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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.
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.
With the support of the Anglican Whig aristocracy,
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’.
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.
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.
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).
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’.
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,
and he used these mathematics in his calculations when developing his theory of gravitation.
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 (#ulink_db9a5cf1-8d92-5d04-a610-bb19ead09fc3)
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.
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’.
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-operatives
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
(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.
Among the most renowned works of Rabanus was his richly illuminated Life of Mary Magdalene.
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’.
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.
(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 Act
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.
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.
(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).
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.
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.
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.’
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 (#ulink_868cc9cb-46ea-57d5-84db-50c384242a9f)
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.
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.
