by Alexander Piatigorsky
Our experience of Freemasonry is one of the minor peculiarities of the British. From The Grand Mystery of Freemasonry Discover’d (1724) and Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected (1730) to Martin Short’s Inside the Brotherhood: Further Secrets of the Freemasons
(1989), the dominant genre in Masonic literature has been the
‘exposure’. Rituals, passwords, oaths, handshakes and symbolic imagery
pique the curiosity of the uninitiated, or ‘cowans’ in Mason-speak. Yet,
despite its exotic paraphernalia, the Craft’s wider influence on
British society is perceived to be mundane and narrow in compass. The
list of allegations on the dust-jacket of Short’s book runs to
corruption in local government, perversions of justice, ‘the promotion
of mediocrity’ and ‘marital break-ups’: why, the cover asks, ‘do so many
husbands don an apron at the lodge when they wouldn’t be seen dead in
one at home?’
British fears of Masonic conspiracy have never risen
to the same pitch as on the Continent or in the United States, not
least because our history lacks an adversarial Enlightenment and its
culmination in a violent democratic revolution. The French Revolution
unleashed a reactionary critique of secret societies. Augustin de
Barruel’s widely translated Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (1797) traced a triad of conspiracies – of philosophes,
Freemasons and Illuminati – which lay behind the assault on the Ancien
Régime. English Masonry, however, unlike the noxious, anticlerical
French model, was misguided rather than vicious. This distinction was
confirmed by John Robison, professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh,
in Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe
(1797). British Masonry stood in a different relationship to the
visible Establishment. Whereas in 1738 Pope Clement XII’s bull, In eminenti,
had excommunicated all Freemasons, British Masonry continued throughout
the turmoil and accusations of the Revolutionary era to enjoy direct
Hanoverian patronage from its Grand Masters, the Duke of Cumberland, the
Prince of Wales and the Duke of Sussex.
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