The Monks of War

by Desmond Seward

  Molay continued his fantastic career for another decade. During the summer of 1837 he made a short visit to London in his capacity as 'Grand Chancellor of the French Langues', staying in Harley Street, where he was visited by the new Grand Secretary of the English Langue, Dr Bigsby. Molay's visit was 'exclusively devoted to [the Order of Malta's] affairs, and he was about to proceed with similar objects to Vienna', says the trusting Bigsby, who adds: 'I believe he wore out his life in fruitless services on behalf of the Order.' In 1840–41 the 'marquis' tried to persuade the unsavoury Honoré V of Monaco to offer Monte Carlo to the Knights of Malta in return for the Grand Mastership.

  Molay seems to have died shortly afterwards, for in September 1841 a member of the English Langue took the documents supposedly authorizing its revival to Paris, where in return for a further payment they were endorsed by the Chevalier Taillepied de la Garonne, 'Secretary-General ad interim of the Venerable Langues of France'. In October the Langue received a most plausible letter from Baron Notret de Saint-Lys, 'Mandatory-General for the Langues of France to the Chef-Lieu', in which he lamented that there were now a mere eighty French Knights, only eight of whom were aged under thirty. According to its third secretary, Richard Broun, the Langue stayed in touch with the 'Venerable Langues of France' until the 1848 Revolution, when it lost contact.

  The 'English Langue' remained blissfully unaware that it had been the victim of an elaborate confidence-trick, its members being wholly convinced that they were genuine Knights of Malta. Their activities appear to have been purely convivial, apart from some vague talk of erecting a 'Hospitallarium' which never materialized. Their inspiration was fancy-dress chivalry of the Eglinton Tournament sort, embodied by the two Grand Priors after Peat. As King's Champion, Sir Henry Dymoke (1837–47) had ridden into Westminster Hall in full armour during George IV's coronation banquet, while he had tried to claim the barony of Marmion. Sir Charles Lamb (1847–60) was Knight Marshal of England and had officiated at the Eglinton Tournament; a man of pleasure, according to rumour his health had been ruined by debauchery. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica was not entirely inaccurate in describing the Langue as 'a characteristic sham-Gothic restoration of the Romantic period'.

  The Langue's first Grand Secretary (or Vice-Chancellor), John Philippart, was a somewhat shadowy figure who lived at Hammersmith, being for many years chairman of the Fulham and Hammersmith District Board of Works. Incorrectly, he called himself 'Sir John' on account of having received the Swedish Order of Vasa. Philippart was succeeded by the far from shadowy Dr Robert Bigsby of 1, Elm Villas, Elm Grove, Peckham, an antiquarian writer and poet, who took the title 'Grand Seneschal' and wrote an epic entitled Ombo, or the Knights of Malta. A Dramatic Romance, in Twelve Acts. His first period of office seems to have ended after an episode straight out of The Pickwick Papers: unable to pay the costs of an action for libel which he had brought against the headmistress of a boarding school, he had been immured in a debtors' prison.

  Later, during a second period of office, Dr Bigsby published a memoir of the Langue in which he listed his many honours. Among other distinctions, he was a Knight of the Golden Militia of Rome and a Count Palatine of the Lateran, a Chevalier d'Honneur de l'Ordre Souverain du Temple, the Grand-Maître Conservateur de l'Ordre Imperial Asiatique de Morale Universelle, a Commandeur Baron de l'Ordre Noble d'Épire, and an Honorary Doctor of Glasgow University. (The Ordre Imperial Asiatique was probably the same Asiatic Order which, so The Times of 8 September 1858 informs us, had been founded by an impostor calling himself 'Aldina del Dir, Sultan of Mongolia'.) In 1864 Bigsby was to become an Honorary Colonel in the 'Armée Chrétienne d'Orient', a force organized by the 'Junte Gréco-Albanaise'. Dr Bigsby – as he preferred to be known, rather than as Colonel Count Bigsby – was highly esteemed by the Langue, who in 1867 presented him with a silver cup on the occasion of his retirement from a second period as Grand Secretary, Registrar and Judge-of-Arms.

  The third Grand Secretary was Sir Richard Broun, Bart, who lived in lodgings at Sphinx Lodge, Chelsea. The 'projector of the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum at Woking', he was also author of 'various works on heraldry, agriculture, colonization, sanitation &c.'. As honorary secretary of the Committee of the Baronetage for Privileges, he achieved a certain notoriety from his campaign to prove that every baronet had a right to a seat in Parliament. (Disraeli caricatured him in Sybil as 'Sir Vavasour Firebrace'.) Broun too published informative memoirs of the Langue, one in 1837 and another twenty years later – the Synoptical Sketch.

  In July 1857 Broun informed a member of the Langue who lived on Malta, John James Watts, that he had been nominated 'Commissioner for the Langue of England to Southern Europe'. During the following summer Watts visited Rome, where he called at the Palazzo Malta. Here he learnt that the Lieutenancy had never received any formal notification of the Langue's creation. 'The surviving chiefs of the [French] Commission having grown old and incapable,' he was told, 'its affairs fell into the hands of an unprincipled secretary [Molay] and his associates, who embezzled money, sold crosses and forged documents, and in other words made a most illegal and dishonest use of the Commission.' Watts realized that Peat had been duped by, as he later put it, 'a small knot of swindling Frenchmen'.

  Even so, Watts was able to report to Broun (in a letter of 19 June 1858) that he had persuaded the Lieutenancy to explore the possibility of restoring the Grand Priory of England, to which an Association of Protestant noblemen could be attached. 'If you are willing to be with us on the terms proposed, not only will we meet you half-way but we will come all the way to you,' Watts was told by Lieutenant Master Colloredo's secretary, Count Luca de Gozze, who added, 'Not only will we hold out the right hand of fellowship but both hands.' The idea must have seemed far from implausible after the revival of the Johanniterorden in 1852, which had been welcomed by the Lieutenant Master – the new Herrenmeister had written to inform him of his appointment, and Colloredo had sent the Herrenmeister his congratulations, applauding the restoration of a bastion against the baneful tendencies of the age.

  The Lieutenancy envisaged the restoration of the pre-Reformation Grand Priory of England, soundly funded and engaged in hospitaller work. As soon as it was functioning, an English non-Catholic priory (i.e. the Langue) would be established as an integral part of the Order. However, when the enthusiastic Count de Gozze came to London to investigate in August 1858, he soon realized that the scheme was unworkable, partly because of the Langue's attitude and partly because of its membership.

  For the Langue had something very different in mind. It wanted a small and purely titular Catholic Grand Priory, under its authority, whose sole function would be to give the Langue the historical continuity and legitimacy which it lacked. The 'English branch' declined to be in any way subordinate to the Lieutenancy, which it always referred to solemnly as the 'Italian branch'. Broun, who handled the negotiations for the Langue in his capacity as Grand Secretary – Grand Prior Lamb was too ill to be involved in them – proved to be a difficult, not to say impossible, man to deal with; and they quickly foundered. Poor Broun died of a stroke, apparently brought on by rage at their failure. Afterwards de Gozze wrote of negotiating with him as 'ce mauvais rêve' (On purchasing Broun's papers from his landlady at Sphinx Lodge – she had impounded them as security for arrears of rent – the Langue was pained to learn that its Grand Secretary had had his Synoptical Sketch printed on credit and that its members would have to foot the bill.)

  In any case, Count de Gozze did not at all care for what he was able to learn of the Langue's membership. The Protestant English 'Knights' were certainly very different from the Lutheran junkers of the Johanniterorden. While accepting that some of them were undeniably distinguished, de Gozze described the Langue (in a rueful letter of 24 September) as an association in which 'on trouve des gens qui [ne] sont décidément pas "Gentlemen"'. He can scarcely have been reassured by the use of questionable titles by several members. Even the tolerant Dr Bigsby admi
tted that although Dr Burnes, the 'Preceptor of Scotland', was a Knight of the Guelphic Order of Hanover, he had no right to call himself 'Sir James'. Philippart, the former Vice-Chancellor, continued to be 'Sir John'. There was also the Langue's Receiver-General, 'Baron de Bliss', the son of a well-known London omnibus proprietor and horse-dealer, who had changed his name from Aldridge to de Bliss and who had somehow acquired a Portuguese barony. Worst of all, there was the 'Count de Melano'.

  It was embarassing to say the least that, during de Gozze's visit to London, The Times of 3 and 8 September (quoting the French legal journal Le Droit) should have chosen to report the 'investigations which are being made into the trafficking in titles and decorations' in Paris. According to The Times, the ring-leader was 'a Piedmontese established at London, and who calls himself Count Antonio de Melano'. The bogus orders which he had been peddling included those of the Four Emperors of Germany, St Hubert [of the Ardennes], the Lion of Holstein, the Golden Spur and the Asiatic Order. 'He was in constant communication with men engaged in the same traffic as himself in Spain, Germany, Italy, and especially in France,' reported The Times. Among the agents of Melano in Paris whom it named was 'a person calling himself Baron Notret de Saint-Lys, Commander of the Order of the Four Emperors'. (This was the 'high official member of the French Council Ordinary' – Bigsby's description – with whom the Langue of England had corresponded in 1841.) Those of the gang held in French custody were fined or sentenced to terms of imprisonment.

  The three genuine Knights of Malta (members of the 'Italian branch') then in England ensured that de Gozze was aware of the lurid reports in The Times. In the circumstances it was therefore peculiarly unfortunate that 'Colonel Count Antonio Laurent de Melano de Calcina' should be a Knight Commander of the English Langue. Living in Park Road, New Wandsworth, London SW, he was a neighbour and seemingly a close friend of Dr Bigsby; he does not appear to have been unduly disturbed by the unflattering references to him in The Times. A few years later Bigsby recorded his name among those of deceased members of the Langue and did so with obvious pride.

  Another member of the English Langue whose name cropped up during the trial was the 'Duke Ludovico Riario-Sforza', described by Broun as 'Bailiff Mandatory in Italy' of the Order of the Golden Spur – one of the orders which had been peddled. (Since 1841, bestowal of the Golden Spur had been reserved exclusively to the Holy See.) Riario-Sforza was a Knight Grand Cross of the Langue and had been its 'Commissioner to Italy'. Bigsby tells us that he was 'uniformly regarded by his more intimate acquaintance as an accomplished, high-spirited, ingenuous and amiable man'.

  Other members of the Langue besides Dr Bigsby were taken in by Melano and Riario-Sforza, proudly wearing their bogus orders. Some dabbled in similar business. According to Notes and Queries (3rd S., III, 342), one of them had inserted the following advertisement in the London newspapers during November 1857:

  A person who has held a high appointment under one of the European royal families, and who possesses considerable influence at several foreign courts, is willing to use that influence with a view to obtain the title of MARQUIS, COUNT or BARON, for a Catholic gentleman. The title would be of great service for a family desiring high position, or about to visit Rome or the Continent.

  Significantly, Gozze (in his letter of 24 September 1858) also observed, with a certain sarcasm, that 'Sir' James Burnes was 'Parmi les franc-maçons, dont il était un des plus hauls dignitaires en Écosse.' It was common knowledge that Burnes was a former Grand Master for Western India where, so the Dictionary of National Biography informs us, he had established 'a lodge for natives'. Even if the Langue's members had been otherwise totally acceptable, from the start its links with freemasonry doomed the project for a Protestant branch of the Order in England. Peat had himself been introduced as a member of St John's Lodge (No. 80) at Sunderland in July 1829. (Sainte-Croix-Molay's name, presumably assumed after much careful thought, hints at both Rosicrucianism and a pretended descent from the last Templar Master, Jacques de Molay.) Dr Bigsby's memoir of the Langue, first published in 1864, contains a list of members since the 'revival', from which it is clear that at least a third of them were masons. Bigsby was one himself – when he died in 1873, his obituary appeared in The Freemason.

  Such links scarcely made for ecumenical relations. In those days Catholics were terrified of freemasonry. Rome lived in dread of another great mason, Garibaldi, future Grand Master of the Orient for Italy, who had occupied the Eternal City in 1849 and who was a sworn enemy of the Roman Church. Indeed, in 1864 in the encyclical Quanta Cura, Pope Pius IX would solemnly declare freemasonry to be damned, 'damnantur clandestinae societates'. At that time the Church did not appreciate that British freemasonry was very different from the Latin variety and in no way hostile to Christianity, and that British masons made a most valuable contribution to charity. (Since then the Catholic Church has greatly modified its attitude.)

  Eventually the Langue despaired of obtaining recognition from the Lieutenancy. Unwilling to accept that Peat had been duped, in 1862 it set up as an independent order, the 'Sovereign and Illustrious Order of St John of Jerusalem, Anglia'. As a recent writer, G. S. Sainty – a member of the modern Venerable Order – has admitted frankly, 'without the recognition of the Lieutenancy, the early nineteenth-century English Priory was a purely private organization'. So too was its successor, the Sovereign and Illustrious Order. They were what would today be termed false Orders of St John.

  However, the new order somehow secured the patronage of the Duke of Manchester, the first English peer to join it, who became Grand Prior. It then began to acquire genuinely dedicated members, notably Sir Edward Lechmere, who realized its potential. In consequence, what had hitherto been no more than a fancy-dress dining-club for cranks and dealers in bogus honours was transformed into a great national institution, performing humanitarian work of vital importance. In 1872 Lechmere was responsible for purchasing the gatehouse of the pre-Reformation Priory of St John at Clerkenwell, formerly The Old Jerusalem Tavern, where the Langue had held its chivalric dinners. Fascinated by the Sovereign Order's history, he sympathized with many of its ideals. Not only did he start a splendid collection of books, paintings and armour associated with it, but he initiated a noble hospitaller tradition. The origins of the St John ambulance movement date from 1872.

  Invited by the Duke of Manchester, the Princess of Wales joined the Order in 1876, as did the Duke of Albany in 1883. Other members of the royal family followed. They seem to have been inspired to some extent by the example of the Johanniterorden, since close links existed between the British and Prussian courts. In 1888 Queen Victoria granted the Order a charter which reconstituted it as an order of the Grown, the Prince of Wales becoming Grand Prior.

  In 1961 the Venerable Order became one of the 'Alliance Orders of St John', signing a convention with the German, Dutch and Swedish branches of the Johanniterorden. Two years later it signed a concordat with the Sovereign Military Order, which relegated 'to the realm of academic discussion' the dispute as to 'whether the Most Venerable Order was the lineal descendant of the old Grand Priory of the Sovereign Order'. Relations have grown cordial between the Venerable Order and the Sovereign Order's British Association, who co-operate in various charities and are sometimes represented at each other's services.

  Today the 'Grand Priory in the British Realm of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem' has some 25,000 members, 1,500 being Knights or Dames. Its many hospitaller works include the Ophthalmic Hospital at Jerusalem (founded in 1882); the St John Ambulance Brigade (1887); and the St John Ambulance Association (1877). The Order also has Priories with large memberships in South Africa, New Zealand, Canada and Australia, and a Society in the United States.

  SOURCES

  The Tongue of England, 1858–9, 1859–60 (unpublished letter books in the possession of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta).

  REDFORD, W. K. R., and HOLBECH, R., The Order of the Hospital of S
t John of Jerusalem (London, 1902).

  BIGSBY, R., Memoir of the Illustrious and Sovereign Order of St John of Jerusalem (Derby, 1867).

  BROUN, R., Hospitallaria, or a Synopsis of the Rise, Exploits, Privileges, Insignia, etc, of the Venerable and Sovereign Order of St John of Jerusalem (London, 1837).

  ——, Synoptical Sketch of the Illustrious and Sovereign Order of Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem and of the Venerable Tongue of England (London, 1857).

  LUKE, Sir H., The Venerable Order of St John in the British Realm (London, 1967).

  PIERREDON, M. DE, Histoire Politique de I'Ordre Souverain de Saint-Jean de Jérusalem (Ordre de Malte) de 1789 à 1955, vol. 2 (Paris, 1963).

  SAINTY, G. S., The Order of Saint John (New York, 1991).

  TORR, c, Small Talk at Wreyland, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1921).

  (An account of the Rev. Sir John Peat may be found in W. Brockie's Sunderland Notables (Sunderland, 1895).)

  APPENDIX 5

  SELF-STYLED ORDERS OF ST JOHN

  Most, though not all, self-styled 'Orders of St John' base their pretensions on an alleged Russian provenance.

  After the fall of Malta in 1798, members of a recently founded Grand Priory of Russia, together with exiled French Knights, elected Tsar Paul I as Grand Master. The Tsar's favourite reading had been Vertot's history of the Order of Malta, and he accepted joyfully. The election was totally invalid. Not even a Catholic, let alone a professed Knight in vows, Paul was never recognized as Grand Master by the Holy See. However, he secured de facto recognition from most Catholic powers.

  The Tsar set up a council of the Order at St Petersburg, modelled on the former Sacred Council at Valetta. Besides the Catholic Grand Priory of Russia, founded in 1797 by agreement with Grand Master de Rohan, he established a Grand Priory for Knights of the Orthodox faith. Soon there were 250 Russian Knights, besides members of the imperial family and ladies upon whom Paul had bestowed the Cross. (Among the latter was Lady Hamilton, Nelson's friend.) Paul also encouraged the endowment of ius patronatus commanderies, the founder's family enjoying the right of nominating the commander; a commander had to have belonged to the Order for five years and to have served in the Russian Army.