London is more than a setting in the novel’s secret history: it is the imagined headquarters of an English Templar-Rosicrucian succession, a place where calendar reform, occult scholarship, courtly spectacle, literary authorship, and later fraternal institutions are made to converge. The narrative’s claims about this history are speculative constructions, but their repeated return to London gives the city a role as both supposed center of coordination and archive of unfinished schemes.

Dee and the English succession

The account begins with the English Templars’ alleged meeting with the Portuguese in 1464. The conspiratorial reconstruction treats the subsequent “cabalistic fervor” in the British Isles as the result of knowledge acquired at that encounter, then assigns John Dee the role of leader in a renewed magical and Hermetic movement. His collection of four thousand volumes is described as a library in the spirit of the Templars of Provins, while his Monas Hieroglyphica is linked to the Tabula smaragdina. These details make London’s intellectual history appear to carry a hidden inheritance, even as the narrative offers no independent proof for that lineage.

Around 1584, Dee was tasked with studying reform of the Julian calendar. In the Plan’s account, his reading of Trithemius’s Steganographia and his astronomical expertise lead him to recognize that an earlier meeting had failed because of a calendrical error. He then turns to the Gregorian reform in an attempt to rectify the mistake, but realizes that it is too late to identify whom he should contact in France. London is thus linked not just to occult learning but to a missed appointment: accumulated knowledge cannot undo a failure of timing.

Dee’s contacts instead draw him toward Central Europe. He travels to Prague, where he meets Heinrich Khunrath, whose allegorical plates are said to have influenced Johann Valentin Andreae and the Rosicrucian manifestos. The narrative leaves Dee’s relationships there uncertain and describes him as dying in 1608, remorseful over an error he could not repair. His departure creates the opening for the next figure in the supposed succession: Francis Bacon, presented as the person at work in London after Dee.

Bacon, the court, and literary authorship

Bacon’s supposed role is built through implication. The narrative acknowledges that he did not, strictly speaking, name the Rosicrucians in New Atlantis; it argues instead that John Heydon’s rewriting of that work as The Holy Land, which inserted the Rosicrucians, makes the distinction immaterial to the Plan. Discretion itself becomes evidence: what Bacon did not say is treated as what he meant to say. This is one of the reconstruction’s characteristic moves, turning absence into confirmation.

In 1613, the marriage of Elizabeth, daughter of James I, to Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, is interpreted as an effort to strengthen relations between English and German circles. The move from Prague to Heidelberg after Rudolf II’s death supplies a new geographical focus, while the wedding festivities in London become a public performance of supposed secret continuity. Bacon is cast as the impresario of those festivities, which include an allegory of mystical knighthood and knights appearing on a hill. The spectacle is read as proof that he has succeeded Dee as grand master of an English Templar group.

The same logic turns toward Shakespeare. Belbo jokingly extends the theory by proposing that, if Bacon authored Shakespeare’s plays, the complete works must also speak of the Plan; he points to Saint John’s Eve and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, only to be corrected that June 23 is not midsummer. The exchange exposes how readily a date or literary reference can be recruited into the theory, while the correction shows that the details do not always fit neatly.

A later first-person account attributed to Edward Kelley sharpens this literary conspiracy into personal grievance. Back in London, Dee tells Kelley to write something insinuating about their rivals for William. Kelley says that William altered the text, shifting its setting from Prague to Venice, and that Dee flew into a rage. The narrative then claims that William received Kelley’s finest sonnets one by one, while asking him about the Dark Lady; Kelley interprets this as William seeking her on Bacon’s behalf. Kelley finally refuses to continue building William’s glory in the shadows. William replies that he cannot write for himself because another person will not let him. The episode turns the alleged hidden network into a struggle over authorship, credit, and whose words become public.

From secret circles to institutions

London returns in the chronology as the birthplace of institutions that the Plan presents as successive forms of an occult inheritance. In 1645, Ashmole founds the Invisible College, described as Rosicrucian in inspiration. In 1660, the Royal Society is said to emerge from the College, and Freemasonry from the Royal Society. This compressed sequence gives the city an institutional afterlife: what begins as a concealed intellectual circle appears to become visible through learned society and fraternal organization.

The chronology continues with the creation of the Great Lodge in London in 1717. Anderson drafts the constitutions of English Masonry in 1721, the same year in which Peter the Great, initiated in London, is said to found a lodge in Russia. These entries make London not only a source of organizations but a point from which the narrative imagines their spread. Yet the chronology also records divergence: Ramsay asserts a Templar origin for Masonry in 1737, and the Scottish rite that follows is described as coming into conflict with the Great Lodge of London. The supposed succession therefore produces rival institutions as well as continuity.

The pendulum and the long calculation

London’s secret history is also connected to a practical problem: how to turn a pendulum into a sufficiently precise instrument. The narrator’s account says that the English and Portuguese held the first two pieces of the message and probably understood them to refer to a pendulum, but early ideas about pendulums were too vague for the purpose. Swinging a weight on a cord was not the same as constructing a mechanism that could be struck by a sunbeam at an exact time and place. The Templars, in this telling, needed six centuries of calculation; the Baconian wing began working immediately and tried desperately to reach the other initiates.

The scientific history that follows is folded into this imagined effort. Salomon de Caus, identified as the Rosicrucians’ man, writes a treatise on solar clocks for Richelieu. Research into pendulums accelerates from Galileo onward, ostensibly to determine longitude. In 1681, Christiaan Huygens finds that a pendulum accurate in Paris runs slow in Cayenne and recognizes that the difference results from variation in centrifugal force caused by Earth’s rotation. After publishing Horologium Oscillatorium, which develops Galileo’s ideas about the pendulum, Huygens is summoned to Paris by Colbert, the same minister who had summoned Salomon de Caus to work on tunnels beneath the city. The narrative makes these separate commissions look like connected stages in a hidden technical history.

A further episode links early experimental science to political suspicion. In 1661, the Accademia del Cimento anticipates conclusions associated with Foucault, but Leopold of Tuscany dissolves it within five years and soon receives a cardinal’s hat from Rome, described as a secret reward. London itself is not the site of this episode; its significance lies in the city’s place within the broader web the Plan constructs, one that joins instrument-making, learned societies, religious authority, and concealed purpose. Across these strands, London serves as the imagined hinge between private knowledge and public institutions, while the narrative’s accumulating connections also reveal how easily chronology and coincidence can be made to resemble proof.