King's College

King's College, established by King George IV in 1829, houses its Department of Theology and Religious Studies adjacent to Parliament on property granted by the Crown. The college's Research Institute in Systematic Theology, founded in 1982, possesses one of the most complete and electronically advanced religious research libraries in the world, a resource that becomes critical to Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu during their flight from the French police.

Role in the Grail Quest

After escaping from the Temple Church and the betrayal of Sir Leigh Teabing, Langdon and Sophie take the London Underground to King's College. Langdon had heard of the college's renowned electronic theological database, which he describes as "the ultimate research tool" capable of providing instant answers to any religious historical question. The primary research room is a dramatic octagonal chamber dominated by an enormous round table surrounded by twelve flat-screen computer workstations. There, they meet reference librarian Pamela Gettum, who recognizes Langdon immediately. Gettum explains that the library's services are normally by petition and appointment only, but she agrees to help them after learning they are friends of Sir Leigh Teabing, whom she describes as a "regular Don Quixote" for his obsessive Grail searches.

The Database Search

Langdon and Sophie present Gettum with only the first two lines of Saunière's poem—"In London lies a knight a Pope interred / His labor's fruit a Holy wrath incurred"—as a security precaution, employing what Sophie calls "compartmentalized cryptography." Gettum uses the college's optical character recognition software and linguistic translation devices to search the digitized collection of religious texts, encyclopedias, sacred scriptures, and Vatican documents. An initial Boolean search for "LONDON, KNIGHT, POPE" returns an estimated 2,692 hits, including irrelevant references to the eighteenth-century writer Alexander Pope. After Sophie reveals the poem's final two lines mentioning "Rosy flesh and seeded womb," Gettum refines the search with Grail-related keywords and proximity parameters, correctly deducing they are on a Grail quest. The search ultimately identifies Sir Isaac Newton as the knight, with the crucial detail that his funeral was presided over by Alexander Pope—revealing the double meaning of "a Pope interred." This discovery leads Langdon and Sophie to Westminster Abbey and Newton's tomb, where the password "APPLE" unlocks the second cryptex.