Green Stone

During the opening years of the seventeenth century, Europe was gripped by Reformation and Counter-Reformation, when Catholics and Protestants persecuted one another with equal fervour. England was ruled by a Protestant regime, and in 1605 a group of oppressed Catholic landowners hatched a plot to kill the king, James I, during the state opening of parliament on 5 November. The plan, conceived by the Midland Catholics Robert Catesby and Thomas Wyntour, was to blow up the Houses of Parliament with dozens of barrels of gunpowder. Known as the Gunpowder Plot, it was thwarted at the last moment when conspirator Guy Fawkes was discovered nervously waiting to light the fuse. When Fawkes was tortured into revealing the names of the other plotters, the small band of conspirators fled to the Wyntour family home at Huddington Court in Worcestershire. Here they spent their last night, fleeing only a few miles the next day before being surrounded by the militia.

But this was not the end of the affair. The king's chief minister, Robert Cecil, had given strict instructions that Robert Catesby should be taken alive. The reason being, that he possessed a sacred relic - a green, jade gemstone called the Meonia Stone. Tradition held that it had once been set in King Arthur's sword Excalibur. Historically, it had belonged to Mary Queen of Scots, the last legitimate Catholic heir to the English throne. Following her death in 1587, a legend had developed that the Catholic who would finally secure the English throne would need to possess the sacred stone. Fearing that the Meonia Stone would act as a rallying symbol for the English Catholics, Cecil was determined that it should be destroyed. He was furious, however, to discover that Robert Catesby had been shot dead and the knowledge of the stone's whereabouts had died with him. Despite months of frantic searching and intense interrogation of the surviving conspirators, the stone was never found. Three centuries later, in 1979, Graham Phillip's and fellow researcher Andrew Collins decided to go in search of the lost Meonia Stone. The Green Stone, co-authored by Martin Keatman, is the remarkable true story of this fascinating quest.

Following a trail of historical clues, Graham and Andrew finally discovered the identity of the person to whom the stone was given. During their interrogation, the surviving Gunpowder Plotters had stated that Robert Catesby still had the stone with him the night before his death. As he no longer had it when he died, it seemed that the only place he could have secured the relic's safety was at Huddington Court. As the other plotters appear to have had no knowledge of its whereabouts, there seemed only one person to whom it could have been passed - Thomas Wyntour's sister-in-law Lady Gertude. The servants having been dismissed when the conspirators arrived, Gertrude was the only person to have spent that last fated night with the Gunpowder Plotters. Cecil himself had suspected that she may have been given the relic, but he had been unable to properly interrogate her because the king had forbidden the torture of titled women. Instead, she was placed under house arrest for many years.

The passage of time was to reveal something that Cecil could not have known. According to Lady Wyntour's own secret writings made during her imprisonment, which still survive with her descendants, a few hours before her arrest she had received a visitor - one Humphrey Packington of nearby Harvington Hall. Although they found no reference anywhere to the Meonia Stone, Graham and Andrew could not help but wonder if Packington had been the one for whom the stone was intended. Although he was never implicated in the Gunpowder Plot, Packington had been a devout Catholic. Moreover, he was distantly related to the late Mary Queen of Scots and