France -- History; France -- Politics and government; France -- Social conditions
Its spread through England and Scotland, and the seceding bodies which
arose from it, as well as the supposed Jacobite tendency of certain
Scotch lodges, do not concern us here. The point interesting to us just
now is, that Freemasonry was imported to the Continent exclusively by
English and Scotch gentlemen and noblemen. Lord Derwentwater is said by
some to have founded the "Loge Anglaise" in Paris in 1725; the Duke of
Richmond one in his own castle of Aubigny shortly after. It was through
Hanoverian influence that the movement seems to have spread into Germany.
In 1733, for instance, the English Grand Master, Lord Strathmore,
permitted eleven German gentlemen and good brethren to form a lodge in
Hamburg. Into this English Society was Frederick the Great, when Crown
Prince, initiated, in spite of strict old Frederick William's objections,
who had heard of it as an English invention of irreligious tendency.
Francis I. of Austria was made a Freemason at the Hague, Lord
Chesterfield being in the chair, and then became a Master in London under
the name of "Brother Lothringen," to the discontent of Maria Theresa,
whose woman's wit saw farther than her husband. Englishmen and Scotchmen
introduced the new society into Russia and into Geneva. Sweden and
Poland seem to have received it from France; while, in the South, it
seems to have been exclusively an English plant. Sackville, Duke of
Middlesex, is said to have founded the first lodge at Florence in 1733,
Lord Coleraine at Gibraltar and Madrid, one Gordon in Portugal; and
everywhere, at the commencement of the movement, we find either London or
Scotland the mother-lodges, introducing on the Continent those liberal
and humane ideas of which England was then considered, to her glory, as
the only home left on earth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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