Secret societies and subversive movementsWebster, Nesta Helen
History
Secret societies and subversive movements
Webster, Nesta Helen
Secret societies
The men who founded this lodge, far from being non-political, were
Jacobite leaders engaged in active schemes for the restoration of the
Stuart dynasty. The leader of the group, Charles Radcliffe, had been
imprisoned with his brother, the ill-fated Lord Derwentwater who was
executed on Tower Hill in 1716. Charles had succeeded in escaping from
Newgate and made his way to France, where he assumed the title of Lord
Derwentwater, although the Earldom had ceased to exist under the
bill of attainder against his brother.[361] It was this Lord
Derwentwater--afterwards executed for taking part in the 1745
rebellion--who with several other Jacobites is said to have founded the
Grand Lodge of Paris in 1725, and himself to have become Grand Master.
The Jacobite character of the Paris lodge is not a matter of dispute.
Mr. Gould relates that "the colleagues of Lord Derwentwater are stated
to have been a Chevalier Maskeline, a Squire Heguerty, and others, all
partisans of the Stuarts."[362] But he goes on to contest the theory
that they used Freemasonry in the Stuart cause, which he regards as
amounting to a charge of bad faith. This is surely unreasonable. The
founders of Grand Lodge in Paris did not derive from Grand Lodge in
London, from which they held no warrant,[363] but, as we have seen, took
their Freemasonry with them to France before Grand Lodge of London was
instituted; they were therefore in no way bound by its regulations. And
until the Constitutions of Anderson were published in 1723 no rule had
been laid down that the Lodges should be non-political. In the old days
Freemasonry had always been Royalist, as we see from the ancient charges
that members should be "true liegemen of the King"; and if the adherents
of James Edward saw in him their rightful sovereign, they may have
conceived that they were using Freemasonry for a lawful purpose in
adapting it to his cause. So although we may applaud the decision of the
London Freemasons to purge Freemasonry of political tendencies and
transform it into a harmonious system of brotherhood, we cannot accuse
the Jacobites in France of bad faith in not conforming to a decision in
which they had taken no part and in establishing lodges on their own
lines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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