Two disputes. In one, two men are suing the author Dan Brown for plagiarism over his blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. In another, a Californian named Paul FitzGerald declares that he is rightfully the Duke of Leinster, being descended from Lord Desmond FitzGerald, who hitherto was believed to have been killed with the Irish Guards in the first World War, writes Kevin Myers.
Paul FitzGerald's 80-year-old aunt Theresa Caudhill insists that she is the daughter of Lord Desmond, who, she says, had joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood in his teens, and was spirited from the trenches by the IRB and whisked off to safety in America.
Well, actually not quite from the trenches. Major Lord Desmond FitzGerald, second in command of the 1st Irish Guards, was fatally wounded during grenade practice on the beach at Calais in March, 1916 - but no doubt the IRB feigned his death. That being the case, it was jolly sporting of the English priest Father Lane-Fox, the high-born Catholic chaplain, to go along with the prank by actually losing an eye and some fingers to the same explosion. Oh yes, and Lieut CER Hanbury, who was wounded in the hand and leg, and who was later killed in action. Not forgetting Lieut T Nugent, whose liver was peppered with shrapnel. IRB to a man.
No doubt the long hand of the IRB reached into Millicent Sutherland (No. 9 Red Cross) Hospital to get the doctor to forge Desmond's death certificate there. And also to persuade the grave-diggers of Calais Southern Cemetery to prepare a place for the non-existent body, where in Plot A, Row 5, a gravestone marks the little jape to this day.
For, of course, the officers of the 1st battalion, the Irish Guards, almost to a man were members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Their cell leader, Rufus Twistleton-Twistleton-Trefusis-Twistleton, had been sworn into the brotherhood at Eton. He was so named because three of his grandparents were siblings: the fourth was their cousin, Nellie Twistleton-Trefusis.
This managed to keep the estates in the family, and also explained why Rufus had three nostrils. It was also possibly the reason why he was able to change his name after the war to Rufa, with no question asked. She briefly founded the Irish Republican Sisterhood with Constance Markievicz, with whom her relationship could be said to have been a knee-tremble or two short of platonic. Rufa spent her declining years engaging in republican embroidery and died, aged 102, in an attack on Crossmaglen barracks in the early 1990s.
Rufus's fag at Eton had been Paget Plantagenet O'Brien Paget, who had inherited Donegal on his 10th birthday. He had been sworn into the IRB while fagging for Rufus: it is difficult to recite the IRB oath into a pillow, but Paget was made of stout Plantagenet-O'Brien-Paget stuff, and managed it nonetheless, with Rufus pantingly helping out with the wording from behind whenever Paget found the proceedings a little trying.
Another doughty IRB man in the 1st Irish Guards was 2nd Lieutenant Tarquin de Montmorency O'Conor de Brun, who came from a deeply impoverished family of Norman Gaels who had drunk deep of the cup of poverty. Eight centuries of oppression had left them with barely more than Leitrim and a few wet bits of Fermanagh, also known as Lough Erne. This chronic penury caused Tarquin to question the very political system which made such injustice possible. Even when he inherited Dundalk on his 21st birthday, the republican spirit burned inside him still. He was sworn into the IRB while at Sandhurst by the commandant, Lieut Gen Marmaduke Hepburn-Stuart-King-Porridge, in the course of that ancient British military ritual, the parting of the tunic-tails.
So, far from Lord Desmond FitzGerald, heir to the Duchy of Leinster and senior magnate of the Irish aristocracy, being alone in his membership of the IRB in the officers' mess of the Irish Guards, he was merely one of many. If you care to make it that way.
And that is the key to confections as trivial as that of the claimant to the Duchy of Leinster and as profitable as the "novel" The Da Vinci Code. What you need to believe is what makes you believe. If you want Mary Magdalene to have borne Jesus's child and to have gone to France, who is to stop you, if Desmond FitzGerald can be similarly translated from death in France to life in California? After all, few deaths in the first World War have been quite so thoroughly attested to as Desmond FitzGerald's. He didn't vanish mysteriously on the battlefield, but on a beach in Calais, surrounded by the cream of English and Anglo-Irish society. Yet into this irreproachable establishment setting has been inserted an IRB conspiracy, which some people now apparently believe.
And that's the wonderful thing about a secret conspiracy. Anyone can be said to be part of it, no matter how implausibly. You cannot prove a negative. You cannot prove that Mary Magdalene did not marry Jesus and bear his child. You cannot prove that she did not emigrate to France and found the Rosicrucian Order, or the Knights Templar. You cannot prove that the Catholic Church is not covering up the origins of European Christianity. You cannot prove that Paul FitzGerald is not the true Duke of Leinster. Yet what both tales have in common is the IRB thread. Forty million people have bought The Da Vinci Code. They can all honestly say they subscribe to the IRB theory: I Read Bilge.