Henry Jones, Sr

Henry Walton Jones, Sr. (December 12, 1872-December 26, 1951) was a Scottish-American archaeologist, academic and author active from 1905 to his death in 1951. Jones was born in Edinburgh in 1872, the child of working-class parents. Jones' father Rober Edwin Jones was a member of the Watchers Council, occupying a key leadership position within the Council and playing a direct role in the Council's efforts to combat infamously brutal vampires such as Angelus and Lord Ruthven who posed threats to 19th century Europe. The young Henry was originally not aware of his father's activities, but in 1889 his father would be murdered by the vampiric Dio Brando along with many other members of that period's Council as part of his efforts to eliminate threats to his plans. Henry would be subsequently allowed to take his father's place within the Council and gain access to the materials within it. This sparked Jones to take an active interest in supernatural phenomena and the occult alongside his preexisting interest in archaeology and medieval studies. This overlapping interest led Jones to initially develop a strong interest in the history of King Arthur of Britain, writing hs thesis on the subject.

Shortly after completing his college education, Jones would be appointed a professor of Medieval Literature and Archaeology at Princeton University. In this role, Jones would have a robust academic career, mentoring a generation of archaeologists and medieval scholars such as Emily Sands and Sven Nelson. Jones' personal life also thrived in this time, as he got married to his wife Anna and had a son, whom he named Henry Walton Jones, Jr. Jones would, in 1905, earn widespread recognition for his medieval scholarship, which led to him getting the opportunity to carry out a worldwide lecture tour he brought his family along for. During this time, Jones would also as a secondary goal engage in collaboration with groups possessing similar interests and goals as the Council, including the Magnus Institute, Warehouse 12, the Tsars' Seers, and the Demon Slayer Corps. The Jones family would become personally acquainted with many prominent individuals not only in the world of history and archaeology, but in literature, politics and military fields as well. During this tour, Jones was approached the Duke of Oxford who invited him to join an intelligence agency he dubbed Kingsman, but the academic declined to participate in the endeavour, instead preferring to focus on his academic and supernatural research.

In 1907, Jones' university friend Marcus Brody invited him to join a League of Archaeologists, consisting of Jones, Brody, Emily Sands, Macrus Scarman, Sven Nelson ans Takeo Yamatone. Despite a promising start, the League never really lived up to it's promise, repeatedly having to put it's activities on hold for various reasons and largely failing to make any discoveries of note. It was during this time that saw Jones become most fascinated by the topic that would consume the bulk of his later career–the Holy Grail.

Jones becoming so obsessed with the Grail was almost accidental. During a leg of his lecture tour, shortly before the death of his wife in 1912, Jones personally met one of his key funders, the eccentric Preston Whitmore. Whitmore had long been fascinated by the possibility of hidden artifacts, civilisations and locations existing on Earth and wished to discover whether or not they existed. Whitmore had backed the first follow-up expeditions to Maple White Land after the return of George Challenger, funded the team that discovered the ruins of the city of El Dorado by decoding a cipher in the journal of a Spaniard named Tulio and had been a key financial backer of Lord Blackwood's many hunts for cryptids such as Mokele-Mbembe and the bunyip. Whitmore approached Jones with a number of documents pertaining to the alleged origins and movements of the Grail. While initially sceptical, as Jones consulted the materials he became increasingly convinced that the Holy Grail was not only real, but could be found. This obsessive search for the Grail began to build a rift with his son, as Anna died shortly after Jones began his research into the Grail and he subsequently largely ignored his son. The seeming last straw for their relationship was the younger Jones enlisting in the Belgian Army during World War I against his father's wishes, causing the two to sever most contact for quite some time to come.

Jones' research into the Holy Grail over the next several years alienated him from the mainstream archaeological community and even left him somewhat estranged from his fellow members of the Watchers Council, who viewed Jones' belief the Grail could be a boon to their cause as borderline delusional. However, Jones made major strides in his research into the Grail–for one thing, he discovered that some references to the 'Holy Grail' referred to descendants of Jesus decades before Robert Langdon made the same discovery. Jones also uncovered that the early Christians had a former slave named Basil cloak the goblet in a covering to make it harder to find and further Christ's reputation for humility. Moreover, Jones was able to trace the custody of the Grail, beginning with the knight Sir Percival who took it on behalf of Camelot from the Fisher King. There, the wizard Merlin helped create several replicas of it in a bid to make it harder to find. The true Holy Grail was returned to the Holy Land, where it remained until the Knights Templar seized it during the Crusades. The Templars fought with the Satan-worshipping Iscarian sect over the Grail's custody before taking it to Paris, only for the collapse of the Templars (largely orchestrated by the far-older Templar Order that had worked behind them until determining they had outlived their usefulness) to see a small group of knights reunite and take the Grail to a secure location, which is where the trail went cold. Reports of successful searches for the Grail during the Hundred-Years War, the Thirty Years War and in an English monastery in 1922 proved to be dead ends. Jones remained undeterred, however. He would spend the bulk of the 1920's and 1930's hunting for the Holy Grail, examining numerous shreds of evidence.

In the process, however, Jones attracted enemies. His neglect of his duties to the Watcher's Council led to his expulsion from the group in 1926, which additionally left him vulnerable to potential enemies. The dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald, while not obsessively preoccupied with the Grail legend, believed possessing it might help him secure rule over the non-magical world and grant him greater legitimacy and ordered his Storm Wizards to capture and interrogate Jones in 1929. Jones was able to evade capture by the Storm Wizards thanks to a warning provided by the White Council, who offered protection in exchange for what information he had. The White Council's own hunt for the Holy Grail would lead them to one of the relic's enchanted replicas, which was later seized by the Greek god Hades. It was not just wizards who went after Jones, however. The vampire Baron Afanas tasked his acolytes in America with capturing Jones, killing him and seizing his papers. This effort failed largely due to the indifference of the vampires involved in achieving the Baron's goals of domination and it is not clear if any of them actually encountered Jones in person. The efforts by the Volturi to do so, on the other hand, proved more serious. Jones spent much of the early 1930's on the run from the Volturi's vampiric assassins, whom were only stopped when another Grail seeker's forces intervened: Ra's Al Ghul. Ra's had members of his League of Assassins dispatch the vampires and offered to protect Jones if he agreed to hand the Grail over to him. While not needing the supposed immortality it provided owing to his own Lazarus Pit, Ra's wanted a backup option in case the location was destroyed or seized by his enemies. Jones reluctantly agreed to let Ra's copy down his notes, but purposely concealed the more elaborate information in his personal journal from him.

By the mid-1930's, Jones' hunt for the Grail was running on fumes. The man was spending half his time on the run, propped up only by financial support provided by Walter Donovan, the executor of Whitmore's estate, and Jones' own cunning and guile. The rise of Adenoid Hynkel's Nazi Party in Germany only put more pressure on Jones. While some Nazis like Johann Schmidt and Frederick Vought dismissed the supernatural as useless superstition, the likes of Heinrich Himmler were deeply invested in the occult. Himmler was closely aligned to William de Lecce, who helped him set up Sonderkommando Thule, Millennium and Operation Jotunheim, among many larger projects. In addition, Himmler encourages Hynkel to dispatch operatives to uncover supernatural artifacts to aid Germany. The biggest triumph in these efforts was in 1935, when Colonel Karel Strucker acquired the Spear of Destiny, which while not militarily significant on its own had the ability to prevent superhumans from entering German soil directly, which would prove quite useful when the Justice Society of America and Defenders first began making their debuts. Emboldened, Hynkel and Himmler eagerly signed off on Arnold Toht's plan to find the Ark of the Covenant, which ended in disaster for the Nazis when the Ark was opened and all German operatives on the scene (as well as French collaborator archaeologist Rene Belloq) were destroyed. Jones' estranged son was closely involved in this event, taking the Ark into American custody afterwards, which helped draw the Nazis to his father. Jones, Sr.-by this point moving from place to place regularly not only to hunt for clues to the Grail's location, but to avoid assassins–was in Europe at this time, which made it possible for the Germans to detain him.

Jones was freed from captivity by his son, whom he worked with to secure the Grail from capture by the Nazis. In the end, Jones' work paid off as the location of the Grail was discovered–but none were to walk away with the sacred object as, while Jones, Sr. was able to make use of the Grail to survive an otherwise-fatal injury, the site the artifact was contained in would be destroyed and the Grail itself lost. While some have speculated the Grail was not truly lost (claims have been made it reappeared in New York City in 1991 or Ethiopia in 1975), it was enough to close out Henry Jones, Sr.'s work with the object. Jones would return to academia full-time with a more positive relationship with his son. Jones would cover much of the teaching his son was meant to do while Henry, Jr. was active as an OSS operative during the Second World War. In the postwar era, Jones' academic reputation experienced something of a revival as a result of him returning to his earlier work on chivalry and medieval studies. Jones would occasionally be consulted by US government agencies such as the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense and the Federal Bureau of Control. There are rumours that Jones was offered a position as the Librarian presiding over a local iteration of the Wanderer's Library at the Metropolitan Public Library, but if true, the elderly Jones declined to do so. Jones would pass away in 1951 at the age of 79, with most of his personal papers being donated to Princeton University or inherited by his son, though rumours that the Watcher's Council and BPRD confiscated a number of them before the transfer was made continue to circulate. Many of Jones' students, as well as his son, would play key roles in shaping archaeology to the present day, with Lara Croft famously identifying him as 'the grandfather or archaeology' in her memoirs. Archaeologists including Evey O'Connell, North Dakota Jones, Janice Covington and Trevor Bruttenholm were all influenced by Jones.