The Last Gospel (57 page)

This rich archaeological potential was recognized during the rebuilding following the Great Fire of 1666, when Sir Christopher Wren recorded a Roman road and other remains during his rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral and the City Churches. Wren did indeed employ the four craftsmen mentioned in the novel, Edward Pierce, mason, Thomas Newman, bricklayer, John Longland, carpenter, and Thomas Mead, plasterer, all of whom worked on the rebuilding of St Lawrence Jewry in 1671-80. Johannes Deverette is fictional, though his Huguenot background is plausible at this period; the wording of his will is based on Sir Christopher Wren’s Will, which can be seen at the National Archives website. Wren did have a mentally disabled child, Billy, and the idea that Wren himself may have found Gregorian music appealing springs from his own documented sympathies for another age ‘. . . in which holy mothers and maids singing divine songs, offering the pure incense of their prayers, reading, meditating and conversing of holy things, spend almost all day in the company of God and his angels’ (recorded by his son Christopher in
Parentalia: or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens
, 1750, p. 195, and quoted further here in Chapter 18).

 

The fictional character of Deverette’s descendent John Everett draws inspiration from the lives of my great grandfather, Arthur Everett Gibbins (1877-1956), and his brother Norman (1882-1956). They were from a Huguenot family, based in Lawrence Lane, London, overlooking the church of St Lawrence Jewry in the heart of the City; their grandfather Samuel Gibbins had been Master of the Carpenters’ Company and a Common Councillor of the City of London, working in the Guildhall. Arthur followed his father John and became an architect, but shortly before the First World War he left his young family and went to America, never to return. He had been Anglo-Catholic, but converted to Roman Catholicism before his departure. He became a US citizen and lived out the remainder of his life in California, where he spent his final years in Santa Paula playing organ, singing Gregorian chant and doing odd jobs for a convent, whose nuns looked after him. He never saw his family again.

For years Arthur had managed a remote estate in the mountains above Santa Paula, and in the first part of his life he and his father had designed and built country villas in southern England. I have a plan of one of those houses, St Mark’s Parsonage in Kemp Town, Brighton, from
The Building News
of 1 March 1889 (John George Gibbins, F.R.I.B.A., architect), showing a façade with the alternating courses of bricks and stone so characteristic of Roman construction. As an architecture student Arthur would have known of the Roman villas then being discovered and excavated in Britain. His cousin Henry de Beltgens Gibbins, an economic historian, wrote in his bestselling
Industry in Britain
(1897) about seeing traces of these villas, ‘with their Italian inner courts, colonnades and tessellated pavements’. Henry was interested in the relationship of these villas to the landscape, and Arthur may have shared that fascination too. In a fold of the Cotswold hills, not very far from Warwick School where Arthur was educated, is Chedworth - my favourite Romano-British villa - where the layout and vista from the buildings seems perfectly attuned to the landscape, outward-looking by contrast with the enclosed splendour of the great Italian houses such as the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.

Arthur’s brother Norman was a ‘wrangler’ at Cambridge University, achieving first class honours in mathematics, and later became a school headmaster, a published mathematician and a prominent figure in British chess. In 1915 he was commissioned into the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and was severely wounded near Loos on the Western Front in June of the following year. In April his battalion had been devastated by a German gas attack at Hulluch, one of the worst gas attacks of the war. During his recuperation he worked as a cipher officer in Room 108 of the War Office in London, encoding and decoding telegrams. While he was there, in January 1917, the famous Zimmerman Telegram - revealing German plans to attack America - was decoded in the nearby Room 40 of the Admiralty Building. One of the codebreakers was the Rev. William Montgomery, translator of Albert Schweitzer’s
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
(1910). Montgomery’s visit to America in my novel is fictional, though plausible given the great interest by the US in British decryption work at the time. The decoding of the Zimmerman Telegram was one of the greatest intelligence coups in history, the single act that brought the United States into the First World War.

In October 1917, Norman became a cipher officer with British Army HQ in Italy, on the front facing the Austrians, and he remained there until 1919. The other British war in the Mediterranean was against the Ottomans, culminating in General Allenby’s victorious entry into Jerusalem in December 1917. My character Everett’s activities in Jerusalem are fictional, though there had been a long tradition of British officers devoting themselves to the archaeology of the Holy Land. I myself was fortunate to spend time with the Ethiopian Coptic monks on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the days leading up to the First Gulf War, when Jerusalem was virtually empty of tourists. One day, when the Old City was in lockdown because of violence, I had the extraordinary experience of being in the church alone, and descended past the carved pilgrim crosses to the Chapel of St Helena. The ship graffito described in this novel is preserved in the Chapel of St Vartan, normally closed to visitors. The passage beyond the graffito is fictional, though there are many cisterns and unexplored spaces nearby and much still to be discovered about the site of the Holy Sepulchre in the first century AD.

 

The quote at the beginning of the book is from
Letters of the Younger Pliny
vi, 16 (trans. Betty Radice, Harvard 1969); the same source is used for quotes in Chapters 6 and 17, the latter from x, 96. In Chapter 9, the quote from the Elder Pliny’s
Natural History
is from xi, 79 (trans. John L. Healey, Penguin 1991), and in Chapter 10, from v, 70-4 (trans. H. Rackham, Harvard 1942, with place-names rendered by me in their ancient form); the discussion between Pliny and Claudius in Chapter 4 derives material from the
Natural History
too, including the account of different types of ink. In the Prologue, the line
Facilis descensus Averno
is from Virgil’s
Aeneid
(vi: 126), as is the quote in Chapter 5 (vi, 237-42, trans. H.R. Fairclough, Loeb 1916); the other Virgil quotes are from his fourth
Eclogue
, including the passage spoken by Claudius in the Epilogue (trans. H.R. Fairclough, ibid., but rendered in verse by me). The quotes from
Acts of the Apostles
, in Chapters 1, 5 and 25, and from
The Gospel of Matthew
, in Chapter 18, are from the King James Version. The
Dies Irae
is a traditional part of the Requiem Mass; the translation used here, in the Prologue - in the utterance of the Sibyl - and in Chapters 5 and 12, was made by John Adams Dix (1798-1879), American Civil War general, Governor of New York and a remarkable classicist, who preserved the trochaic metre of the medieval Latin.

In Chapter 15, the quotes from Tacitus are from
Annals
xiv, 30 (trans. John Jackson, Harvard 1937), also the source of the line of Latin read by Jack from Claudius’ fictional history, in chapter 17; from Dio Cassius his
Roman History
, lxii, 2-13 (trans. Earnest Cary and Herbert Baldwin Foster, Harvard, 1925); and from Gildas his
De Excidio Britonum
, ‘The Ruin of Britain’, 15 (trans. Michael Winterbottom, Phillimore, 1978). The ‘sacramentum gladiatorium’ is my translation of the gladiators’ oath in Petronius,
Satyricon
117.

In Chapter 2, the hieroglyphics on the Anubis statue are text from the ‘Instruction of Merikare’, an Egyptian Middle Kingdom document preserved in several eighteenth Dynasty papyri. In Chapter 7, the inscription of Piso, though fictional, is worded after an actual inscription of Piso found on the Greek island of Samothrace. In Chapter 12, the fictional inscription under the Palatine Hill, including the archaic spelling
Caisar
, is based on the inscription of Claudius on the Porta Maggiore, originally part of his aqueduct - the
aqua Claudia
- where you can still see masonry in the ‘rusticated’ style typical of Claudius. In Chapter 16, the delightful baroque prose of Sir Thomas Browne in treating the grim business of saponification and ‘body liqueur’ can be appreciated throughout his
Hydrotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse on the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk
(1658). In Chapter 20, the words of Winston Churchill are from his obituary of Harvey Augustus Butters in the
Observer
, 10 September 1916. In Chapter 21, the ‘Paternoster’ is based on an actual word-square found scratched on a second-century Roman amphora sherd from Manchester, once thought to be the earliest evidence for Christianity in Britain. In Chapter 24, the quote from Mark Twain is from his
The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim’s Progress
(San Francisco, 1870), p. 497.

DOMINE IVMIVS is the painted inscription under the St Vartan’s Chapel ship graffito in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the other inscription found there in the novel is fictional. The illustrations in the text are based on the ship graffito, still
in situ
in Jerusalem, on the Lullingstone Villa Chi-Rho mosaic and the St Mary Hinton ‘Christ’ painting - both on display in the British Museum - and on the map of Rome by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in
Antichità Romane de’tempo prima Repubblica e dei prima imperatori
(Rome, 1756), Vol. I, Pl. II. The Roman painting of Vesuvius described in Chapter 5 is from the House of the Centenary in Pompeii, and is now in the Naples Archaeological Museum. Other images, including the coins of Claudius and Herod Agrippa and finds from the Plemmirio shipwreck, can be seen on my website
www.davidgibbins.com
.