"What happened to www.dragoncourt.org?"
My personal experience of the Dragon Court on the Web.
"Truly these days everything is for sale and as a commodity, the sacred becomes profane."
---HRH Prince Nicholas de Vere, in an excerpt from his interview with Tracy Twyman.
As I mentioned in my previous article, I finally found the website and its online forum at http://www.dragoncourt.org in January 2003. I had hoped to ask Nicholas de Vere directly about the Draconic Bloodlines and their associated Lore, but alas, it seems that he had stopped communicating with the forum members by then. The site's forum was awash with rumors: mostly notably that de Vere had left, or even that he had been committed to a mental institution. I was told that the whole thing had been taken over by an individual named Tracy Twyman, editor of the Webzine Dagobert's Revenge as a moneymaking venture, and that she had obtained legal Power of Attorney over Nicholas de Vere's Dragon Court (as opposed to the Dragon Court's website, which was then being hosted and maintained by Bill Barckley.) At the time I was unable to substantiate any of this, and so I simply decided to put my two cents into the discussion threads that were going on, and to wait and see what would happen.
At that point I lamented being unable to speak with Nicholas de Vere directly, and posed my questions to others upon the forum who seemed to be knowledgeable enough to at least provide some of the answers to the questions I had. I got to know and admire Bill Barckley, the site's creator, Webmaster, and Forum Moderator.
That summer, an attempt to wrest the site from Bill commenced. This came as a great emotional blow to Bill, who was also suffering from full-blown cancer at the time. I, like many others who frequented the site's forum, was profoundly confused and upset by this turn of events. Bill quite publicly railed against what he saw as a personal betrayal on the part of Nicholas de Vere, and we later received this account of the tumultuous events from Gregory Ellison, who took over as Webmaster shortly before Bill passed away.
"Since this website began its life primarily as a vehicle for the (free) presentation of the works of Nicholas de Vere, I suppose I should state our "official" position with regard to Mr. de Vere and his works at this time ... escpecially since the commercial publication of de Vere's book has re-stimulated some controversy about him and this issue.
When Dragoncourt.org was founded, Mr. de Vere had no publisher, nor any resources to make his book and ideas available to the public. Our original webmaster, Bill Barckley, kindly offered to create this site for the purpose of freely sharing these writings with anyone interested, as was Mr. de Vere's stated intention. Accordingly, Bill, entirely at his own considerable expense in both money and work, created this domain and prepared Mr. de Vere's works for web presentation. This was a labor of love, with no commercial motivation and no compensation asked or expected, both as a personal favor to Nick and because he believed that the history of the dragon court and ideas of dragon consciousness were interesting and valuable ideas that deserved greater awareness.
The only condition Bill imposed on this work was that the works would remain free to the public rather than being sold as a commercial venture. This is not because Bill believed there is anything "wrong" with earning a fair profit on books that an author has worked hard to produce, but simply a recognition of the joint aim and agreement at the outset ... it would hardly have been fair for Bill to donate hundreds of dollars (by now thousands) of his own money, along with many hundreds of hours of his own work in paginating and producing Nick's books to be easily readable and navigable on the site, if Mr. de Vere intended to use that goodwill donation as a springboard for a commercial venture rather than the public sharing that he represented to Bill when Bill volunteered his assistance.
However, all things change, and in time Mr. de Vere found a publisher as well as other individuals (i.e., Tracy Twyman) interested in helping him promote it commercially. But since he had already agreed to make his works permanently available on this site at no charge, he thought he had a problem, believing that the FREE availability of the works here would hurt the commercial sale of his published book. (Actually, I believe that was an error in judgment ... the new book is updated and revised, and the presence of a free earlier version on the web would probably NOT have hurt its sales ... if anything it would likely have stimulated sales of the published book, as his ideas would have reached and interested more folks, many of whom would wish to own the most recent versions. However, that kind of marketing wisdom is rare, and Mr. de Vere did not take that position.)
The breaking point came when Mr. de Vere, rather than cordially speaking with Bill (who had, after all, been a great benefactor to him) about the situation, instead made other arrangements to be represented on other websites and then served Bill with legal notices DEMANDING that his works be removed from this site. Not a very friendly repayment for a great favor!
Now as it happens, under the Digital Millennium Copyright act, once permission for royalty-free web publication of a work has been given, it cannot legally be revoked. So Bill would have been perfectly within his rights to keep Mr. de Vere's books available here according to the original agreement. However, rather than go through an ugly battle about it, when the whole point to begin with had been free goodwill sharing, Bill removed Nick's works ... and that is why they are no longer on this site."
It was at this point that many of Nicholas de Vere's supporters, including some who claimed to have had direct dealings with Nicholas de Vere himself, stopped posting on the www.dragoncourt.org forum. Basically, I felt that I had a choice - should I cleave to Nicholas de Vere and Tracy Twyman, whom I did not personally know, and had never met or spoken with, even on the Internet? Or should I stick by my friends Bill and Greg, whom I did know and had come to trust implicitly? I stuck by my friends, and I do not regret my decision.
But that was not the end of it, as Gregory Ellison goes on to say;
Had that been the end of the story it wouldn't be so unusual ... disagreements happen, and people change their minds, that's just life. But it wasn't the end of the story. Shortly thereafter, it became known that Bill was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and someone in Mr. de Vere's new "camp" -- I don't know for sure if it was Nick's own idea or one of his followers - apparently decided that in his weakened condition Bill would be a helpless target for aggressive action. Through Tracy Twyman, Mr. de Vere instigated legal action to sieze this website and take its ownership away from Bill, on the harebrained legal theory that since it was originally intended to highlight Mr. de Vere's works and his version of the Dragon Court, it was therefore legally his property (even though it had been ENTIRELY paid for and developed by Bill). Needless to say, this claim had no legal merit and failed utterly.
Not to be undone by mere legalities, however, Mr. de Vere's supporters (and honestly I do not know whether with or without his blessings) undertook an aggressive attack on this website in an attempt to shut it down. This consisted of a concerted campaign to register under dozens of new fake usernames and post literally HUNDREDS of "garbage" messages to drown out any meaningful discussion. Most of these messages were simply irrelevant text, long copy-and-paste passages from other threads and third-party sources with no relevant purpose or content, and many of them were bitingly critical of this site while strongly supportive of Mr. de Vere and Ms. Twyman; but a large number of them were genuinely vile insults directed toward Bill personally ... calling him "Cancer-bag Barckley," for example, and referring to his "miserable sputum-filled existence."
That's when we were forced to make moderator approval of registration a requirement for posting on the site, thereby making it harder to use and less accessible to the general public ... but it was the only way to prevent it from being totally destroyed by aggressive "pro-de Vere" attackers."
In January, 2004 - the week after the forum raid - it came out that Tracy Twyman and Book Tree publishers were trying to put out the material that appeared in From Transylvania to Tunbridge Wells in a new book, which would be called The Dragon Legacy. It was also discovered that Tracy Twyman was on the outs with Boyd Rice, from this open letter which forum user Fleuret decided to post upon the Dragon Court site forum. Rightly or wrongly, these events poisoned the opinions of many of us against Tracy Twyman, and sealed her guilt in our minds as someone who had either beguiled or coerced Nicholas de Vere into selling out (if indeed that had not been his own intention all along) and who was attempting to turn the Lore of the Dragon Court into a moneymaking machine - and who had most likely instigated the attack against our forum.
My suspicions regarding towards Tracy Twyman and Book Tree were seemingly justified when, in the summer of 2004, I discovered that de Vere's old works, From Transylvania to Tunbridge Wells and The Ritual of the Vampire were archived on The Wayback Machine. I posted a link to these on an older version of this website, with a caveat that I while I felt that de Vere's claims were genuine, I was not as sure about Tracy Twyman and her association with him. I promptly received this email from Book Tree publishers:
"Dear Erin,
The Book Tree is the publisher of The Dragon Legacy, by Nicholas de Vere. It has been brought to our attention that you are posting copyrighted sections of the book or allowing people access to it through or sourced from an archived website. It is great that you wish to share this information, but it is a violation of copyright law and would ultimately hurt the sales of this book, which we put a lot of time and hard work into. To avoid legal action, we are requesting that you remove the link to this information.
The material was free at the time it was posted, but such an argument would never hold up, as the material is now, at this very moment in time, copyrighted, and it is now that you are choosing to use it, or allow people access through your name or company. Thank you for your understanding in this matter."
Paul Willey
The Book Tree.
Enraged, I posted a very angry diatribe against de Vere, Twyman, and Book Tree that I have since deleted (this can also probably be found on the Wayback Machine.)
Also, I would like to point out (as I have so often in the past) that I could not have been sued for posting links to material that someone else had archived. If they had such a problem with it, why didn't Book Tree go after the Wayback Machine instead, for archiving 'copyrighted' works? But no, it was easier to try and intimidate me, an individual person, rather than an entity like the Wayback Machine - and try they did. It didn't work. And now that the material has been archived on other sites as well, it appears that the point is moot, and all of their threats have come to nothing.
A few weeks after this, Nicholas de Vere's Dragon Court re-emerged on the web, renamed "The Dragon Society," with Tracy Twyman, not Nicholas de Vere - as the Grand Master. To me, this seemed to confirm the rumor that she was the one pulling the strings of the organization. Was he or was he not the Dragon King of the House of Vere, the current head of his Order? Or was someone else in charge, and was he just a figurehead - a "mascot" being used to sell books, in much the same way that Laurence Gardner seemed to be "selling" Michel Lafosse, aka "Prince Michael Stewart of Albany?" Again, we had only rumor to go on, but even the "official word" from de Vere himself (albeit via a third party) seemed to suggest that he was without regular internet access, and was probably somewhat removed from the goings-on of the online contingent of his Order.
Martin Lunn, author of The Da Vinci Code Decoded created a new website and forum to promote The Dragon Legacy, at http://www.thedragonsociety.com. Although I had no desire to join the Dragon Society (and felt certain that I'd be rebuffed in any case) I heard nothing but good things about Mr. Lunn from the original www.dragoncourt.org forum members who did join.
But what put me off from the moment I first visited the Dragon Society site was the announcement that "We are offering free membership of the Society to the first suitable 100 applicants." To me, this implied that all other applications after the first hundred would not be free - in other words, anyone could join as long as they could pay the price tag.
This was especially confusing to me, since all along Nicholas de Vere's most fervent assertion was that the Dragon Court was a "closed fraternity" and that only "those of the blood" could join, and that the "kinship within the Bloodline could never be bought or sold, like the fake titles of the 'Tinker Nobility'" (Nicholas de Vere's name for the merchant-class dynasties who were elevated to power by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, in an attempt to displace what he claims were the rightful Elven Kings and Queens of old.) After all, it was Nicholas de Vere who'd made such a big deal about "Which Court had a price tag attached.".
Seen in this light, de Vere's claims that the true Dragon Court and order was and still is a closed fraternity, and his ranting about "New Age Gurus" (whom he claimed would attempt to create a fake pseudo-religion out of the whole thing in order to cash in on the Grail Hype) could be perceived by the more cynicially-minded as a clever "hook." Tell people that it is a closed, elite society and there is absolutely no way for anyone not of the blood to "buy their way in," and they'll be all the more desperate to do just that if given half the chance.
Even more perplexing, it appeared that there was actually "Dragon Society Swag" for sale on the new site ("Come Visit Our Shop!") trinkets like mugs, ball caps, keychains, and mouse pads! This seemed to run sharply counter to de Vere's frequent criticisms of the rampant capitalist-consumerist behavior of the "Tinker Nobility" and their attempts to market nearly everything under the sun to modern "mundane" humanity as a whole. Part of me still wonders if that part was all some kind of joke.
Nicholas de Vere's and Tracy Twyman's supporters may be wondering who died and appointed me the "Integrity Police." Simply put, the whole fiasco left me feeling very angry, wary, and disillusioned. Yes, if it's de Vere's family history, he can publish it in any way that he likes. Yes, I realize that decent websites take money to host and maintain, as I learned myself during the time I was involved with dragoncourt.org as the forum moderator. What I primarily took issue with was the de Vere/Twyman camp's treatment of Bill Barckley, and their subsequent threats and attacks upon anyone who was trying to spread the word about the Draconic Bloodlines without Official Sanction from Tracy Twyman and the Book Tree publishing company - presumably so that they could then claim to be the "only source" of information on the subject.
One cannot deny that Tracy Twyman has done a great deal to further the progress of the "Arcadian Zeitgeist" as she calls it - public consciousness of the Grail bloodlines and the mysticism surrounding these families. I think it would have been more constructive, and more helpful to the sales of The Dragon Legacy, if Tracy Twyman had made more of an attempt to win over the diehards of the original Dragon Court website and forum. But instead, it seems that her goal has been to alienate us as much as possible - and I can only assume that this, more than any linking to the Wayback Machine, has hurt the sales of their book. Threatening one's target audience is generally bad for business. I did eventually buy The Dragon Legacy, though I made a point of buying it used.
When Gregory Ellison himself passed away in late 2004 from a heart condition, the administration of the www.dragoncourt.org site changed hands. Maria Barron presided as the Webmistress until December 2005, when the site was shut down due her lack of time, funding, and her lack of interest in the subject matter expressed on the site (she had only taken it on as a favor to Greg Ellison.) It is currently changing hands once again. Only time will tell if the site will once again serve as a repository of the Lore of the Draconic Bloodlines on the Web.
The site at http://www.thedragonsociety.com was never completed, and it folded when Martin Lunn passed away from cancer in 2005. It, too can be found on the Wayback Machine.
What disturbs me the most are the rumors that Nicholas de Vere may be completely detached from the doings of those who claim to represent him, perhaps as much so as to be completely ignorant of the attacks, threats, and attempts at intimidation against the late Bill Barckley and the users of the forum on the original Dragon Court website that were supposedly made on his behalf. However, the idea that he, the supposed Guardian of the secrets of the Draconic Bloodlines, might be endorsing or even participating in such behavior would be even more disturbing. Again, I have never learned the truth, one way or another - though I have repeatedly heard rumors over the past three years that he has been without regular internet access.
Nicholas de Vere was supposed to have embarked upon a lecture tour in early 2005, but it was canceled. A few of the remaining www.dragoncourt.org forum diehards who did correspond directly with Nicholas de Vere in 2000 and 2001 informed me that they have not heard from him since 2002, and that his recent press releases and interviews on the web (i.e. at Tracy Twyman and Brian Albert's site at http://www.nicholasdevere.com/) "don't sound like him," again suggesting that he is somehow "out of the loop" and might not even be aware of what is being done in his name. Rumors persist that he is actually "Tom Weir," though the Scottish Clan Weir/Clan de Vere connection has been firmly established, and as such would not necessarily cast doubt upon the claims he has made in his written works.
In September 2006, I received an anonymous email from someone who claims to have spoken with Nicholas de Vere personally, and that he is alive and well, but without internet connection. However, anyone with any information at all regarding Nicholas de Vere is certainly welcome to contact me if they are inclined to do so.