THE TEMPLARS
FOUNDATION of Order.— The Order of the Knights of the Temple arose out of the Crusades. In 1118 nine valiant and pious knights formed themselves into an association which united the characters of the monk and the knight. They selected for their patroness " La douce mere de Dieu," and bound themselves to live according to the rules of St. Augustine, swearing to consecrate their swords , arms, strength, and lives, to the defence of the mysteries of the Christian faith; to pay absolute • obedience to the Grand Master ; to encounter the dangers of the seas and of War, whenever commanded, and for the love of Christ ; and even when opposed singly to three infidel foes not to retreat. They also took upon themselves the vows of chastity and poverty, promised not to go over to any other Order, nor to surrender any wall or foot of land. King Baldwin II. assigned them a portion of his palace, and, as it stood near the Church of the Templar the abbot gave them a street leading from it to the palace, and hence they styled themselves " Soldiery of the Temple " (militia templi).
Progress of the Order. — The first nine years which elapsed after the institution of the Order, the Templars lived in great poverty ; Hugh des Payens and Godfrey of St. Omer, the founders, had but one war-horse between them, a fact commemorated on the seal of the Order, which represents two knights seated on one charger. Soon after. Pope Honorius confirmed the Order, and appointed a white mantle —to which Bugenius III. afiaxed a red cross on the breast—to be the distinguishing dress of the Templars. The Order also assumed a banner formed of cloth, striped white and black, called Beauseant (in old French a piebald horse) , which word became the battle-cry of the knights. The banner bore a cross and the inscription, " Non nobis, Domme, sed nomini tuo da gloriam." Thenceforth many knights joined the Order, and numerous powerful princes bestowed considerable possessions upon it. Alfonso, king of Arragon and Navarre, even appointed the Templars his heirs, though the country refused to ratify the bequest. Thus they became the richest proprietors in Europe, until they possessed about nine thousand commanderies, situated in various countries of Europe and in Palestine, with an annual rental of one hundred and twelve million francs.
Account of Commanderies.—^Theircommanderies were situate in their eastern and western provinces, the former embracing Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch, Cyprus, the latter, Portugal, Castile and Leon, Arragon, France, including Flanders and the Netherlands, England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, and Sicily. Whilst Jerusalem was in the hands of the Christians, the chief seat of the Templars was in that city ; afterwards it was transferred to Paris, where they erected the large building until lately known as the Temple. It was in this building that Philip the Fair took refuge on the occasion of a riot which took place in 1306, where the Templars protected him until the fury of the people had calmed down. The Knights, it is said, incautiously displayed to the royal cupidity their immense treasures. On a subsequent, but far more momentous rising, the pile which served an ungrateful King for an asylum, became the prison of an unfortunate successor ; recently this memento of royal perfidy, and of an avenging fate that struck the innocent, has been levelled to the ground.
Imputations against the Order.—Towards the end of the twelfth century the Order counted about thirty thousand members, mostly French, and the Grand Master was generally chosen from among the French. Through the great number of their affiliated members they could raise a large army in any part of the Eastern world; and their fleet monopolized the commerce of the Levant. Hence they departed from their original humility and piety. Palestine was lost, and they made no effort to recover it ; but frequently drew the sword—which was only to be used in the service of God, as they understood the phrase—in the feuds and warfares of the countries they inhabited. They became proud and arrogant. When dying Richard Cceur de Lion said, "I leave avarice to the Cistercian monks, luxuriousness to the begging friars, pride to the Templars;" and yet perhaps they only felt their own power. The English Templars had dared to say to Henry lll., " You shall be king as long as you are just;" portentous words which supplied matter for meditation to that Philip of France who, like many other princes, wished to be unjust with impunity. In Castile, the Templars, Hospitallers, and Knights of St. John, combined against the King himself. Perhaps they aimed at universal dominion, or at the establishment of a Western sovereignty, Hke the Teutonic Knights of Prussia, the Hospitallers in Malta, or the Jesuits in Paraguay ? But there is scarcely any ground for these imputations, especially the first, considering that the members of the Order were scattered all over the earth, and might at the utmost have attempted to seize the government of some individual state, as that of Arragon for instance ; but not to carry out a scheme for which even the forces of Charlemagne had been inadequate.
Accusations better founded -weve, that they had disturbed the kingdom of Palestine by their rivalry with the Hospitallers ; had concluded leagues withthe infidels ; had made war upon Cyprus and Antiochia; had dethroned the King of Jerusalem, Henry II. ; had devastated Greece and Thrace ; had refused to contribute to the ransom of Saint Louis ; had declared for Arragon against Anjou—an unpardonable crime in the eyes of France—with many other accusations. But their greatest crime was that of being exceedingly wealthy ; their downfall was therefore determined upon.
Plots against the Order.—Philip the Fair had spent his last sou. The victory of Mons, worse than a defeat, had ruined him. He was bound to restore Guyenne, and was on the point of losing Flanders. Normandy had risen against a tax which he had been, obliged to withdraw. The people of the capital were so opposed to the government, that it had been found necessary to prohibit meetings of more than five persons. How was money to be obtained under these circumstances ? The Jews could give no more, because all they had had been extorted from them by fines, imprisonment, and torture. It was necessary to have recourse to some grand confiscation, without disgusting the classes on whom the royal power relied, and leading them to believe, not that booty was aimed at, but the punishment of evil doers, to the greater glory of religion and the triumph of the law. At the instigation of Philip the Fair libels were published against the Order of the Knights Templars, in which the most absurd charges were made against the members, accusing them of heresy, impiety, and worse crimes. Great weight was attached to the statements made against the Templars by two renegades of the Order, the Florentine Roffi Dei, and the prior of Montfaucon, which latter, having been condemned by the Grand Master to imprisonment for life for his many crimes, made his escape, and became the accuser of his former brethren.
Attentions paid to Grand Master.—Bertrand de Got, who by the influence of the French King had become Pope under the title of Clement V., was now urged by the former to fulfil the last of the five conditions on which the King had enabled him to ascend the chair of St. Peter. The first four conditions had been named, but Philip had reserved the naming of the fifth till the fit moment should arrive ; and from his subsequent conduct there can be no doubt that the destruction of the Order of the Temple was the condition that was in the King's mind when he thus alluded to it. The first step was to get the Grand Master, James de Molay, into his power. At the request of the Pope that he would come to France to concert measures for the recovery of the Holy Land, he left Cyprus and came to Paris in 1307, accompanied by sixty knights, and bringing with him 150,000 florins of gold, and so much silver that it formed the lading of twelve horses, which he deposited in the Temple in that city. To lull him into false security, the King, whose plan was not yet quite ripe for execution, treated the Grand Master with the greatest consideration, made him the godfather of one of his sons, and chose him with some of the most distinguished persons to carry the pall at the funeral of his sister-in-law. The following day he was arrested with all his suite, and letters having in the meantime been sent to the King's officers in the provinces on the 13th of October, 1307, to seize upon all the Templars, their houses and property throughout the kingdom, many thousand members of the Order, knights and serving brothers, were thus made prisoners.
Charges against the Templars. — The Templars were accused of denying Christ, the Virgin, and the Saints, and of spitting and trampling on the cross ; of worshipping in a dark cave an idol in the figure of a man covered with an old human skin, and having two bright and lustrous carbuncles for eyes, of anointing it with the fat of young children roasted, of looking upon it as their sovereign God ; of worshipping the devil in the form of a cat; of burning the bodies of dead Templars and giving the ashes to the younger brethren to eat and drink mingled with their food. They were charged with various unnatural crimes, frightful debaucheries, and superstitious abominations, such as only madmen could have been guilty of. To make them confess these crimes they were put to the torture, not only in France, but also in England, for Edward II. leagued with Philip to destroy the Order. Many knights in the agonies of the torture confessed to the crimes they were charged with, hundreds expired under it without making any confession, many starved or killed themselves in other ways in prison. The trial was protracted for years ; the persecution extended to other countries ; in Germany and Spain and Cyprus the Order was acquitted of all guilt ; in Italy, England, and France, however, their doom was sealed, though for a moment there seemed a chance of their escaping, for the Pope seeing that Philip and Edward had seized all the money and estates of the Templars, and seemed inclined to deprive him of his share of the spoil, began to side with the Order. But on some concessions being made to him by the two Kings, he again supported them ; though in the end we find him complaining of the small share of the booty that came into his hands.
Burning of Knights.—The tedious progress of the sham trial was occasionally enlivened by the public execution of knights who refused to acknowledge crimes of which they were not guilty. Fifty-nine gallant knights were led forth, in one day to the fields at the back of the nunnery of St. Antoine, where stakes had been driven into the ground, and fagots and charcoal collected. The knights were offered pardon if they would confess ; but they all refused and were burned by slow fires. At Senlis nine were burned, and many more in other places. On all these occasions, as well as in the awful scenes of the torture-chamber, the Dominican friars were the mocking witnesses.
James de Molay.—The Grand Master remained in prison five years and a half; and there is no doubt that he was repeatedly put to the torture. The confession he was said to have made was probably a forgery. Finally, on the 18th March, 1313, he and Guy, the Grand Preceptor of the Order, were burnt by a slow fixe on a small island in the Seine, 'between the royal gardens and the church of the Hermit Brethren, where afterwards the statue of Henry IV. was erected, both to the last moment asserting the innocence of the Order.
Mysteries of the Knights Templars. — Without laying too much stress on confessions extorted by violence, or denunciations proceeding from revenge, cupidity, and servility, it is manifest that the Templars, in their ordinances, creed, and rites, had something which was peculiar and secret, and totally different from the statutes, opinions, and ceremonies of other religio-military associations. Their long sojourn in the East, in that dangerous Palestine which overflowed with schismatic Greeks and heretioSj whoj driven from Constantinople, took refuge with the Arabs ; their rivalry with the Hospitallers ; their contact with the Saracen element ; finally, the loss of the Holy Land, which injured them in the opinion of the world, and rendered their lives idle all these and many other circumstances would act on this institution in an unforeseen manner, differing from the tendencies of the original constitution, and mix up therewith ideas and practices little in accordance with, nay, in total antagonism to, the orthodox thought that had originated, animated, and strengthened this military brotherhood.
The Temple and the Church.—The very name may in a certain manner point to a rebellious ambition. Temple is a more august, a vaster and more comprehensive denomination than that of Church. The Temple is above the Church ; this latter has a date of its foundation, a local habitation ; the former has always existed. Churches fall ; the Temple remains as a symbol of the parentage of religions, and the perpetuity of their spirit. The Templars might thus consider themselves as the priests of that religion, not transitory, but permanent; and the aspirants could believe that the Order constituting them the defenders of the Temple, intended to initiate them into a second and better Christianity, into a purer religion. Whilst the Temple meant for the Christian the Holy Sepulchre, it recalled to the Mussulman the Temple of Solomon; and the legend which referred to this latter served as a bond to the rituals of the Freemasons and other secret societies.
The Temple the Symbol of the Holy Spirit.— In another sense, the Church may be called the house of Christ ; but the Temple is the house of the Holy Spirit. It is that religion of the Spirit which the Templars inherited from the Manichseans, from the Albigenses, from the sectarian chivalry that had preceded them. Defenders of the Sepulchre of Christ, they remained faithful to their trust, but considered that He had come on earth only to preach in the name of the Eternal Spirit, to whom their principal worship was addressed ; and, like the Gnostics and Manichseans, they celebrated Pentecost rather than Easter, because in the former the Divine Spirit itself had descended and spread itself over the face of the earth. This, in a certain sense, was an amplification, and in another a denial, of the Catholic dogma. The Holy Spirit is the universal conscience.
Doctrines of Templars.--The initiatory practices, the monuments, even the trial, show this prevalence of the religion of the Spirit in the secret doctrines of the Temple. The Templars drew a great portion of their sectarian and heterodox tendencies from the last epic cycle of the middle ages—from that period in which chivalry, purified and organized, became a pilgrimage in search of the San Greal, the mystic cup that received the blood of the Saviour ; from that epoch in which the East, in invasions, armed and unarmed, with the science of the Arabs, with poetry and heresies, had turned upon the "West.
Initiation.—Much has been said about the mode of initiation—that it took place at night in the chapel, in the presence of the chapter, all strangers being strictly excluded; that licentious rites attended it, and that the candidate was compelled to deny, curse, and spit upon the cross—that cross for which they had shed so much of their own blood, sacrificed so many of their own lives. We have seen that this was one of the chief accusations brought against the Order. Was there any truth in it ? It seems most probable there was ; but the practice may be explained as in the following paragraph.
Cursing and Spitting on the Cross Explained. — Such a practice need not surprise us in an age in which churches were turned into theatres, in which sacred things were profaned by grotesque representations, in which the ancient mysteries were reproduced to do honour, in their way, to Christ and the saints. The reader may also bear in mind the extraordinary scenes afterwards represented in the Miracle Plays. Now the aspirant to the Templar degree was at first introduced as a sinner, a bad Christianj a renegado. He denied, in fact, after the manner of St. Peter ; and the renunciation was frequently expressed by the odious act of spitting on the cross. The fraternity undertook to restore this renegado, to raise him all the higher the greater his fall had been. Thus at the Festival of the Idiots, the candidate pre-. sented himself as it were in a state of imbecility and of degradation, to be regenerated by the Church. These comedies, rightly understood at first, were in course of time falsely interpreted, scandalizing the faithful, who had lost the key of the enigma. The Templars had adopted similar ceremonies. They were scions of the Cathari (123) and Manichseans. Now the Cathari despised the cross (124), and considered it meritorious to tread it under foot. But with the Templars this ceremony was symbolical, as was abundantly proved during their trial ; and had indeed reference to Peter's thrice-repeated denial of Christ.
The Templars the Opponents of the Pope.— But there may have been another and special reason for introducing this ceremony, and ever keeping the treachery of Peter before the mind of the members of the Order. We have seen that the Templars, during and in consequence of their sojourn in the Bast, attached themselves to the doctrines of the Gnostics and Manichseans,—as is sufficiently attested, were 'other proofs wanting, by the Gnostic and cabalistic symbols discovered in and on the tombs of Knights Templars,—which appeared to them less perverted than those of the priests of Rome. They also knew the bad success the proclamation of Christ's death on the cross had had at Athens, in consequence of AEschylus' tragedy, "Prometheus Vinctus," wherein Oceanus denied his friend, when God made him the sacrifice for the sins of mankind, just as Peter, who lived by the ocean, did with regard to Christ. The Templars, therefore, came to the conclusion that all these gods, descended from the same origin, were only religious and poetic figures of the sun ; and, seeing the bad use made of the doctrines connected therewith by the clergy, they renounced St. Peter, and became Johannites, or followers of St. John. There was thus a secret schism, and according to some writers, it was this, together with the opposition to Roman Catholicism which it implied, as well. as their great wealth, which was among the causes of their condemnation by the court of Rome.
Baphomet. — The above explanation may also afford a clue to the meaning and name of the idol the Templars were accused of worshipping. This idol represented a man with a long white beard, and the name given to it was Baphomet, a name which has exercised the ingenuity of many critics, but the only conclusions arrived at by any of them as to its origin and meaning, and deserving consideratioiij are those of Kieolai, who assuines that it was derived from (Sacpn^ fAijTio?, the ''baptism of wisdom," and that the image, which sometimes had three heads, represented God, the universal Father ; and that of De Quincey, to which latter I myself incline, that the figure, sometimes represented with two heads only, meant the two chiefs against whom the Templars directed their hostility, viz. the Pope and Mahomet, and in the name Baphomet they intertwisted the names of both, by cutting off the first two letters of Mahomet, and substituting Bap or Pap, the first syllable of Papa. Thus by this figure the Templars expressed their independence of the Church and the Church creed ; and an initiated member was called a " friend of God, who could speak with God, if he chose ; " that is, without the intermediation of the Pope and the Church. Hence it becomes sufficiently plain why the secret w;as looked upon as inviolable, and was so well kept that we can only conjecture its import.
Effects of the Downfal of the Knights of the Temple. — With the Templars perished* a world ; chivalry, the crusades, ended with them. Even the Papacy received a tremendous shock. Symbolism was deeply affected by it. A greedy and arid trading spirit rose up. Mysticism, that had sent sach a glow through past generations, found the souls of men cold, ihcredulous. The reaction was violent, and the Templars were the first to fall under the rude blows of the West, that longed to rebel against the Bast, by which it had hitherto been in so many ways permeated, ruled, and oppressed.
Connection with Freemasonry. —The Freemasons assert a connexion with the Templars ; and there is a society calling themselves Templars whose chief seat is at Paris, and whose branches extend into. England and other countries. They say that James de Moulay before his death appointed a successor, and that since then there has been anunbroken line of Grand Masters down to the present time, a list of whichi is given by the Order of the Temple at Paris. But true Freemasonry, of which Freemasons, as a rule, know nothing, existed before the Templars, as I shall show when speaking of the Masonic Orders. A simple allusion to the alleged connexion therefore is all that is needed here.
THE HOLY VEHM
OIRIGIN and object of Instiiution.—In this book we are introduced to an order of secret societies altogether different from preceding ones. Hitherto they were religious or military in their leading features ; but those we are now about to give an account of were judicial in their operations, and arose during the period of violence and anarchy that distracted the German empire after the outlawry of Henry the Lion, somewhere about the middle of the thirteenth century. The most important of these were the secret tribunals of Westphalia, known by the name of Vehm-Oerichte, or the Holy Vehm. The supreme authority of the emperor had lost all influence in the country ; the imperial as sizes were no longer held ; might and violence took the place of right and justice ; the feudal lords tyrannized over the people ; whosoever dared, could. To seize the guilty, who ever they might be, to punish them before they were aware of the blow with which they were threatened, and thus to secure the chastisement of crime—such was the object of the Westphalian judges, and thus the existence of this secret society, the instrtanent of public vengeance, is amply justified, and the popular respect it enjoyed, and on which alone rested its authority, explained.
Officers and Organization.—The Westphalia of that period comprehended the country between the Rhine and the Weser; its southern boundary was formed by the mountains of Hesse, its northern, by Friesland. Vehm or Fehm is according to Leibnitz derived from fama, as the law founded on common fame. But fern is an old German word, signifying condemnation, which may be the proper radix, of Vehm. These courts were also called Fehmding, Freistuhle, free courts," heimliche Gerichte, heimliche Achten, heimliche _ ieschlossene Achten, ''secret courts," "free bann," and verhotene Gerichte, "prohibited courts." No rank of life excluded a person from the right of being initiated, and in a Vehmic code discovered at Dortmund, and whose reading was forbidden to the profane under pain of death, three degrees are mentioned ; the affiliated of the first were called Stuhlherren, " lords justices;" those of the second, Schoppen (scahini, echevins) j those of the third, Frohnhoten, "messengers." Two courts were held, an offenbares Ding, " open court," and the heimliche Acht, " secret court." The members were called Wissende, " the knowing ones” or the initiated. The clergy, women and children, Jews and heathens, and as it would appear the higher nobility, were exempt from its jurisdiction. The courts took cognizance of all offences against the Christian faith, the Gospel, and the Ten Commandments.
Language and Rules of Initiated.—The initiated had a secret language; at least we may infer so from the initials S. S. S. G. G., found in Vehmic writings preserred in the archives of Herfort, in Westphalia, that have puzzled the learned, and by some are explained as meaning, Stock, Stein, Stride, Oras, Grein, stick, stone, cord, grass, woe. At meals the members are said to have recognized each other by turning the points of their knives towards the edge, and the points of their forks towards the centre, of the table. A horrible death was prepared for a false brother, and the oaths to be taken were as fearful as some prescribed ia the higher degrees of Freemasonry. The affiliated promised, among other things, to serve the secret Vehm before anything that is illumined by the sun or bathed by rain, or to be found between heaven and earth ; not to inform any one of the sentence passed against him; and to denounce, if necessary, his parents and relations, calling down upon himself, in case of perjury, the malediction of all, and the punishment of being hanged seven feet higher than all others. One form of oath, contained in the archives of Dortmund, and which the candidate had to pronounce kneeling, his head uncovered, and holding the forefinger and the middle finger of his right hand upon the sword of the president, runs thus : " I swear perpetual devotion to the secret tribunal, to defend it against myself, against water, sun, moon and stars, the leaves of the trees, all living beings to uphold its judgments and promote their execution. I promise moreover that neither pain, nor money, nor parents, nor anything created by God, shaller me perjured."
Procedure. —The first act of the procedure of the Vehm was the accusation, made by a Freischqppe. The person was then cited to appear ; if not initiated, before the open court, and woe to the disobedient ! The accused that belonged to the order was at once condem.ned ; and the case of the unaffiliated was transferred to the secret tribunal. A summons was to be written on parchment and sealed with at least seven seals ; six weeks and three days were allowed for the first, six weeks for the second, and six weeks and three days for the third. When the residence of the accused was not known, the summons was exhibited at a cross-road of his supposed county, or placed at the foot of the statue of some saint or affixed to the poor-box, not far from some crucifix or humble wayside chapel. If the accused was a knight, dwelling in his fortified castle, the Schoppen were to introduce themselves at night, under any pretence, into the most secret chamber of the building and do their errand. But sometimes it was considered sufficient to affix the summons, and the coin that always accompanied it, to the gate, to inform the sentinel of the fact that the citation had been left, and to cut three chips from the gate, to be taken to the Freigraf, as proofs. If the accused appeared to none of the summonses, he was sentenced in contumacia, according to the laws laid down in the " Mirror of Saxony ; " the accuser had to bring forward seven witnesses, not to the fact charged against the absent person, but to testify to the well-known veracity of the accuser, whereupon the charge was considered as proved, and the Imperial ban was pronounced against the accused, which was followed by speedy execution. The sentence was one of outlawry, degradation, and death; the neck of the convict was condemned to , the halter, and his body to the birds and wild beasts ; his goods and pstates were declared forfeited, his wife a widow, and his children orphans. He was declared fembar, i. e. punishable by the Vehm, and any three initiated that met with him were at liberty, nay, enjoined, to hang him on the nearest tree. If the accused appeared before the court, which was presided over by a count, who had on the table before him a naked sword and a withy halter, he, as well as his accuser, could each bring thirty friends as witnesses, and be represented by their attorneys, and also had the right of appeal to the general chapter of the secret closed tribunal of the Imperial chamber, generally held at Dortmund. When sentence was once definitively spoken for death, the culprit was hanged immediately.
Execution of Sentences.—Those condemned in their absence, and who were pursued by at least a hundred thousand persons, were generally unaware of the fact. Every information thereof conveyed to him was high treason, punishable by death ; the emperor alone, was excepted from the law of secresy ; merely to hint that " good bread might be eaten elsewhere," rendered the speaker liable to death for betraying the secret. After the condemnation of the accused a document bearing the seal of the count was given to the accuser, to be used by him when claiming the assistance of other members to carry out the sentence, and a the all initiated were bound to grant him theirs, were it even against their own parents. A knife was stuck in the tree on which the person had been hanged, to iadicate that he had suffered death at the hands of the Holy Vehm. If the victim resisted, he was slain with daggers ; but the slayer left his weapon in the wound to convey the same information,
Decay of the Institution.—These secret tribunals inspired such terror that the citation by a Westphalian free count was even more dreaded than that of the emperor. In 1470 three free counts summoned the emperor himself to appear before them, threatening him with the usual course in case of contumacy ; the emperor did not appear, but pocketed the affiront. By the admission of improper persons, and the abuse of the right of citation, the institution—which in its time had been a corrective of public injustice—gradually degenerated. The tribunals were, indeed, reformed by Rupert; and the Arensberg reformation and Osnaburgh regulations modified some of the greatest abuses, and restricted the power of the Vehm. Still it continued to exist, and was never formally abolished. But the excellent civil institutions of Maximilian and of Charles V., the consequent decrease of the turbulent and anarchic spirit, the introduction of the Eoman law, the spread of the Protestant rehgion, conspired to give men an aversion for what appeared now to be a barbarous jurisdiction. Some of the courts were abolished, exemptions and privileges against them multiplied, and they were prohibited all summary proceedings. But a shadow of them remained, and it was not till French legislation, in 1811, abolished the last free court in the county of Miinstfer, that they may be said to have ceased to exist. But it is not many years since that certain citizens in that locality assembled secretly every year, boasting of their descent from the ancient free judges.
Kissing the Virgin.—There is a tradition that one of the methods of putting to death persons condemned to that fate by the secret tribunals was the following :—The victim was told to go and kiss the statue of the Virgin which stood in a subterranean vault. The statue was of bronze and of gigantic size. On approaching it, so as to touch it, its front opened with folding doors and displayed its interior set full with sharp and long spikes and pointed blades. The doors were similarly armed, and on each, about the height of a man's head, was a spike longer than the rest, the two spikes being intended when the doors were shut to enter the eyes and destroy them. The doors having thus opened, the victim by a secret mechanism was drawn or pushed into the dreadfal statue, and the doors closed upon him. There he was cut and hacked by the knives and spikes, and in about half a minute the floor on which he stood—which was in reality a trap-door—opened, and allowed him to fall through. But more horrible torture awaited him ; for underneath the trap –door were six large wooden cylinders, disposed in pairs one below the other. There were thus three pairs. The cylinders were furnished all round with sharp blades ; the distance between the uppermost pair of parallel cylinders was such that a human body could just lie between them; the middle pair was closer together, and the lowest very close. Beneath this horrible apparatus was an opening in which could be heard the rushing of water. The mechanism that opened the doors of the statue also set in motion the cylinders, which turned towards the inside. Hence when the victim, already fearfully mangled and blinded, fell through the trap-door he fell between the upper pair of cylinders and was thus drawn in between them, his body being cut on all sides by the knives set round the cyliciders. In this mutilated condition, the quivering mass feU between the second and more closely approaching pair of cylinders, and was now actually hacked through and through and thrown on the lowest and closest pair, where it was reduced to small pieces which fell into the brook below, and were carried away; thus leaving no trace of the awful deed that had been accomplished.
THE BEATI PAOLI
CARACTER of the Society.—The notices I of this sect, which existed for many years in Sicily. are so scanty, that we may form a high idea of the mystery ia which it shrouded itself. It had spread not only over the island, where it created traditional terror, hut also over Calabria, where it was first discoyered, and cruelly repressed and punished by the feudatories, who saw their power assailed by it. Apopular institution, in opposition to the daily arrogance of baronial or kingly power, it knew not how to restrain itself within the prescribed limits, and made itself guilty of reprehensible acts, so that it was spoken of in various ways by its contemporaries.
Tendencies and Tenets.—We have already seen that it had connections with the Holy Vehm, and its statutes were somewhat similar to this tribunal ; but it is to be observed that it proceeded from that spiritual movement whicli produced the reaction of the Albigenses, the propaganda of the Franciscans, and the reformatory asceticism of the many heretics who roamed through Italy and the rest of Europe, preaching opposition to Rome, and organizing a crusade against the fastuous and corrupt clerocracy. Among these heretics we must remember the abbot Gioachimo, whose propheciesand strange sayings reappear in the Evangelium Sternum of John of Parma, a book which was one of the text-books of the Sicilian judges.' The Evangelium, AEternum, a tissue of cabalistic and Gnostic eccentricities, was, by the Beati Paoli, preferred to the Old and New Testaments ; they renounced belief in duaHsm, and made God the creator of evil and death—of evil, because he placed the mystical apple in the mystical garden ; of death, because he ordained the deluge, and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.
Account of a Sicilian Writer.—Amidst the general silence of historians, the account of a Sicilian writer, which was published only in 1840, and is still generally unknown, may be considered the only document concerning this family of Avengers, who at the extreme end of Italy reproduced the struggles and terrors of the Westphalian tribunals. This writer says: — " In the year 1185, at the nuptials of the Princess Constance, daughter of the first King Roger of Sicily, with Henry, afterwards Henry VI, Emperor of Germany, there was discovered the existence of a new and impious sect, who called themselves the Avengers, and in their . nocturnal assemblies declared every crime lawful committed on pretence of promoting the public good. Of this we find an account in an ancient writer, who does not enter into further details. The King ordered strict inquiry to be made, and their chief, Arinulfo di Ponte Corvo, having been arrested, he was sentenced to be hanged with some of his most guilty accomplices ; the less guilty were branded with a red-hot iron. The belief exists among the vulgar that this secret society of Avengers still exists in Sicily and elsewhere, and is known by the name of the Beati Paoli. Some worthless persons even go so far as to commend the impious institution. Its members abounded especially at Palermo, and Joseph Amatore, who was hanged on Dec. 17, 1704, was one of them. Girolamo Ammirata, comptroller of accounts, also belonged to this society, and suffered death on 27th April, 1725. Most came to a bad end, if not by the hands of justice, by the daggers of their associates. The famous vetturino, Vito Vituzzo of Palermo, was the last of the wretches forming the society of the Beati Paoli. He escaped the gallows, because he turned in time from his evil courses; and thenceforward he passed all day in St. Matthew's Church, whence he came to be known by the Surname of the church, mouse. The preceptors and masters of these vile men were heretics and apostates from the Minor Brethren of St. Prancis, who pretended that the power of the pontiff and the priesthood had been bestowed on them by an angelic revelation. The house where they held their meetings is still in existence in the street de' Canceddi, and I paid it a visit. Through a gateway you pass into a courtyard, under which is the vault where the members met, and which receives its light through a grating in the stone pavement. At the bottom of the stairs is a stone altar, and at the side a small dark chamber, with a stone table, on which were •written the acts and sentences of these murderous judges. The principal cave is pretty large, surrounded with stone seats, and furnished with niches and recesses where the arms were kept. The meetings were held at night by candle, light. The derivation of the name, the Beati Paoli (Blessed Pauls) , is unknown ; but I surmise that it was adopted by the sect, because either the founder's name was Paul, or that he assumed it as that of a saint who, before his conversion, was a man of the sword, and, imitating him, was, during the day, a Blessed Paul, and at night at the head of a band of assassins, like Paul persecuting the Christians." Such is the author's account, which I have greatly abbreviated, omitting nearly all his invectives against the sect, of which very little is known, and whose existence evidently, in its day, was to some extent beneficial ; for Sicilians, on suffering any injury or loss, for which they cannot apply to justice, are often heard to exclaim :— " Ah, if the Beati Paoli were still in being “.
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Jumat, 09 Desember 2016
Sabtu, 03 Desember 2016
THE TEMPLE & LODGE PART 13
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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 РFran̤ois of Austria, for example Рthan 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.
\\\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 РFran̤ois of Austria, for example Рthan 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.
THE TEMPLE & LODGE PART 12
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\\\THE TEMPLE AND THE LODGE
MICHAEL BAIGENT AND RICHARD LEIGH
THREE
The Origins of Freemasonry
12
The Development of Grand
Lodge
It is difficult to say precisely how much Freemasonry, as it evolved in Scotland, owed to the old Templar heritage and Templar traditions. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, whatever link there may have been between them was long lost, and no new link had yet been forged. Freemasonry had not yet publicly attempted to claim a Templar pedigree for itself . And while Claverhouse and his brother are extremely likely to have been Freemasons, no documentation survives to confirm that they were. If a Templar cross was indeed passed from Claverhouse to his brother and thence to the Abbé Calmet, this may attest some species of Templar survival, but it constitutes no direct connection with Freemasonry. When the Templar mystique surfaced again, it was to do so primarily, as we shall see, in France. Freemasonry, in the mean time, had come to play a much more central role in English affairs.
Under William and Mary, Protestantism regained its supremacy in England. By an act of Parliament which obtains to the present day, all Catholics were precluded from the throne, as was anyone married to a Catholic. Thus a repetition of the circumstances which had precipitated the 1688 revolution was effectively forestalled.
In 1702, eight years after his wife, William of Orange died. He was succeeded by Queen Anne, his sister - in- law and James II’s younger daughter . She, in turn, was succeeded in 1714 by George I, grandson of Elizabeth Stuart and Friedrich, Count Palatine of the Rhine. When George died in 1727, the throne passed to his son, George II, who reigned until 1760. For sixty years f ollowing William’s accession in 1688, the exiled Stuarts clung tenaciously to their dream of regaining the kingdom they had lost. The deposed James II died in 1701, to be succeeded by his son, James III, the so- called ‘ Old Pretender ’ . He in turn was succeeded as claimant by his son, the ‘ Young Pretender ’ , Charles Edward, ‘ Bonnie Prince Charlie’ . Under these three monarchs- in- exile, Jacobite circles on the Continent were to remain hotbeds of conspiracy and political intr igue. Nor were they inef f ectual. In 1708, a projected Stuart invasion of Scotland was mounted, supported by French troops and transported by French ships. England, with most of her troops committed to the War of the Spanish Succession, was ill- equipped to counter this threat, and the invasion would very likely have proved successful but for a combination of bad luck, Jacobite dithering and French apathy. In the event, the whole project foundered, but seven years later , in 1715, Scotland rose in a full- scale revolt under the Earl of Mar — who, as we have seen, was alleged to have succeeded Claverhouse as Grand Master of the latterday Templars. Also joining in the rebellion was Lord George Seton, Earl of Winton, whose title was for feited as a result and the earldom allowed to lapse, while he himself was condemned to death. In 1716, however , he escaped from the Tower of London and joined the exiled Stuart pretenders in France. He remained active in Jacobite affairs for the rest of his life, and in 1736 he became Master of an important Jacobite Masonic lodge in Rome. The revolt was put down, but only at considerable cost, and the exiled Stuarts were to remain a threat for another thirty years. Only after the invasion and full- scale military operations of 1745—6 was this threat at last to recede.
The 1688 revolution had introduced a number of modern, muchneeded reforms, including, and not least, a Bill of Rights. At the same time, however , British society had been grievously split. Nor was it simply a matter of those who supported the Stuarts fleeing the country en masse and leaving it entirely to their rivals. On the contrary, Stuart interests continued to be well represented in English affairs. Not all Stuart adherents were prepared to sanction force. Not all were prepared to defy Parliament. Many, despite their loyalties, were to prove conscientious civil servants under William and Mary, under Anne, under the Hanoverians. Such was the case, for example, with Sir Isaac Newton. But if William and Mary, and Anne, were reasonably popular monarchs, the Hanoverians were not; and there were many in England who publicly, unabashedly, without actually slipping into official treason, inveighed against the detested German sovereigns and agitated for a return of the Stuarts, whom they regarded as the country’s r ightful dynasty.
It was among these Stuart sympathisers that the modern- day Tory Party originated and came of age. The early eighteenth- century Tories had ar isen in the late 1670s out of the old, pre- Civil War cavalier class. Most were High Church Anglican or Anglo- Catholic. Most were landowners and sought to concentrate power in the hands of landed gentry. Virtually all of them esteemed the crown above Parliament and insisted on the Stuar ts’ hereditary r ight to the throne.
Their opponents, nicknamed Whigs, had also risen to prominence during the 1670s. The Whigs consisted mostly of the newly consolidated mercantile and professional classes, and were active in commerce, in industry, in finance and banking, in the army. They encouraged religious diversity and included many dissenters and free- thinkers. They extolled the power of Parliament over that of the crown. And, as Swift says, they ‘ preferred . . . the monied interest before the landed’ . 2 Subscribing, implicitly or explicitly, to the ‘ Puritan work ethic’ , they represented the triumphantly emergent middle class, whose leadership, first in the Commercial, then in the Industrial Revolution, was to determine the course of British history and establish money as supreme arbiter . They had no particular affection for the Hanoverians, but were prepared to tolerate the German rulers as a price of their own burgeoning success.
The fissures in British society were to be reflected in Freemasonry itself . According to extant records, Freemasonry, after the 1688 revolution, continued ostensibly as bef ore. Lodges continued not just to meet, but also to proliferate. It is likely that many older lodges, or the senior members of newer lodges, were pro- Stuart or Tory, but there is no evidence to suggest that Freemasonry, at this point, actually served as a vehicle for Jacobite espionage, conspiracy or propaganda. So far as possible, most lodges in England seem to have remained — or tried to remain — studiously aloof from politics. And inevitably, as more and more Whigs rose to prominence and assumed important positions in the country’s social and commercial affairs, they found their way into the lodge system, putting their own pro- Hanoverian stamp on to Freemasonry.
As we have seen, however , Freemasonry, from its very inception, had been inextricably linked with the Stuarts. Freemasons, during the seventeenth century, were not only required to ‘ be true to the Kinge’ , but also, and actively, to root out and inform against conspirators — thus becoming, in effect, part of the Stuarts’ administrative apparatus and machinery. Such allegiances ran deep. It is not surprising, therefore, that the main thrust of Freemasonry should have remained attached to the Stuart line, should have followed that line into exile and, from abroad, worked to further its interests in England. During the first third or so of the eighteenth century, Freemasonic lodges might be either Whig or Tory, Hanoverian or Jacobite; but it was the Tories in England and the Jacobites abroad who possessed more of the institution’s history and heritage. They constituted the mainstream, while other developments were but tributaries.
In England, prominent Freemasons like the Duke of Wharton were also professed Jacobites. Abroad, most of the Jacobite leaders – General James Keith, for example, the Earl of Winton (Alexander Seton), and the Earls of Derwentwater (first James, then his younger brother Charles, Radclyffe) — were not only Freemasons, but also instrumental in the dissemination of Freemasonry throughout Europe. After the suppression of the 1745 rebellion, a number of illustrious Freemasons were to be sentenced to death for their service to the Jacobite cause — Derwentwater , who had formerly been Grand Master of French Freemasonry, and the Earls of Kilmarnock and Cromarty, who had been Grand Masters of Scottish Freemasonry. Only the latter escaped execution at the Tower .
According to one histor ian:
There is no question but that the Jacobites had a crucial influence on the development of Freemasonry — to such an extent, indeed, that later witnesses went so far as to describe Freemasonry as a gigantic Jacobite conspiracy.
We would argue that the Jacobites did not just have ‘ a crucial influence on the development of Freemasonry’ . We would argue that they were, at least initially, its chief custodians and propagators. And when Grand Lodge — subsequently to become the primary repository of English Freemasonry — was created in 1717, it was created in large part as a Whig or Hanoverian attempt to break what had hither to been a virtual Jacobite monopoly.
The Centralisation of English Freemasonry
Grand Lodge of England was created on 24 June 1717 — St John’ s Day, the day formerly held sacred by the Templars. There were, initially, four London lodges which, in a manifest thrust towards centralisation, chose to amalgamate into one organisation and elect a Grand Lodge as a governing body. They quickly drew more lodges into their fold, and by 1723 the original four lodges had increased in number to fifty- two.
The usual explanation for the coalescence of Grand Lodge is astonishingly bland — or disingenuous. According to one writer , it ‘ came into being for the frankly social purpose of providing an occasion at which the members of a few London lodges could meet’ . One is also told that the period was one of general enthusiasm for clubs and societies, and that the dissemination and proliferation of English Freemasonry was a consequence of this enthusiasm. And yet there is no comparable movement towards centralisation among the various dining and drinking clubs of the time, or the burgeoning antiquarian, bibliographical and scientific societies. It is specifically in Freemasonry that the emphasis is not just on proliferation, but, even more crucially, on centralisation. Thus, for example, of the fifty- two lodges comprising Grand Lodge in 1723, at least twenty- six appear to have pre - date d Grand Lodge’ s foundation in 1717. Their entry into the historical record, in other words, results not from their proliferation, but from their preparedness to centralise.
According to J. R. Clarke, a Freemasonic historian writing in 1967, ‘ I think that in 1717 there was a much more serious reason f or the cooperation: it was made necessary by the political state of the country.’ Clarke goes on to stress the effusive demonstrations of pro- Hanoverian allegiance at the inaugural meeting of Grand Lodge — the drinking of loyal toasts to King George, the singing of loyal songs. And he rightly concludes that such an exaggerated display of patriotic fervour must be seen as an attempt to prove that Freemasons were not Jacobites — a display which would hardly have been necessary were there not some reason to suspect that they were.
Historians today tend to think of the Scottish rebellion of 1715 and the foundation of Grand Lodge in 1717 as two distinct events, separated by a full two years. In fact, however , the 1715 rebellion was not finally and completely suppressed until the execution of Lords Kenmuir and James Derwentwater in February 1716, and the plans for the amalgamation which formed Grand Lodge were made well before the event — during the previous summer or autumn of 1716. The Scottish rebellion and the foundation of Grand Lodge were not therefore separated by two years, but by a mere six to eight months. And there would appear , quite patently, to have been a causal connection between the two. It is as if the pro- Hanoverian establishment, envious of the network which Freemasonry provided for its Jacobite rivals, deliberately sought to foster a parallel network of its own — as if it sought to compete, very much in the enterprising free-market spirit of early Georgian England. Nor was Grand Lodge above co- opting material from its rivals in order to augment its appeal.
This is apparent in the vexed, complicated and controversial issue of Freemasonic ‘ degrees’ , or what might be called stages of initiation. Freemasonry today is divided into three ‘ Craft’ degrees and a number of ‘ optional’ ‘ higher degrees’ . The three ‘ Craft’ degrees — Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason — come under the jurisdiction of United Grand Lodge of England. The ‘ higher degrees’ do not. They come under the jurisdiction of other Freemasonic bodies, such as the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite Supreme Council or the Grand Chapter of the Royal Arch. Most English Freemasons today will work through the three degrees offered by Grand Lodge, then continue on to their choice among the various ‘ higher degrees’ — rather in the way that a student, graduating with a BA in English Literature from one university, might move to another university to work for a BA in French or German Literature. In the early to mid- eighteenth century, however , this was not permitted. For an English Freemason of the time, who did not want his loyalty to the crown impugned, only the degrees offered by Grand Lodge were available. The ‘ higher degrees’ , being an almost exclusively Jacobite preserve, were not; and the Freemasonic authorities offering such ‘ higher degrees’ were considered suspect at best, treasonous at worst. Argument still rages about the matter , but it is widely acknowledged today that what are now called ‘ higher degrees’ not only originated in Jacobite Freemasonry, but, in fact, had been there all along. In other words, they do not appear to have been later inventions, but to have been incorporated in a ‘ Store of Legend, Tradition and Symbolism of wide extent’ of which Grand Lodge, in 1717, selected only a portion. And, according to one Freemasonic histor ian:
. . . what our Jacobite Brethren did was to take still other portions of the same Store, adapting them in a manner which to them seemed perfectly justifiable to the service of that Cause which for them was Sacred . . . The Cause . . . has passed away, but, freed from all political associations, many of the Degrees remain.
In other words, the ‘ higher degrees’ seem to have involved aspects of Freemasonic r tual, tradition and history which were simply not known or available to Grand Lodge — or which would have been too politically volatile for Grand Lodge to accommodate, and which had therefore to be repudiated. After 1745, however , when the Stuarts had finally and definitively ceased to be a threat and the Hanoverian grip on the throne was secure, Grand Lodge, albeit grudgingly, began to recognise the ‘ higher degrees’ . And indeed, certain aspects of the ‘ higher degrees’ , purged now of any potentially controversial elements, were eventually appropriated and incorporated into extensions of Grand Lodge’ s own system. Out of this, which entailed a merger with a parallel and rival alternative Grand Lodge, there finally arose, in 1813, United Grand Lodge.
Most English Freemasonic history today has been written by scholars working under the auspices of United Grand Lodge. They present Jacobite Freemasonry and the proliferation of ‘ higher degrees’ as schismatic and heretical — deviations from the mainstream of which they themselves are representative. In fact, however , this would appear to be precisely the opposite of what actually occurred, with Jacobite Freemasonry apparently forming the original mainstream and Grand Lodge the deviation — which, by dint of historical circumstance and vicissitude, eventually became the mainstream itself . One is reminded of the origins of Christianity and the process whereby Pauline thought, originally a schism or heretical deviation from Jesus’s own teachings, supplanted those teachings and became the new or thodoxy — while Nazarean thought, the original repository of the teachings, was labelled a form of heresy.
Like Pauline thought, Grand Lodge seems to have begun as a deviation of the mainstream. Like Pauline thought, it displaced the mainstream and became the mainstream itself . But like Pauline thought, it did not always have things easy, and it continued to be suspect in the eyes of the secular authority it sought to appease. As a Masonic historian observes: ‘ to be a member of the Fraternity of Freemasons at that period was to invite the suspicion that one was also a Jacobite . . .’
The Influence of English Freemasonry
The Duke of Wharton, Grand Lodge’s Grand Master in 1722, did little to encourage either public or official confidence. Not only was he a vociferous Jacobite. Three years before, he had co- founded the f amous (or notorious) Hell Fire Club, which originally met in the Greyhound Tavern near St James. In this undertaking, he was joined by another figure soon to be prominent in Freemasonry, George Lee, Earl of Lichfield, whose father had died fighting for the Stuarts at the Boyne and whose mother , Charlotte Fitzroy, was an illegitimate daughter of Charles II. Lee himself was thus of Stuart blood and a cousin of two other illegitimate grandchildren of Charles II, James and Charles Radclyffe, successively Ear ls of Derwentwater . Not surprisingly, he, too, played an active role in Jacobite affair s. In 1716, his machinations had effected the escape of Charles Radclyffe and thirteen others from Newgate Prison, where they had been incarcerated for their part in the 1715 rebellion. James Radclyffe had already been executed.
Predictably enough, the authorities cracked down. In 1721, an edict was issued against ‘ certain scandlous clubs or societies’ . Quietly, though only temporarily, the Hell Fire Club was closed down. Aware of the suspicion it attracted, Grand Lodge f elt obliged to assure, or reassure, the government that it was ‘ safe’ . In 1722:
. . . a select Body of the Society of Free Masons waited on . . . the Lord Viscount Townsend [brother - in- law of Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister ] . . . to signify to his Lordship, that being obliged by their Constitutions, to hold a General Meeting now at Midsummer , according to annual Custom, they hoped the Administration would take no Umbrage at that Convocation, as they were all zealously affected to His Majesty’s Person and Government. His Lordship received this Intimation in a very affable Manner , telling them he believed they need not be apprehensive of any Molestation from the Government, so long as they went on doing nothing more dangerous than the ancient secrets of the society; which must be of a very harmless Nature, because, as much as Mankind love Mischief , no Body ever betray’d them.
And yet it was at this 1722 convocation – amidst charges of irregularity that Wharton managed to get himself elected Grand Master . Subsequently, he was accused of attempting to ‘ capture Freemasonry for the Jacobites’ . The f ollowing year , he was succeeded by the proHanoverian Earl of Dalkeith and left abruptly, ‘ without any ceremony’ . If there were ever any minutes for the period of his or his predecessors’ Grand Masterships, they disappeared. Officially, Grand Lodge’s minutes begin on 25 November 1723, under Dalkeith’s Grand Mastership. In September 1722, an ambitious if rather half - baked Jacobite plot was exposed – to foment a rising in London, capture the Tower and hold it until the rebels could be joined by an invasion force from France. Among the conspirators implicated in this plot was Dr John Arbuthnot, a prominent Freemason and former Royal Physician to Queen Anne. Arbuthnot’s closest friends included a number of other distinguished Freemasons, among them Pope and Swift – who, though not involved in the plan, suffered some degree of stigma by association. The September plot undid much of the credibility Grand Lodge had endeavoured to establish for itself earlier in the year and dictated the need for fresh assurances.
In 1723, as if to allay once and for all any suspicion of subversive political activity, there appeared the famous Constitutions of James Anderson. Anderson, a minister of the Scots Church in St James and chaplain to the staunchly pro- Hanoverian Earl of Buchan, was a member of the immensely influential Horn Lodge, which included such pillar s of the establishment as the Duke of Queensborough, the Duke of Richmond, Lord Paisley and, by 1725, Newton’ s associate, Joh Desaguliers. Such credentials and connections effectively placed Anderson above suspicion. In 1712, moreover , he had printed some virulent anti- Catholic sermons, extolling Queen Anne and invoking God:
. . . that he may disappoint the vain hopes of our common Adver saries by continuing the Protestant reformed Religion amongst us, and securing further the Protestant Succession to the Crown in the Line and House of Hanover . . .
Later , in 1732, Anderson was to publish another pro- Hanoverian work, Royal Genealogies. Among its subscribers were the Earl of Dalkeith, the Earl of Abercorn, Colonel (later General) Sir John Ligonier , Colonel John Pitt, Dr John Arbuthnot, John Desaguliers and Sir Robert Walpole.
Anderson’s Constitutions became, in effect, the Bible for English Freemasonry. It enunciates what were to become some of the now familiar and basic tenets of Grand Lodge. The first article, in its sheer vagueness, remains to this day a point of debate, interpretation and contention. In the past, Freemasons had been obliged to declare their allegiance to God and the Church of England, but, Anderson wr ites, ‘ tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that Religion to which all men agree, leaving their par ticular opinions to themselves . . .’ The second article states explicitly: ‘ A Mason . . . is never to be concerned in Plots and Conspiracies against the Peace and Welfare of the Nation.’ According to the sixth article, no arguments pertaining to religion or politics are to be countenanced in the lodge.
The Constitutions did not entirely allay all suspicion. As late as 1737, a long letter appeared in two London journals, warning that Freemasonry was dangerous to English society because it was secretly serving the Stuart cause. Portentous allusions were made to certain ‘ special’ lodges which were privy to crucial information and withheld it from ordinary Freemasons. These lodges – which ‘ admit . . . even Jacobites, Nonjurors, and Papists’ – were said to be recruiting on behalf of Stuart interests. The anonymous author admitted that many Freemasons were loyal supporters of the Crown, but then asked: ‘ how can We be sure that those Persons who are known to be well- affected are let into all their mysteries?
By then, however , such paranoia had become the exception rather than the rule. With Ander son’ s Constitutions, Grand Lodge became respectable, an increasingly unimpugnable social and cultural adjunct of the Hanoveian regime which was to extend, eventually, up to the throne. In Scotland, in Ireland and on the Continent, other forms of Freemasonry, as we shall see, continued active. In England, however , Grand Lodge established something approaching a monopoly; and its political orthodoxy was never subsequently to be seriously in doubt. Indeed, so integrated had Grand Lodge become in English society that its nomenclature had already begun to permeate the language and remains with us to this day. Phrases such as ‘ standing four square’ , ‘ on the level’ , ‘ taking a man’ s measure’ , subjecting a person to ‘ the third degree’ and many others certainly derive from Freemasonry.
By the 1730s, Grand Lodge had begun to take a burgeoning interest in North America and to ‘ warrant’ lodges there—that is, to sponsor lodges as affiliates of itself . In 1732, for example, General James Oglethorpe founded the colony of Georgia and became, two years later , Master of Georgia’s first Freemasonic lodge. Oglethorpe’s own political allegiances were ambiguous. Most of his family were active Jacobites. Three of his sisters were particularly militant on behalf of the Stuart cause, as was his elder brother , exiled for seditious activity. In the 1745 rebellion, Oglethorpe himself commanded British troops in the field, and displayed such apathy in his operations that he was court-mar tialled. Although he was acquitted, there seems little doubt that he shared his family’s sympathies. Never theless, his venture in Georgia met with approval from both the Hanover ian regime and Grand Lodge. Not only did Grand Lodge warrant the lodge he had founded. It also ‘ strenuously recommended’ that its English membership take up ‘ a generous collection’ on behalf of their Georgia off shoot and affiliate.
Thus, by the third decade of the eighteenth century, English Freemasonry, under the auspices of Grand Lodge, had become a bastion of the social and cultural establishment, including, among its more illustrious brethren, Desagulier s, Pope, Swift, Hogarth and Boswell, as well as Charles de Lorraine, future husband of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa. As we have seen, it had begun as a deviation from the mainstream, and then – so far at least as England was concerned – become the mainstream itself . In some respects, the Freemasonry of Grand Lodge may have been ‘ less complete’ than that of the Jacobites, less privy to ancient secrets, less heir to original traditions. And yet despite all this, or perhaps precisely because of it, the Freemasonry of Grand Lodge performed a social and cultural function that its rivals did not.
Grand Lodge suffused the whole of English society and inculcated its values into the very fabric of English thought. Insisting on a universal brotherhood which transcended national frontiers, English Freemasonry was to exert a profound influence on the great reformers of the eighteenth century – on David Hume, for example, on Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu and Rousseau in France, on their disciples in what was to become the United States. It is to Grand Lodge, and to the general philosophical climate fostered by it, that much of what is best in English history of the age can be ascribed. Under the aegis of Grand Lodge, the entire caste system in England became less rigid, more flexible, than anywhere else on the Continent. ‘ Upward mobility’ , to use the jargon of sociologists, became increasingly possible. Structures against religious and political prejudice served to encourage not just tolerance, but also the kind of egalitarian spir it that so impressed visitors from abroad: Voltaire, for example, later a Freemason himself , was so enthused by English society that he extolled it as the model to which all European civilisation should aspire. Anti- Semitism became more discredited in England than anywhere else in Europe, with Jews not only becoming Freemasons, but also gaining an access hither to denied them to social, political and public life. The burgeoning middle class was given room and latitude to manoeuvre and expand in a way that it could not elsewhere, and hence to catapult Britain to the forefront of commercial and industrial progress. Charitable works, including the often stressed solicitude for widows and orphans, disseminated a new ideal of civicresponsibility and paved the way for many subsequent welfare programmes. One might even argue that the solidarity of the lodge, together with its invocation of the medieval guilds, anticipated many of the features of later trade unionism. And finally, the process whereby masters and grand masters were elected implanted in English thinking a healthy distinction, soon to bear fruit in America, between the man and the office.
In all these respects, English Freemasonry constituted a kind of adhesive, holding together the fabric of eighteenth- century society. Among other things, it helped to provide a more temperate climate than obtained on the Continent, where grievances were eventually to culminate first in the French Revolution, then in the upheavals of 1832 and 1848. As we shall see, this climate was to extend to the British colonies in North America and to play a crucial role in the foundation of the United States. Thus, the form of Freemasonry promulgated by Grand Lodge was to supplant its own or igins. In doing so, it was to emerge as one of the most genuinely important and influential phenomena of the century – and one whose significance has all too of ten been overlooked by orthodox historians.
\\\THE TEMPLE AND THE LODGE
MICHAEL BAIGENT AND RICHARD LEIGH
THREE
The Origins of Freemasonry
12
The Development of Grand
Lodge
It is difficult to say precisely how much Freemasonry, as it evolved in Scotland, owed to the old Templar heritage and Templar traditions. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, whatever link there may have been between them was long lost, and no new link had yet been forged. Freemasonry had not yet publicly attempted to claim a Templar pedigree for itself . And while Claverhouse and his brother are extremely likely to have been Freemasons, no documentation survives to confirm that they were. If a Templar cross was indeed passed from Claverhouse to his brother and thence to the Abbé Calmet, this may attest some species of Templar survival, but it constitutes no direct connection with Freemasonry. When the Templar mystique surfaced again, it was to do so primarily, as we shall see, in France. Freemasonry, in the mean time, had come to play a much more central role in English affairs.
Under William and Mary, Protestantism regained its supremacy in England. By an act of Parliament which obtains to the present day, all Catholics were precluded from the throne, as was anyone married to a Catholic. Thus a repetition of the circumstances which had precipitated the 1688 revolution was effectively forestalled.
In 1702, eight years after his wife, William of Orange died. He was succeeded by Queen Anne, his sister - in- law and James II’s younger daughter . She, in turn, was succeeded in 1714 by George I, grandson of Elizabeth Stuart and Friedrich, Count Palatine of the Rhine. When George died in 1727, the throne passed to his son, George II, who reigned until 1760. For sixty years f ollowing William’s accession in 1688, the exiled Stuarts clung tenaciously to their dream of regaining the kingdom they had lost. The deposed James II died in 1701, to be succeeded by his son, James III, the so- called ‘ Old Pretender ’ . He in turn was succeeded as claimant by his son, the ‘ Young Pretender ’ , Charles Edward, ‘ Bonnie Prince Charlie’ . Under these three monarchs- in- exile, Jacobite circles on the Continent were to remain hotbeds of conspiracy and political intr igue. Nor were they inef f ectual. In 1708, a projected Stuart invasion of Scotland was mounted, supported by French troops and transported by French ships. England, with most of her troops committed to the War of the Spanish Succession, was ill- equipped to counter this threat, and the invasion would very likely have proved successful but for a combination of bad luck, Jacobite dithering and French apathy. In the event, the whole project foundered, but seven years later , in 1715, Scotland rose in a full- scale revolt under the Earl of Mar — who, as we have seen, was alleged to have succeeded Claverhouse as Grand Master of the latterday Templars. Also joining in the rebellion was Lord George Seton, Earl of Winton, whose title was for feited as a result and the earldom allowed to lapse, while he himself was condemned to death. In 1716, however , he escaped from the Tower of London and joined the exiled Stuart pretenders in France. He remained active in Jacobite affairs for the rest of his life, and in 1736 he became Master of an important Jacobite Masonic lodge in Rome. The revolt was put down, but only at considerable cost, and the exiled Stuarts were to remain a threat for another thirty years. Only after the invasion and full- scale military operations of 1745—6 was this threat at last to recede.
The 1688 revolution had introduced a number of modern, muchneeded reforms, including, and not least, a Bill of Rights. At the same time, however , British society had been grievously split. Nor was it simply a matter of those who supported the Stuarts fleeing the country en masse and leaving it entirely to their rivals. On the contrary, Stuart interests continued to be well represented in English affairs. Not all Stuart adherents were prepared to sanction force. Not all were prepared to defy Parliament. Many, despite their loyalties, were to prove conscientious civil servants under William and Mary, under Anne, under the Hanoverians. Such was the case, for example, with Sir Isaac Newton. But if William and Mary, and Anne, were reasonably popular monarchs, the Hanoverians were not; and there were many in England who publicly, unabashedly, without actually slipping into official treason, inveighed against the detested German sovereigns and agitated for a return of the Stuarts, whom they regarded as the country’s r ightful dynasty.
It was among these Stuart sympathisers that the modern- day Tory Party originated and came of age. The early eighteenth- century Tories had ar isen in the late 1670s out of the old, pre- Civil War cavalier class. Most were High Church Anglican or Anglo- Catholic. Most were landowners and sought to concentrate power in the hands of landed gentry. Virtually all of them esteemed the crown above Parliament and insisted on the Stuar ts’ hereditary r ight to the throne.
Their opponents, nicknamed Whigs, had also risen to prominence during the 1670s. The Whigs consisted mostly of the newly consolidated mercantile and professional classes, and were active in commerce, in industry, in finance and banking, in the army. They encouraged religious diversity and included many dissenters and free- thinkers. They extolled the power of Parliament over that of the crown. And, as Swift says, they ‘ preferred . . . the monied interest before the landed’ . 2 Subscribing, implicitly or explicitly, to the ‘ Puritan work ethic’ , they represented the triumphantly emergent middle class, whose leadership, first in the Commercial, then in the Industrial Revolution, was to determine the course of British history and establish money as supreme arbiter . They had no particular affection for the Hanoverians, but were prepared to tolerate the German rulers as a price of their own burgeoning success.
The fissures in British society were to be reflected in Freemasonry itself . According to extant records, Freemasonry, after the 1688 revolution, continued ostensibly as bef ore. Lodges continued not just to meet, but also to proliferate. It is likely that many older lodges, or the senior members of newer lodges, were pro- Stuart or Tory, but there is no evidence to suggest that Freemasonry, at this point, actually served as a vehicle for Jacobite espionage, conspiracy or propaganda. So far as possible, most lodges in England seem to have remained — or tried to remain — studiously aloof from politics. And inevitably, as more and more Whigs rose to prominence and assumed important positions in the country’s social and commercial affairs, they found their way into the lodge system, putting their own pro- Hanoverian stamp on to Freemasonry.
As we have seen, however , Freemasonry, from its very inception, had been inextricably linked with the Stuarts. Freemasons, during the seventeenth century, were not only required to ‘ be true to the Kinge’ , but also, and actively, to root out and inform against conspirators — thus becoming, in effect, part of the Stuarts’ administrative apparatus and machinery. Such allegiances ran deep. It is not surprising, therefore, that the main thrust of Freemasonry should have remained attached to the Stuart line, should have followed that line into exile and, from abroad, worked to further its interests in England. During the first third or so of the eighteenth century, Freemasonic lodges might be either Whig or Tory, Hanoverian or Jacobite; but it was the Tories in England and the Jacobites abroad who possessed more of the institution’s history and heritage. They constituted the mainstream, while other developments were but tributaries.
In England, prominent Freemasons like the Duke of Wharton were also professed Jacobites. Abroad, most of the Jacobite leaders – General James Keith, for example, the Earl of Winton (Alexander Seton), and the Earls of Derwentwater (first James, then his younger brother Charles, Radclyffe) — were not only Freemasons, but also instrumental in the dissemination of Freemasonry throughout Europe. After the suppression of the 1745 rebellion, a number of illustrious Freemasons were to be sentenced to death for their service to the Jacobite cause — Derwentwater , who had formerly been Grand Master of French Freemasonry, and the Earls of Kilmarnock and Cromarty, who had been Grand Masters of Scottish Freemasonry. Only the latter escaped execution at the Tower .
According to one histor ian:
There is no question but that the Jacobites had a crucial influence on the development of Freemasonry — to such an extent, indeed, that later witnesses went so far as to describe Freemasonry as a gigantic Jacobite conspiracy.
We would argue that the Jacobites did not just have ‘ a crucial influence on the development of Freemasonry’ . We would argue that they were, at least initially, its chief custodians and propagators. And when Grand Lodge — subsequently to become the primary repository of English Freemasonry — was created in 1717, it was created in large part as a Whig or Hanoverian attempt to break what had hither to been a virtual Jacobite monopoly.
The Centralisation of English Freemasonry
Grand Lodge of England was created on 24 June 1717 — St John’ s Day, the day formerly held sacred by the Templars. There were, initially, four London lodges which, in a manifest thrust towards centralisation, chose to amalgamate into one organisation and elect a Grand Lodge as a governing body. They quickly drew more lodges into their fold, and by 1723 the original four lodges had increased in number to fifty- two.
The usual explanation for the coalescence of Grand Lodge is astonishingly bland — or disingenuous. According to one writer , it ‘ came into being for the frankly social purpose of providing an occasion at which the members of a few London lodges could meet’ . One is also told that the period was one of general enthusiasm for clubs and societies, and that the dissemination and proliferation of English Freemasonry was a consequence of this enthusiasm. And yet there is no comparable movement towards centralisation among the various dining and drinking clubs of the time, or the burgeoning antiquarian, bibliographical and scientific societies. It is specifically in Freemasonry that the emphasis is not just on proliferation, but, even more crucially, on centralisation. Thus, for example, of the fifty- two lodges comprising Grand Lodge in 1723, at least twenty- six appear to have pre - date d Grand Lodge’ s foundation in 1717. Their entry into the historical record, in other words, results not from their proliferation, but from their preparedness to centralise.
According to J. R. Clarke, a Freemasonic historian writing in 1967, ‘ I think that in 1717 there was a much more serious reason f or the cooperation: it was made necessary by the political state of the country.’ Clarke goes on to stress the effusive demonstrations of pro- Hanoverian allegiance at the inaugural meeting of Grand Lodge — the drinking of loyal toasts to King George, the singing of loyal songs. And he rightly concludes that such an exaggerated display of patriotic fervour must be seen as an attempt to prove that Freemasons were not Jacobites — a display which would hardly have been necessary were there not some reason to suspect that they were.
Historians today tend to think of the Scottish rebellion of 1715 and the foundation of Grand Lodge in 1717 as two distinct events, separated by a full two years. In fact, however , the 1715 rebellion was not finally and completely suppressed until the execution of Lords Kenmuir and James Derwentwater in February 1716, and the plans for the amalgamation which formed Grand Lodge were made well before the event — during the previous summer or autumn of 1716. The Scottish rebellion and the foundation of Grand Lodge were not therefore separated by two years, but by a mere six to eight months. And there would appear , quite patently, to have been a causal connection between the two. It is as if the pro- Hanoverian establishment, envious of the network which Freemasonry provided for its Jacobite rivals, deliberately sought to foster a parallel network of its own — as if it sought to compete, very much in the enterprising free-market spirit of early Georgian England. Nor was Grand Lodge above co- opting material from its rivals in order to augment its appeal.
This is apparent in the vexed, complicated and controversial issue of Freemasonic ‘ degrees’ , or what might be called stages of initiation. Freemasonry today is divided into three ‘ Craft’ degrees and a number of ‘ optional’ ‘ higher degrees’ . The three ‘ Craft’ degrees — Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason — come under the jurisdiction of United Grand Lodge of England. The ‘ higher degrees’ do not. They come under the jurisdiction of other Freemasonic bodies, such as the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite Supreme Council or the Grand Chapter of the Royal Arch. Most English Freemasons today will work through the three degrees offered by Grand Lodge, then continue on to their choice among the various ‘ higher degrees’ — rather in the way that a student, graduating with a BA in English Literature from one university, might move to another university to work for a BA in French or German Literature. In the early to mid- eighteenth century, however , this was not permitted. For an English Freemason of the time, who did not want his loyalty to the crown impugned, only the degrees offered by Grand Lodge were available. The ‘ higher degrees’ , being an almost exclusively Jacobite preserve, were not; and the Freemasonic authorities offering such ‘ higher degrees’ were considered suspect at best, treasonous at worst. Argument still rages about the matter , but it is widely acknowledged today that what are now called ‘ higher degrees’ not only originated in Jacobite Freemasonry, but, in fact, had been there all along. In other words, they do not appear to have been later inventions, but to have been incorporated in a ‘ Store of Legend, Tradition and Symbolism of wide extent’ of which Grand Lodge, in 1717, selected only a portion. And, according to one Freemasonic histor ian:
. . . what our Jacobite Brethren did was to take still other portions of the same Store, adapting them in a manner which to them seemed perfectly justifiable to the service of that Cause which for them was Sacred . . . The Cause . . . has passed away, but, freed from all political associations, many of the Degrees remain.
In other words, the ‘ higher degrees’ seem to have involved aspects of Freemasonic r tual, tradition and history which were simply not known or available to Grand Lodge — or which would have been too politically volatile for Grand Lodge to accommodate, and which had therefore to be repudiated. After 1745, however , when the Stuarts had finally and definitively ceased to be a threat and the Hanoverian grip on the throne was secure, Grand Lodge, albeit grudgingly, began to recognise the ‘ higher degrees’ . And indeed, certain aspects of the ‘ higher degrees’ , purged now of any potentially controversial elements, were eventually appropriated and incorporated into extensions of Grand Lodge’ s own system. Out of this, which entailed a merger with a parallel and rival alternative Grand Lodge, there finally arose, in 1813, United Grand Lodge.
Most English Freemasonic history today has been written by scholars working under the auspices of United Grand Lodge. They present Jacobite Freemasonry and the proliferation of ‘ higher degrees’ as schismatic and heretical — deviations from the mainstream of which they themselves are representative. In fact, however , this would appear to be precisely the opposite of what actually occurred, with Jacobite Freemasonry apparently forming the original mainstream and Grand Lodge the deviation — which, by dint of historical circumstance and vicissitude, eventually became the mainstream itself . One is reminded of the origins of Christianity and the process whereby Pauline thought, originally a schism or heretical deviation from Jesus’s own teachings, supplanted those teachings and became the new or thodoxy — while Nazarean thought, the original repository of the teachings, was labelled a form of heresy.
Like Pauline thought, Grand Lodge seems to have begun as a deviation of the mainstream. Like Pauline thought, it displaced the mainstream and became the mainstream itself . But like Pauline thought, it did not always have things easy, and it continued to be suspect in the eyes of the secular authority it sought to appease. As a Masonic historian observes: ‘ to be a member of the Fraternity of Freemasons at that period was to invite the suspicion that one was also a Jacobite . . .’
The Influence of English Freemasonry
The Duke of Wharton, Grand Lodge’s Grand Master in 1722, did little to encourage either public or official confidence. Not only was he a vociferous Jacobite. Three years before, he had co- founded the f amous (or notorious) Hell Fire Club, which originally met in the Greyhound Tavern near St James. In this undertaking, he was joined by another figure soon to be prominent in Freemasonry, George Lee, Earl of Lichfield, whose father had died fighting for the Stuarts at the Boyne and whose mother , Charlotte Fitzroy, was an illegitimate daughter of Charles II. Lee himself was thus of Stuart blood and a cousin of two other illegitimate grandchildren of Charles II, James and Charles Radclyffe, successively Ear ls of Derwentwater . Not surprisingly, he, too, played an active role in Jacobite affair s. In 1716, his machinations had effected the escape of Charles Radclyffe and thirteen others from Newgate Prison, where they had been incarcerated for their part in the 1715 rebellion. James Radclyffe had already been executed.
Predictably enough, the authorities cracked down. In 1721, an edict was issued against ‘ certain scandlous clubs or societies’ . Quietly, though only temporarily, the Hell Fire Club was closed down. Aware of the suspicion it attracted, Grand Lodge f elt obliged to assure, or reassure, the government that it was ‘ safe’ . In 1722:
. . . a select Body of the Society of Free Masons waited on . . . the Lord Viscount Townsend [brother - in- law of Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister ] . . . to signify to his Lordship, that being obliged by their Constitutions, to hold a General Meeting now at Midsummer , according to annual Custom, they hoped the Administration would take no Umbrage at that Convocation, as they were all zealously affected to His Majesty’s Person and Government. His Lordship received this Intimation in a very affable Manner , telling them he believed they need not be apprehensive of any Molestation from the Government, so long as they went on doing nothing more dangerous than the ancient secrets of the society; which must be of a very harmless Nature, because, as much as Mankind love Mischief , no Body ever betray’d them.
And yet it was at this 1722 convocation – amidst charges of irregularity that Wharton managed to get himself elected Grand Master . Subsequently, he was accused of attempting to ‘ capture Freemasonry for the Jacobites’ . The f ollowing year , he was succeeded by the proHanoverian Earl of Dalkeith and left abruptly, ‘ without any ceremony’ . If there were ever any minutes for the period of his or his predecessors’ Grand Masterships, they disappeared. Officially, Grand Lodge’s minutes begin on 25 November 1723, under Dalkeith’s Grand Mastership. In September 1722, an ambitious if rather half - baked Jacobite plot was exposed – to foment a rising in London, capture the Tower and hold it until the rebels could be joined by an invasion force from France. Among the conspirators implicated in this plot was Dr John Arbuthnot, a prominent Freemason and former Royal Physician to Queen Anne. Arbuthnot’s closest friends included a number of other distinguished Freemasons, among them Pope and Swift – who, though not involved in the plan, suffered some degree of stigma by association. The September plot undid much of the credibility Grand Lodge had endeavoured to establish for itself earlier in the year and dictated the need for fresh assurances.
In 1723, as if to allay once and for all any suspicion of subversive political activity, there appeared the famous Constitutions of James Anderson. Anderson, a minister of the Scots Church in St James and chaplain to the staunchly pro- Hanoverian Earl of Buchan, was a member of the immensely influential Horn Lodge, which included such pillar s of the establishment as the Duke of Queensborough, the Duke of Richmond, Lord Paisley and, by 1725, Newton’ s associate, Joh Desaguliers. Such credentials and connections effectively placed Anderson above suspicion. In 1712, moreover , he had printed some virulent anti- Catholic sermons, extolling Queen Anne and invoking God:
. . . that he may disappoint the vain hopes of our common Adver saries by continuing the Protestant reformed Religion amongst us, and securing further the Protestant Succession to the Crown in the Line and House of Hanover . . .
Later , in 1732, Anderson was to publish another pro- Hanoverian work, Royal Genealogies. Among its subscribers were the Earl of Dalkeith, the Earl of Abercorn, Colonel (later General) Sir John Ligonier , Colonel John Pitt, Dr John Arbuthnot, John Desaguliers and Sir Robert Walpole.
Anderson’s Constitutions became, in effect, the Bible for English Freemasonry. It enunciates what were to become some of the now familiar and basic tenets of Grand Lodge. The first article, in its sheer vagueness, remains to this day a point of debate, interpretation and contention. In the past, Freemasons had been obliged to declare their allegiance to God and the Church of England, but, Anderson wr ites, ‘ tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that Religion to which all men agree, leaving their par ticular opinions to themselves . . .’ The second article states explicitly: ‘ A Mason . . . is never to be concerned in Plots and Conspiracies against the Peace and Welfare of the Nation.’ According to the sixth article, no arguments pertaining to religion or politics are to be countenanced in the lodge.
The Constitutions did not entirely allay all suspicion. As late as 1737, a long letter appeared in two London journals, warning that Freemasonry was dangerous to English society because it was secretly serving the Stuart cause. Portentous allusions were made to certain ‘ special’ lodges which were privy to crucial information and withheld it from ordinary Freemasons. These lodges – which ‘ admit . . . even Jacobites, Nonjurors, and Papists’ – were said to be recruiting on behalf of Stuart interests. The anonymous author admitted that many Freemasons were loyal supporters of the Crown, but then asked: ‘ how can We be sure that those Persons who are known to be well- affected are let into all their mysteries?
By then, however , such paranoia had become the exception rather than the rule. With Ander son’ s Constitutions, Grand Lodge became respectable, an increasingly unimpugnable social and cultural adjunct of the Hanoveian regime which was to extend, eventually, up to the throne. In Scotland, in Ireland and on the Continent, other forms of Freemasonry, as we shall see, continued active. In England, however , Grand Lodge established something approaching a monopoly; and its political orthodoxy was never subsequently to be seriously in doubt. Indeed, so integrated had Grand Lodge become in English society that its nomenclature had already begun to permeate the language and remains with us to this day. Phrases such as ‘ standing four square’ , ‘ on the level’ , ‘ taking a man’ s measure’ , subjecting a person to ‘ the third degree’ and many others certainly derive from Freemasonry.
By the 1730s, Grand Lodge had begun to take a burgeoning interest in North America and to ‘ warrant’ lodges there—that is, to sponsor lodges as affiliates of itself . In 1732, for example, General James Oglethorpe founded the colony of Georgia and became, two years later , Master of Georgia’s first Freemasonic lodge. Oglethorpe’s own political allegiances were ambiguous. Most of his family were active Jacobites. Three of his sisters were particularly militant on behalf of the Stuart cause, as was his elder brother , exiled for seditious activity. In the 1745 rebellion, Oglethorpe himself commanded British troops in the field, and displayed such apathy in his operations that he was court-mar tialled. Although he was acquitted, there seems little doubt that he shared his family’s sympathies. Never theless, his venture in Georgia met with approval from both the Hanover ian regime and Grand Lodge. Not only did Grand Lodge warrant the lodge he had founded. It also ‘ strenuously recommended’ that its English membership take up ‘ a generous collection’ on behalf of their Georgia off shoot and affiliate.
Thus, by the third decade of the eighteenth century, English Freemasonry, under the auspices of Grand Lodge, had become a bastion of the social and cultural establishment, including, among its more illustrious brethren, Desagulier s, Pope, Swift, Hogarth and Boswell, as well as Charles de Lorraine, future husband of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa. As we have seen, it had begun as a deviation from the mainstream, and then – so far at least as England was concerned – become the mainstream itself . In some respects, the Freemasonry of Grand Lodge may have been ‘ less complete’ than that of the Jacobites, less privy to ancient secrets, less heir to original traditions. And yet despite all this, or perhaps precisely because of it, the Freemasonry of Grand Lodge performed a social and cultural function that its rivals did not.
Grand Lodge suffused the whole of English society and inculcated its values into the very fabric of English thought. Insisting on a universal brotherhood which transcended national frontiers, English Freemasonry was to exert a profound influence on the great reformers of the eighteenth century – on David Hume, for example, on Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu and Rousseau in France, on their disciples in what was to become the United States. It is to Grand Lodge, and to the general philosophical climate fostered by it, that much of what is best in English history of the age can be ascribed. Under the aegis of Grand Lodge, the entire caste system in England became less rigid, more flexible, than anywhere else on the Continent. ‘ Upward mobility’ , to use the jargon of sociologists, became increasingly possible. Structures against religious and political prejudice served to encourage not just tolerance, but also the kind of egalitarian spir it that so impressed visitors from abroad: Voltaire, for example, later a Freemason himself , was so enthused by English society that he extolled it as the model to which all European civilisation should aspire. Anti- Semitism became more discredited in England than anywhere else in Europe, with Jews not only becoming Freemasons, but also gaining an access hither to denied them to social, political and public life. The burgeoning middle class was given room and latitude to manoeuvre and expand in a way that it could not elsewhere, and hence to catapult Britain to the forefront of commercial and industrial progress. Charitable works, including the often stressed solicitude for widows and orphans, disseminated a new ideal of civicresponsibility and paved the way for many subsequent welfare programmes. One might even argue that the solidarity of the lodge, together with its invocation of the medieval guilds, anticipated many of the features of later trade unionism. And finally, the process whereby masters and grand masters were elected implanted in English thinking a healthy distinction, soon to bear fruit in America, between the man and the office.
In all these respects, English Freemasonry constituted a kind of adhesive, holding together the fabric of eighteenth- century society. Among other things, it helped to provide a more temperate climate than obtained on the Continent, where grievances were eventually to culminate first in the French Revolution, then in the upheavals of 1832 and 1848. As we shall see, this climate was to extend to the British colonies in North America and to play a crucial role in the foundation of the United States. Thus, the form of Freemasonry promulgated by Grand Lodge was to supplant its own or igins. In doing so, it was to emerge as one of the most genuinely important and influential phenomena of the century – and one whose significance has all too of ten been overlooked by orthodox historians.
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