‘It was somewhat in the role of a Crusader that Warren accepted the charge,’ wrote his grandson and biographer Watkin Williams, ‘as he was stirred by a longing to reveal to the Christian world those sacred places hidden in the debris of many a siege and jealously guarded by the Turkish Mussulmans.’6 More accurately, Warren’s eagerness was in no small part because he was a member of the Knights Templar.
The story of that body’s godforsaken origins at the time of the Crusades needs little retelling here. For about two hundred years in the Middle Ages, the good guys (Christians) fought the bad guys (Muslims) for possession of the Holy Lands around Jerusalem. In the eleventh century the Turks had usurped control of Palestine and put their god in charge. Christian pilgrims were no longer welcome, and the proposition of liberating ‘the birthplace of the cross from the thraldom of the crescent’ began to resonate as a good idea. A mentally abnormal priest called Peter the Hermit went about Europe inciting a Holy War. ‘It’s the voice of God!’ he shrieked, when in fact it was the voice of the Pope, Urban II in Rome. The result was misery without end for a God that didn’t give a monkey’s. Urged on in atrocity by religious fanatics called Popes, the insanity went on and on. Tens of thousands would bleed their lives away, suffering every conceivable inhumanity. In 1099, under the banner of a French knight called Godfrey de Bouillon, the Muslims were temporarily driven from the Holy City, and the real estate returned to Christ.
Great congratulation and instant myth were bestowed upon the Soldiers of the Cross. After the usual protocols of butchery and rape, a barracks was constructed in their honour on the site of Solomon’s Temple, the exalted House of the Lord, and the ‘fame of the Knighthood of the Temple of Solomon began to spread through the enlightened [i.e. Christian] world’.
It was primarily in Europe, most especially France, that the returning knights evolved into the Templars. Initially received as heroes, but later reviled, outcast, imprisoned, and sometimes burnt to a cinder by papal diktat, the Knights Templar had to put up shutters to survive. They became a secret society, and over the centuries they developed into what is understood (in the higher degrees) as Christian Freemasonry.7
Below is the Earl of Euston, resplendent in his Knights Templar togs. Given his brush with the law, it was perhaps a happy circumstance that from the first, English jurisprudence shared an embryo with this cabal of covert Masonic tradition.
The Inner and Middle Temples at the ancient Inns of Court (off Fleet Street in the City of London) take their names from the House of the Lord in Jerusalem. ‘Within these precincts have lived and toiled many of our great statesmen,’ wrote barrister at law Colonel Robert Blackham, ‘to say nothing of a long unbroken line of eminent lawyers who in their turn succeeded in the illustrious order of the Knights Templars of Medieval fame.’8
That Freemasonry and the law should conflate so intimately is no accident. By the time of Victoria it would take a very long day to discover any member of the judiciary who wasn’t heir to that not entirely impartial root.
Captain Warren became a Templar in 1863, installed in the Cape Preceptory (60) while he was at Gibraltar with the Royal Engineers. Four years later, on the morning of 17 February 1867, he climbed to the summit of Mount Moriah (better known today as the Temple Mount) and looked across the city of Jerusalem from where the Crusaders had gasped their first short breath of victory. His guide would have told him what he already knew, that the plateau had been ‘flattened by centuries of disaster and detrition’, and that the mosque of Qubbat as-Sakhra now stood on the site of Solomon’s glorious temple. It was here that de Bouillon had raised his banners to Jesus Christ, and that the mysteries of the Templars had begun.
But it was a legend of deeper antiquity, almost 3,000 years before, that was predominant in Warren’s thoughts. Under his feet was the place of the Great Secret, from whence Freemasonry had come, but where no Freemason had ever been. Warren must have looked about him, wondering how he was going to get at it.
‘The Dome of the Rock’ at Haram el Sharif was sacred to whoever held it – Christian, Jew, Mohammedan alike – and once again it was under the flag of the Crescent Moon. Its holy places were forbidden to Christians, and it was second only to Mecca itself among the sacred sites of Islam. It is not surprising, therefore, that Warren and his diggers ran into immediate difficulties. They weren’t invited and they weren’t welcome. ‘The result,’ according to his grandson, ‘was that Warren had to work on the peripheries of Jerusalem and could reach few of the places he wanted.’
This is a distracting synopsis, and in no way correct. Watkin Williams was also a Freemason, which makes his account of his grandfather’s underground activities in Jerusalem somewhat circumspect. The reason is to attempt to diminish the reality of Warren’s Masonic expertise. The motive behind this subterfuge will soon explain itself. When Bro Williams writes that his grandfather ‘could reach few of the places he wanted’, he neglects to clarify that among the few was one of the only places he really wanted, and that was deep in the foundations of Solomon’s Temple. For so zealous a Freemason there could be no more enthralling place on earth. Such mystery, such occult romance was there, all waiting to be dug out. It couldn’t have been more exhilarating – nor more pertinent to my point. Here was something Masonry condemns with such venom in others, but congratulates in itself: a desire to penetrate ‘mystery’, and a compulsion to find the truth.
Truth is not biodegradable, even after 3,000 years. Nor did it evaporate from late Victorian England. Truth was what had brought Warren to Jerusalem, and it was what, in Masonic terms, he found. But in that terrible darkness there was a caveat that none could have anticipated, and if it reads a little melodramatic, it reads just about right. For in the undisturbed mysteries of this building lay the seeds of the Whitechapel Murderer.
While sojourned in Jerusalem, Warren’s life was at risk on an almost daily basis, both above and below the ground. Just as the rock threatened to crush him, the Muslims would quite literally have killed him had the extent of his excavations been known. ‘Our work was of such a nature,’ wrote Warren, ‘that, I may say, every week Sergeant Birtles had to act in such a manner as would, on active service, have assured him the Victoria Cross.’
Faced as they were with hostile Turks, catastrophic roof falls and causeways choked with antediluvian filth, this was no exaggeration. Everything in this alien place conspired to want them dead. But Warren triumphed. When the pit props ran out, he did without, and when the money ran out, he spent his own.
It isn’t possible to equate Warren’s dynamism here with his vacillating idiocy as a Police Commissioner twenty years later. To read of Warren in Jerusalem, and then of the neutered pomp of his failure in Whitechapel, is like reading about two different men. ‘His [archaeological] reports were being published in the English press,’ wrote Williams, ‘and causing intense interest.’ It is without question that these few Englishmen, clawing their way through thirty centuries of darkness, were men of justified fame. Warren’s resolve was indefatigable, his courage unkind to no one but himself. He earned his place in the history of Jerusalem, it’s his forever, and no one would ever wish to make ill of it.
But there was a psychopath who tried.
In terms of intellect, the Ripper was utilitarian, with no more sophistication than a spoiled child. Irrespective of the boundless efforts to swaddle him in cosmetic ‘mystery’, it is by his spite for Warren that he is betrayed. What a piece of work was this man, and what men were they that