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\\\THE TEMPLE AND THE LODGE
MICHAEL BAIGENT AND RICHARD LEIGH
THREE
The Origins of Freemasonry
13
The Masonic Jacobite Cause
While Grand Lodge was thriving, pro- Jacobite lodges in England were driven increasingly underground. Some certainly persisted, particularly in the nor th- east, around Newcastle and the Radclyffe family estates at Derwentwater ; but the prevailing climate afforded them little latitude for expansion or development. The same obtained for Scotland, where much evidence pertaining to Freemasonry between 1689 and 1745 was lost, deliberately or otherwise, in the tumult of events. Ireland, however , was a different matter .
As early as 1688, Freemasonry was well- known in Ireland. In that year , a Dublin orator , seeking to capture the attention of his audience, did so by referring to a man ‘ being Freemasonized the new way’ – implying, of course, that there was also an ‘ old way’ . In the same year , there was a minor scandal when a notorious individual named Ridley, known as an anti- Catholic spy and informer , was found dead with what was referred to as a ‘ Mason’ s Mark’ upon his body – though there is no indication of what this ‘ Mark’ was, how it was affixed or imprinted, or whether it had anything at all to do with his death.
Documentation on the early history of Grand Lodge of Ireland is patchy, all minute books prior to 1780 having been lost, and all records prior to 1760. Whatever information can be obtained derives from external sources, such as newspaper reports and letters. The evidence available indicates that Irish Grand Lodge was formed around 1723 or 1724, six or seven years after its English rival. The first Grand Master was the Duke of Montague, who, in 1721, had presided over Grand Lodge of England. Montague was a godson of George I and staunchly pro- Hanoverian. Not surprisingly, given the depth and pervasiveness of Stuart allegiances in Ireland, he got up numerous noses, and Irish Grand Lodge was plagued by internal squabbles. Between 1725 and 1731, there is a total lacuna in its history, and later commentators have concluded it must have been hopelessly split between Hanoverian suppor ter s and Jacobites.
In March 1731, there appears to have been some consolidation under the Grand Mastership of the Earl of Ross. A month later , Ross was succeeded by James, Lord Kingston. He, too, in 1728, had presided over the Grand Lodge of England but af ter 1730, when English Grand Lodge ratified certain unspecified changes, ‘ confined his zeal to Irish Freemasonry’ .
Kingston was to personify the orientation of Irish Grand Lodge. He had a Jacobite past and came from a Jacobite family. His father had been a courtier to James II and had followed the deposed king into exile, returning to Ireland in 1693 to be first pardoned, later ar rested and charged with recruiting military personnel for the Stuart cause. In 1722, Kingston himself had incurred similar accusations.
Irish Grand Lodge was thus to remain a repository for aspects of Freemasonry which the Grand Lodge of England repudiated or disowned. And it was to the Freemasonry of Irish Grand Lodge that the numerous British regiments passing through Ireland or stationed there in garrison were to be exposed. When the network of regimental field lodges began to proliferate through the British Army, most of them, at least initially, were warranted by Irish Grand Lodge. This was to be immensely important, but its effects were not to become apparent for another quarter of a century.
In the mean time, the original mainstream of Freemasonry had moved with the exiled Stuarts to the Continent. It was in France, in the period immediately prior to 1745, that the most consequential developments were to occur . And it was in France that Jacobite Freemasonry was to become integrated – or perhaps re- integrated – with the old Templar heritage.
The Earliest Lodges
Freemasonry seems to have come to France with contingents of the defeated Jacobite army between 1688 and 1691. According to one eighteenth- century account, the first lodge in France dates from 25 March 1688, and was established by an infantry regiment, the Royal Irish, which had been formed by Charles II in 1661, had accompanied him to England on his restoration and had then gone into exile again with James II. Subsequently, in the eighteenth century, this unit came to be known as the ‘ Regiment d’ Infantrie Walsh’ after its commanding officer . The Waishes were a prominent family of exiled Irish shipowners. One member of the family, Captain James Walsh, provided the ship which car r ied James II to safety in France. Later , Walsh and his kinsmen founded a major shipbuilding concern at St Mâlo, which specialised in furnishing the French navy with warships. At the same time, they remained fervently loyal to the Jacobite cause. Two generations later , Walsh’s grandson, Anthony Vincent Walsh, together with Dominic O’ Heguer ty, another influential merchant and shipowner , was to provide the vessels on which Charles Edward Stuart launched his invasion of England. In recognition of this service, Anthony Walsh was created an earl by the exiled Stuarts and his title was officially recognised by the French government.
In France, the Irish military men responsible for the transplantation of Freemasonry moved, naturally enough, in the same circles as pro- Stuart refugees from Scotland – such as David Grahame, the brother of John Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, alleged to have been found after Killiecrankie with a Templar cross. If Freemasonry had previously, for a time, lost contact with the skein of Templar tradition, that contact was re- established in France during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. And France was to provide fertile soil for both Freemasonry and the Templar mystique.
In many respects, it had been a Frenchman, René Descartes, who, early in the seventeenth century, first embodied what was to become the prevailing mentality of the eighteenth. In France, however , the combined pressures of Church and state had proved inimical, and the impetus of Cartesian thought had passed to England, where it manifested itself through men such as Locke, Boyle, Hume and Newton, as well as through such institutions as the Royal Society and Freemasonry itself . It was therefore to England that progressive-minded French thinkers, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire, looked for new ideas. They and their countrymen were to prove particularly receptive to Freemasonry.
But if Freemasonry first came to France in 1688, some thirty- five years were to elapse before the first authoritatively documented native French lodge was established. This was formed in 1725 according to most sources, in 1726 according to one other which may be more reliable. Its primary founder was Charles Radclyffe, Earl of Derwentwater , whose elder brother , James, had been executed for his part in the 1715 rebellion. Radclyffe’ s co- founders included Sir James Hector MacLean, chief of the MacLean clan; Dominic O’ Heguerty, the wealthy expatr iate merchant and shipowner who, along with Anthony Walsh, provided vessels for Charles Edward Stuart’s expedition in 1745; and an obscure man, said to be a restaurateur , whose name appears on surviving documents as ‘ Hure’ or ‘ Hurc’ . One writer has persuasively argued that this may be a corruption of ‘ Hurry’ . Sir John Hurry had been beheaded at Edinburgh in 1650 f or his loyalty to the Stuarts. His family had remained militantly Jacobite and were ennobled by Charles II; and it may well have been one of his exiled children or grandchildren who, together with Radclyffe, MacLean and O’ Heguer ty, established the first French lodge.
By 1729, French lodges were already proliferating within the framework of specifically Jacobite Freemasonry. Not to be outdone by the ‘ competition’ , the Grand Lodge of England began, in that year , to establish its own affiliated lodges in France. For a time, the two separate systems of Freemasonry pur sued parallel and rival courses of development. Although it never managed to impose a monopoly, the Jacobite system gradually gained the ascendancy. Out of it there eventually evolved, in 1773, the most important Freemasonic body in France, the Grand Orient.
One of the most prominent Jacobite lodges in France was the Lodge de Bussy. The street in which this lodge was situated, the rue de Bussy (now the rue de Buci), ran directly into the square in front of St Germain des Prés. The other street running into the square was the rue de Boucheries, where the lodge founded by Radclyffe was located. The two lodges, in other words, were within yards of one another , and the neighbourhood was effectively a Jacobite enclave. The French Jacobites were soon to cast their nets further afield. In September 1735, for example, the Lodge de Bussy initiated Lord Chewton, son of the Earl of Waldegrave, British Ambassador to France (himself a member of the ‘ Horn’ Lodge since 1723) and the Comte de St Florentin, Secretary of State to Louis XV. Among those present were Desagulier s, Montesquieu and Radclyffe’s cousin, the Duke of Richmond. Later in the same year , the Duke of Richmond established a lodge of his own at his château of Aubigny- sur - Nère.
Although Radclyffe had co- founded the first recorded lodge in France, he was not Grand Master . According to the oldest surviving documents, the first Grand Master , appointed in 1728, was none other than the former Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of England, the Duke of Wharton. Becoming ever more militant in his Jacobite sympathies, Wharton, after being supplanted in Grand Lodge, had gone to Vienna, hoping to persuade the Austrian Habsburgs to mount an invasion of England on behalf of the Stuarts. His subsequent peregrinations took him to Rome and then to Madrid, where he founded the first lodge in Spain. While in Paris, he appears to have stayed for a time with the Walsh f amily. On his return to Spain, he was succeeded as Grand Master of French Freemasonry by Sir James Hector MacLean, Radclyffe’ s colleague. In 1736, MacLean in turn was succeeded by Radclyffe, the e minence grise , who emerged from the wings to assume his position centre- stage.
Radclyffe was one of two major personalities in the dissemination of Freemasonry throughout France. The other was an eclectic, peripatetic individual named Andrew Michael Ramsay. Ramsay was born in Scotland some time during the 1680s. As a young man, he joined a quasi- ‘ Rosicrucian’ society called the ‘ Philadelphians’ , and studied with a close friend of Isaac Newton. He was later to be associated with other friends of Newton, including John Desagulier s. He was also a particularly close friend of David Hume, and they exercised a reciprocal influence on each other .
By 1710, Ramsay was in Cambrai, studying with the man he regarded as his mentor , the liberal mystical Catholic philosopher François Fénelon. On Fénelon’ s death in 1715, Ramsay came to Paris. Here, he became an intimate of the French regent, Philippe d’ Or léans, who inducted him into the neo- chivalr ic Order of St Lazarus;
from then on, Ramsay was to be known as ‘ Chevalier ’ . When precisely he made Radclyffe’s acquaintance is not known, but by 1720 he was affiliated with the Jacobite cause and served, for a time, as tutor to the young Charles Edward Stuart.
In 1729, despite his Jacobite connections, Ramsay returned to England. Here, an apparent lack of qualif ications notwithstanding, he was promptly admitted to the Royal Society. He also became a member of another prestigious organisation, the f ashionable ‘ Gentlemen’s Club of Spalding’ , which included the Duke of Montague, the Earl of Abercorn, the Earl of Dalkeith, Desaguliers, Pope, Newton and François de Lorraine. By 1730, he was back in France and increasingly active on behalf of Freemasonry, and increasingly associated with Charles Radclyffe.
On 26 December 1736 – the date on which Radclyffe assumed the Grand Master ship of French Freemasonry – Ramsay gave a speech which was to become one of the major landmarks in Freemasonic history, and a source of endless controver sy ever since. This speech, which was presented again in a slightly modified version for the general public on 20 March 1737, became known as Ramsay’s ‘ Oration’ . There was an ulter ior political motive behind it. France at the time was ruled by Louis XV, then aged twenty- seven. The real governing power in the country, however , as Richelieu had been a century before, was the king’s chief advisor , Cardinal André Hercule de Fleury. Fleury, tired of war , was anxious to establish a lasting peace with England. In consequence, he was hostile to the hotbed of anti- Hanoverian conspiracy which Jacobite Freemasonry in France had come to be. The Stuarts, for their part, hoped to dissuade Fleury from his desired detente and to keep France, the traditional supporter of the Scottish royal house, firmly allied to their dream of regaining the English throne. Ramsay’s ‘ Oration’ was intended, at least in part, to allay Fleury’s antipathy towards Freemasonry and to win him over , with the eventual aim of establishing Freemasonry in France under royal patronage. He hoped to initiate Louis XV. With the French king thus involved, Freemasonry would constitute a united Franco- Scottish front, and another invasion of England could be contemplated, another attempt made to restore the Stuarts to the English throne. These objectives prompted Ramsay to reveal more than anyone had previously done of the attitudes and or ientation of early eighteenth- century Jacobite Freemasonry – and, at the same time, to divulge more than anyone previously had of its alleged history.
In a statement plundered almost verbatim from Fénelon, Ramsay declared: ‘ The world is nothing but a huge republic of which every nation is a family and every individual a child.’ This statement did not make much impression on Fleury, a Catholic nationalist monarchist cardinal who did not like Fénelon anyway. But it was to prove enormously influential among later political thinkers, not only in France, not only elsewhere in Europe, but in the American colonies as well. Ramsay went on: ‘ The interests of the Fraternity shall become those of the whole human race.’ And he condemned Grand Lodge, as well as other non- Jacobite forms of Freemasonry, as ‘ heretical, apostate and republican’ .
Ramsay stressed that the origins of Freemasonry lay in the mystery schools and sects of the ancient world:
The word Freemason must therefore not be taken in a literal, gross, and material sense, as if our founder s had been simple workers in stone, or merely curious geniuses who wished to perfect the arts. They were not only skilful architects, desirous of consecrating their talents and goods to the construction of material temples; but also religious and warrior princes who designed to enlighten, edify, and protect the living Temples of the Most High.
But though they may have derived from the mystery schools of antiquity, they were, Ramsay asserted, fervently Christian. In Catholic France at the time, it would, of course, have been imprudent to specify the Templars by name. But Ramsay emphasised that Freemasonry had its beginnings in the Holy Land, among ‘ the Crusaders’ :
At the time of the Crusades in Palestine many princes, lords, and citizens associated themselves, and vowed to restore the Temple of the Christians in the Holy Land, and to employ themselves in bringing back their architecture to its first institution. They agreed upon several ancient signs and symbolic words drawn from the well of religion in order to recognise themselves amongst the heathen and Saracens. These signs and words were only communicated to those who promised solemnly and even sometimes at the f oot of the altar , never to reveal them. This sacred promise was therefore not an execrable oath, as it has been called, but a respectable bond to unite Christians of all nationalities in one confraternity. Some time afterwards our Order formed an intimate union with the Knights of St John of Jerusalem. From that time our Lodges took the name of Lodges of St John.
Needless to say, the Knights of St John, such as they were in the early eighteenth century, never acknowledged any affiliation of this kind. Had they survived as an accredited public institution, the Templars, just possibly, might have done. Ramsay, for his part, charting the purpor ted history of Freemasonry, quickly moved from the Holy Land back to Scotland and the Celtic kingdom immediately prior to Bruce:
At the time of the last Crusades many Lodges were already erected in Germany, Italy, Spain, France. James, Lord Steward of Scotland, was Grand Master of a Lodge established at Kilwinning, in the West of Scotland, MCCLXXXVI, shortly after the death of Alexander III, King of Scotland, and one year before John Baliol mounted the throne. This lord received as Freemasons into his Lodge the Earls of Gloucester and Ulster , the one English, the other Irish.
And finally, in an unmistakable reference to the Scots Guard, Ramsay declared that Freemasonry ‘ preserved its splendour among those Scotsmen to whom the kings of France confided during many centuries the safeguard of their royal persons’ .
The implications and significance of Ramsay’s ‘ Oration’ will be considered shortly. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that the attempt to win Cardinal Fleury’s sympathy and support backfired. Two years bef ore, in 1735, the police had acted against Freemasonry in Holland. In 1736, they had done so in Sweden. Now, within a few days of Ramsay’s second ‘ Oration’ , Fleury ordered the French police to follow suit. An immediate investigation of Freemasonry was ordered. Four months later , on 1 August 1737, the police report was completed. Freemasonry was declared to be innocent of ‘ indecency’ , but potentially dangerous ‘ by virtue of the indifference of the Order towards religions’ . On 2 August, Freemasonry was interdicted in France and the Grand Secretary arrested.
In a series of police raids, numerous documents and membership lists were confiscated. Fleury and his advisors must surely have been shocked by the extraordinary number of high- ranking nobles and churchmen who proved already to be Freemasons. The chaplain of the Garde du Corps, the King’s Bodyguard, for example, turned out to be a member of the Jacobite Grand Lodge Bussi- Aumont, as the old Lodge de Bussy had come to be called. So, too, was the Guard’ s quartermaster . Indeed, virtually all members of the lodge were officers, officials or intimates of the court.
Rome was already alarmed, and there can be little doubt that Fleury applied pressure to his ecclesiastical colleagues and superiors. Even before the investigation in France was completed, Pope Clement XII acted. On 24 Apr il 1738, a Papal Bull, ‘ In eminenti apostolatus specula’ , forbade all Catholics to become Freemasons under threat of excommunication. Two years later , in the Papal States, membership in a lodge was punishable by death.
According to one authority on the subject, the first effect of Clement’s Bull may have been to force Radclyffe’s removal as Grand Master of French Freemasonry.
Within a year , he was replaced by a French aristocrat, the Duc d’ Antin. The duke in turn was succeeded in 1743 by the Comte de Clermont, a prince of the blood. It is thus clear that the Papal Bull had a fairly minimal effect in dissuading French Catholics from becoming Freemasons. On the contrary, after the promulgation of the Bull some of the most illustr ious names in France became involved. Even the king seems to have been on the point of joining a lodge. The Pope, it would appear , accomplished nothing, save to topple the Jacobites from their former position of supremacy in French Freemasonic affair s. From the time of the Papal Bull on, the Jacobites were to play a progressively less influential role in French Freemasonry, and ceased completely to affect its evolution and development. Eventually, as we have noted, Grand Orient was to emerge as the chief repository of Freemasonry in France.
In certain quarters, the Church’s attitude must have seemed – and must still seem – puzzling. Most of the Jacobite leaders, after all, had either been born Catholic or become converts. Why, then, should the Pope have acted against them – par ticular ly when doing so meant Freemasonry falling increasingly under the anti- Catholic influence of the English Grand Lodge? With hindsight, the answer to that question is much clearer than it probably was to many people – Catholics, Freemasons or both – at the time. The point is that Rome feared, not entirely without justification, that Freemasonry, as an international institution, stood a reasonable chance of offering a philosophical, theological and moral alternative to the Church.
Prior to the Lutheran Reformation, the Church had provided, with whatever qualified success, a species of international forum. Potentates and princes, though their nations might war with each other , were still nominally Catholic and acted under the Church’s umbrella; their people might sin, but they sinned according to the context and definition established by Rome. As long as the Church’s umbrella remained in place, it ensured that channels of communication remained open between belligerents and that, in theory at least, Rome could act as arbiter . With the Reformation, of course, the Church was no longer able to function in that capacity, having lost her authority among the Protestant states of northern Europe. But she still enjoyed considerable currency in Italy, in southern Germany, in France, in Spain, in Austria and the domains of the Holy Roman Empire.
Freemasonry threatened to offer the kind of international forum that Rome had provided prior to the Reformation: to furnish an arena for dialogue, a network of communications, a blueprint for European unity that transcended the Church’s sphere of influence and rendered the Church irrelevant. Freemasonry threatened to become, in effect, something like the League of Nations or United Nations of its day. It is worth repeating Ramsay’s statement in his ‘ Oration’ : ‘ The world is nothing but a huge republic of which every nation is a family and every individual a child.
Freemasonry may not have been any more successful in fostering unity than the Church had been, but it could hardly have been less so. A few years after Clement’s Bull, for example, Austria and Prussia were at war . Both Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, and François, Emperor of Austria, were Freemasons. By virtue of this common bond, the lodge offered an opportunity for dialogue, and at least a prospect of peace. It was in an effort – futile, in the event, and even, it might be argued, counter - productive – to preclude such developments that Rome acted against Freemasonry. The Jacobites, and Jacobite Freemasonry on the Continent, were incidental casualties of much broader considerations. And their fall from prominence was probably, in the end, more costly to Rome than leaving their status intact would have been.
As we have seen, the Papal Bull, intended to exclude Catholics from Freemasonry, proved signally ineffectual. Indeed, it was precisely in the Roman sphere of influence that Freemasonry, during the next half century, was to spread most vigorously and to assume some of its wilder , more exotic and extravagant permutations. It was patronised more enthusiastically by Catholic potentates – François of Austria, for example – than by anyone else. And it was to prove most influential precisely within such bastions of Roman authority as Italy and Spain. By casting Freemasonry as a villain, Rome in effect turned it into a refuge and rallying point for her own adversaries.
In England, Grand Lodge became progressively more divorced from both religion and politics. It fostered a spirit of moderation, tolerance and flexibility, and often worked hand in hand with the Anglican Church, many of whose clergy were themselves Freemasons and found no conflict of allegiance. In Catholic Europe, on the other hand, Freemasonry became a repository for militantly anti- clerical, antiestablishment, eventually revolutionary sentiment and activity. True, many lodges remained bulwarks of conservatism, even reaction. But many more played a vital part in radical movements. In France, for example, prominent Freemasons such as the Marquis de Lafayette, Philippe Egalité, Danton and Sieyès, acting in accordance with Freemasonic ideals, were prime movers in the events of 1789 and everything that followed. In Bavaria, in Spain, in Austria, Freemasonry was to provide a focus of resistance to authoritarian regimes, and it functioned prominently in the movements culminating with the revolutions of 1848. The whole of the campaign leading to the unification of Italy – from the revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century, through Mazzini, to Garibaldi – could be described as essentially Freemasonic. And from the ranks of nineteenth- century European Freemasonry there emerged a figure who was to cast the’ sinister shadow of terrorism not only over his own age, but over ours as well – a man named Mikhail Bakunin.
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