Knights of the Round Temple

The Sunday Pilgrimage #10

The Temple Church, London, England

What do Rosamund the Fair’s lover King Henry II and Renowned Author Dan Brown, creator of the humungous bestseller The Da Vinci Code, have in common? Only this: they have both spent time in London’s only round church.

But this - as we can see from the quality of its clientele - is not just any church, and its roundness is not the only thing that makes it unusual. The Temple Church is a thousand-year-old Romanesque-Gothic mashup, inspired by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and founded by an order of secretive crusading knights who may or may not have worshipped cats and known the location of the Holy Grail.

Best of all, some of the knights are still there:

I lived and worked in London for years back in the nineties and the 2000s, but somehow I never made it to the area known as Temple, which I first visited last December. It is a genuinely strange place in the context of what London has become over the last thirty years, which is to say a city that Judge Dredd would feel right at home in:

The Temple, meanwhile, is accessed down windy little lanes which look more like the backstreets of Oxford than central London. There’s a reason for that. This area is home to the four ancient ‘Inns of Court’, all of which have excellent Tolkeiny names: Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, the Middle Temple and the Inner Temple. London is a city whose place names sometimes seem to have been invented for the specific purpose of appearing in a fantasy novel. Consider some of the stops on the Tube network: Shepherd’s Bush, White City, Mansion House, Tower Hill, Earl’s Court. You imagine dreamy meadows, knights errant pursuing dragons, stone palaces behind high walls, glittering spires. And then you actually visit.

Alas, the Inns of Court are also less Romantic in reality than they sound: they are the place where British barristers go to learn their trade. But even though barristers are far more boring than knights, the Inns of Court still look like they belong in another age, resembling Oxford colleges or Tudor Palaces, at least from the outside.

But why are lawyers learning about tort theory in a place that sounds like it was named by Aleister Crowley? Could there possibly be an interesting historical explanation? Thrillingly enough, the answer is yes.

The Temple got its name because originally it was home to a mysterious and mystical medieval order that everyone has surely heard of: the Knights Templar. The Templars - or, to give them their proper name, the ‘Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon’, were founded in France in the wake of the First Crusade, when a group of knights set themselves the task of protecting Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Over time, they became a wealthy, influential and powerful religious order. Committed, like monks, to vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, they were also committed, unlike monks, to smiting with their blades the enemies of Christ.

But the Templars overplayed their hand. They ended up too rich, too powerful and too mysterious, with gossip about what really went on in their initiation ceremonies getting louder by the decade. In the early 1300s, two centuries after their foundation, the Order was violently disbanded on the orders of King Philip IV of France, who claimed they were committing terrible blasphemies in secret, but who in reality wanted their money and property. Perhaps this is where Henry VIII of England got the idea. The Grand Master of the Templars was duly burned at the stake, though not before he had cursed Philip’s royal line, which went extinct less than twenty years later.

Fascinating stuff, I hear you all cry in unison, but aren’t we supposed to visiting a church in London? Yes we are, I reply. But who do you think founded that church? The clue, dear reader, is in the name.

This, the only round church to be found in England’s capital, was the church of the Knights Templar when this area of the city was their English HQ nearly a millennium ago. It is round because it is modelled on both the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which contains Jesus’s alleged tomb, and the Dome of the Rock, which the Muslims had built on the site of Solomon’s Temple after they conquered Jerusalem. The Temple Church has its own impressive dome:

It was in this church that some of those mysterious Templar initiation ceremonies were held, and it is in this church that many of the knights were buried, and remain. In 1940, the church was bombed and burned down during the Blitz, and many of the stone effigies of the knights were smashed. Some of them have since been reproduced in metal form:

The Temple Church is very ancient, having been consecrated in 1085 at a ceremony in which the King - Henry II, who we met last week - was present. Renowned Author Dan Brown was not there at the same time, but did visit nine centuries later, when he chose the church as one of the locations for his utterly ridiculous but somehow also very readable ‘historical’ whodunnit. Perhaps the Holy Grail was supposed to be there at some point, or maybe it was home to murderous members of Opus Dei or something. Anyway, it’s a talking point.

A much more interesting talking point, to my mind, is the fantastic selection of gargoyley faces which are carved into the stonework all around the dome of the church:

The older parts of the church, which was extended later in the middle ages, have plenty of fantastic stonework to choose from. Behold the font:

Some old churches in London are so heavily layered that it can be hard to keep up: you can almost feel the palimpsest of English history bearing down on you. The Temple Church is a good example. Even with all the modern signboards and fire escape signs, you can feel something old and odd about the place. Maybe it’s just the fact that, wherever you turn, you’re being stared at by cold-eyed knights:

Or maybe it’s something else. You can climb the tower and look down on the church, and when you do it seems anything but homely. It’s not sinister exactly, but there’s something going on beneath the surface. If you ask me, anyway. But maybe I just have an overactive imagination. If so, it would be something I shared with those who did down the Templars, it seemed.

Back in the day, the Templars were accused of denying Christ, indulging in homosexual acts, drinking blood and, bizarrely, worshipping cats. None of these claims had any evidence behind them, and they were all standard fare in European witch trials later on. One claim stands out as more intriguing, though: the knights were accused of idol worship. Specifically, they were said to have worshipped ‘a bearded head said to have great power.’

What kind of head could this be? Intriguingly, fifteen years ago, historian Barbara Frale, who works in the Vatican’s Secret Archives, discovered a document which suggested that this particular accusation might not be unfounded after all. The document offered details of what really happened during a Templar initiation ceremony. A Templar leader would guide the new boy into a hidden room, where he ‘showed him a long linen cloth that bore the impressed figure of a man, and ordered him to worship it, kissing the feet three times.’

What does that description remind you of? The British historian Ian Wilson suggested back in the 1970s that the Templars were the guardians of the Turin shroud in the the 13th and 14th centuries. This might explain some of their secrecy. It might demonstrate, too, that they were not worshipping an idol, but venerating what they considered to be the image of Christ Himself.

I suppose we’ll never know the truth of it all. If the Temple Church has any secrets today, it’s not telling anyone. Not even Dan Brown.