the Thames and its tributaries. Swords, shields, spears. It’s a tradition that goes back at least to the Bronze Age, and lasted well into the medieval period.’

  ‘Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake,’ Jeremy murmured.

  ‘Offerings seem to have been made on tribal boundaries,’ Jack continued, nodding. ‘Maybe the weapons were to arm the god of your tribe, a way of asserting territorial claims, a bit like the medieval ritual of beating the bounds of parishes on Rogation Day. And London was the biggest boundary site of them all, with at least five tribal areas converging on the river Thames. The distant island of Anglesey may have represented the edge of the British Iron Age world, but London may have been its ritual apex.’

  ‘Yet no Iron Age settlements have been found here, according to this plan,’ Costas said.

  ‘Remember Tacitus’ account, the sacred groves on Anglesey? London was densely wooded at the time of the Roman invasion, right up to the water’s edge. Within the forest, along the edge of the river and its tributaries, were clearings, groves, places now submerged under the streets of London.’

  Costas peered hard at the map. ‘How about this. In AD 60, when Boudica rose in revolt, the one place the Britons really can’t stomach having a new Roman settlement is London, built on their sacred site. They save their worst retribution for it.’

  Jack nodded enthusiastically. ‘After the rebels had ravaged Camulodunum and driven the Roman survivors into the Temple of Claudius there, Tacitus tells us that the Celtic warriors heard an augury. At the mouth of the Thames a phantom settlement had been seen, in ruins. The sea was a blood-red colour, and shapes like human corpses were seen in the ebb tide. For Boudica, it was a sign of where to go next.’

  ‘What happened when Boudica hit London?’

  ‘There were no survivors. Tacitus says that the Roman general Suetonius and his army reached London from Anglesey before Boudica arrived, but Suetonius decided his force was too weak to defend the place. There were lamentations and appeals, and the inhabitants were allowed to leave with him. Those who stayed, the elderly, the women, children, were all slaughtered by the Britons.’

  ‘Cassius Dio tells more.’ Jeremy picked up another book Jack had taken out of his bag. ‘As I recall, he’s our only other source on Boudica, writing over a hundred years after the revolt but perhaps based on lost first-hand accounts.’ He found a page. ‘Here’s what the Britons did to their captives: “The worst and most bestial atrocity committed by their captors was the following. They hung up naked the noblest and most eminent women, cut off their breasts and sewed them into their mouths, so that they seemed to be eating them; afterwards they impaled the women on sharp skewers run through the length of their bodies. All this they did to the accompaniment of sacrifices, feasts and wanton behaviour. This they did in their holy places, especially in the Grove of Andraste, their name for the goddess of Victory.”’

  ‘Sounds like a scene from Apocalypse Now,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘That may not be far off,’ Jack said quietly. ‘The name Boudica also meant Victory, and it could be that her sacred grove was some pool up the river, her own holy of holies.’

  ‘Her own private hell, you mean,’ Costas said.

  ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth thought there were mass beheadings,’ Jeremy said quietly. ‘He wrote in the twelfth century, when human skulls started to be found along the Walbrook, just yards from here. They’ve been found
ever since, when the river’s been dug into. Skulls, hundreds of them, washed down from somewhere and embedded in the river gravel, right under the heart of the city of London where the Walbrook flows into the Thames. Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to link the skulls with the Boudican revolt.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’ Costas had picked up Jack’s copy of Tacitus, and was flicking through the pages, stopping and reading. ‘Here we go again. Sacrifices, orgies of slaughter. Whole towns razed, everyone murdered. Men, women, children. Correct me if I’m wrong, but these hardly seem acts of charity. I don’t get why Claudius would have brought his precious document with the word of Christ to this place, to the care of some pagan goddess.’

  ‘We don’t know what was going on,’ Jack murmured. ‘The British rebels who knew of Jesus, perhaps even Boudica, may have seen him as a fellow rebel against Roman rule. They may have been sympathetic to early Christians for that reason alone. If Tacitus and Dio Cassius are right about the violation of Boudica’s daughters by the Romans, she would have had ample cause for retribution, for vengeance wreaked in the ways of the barbarian, ways which she must have known would cast most fear into the hearts of Romans.’

  ‘She must also have known it was suicidal, that she was on a one-way ticket,’ Costas murmured. ‘Maybe it unhinged her. Remember Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz. A noble cause, unsound methods. Maybe Boudica got swallowed up in her own heart of darkness.’

  ‘Speaking of which, it’s time.’ Jeremy lurched to his feet. ‘The rector’s opened the crypt specially for us during the lunchtime concert in the church. Come on.’

  A few minutes later they stood just inside the portico of the Guildhall Art Gallery, looking out over the yard with the elliptical line of the Roman amphitheatre arena marked across it. To their right was the medieval façade of the Guildhall itself, and to the left the solid, functional shape of St Lawrence Jewry, reconstructed after the Second World War to resemble as closely as possible the original design built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

  ‘This place seems pristine now, but it’s seen three circles of hell,’ Jack said quietly, peering out into the drizzle. ‘Boudica’s revolt in AD 60, the massacre, possibly human sacrifice. Then the Great Fire of 1666. Of the buildings here, only the Guildhall wasn’t completely destroyed, because its old oaks wouldn’t burn. An eyewitness said it looked like a bright shining coal, as if it had been a Palace of Gold or a great building of burnished brass. Then, almost three centuries later, the inferno visited again. This time from above.’

  ‘The twenty-ninth of December 1940,’ Jeremy said. ‘The Blitz.’

  ‘One night of many,’ Jack replied. ‘But that night the Luftwaffe targeted the square mile, the City of London. My grandmother was here, a despatch rider at the Air Ministry. She said the sound of dropping incendiaries was ominously gentle, like a rain shower, but the high-explosive bombs had been fitted with tubes so they screamed rather than whistled. Hundreds were killed and maimed, men, women, children. That famous picture of St Paul’s Cathedral, wreathed in flames but miraculously intact, comes from that night. St Lawrence Jewry wasn’t so lucky. It went up like a Roman candle, the flames leaping above the city. One of the men standing next to my grandmother on the roof of the Air Ministry watching the churches burn was Air Vice Marshal Arthur Harris, “Bomber” Harris. He said he saw total war that night. He was the architect of the British bomber offensive against Germany.’

  ‘Another circle of hell,’ Jeremy murmured.

  ‘My grandmother heard a terrible scream that night, like a banshee,’ Jack said quietly. ‘It haunted her for the rest of her life.’

  ‘Must have been a lot of horror,’ Costas said.

  ‘The scream came from the church,’ Jack continued. ‘The organ was on fire and the hot air rushing through the pipes made it shriek, as if the church was in a death agony.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘You couldn’t put that in a horror movie, could you? Nobody would believe you.’

  ‘I think I’m getting the jitters about this place, Jack.’

  ‘It’s all still there, under our feet,’ Jack said. ‘The Boudican destruction layer, charred earth and smashed pottery, human bone. Then masses of rubble from the old medieval church destroyed in 1666, cleared and buried to make way for Sir Christopher Wren’s new structures. And then another layer of destruction debris from the Blitz, with reconstruction work still going on.’

  ‘Any unexploded ordnance?’ Costas said hopefully. ‘That’d make me happy. You owe me one. That stuff you wouldn’t let me touch on the sea bed off Sicily.’

  Jack gave Costas a look, and then walked briskly over Guildhall Yard. ‘Remember where we are, the lie of the amphitheatre,’ he said as he stepped over the curved line in the pavement. He pointed to the western wall of St Lawrence Jewry, about eight metres away. ‘And remember the proximity of the church.’ They reached the church entrance and went inside. The lunchtime concert was about to begin, and Jeremy led them quickly through the nave packed with seated people to a small wooden door off the west aisle. He opened it, ducked inside and beckoned. Costas followed him, then Jack. As Jack shut the door the music began. The concert was a selection of Bach’s reconstructed violin concertos, and Jack recognized the Concerto in D Minor for solo violin, strings and basso profundo. The music was bold, confident, joyous, the strident Baroque beat giving order to confusion, structure to chaos. Jack lingered, and for a moment he thought of slipping back and sitting anonymously in the audience. He had always loved the reconstructed concertos, the result of a kind of musical archaeology that seemed to mirror his own processes of discovery, small fragments of certainty put together by scholarship, by guesswork and intuition, suddenly fusing into an explosion of clarity, of euphoria. At the moment, he felt he needed the reassurance, uncertain whether the pieces they had found would meld, whether the trail they were following would lead to a conclusion that was greater than the sum of the parts.

  ‘Come on, Jack,’ Costas said from below. Jack followed him down the steps, into an undercroft beneath the level of the nave. The music was still there, but now just a background vibration. He saw an open door, and followed them down into another chamber, smaller and darker. It was old, much older than the masonry structure of Wren’s church, and looked as if it had been recently cleaned. A bare bulb hung from the brick vault. Once they were all inside, Jeremy closed and bolted the door at the bottom of the steps, then ran his hand along the masonry wall. ‘It’s a medieval burial chamber, a private crypt. It was found during the recent excavation work. This is as near as anyone’s got to the southern edge of the amphitheatre arena.’

  ‘This must be it,’ Jack said. ‘Jeremy?’

  ‘I agree. Absolutely.’

  Costas eyed them. ‘Okay, Jack. I want a damn good explanation for what we’re doing here.’

  Jack nodded, then squatted back against the wall, his khaki bag hanging from his left side. He was excited, and took a deep breath to steady himself. ‘Okay. When we worked out that riddle in Rome, when the location clicked, I immediately thought of Sir Christopher Wren and this church. When I was a boy I used to come here a lot, visit the old bomb sites and help with the excavations. My grandmother was a volunteer, drawn back to the place where she had watched helplessly decades before, trying to atone by helping with the reconstruction work. She took me along for my first excavation, and somehow her description of the inferno in 1940 brought the Boudican revolt to life for me, brought the true horror home, the colour of fire and blood and the terrible noises of human suffering. I’ve been fascinated by the Boudican revolt ever since, by all the attempts to find Boudica’s last place of refuge and her tomb. It became my grandmother’s passion too, and when she was dying it was the last thing we spoke about. I made her a promise I thought I’d never be able to fulfil. Later, as a student, having seen myself what the bombing and clearance had revealed of the Roman city, I became fascinated by the other great inferno, by what Wren
might have come across in the prehistoric and Roman layers exposed after the Great Fire of 1666. That was before archaeology had begun as a discipline, when most artifacts were never even recognized, let alone recorded.’

  ‘With a few exceptions,’ Jeremy murmured.

  Jack nodded. ‘Wren himself had an antiquarian interest, and mentioned finding Roman artefacts under St Paul’s. That’s what really fired me up. Then I discovered that the Church of St Lawrence Jewry had been owned by Balliol College, Oxford. One of my uncles was a Fellow of the College, and he arranged for me to visit the archive, to see whether there was any record of finds made here after 1666. That visit was years ago, when I was being drawn away by diving and shipwrecks, and I didn’t take detailed notes. That’s what I asked Jeremy to check out.’

  ‘And Jeremy came up trumps,’ Costas said.

  ‘Jack remembered it was just a scrap of loose paper in an old book, part of the master mason’s diary, but I found it,’ Jeremy replied, pulling a notepad out of his coat pocket. ‘It’s fantastic. It was when they were clearing the rubble and burned timbers after the fire, trying to find holes underground to bury the stuff away: disused wells, cesspits, old vaults. One of the workmen broke into a crypt which must be this chamber. The mason described going through into another crypt, then seeing a line of large pottery pipes with handles, upright in a row against the earth wall on one side. He thought they might be drainage pipes, possibly the lining of a well, so they left them intact. They stuffed as much debris as they could into a space off to one side and then bricked it up. They then came back out, and bricked up the entrance from the first crypt also.’ Jeremy gestured towards the crumbling wall on the far side of the chamber, opposite the side with the entrance door. ‘Over there. That must be it. The brickwork looks hasty, and it’s definitely post-medieval. It looks like it hasn’t been disturbed since.’

  Costas looked perplexed. ‘Okay. Drainage pipes. So where does that get us?’