booknetsaWebster-secretSocietiesAndSubversiveMovements

middle of the eighteenth century split Masonry into opposing camps of Ancients and Moderns, the Ancients
declaring that the R.A. was " the Root, Heart, and Marrow of Freemasonry,"(16) the Moderns rejecting it.
Although worked by the Ancients from 1756 onwards, this degree was definitely repudiated by Grand
Lodge in 1792,(17) and only in 1813 was officially received into English Freemasonry.
The R.A. degree, which is said nevertheless to be contained in embryo in the 1723 Book of Constitutions,(18)
is purely Judaic-a glorification of Israel and commemorating the building of the second Temple.
That it was derived from the Jewish Cabala seems probable, and Yarker, commenting on the phrase in the
Gentleman's Magazine quoted above-" Who knows whether they (the Freemasons) have not a higher order
of Cabalists, who keep the Grand Secret of all entirely to themselves " observes: " It looks very like an intimation
of the Royal Arch degree,"(19) and elsewhere he states that " the Royal Arch degree, when it had
the Three Veils, must have been the work, even if by instruction, of a Cabalistic Jew about 1740, and from
this time we may expect to find a secret tradition grafted upon Anderson's system."(20)
Precisely in this same year of 1740 Mr. Waite says that " an itinerant pedlar of the Royal Arch degree is
said to have propagated it in Ireland, claiming that it was practised at York and London,"(21) and in 1744 a
certain Dr. Dassigny wrote that the minds of the Dublin brethren had been lately disturbed about Royal Arch
Masonry owing to the activities in Dublin of " a number of traders or hucksters in pretended Masonry,"
whom the writer connects with " Italians " or the " Italic Order."
A Freemason quoting this passage in a recent discussion on the upper degrees expresses the opinion that
these hucksters were " Jacobite emissaries disguised under the form of a pretended Masonry," and that " by
Italians and Italian Order he intends a reference to the Court of King James III, i.e. the Old Pretender at
Rome, and to the Ecossais (Italic) Order of Masonry."(22) It is much more likely that he had referred to another
source of masonic instruction in Italy which I shall indicate in a later chapter.
But precisely at the moment when it is suggested that the Jacobites were intriguing to introduce the Royal
Arch degree into Masonry they are also said to have been engaged in elaborating the " Scottish Rite." Let
us examine this contention.
Freemasonry in France
The foundation of Grand Lodge in London had been followed by the inauguration of Masonic Lodges on
the Continent-in 1721 at Mons, in 1725 in Paris, in 1728 at Madrid, in 1731 at The Hague, in 1733 at Hamburg,
etc. Several of these received their warrant from the Grand Lodge of England. But this was not the
case with the Grand Lodge of Paris, which did not receive a warrant till 1743.
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.
(23) 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."(24) 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,(25) 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.
Unfortunately, however, as too frequently happens when men form secret confederacies for a wholly
Nesta H. Webster — Secret Societies and Subversive Movements — Part I
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