LAURENCE
GARDNER

BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF BLOODLINE OF THE HOLY GRAIL

THE SHADOW OF
SOLOMON
THE LOST SECRET OF THE FREEMASONS REVEALED

The mason poor that builds the lordly halls,

Dwells not in them; they are for high degree.

His cottage is compact in paper walls,

And not with brick or stone, as others be.

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, 1573

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Introduction

PART I

1 Ancient Secrets

2 Masonic Origins

3 Royal Society

4 Legacy of Invention

5 Power and Politics

6 Imperial Conquest

PART II

7 Knights of the Temple

8 Hiramic Legend

9 The Transition

10 Rosslyn

11 Mysterious Science

12 The Temple of Light

13 The Lost Word

PART III

14 Anti-Masonry

15 The Tudor Stage

16 Guilds and Traditions

17 Into America

18 Debates and Monuments

19 The Royal Art

20 Discovering the Secret

NOTES AND REFERENCES

MASONIC AND MONARCHICAL TIMELINE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Also by Laurence Gardner

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

For close to 300 years since the foundation of England’s premier Grand Lodge in 1717, many books have been published concerning Freemasonry. They appear with some regularity, and masonic libraries are extensive in Britain, America, France and other countries. These books reside in two clearly defined camps: they are either written by masons, or they are written by non-masons. In the latter case, there are further subdivisions in that the publications might be pro-masonry or anti-masonry but, either way, their contents are based on hearsay. In comparison, books written by masons are generally written for masons. Though perhaps authoritative, they are largely concerned with in-house doctrines, and often relate to specific aspects that are of little interest to outsiders.

In The Shadow of Solomon, I have approached the subject from an objective standpoint since I am able to call upon long-term experience as a Freemason, while also now being an equally long-term Past Mason. Initiated into a City of London lodge in 1966, and subsequently progressing through the Craft degrees, my active regular involvement as a Master Mason continued for around 20 years. By the middle 1980s, however, it became necessary to review my situation because the requirements of lodge membership were potentially limiting to my occupation as an independent researcher. Consequently, I tended my formal resignation at the United Grand Lodge of England.

Since that time, while taking neither a pro nor anti-Freemasonry stance, I have continued to investigate masonic history, structure and practice in the course of general studies which often have loose or close associations with masonry. These include matters that concern chivalric institutions, philosophical societies and other groups that have influenced monarchical and governmental structure over the centuries. In the course of this, I have met with both approval and disapproval from masonic quarters. As in any walk of life, it is not possible to please everybody all of the time—and Freemasons are no exception in this regard. The majority are tolerant, fair-minded individuals with an aptitude for discussion, but for some there is no debating ground beyond the recognized teachings. Hence, although Freemasonry is not a religion, it is similar in certain respects since its defence mechanisms can operate in much the same way if there is a perceived challenge to the accepted dogma.

Numerous Grand Lodges worldwide have websites on the Internet, and these often present an intriguing scenario. Their purpose is to be informative—and many are—but there is also a good deal of defensive content. Pages of official replies are given to what are taken to be harmful assaults against the masonic establishment. No other organization suffers from such a proliferation of accusations, nor feels the need to respond with guarded explanations in every case. But why, if the Fraternity is loyal and mutually supportive, should they even care what outsiders think? It is the masonic choice to be secretive—it is not forced on them.

It is often stated in official literature that Freemasonry is not a secret society, and this is true to a point because its existence is hardly a secret; neither is there any requirement for secrecy of membership. But, in reality, this is splitting hairs since the masonic charge is that members must ‘conceal and never reveal’ aspects of learning from within the lodge environment. Thus, although not a secret society, it is indeed a secretive society and, to outsiders, this amounts to the same thing.

The basic precepts of Freemasonry have much in their favour, but the most anomalous feature is that masonic practice derives from certain ancient sciences which are never actually taught. Ceremonies are performed and rituals are learned, but it is stated that, for all this pageantry, the secrets on which the Brotherhood was founded were lost long ago.

The most devastating loss of primary manuscripts in respect of ancient philosophical thought was caused by the Church of Rome’s burning of the Library of Alexandria in AD 391. Subsequent to this, numerous other records were destroyed throughout the Roman Empire. Some discoveries of the utmost significance were made in the Middle Ages when the Knights Templars excavated the Jerusalem Temple vaults after the First Crusade. But, again, much was destroyed in the 14th-century Inquisition against the Order. Remnants of documentation were preserved outside the Papal States, particularly in Scotland, and philosophers of the emergent Royal Society (such as Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle) used what was available to make some of the greatest ever scientific discoveries (or, as we shall learn, re-discoveries). Earlier in the 17th century, however, many valuable papers had been burnt during the Cromwellian Protectorate, with further losses incurred in the Great Fire of London. Following this, a change of reigning dynasty and parliamentary affiliation saw even more documentation sidelined, while many key adepts of the masonic tradition were dispersed into European exile.

Freemasonry, in its current form, was established in the 18th century as a questing fraternity that would endeavour to retrieve and collate what could be salvaged of the scattered archive, but it was a short-lived enterprise. Within a very short time the movement changed its emphasis to become a charity-based social institution, although electing to maintain aspects of ritual that would satisfy the original philosophical ideal. These days—although ostensibly perceived as a secret society—it is fair to say that modern Freemasonry’s best kept secret is that it actually holds no secrets of any genuine substance. Contained within the surviving Renaissance annals, however, are numerous pointers which, although perhaps vague and incomprehensible 300 years ago, are becoming thoroughly meaningful as modern science catches up with its ancient past.

In The Shadow of Solomon, we shall follow an investigative trail of documented record, accessing some of the archival material that the Masonic Constitutions claimed to have been lost more than three centuries ago. We shall consider modern lodge workings in comparison with those of the past, to ascertain how latter-day Freemasonry was shaped and manipulated so as to cause its own original precepts to be forgotten. The Shadow of Solomon is arranged in three parts: in Part I the focus is on power, politics and the conspiratorial intrigue that set the scene for masonic evolution; Part II deals more specifically with the ceremonies and alchemical heritage of Freemasonry—its connection to chivalric institutions and the philosophies that underpin the foundation; finally, in Part III, the puzzle condenses into a unified shape as we discover not only how the original secrets of the Craft were lost, but why this happened and—most importantly—what those secrets were.

There are many allegorical glyphs and symbols used in Freemasonry; some are well known, others are not. But of all these, the most potent is among the least familiar to outsiders—a point within a circle . As we shall see, the whole original purpose of Freemasonry rests with the definitive meaning of this device, which dates back to ancient times. We shall also discover that a time-hon-oured aspect of the Craft known as the Royal Arch Chapter holds the ultimate key to Freemasonry. Although the Chapter is optional to Brethren, it is within this particular ritual (as distinct from the three primary degrees) that the light of masonic heritage truly shines—yet the all-important Royal Arch was totally ignored by the Grand Lodge establishment for 96 years from its foundation. Many masons have wondered why the biblical Ark of the Covenant appears at the crest of the Arms of the United Grand Lodge of England, when it is not an item of significance in the Craft degrees. But clearly—as our investigation will reveal—it was once of the utmost significance, just as were the enigmatic Philosophers’ Stone, and the Golden Calf that Moses burnt to a powder in Sinai.

Our task is to undertake precisely what formalized Freemasonry sought to achieve when it was established back in 1717. It is, in essence, the quest for a philosophical treasure, and for a lost Mason’s Word which is the code to unlocking that treasure. The difference between our quest and that undertaken by the Fraternity itself is that we are not constrained by in-house preconceptions. Hence, our approach will succeed where earlier efforts have failed. Many of the time-honoured mysteries are, in fact, perfectly traceable, and emerge as being far more dramatically exciting than might be imagined.

Laurence Gardner

Exeter, March 2005.

PART I

1 Ancient Secrets
A Magical Heritage

Stories of the biblical King Solomon reside at the heart of modern Freemasonry. They relate especially to the building of his lavish Temple in Jerusalem, where the Ark of the Covenant was housed in the Holy of Holies. Famed for his extraordinary wealth and wisdom, this son of King David from around 950 BC presents an Old Testament enigma. He is greatly revered in Judaic lore, but also criticized for having a number of wives and for allowing many deities to be worshipped within his realm. Notable in the Solomon accounts are his relationships with the King of Tyre and the Queen of Sheba, each of whom supplied him with valuable gifts and a vast quantity of gold to enrich his kingdom of Judah (see page 285).

Outside the Bible, Jewish tradition holds that Solomon was a practitioner of divine technology, with a magic ring and a gem that could cut through stone with silent precision. And it was said that he kept the Ark mysteriously suspended above the ground. In such respects, King Solomon was regarded well beyond his era as a master magician, and he became a much revered figure in Renaissance Europe. As we shall see, the geometry of his Temple was considered to represent sacred perfection; the secret of his stone-cutting and his ability with levitation became subjects of scientific quest, and his passionate interest in gold was a source of constant fascination.

In figurative terms, Solomon holds the key to unlock the secrets of modern Freemasonry, but before the institution was formalized in 1717, the historical connection to his legacy rested with the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon. Commonly known as the Knights Templars, this elite fraternity of Western European knights—a military legation with a monastic structure—was founded in the early 1100s as an ambassadorial fraternity after the First Crusade. The question arises, therefore: Did the masonic movement take its lead from the Templars? If so, how does a modern-day charitable fraternity reconcile with a medieval Order of warrior monks? Or did Freemasonry evolve from stonemasons’ guilds, as is generally portrayed? Perhaps it began with the mystery schools of ancient Egypt, with which there are recognizable similarities. Whatever the case, the same question applies: How does the present institution equate with any of these?

The Bible’s Old and New Testaments have been used for centuries as scriptures which underpin the Jewish and Christian faiths, but that is not how they were originally conceived; neither were the Testaments written as cohesive volumes. They consist of a series of individual works written by different people at different times, eventually brought together with common purpose. The books embody aspects of history which, in the Old Testament, encompass lengthy spans of time, but they have a greater value than history alone in that the inherent stories often relate to truly extraordinary events. The fact that modern Freemasonry (which is neither a faith nor a religion) should focus on certain of these events after such a period of time is intriguing in itself, but it has been an evolutionary process which has brought a variety of past disciplines within the wrap of a single ideal.

In researching pre-18th century Freemasonry in its various guises, it becomes clear that its constituent parts were more romantically exciting as individual subjects than they have become beneath a masonic umbrella which veils them with allegory. Most notable is the science and nature of alchemy—the art of material transposition, which is most commonly associated with gold—along with the manipulation of light waves and, not least in the equation, the techniques of levitation. As recorded in texts from Mesopotamia, Egypt and other countries from the 3rd millennium BC, there is abounding evidence that the technological capabilities of ancient civilizations were far superior to anything credited to them by latter-day educational establishments. The study of such documents not only confirms a good deal of biblical scripture, but sheds a whole new light on the history and origins of Freemasonry. It is time, therefore, to put aside conventional dogma and preconceptions, and to look afresh at the archival material that supports the masonic ideal. To help us in our quest, we should first look at Freemasonry as it exists today and, in particular, at what its formative Constitution has to say about the masonic secrets themselves.

The Riddle of the Lost Archive

Freemasonry is described by the United Grand Lodge of England as ‘a peculiar system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols’. It is associated with the funding of schools, hospitals and care centres. But, worthy as these activities might be, it appears that they were introduced to give meaning and purpose to a brotherhood which apparently had no access to records of the tradition which it endeavoured to emulate. When the Presbyterian mason Rev James Anderson compiled and published The Constitutions of the Free-Masons in 1723, he wrote:

Very little has come down to us that testifies the English masonic tradition before the latter 17th century. Many of the Fraternity’s records of Charles II’s and former reigns were lost in the next and at the Revolution of 1688; and many of them were too hastily burnt in our time for fear of making discoveries.

Anderson’s reference to the ‘English masonic tradition’ is important because it reflects a commonly held view that Freemasonry is English by design. In loose terms, this is fair comment since the first Grand Lodge (as against separately run independent lodges) was instituted in London in 1717. Just six years after this, Anderson commented on the fraternity’s records of a previous generation—an archive that had seemingly been lost. Were those records English, or were they perhaps Scottish, given that King Charles II Stuart (whom he mentions) was of the royal line of Scotland? The Knights Templars certainly had been prevalent in Scotland after being banished by the Pope from England and Europe in 1307, but the 12th-century origin of the Templars was a matter of French historical record before it was Scottish.

If Freemasonry evolved into England from Scotland, and prior to that from France, an interesting scenario would be presented. But it would still not explain how centuries of chronicles from before 1723 had been lost. It may be that they were not lost—merely that it suited the new style of English Freemasonry to pretend this was so. But since Freemasonry is founded on the principles of honesty and integrity, it would seem incongruous for the establishment to be constituted with a pointless falsehood from the outset.

Our task, therefore, is to search beyond Anderson’s Constitutions and the founding of the first Grand Lodge of England—to look back as far as possible, tracing the story of Freemasonry as it evolved to become the secretive, charitable institution that exists today. In this regard, our search for the lost records must begin with Anderson’s own statement that they went missing in the reign following King Charles II, and during the Revolution of 1688.

Setting the Stage

Freemasonry is officially described as a ‘peculiar system of morality’, conceived as a neighbourly institution of fraternity and goodwill—and it rests upon well-defined codes of ‘brotherly love, faith and charity’. Indeed, these are all perfectly valid and admirable ideals, but they can exist perfectly well outside Freemasonry. No doubt there are other organizations which claim to support the same principles, but they are not covert and secretive. Any individual may aspire to the same codes of practice, but it does not take knowledge of secret signs and handshakes to make them possible. So, does Freemasonry confer some great and privileged secret to its members over and above these aspirations? Not according to James Anderson. He made it plain enough in the Constitutions that the secrets (whatever they were) have been lost. More than that, he said they had been burnt ‘for fear of making discoveries’.

From this it is evident that there is a distinct difference between pre and post-1688 Freemasonry, and that the earlier movement held secrets which are not apparent in the modern lodge workings. Candidates are advised on initiation that they will be ‘admitted to the mysteries and privileges of ancient Freemasonry’, but in fact they are not. They are admitted to the workings (and perhaps privileges) of modern Freemasonry. Some quaint rituals and entertaining ceremony have been preserved (or newly invented), but anything which made the brotherhood worthy of a code of silence, with secret signs and passwords of recognition, has long since been sidelined or forgotten.

So what happened in England in 1688 that was so dramatic as to change everything? Anderson specifically mentioned ‘the Revolution’, and it is with this that we should commence our investigation. From 1603 until 1688, the monarchy of Britain was the Royal House of Stuart. They had previously reigned in Scotland for 232 years from 1371, beginning with King Robert II, the grandson of Robert the Bruce. When Queen Elizabeth I Tudor of England died childless in 1603, her supposed nearest relative, King James VI Stuart of Scots, was granted dual crown status and invited to London to become James I of England.

James was succeeded by his son, who became Charles I of Britain in 1625 but, following the puritanical uprising of the parliamentary rebel, Oliver Cromwell, and the resultant Civil War, Charles was executed in 1649. There ensued a short period of Commonwealth, during which the late king’s son and royal heir was crowned King Charles II of Scots, at Scone, Perthshire, on 1 January 1651. Later that year, Cromwell’s army defeated the new King’s troops at Worcester in England, and Charles II fled to safety in France. Oliver Cromwell then decided to rule the nation by martial force alone, establishing his Protectorate in 1653 and dissolving Parliament to facilitate his military dictatorship.

In 1660, Charles II was restored to the British crowns, taking his hereditary seat in London. Although a popular and diplomatic monarch, Charles died without a legitimate heir, and was succeeded in 1685 by his brother, the Duke of York, who became King James II of England, while also being James VII of Scots (see Masonic and Monarchical Timeline, page 412).

In collaboration with such famed colleagues as the diarist Samuel Pepys (then Secretary to the Navy), James had previously revitalized the British Fleet after its abandonment by Oliver Cromwell. And, as James, Duke of York, he had named the American settlement of New York in 1664.¹ But, despite all his expertise and former glory, James became a very unfortunate king. Plagued in the first instance by a challenge for the throne from his illegitimate nephew, the Duke of Monmouth, James ultimately fell foul of his old trading enemies, the Dutch. He and Charles II had declared war against Holland in 1665 and, during his reign as King James II of England (VII of Scots), this loomed large to confront him in 1688.

At that time there was a religious upheaval in Britain—mainly because of Quaker and Presbyterian movements whose popularity in the rural areas was undermining the supremacy of the Anglican Church. It was also not long since England had been a formally Catholic nation, and Catholics still constituted about a seventh of the population.² In addition to this, there were many Jewish people in Britain and, throughout the reign of Charles II, everyone had been treated with due accord. His reign had been such a relief following the church-banning Cromwellian Protectorate that no one cared which religion their neighbour might prefer. But the Anglican ministers of James’s era were not so forbearing, and pressures (such as exclusion from trading opportunities) were brought to bear against those who did not conform to the Church of England doctrine.

James decided that, as King and Guardian of the Realm, he had a primary responsibility to the people before any allegiance to Parliament and the Church. On 4 April 1687, he issued a Declaration for Liberty of Conscience. It conveyed the ideal of religious tolerance and freedom for all, stating:

Conscience ought not to be constrained, nor people forced in matters of mere religion. It has ever been contrary to our inclination, as we think it is to the interests of governments, which it destroys by spoiling trade, depopulating countries and discouraging strangers. And finally, that it never obtained the end for which it was employed.

We therefore—and out of our princely care for all our loving subjects (that they may live at ease and quiet), and for the increase of trade and encouragement of strangers—have thought fit, by virtue of our royal prerogative, to issue forth this declaration of indulgence…and do straitly charge and command all our loving subjects that we do freely give them leave to meet and serve God after their own way and manner.³

It was one of the most public-spirited documentary pronouncements ever made by a reigning monarch, but it was more than the Anglican ministers could tolerate—a king who presumed to offer people freedom of religious choice. James had challenged their ultimate supremacy—he must be in league with the Catholics!

James had always been offended by the way in which the Church had abandoned his grandfather, Charles I, to the mercy of irreligious mobsters, and how the bishops had conformed so readily to Cromwell’s closure of the churches. He was no Anglican conformist, neither was he raised as a Presbyterian in the manner of his greatgrandfather James I. But, in attempting to grant an equality of conscience, he sought to repeal the restrictive Test Acts of 1673 and 1678, which bound those in public office to communion with the Church of England. His action, therefore, was seen to oppose the privileges of the Anglican clergy, as well as affording people a denominational choice over which Parliament had no control.

Much later, in 1828-9, England’s Test Acts were finally repealed in favour of Catholics (with the exception of the offices of monarch and Lord High Chancellor). Then, in 1858, the provisions were relaxed in respect of Jews, and the Scottish Test Act of 1681 was overturned in 1889. In Britain today, all religious denominations (Christian or otherwise) are afforded the right of worship according to their beliefs and conscience—precisely as King James II (VII) envisaged over 300 years ago. James was way ahead of his time, but his public popularity counted for nothing in 1688, neither did his earlier courage on the battlefields of France and Flanders, nor his years of relentless work for the British Navy. Because of his liberal attitude in religious affairs, the stage was set for James’s regnal demise.

The Revolution

What has all this to do with Freemasonry? In actual fact, everything, for when King James was sent into French exile in December 1688, the traditional masonic inheritance of the Kings of Scots went with him—as did his key masonic allies. This is one of the reasons why today the 33-degree masonic working known as the Scottish Rite (albeit, as we will see, now a contrived Scottish Rite) embodies rituals that are unfamiliar to the three degrees of English Craft Freemasonry (see page 308). For now, to complete the 17th-century picture, we need to follow on with the drama of King James.

James had two daughters by his first wife, Anne Hyde of Clarendon, as well as a young son by his second wife, the Italian noblewoman Mary d’Este de Modena. The elder of the daughters, Mary, was married to Prince William of Orange, Stadhouder (chief magistrate) of the Netherlands. It had been hoped that this alliance would calm the long-standing dispute between Britain and Holland over international trading rights but, in the event, it worked to the contrary.

Given the situation of religious unrest in Britain, William saw his opportunity to dominate Britain’s trade from within and, with approval from the Anglican Church, he put together an invasion force. Meanwhile, the Westminster Parliament in London had denied King James the funds to maintain a standing army in times of peace, so when William’s assault came he had no means of defence. What followed in this large-scale, but comparatively localized, revolution was as pictorially dramatic as any Hollywood screenplay.

With a substantial fleet of ships and around 6,000 troops, William of Orange disembarked at Torbay in south-west England on 5 November 1688. Almost immediately, he issued violent threats against James’s family. Consequently, on 21 December, James’s second wife, Mary de Modena (disguised as an Italian laundress), and their son, the infant Prince of Wales, were secreted from London by night. Taken by armed riders across the countryside to the coast in howling gales and driving sleet, they embarked a small boat for Calais. Mary then got word to her cousin, King Louis XIV of France, who sent courtiers to fetch her. Once in Paris, Mary was met by King Louis and presented with the keys to the Château de Saint Germain-en-Laye. (This royal palace had previously been the grand residence of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots 1542-87, before she also became Queen of France in 1559.)

Meanwhile, back in London, James received an ultimatum from his son-in-law, William. It stated that if James did not give up his crown immediately, then his family would be at risk. William was unaware that Mary and the prince had already left the country. Resigned to the situation, King James made a final gesture by throwing the Great Seal of England (the constitutional device of the English monarchy) into the River Thames.⁴ He then made his way to Paris and to the Stuart Palace of St Germain, which became his primary residence thereafter.

Following James’s departure, the parliamentary House of Lords determined that since he had fled, but not formally abdicated, there remained a legal compact between the king and the people. The throne was, therefore, ‘not vacant’ (although not technically occupied either). It was suggested that a Regency (with an appointed state administrator) was the best way to preserve the kingdom during the remainder of James Stuart’s lifetime, but William of Orange made it clear that he had no intention of becoming just a Regent—neither would he consent to sharing in government. His declaration was so forceful that there was an immediate fear of war, and many thought he would seize the crown regardless. A panic conference then ensued between the Houses of Lords and Commons, resulting in a decision that per haps the throne was vacant after all.⁵

With the support of the Anglican Whig aristocracy,⁶ Prince William convened an illegal Parliament at Westminster on 26 December 1688, and the politicians were held at gunpoint to vote in respect of a dynastic change, with the majority voting in favour (although it was still a very close contest). The press later reported that ‘the Convention Parliament was in no way at liberty to vote according to conscience because Prince William’s soldiers were stationed within the House and all around the Palace of Westminster’.⁷ The press report illustrates the effect that this mil-itarily-obligated Parliament had on the monarchical structure:

King James was gone, and William was present with the Dutch Guard at Westminster to overawe, and with power to imperil the fortunes and lives of those who stood in the way of his advancement…William employed actual intimidation which resulted in majorities of one vote, in two of the most important divisions in the history of Parliament…In our time, governments have resigned when their majority over a censuring opposition has not been so small. Yet a majority of one is held to be adequate justification for a revolution involving the fundamental principle of primogeniture upon which our social fabric is based!

Not all the Church of England hierarchy in the House of Lords were in opposition to King James, however. His supporters included Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury, and the Bishops of Bath and Wells, Ely, Gloucester, Norwich, Peterborough, Worcester, Chichester, and Chester. When James was deposed, they were all deprived of their sees and incumbencies. History has since been manipulated to suggest that James was displaced because he was a Catholic. In truth, he was deposed to guarantee power to a Parliament that was controlled by Anglican supremacists and not elected by a democratic vote of the people.

William did not get everything his own way though. He gained the crown as King William III only with the proviso that his wife, Mary (James’s daughter), held equal rights as Queen Mary II, instead of being ranked Queen Consort as is the norm. Consequently, the reign is known in history as that of William and Mary. At the same time, the 1689 Bill of Rights was introduced, stating that future British monarchs could reign only with parliamentary consent, and that MPs should be freely elected. In reality, MPs of the era were certainly not freely elected. Only a very limited number of male property-owners who enjoyed high incomes were allowed to vote, and the House of Commons was far from characteristic of the populace it was supposed to represent. The monarchical situation remains the same today in that HM Queen Elizabeth II reigns only with governmental consent as a parliamentary monarch. She is not a constitutional monarch (appointed by the provisions of a people’s written Constitution) as are other kings and queens in Europe.

The reason why the 1689 Act came into being was that, although Queen Mary was a devout Protestant, the ministers were concerned about William’s personal relationship with Rome. Holland was the chief northern province of the independent Netherlands which had previously been attached to the Holy Roman Empire, and it was known that William’s army consisted largely of Catholic mercenaries paid from the papal purse. King James II had assisted Louis XIV of France in his nation’s opposition to the Catholic empire, and it was anticipated by the Pope that, with William in charge of Britain, this support would cease, thereby weakening the French position.

On 23 September 2001, Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper ran an article entitled ‘William of Orange funded by the Pope’, explaining how documents discovered at the Vatican reveal that Pope Innocent XI had provided William with 150,000 scudi—equivalent to more than £3.5m today. This came as a surprise to the people of Northern Ireland, who always felt that William’s Orangemen (who prevented James Stuart’s restoration attempt at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690) were a Protestant army.⁸ Cecil Kilpatrick, archivist for the Orange Order, acknowledged that there had already been embarrassing indications of ties between William and the Pope. He said that in the 1930s, when they discovered Pope Innocent XI depicted with Prince William in a portrait at Stormont (the Northern Ireland Parliament), they ‘had to get rid of it’!

Despite William’s outwardly routine aspirations in what his supporters called the Glorious Revolution, the Whig politicians determined that, having facilitated his invasion, they were in a position to impose certain restrictions for the future. Notwithstanding protests from Stuart adherents on the Tory benches, they laid immediate ground rules. The Bill of Rights, with its inherent Declaration of Rights, stipulated that Parliament retained absolute rights of consent over the monarchy, the judiciary and the people. Furthermore, it was henceforth illegal for a monarch to make or amend any laws of the land. So, although William made a great show of strength at his initial Convention Parliament, the politicians maintained the upper hand by granting his kingship on a conditional basis. These measures, coupled with Queen Mary’s Protestantism, curtailed the papal ambitions, but following Mary’s childless death in 1694 the inevitable dilemma of succession arose.

To establish fully the Anglican Parliament’s supreme position over the monarchy during the balance of William’s reign, the 1701 Act of Settlement was introduced to secure the throne of Britain for Protestants alone, and the Act remains in force today—even though it was passed in the House of Commons by a majority of only one vote (118 for, and 117 against). The earlier Act of Abjuration (requiring all government officials to renounce King James) was similarly passed by one vote (193 to 192), and there was no true parliamentary majority for either of these Acts which set the constitutional scene for everything that followed concerning the operational nature of the British monarchy.

Religion and the Great Lights

The much publicized Orange Order was founded in 1795 in the wake of the Williamite revolution and the continuing aggression between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. The Order is often portrayed as being a masonic lodge in Ulster, but it is not. Indeed, the very nature of its constitution provides us with a good example as to the contrasting religious stance taken by authentic Freemasonry.

The Orange Order is pseudo-masonic in its presentation, but stipulates that its members must be Protestant Christians. There is no such requirement, nor indeed any religious stipulation in legitimate Freemasonry. Those of any religion (or none) are welcomed into the ranks, and the godhead of Creation is defined not in religious denominational terms, but as the Great Architect of the Universe. The Three Great Lights of Freemasonry (the so-called ‘furniture’, without which no lodge can be convened) include a volume of the Sacred Law. This might be the Judaeo-Christian Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Vedas or the Zend-Avesta, depending on the predominant culture of the lodge concerned. Each and all are acceptable to attendant or visiting masons since the volume is representative of an essential belief in some form of supreme authority, by whatever definition. Outside that, discussion of religious matters is not permitted within the lodge environment.

The other Great Lights of Freemasonry are the square and compasses, representing the psyche and spirit respectively. The configuration in which these physical items are displayed within an active lodge (for instance, with one, two or neither of the compass points revealed in front of the square) denotes the degree in which the prevalent meeting is being conducted. The Three Great Lights in unison denote the extent of a mason’s qualifying achievement within an overall environment of divine consciousness, while the lodge itself is perceived as a bridge between the material and spiritual worlds.

This aspect of lodge working demonstrates that there is something more to Freemasonry than is immediately apparent from its superficial image. The masonic hierarchy is always quick to assert that Freemasonry is not a religion—and indeed it is not—but something else is indicated here: divine consciousness and a recognition of different material and spiritual worlds. If not religious, then there is clearly a spiritual aspect to consider, and the concept of ‘worlds’ is somewhat kabbalistic in nature. In fact, the levels of masonic spiritual attainment between the mundane environment and the higher levels of enlightenment are represented by Jacob’s Ladder from the Genesis story of Jacob’s dream.⁹ This was depicted in Georgian times by the Rosicrucian poet and artist, William Blake (b. 1757), in the masonic tradition of a winding staircase (see plate 2). His is also probably the best-known representation of the masonic Great Architect of the Universe—the Ancient of Days with his compasses (see plate 1). The staircase, in its final interpretation, defines seven levels of consciousness, and can be assigned to each of the seven officers of a lodge (see page 148).¹⁰

While the spiritual path in modern Freemasonry is a journey of allegory and symbolism in pursuit of self-improvement, that of the Stuart era was about the acquisition of scientific knowledge with a much bigger scale of practical involvement. Hence, current masonic teachings point members to a wealth of Renaissance literature, recommending that it should be studied, although those making the suggestions have rarely perused the material themselves. Instead, they are generally in pursuit of social recognition and personal fulfilment, not scientific accomplishment.

The fact remains that any amount of Renaissance literature in the public domain might be studied without revealing the secrets that were lost to the English masonic stage in 1688. Even though all the relevant documentation was not carried to France by King James’s supporters, a good deal was burnt and destroyed as described in the Anderson Constitutions (see page 5).

Intellectuals of the era, such as Sir Christopher Wren (b. 1632) and Sir Isaac Newton (b. 1642), did their best to work with the information to hand. They knew that masonic lore was connected with Kabbalah wisdom philosophy (an ancient tradition of enlightenment based on material and spiritual realms of consciousness). They also knew that it was related to the culture of the biblical kings, and were aware of a scholarly existence before the days of the Roman Empire. They researched the technology of the ancient Babylonians, the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato, and the mystery traditions of old Egypt, becoming thoroughly absorbed in history beyond the bounds of biblical scripture. But for all that, and despite their own considerable scientific achievements, they also knew that they lived only in the shadow of King Solomon, whom Newton called ‘the greatest philoso pher in the world’.¹¹ Newton viewed the design of Solomon’s Temple as a paradigm for the entire future of mankind and, in referring to the great masters of old, he wrote in a letter to his Royal Society colleague, Robert Boyle, ‘There are things which only they understand.’

Newton believed that the dimensions and geometry of the Jerusalem Temple floor-plan contained clues to timescales,¹² and he used these mathematics in his calculations when developing his theory of gravitation.¹³ The Temple, he said, was the perfect microcosm of existence, and his diagrammatic Description of the Temple of Solomon is held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. At the centre of the Temple, in the Sanctum Santorum (Holy of Holies) was kept the Ark of the Covenant, and Newton likened this heart of the Temple to a perpetual fire, with light radiating outwards in circles, while also being constantly attracted back to the centre. In line with this thinking, a point within a circle was indeed a symbol for Light in ancient Egypt and, in the lodge ritual of Freemasonry, there is a related conversation which takes place between the Worshipful Master and his Wardens concerning the lost secrets. The Master asks the Question: ‘How do you hope to find them?’ Answer: ‘By the centre’. Question: ‘What is a centre?’ Answer: ‘That point within a circle from which every part of its circumference is equidistant’. In due course we shall discover that a point within a circle is the most important of all masonic devices.

Although the Temple of Solomon commands primary attention in modern Freemasonry, far older masonic documents than Anderson’s Constitutions suggest that, for all his great wisdom, Solomon (c. 950 BC) was the inheritor of a much more ancient tradition. From this point, we shall travel back in time to trace the history of Freemasonry as it developed through the ages. What we know at this stage, however, is that the majority of what existed in English masonic circles prior to the 1688 Revolution disappeared from Britain’s shores with the deposition and exile of the House of Stuart. This was explained in 1723 by James Anderson, whose Constitutions formed a base for the development of Freemasonry thereafter. Indeed, it follows that the immediate answer to the question ‘What is Freemasonry?’ can be summed up by saying that it is not the same thing today as it once was.

2 Masonic Origins
Secret Signs

Masons, in the operative sense, are stoneworkers, but the term Freemason is not so readily understandable. Many views have been put forward as to what the word actually means, but even Freemasons tend to disagree. The best routes to the origin of words are good etymological dictionaries—these have no vested interest and do not need to slant their descriptions in any particular way. The most famous of such early works is the 1721 edition of Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary. This was published just two years before James Anderson’s Constitutions and, interestingly, the word Freemason does not appear. Neither does it in the revised edition of 1736.

Writers such as John Hamill (librarian and curator for the United Grand Lodge of England in 1986) consider that ‘freemason’ is a contraction of ‘freestone mason’—a worker in finely grained freestones such as limestone and sandstone, which have no flaws and are easily cut.¹ Although quite plausible, this is not in keeping with general masonic theory which suggests that the prefix ‘free-’ relates to the realm of the ‘speculative’ rather than ‘operative’—ie, not a working stonemason as such. However, the term ‘freestone mason’ is recorded as far back as 1375, while the epitaph of a freestone quarryman at St Giles Church, Sidbury, describes him as ‘John Stone, free mason’. It is thought that he was the father of the celebrated sculptor Nicholas Stone, who became Master of Works in 1619 for the great architect Inigo Jones at London’s Banqueting House in Whitehall. Among the noted achievements of Devonshire-born Nicholas Stone (1586-1647) is the gate at St Mary’s Hall, Oxford, the monument to the poet John Donne at St Paul’s Cathedral, and numerous tombs including that of Viscount Dorchester at Westminster Abbey. In 1625, he was appointed as Master Mason at Windsor Palace by King Charles I.

When entitling his Constitutions, James Anderson hyphenated the word as ‘Free-Masons’ and, in earlier times, two separate words were sometimes used—which may explain the non-existence of ‘freemason’ in old dictionaries. Another early use of the term comes from 1435, when ‘John Wode, mason, contracts to build the tower of the Abbey of St Edmundsbury in all manner of things that longe to free masonry’.² In line with this, the Oxford Word Library explains that, in those times, stonemasons’ guilds would emancipate (or free) their local members so that they might travel from place to place in order to gain work contracts. When arriving in unfamiliar surroundings, they would communicate their degrees of proficiency by way of secret signs known only to others of their craft.

This makes reasonable sense and certainly gives a valid reason for the use of signs and passwords in order to gain employment at the right level of attainment. However, latter-day Freemasons are, for the most part anyway, not operative stonemasons and do not require the signs for this purpose. Either way, it is clear that by the mid-1600s operative masonic guilds did afford membership to non-operatives³ (for example, selected employers, who would need to know the signs and symbols when hiring their workmen). Thus, as is commonly believed in masonic circles, the structural framework of Freemasonry (even if not the inherent subject matter) does seem to emanate from the methods employed by the medieval workers’ guilds.

The Old Charges

The two oldest known masonic documents held in Britain have traditions from around 1390 and 1450 respectively. The first, which is called the Regius Manuscript, is a vellum at the British Museum containing a rather long (and not very good) poem of rhyming couplets.⁴ In 1757, a facsimile bearing the arms of King George II was produced for the Royal Library, and the original was discussed by Mr Halliwell-Phillips at the Society of Antiquaries in 1838. Subsequently, some transcribed copies were made, entitled The Early History of Freemasonry in England. The document makes no mention of King Solomon, but does feature the Alexandrian mathematician Euclid (c. 300 BC), along with an account of England’s King Athelstan of Mercia (c. 930) and his precepts concerning the duties of master masons and apprentices.

Rather more informative and entertaining than the Regius is the 15th-century Matthew Cooke Manuscript, which is also listed in the British Museum catalogue.⁵ Edited by a Matthew Cooke, it was published in London in 1891 and is believed to have originated in middle England. The two-part contents—known as the History and the Old Charges—formed part of the masonic General Regulations compiled in 1720, and were also used as reference material for James Anderson’s Constitutions three years later.

From a prayer-like beginning, the document moves to an explanation of the Seven Liberal Arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. It then tells how the sciences which formed the bedrock of Freemasonry began with the biblical offspring of Lamech, namely Jabal, Jubal, Tubalcain and their sister Naamâh (Genesis 4:19-22). In line with the Bible, Tubalcain is featured in the 3rd degree of Craft masonry (the Masters degree) as an instructor of metal artificers, and historically this takes us back more than two millennia before Solomon to around 3500 BC when Tôbalkin the vulcan, son of Akalem (Lamech), was a prince in southern Mesopotamia.

Lamech was fourth in succession from Enoch (Henôkh), the son of Cain of Kish, and the manuscript relates that his offspring inscribed the sciences on two imperishable stones. They were of such virtue that one of them, called marbyll, would never burn—and the other, called latres, would not perish in water.

In part of the text the stones are referred to as ‘pylers’, and this has generally been assumed to relate to ‘pillars’. The same definition was also given in a 19th-century English translation from the 1st-century work of Flavius Josephus of Galilee, who had related a version of the same story in his Antiquities of the Jews.⁶ The translation from Josephus has been criticized by scholars because of its many inaccuracies, among which are the use of ‘brick’ and ‘stone’ for the Hebrew words equivalent to marbyll and latres. Similarly, the word ‘pillar’ was wholly misleading and led to the illusion of two great columns which appeared to have no geographical location. Given that Lamech and his sons lived before the biblical Flood, the stones became known as the Antediluvian Pillars.

In fact, there are two very distinct words used in old Hebrew, each of which has been translated to ‘pillar’ in the English version of the Old Testament—ammud and mazzebah.⁷ The first denotes a pillar such as a column in architecture or a column of smoke, but the second has a rather different connotation. It might refer to a stela or altar stone, but was equally applied to the stone that Jacob used for a pillow (pyler) and established as a mazzebah at Beth-el (Genesis 28:18). The antediluvian stones of the Matthew Cooke Manuscript were therefore correctly designated (before the translatory errors) as mazzebah stones of marbyll and latres. The former might perhaps have been marble or some crystalline rock, while the other was corrupted in some writings to ‘laterus’ and then reckoned to be ‘laterite’ (a red iron-based clay used for bricks and road surfaces). The fact is that the nature of latres is obscure, although early masonic tradition pre sumes it to have been a type of metal.⁸

The Seven Liberal Arts (artes liberales) were branches of knowledge taught in medieval schools, and they were so named from the Latin liber meaning ‘free’.⁹ (This is another possible derivation of the prefix ‘free-’ in Freemason, but again it is not the definitive source of the term as will become clear when we return to the subject in chapter 7.) The Liberal Arts were not so much taught as a means of preparing students to gain a livelihood, but to increase their awareness in the philosophical sciences. They were individually defined in 819 by the Benedictine scholar, Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mayence (Mainz) and Abbé of Fulda, the greatest seat of learning in the Frankish Empire in the days of Charlemagne. Rabanus was renowned as the most learned sage of the era, and it was said that he had no equal in matters of scriptural knowledge, canon law and liturgy.¹⁰ Among the most renowned works of Rabanus was his richly illuminated Life of Mary Magdalene.¹¹

The Liberal Arts were, in effect, perceived as routes towards personal enlightenment in the finer things that were the keys to harmony and justice. In the 2nd degree of Craft masonry (the Fellow Craft degree), it is explained to the candidate that there are seven levels to the winding staircase that leads to the middle chamber of Solomon’s Temple. They are important aspects of the journey to wisdom, and allude (among other things) to the Seven Liberal Arts. They are the abstracts of truth and, as Plato claimed, the steps of the universal whole. The painting Allegory of the Liberal Arts by the Italian artist Biagio d’Antonio (c. 1445-1510), shows the seven levels (reminiscent in concept to Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder), with scholars and philosophers receiving instruction in the respective Arts at each level, at the base of which is the Gate of Wisdom (see plate 3).

The Matthew Cooke Manuscript continues with the story of Noah and relates that after the Flood the marbyll and latres stones were found by Hermes and the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. In historical terms, this makes little sense given the enormous time span (around 3,000 years) between Noah and Pythagoras. However, the manuscript was produced in about 1450—two centuries before Archbishop Ussher of Armagh compiled the first biblical chronology, and many such date anomalies are discovered in documents of the era. But this does not excuse the naive manner in which the story is recounted verbatim today.

Other versions of the account separate the Hermes and Pythagorean involvements. They explain that, in the first instance, Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Great)—revered as the founder of alchemy and geometry, and from whose name the definition ‘hermetic’ derives—transcribed the stones’ content onto an emerald tablet. Then, in time, the emerald text of Hermes was inherited by Pythagoras.

The extent of truth in the story of Lamech’s offspring is unknown, but Apollonius of Tyana, from the Temple of Asklepios in Aegae, is said to have discovered the emerald text in the 1st century. From that time, many notable philosophers have studied and made use of his transcription. Extant part-translations date from the 700s, beginning with that of the Islamic philosopher Jãbir Ibn Hayyãn, who also wrote of the alchemical School of Pythagoras (the Ta’ifat Fthaghurus). Prominent among later students of the Emerald Tablet was Sir Isaac Newton. He was so entrenched in the research of ancient hermetic writings that, in a Royal Society lecture by Lord Keynes in 1942, he was referred to as ‘the last of the magicians; the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians’.¹² Unfortunately, Newton did not have the benefit of the thousands of Mesopotamian tablets discovered since his lifetime, so his efforts to produce a reliable chronology of events were substantially hampered.

Newton also translated the Corpus Hermeticum (attributed to Hermes Trismegistus), from the Florentine collection of Cosimo de Medici, and was especially interested in a unified theory of the law of the Universe (the prisca sapienta), which he referred to as the Frame of Nature. With Hermes’ maxim ‘as above, so below’ at its heart, it denotes that the harmony of earthly proportion is representative of its universal equivalent. In other words, that earthly proportion is the mundane image of cosmological structure. From the smallest cell to the widest expanse of the galaxies, a repetitive geometric law prevails, and this was understood from the very earliest of recorded times.

Following the ‘Wisdom of Lamech’ theme, the Matthew Cooke Manuscript moves to the geometry of Euclid, although confusing his lifetime with that of Abraham some 1,700 years before. It explains how geometry and masonry were synonymous crafts in ancient Egypt, and makes the point that these crafts were learned by the Israelites during their 400-year sojourn in the Nile Delta before travelling with Moses to the promised Holy Land (c. 1360 BC). Subsequently, the crafts flourished in Phoenicia and Judah, leading to their inheritance by King Solomon and his artificer Hiram, sent to Jerusalem by the King of Tyre.

At this point in the Matthew Cooke text, there is a dramatic leap in historical context and, in the same paragraph that relates to Solomon, it is stated: ‘And from thence this worthy science was brought to France.’ The account continues with the notion that Charles II of France (c. 885) was a mason before he became king. Then, flitting back in time, we are in England with the 3rd-century St Alban, followed (as in the Regius Manuscript) by the 10th-century King Athelstan and his council of stonemasons!

In all of this, the Matthew Cooke Manuscript centres on the fact that the precepts of masonry were first cemented when 40,000 masons were employed to build the Tower of Babel in Shinar (historically, the great ziggurat of Babylon in Mesopotamia). The masonic Charges, it states, were formulated by King Nimrod of Babel—the mighty hunter of Genesis 10:8-10—when he sent 3,000 masons to build the city of Nineveh in Assyria (northern Mesopotamia). Again there is a major date anomaly here since there were more than 2,000 years between Nimrod and the building of Nineveh.

Authentic or not, this rambling and diverse account is a strange mixture of tales concerning philosophical mathematics and hermetic practice, interwoven with the artisan craft of straightforward stonemasonry, without actually detailing much about any of them. Although considered to relate to speculative Freemasonry (as against operative stoneworking) it does little more than establish the fact that there is a similarity in the guild-like structure of officers and workers in the lodge fraternity.

Antients and Moderns

The documented history of Craft Freemasonry in a form that might be recognized today starts in 1717. This was just three years after Georg, Elector of Hanover in Germany, was brought over by the Westminster politicians to become King George I of Britain, thus initiating the Hanoverian dynasty, which followed the Stuart and Orange reigns. On 24 June that year, the Grand Lodge of England was founded by an amalgamation of four London lodges, which met at different taverns, namely The Goose and Gridiron, St Paul’s Churchyard, The Crown, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, The Rummer and Grapes, Channel Row, and The Apple Tree, Covent Garden.¹³ (The Goose and Gridiron, as it was in 1870 before demolition, is shown in plate 26.)

Following the death of King William in 1702, his late wife’s sister had reigned as Queen Anne for a while. But since Anne had no surviving children by her husband Prince George of Denmark, her own choice of successor was the German Electress, Sophia of Hanover. She was the daughter of Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, whose wife was Elizabeth Stuart, a daughter of King James I (VI). Irrespective of the Stuart maternal connection, however, the Scots vigorously opposed the concept of a German ruler to the extent that the English Parliament implemented express trade limitations against the Scots. In March 1705, Westminster passed the Alien Act¹⁴ which demanded that the Scots must accept Sophia of Hanover as Anne’s successor or all trade between the North and South would cease. The importation of Scottish coal, linen and cattle into England would be forbidden and there would be no continued export of English goods into Scotland.

In order to give Westminster full powers north of the Border, the traditionally separate Scottish Three Estates Parliament in Edinburgh was terminated by the 1707 Act of Union. Many Scots would have preferred to install the son of the deposed King James as their monarch when Queen Anne died in 1714. But they had no say in the matter and, in the light of Sophia of Hanover ‘s own demise, her son Georg von Brunswick duly arrived in London to receive the crown. Following the termination of Scotland’s Parliament, all traditional Scottish Orders were taken over and reconstituted by the English establishment. These included The Most Ancient and Noble Order of the Thistle (previously equivalent to England’s Most Noble Order of the Garter) and, in the course of the restructuring, Scottish Freemasonry was also subsumed. As a result, English Freemasonry rose to the fore, soon to be granted the Hanoverian patronage that persists today with Edward, Duke of Kent, as the overall Grand Master.

Meanwhile, with the four tavern lodges combined to form the premier Grand Lodge of England from 1717, John, 2nd Duke of Montagu, was installed as Grand Master in 1721. The frontispiece of James Anderson’s Constitutions depicts Montagu passing the Constitutional Roll and the compasses (dividers) to his successor Philip, Duke of Wharton, in 1723 (see plate 5).

Having stated that the pre-1688 records of Freemasonry had been lost, Anderson set down a schedule of regulations concerning lodge appointments and activities as approved by Lord Montagu. His 1723 Constitutions also contained a list of Charges, described as being ‘The Ancient Records of Lodges beyond the Sea, and of those in England, Scotland and Ireland’—though from where he obtained them in that particular form is unknown. In 1738, however, Anderson produced a revised set of Constitutions in which his (or someone’s) imagination concocted a detailed history of English Freemasonry, which had supposedly begun with an assembly of stonemasons convened in York by a Prince Edwin in 926.¹⁵

To substantiate his dubious history of the masonic institution, Anderson explained how it had been neglected and sidelined by the previous Grand Master, Sir Christopher Wren, who had conveniently died since the 1723 Constitutions were published. This was in direct contrast to Anderson’s earlier pronouncement that there had been no Grand Lodge, and therefore no Grand Master, prior to 1717, and Wren is certainly not listed as a documented Grand Master after that date. So why did Anderson single out Christopher Wren for the blame? The reason, as will become clear, is that Wren had been a prominent mason of the Stuart fraternity of King Charles II, whose records Anderson claimed had been lost. With the Hanoverian Elector now reigning in Britain the chance came to reinvent the history of Freemasonry, and James Anderson was the foremost architect of this project, whose imaginative writings emerged like a holy writ.

In 1768, the decision was taken to build a central headquarters for Grand Lodge. A site was duly purchased in Great Queen Street, London, and on 23 May 1776 the foundation stone was laid for what was to become the first Freemasons’ Hall (incorporating, of course, the Freemason’s Tavern so as to maintain the traditional meeting environment). When producing the 1784 revision of Anderson’s Constitutions, the prestigious Hall was featured in the new frontispiece illustration (see plate 7). In this depiction, the figure of Truth is holding her mirror to illuminate the Hall, while accompanied by the other virtues of Freemasonry. (The larger Freemason’s Hall complex used today in Great Queen Street was built in 1927-33.)

During the course of Anderson’s revisions, a second Grand Lodge was founded on 17 July 1751. Calling themselves the ‘Antients’ (Ancients), they nicknamed the earlier Grand Lodge—which by then had around 200 member lodges—as the ‘Moderns’. The full style of the new group was The Most Antient and Honourable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons. Whereas the Moderns used the old Company of Masons guild crest as their arms, the Antients used a quartered design of a lion, ox, man and eagle—the four ‘living creatures’ from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel.¹⁶ (These visionary creatures are known in astrological circles as the Tetramorphs, representing Leo, Taurus, Aquarius and Scorpio respectively.) The Antients’ Book of Constitutions, called the Ahiman Rezon (meaning, essentially, ‘Brother Prince’) was prepared by the Irish masonic artist Laurence Dermott, who became Grand Secretary of the Antients and the chief protagonist for their Royal Arch degree (of which more later).¹⁷

Claiming a more authentic Scots-Irish tradition, which they undoubtedly had by way of the Royal Arch ritual, the Antient Grand Lodge became significant competition for the premier Grand Lodge, especially since they warranted travelling lodges in regiments of the British Army, which eventually took the masonic concept to the colonies.

In 1727, a central charity fund had been established by the premier Grand Lodge to give the cause a common purpose and, following a programme of diversified contributions for some decades, a girls’ school (funded by voluntary subscriptions) was founded in London in 1788. This established a more positive focus and soon afterwards, in 1798, the Antient Grand Lodge set up a charitable fund for boys. Now, not only was there competition over seniority and authenticity of ritual, but the two key Grand Lodges were competing in the arena of public relations and social recognition. To complicate matters even further, yet another lodge, the Grand Lodge of All England was established at York in 1761. And, in 1778, a breakaway group from the premier Grand Lodge was styled (by way of a warrant from York) as the Grand Lodge South of the River Trent.

The whole scene had become so argumentatively pointless within the course of a century that a necessary truce was called. Articles of Union were then agreed and signed by the respective Grand Masters and officers at Kensington Palace on 25 November 1813. Henceforth, the Antients and Moderns were amalgamated to form the United Grand Lodge of England which prevails today.

Old Masters

The legend of Hiram Abiff and the building of Solomon’s Temple, which dominates the 3rd degree of modern Craft Freemasonry first appeared in print as late as 1730 in a treatise by the London mason Samuel Pritchard, entitled Masonry Dissected.¹⁸ Its appearance in that work indicates that it was known earlier as part of the newly designed Grand Lodge ritual, although not mentioned by Anderson in 1723. The English scholar Thomas Paine (1723-1809) stated that Pritchard swore an oath before the Lord Mayor of London that his Masonry Dissected was a ‘true and genuine copy of every particular’—but he did not say a copy of what! (Paine was personally famedfor his works, Common Sense, Age of Reason and The Rights of Man, along with his part in the American Revolution.) We shall examine in detail the main Hiramic legend in chapter 8, but for now we can look at another account of Freemasonry’s origins as it appeared soon after the foundation of United Grand Lodge.

In 1802, a Portuguese journalist named Joseph Hippolyte da Costa was imprisoned by the Catholic Inquisition for the crime of being a Freemason, as was denounced by papal decree. Following his escape after three years, in 1820 he wrote an essay entitled ‘History of the Dionysian Artificers’ which drew parallels between masonic initiation and the Orphic mysteries. (See chapter 5 for more on this Portuguese mason.)

In this account, Hiram Abiff is said to have belonged to an ancient society known as the Dionysian Artificers, who emerged around 1000 BC just before the building of Solomon’s Temple.¹⁹ They took their name from the Greek god Dionysus (Bacchus), and were associated with another group called the Ionians, who built the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. Apparently, when in Jerusalem, the Dionysian Artificers called themselves the Sons of Solomon, and used Solomon’s six-pointed seal (two interlaced triangles) as their masons’ mark. They were seemingly masters of sacred geometry and hermetic philosophy.

There is no reason to doubt the existence of the Dionysian Artificers. They were, in fact, cited by the Greek geographer Strabo in the 1st century BC. He wrote that they acquired their name because Dionysus was reckoned to be the inventor of theatres. Whether Solomon’s artificer, Hiram of Tyre, was associated with this group is another matter. He might well have been if they had a presence in Phoenicia, but there is no mention of the Hiram connection that can be discovered prior to the 1820 treatise.

Another addition to the said masonic pedigree comes in the form of a college of architects called the Comacine Masters, who were based at Lake Como in Northern Italy during medieval times. The masonic link to this guild was said to have been referenced by a Lucy Baxter (pen-name Leader Scott) in her book The Cathedral Builders, published in 1899. The theme of a link between the Comacines and Freemasonry was subsequently taken up in a booklet called The Comacines that was serialized in the masonic journal, The Builder, in 1910.

From the architectural records of Lombardy, it can be deduced that the Magistri Comacini were indeed prominent in their day, and they made a good contribution to Italian design between the years 800 and 1000. But there is nothing whatever to associate them in any way with English masonic history. In fact, not even Leader Scott (who is widely misquoted) said there was a connection. Having investigated the possibility, she stated: ‘There is no certain proof that the Comacines were the veritable stock from which the pseudo Freemasonry of the present day sprang.’²⁰

The Key

The net product of all this research into the origins and history of post-1688 English Freemasonry is that it is about as weak and insubstantial as it could possibly be. Taken chronologically, the story begins with the biblical metal-worker Tubalcain of Mesopotamia (c. 3500 BC) and the wisdom of his father Lamech—a story that incorporates the later Hermes Trismegistus (Thoth of Egypt), and eventually the Greek philosopher Pythagoras.

From Tubalcain and his siblings, the history skips to King Nimrod of Babylon, who apparently instituted the masonic Charges (c. 3000 BC), and then leaps 1,000 years to Abraham, who somehow met with Euclid (c. 300 BC) in Egypt. Moving from Egypt to Israel with Moses (c. 1360 BC), we arrive with the Dionysian Artificers and Hiram of Tyre, who built Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem (c. 950 BC). After that we are in England with St Alban (AD c. 260); then with King Charles II of France (c. 850), and back again to England with Prince Edwin of York (c. 926), and King Athelstan of Mercia (c. 930).

At the end of all this, there is the unfortunate Sir Isaac Newton trying to fathom what he can from this chaotic mire. And to cap it all, James Anderson—the man responsible for most of the chaos—admits that there were no legitimate records to speak of, but then lays the blame for the lack of available literature on the recently deceased Sir Christopher Wren!

Whether the stories of Tubalcain, Nimrod, Athelstan and the others are correct or not is of no real consequence. There is, in fact, a measure of historical substance in some aspects—but these are all accounts of operative artificers, craftsmen and builders. Chronologically, the last account in the series of tales is that of King Athelstan and his stonemasons. Then, quite suddenly, around 800 years later there emerges a charitably based group of nobles and businessmen who support boys’ and girls’ educational foundations and meet in taverns. Nothing, it seems, happened in between, except that the latter fraternity was said to have inherited its secret signs and passwords from the former.

Something is drastically wrong here. There would be small likelihood of high-ranking nobility becoming involved in a tavern club with such little substance or pedigree. Nor indeed would Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and Prince Augustus, Duke of Sussex, (the sons of King George III) have taken positions as Grand Masters of the Antients and Moderns respectively if Freemasonry were just an everyday fraternity of moralists and benefactors.

James Anderson said at the outset that the meaningful records had been lost when the Stuarts were exiled. So that is the key to understanding the real course of events. King George I was the son of Electress Sophia of Hanover. She was the daughter of Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, whose wife was Elizabeth Stuart, a daughter of King James I (VI). John Wilkins, chaplain to the Palatinate in the middle 1600s had been the man who had founded the masonic group that became the Royal Society of King Charles II, for which Isaac Newton later became president in 1703. Another original founder of that Society was its professor of astronomy, Sir Christopher Wren.

Being the grandson of Frederick and Elizabeth, Britain’s King George I was well aware that there were masonic traditions in the maternal branch of his family, but they had not formed part of his Hanoverian education. His successors were also conscious of the heritage, but they were similarly unaware of the detail. Their only hope of discovery rested with Christopher Wren, who did not die until 1723—the year of the first Anderson Constitutions.

What Anderson really meant when he blamed Christopher Wren for the chaotic state of English Freemasonry was not that Wren had been responsible for losing anything—but that Wren’s loyalties were not with the new Hanoverian establishment. They were with the Stuarts and the Palatinate. Anderson was convinced that Wren, a founder member of the Royal Society, was fully aware of secrets that the Hanoverian fraternity wanted to know—but he died without revealing anything.

3 Royal Society
The Transition

It is on record that the first mason to be installed south of the Scottish Border was the statesman Sir Robert Moray. Knighted by King Charles I, this eventual close friend of Charles II was made a Freemason at Newcastle in 1641.¹ Freemasonry was very much a part of the Stuart tradition and, in 1601, King James VI of Scots had been initiated at the Lodge of Scone two years before his arrival in London as James I of England. His son and grandson, Charles I and Charles II, were also both patrons of Freemasonry.

Moray’s initiation does not strictly qualify as an English installation because the lodge concerned was a travelling branch of the Lodge of Edinburgh, and Moray was himself a Scot. But Elias Ashmole, the antiquarian and founder of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, was subsequently initiated into Freemasonry at Warrington, Lancashire, in October 1646. Hence, he is officially regarded as being England’s first home-grown Freemason. His diary, however, gives the names of those present at his induction and, as pointed out by the Curator of the United Grand Lodge of England some years ago, the seven men who formed this lodge must have been Freemasons before Ashmole.² It is, therefore, clearly incorrect to claim that Freemasonry in England began when four gentlemen’s tavern clubs amalgamated to form a Grand Lodge in 1717.

Ashmole’s keen interest and involvement in hermetic magic is not generally mentioned in masonic works concerning him, since a practising alchemist is not the desired image of England’s first Freemason. In contrast, however, the Ashmolean Museum has no problem with the subject, and makes the point that Ashmole used the pseudonym James Hasolle for his first book on alchemy, Fasciculus chemicus.³ The fact that Ashmole was also Windsor Herald and Treasurer of the College of Arms holds a far greater appeal for idealized masonic society, but in Restoration times these two seemingly diverse facets would have been unremarkable. His Theatrum chemichum Britannicum, published in 1652, was of primary importance to the Rosicrucian movement (see page 49) in that it was a collated synthesis of English alchemical texts, and became a valuable reference source for manuscripts otherwise hard to access.

It is beyond dispute that Freemasonry of a ‘speculative’ style came into England from Scotland when the two Crowns were united in 1603. But it is also apparent that in ‘operative’ terms the London Company of Freemasons was granted a coat of arms as far back as 1472. Equally interesting is the fact that in 1655 the name was changed to the London Company of Masons. This appears to indicate that the word Freemason had taken on a new connotation—relating now more to a speculative craft, rather than to a particular form of operative stonemasonry. This still does not explain why the word Freemason is not found in etymological dictionaries of the early 1700s, but it does suggest that a key operative guild wished to draw a distinction between its own membership and that of the speculative lodges.

It appears that Freemasonry has been portrayed very strangely since 1723—a hotchpotch of disconnected legends and a general lack of cohesion, with the reason given that the truly enigmatic secrets had been lost. The actual reason for the vagueness of otherwise intellectual men was not so much that everything had gone missing after the 1688 Revolution. It was more a question of their obstinacy in not acknowledging the facts of the matter. Information was there to find if Anderson and his allies had cared to look, but the political situation was such that they preferred not to do so.

This attitude arose after 1715, when James Francis Edward Stuart, the son of the exiled King James II (VII) made a bid to regain the crowns of his ancestral heritage. Soon after the coronation of George I, James Francis was proclaimed as the rightful King James VIII of Scots by Stuart adherents in Aberdeen, Brechin, Dundee, Montrose, Perth, St Andrews and Edinburgh. He then sailed to Scotland from Dunkirk, and in September that year his standard was raised at Braemar. His supporters seized Inverness and Perth from the Hanoverian guard, but they failed to take Edinburgh and Stirling castles, and their advance was halted at Sherriffmuir. South of the Border their penetration was feeble, and within a few weeks the 1715 Rising was terminated by a surrender at Preston, Lancashire, on 14 November. Soon afterwards, the deflated James Francis returned to France.

Despite its initial enthusiasm, the 1715 rebellion was one of the worst campaigns ever organized. But it was not destined to be the last Stuart attempt at restoration, and the people of Britain began to question their personal loyalties and sympathies: Were they Stuart or Hanover supporters?

In Latin, the name James is rendered as Jacobus—and from the time of the Stuart exile, their supporters had become known as Jacobites. Pre-1688 Freemasonry in Scotland and England had ostensibly been a Jacobite institution. But the post-1717 English variety of Anderson and his friends was essentially Hanoverian—a newly devised pseudo-masonry with no real provenance of its own. Whatever information might have been available from previous sources, it would have been unacceptable to the hard-line Hanoverians because it was of Scottish origin. Consequently, much of the new-style English Freemasonry has since bewildered masons and non-masons alike because its weak, often incomprehensible, tradition leaves so much to be desired. Only the introduction of charitable objectives and precepts of moral idealism appear to give it any meaningful substance, but we should not judge too hastily in this regard since there is a good deal more to uncover. Meanwhile, back in 1738, since Christopher Wren was a deceased mason of the old school it was convenient to blame him for spoiling everything!

Heresy

So, what was Christopher Wren’s ‘old school’ of masonry? The picture comes together easily by looking at those few men of his acquaintance whom we have met already: King Charles II, Sir Robert Moray and Elias Ashmole—Freemasons all, but what was their communal meeting ground? It was the Royal Society at Gresham College in London. The Royal Society was, and is, a scientific academy for the purpose of studying natural philosophies. Freemasonry had the very same objectives and, even today, the ritual makes it clear that members are encouraged to ‘devote time to the study of such liberal arts and sciences as may be within the compass of your attainments’.

Although Freemasonry is a secretive society, this does not mean that the secrets held amount to anything that would benefit any outsider to discover. All lodge ceremonies and rituals are scripted and rigorously repetitive. Nearly everything in those rituals is publicly available. The secrets are nothing more than the signs, tokens and passwords of recognition by way of which one mason knows the degree status of another. These words and definitions are left as blanks in the published rituals—and that is the full extent of it.

The Liberal Arts (see page 23) are not taught as subjects within the lodge environment, they are only alluded to. Neither are the sciences (as cited in the lodge dialogue), nor any natural philosophies taught or discussed. There are allegorical, illustrated lectures which point members towards an awareness of spiritual and philosophical enlightenment, but there is no practical instruction given. The lectures are delivered by way of rote, not by way of any qualified professional experience, and the lectures for each grade are not based on any ongoing research. They are fixed, rigid and the same, word-for-word, time after time. Thus, what it all amounts to these days is a ‘role play’, a costumed re-enactment of operating procedures that were followed in lodges at a time when new material was introduced and debated at each meeting. Freemasonry today exists as a framework for something that used to be a cumulative and progressive work experience. But the only ‘work’ necessary for lodge performance these days is that of learning scripted text off by heart.

Outside the formal lodge environment, in what are styled the ‘private assemblies’ (such as around the dinner table, or ‘festive board’ as it is called), it is stated in lodge instruction that a member may ‘offer opinions on such subjects as are regularly introduced in our lectures’. The claim is that this ‘privilege’ enables one to ‘strive through researching the more hidden paths of nature and science’. But in my own experience of some 20 years of lodge attendance, I never heard anyone discussing nature or science. Moreover, if one were to make a headline discovery that rocked the world of science and changed the course of history, it would not make one iota of difference to the lodge workings. The basic precepts in such matters have been fixed (albeit loosely) since the revisions of United Grand Lodge were introduced in 1816. The most up-to-date scientific statement in modern Craft ritual is that the Earth revolves, on its own axis, around the Sun, which is at the centre!

Although such a statement (which the 2nd-degree candidate is obliged to announce to the lodge as the required answer to an explicit question) is wholly naive by today’s standards, it does pose an interesting scenario. It is the Copernican heliocentric principle as put forward by Galileo in 1632, and for which he was summoned before the Inquisition and imprisoned for 10 years until he died. In this respect, if we think in terms of the same question and answer in 1641, when Sir Robert Moray was installed, it would have held tremendous significance. To gain Fellow Craft masonic status on those terms meant that one was risking life and limb by admitting to such an heretical concept! This also demonstrates that progression through the degrees would have been impossible unless one was a scientific heretic. That is why Freemasonry was secretive and relied on brotherly support and loyalty. Outside the lodge confines one would know to discuss such punishable matters only with those who knew the signs and passwords of the fraternity. In short, Freemasonry true and proper, in its original uncorrupted form, was about liberal arts, science and natural philosophy.

The Invisible College

Science in the 1600s was concerned, in the main, with natural philosophy. Chemistry fell within the scope of this, but was a lowly art since chemists worked as assistants to the more experienced alchemists, who were practitioners of the senior profession, although detested by the Church. Scotland had a strong tradition in hermetic alchemy, and its research was subsidized from the royal purse as far back as the days of King James IV (1488-1513). Since masonic lodges were concerned with scientific experimentation, alchemy had a powerful and permanent influence on lodge operations.⁴ One of the foremost collectors of alchemical manuscripts was Lord Balcarres, whose daughter was married to Sir Robert Moray. In turn, Moray was the patron of England’s most notable 17th-century alchemist, Eirenaeus Philalethes, the revered mentor of Robert Boyle and others of the masonic Royal Society.

Although the Renaissance had brought a great flourish to academic and creative interests, throwing off the superstitious shackles of the Church in favour of reviving classical philosophy and literature, in this respect Britain fell into a repressed doldrums during the Cromwellian era. Following Cromwell’s military overthrow and the 1649 execution of King Charles I, this hitherto rural politician became so powerful that in 1653 he chose to rule by martial force alone. He dissolved Parliament and appointed himself Lord Protector, with greater dictatorial powers than any king had ever known. He then sought to demolish the activities of the Anglican Church. At his order, the Book of Common Prayer was forbidden, as were the celebrations of Christmas and Easter. His dictatorship was more severe than any previous regime, and his puritanical directives lasted throughout the 1650s. Games, sports and entertainment were restricted, dissenters were tortured and banished, houses were sequestrated, punitive taxes were levied, universities were constrained, theatres and inns were closed, freedom of speech was denied, adultery was made a capital offence and mothers of illegitimate children were imprisoned. No one was safe even at home, and any unwitting group of family or friends could be charged with plotting against an establishment that empowered crushing fines to be imposed at will by the military.

This was the environment which brought enterprising university students such as Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle together as pioneers of an undercover society of subversive academics, which grew to become the foremost scientific academy. It began at Oxford University during the 1650s, at a time when Oxford was in a state of restlessness. Having been the capital of Royalist England during the Civil War, Cromwell had appointed himself Chancellor of the University and the once lively streets were subdued and an air of general oppression prevailed.

Within the University, subjects such as astronomy and mathematics were considered demonic and were expressly forbidden by the Puritan commissioners. In fact, learning in general was frowned upon, for scholars were the greatest of all threats to the regime. There was, however, one man who stood apart from his colleagues on the University staff—an unusually freethinking churchman, Dr John Wilkins. He was the maverick Warden of Wadham College, a future bishop who studied the wisdoms of the ancient world. At Oxford, Wilkins ran a philosophical group who met secretly by night in a local apothecary’s house to discuss prohibited subjects. In fact, he was a positive enigma since he was married to Oliver Cromwell’s sister, Robina, but fronted a secret society in blatant opposition to his brother-in-law’s dictatorship. The Cromwell family was very mixed in outlook, however, and Elizabeth, another of the sisters, was a Stuart supporting Royalist.⁵

Immediately before coming to Wadham in 1648, Wilkins had published his controversial book Mathematicall Magick, which the Puritans considered wholly satanic. For a churchman even to acknowledge the notion of magic was inconceivable, especially when allied to numerology, the most diabolical of all occult aberrations!

Members of Wilkins’ clandestine group, which became known as the Invisible College, included the young Christopher Wren, along with Robert Boyle (son of the Earl of Cork), the anatomist William Petty, and a technically-minded student called Robert Hooke. Other participants were the noted theologian Seth Ward—an older man who encouraged Wren’s interest in astronomy—along with the cryptologist John Wallis and the physician Thomas Willis. The term Invisible, as applied to the group, was first used in a letter written by Robert Boyle,⁶ but it was common in covert Rosicrucian circles. Rosicrucianism was directly allied to Freemasonry in Scotland, and the two were shown as synonymous in a metrical account of Perth, published in Edinburgh in 1638:

For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse;

We have the Mason Word and the second sight.⁷

In order to fulfil their overriding scientific objectives, the fraternity was in no doubt as to the key that would unlock the doors of enlightenment. They knew that in order to advance science and medicine beyond the bounds of academic constraint, they had to discover the alchemical secrets of the ancient and medieval masters.

Among the more prominent alchemists of the day was the inscrutable Thomas Vaughan (brother of the poet Henry Vaughan), who styled himself Eirenaeus Philalethes. His writings on the subject of chemical hermeticism were no less confusing than those of any alchemist through the ages, but he was rather more forthcoming to his friends. In contrast to the general presumption that alchemy was about making gold from base metals by use of the Philosophers’ Stone, Philalethes made it clear that the Stone was itself made from gold, ‘but not common gold’. He stated that it was called a Stone because of its fixed nature and its resistance to fire, but that ‘its appearance is that of a very fine powder’.⁸ The French chemist, Nicolas Flamel, had written much the same back in 1416, referring to ‘a fine powder of gold, which is the Stone’.

What especially intrigued the Oxford fraternity was that the Philosophers’ Stone was traditionally associated with the defiance of gravity, and this compelling subject was a primary focus of their study. It had been stated in an old Alexandrian document, the Iter Alexandri ad Paradisium, that the Stone gave youth to the old, and that although outweighing its own quantity of gold, even a feather could tip the scales against it!⁹

The students could not imagine why the universities were not encouraged towards such research. Instead, their textbooks were substantially out of date, and the majority of schooling was vested in long outmoded principles. The 2nd-century Alexandrian work of Ptolemy was considered a good enough guide to the celestial system, expounding the notion that the Earth was the fixed centre of the Universe, while in matters of natural philosophy Aristotle prevailed. They were taught nothing of atomic structure, only that everything existed in varying combinations of the four basic elements: earth, water, fire and air. It did not take them long, however, to recognize that true alchemy was far from being a foolish medieval cult. Moreover, it emerged that geometry and numerology were at the hub of all alchemical learning. They were not taught mathematics since it was not in the interests of their masters that they learn anything of real consequence.

John Wilkins knew that within his circle were some of the most inventive young minds in Britain—minds that should not be confined to shady backroom sessions. It was determined, therefore, that they must come out into the open with something to transform philosophy into an accredited science. Undoubtedly, what they needed were precedents—new scientific laws that would rock the establishment to its foundation. Christopher Wren and his friend Robert Hooke were especially fascinated by the stars and, in due course, the pair were destined to become the foremost masters of astronomy since Galileo. Indeed, eventually their pioneering approach was to demolish and overawe the restrictive teaching methods of all the major academies.

In 1657, wonderful news arrived from London, when Christopher Wren (still only 27) was offered the position as Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College in Bishopsgate. Astronomy, though regarded with suspicion at Oxford, was now officially recognized at Gresham despite the punitive regulations that applied. The college founder Sir Thomas Gresham (the Tudor royal agent in Antwerp) stated in the early 1600s that no more than 10 thinkers in Europe were prepared to accept the heliocentric principle of Nicolas Copernicus!¹⁰ Established in 1597, Gresham College was associated from the outset with cutting-edge research, and Sir Thomas’s daughter Anne was married to Nathaniel, brother of the Rosicrucian Grand Master, Sir Francis Bacon.

After Wren’s lecture, members of a London-based philosophical group explained to their Oxford counterparts that life had been tough for them in the City. Cromwell’s soldiers had invaded and disrupted their meetings, filling them with trepidation and fear for their lives. They had moved the venue numerous times to settle at the Bull’s Head tavern in Cheapside, but now the Gresham College door was opened by virtue of Wren’s fortuitous appointment. The New Philosophy, declared Wren, had been constrained for long enough. It was now time to straddle the divide and put science firmly on the map of academia.

Through the use of books brought in from Europe, they discovered the existence of theorems from ancient times—general propositions which were not self-evident (as conventional science was supposed to be), but were proven by chains of reasoning. They learned too about problems which could be expressed as symbols or formulae and solved by algebraic application. They found that astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo had made revelations concerning the sun and the solar system, without the help of official tutoring, along with a new celestial concept of the heavenly bodies which completely overturned what they had been taught by the university clerics. In the event, it was not long before Robert Hooke (by then Professor of Geometry at Gresham College) reinvented the telescope with his own uniquely manufactured lenses, discovering not only the secret of Orion’s alignment, but emerging as the first to determine sun-spots and Jupiter’s rings, and to calculate Jupiter’s rotation.

In all this, a prevailing mystery was the anomalous nature of their founder John Wilkins, for he was a reverend gentleman quite unlike any other. He had taken Holy Orders before 1645, but his Mathematicall Magick had a strong alchemical flavour which flew in the face of Church doctrine. Even more baffling to the group (considering his family alliance with Cromwell) was that Wilkins was chaplain to Charles Louis, Prince Palatine of the Rhine—eldest son of the King and Queen of Bohemia,¹¹ and a sworn enemy of the Lord Protector. Moreover, the Palatinate was steeped in Rosicrucian alchemy.

Rosicrucians were, by Inquisitional definition, heretics and meddlers in the occult. Back in the days of Elizabeth I, the Queen’s adviser John Dee was a noted Rosicrucian,¹² as was the hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd who aided the translation (from Greek into English) of the King James Bible. In practice, however, Rosicrucians were student chevaliers of the Rosi-crucis—the enigmatic symbol of the grand enlightenment (see chapter 13).

An intriguing, but poignant, aspect of post-1723 Freemasonry is that, whilst Euclid is revered in the Charges (although wrongly dated) there is no mention of John Dee. He had written the famous preface to the English translation of Euclid—the most remarkable monument to sacred geometry in which he urged the revival of the Euclidian art. James Anderson clearly knew of this work since he almost quotes from it on occasions. For example, concerning the 1stcentury reign of Augustus Caesar, Dee wrote: ‘…in whose days our heavenly Archmaster was born’. On the same subject of Emperor Augustus, Anderson wrote: ‘…when the great Architect of the Church was born’. Just as Hanoverian Freemasonry ignored Elias Ashmole’s hermetic interests, it also paid no heed to the work of John Dee, even though the 47th Proposition of the 1st Book of Euclid (the Pythagoras Theorem) is pictorially demonstrated (bottom centre) in Anderson’s 1723 frontispiece (see plate 5), and is a traditional symbol of masonic perfection. The reason once again is that Dee’s Rosicrucian connection was anathema to the newly devised straitlaced Freemasonry of Georgian times.

Wilkins’ Mathematicall Magick specifically referenced the sepulchre of Frater Rosicrosse, as detailed in the 1614-15 Fama Fraternitatis of the Rosicrucian Manifestos. (Also incorporating the Confessio Fraternitatis, the Manifestos were German works that announced an impending age of new enlightenment and hermetic liberation in which certain universal secrets would be unlocked and made known.) Wilkins’ work was also substantially based upon the mechanics section of Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Geomi Historia (published in the Palatinate in 1619). Additionally, Wilkins frequently cited the late Stuart Chancellor, Sir Francis Bacon, who had been a master craftsman of the Rosicrucian Order. Indeed, it was Bacon’s one-time vision of a fraternal scientific institute which led Wilkins to envisage the Oxford fraternity at a time when the Bohemian research of the Palitinate had been curtailed by the Thirty Years’ War in Europe (1618-48).

The apparent dichotomy of Dr Wilkins was a mystery to all. But for his group to thrive and survive, he made a strict masonic ruling from the outset: Whatever else might be discussed, the subjects of religion and politics were prohibited. Notwithstanding this, the Bible became a subject of continued study from the time of Wren’s Gresham College lecture in 1657, particularly in respect of chronology and astronomical time frames. In fact, this lecture was a manifesto of things to come from the group, since it referred to the tyranny of the Greek and Roman cultures upon which all 17th-century academic society was based.

Despite his scientific genius, the Eton-educated Robert Boyle was short-sighted and not particularly adept at mathematics, so Robert Hooke helped him a good deal with calculations and experiments. Both were fascinated by the power of exerted pressures, so Boyle concentrated on air pumps, while Hooke investigated springs. In the course of their collaborative work, important mathematical formulae relating to compressed air and compressed springs were discovered. They become known respectively as Boyle’s Law and Hooke’s Law—two of the most crucial precedents in the world of emergent science, and equally important today.

A Royal Charter

In time, and specifically from 1660, the Rosicrucian aims of the group emerged into the open with the Restoration of the flamboyant King Charles II. Quite suddenly, and irrespective of clerical opinion, they gained approval and recognition by way of a Stuart charter in 1662, to become known henceforth as the Royal Society. Their motto was established as Nullis in verba, which translates roughly to ‘Take no one’s word for it’—a motto which had been used previously by Sir Francis Bacon.

The Society’s new status was achieved by two influential members, namely the Scottish statesman Sir Robert Moray and the Gresham College president William, Viscount Brouncker—both of whom had direct access to the king. In the event, it was Moray who approached King Charles on behalf of the fraternity, securing his patronage and encouragement. Having been Attaché to Cardinal Richelieu in France during the Protectorate, Moray was a man of enormous influence in court and government circles, and was greatly respected by the royal household. By that time, other subsequently famous characters, such as Elias Ashmole and the diarist John Evelyn, had joined the group. Viscount Brouncker (though not a scientist) became the Society’s first President, with Robert Hooke appointed as the first Curator and, on 20 May 1663, some 150 Fellows were elected from the fastgrowing overall membership.

The House of Stuart progenitor, Robert the Bruce had inaugurated the Elder Brethren of the Rosy Cross in 1317—a Knight Templar institution¹³ which was inherited 11 generations later by King Charles II. It is no coincidence that the first two known prominent masonic initiates in England, Sir Robert Moray and Elias Ashmole, were both foundation Fellows of the Royal Society and members of the Rosicrucian movement. The Royal Society’s New Philosophy (as Wren had dubbed it) was therefore largely Rosicrucian and, as such, was immediately concerned with matters of hermetic alchemy.

King Charles’s paternal aunt, Princess Elizabeth—the daughter of King James I (VI)—had married Frederick V, Elector Palatine, in 1613. Hence, it comes as no surprise that the House of Stuart, with its link to the Bohemian Palatinate, accompanied by John Wilkins’ own Rosicrucian chaplainship, was eager to acknowledge the enthusiastic brotherhood of the Royal Society. In so doing, King Charles effectively reconstituted the Brethren of the Rosy Cross, taking on the Grand Mastership of his family’s traditional Order.

To leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that the Royal Society was a Rosicrucian establishment, the Society’s historian Thomas Sprat included a descriptive frontispiece illustration in his 1667 History of the Royal Society (see plate 12). Designed by John Evelyn and engraved by Wenceslas Hollar, the Society’s inaugural picture depicts a bust of King Charles, along with Viscount Brouncker and Sir Francis Bacon who had died many years before in 1626. Also featured in the engraving is the trumpet-bearing Angel of Fame from the Fama Fraternitatis of the 1614 Rosicrucian Manifestos, along with a number of books and masonic devices.¹⁴

Having moved to join their colleague Christopher Wren at Gresham College, the founding Fellows soon became a threat to all sectors of the establishment, whether governmental, educational or clerical. But, despite this, they appeared like a breath of fresh air to the people at large—and best of all, they had the popular King Charles as their patron, with his personal access to the masonic archive of the Kings of Scots.

4 Legacy of Invention
The Georgian Movement

Prior to James Anderson’s mention that key masonic documents had been lost and destroyed, this was also stated to have been the case in 1718. George Payne, an early Grand Master of the premier Grand Lodge asked his members to bring whatever old literature they could find, so as ‘to shew the usages of antient times’. But it was subsequently recorded that the more valuable manuscripts were ‘tragically lost’. Anderson noted particular examples in his revised 1738 Constitutions, stating that papers ‘writ by Mr Nicholas Stone, the Warden of Inigo Jones, were too hastily burnt by some scrupulous Brothers, that those papers might not fall into strange hands’. The question has recently been posed in the journal Freemasonry Today: ‘Could it be that there was a ritualistic form of Accepted Freemasonry prior to 1717 that was unpalatable to those who wished to review the movement in the 1720s?’¹

The answer to this would appear to be ‘yes’. Everything points to the fact that speculative Freemasonry in England prior to Hanoverian intervention was not a role-playing organization as evolved from the dining clubs in 1717. It was concerned with matters that required scientific or technical qualification or experience. Such things would have been foreign to many, and generally unpalatable to the emergent Grand Lodge masons of the London group. It is impossible to discover precisely what these new members did as a cohesive unit outside of performing rituals in their tavern rooms. But in view of the benevolent reputation that evolved, it is likely that they established a Box Club to cement the aspect of mutual support. This was a custom of the old trade guilds, whereby contributions were made into a central pool for the benefit of less fortunate members. The welfare of ‘poor and distressed Freemasons’ and the support of their immediate relatives, including widows and orphans, is still a major concern today.

Irrespective of the new-style Freemasonry, the Royal Society prevailed into Hanoverian times, and thence after Queen Victoria’s death into the Edwardian reign of Saxe Coburg-Gotha—the Germanic house of Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, that was obliged to change its name in 1917. After the accession of Victoria’s grandson King George V in 1910, World War I was looming, and people began to believe there was a German fifth column in Britain. Notwithstanding the immediate royal family with its roots in Hanover, shopkeepers and business people of German extraction—even the Lord of the Admiralty, Louis Battenberg—found themselves at the wrong end of public opinion. By 1917, with the war well under way, the situation was so bad that King George changed his Saxe Coburg-Gotha family name to Windsor (in allusion to the royal castle in Berkshire). At the same time, Lord Louis changed his Battenberg of Hesse name to the more English-sounding Mountbatten.

Through all this, the Royal Society pressed on regardless, and today remains one of the world’s foremost scientific institutions. But things did change after 1688, and more especially after 1714 when the enthusiastic flair of the early pioneers was subsumed by a more austere Georgian regime.

The Gresham Days

The life and times of England during the early years of the Royal Society were recorded by two of Britain’s best-known diarists: John Evelyn, a cultivated man of means and lawyer of the Middle Temple who became Commissioner of the Privy Seal,² and Samuel Pepys, who became Secretary to the Admiralty.³ In fact, Evelyn and Pepys joined forces to plan the Naval Hospital at Greenwich—one of the supreme achievements of Restoration architecture. Although not so well known as the others, Robert Hooke’s diary is equally informative.⁴

Pepys recalled in his journal how, on 15 February 1665, he first visited Gresham College where he met with Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren and others of the Royal Society who were not content to view the world through the eyes of Ptolemy and Aristotle. By 1664, Pepys was a regular visitor, and although he lacked personal training and experience in matters of mathematics and science, he found the meetings enthralling. What he loved most were the laboratory gadgets and gizmos, soon acquiring his own telescope, microscope, thermometer, scales and geometric instruments, which he said were a great help to his work at the Navy Board.

At a professional level, Pepys found his greatest ally to be the tenacious Robert Hooke, whose work with springs, pulleys and the like led him to invent a depth-sounding device, a diving bell and the marine barometer—all of which were of great significance to the Navy. However, not everything was straightforward for Hooke, especially when it came to giving unpractised public demonstrations. In one experiment concerning respiration, he was sealed in a large cask from which the air was gradually extracted, but things went badly wrong. By virtue of the cask’s inner environmental change towards a vacuum state, his colleagues could not undo the seal quickly enough, and the near frantic curator finally emerged, gasping, with permanent damage to his ears and nose!⁵

Nevertheless, mishaps or otherwise, London was bustling again in the 1660s after its 11 years of puritanical suppression. Charles II was skilful, well-liked and perfectly suited to the mood of the era. His primary concern was to allow the nation considerable freedom. In this regard, he allowed an abandoned gaiety to prevail, reopening the inns and theatres, while at the same time a new romantic spirit of learning and enquiry was born.

The group’s interest in hermetic subjects was notably encouraged by the Cambridge Platonist Henry More and his pupil Anne, Viscountess Conway of Ragley Hall, who nurtured a group of intel lectuals called the Hartlib Circle,⁶ to which Robert Boyle and the physician William Petty belonged. They recognized that medieval alchemy, in the way it was generally portrayed (ie, the manufacture of gold from base metal), was a delusion conveyed to the outside world by propagandists and failed adepts. Alchemy, they knew, was a combination of practical and spiritual arts which had its root in metallurgy as practised by the ancient artificers.

Robert Boyle (who refused to take Holy Orders as scientists were expected to do) was as much a mystery to his friends as was John Wilkins. His father was the richest man in Britain and he wanted for nothing, yet few young men worked so hard and long without the need for personal gain. Being such a high-profile figure, Boyle suffered more than the others from clerical harassment, and he was viewed as being highly suspicious by the Church because of his determined research into matters of the occult. The bishops were aware that he had his own specially equipped alchemical workshop, and they watched him closely.

Ostensibly a scrupulous man, it is evident that Robert Boyle confronted a real dilemma in his work. He stated that so much alchemical writing was too obscure to be of any real value, but nevertheless he studied all that he could in order to pursue his research. Whether Boyle actually succeeded in making the Philosophers’ Stone is unclear, but it seems that he did see it in operation after a Viennese friar found a quantity of the mysterious powder secreted in a small casket at his monastery.⁷ In a related report to the Royal Society, Boyle made particular mention of the powder’s ability to manipulate specific gravity—an attribute which has now been demonstrated in today’s laboratory research.

The Vienna discovery is somewhat reminiscent of a similar box of alchemical powder which John Dee obtained from the Dissolution remnants of Glastonbury Abbey.⁸ Boyle also managed to find an Eastern source for the Stone in its natural state, without having to go to the trouble of manufacturing it. This, once again, is something which has recently been shown to be possible. In his subsequent Royal Society Philosophical Transactions paper, Boyle noted that his objective was not to make gold but to ‘produce good medicines for general use’. Given the reoccurring importance of this powder in the continuing story of Rosicrucian research (a powder of gold classified by physicists today as ‘exotic matter ‘), it might prove to be the missing link to the otherwise ambiguous King Athelstan legend in the masonic Charges. By virtue of some writing found with the powder, John Dee associated it with St Dunstan, the 10th-century Abbot of Glastonbury, who was attached to King Athelstan’s court. It is also clear that it was an important substance at the Temple court of King Solomon (see page 354).

By virtue of a later programme to sanitize the early Royal Society’s image in the Hanoverian era, Robert Boyle’s alchemical pursuits were strategically lost to academia until modern times. Although he is best remembered for Boyle’s Law concerning the volume of gases, along with his research into the elasticity of air, few have recognized that the tireless work and findings of this wealthy nobleman’s son were fuelled by his overwhelming desire to understand the nature and functions of the great alchemical secret.

In those early days, the Royal Society welcomed members of various philosophical disciplines in the knowledge that all creative pursuits were as much science as those things which were most obviously so. Music was based upon mathematics, as was fine art, architecture and the metre of poetic writing. They were all aspects of the time-hon-oured Liberal Arts. It was decided, therefore, that men of such creative talents had much to offer the fraternity, which expanded to include the poets Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller, along with the poetic dramatist John Dryden and the antiquary John Aubrey.

This practice was severely criticized by the French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) who, in making a comparison with the Academie Français, wrote that the Royal Society was badly governed and in need of laws. What he failed to realize was that this was precisely what made the Society work so well and achieve so much. It existed outside the constraints of formal academia and thereby afforded a freedom of research and expression that was not apparent in the strictly regulated French institution.

Fraternal Disputes

Not just confined to the dusty backrooms of Gresham College or to fume-laden laboratory workshops, the world of the founding fraternity was one of committed enthusiasts who took their working debates into every corner of their lives. It was a constant whirl of frock-coated, bewigged gentlemen, embroiled in the fevered conversation of inns and coffee houses. The City of London presented a more colourful stage than they had found in Oxford. It was a world of doctors and merchants, financiers, fine ladies and costermongers—all amid a bustle of carriages in narrow, rutted streets where flower girls cried, paupers begged, and the women of the night plied their trade.

Working colleagues though the Fellows were, it cannot be said that all was friendship and harmony within the group. In fact, there were many disputes—some heated but short-lived, while others rumbled on over the years. At one meeting, the botanist Sir Hans Sloane (whose manuscripts eventually formed the core of the British Museum collection in 1753) was rebuked by the President for making faces at his dissenters, and the medical professor John Woodward even fought a duel on the College steps after a row had disrupted the proceedings.

Within the Sloane collection was Manuscript 3848. Now at the British Library (dated October 1646) it is a constitutional document of old Masonic Charges from 77 years before James Anderson compiled his Constitutions,⁹ and is one of the pre-1688 documents that Anderson accused Christopher Wren of losing. Also, Sloane Manuscript 3323 is of a similar masonic nature, as is SM 3329—and both are from the latter 1600s. The important document in this group is 3848—the others appear to stem from it. Unlike the Regius and Cooke manuscripts (see page 23), the content of Sloane 3848 is mainly of Scottish origin¹⁰ and discusses, among other things, the secret words of Freemasonry and rituals of identification.

In the course of occasional Society arguments, certain important discoveries were shelved and ultimately forgotten—a good example being Robert Hooke’s 1662 marine chronometer for determining longitude. Consequently, a century later, the research was begun again from scratch by the Yorkshire joiner John Harrison. He achieved his result knowing nothing of Hooke’s original design, which was not rediscovered until 1950 in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.¹¹

In contrast, however, there were times when the Fellows would leap to each other’s aid. On one occasion, Christopher Wren was specifically asked to submit the result of an experiment concerning the incubation of chickens’ eggs but, owing to more pressing commitments, he failed to comply. Nevertheless, Hooke told the President that he had indeed received Wren’s submission in part, and he covered for his friend by verbally concocting a most plausible temporary report.

The worst disputes arose by virtue of Robert Hooke’s salaried employment as the Society’s Curator, whereas the other Fellows were all fee-paying members. Because of his specifically defined occupation, it was Hooke’s role to conceive and progress all manner of experiments, passing them over to others for completion, and then helping them when necessary. The problem was that it often became a matter of debate as to who could actually claim credit for any resultant discovery or invention.

In February 1665, Samuel Pepys described in his diary a particular Society meeting at which Hooke (then aged 30) lectured on the nature of comets, proving with dates and examples that comets are periodic. At that time there was a nine-year-old boy living nearby in Shoreditch. His name was Edmund Halley, and he grew to become one of the most famous astronomers of all time—the Astronomer Royal no less. However, for all his great accomplishments and deserved status, Halley is most popularly remembered for announcing in 1704 that comets are periodic, long after Hooke was recorded by Pepys as pronouncing the very same.

In his 1665 book of microscopic studies entitled Micrographia, Robert Hooke commented on the concentric bands of coloured light which appear around the central area of a tight air-space between two sheets of transparent mica pressed together. From his studies in light waves, he determined that the rings were the result of interference, and that they occur when the separation between the surfaces is of the same order as the wavelength of light. Meanwhile, there was a young fellow studying for his bachelor ‘s degree at Cambridge named Isaac Newton. Many years later, Newton commented on these very same light bands, and today they are known as Newton’s Rings.¹²

Long before Isaac Newton came into the group’s philosophical arena, Robert Hooke began the first specifically defined research into gravity. Setting a pendulum swinging, he noted that the wider the commencing arc, the longer it took to come to a halt. But why should it come to a halt at all and what force was it that drew the pendulum gradually, through decreasing arcs, to an eventual standstill? The answer was, of course, gravity—a subject which Robert was destined to pursue, for it baffled him that everything pulled or fell downwards, except for the stars which remained in their suspended positions. There had to be scientific laws which determine the nature and function of earthly weight, or the apparent lack of it in the heavens.

Hooke’s Micrographia is one of the greatest scientific volumes ever published, and without doubt the foremost of all works concerning microscopy and biological research. But it was not limited to views through a microscope; there were telescopic observations of the moon and stars, descriptions of his newly invented thermometer, his barometer, his wind gauge and a hygrometer for measuring atmospheric humidity. He distinguished heat from burning, citing that burning ceases when oxygen expires no matter how much heat is applied, and put forward an abundance of revelatory material which brought proven science firmly out of the vague philosophical arena in which it had existed for so long.

This then was the operative scientific world of the Rosicrucian brotherhood in England. In terms of ultimate achievement, however, the Society’s heyday was far from over, and the greatest of all scientists, Isaac Newton, was yet to appear on the scene, 16 years before the 1688 Revolution.

Fire and Pestilence

While Samuel Pepys battled to resurrect a Navy that had fallen into decline during the Cromwellian era, John Evelyn and King Charles prepared a paper concerning plans to improve the environment. Both were troubled by the amount of grime and smoke which enveloped the narrow streets of London, and they called their scheme Fumifugium. But the politicians, with their out-of-town estates, were not remotely interested in the welfare of the city dwellers—only in the revenue derived from them—and so the scheme came to nothing. As it transpired, a little time and thought applied by the reluctant authorities at that stage might have prevented the great disasters which followed soon afterwards.

The poverty ensuing from the harsh Protectorate remained evident in the 1660s, with the towns and cities in a state of filth and decay, while the Whig aristocracy had built themselves fine country mansions with public money. Then came the long, hot summer of 1665, bringing with it the worst of all dreaded diseases: bubonic plague. Pepys recorded that it began in the June when he saw some houses in London’s Drury Lane marked with red crosses and the plea written on their doors, ‘Lord have mercy upon us’. By August, thousands were dying each week. Eventually, the Black Death (carried by rats and fleas) killed nearly 70,000 people in the capital alone—about 15 per cent of the population—as a result of which King Charles made another attempt to save the city. He sensed that another such summer, with severe electric storms, could so easily bring fire to the crowded timber structures that lined the streets and lanes of the capital. He approached the city authorities and gave them express permission to pull down strategically located buildings to create fire breaks, but nothing was done and the consequence was a major calamity.

Again it was Samuel Pepys who gave the news to the King and his brother James, Duke of York, after he had seen a fire spreading on 1 September 1666. He recommended, just as Charles had already suggested, that buildings must be demolished around the fire without delay. But it was too late and the blaze was already moving at an incredible rate. Subsequently, Pepys found the Lord Mayor skulking in Canning Street, knowing the disaster was his fault. With smoke and flames pouring through the alleys and billowing to the sky, King Charles became the director of operations. Hose-in-hand, he laboured among the soldiers and firemen, while his brother James organized the clearing of crucial areas to prevent an outward spread of the conflagration. In the event, however, it was a lost cause and 100,000 residents were made homeless.¹³

Through some fluke of circumstance, Gresham College and its precious library were spared, but its facilities were temporarily lost to the Royal Society. In order that the merchants and businessmen could maintain the trading economy of London, the College became an interim Royal Exchange. Hence, the Fellows’ research activities were curtailed for a time and the alchemical crucibles were placed on the back burner.

To mark the Great Fire of London as a constant reminder for the generations to come, Robert Hooke designed and built the 202-ft Doric-style Monument (the tallest of its kind in the world) in Fish Hill Street, close to where the fire started, and where the edifice remains a popular visitor attracton (see plate 25). Given the nature of the Royal Society’s cause, however, Hooke also contrived a practical purpose for the Monument, designing it with an internal spiral staircase to double as an astronomical viewing station.¹⁴

Gone was the city of Chaucer and Shakespeare; gone was the beautiful old St Paul’s, the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall, the Custom House and the Post Office, along with 87 city churches and the halls of 44 livery companies. Indeed, four-fifths of the city was destroyed, and this accounted for one-tenth of the nation’s wealth production. Quite suddenly it was an age of architects and designers, and none was more prominent than the Royal Society’s Christopher Wren, who entered the fray together with his colleague Robert Hooke. With the clearing of the debris completed by early December, Wren and Hooke began to measure the streets and sites, marking them up for restoration as great piles were driven into the ground.

The Act for Rebuilding was given royal assent in February 1667, stipulating new wider streets; also that buildings were to be of brick or stone, with slate or tiled roofs and no overhanging jetties or exterior woodwork. While Wren considered the more complex architectural work, Hooke was appointed Chief Surveyor, also gaining architectural commissions for the Royal College of Physicians, Montague House and the Bethlehem Hospital. Additionally, he worked on plans for various city companies: Grocers, Merchant Taylors and Mercers, along with Christ’s Hospital School and Bridewell. In preparing the design for the physicians’ college, Hooke made good use of his previous work with pulley-wheels and counterweights for wheel barometers, inventing the first ever sash windows.

Meanwhile, the 34-year-old Surveyor General, Christopher Wren, was faced with the seemingly insurmountable task of replacing innumerable buildings of the greatest magnitude and complexity—so many of which (though he built them to last for ever) were to be lost in the 1940 German air-raid blitz of World War II. Prized as the best known of his city masterworks is St Paul’s Cathedral, but he also rebuilt 51 other churches of the 87 that were lost in the fire. While thousands of new houses and business premises were rising like a phoenix from the ashes, another Wren masterwork was the new Royal Exchange. When this opened for business, the Royal Society moved once more to Gresham College. At the same time, Wren was working on other London buildings outside the central city, including the Chelsea Hospital, St Clement Danes, the Strand, and the area of St James’s where the Royal Society Club was subsequently installed.

If Freemasonry is about geometry, architecture, building, stonemasonry and all such things as are supposedly at its core (via Hiram Abiff, Prince Edwin, King Athelstan and the rest), then no one in the course of masonic history—not even King Solomon— has done so much as Sir Christopher Wren to further the masonic cause. And yet, for all that, James Anderson—the very man who compiled the Constitutions on which modern Freemasonry rests—wrote in those Constitutions that Wren had allowed Freemasonry to fall into ‘decay’. Even the librarian and curator of the United Grand Lodge of England expressed his bewilderment at this some years ago.¹⁵

Gravity on a Plate

The greatest of all misfortunes to settle upon the Royal Society followed Isaac Newton’s arrival on the scene in 1672. From the very beginning, Newton and Hooke were on a wrong footing, which began with a disagreement over light refraction; also because Newton lodged a formal objection to Hooke’s fee-exempt status as Curator. After only a few months, Newton threatened to leave the Society, but the Secretary, intelligence agent Henry Oldenburg, pleaded for him to stay, waiving his dues too, much to the annoyance of the other Fellows.

A major argument ensued in 1675 when Newton gave a lecture entitled Discourse on Colour, claiming originality when, as Robert Hooke stated, ‘The main of it was contained in Micrographia.’ This set Oldenburg firmly against Hooke, leading to regular disputes. In 1678, Oldenburg died and Robert Hooke was elected to become the new Secretary, which upset Newton even further.

Isaac Newton was a man of incredible talent and, like Boyle, Wilkins, Ashmole and others, he was an ardent alchemist. He was, however, a curious character and the others could not fathom him at all. Having embarked on a translation of the Emerald Text of Hermes, Newton recalled from his youth that phoenix was an old Graeco-Phoenician word for ‘crimson’, and his quest for the great enlightenment led to a new decoration of his quarters—crimson furniture, carpets, curtains, quilts, cushions and hangings. At his eventual death, no other colour was mentioned in the inventory of his furnishings.¹⁶

Newton’s religious leaning was distinctly Arian, a form of early Christianity which rejected any concept of the Holy Trinity.¹⁷ One of his foremost studies concerned the structure of the ancient kingdoms, and he claimed the pre-eminence of the Judaic heritage as an archive of divine knowledge and numerology. Although he was a deeply spiritual man and a true authority on early religion, he refused (like Boyle) to take Holy Orders, and constantly maintained that the New Testament had been strategically distorted by the Church before its publication.

In January 1684, Robert Hooke was in London at Garaway’s coffee house, off Cornhill, with Newton, Wren and the debonair Edmund Halley who (as an honorary Oxford graduate) had become a Society Fellow four years after Newton. They were discussing celestial harmony—the relationship between heavenly bodies and ratios in accordance with Pythagoras’ Music of the Spheres. In the course of this, the questions were posed: What kept the planets suspended in their orbital positions around the sun? Why do they not fall down?

Letters written by Hooke to Newton between 1677 and 1680 make it clear that in his earlier research Hooke had discovered gravitational law to be based upon the principle of an Inverse Square (the force of the attraction is proportionate to the inverse square of the distance), but Newton had responded stating that he was not interested because he was working on other things. Nevertheless, at Garaway’s the matter was raised again, with Wren and Halley agreeing with Hooke’s Inverse Square principle, while Newton apparently did not—and so the matter rested.

Then, in 1685, Hooke’s long-standing ally King Charles II died, and within two years Newton produced his Principia Mathematica in which he stated the very same Inverse Square principle that Robert Hooke had handed to him on a plate. It became known as the Law of Gravity and, with no acknowledgement of Hooke’s research, it gained Newton a primary place in scientific history. Since no one knew how he had come to his discovery, the antiquarian William Stukeley explained in 1752 (25 years after Isaac Newton’s death) that Newton was inspired by an apple falling from a tree—the same dubious tale that students are taught to this day.¹⁸

In practice, the big difference between Hooke and Newton (and Hooke and Halley) was that so many aspects of research begun by Robert Hooke were never properly concluded. He made some amazing discoveries, and his Micrographia is acknowledged as one of the greatest scientific works ever written. But comet periodicity and gravity fell into the same pending tray as his marine chronometer. It is perfectly true that Hooke theorized the Inverse Square principle—but it was Newton who proved it.

Genius of the Few

The rebuilding of London continued through 42 years, during the course of which Isaac Newton became President of the Royal Society in 1703. Christopher Wren had been knighted by King Charles II in 1673, and Isaac Newton was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. It is in English masonic records that, on 18 May 1691, a great meeting of accepted masons took place at St Paul’s to adopt Sir Christopher Wren as a brother. The lodge to which this refers is uncertain, but it is presumed to be the Goose and Gridiron lodge, which actually dates from that year, and later became known as the Lodge of Antiquity. Wren is now listed as having been Master of that lodge, but this is fanciful myth.¹⁹ Wren was a staunch Tory supporter, a well-known Jacobite, and already a long-term mason who would certainly not have joined a Whig lodge to become its Master. There never was any such meeting at St Paul’s. In fact, there was no St Paul’s. The old building had been completely demolished; work was not begun on the new cathedral until 1675, and the scaffold and screens were not taken down until the winter of 1708. Meanwhile, no one but the workmen were allowed beyond the screens, and in May 1691 Christopher Wren was busy in Richmond, working at Hampton Court Palace for Queen Mary.²⁰

St Paul’s Cathedral was the last of London’s reconstructions and, with the work finished, the once low-slung, shambling city displayed an elegant skyline of towers, domes, steeples and spires. It should have been the most wonderful culmination, but by that time Wren had few surviving friends or family with whom to share his triumph. Twice a widower and not marrying again, he had also lost his beloved daughter Jane. His dear friend Robert Hooke, with whom he rebuilt the City, had died in 1703, as had Samuel Pepys, while Robert Boyle had died earlier in 1691, and John Evelyn in 1706.

King Charles had been succeeded by his brother James, who was deposed by the Whigs, in favour of William and Mary in 1688, and the Royal House of Stuart—Europe’s longest reigning dynasty—had reached its monarchical end. So too went the heritage of the Rosicrucian Order from Britain, and the philosophical mind-set which had inspired and fuelled the pioneers of the Gresham brotherhood, moved into France and Italy.

It was Christopher Wren’s inaugural Gresham College lecture in 1657 which had cemented the original group into a formal Society. But now his visits to the coffee houses and theatres were over, for the old haunts had gone and the new ones were quite different without his friends. They had become business places for a new breed of financial marketeers. As the resurrected city became operative once again, so the fraternity of Wren’s early years became a figment of history. The days of their pioneering collaboration were done, and irrespective of how the Royal Society might progress in the future, that magical half-century could never be repeated. Nevertheless, as Britain moved towards a new era of Industrial Revolution, everyone knew that none of it would have been possible were it not for the grand legacy of invention, design and discovery, unrivalled in all history, and the incomparable genius of those few.

5 Power and Politics
Builders and Bees

Freemasonry is described these days as being concerned with speculative rather than operative stonemasonry, but the word ‘speculative’ is an odd choice when used as an alternative to ‘non-operative’. Freemasons use a system of signs, tokens and passwords in accordance with medieval masonic practice, and the Great Lights and working tools of lodges include various implements associated with architectural design and building: compasses (dividers), a setsquare, a ruler (called a 24-inch gauge), a plumb line and so forth. But that really is about as far as lodge-working goes in symbolic stonemasonry terms, apart from allegorical representations to alignment, rectitude and perfection in life as they might be construed in practical building.

It is only since the 18th century that the term ‘speculative’ has fallen into common masonic use since its inclusion in a letter from the Deputy Grand Master of the premier Grand Lodge in London to a colleague at The Hague on 12 July 1757. Significantly, however, an earlier building trade publication in 1703 had used the term in a very specific way, explaining:

Some ingenious workmen understand the speculative part of architecture or building. But of these knowing sort of artificers there are few because few workmen look any further than the mechanical, practick or working part of architecture; not regarding the mathematical or speculative part of building.¹

In architectural terms, a building is speculative before it becomes a physical reality. That is to say, when it is the province of the speculator—the architect—rather than the builder. At that stage, when at the drawing board, the architect is free of the masonry, but must have knowledge of all the operative practicalities. This includes not just an awareness of stone and building materials, but also the scientific aspects of stresses, strains and other such matters. The true free-mason is therefore the architect, just as Hiram was the architect for King Solomon’s Temple, while in a broader sense the Supreme Being of Freemasonry is defined as the Great Architect of the Universe.

Historically, architects and surveyors have often been practical builders too, and have certainly operated as site overseers or masters of works. In this sense, speculative masons are not, therefore, a product of modern symbolic Freemasonry. Back in 1620, when operative members were ‘admitted’ into the Worshipful Company of Masons of the City of London, it was stated that speculative mem bers were also ‘accepted’.²

When considering the furniture and tools of Freemasonry, their scope moves from the compasses of the architect to the trowel of the artisan, with the compasses and square being two of the Three Great Lights along with the volume of Sacred Law. In the 18th-century, William Blake portrayed the Great Architect with his compasses in his depictions of the Ancient of Days (see plate 1), but this was not a newly contrived image. The French illuminated Bible Moralisée used the same theme back in 1245 (see page 236), as did the vernacular encyclopedia, Li Livres dou Tresor, by Dante Alighieri’s mentor, Brunetto Latini, from the same era.

Greatly admired by Isaac Newton was the Rosicrucian alchemist Michael Mair (b. 1566), physician to the German Emperor Rudolph II and a colleague in England of Robert Fludd. His book Atlanta Fugiens became one of the earliest textual models for the Royal Society.³ In this work, Mair introduced the image of a master mason using compasses to prepare the architecture of the Philosophers’ Stone as described in the Rosary of the Philosophers⁴—the Rosarium Philosophorum:

Make a round circle of the man and the woman, and draw out of this a square, and out of the square a triangle. Make a round circle, and you will have the stone of the philosophers.

For his symbol of London’s rebirth from the fire, Christopher Wren selected the phoenix—the mythical bird which rose from the ashes in a blaze of new enlightenment. The great phoenix effigy which commands the south portico pediment of St Paul’s Cathedral was carved by the Danish sculptor Caius Cibber, who also produced the distinctly masonic plaque at the base of the Monument. This image shows London as a collapsed and grieving woman,⁵ holding the sword of the City (see plate 32). Accompanying her is the figure of Expedition and some citizens, with the buildings aflame behind them. To the right of the plaque, the masons construct the new city, while Envy skulks in the gutter below. Peace and Plenty survey the scene from above, and King Charles II approaches (wearing Roman attire), along with Justice, Victory and Fortitude. Central to the scene is Natural Science, accompanied by Liberty and Architecture who carries the requisite square and compasses.⁶ And between the figures of London and Natural Science there is a beehive.

Not only are bees the biblical creature most associated with King Solomon, the beehive is also a recognizable emblem of Freemasonry, and it denotes industry. Honeycomb, being constructed of hexagonal prisms, was considered by philosophers to be the manifestation of divine harmony in nature, and bees have always been associated with insight and wisdom, as defined in the Proverbs of Solomon 24:13-14:

My son, eat thou honey, because it is good…So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul.

The hexagon is formed by dividing the circumference of a circle by chords equivalent to its radius. This produces a figure of six equal straight sides, as found in the cells of some organic life. Consequently, bees were held to be endowed with geometrical forethought, employing strength with economy of space as their guiding principles. King Solomon’s Seal (two interlaced equilateral triangles within a circle) incorporates a natural hexagon, and the resultant hexagram symbolically denotes the unity (if not the harmony) of opposites: male and female, fire and water, hot and cold, earth and air, and so on. The bee was also a traditional device of the Royal House of Stuart, and is often seen engraved as a distinguishing mark of Jacobite glassware.

To the early Merovingian Kings of the Franks (AD 451-751),⁷ King Solomon was the model of earthly kingship, and the bee was a most hallowed creature. When the grave of the 5th-century King Childeric I was unearthed in 1653, some 300 small golden bees were found stitched to his cloak. Emperor Napoleon I Bonaparte had these attached to his own coronation robe in 1804—claiming his right by virtue of a family descent from James de Rohan-Stuardo, the natural son (legitimized 1677) of Charles II Stuart of Britain by Marguerite, Duchesse de Rohan. In modern Freemasonry, the beehive is used as an emblem of industry, bonding and mutual service.

The New Foundation

Following the death of Sir Christopher Wren in 1723, those at the forefront of Hanoverian Freemasonry began to formulate an historical backdrop for their evolving, non-operative Craft. Such things as tolerance and benevolence were cemented as objectives, while signs and tokens were established, along with the aim of building a socially aware community. There was little similarity between this and the more scientific or architecturally based movements whose format they endeavoured to emulate, but a convenient biblical metaphor was to hand—the building of Solomon’s Temple. By way of allegory and symbolism, the methods of the Hiramic masons of Jerusalem could be used as emblematic models for building an exemplary Craft culture—and within such a framework it was logical enough to adopt the guise of a stonemasons’ guild. That apart, there does appear to have been some friction at the outset between the premier Grand Lodge and the operative trade guilds with which they sought alignment, but this was soon overcome.⁸ This seems to have been effected by enticing high-ranking nobility into the fold, with John, 2nd Duke of Montagu accepting the Grand Mastership in 1721, followed by Philip, Duke of Wharton on 17 January 1723.

Only from that date were any Minutes kept of the meetings. Anderson’s first Constitutions were officially sanctioned, and it was determined that new lodges could only be considered ‘Regular ‘ (legitimate) if they were constituted by the Grand Master or an appointed deputy. So, in spite of the initial socially-minded objectives, the first real moves in the process of establishing an institute of fraternal ‘equality’ were actually the denial of freedom in the field, and the creation of a dictatorial hierarchy! In parallel, much the same was happening within the confines of the Royal Society as it became more bureaucratic and exacting in the Georgian style.

Although installed as King of Britain in 1714, George I openly mistrusted the English since they had already rid themselves of two kings in the previous 65 years, and had executed the Queen of Scots prior to that. He preferred to rely on his German ministers and, since he could not speak a word of English, George ran his kingly affairs from Hanover with his prime minister Robert Walpole holding the reins at Westminster from 1721.

George II succeeded his father in 1727, only to display a similar lack of empathy with the populace. Ten years later, however, King George’s eldest son Frederick, Prince of Wales, was initiated into Freemasonry at Kew, and Grand Lodge thereby gained its first royal member.⁹ His membership was of little consequence though—and in opposition to his father, Frederick joined the Stuart cause after the 1745 Jacobite Rising of Bonnie Prince Charlie. During the course of this civil war and the simultaneous War of Austrian Succession (1740-48), there was very little lodge activity recorded, and it is claimed that, because of these campaigns, English Freemasonry fell into a severe decline. That is the official story—in practice quite the reverse was the case; the lodges were never so lively as they were during that era.

Divided Loyalties

So much has been written about Charles Edward Stuart and his attempt to regain the crowns of his grandfather, King James II (VII), that it is not possible to retell the whole story here, except for those parts of it that directly concern Freemasonry.

Despite an encouraging start in September 1745, and some Scots victories against the troops of King George’s son William, Duke of Cumberland, the campaign met a disastrous end at Culloden Moor on 16 April 1746. There followed the Prince’s dramatic flight to Skye with Flora Macdonald—the rest is romantic history. In the course of all this, masonic lodges (by virtue of their secrecy) became the perfect centres for intelligence operations on both sides. Notwithstanding the regulations imposed by Grand Lodge for the licensed constitution of all other lodges, there were many lodges in London and the provinces that ignored this directive. Just because the Whig aristocracy had established their presence within the premier Grand Lodge, this did not mean there were no Tory lodges classified as ‘Irregular ‘ by the tavern-club movement. Such lodges were especially prevalent in Wales and the West of England, and the Whig and Tory opposition lodges became nests of spies and secret agents, each endeavouring to infiltrate the other to gain inside information.

Although many of the aristocratic families created after 1688 were inclined to be Whigs, many of the older landed families retained their Tory position and their traditional Stuart support—which did not end with the Battle of Culloden. Even after the Rising, Jacobitism was rife in Northumbria, through the Midlands, down to the south of the country. Across the land there was an active network of Jacobite societies and Tory lodges in major centres such as London, Liverpool, Preston, Norwich, Bristol and Manchester.

Wherever Charles Edward travelled south of the Border, there were prestigious safe houses at his disposal. They included Stoneleigh Abbey (baronial seat of the Leighs of Warwick), Marbury Hall, Cheshire (the home of James, Earl of Barrymore—Member of Parliament for Wigan and leader of the English Jacobites),¹⁰ Malpas Hall, Cheshire (belonging to the Stuart envoy Richard Minshull) and Blythefield Hall, Staffordshire (seat of the noble Bagot family). In London, Charles stayed at the Essex Street home of Lady Anne Primrose, the widow of Hugh, 3rd Viscount Primrose (ancestor of Lord Rosebery). Anne had been involved with the Jacobite cause during the 1745 Rising and, following Flora Macdonald’s imprisonment in England, it was Lady Anne who secured her release and gave her financial aid. A particularly significant visit by the Prince to Lady Anne’s London house is recorded in the Stuart Papers at Windsor as having occurred on 16-22 September 1750, some years after the Rising.¹¹

In 1752, Charles stayed at Westbrook House in Godalming, Surrey, with Eleanor Oglethorpe,¹² sister of the Crown agent James Oglethorpe, who founded Georgia, USA, and built Savannah. Eleanor worked for the Stuarts with the famed Jacobite agent Dr Samuel Johnson, and with Dr William King, Principal of St Mary Hall, Oxford. Other English supporters of the Prince included the Earls of Cornbury and Derwentwater, the Lords of Chesterfield, Bath, Sandwich and Pultney, along with the Dukes of Somerset, Westmorland, Beaufort¹³ and, perhaps most surprisingly, King George II’s own son Frederick, Prince of Wales, who was instrumental in helping Lady Anne to secure the release of Flora Macdonald.¹⁴

In the Welsh sector (which included the Shropshire and Cheshire border country) there were three prominent Jacobite lodges to which many of the nobility and gentry belonged. In the south were the Sea Serjeants of Carmarthen, whose headquarters was the Masonic Lodge at the Red Lion in Market Street.¹⁵ In mid-Wales was the Tory gentle-men’s Montgomeryshire Club of Twenty-Seven, while the north oper ated through another Tory lodge called the Cycle of the White Rose.¹⁶ This was headed by Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, Lord Lieutenant and Member of Parliament for Denbighshire. The Cycle was headquartered at Sir Watkin’s house at Winnstay; then (following his death in 1749) at his widow’s property, Llangedwyn Hall near Oswestry.

In 1747, the estate house of Berse Drelincourt was built near Wrexham for Mary, the widow of Peter Drelincourt, Dean of Armagh, to become a masonic charity school for the residential education of children born to exiled Jacobite nobility. Technically, the school was registered as an orphanage and, for reasons of strict security, access was forbidden to outsiders. Lady Anne Primrose (Mary’s daughter) eventually became director of operations.

The style of Freemasonry worked within Tory lodges (such as the Sea Serjeants and the Cycle of the White Rose in the Welsh regions) was somewhat akin to that which led to the Antients’ Grand Lodge foundation in 1751, thereafter referring to the premier Grand Lodge as the Moderns. In 1760, Robert Jones of Glamorgan became Grand Master of the Welsh Freemasons, and was also a member of the One Ton lodge in Noble Street, London, along with the Black Lion lodge in Jockey Field.¹⁷ A close friend of the political activist John Wilkes, he also attended other Tory lodges in London at the Antwerp Tavern, the Turk’s Head and The Shakespeare. Prior to Jones’ appointment, the Carmarthen Grand Masters of the 1750s were Sir Edward Mansell of Trimsaran and David Gwynne of Talaris from 1754. (Plate 10 illustrates a summons of The Globe Lodge, Fleet Street, during this era.)

The following example of the scale of the inter-lodge hostility that prevailed at this time comes from the Transactions of the Antiquarian Society and from London’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review, 1755. Unable to infiltrate the Tory’s Red Lion lodge in Market Street, Carmarthen, at a time when borough elections were taking place, the Whigs instituted their own new lodge at the nearby Greyhound in Bridge Street. Arguments led to scuffles which, in turn, led to several injuries and the killing of the Red Lion barber, whereupon wholesale warfare erupted in the streets as reinforcements came in from out of town. The Tories occupied the castle, and the Whigs took the town hall. ‘In short’, wrote one correspondent, ‘the town is full of fire, smoke and tumult.’¹⁸ Another report stated that people were ‘armed with guns, swords and other offensive weapons—threatening, assaulting, beating, knocking-down, wounding, maiming, shooting at and killing several’.¹⁹ After the disturbances had died down, the rival masonic lodges each began legal proceedings against the other.

This was the state of Britain’s Freemasonry in the 1740s and 1750s, at a time when the premier Grand Lodge lost 72 of its 271 member branches, yet the official records are remarkably quiet. William, 5th Lord Byron (great-uncle of the poet), was elected as Grand Master in 1747, and was never seen again in a masonic lodge until he nominated a successor in 1752.²⁰ Subsequently, he caused public feeling to well up against Freemasonry when he killed his neighbour, William Chatworth, in a sword fight at the Star and Garter in London’s Pall Mall.

Even the individual member Freemasons whose lodges were tied to premier Grand Lodge were unhappy at this time, and they were especially angered when a Bill of Incorporation was presented to Parliament by their masters in 1768. By virtue of its terms, the feeling against the concept was intense, and members complained that it would constitute a legal way for the hierarchy to misappropriate their charity contributions for other purposes. At the outset, Horace Walpole, Earl of Oxford and son of Robert (the late Prime Minister), had written to a colleague, ‘The Free Masons are in such low repute now in England…I believe that nothing but a persecution could bring them into vogue again.’

In masonic circles, the most frequently given reason for the hostile 18th-century conflict between the Antients and the Moderns is that the Antients must have been Irish and unable to gain access to the English lodges—so they started their own! But the truth is far more straightforward than that. Whether English, Scots, Irish or Welsh, it was a party-political feud. The Antients were essentially Jacobite Tories, whereas the Moderns were mostly Hanoverian Whigs.

The Dunkerley Episode

Prince Frederick predeceased his father in 1751 and, when George II died in 1760, he was succeeded by Frederick’s eldest son as King George III. Soon afterwards, following an induction meeting at the Horn Tavern in London, three of the new King’s brothers—the Dukes of Gloucester, York and Cumberland—were each given the spuri ous title of Past Grand Master by premier Grand Lodge.²¹ This ensured that the Royal Family was wholly attached to their branch of the Craft, while also giving the impression to outsiders that Grand Lodge had a more solid foundation than in reality. From that point, the scene was set for a masonic institution headed by Hanoverian royalty, as it remains today.

The American War of Independence (1775-83) was a major world event in masonic terms since George Washington, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin and other Founding Fathers of the emergent new Republic were Freemasons. But how could these eminent men be attached to a fraternity that was so heavily influenced by the very royal house whose colonial authority they challenged?

This fascinating aspect of transatlantic history is more than worthy of its own section in this book, and it shall be examined in detail in chapter 17. Meanwhile, the point to hold in mind is that the Tory Ancients and the Whig Moderns were competitive, antagonistic, and supported wholly conflicting political viewpoints. There were two distinct and opposing forms of Freemasonry in the latter 1700s, and the relationship between America and the Tory faction was far stronger than any academic history book is ever likely to reveal.

In 1782, Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland, was installed as overall Grand Master in London and, with this formal royal patronage, the masonic cause of the Moderns was considerably strengthened. Another prominent character of the moment, known as Thomas Dunkerley, was an illegitimate son of George II. Born in 1724, he served (from the age of 10) in the Royal Navy, and his royal birthright was not announced until he was over 40. Having been initiated into Freemasonry in 1754, Dunkerley formed lodges in many of the ships in which he served, and when his parentage was recognized he was granted a personal income and rooms at Hampton Court Palace. Subsequently, he became Provincial Grand Master in numerous regions.²²

The Duke of Cumberland died in 1790, whereupon his nephew, the Prince of Wales (later King George IV), took up the reins as Grand Master—at least nominally. In practice, he appointed a deputy to carry out the functions of the post.

In 1791, Dunkerley decided to introduce high degrees of a presumed Knight Templar style into English Freemasonry. He formed the Supreme Grand and Royal Conclave, inviting George III’s young son, Prince Edward (the later Duke of Kent), to be overall Patron of an Order that would assume control of the said high degrees. But Dunkerley died in 1795, and no one really knew what the Supreme Grand and Royal Conclave was. It seems to have been little more than Dunkerley himself, possibly with the aid of a friend’s sister, whom he referred to in correspondence as the Lady Patroness. There were, however, a number of regionally affiliated ‘encampments’ (lodges) whose members appointed Thomas Parkins, Lord Rancliffe, to succeed Dunkerley. But in all the 11 years of his appointment, Rancliffe only attended one meeting,²³ which was one more than the Duke of Kent attended!

Legal Exemption

During this period, and following the French Revolution (1789-99), an innovatory concept of voting was put forward by the British author Thomas Paine in his The Rights of Man. He suggested that people should have the right to appoint and change their own governments. This was too much for the Georgian politicians—Paine was indicted for treason and fled to Calais in 1792. By that time, almost every town in Britain had a Constitutional Information Club, or a Society of Friends. In 1793, the British Convention of People’s Delegates was held in Edinburgh and, in response to their plea for better workers’ representation, the Government duly transported the leaders to the colonies. Hostilities were then commenced against the French who, along with the Americans, were said to have fuelled a widespread anti-Hanover mood in Britain.

Subsequently, the long-standing Habeas Corpus Act was suspended by prime minister William Pitt (the Younger) in 1794, so that citizens could be kept in prison indefinitely without need for trial. Following Pitt’s Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797, Government spies roamed the country, bringing in anyone who belonged to a workers’ group that Westminster deemed seditious, and they were duly sentenced without a hearing. (It was under the terms of this Act that the Tolpuddle Martyrs of Dorset were arrested long afterwards in 1834, and charged at the Dorchester Assizes with ‘administering unlawful pledges of loyalty’.) Even the Royal Navy did not escape the harsh judgements in 1797. Most sailors were pressganged into service, only to be treated abominably with miserable pay and conditions. But when seamen of the Fleet at Nore (near Sheerness) demonstrated for a revised ship-board policy and a grant of two meals a day instead of one, their leaders were hanged.²⁴ At this time, Britain was in a desperate position; France had conquered the Netherlands, and controlled the Dutch Fleet. France had also made an alliance with Spain, and practically controlled the Spanish Fleet.

Then, within a general stirring of public unrest, Pitt made it unlawful to speak, write or to have any opinion against the Government. He sent German troops into Ireland in 1797, prompting an Irish rebellion in the following year, which led to the arrest and death of the prominent leader Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Pitt then introduced the Unlawful Societies Act in 1799, whereupon workers’ groups and unlicensed public meetings of any kind were forbidden anywhere in Britain. The coming together of men into any form of club or society for negotiation of improved working conditions or wages was henceforth defined as a punishable conspiracy. In fact, any organization which held secretive meetings came under the wrap of this Act which, potentially, could have closed all the masonic lodges. Given the royal patronage that applied, however, Pitt was pressured and obliged to relent in favour of Grand Lodge so that Freemasonry was made uniquely exempt from the law.²⁵

The Sussex Years

One of the Duke of Kent’s brothers was Prince Augustus, Duke of Sussex, who (despite his Hanoverian status) married twice into Jacobite families. He was first married in Rome to Lady Augusta Murray, daughter of the 4th Earl of Dunmore, on 4 April 1793. But this marriage was formally annulled in the following year because it had not been sanctioned by King George III, and therefore contravened the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. Much later, Augustus married Lady Celia Saunders, daughter of the 2nd Earl of Arran, on 2 May 1831. She was granted the style Duchess of Inverness, but the marriage was similarly deemed to be in breach of the Act.²⁶ However, in 1793 (the year of his first marriage) Augustus had resigned his right of succession to the British Crown, and pursued his own course irrespective of the restrictive Hanoverian statute.

In 1812, Sussex was installed as Grand Master of the Supreme Grand and Royal Conclave, but in the following year, with the Antients and Moderns finally amalgamated, he was also invited to become Grand Master of the new United Grand Lodge, which did not condone the higher degrees of the Conclave. This placed the Duke in a difficult situation, but he decided to accept the office and ride out the storm. In addition to that (and following some heated disputes about who had rights of supreme authority over the masons in France), Augustus was afforded another position in 1819, when selected to head the French Supreme Council in Britain.²⁷ This greatly appealed to him because, in contrast to Dunkerley’s pseudo-Grand Conclave, it was a Templar-style institution with its roots in the exiled Stuart Rite, and would grant him the high-degree patent in Britain.

By virtue of his family ruining his first marriage, Augustus was rather more inclined towards Stuart than Hanoverian sympathy, and so he accepted the nomination. The trouble was that he could not tell his masonic colleagues in England about the plan, and therefore had his masonic secretary make the arrangements. This man was Joseph Hippolyte da Costa, the Portuguese mason who had been extricated by his English friends from papal custody, and who wrote about the Dionysian Artificers (see page 34). In the event, the office proved to be a title without a function because there was nothing the Duke could do to further his appointment without making his French collaboration known.

From this somewhat egotistical masonic era of Grand Councils and Supreme Conclaves, comes an intriguing and very ordinary sounding name, listed among all the aristocrats and royalty. It appears in the 1845 Statutes of the Temple by authority of the Grand Conclave in Scotland which states that in 1808 a certain ‘Mr Alexander Deuchar was elected Commander of the Edinburgh Templars’. These are the Statutes of a pseudo-Templar Conclave in Scotland that had a serious effect on the relationship between English and Irish Freemasons before and after the amalgamation of the Ancients and Moderns.

Alexander Deuchar was a seal-engraver who became aware of the possibility of a French Templar Council being instituted in Britain long before the offer to head such a body was made to Duke Augustus. The background negotiations had begun when the French Council was itself formed in 1804. Major Müller of the 1st Royal Foot had the ear of the Duke’s brother, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and Deuchar conspired with Müller to approach Edward for a Charter of Dispensation to establish an anti-Jacobite Templar authority in Scotland.

Deuchar’s brother, David, was an officer in the Peninsula War (Britain against France in Portugal, 1808-14) and, during the campaign at Leira in Portugal, he stole the altar cross from a Templar chapel in the Castle of Tomar in order to aid his brother’s endeavour. In the old days, the Deuchars had served Scotland well and, from the time of Bannockburn (24 June 1314) and beyond, the Great Sword of Deuchar, with its family coat-of-arms, was a welcome sight on any battlefield. By 1745, however, the table had turned, and the Deuchar allegiance swayed, so that Lyon of East Ogil (a Jacobite supporter of Charles Edward Stuart) made it his business to carry off the prized heirloom. The sword was, nevertheless, retrieved after Culloden, to be held by the Hanoverian supporter Alexander Deuchar when he began his discussions with the Duke of Kent.

Seeing his opportunity to get a firm Hanoverian foothold in Scotland, the Duke agreed to Deuchar’s request, and the new establishment became known as the Scottish Conclave, with Deuchar as its Grand Master. However, the Duke of Kent asserted that the English Masonic rules must be followed, and that he would himself be the Royal Grand Patron of the Conclave established ‘in that part of Great Britain called Scotland’. Not surprisingly, within a few decades influential Whigs were allowed to buy their way into the Conclave. The Duke of Leeds, for example (who had no Templar training) was admitted in 1848, to become Steward of the Great Priory within just a few months, and the Episcopal Bishop of Edinburgh was similarly admitted.²⁸

The Scottish Grand Conclave was formally constituted in 1811, and falling under Deuchar’s banner of intended Scottish subjugation were several traditional Templar lodges of the legitimate Irish Grand Encampment whose warrants were from Ireland. In 1826, the Grand Master of these lodges in Scotland was Robert Martin, who wanted nothing whatever to do with the Deuchar interlopers or the Duke of Kent. The Conclave was formally denounced by the Dublin Encampment on 28 December 1827. All Encampment Templars who had succumbed to the unethically created Hanoverian protectorate in Scotland were instructed to surrender their original Irish warrants to Robert Martin. In condemning the establishment of the Deuchar Conclave, the Irish document stated, ‘Every ancient Sir Knight knows that the Duke of Kent had no more authority to do so than Deuchar himself.’²⁹

This completes an overview of the first 100 years of the new-style English Freemasonry as it evolved during the Georgian era. There is little mention in the records of those symbolic or charitable ideas that were seemingly in the minds of the original tavern-club members of the early 1700s. Apart from internal wrangling and disputes between different factions, the century was mainly concerned with the establishment of power bases and grand titles. There are references, here and there, of an evolving lodge ritual, which was added to at various stages—the first mention of the Temple pillars Jachin and Boaz, for example, occurring in 1762.³⁰ Not until the 1800s did anything that might be recognized by today’s masons begin to take shape. The basic ceremonial format was settled in around 1816, while the philosophical and moral concepts were very much a product of the latter Victorian era. Despite the fact that the newly initiated Entered Apprentice Freemason believes himself to be in a privileged realm of ancient mysteries, there is actually not that much in modern ritual that can claim to be especially ancient, except in theory. This is not a criticism of current masonic practice, it is simply a recognition that the historical provenance of certain aspects is not always correct in the way it is conveyed.

6 Imperial Conquest
The Celtic Realms

Although there was a Grand Master for Wales by the middle 1700s, there was no formally constituted Grand Lodge as such. In Ireland and Scotland, however, Grand Lodges were established as separate institutions to the Grand Lodge of England, and they remain independent today. The Grand Lodge of Ireland was founded in 1725, and the Grand Lodge of Antient, Free and Accepted Masons of Scotland in 1736.

Documentary evidence of Freemasonry in Ireland dates back to the 1600s, and the present headquarters is in Dublin. The journal Dublin Weekly of 26 June 1725 relates that two days earlier Richard, Earl of Rosse, was installed as Grand Master of Ireland, and the story of privately-run Irish lodges immediately prior to this is worth noting.¹

Unlike in the English system, women were not necessarily precluded from becoming masons in Ireland. A well-documented lady Freemason of the era was the Hon Elizabeth St Leger (b. 1693), sister of the 4th Viscount of Doneraile, County Cork.² Initiated in about 1715, Elizabeth’s later portrait depicts her in a masonic attitude and wearing her apron.³ Following the Earl of Rosse, the Irish Grand Master from 1731 was James, Lord Kingston. His father had been a Jacobite exile with King James and, on returning to Ireland in 1693, he was charged with recruiting for the Stuart cause. The same happened with Grand Master James in 1722.

The first extant reference to Freemasonry in Ireland comes from a student graduation speech delivered at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1688. It was stated that a new college was to be established with a society of Freemasons.⁴ The penal laws William of Orange (Billy Windmills to his Irish subjects) drew up against the people of Ireland, Protestants and Catholics alike, were extremely harsh, particularly his ruinous 1699 prohibition of Irish wool exports to England. Many have wondered why the Protestants of Ireland were shamefully treated by the monarch they had served so well at the Battle of the Boyne—especially when his wife, Queen Mary, was a convinced Protestant—but the answer is straightforward. The trade sanction was imposed in 1699, but Mary had died in 1694, leaving William as the sole ruler. His interests were not with Britain or Ireland, and they were certainly not with the Protestants. His mission throughout was to maximize Holland’s trading position against that of France. In Scotland, where the masonic tradition dates back to much earlier times, King William was equally ruthless, even though Scotland was a Protestant nation with a National Kirk. In fact, the Scots had been subjected to a blanket excommunication in the days of Robert the Bruce for standing against the Catholic King Edward of England. In this light it is surprising that for all his blatantly anti-Protestant behaviour, William III is still considered by so many to have been a champion of the Protestant cause.

When King James was deposed in December 1688, the Scots in general were most displeased at the loss of their dynastic monarchy, and in the very next year came the first Jacobite Rising. On 27 July 1689, Viscount Graham of Claverhouse (known as Bonnie Dundee), led a force of Highlanders against King William’s troops at Killiecrankie, near Perth. The Scots’ charge was successful, but Dundee was mortally wounded and died without knowing he had been appointed King’s General. A few weeks later the Highlanders were less fortunate when defeated at Dunkeld. A particularly intriguing fact, however, comes from the Benedictine abbot Dom Augustin Calmet (1672-1757). He recorded that when Viscount Dundee fell at Killiecrankie he was wearing the Grand Prior’s cross and sash of the Knights Templars—a pre-masonic Order which, according to a majority of modern reference sources, ceased to exist in 1307.⁵

Early in his reign, King William instructed that all Highland Chiefs should swear an oath of allegiance to him, but the majority were reluctant to comply. Their kings had always sworn fealty to the nation, rather than the reverse. In order to force the issue, Sir John Dalrymple, Secretary of State for Scotland, was empowered to persecute one reluctant clan as an example to the others. He chose the Macdonalds of Glencoe, who had failed to meet the deadline of 1 January 1692. The ageing MacDonald chief, MacIain, had actually tried to swear his oath at Fort William on 30 December, but no Crown officer was present, and as a result he did not manage to comply until 6 January—almost a week late.

Unlike some other clans, the Macdonalds had no military strength and so were easy prey. Their settlement nestled between the towering mountains of Glencoe, which constituted more of a geographical trap than a natural fortress. On 1 February, Dalrymple sent two companies of Argyll’s Regiment, under Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, to exterminate the unsuspecting clan. Arriving in the guise of a peaceful mission, the soldiers took lodging with the hospitable families for many days. Then, on the bitter morning of 13 February, they cut down every Macdonald they could find, sparing neither the women, the elderly, nor the young. Not surprisingly, the dreadful Glencoe Massacre had the opposite effect to that intended. Instead of intimidating the clans into supporting the new regime, it caused them to form a strong Jacobite confederacy against the ruthless Dutchman and his Government. (In the next chapter the long-standing history of Templarism and Freemasonry in Scotland is investigated.)

The masonic Grand Lodge of Scotland was founded some years after those of England and Ireland. The reason for this might have been the much wider scope of Scottish Freemasonry, which had many more independent lodges from which to obtain agreement. Of the 100 lodges invited to the foundation meeting, representatives from only 33 attended. The other two-thirds did not see the point of a central regulatory body. By virtue of this, the Edinburgh-based Grand Lodge could not exert its authority in the same way as the London group and so the lodges were permitted to retain their own procedures, regalia and ritual. Subsequently, as new lodges were formed after 1736, it was necessary to afford them the same privilege.⁶ The situation remains the same today and, although lodges in Scotland are chartered by Grand Lodge, they retain their individual modes of operation, and there is no rigidly standard ritual.

The Grand Lodge of Scotland is keen to assert that theirs is the only nation capable of proving a direct documented connection between operative stonemasonry and speculative Freemasonry. Certainly, Scotland holds the oldest masonic records in the world and even in today’s lodge workings a stonemason’s maul is used by the Master and Wardens.

The dissident preacher, Dr James Anderson (1680-1739), who prepared the 1723 Constitutions for the Grand Lodge of England, had been born into a Scottish masonic family. His father was a lodge member in Aberdeen, although there is no record of James having been initiated there. Well-known Scottish Freemasons of the 1700s included the poet Robert Burns, the architect Robert Adam, the author Sir Walter Scott, and John Paul Jones of Kirkcudbright, who founded the American Navy.

Edict of Rome

Back in England, the Grand Master Augustus, Duke of Sussex, died in 1843. During the 1750s, the Welsh Grand Master frequented a London lodge at the Turk’s Head in Greek Street, Soho (see page 82). This was a lodge of The Most Antient and Honourable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons (the Antients), who had formed their Grand Lodge in 1751. Their original Grand Secretary was the Irish artist and wine merchant Laurence Dermott, who had been initiated into a Dublin lodge 10 years earlier. When publishing the Constitutions of the Antients in 1756, Dermott stated that the premier Grand Lodge (the Moderns) had perverted masonic traditions, and he moulded the Antients into a far more democratic organization.⁷

Unlike the Moderns, the Grand Master of the Antients had no independent or final authority in respect of existing or newly appointed lodges. Everything had to be ratified by mutual consent of the officers. Travelling warrants were issued into the military regiments so that lodges could be established and convened wherever the troops were stationed at home or abroad. This enabled the Antients to grow at a much faster pace than the Moderns, and there was a good deal of friction between the two.

In line with the York-based Grand Lodge of All England, the Antients differed considerably from the Moderns because they did not limit their function to the three degrees of English Craft Freemasonry. They and York (whose foundation lodge dated back to 1705) had an additional Chapter for the working of Royal Arch ritual, along with a different structure for their Knight Templar units (see page 163). In the event, the York Grand Lodge wound up in 1792, while the Antients and Moderns subsequently amalgamated on 27 December 1813. Prior to that, Augustus of Sussex was Grand Master of the Moderns, and his brother Edward, Duke of Kent, was Grand Master of the Antients. At the time of amalgamation, Edward stepped down to leave Augustus as the overall Grand Master of the new United Grand Lodge of England.⁸ Lodges from each branch were then renumbered, with the Grand Master’s Lodge of the Ancients becoming No 1, and the Moderns’ Lodge of Antiquity becoming No 2. The rest were numbered alternately. Provincial Grand Lodges were formalized to run the regions, and the Constitutions were restructured into a new format in 1819.

When Augustus died, Thomas Dundas, Earl of Zetland (Shetland), took the reins for 27 years, during which period Freemasons’ Hall in Great Queen Street, London, was substantially rebuilt and extended. He was followed by George Robinson, Lord Ripon—son of Frederick, Earl Grey (Whig prime minister 1830-34). However, George resigned the Grand Mastership in 1874 in order to join the Catholic Church, subsequent to which he became Viceroy of India.⁹

The Catholic Church had formally opposed and denounced Freemasonry from the time that Anderson’s revised Constitutions were published. There have been numerous significant Vatican pro nouncements in this respect,¹⁰ with over a dozen in the 19th century alone. The first, known as In Eminenti, was a Bull of Pope Clement XII in 1738. He classified Freemasons as ‘depraved and perverted’, and decreed that they ‘are to be condemned and prohibited, and by our present constitution, valid for ever, we do hereby condemn and prohibit them’. He added that Freemasonry has contempt for ecclesiastical authority, and that its members plot ‘the overthrow of the whole of religious, political, and social order based on Christian institutions’. Clement concluded:

We desire and command that both bishops and prelates and other local ordinaries, as well as inquisitors for heresy, shall investigate and proceed against transgressors of whatever state, grade, condition, order dignity or pre-eminence they may be; and they are to pursue and punish them with condign penalties as being most suspect of heresy.

As a result of this edict, Catholics were placed under penalty of excommunication, incurred ipso facto, and were strictly forbidden to enter or promote masonic societies in any way.¹¹

In 1864, after numerous other denouncements, it was the turn of Pope Pius IX to condemn Freemasonry with his encyclical letter, Quanta Cura. This censured societies which draw no distinction between ‘the true religion and false ones’. Coming from the Catholic hierarchy, this was very much a repeat of the way in which the Anglican Church had admonished King James II (VII) for tolerating different religions whilst granting people the liberty of their conscience. In this context, Pope Pius wrote that such organizations dare to assert that ‘liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right…They do not think and consider that they are teaching the liberty of sedition’.

The strange thing about all this is that Freemasonry, just like all manner of other clubs and societies, was not (and is not) a religion, nor in any way a religious institution. Hence, it is open to all. The problematical difference between Freemasonry and other private associations, as far as the Catholic Church was concerned, was that Freemasonry embodied a vow of secrecy. This was contrary to the ‘confessional’ tradition of the doctrine, and was solemn enough to override the Church obligation to confide secrets to one’s priest. In short, Freemasonry was an environment within which the Church lacked the power of authority that it had in other walks of life.

A later encyclical from Pope Leo XIII in 1884 pursued this viewpoint even further. Whereas the previous decrees had suggested that Freemasonry was irreligious, Leo’s Humanum Genus went further in claiming that it was anti-religious. When discussing ‘that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons’, he stated:

No longer making any secret of their purposes, they are now boldly rising up against God himself. They are planning the destruction of the Holy Church publicly and openly, and with this the set purpose of utterly despoiling the nations of Christendom…We pray and beseech you, venerable brethren, to join your efforts with Ours, and earnestly to strive for the extirpation of this foul plague.

In order to put the masonic view of religious tolerance into perspective, we can see that, from the very outset of the 1723 Constitutions, this item of concern was addressed in a manner which made the position very clear:

Concerning God and religion: A mason is obliged by his tenure to obey the moral law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid atheist nor an irreligious libertine. But though in ancient times masons were charged in every country to be of the religion of that country or nation, whatever it was, yet ‘tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves: that is to be good men and true, or men of honour and honesty, by whatever denominations or persuasions they may be distinguished.

Although the definitions, ‘stupid atheist’ and ‘irreligious libertine’ have been superseded, along with a generally better wording since that time, the basic premise still prevails in that Freemasonry is religiously tolerant even though not religiously based.

Missing Documents

At the departure of George, Lord Ripon, United Grand Lodge realized another splendid coup in December 1874 when, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), accepted the nomination as Grand Master. This added particular weight to the Masonic Charge after initiation:

Ancient no doubt it is, having subsisted from time immemorial. In every age, monarchs have been promoters of the Art,¹² have not thought it derogatory to their dignity to exchange the sceptre for the trowel, have participated in our mysteries and joined in our assemblies.

Electing to resign his office on his accession to the throne in 1901, Edward remained Protector of the Order,¹³ but during his 26-year term he took Freemasonry to a new level of international prominence. This was particularly the case on the occasion of his mother Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. To celebrate this event, and also to make the point to Grand Lodges abroad that Imperial Britain still held a form of masonic sovereignty, Edward convened a special Jubilee Grand Lodge in 1897, with his brother Arthur (Duke of Connaught) and his son Albert (Duke of Clarence) in attendance (see plate 14).

A few years earlier, steps had been taken to clear the field of any potential opposition from supporters of the Royal House of Stuart, which had been responsible for the dissemination of traditional Scots (Ecossais) Freemasonry in France and other parts of Europe from 1688. Even from as late as 1733, some while after the foundation of premier Grand Lodge, there are records of Ecossais high degrees and Scots Masters at the Devil’s Tavern lodge, Temple Bar, in London.¹⁴ And, perhaps surprisingly for the Victorian era, the Jacobite Cycle of the White Rose (see page 81) had been revived in 1886 by Bertram, 5th Earl of Ashburnham. His colleagues in this were Melville Henri Massue, 9th Marquis de Ruvigny, along with the Celtic language authority Henry Jenner FSA, the writer and press correspondent Herbert Vivian, and the Hon Stuart Erskine.

The Jacobite Peerage, compiled by Melville de Ruvigny, relates that in the autumn of 1886, a select number of prominent people were sent elaborately sealed pamphlets from the White Rose (a traditional emblem of James II, Duke of York) marked ‘Private and Confidential’.¹⁵ The communication reads as follows:

For a long time past, it has seemed desirable that some efforts should be made to bring together those who, by hereditary descent or community of sentiment, are in sympathetic accord on the subject of history and the misfortunes of the Royal House of Stuart. It is now close to two-hundred years since the Revolution of 1688 dispossessed that House from the Throne of Great Britain. The chivalrous devotion of so many Englishmen and Scotsmen to that House, which they regarded as their lawful Sovereign, has never received a fitting tribute of respect and honour from those who, with an affectionate intensity, admire and reverence the disinterested loyalty of the noble men and women who freely gave up life and fortune for a Sacred Cause.

This approach by mail gave rise to a number of supportive replies, and plans were made for a grand Stuart Exhibition in London. Relics and relevant documents arrived from all over Britain, and arrangements were made to hold the display at the New Gallery in 1889 to mark the bicentenary of Stuart exile. By 1887, plans were under way, and two years later the Exhibition took place—but it was not sponsored by the White Rose as originally planned. Instead, by way of a strategic manoeuvre of the Imperial court, the patronage was taken over by Queen Victoria herself. Notwithstanding Lord Ashburnham’s leadership of the White Rose, the Queen appointed him president of the display, but retained her own control by excluding Ruvigny, Erskine, Vivian and Jenner. This was particularly hard on Henry Jenner who, as Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, had been responsible for the Exhibition’s manuscript collection, much of which was never seen again by the respective owners.

Aided in France by Marie, dowager Countess of Caithness, plans had been made by Anne, Duchess of Roxburghe (Mistress of Robes for the Queen), and others to organize a coinciding event in Scotland. Charles Benedict Stuart, 4th Count of Albany in descent from Prince Charles Edward, was invited to attend from Italy, but was found dead soon afterwards. The circumstances were suspicious, and there was a common belief that he had been murdered.¹⁶ Charles had supposedly fallen from his horse, but Father Torquato Armellini (Postulator of the Jesuits in Rome) maintained that his demise was in no way consistent with the presumed fall. In fact, the post-mortem examination revealed that Charles had died from suffocation.¹⁷

The 1904-21 Jacobite Peerage relates that the Stuart documents which disappeared after the Exhibition were not the only such papers to go missing in the Hanoverian era. In 1817 (during the reign of King George III), a Dr Robert Watson purchased a collection of manuscripts concerning the Stuart dynasty. He bought them in Rome, where they had been the property of Cardinal Henry Stuart, the younger brother of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Watson paid £23.00 sterling (equivalent to about £1,000 today), and prepared to publish the contents, but the files were seized and taken to London. Some time later, he received an ex gratia payment from Westminster for having been deprived of his property. Not content with this, he pursued his right to the collection—but he too was found mysteriously dead (supposedly having committed suicide) in 1838. The papers have never since appeared in the public domain, and their whereabouts remain a matter of conjecture.

Subsequent to the Exhibition fiasco, Ruvigny, Vivian and Erskine founded the Legitimist Jacobite League of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1892, they attempted to lay a wreath at the Charing Cross statue of King Charles I in London, but were again blocked by Queen Victoria, who sent ‘a considerable detachment of police’ to obstruct the ceremony. In the wake of this, Herbert Vivian spent much of his time abroad as foreign news correspondent for the Morning Post, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express. Henry Jenner, a constant protagonist of the Celtic realms, wrote his noted Handbook of the Cornish Language, and became a Bard of the Breton Gorsedd, promoting the culture and arts of Brittany. Lord Ashburnham and the Marquis de Ruvigny also departed from the political stage to direct their future interests towards chivalric endeavours. In 1908, Ruvigny became Grand Master of the Stuart Order of the Realm of Sion—a continuation of Scotland’s Order of the Thistle (equivalent to England’s Order of the Garter) whose title had been usurped by the English Crown. This international organization later merged with its allies, the Knights Protectors of the Sacred Sepulchre, and the Order of the Sangréal (Holy Grail)—a long-standing dynastic Order of the Royal House of Stuart, founded in 1689.¹⁸

The Great Divide

The reign of Queen Victoria, Regina et Imperatrix, saw an amazing boom in masonic interest. In London, the number of lodges increased from 100 to 382, and the provinces showed a commensurate increase. On a global scale, English lodges numbered 2,543 throughout the British Empire by the end of the 19th century.¹⁹ Clubs and Societies multiplied considerably within Victorian middle-class society, and Freemasonry was by far the largest and most influential of these in a period when imposing masonic halls and opulent lodges were built in a number of major centres. Although not at the Jubilee Grand Lodge with Edward, Arthur and Albert in 1897, Prince Edward’s younger brother Leopold (who had died shortly before) was also a Freemason, and the Craft had become a truly royal institution. Throughout the land, masons, by definition, achieved a celebrity status, opening churches, theatres and pavilions, and Freemasonry, with openly paraded regalia, became a focus of public ceremony. The foundation stone for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon was laid with full masonic honours by William, Lord Leigh, Provincial Grand Master of Warwickshire, in 1877.²⁰ Similar events were held to establish Truro Cathedral in 1880, and the York Institute in 1883.²¹ Truro was the first cathedral to be consecrated in England since the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, and Prince Edward’s laying of the foundation stone led to other masonic cathedral foundations at Rochester, Peterborough and Liverpool.

Regular masonic newspapers also emerged in this era: The Freemason in 1869 and The Freemason’s Chronicle in 1875. There was nothing discreet about being a Freemason in those times—in fact, quite the opposite; it was truly a mark of social prestige. Even private groups that were in no way masonic made applications for warrants to become lodges. The Savage Club, for example—a fraternity of writers, artists and thespians of London’s bohemian sect—was consecrated at Freemasons’ Hall on 18 January 1887, with the actor Sir Henry Irving as its Treasurer.²² When French masons came to Britain, they could hardly believe the pomp and pageantry of the English institution, nor indeed the personal cost of it to members. Since the French Revolution (1789-99), such displays of class and financial status had become unfamiliar to them, while as republicans they were baffled by the apparent preoccupation with monarchy.

The French masonic journal Le Monde Maçonnique went so far as to criticize English Freemasonry for its cathedral bequests, claiming that it should concentrate rather more on moral architecture. In line with this, the Grand Orient of France asserted that the United Grand Lodge of England was like ‘a body without a soul’. In retaliation, The Freemason expressed the view that the English system was more solid and grounded than that of the French, which it described as too mystical and esoteric. There had always been differences because the Franco-Scottish system was founded on far more ancient traditions, whereas the more lately contrived English system had spent nearly two centuries endeavouring to find its feet. And it found them in what was a regeneration of medieval feudal benevolence—a realm of aristocratic and wealthy benefactors, adherents of the Empire who aspired to a popular Robin Hood image without having to steal from the rich. They were the rich.

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