What is the Real Seton Secret?
In my upcoming book, “The Seton Secret,” scheduled for release this summer, our leading characters pursue the clues to the whereabouts of early Christian relics throughout Europe and the Holy Land. But what is the story behind the real Seton secret?
The Templar Seton family was given the responsibility of holding and supporting the estates of the Knights Templar after the Knights Templar and their army fled the 1307 Inquisition in France. They sailed in their eighteen anchored ships from the port of La Rochelle for different destinations. Six of the ships sailed to the mysterious New Jerusalem and twelve of the ships sailed to Scotland for protection. History records that a large part of the Templar treasure from Crete, which included relics of John the Baptist, a mysterious skull, and the elusive stone cup that Jesus Christ used at the Last Supper—“The Holy Grail!”
The Seton family clan was close friends with the Saint Clair and the Douglas clans. The Seton clan was the true “legal heirs” of the Templar possessions—their property and treasure in New Jerusalem and Scotland where they hid within the Hospitaller Order of Saint John under their cloak and the guise of the Fréres Maçons. That term was misinterpreted by the English as Free Masons when it actually meant brother mason which referred to the Templar hidden espionage service, much like the modern English MI-6 of James Bond fame. The Templars used their guild of masons which had two branches—one that helped build structures in the European kingdoms and principalities, and the other in which the knights, posed as architects or contractors, but were actually espionage agents, to spy within the various courts of Europe. In the history of the Seton family, George Seton noted that when the Knights Templar were deprived of their patrimonial interests through the instrumentations of the Grand Prior of the Hospitaller Order, Sir James Sandilands in 1560, the Catholic knights of the Templar Malta Order drew off in a body with David Seton, the Grand Prior of the Templars. They left Scotland for refuge in Catholic Europe. He also noted that David Seton died abroad after visiting the pope and going to Malta for a time. He died in 1591 and was buried in the Church of the Scottish Convent in Ratisbon, Bavaria, near Nuremberg. Ratisbon is now known as Regensburg.
The historian Whitworth Porter who had access to the Hospitaller Archives in Valletta, Malta, in 1858, wrote that David Seton was the head of the Fréres Maçons, and the Setons later were particularly close to the tutor of Bonnie Prince Charlie, Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, in 1724 in Rome. The Seton family held vast estates, the Eglinton Estates near Kilwinning, Scotland, where the first Masonic Lodge of the Scottish Rite in Scotland was located.
The Regent Queen of Scotland, Marie de Guis, mother of Mary, Queen of Scots and wife of King James V of Scotland, revealed in a secret letter to the Seton family that she knew of the secret about the Templars hiding within the Hospitallers in Scotland. She also knew that the Seton family was maintaining the property and treasure of the Templars and she would keep their secret. She acknowledged that the Stewarts and the kings of Scotland from the time of David I of Scotland in 1124 had been members of the Knights Templar and later the Templar Malta Order, also known as the Frére Maçon.
There was also some evidence from a personal diary of John Seton, who was a knight in the Templar Malta Order at the time of the Knox Parliament in 1560, that the Seton Family was the keeper of the Templar Malta property. The Protestant Knox Parliament was trying to dismantle the Catholic Hospitaller Order of Saint John and seize its property the same way that Henry VIII, father of Queen Elizabeth I, had previously done in England.
Catholic Regent Queen Marie de Guis was trying to keep the Templar-Hospitaller land and property from being sold on the open market by the Protestant Knox Parliament of Scotland by selling it overnight at a bargain price to the then Catholic Grand Prior of the Hospitallers in perpetuity and making him the Earl of Torphichen.
The Regent Queen Marie de Guis died shortly after the transfer of the Templar-Malta holdings to the Grand Prior Sandilands, now known as the Earl of Torphichen, in 1560. Mary, Queen of Scots, was the consort Queen of France until the untimely death of her husband, King Francis II of France, in a joust in December 1560. Widowed, she came to Scotland on August 19, 1561, and assumed her role as queen of the Scots.
At this time, James Sandilands visited the pope and announced that he was converting to the Protestant cause. The pope tried to persuade him otherwise, but Sandilands, who was a friend of John Knox, knew which political side to take. Sandilands joined the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and cemented the rift between the Catholic members of the Fréres Maçon and the Protestant members. It was just too much for the Catholic members! They could not accept the treachery they felt had been placed on the Order by the Knox Parliament and the deceit of Sandilands against the Regent Queen, who had acted on good faith.
David Seton and a contingent of Catholic knights from Ireland and Scotland and Wales left for Catholic Bavaria, France, Italy and Malta—“The Flight of the Wild Geese!”