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CHAPTER 1

Origins

In 1717, four old London lodges consolidated and a remarkable social organization emerged. They formed the Grand Lodge of London, an umbrella organization to which other British, and eventually even foreign lodges would give their affiliation, and then as their numbers grew, seek to imitate. Within decades Benjamin Franklin brought the freemasonry he had learned in London to Philadelphia. From this rather simple beginning grew an organization that by 1750 was steeped in controversy yet growing in popularity in both Europe and America.¹

Who were these masons, why did they form a “Grand Lodge”? Were there no masons before 1717? Masons, carpenters, bakers, bell makers, barber-surgeons had all been protected and supervised by guilds for centuries in many European countries. Medieval and early modern guilds provided social life, benefits, wage protection, and quality control over skills and finished goods.² The identity of members and hence their right to work in places far from home was protected by secret words and handshakes. A worker who knew them was truly a member of the guide. Frequently, the guild masters acted in concert with town officials to maintain order and to ensure the stability of prices and wages as well as the quality of work.³ But of the many medieval artisan crafts, only the masons’ guilds survived the transition into modern market conditions by becoming something other than a protective and disciplining club for workers, by becoming freemasonry. ⁴

In seventeenth-century urban Scotland and England, where the open, unprotected wage economy had become far advanced relative to the rest of Europe, lodges saw their numbers dwindle. They began to admit nonmasons largely because their dues were needed. The guild system had essentially broken down, and if buildings were to be built, capital was needed. What began out of necessity transformed this one guild into a voluntary society; in the process few of the original stonemasons found a place. Thus began a transformation that is sometimes called the transition from operative to speculative masonry; let us just call it the transition from masonic guild to freemasonry. The four London lodges must have gone through such a process. We meet them only in 1717 when the existence of the Grand Lodge became known. But the great English architect, Sir Christopher Wren, had been asked to head the London lodges as early as 1710—one of the few pieces of information we have about them before 1717.⁵

Besides conviviality and fellowship, the masonic lodges held other cultural attractions for merchants and gentlemen. Master masons were literate and known for their mathematical and architectural skills, particularly with fortifications, military and urban. The myth and lore associated with the lodges tied the geometrical skills of the masters with ancient learning supposedly inherited from the legendary Egyptian priest, Hermes Trismegistes.⁶ He was thought to have taught Moses and to have transmitted a mystical understanding of the heavens that included a dedication to mathematics. Educated nonmasons may have been attracted to the lodges because of orally transmitted legends about their antiquity, and because in them the prosperous found useful men skilled in architecture and engineering. The mystical, in the form of the Hermetic tradition, combined with the utilitarian to bond brothers who became increasingly interested in the first, while shedding the second.⁷

Two individuals stand out from the transitional period of masonry as practiced by simple stone workers, to masonry as a new form of social fraternizing. One of the earliest nonmasons to be admitted into a lodge in the 1650s was Sir Robert Moray, a Scot, a man of the new science associated with Bacon and Descartes, and a military engineer. He was also one of the founders of the Royal Society of London and a key player in the English civil wars. Moray, like the Oxford antiquarian, Elias Ashmole, who also accepted membership in a lodge in that decade, may have believed that masonry put him closer to the oldest tradition of ancient wisdom, associated with Hermes, out of which mathematics and the mechanical arts were said to have been nourished. Moray always signed his letters with his masonic emblem—a mark of his dedication to the ancient craft. For his part, Ashmole dabbled in alchemy (as did his contemporary Sir Isaac Newton) and may be described as a seeker after ancient lore and wisdom.⁸ By the 1690s more and more gentlemen like Moray and Ashmole, some merchants, and others who were denizens of London political life had been brought into the lodges.

The details of the historical process by which, after 1650, a guild of workers evolved into a voluntary society of gentlemen are probably forever lost. While there are Scottish records, the English ones have mostly disappeared. As we will see with greater detail in Chapter 4, one lodge in Dundee, Scotland, shows nonmasons being admitted throughout the seventeenth century, but by 1700 the gentlemen have taken charge of the lodge.⁹ The Scottish historian, David Stevenson, sees Scotland as the home of modern freemasonry.¹⁰ It was—since lodges there were the first to become social clubs for the genteel. But the freemasonry of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment—the fraternity, ideals and constitution exported to continental Europe—encoded not the local Scottish customs and clan governance, but the institutions and constitutional ideals originating in the English Revolution against royal absolutism.

A manuscript from 1659, now housed in the Royal Society of London, makes the link between ancient wisdom and national governance. “This Craft … founded by worthy Kings and Princes and many other worshipful men” prescribes dedication to the seven liberal arts, particularly geometry. Hermes taught it and he was “the father of Wisemen [who] found out the two pillars of Stone whereon the Sciences were written and taught them forth, and at the making of the Tower of Babylon there was the craft of masonry found….”¹¹ The manuscript narration about “Free Masons’ Word and Signs,” gives away its contemporary milieu, the revolution of the 1640s, the birth of constitutional government bound by laws or rules. It speaks in passing about “parliament” and further admonishes its members: “You shall … truly observe the Charges in the Constitution.” It also invokes the ancient teacher and philosopher Hermes and the sciences that he taught. As we shall see in chapter 3, the document had been collected by the new Royal Society because it was attempting to write a history of all the trades and crafts—a project it never completed.

As the Oxford English Dictionary shows, the use of the term “constitution” to mean “rules, statutes, or charges” adopted by a body has few if any precedents prior to the 1650s. In that revolutionary decade, after the execution of Charles I in 1649, parliament enacted laws for the new republic. Simultaneously, voluntary societies with constitutions, however loosely structured, came into existence. At one point the 1659 document speaks quaintly of a French king as having been “elected,” at another it speaks of a biblical time when “the King … made a great Councell and parliament was called to know how they might find meanes” to provide for the unemployed.¹² The English masons saw their history as inextricably bound up, not always happily, with the fate of kings and states. After 1700 they also came increasingly to be associated with a new cultural movement in favor of religious toleration and the end of censorship, the Enlightenment. Where we find the word “constitutions” being used in French for the first time to denote the rules or statutes of an organization (in 1710) the context is masonic and employs terms like “brothers” and “Grand Master.”¹³

Of the many forms of new social behavior to become an integral part of enlightened culture during the eighteenth century, freemasonry has been the most difficult to understand. Secretive, ritualistic, devoted in many Grand Lodges to hierarchy—that would be one set of characteristics! But the eighteenth-century lodges also consistently spoke about civic virtue and merit, about men meeting as equals, about the need for brothers to become philosophers, about their being “enlightened.” They said it in every European language: brothers must become in French éclairé, in Dutch verlichte, in German aufgeklärt.¹⁴ Such lofty ideals surfaced early in the transition from masonic guild to the society of freemasons. With ideals and myths went a set of ancient practices and beliefs born in the guilds, but capable of being given modern meaning. By late in the century the egalitarian logic had spread—particularly in France—where, as shall see in the last chapter, women flocked to the new “lodges of adoption.”

Now seen to be enlightened, masonic practices such as elections, majority rule, orations by elected officials, national governance under a Grand Lodge, and constitutions—all predicated on an ideology of equality and merit—owed their origin to the growth of parliamentary power, to the self-confidence of British urban merchants and landed gentry, and not least, to a literature of republican idealism. John To-land, a major republican Whig activist of the early eighteenth century, and his patron the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Robert Clayton, can be linked directly to London lodges that may have formed the nucleus of the Grand Lodge.¹⁵ The masonic ideology of rising by merit, which justified egalitarian fraternizing among men of property free to chose their governors, belonged first and foremost to the English republican tradition. This identity did not prevent the lodges from being hierarchical and everywhere eager for aristocratic patronage, but it did ultimately tilt the lodges in the direction of being schools for government—more, rather than less, democratic government.

Such practices when taken onto the European Continent played into the love of secrecy found in court culture and imitated by elites, but in the new lodges secrecy and clubbing also inspired new degrees and ceremonies, and new political aspirations. By the later part of the century imitations of freemasonry appeared: such were the radical Illuminati founded in Bavaria in 1776.¹⁶ They were an overtly political group, eager to reform German society. In general, whether in Europe or America, masonic lodges sought never to be overtly political, never to take sides publicly. But the format of the lodge offered a template that other groups could imitate or embrace; it also offered men and some women the chance to imagine that they governed themselves competently.

The 1720s in London were critically important. The decade spawned the earliest lodges of literate gentlemen where few, if any, working stonemasons can be found. The evidence before 1717 shows lodges of gentlemen in London by the 1690s. Somewhere before 1717 the great architect, Sir Christopher Wren, presided as Grand Master, and the Grand Lodge took shape. By the 1730s the engraved picture that celebrated the lodges, and came from a Dutch source, had over one hundred meeting in pubs and claimed Sir Richard Steele, the great journalist of the period, as their guiding spirit.¹⁷

Sometime between the 1690s and 1723, when the Grand Lodge of London published its soon to be famous and often translated, Constitutions, the lodges became ever more fashionable.¹⁸ The use of the plural, rather than the singular “constitution” in the 1723 document revealed it as an amalgam of various constitutions used by individual lodges. The term was unmistakably English. At this time in French, une constitution denoted the fact that a thing, like the human body, or eventually the government of a country, is composed of its constituent parts. The body’s constitution is merely the sum of its organs and limbs, healthy or diseased. Only gradually in eighteenth-century French did the term come to denote rules and statutes, or an activity, as in a law not being constitutional and hence useless, or as in government by contract made by men who give it a constitution. That usage appears in a French book about the English “revolution” published in 1719.¹⁹ As early as the first decade of the century, by contrast, the Grand Lodge of London was being constituted and governed by its brothers who have become very secular indeed.

The secular, even outrageously nonreligious side of freemasonry appeared very early in its history. The papers of John Toland now preserved in the British Library tell the story. He kept one meeting record of a group living in The Hague (where he was at the time), and, although written in French by men who had never been to England, the meeting used masonic words and phrases. They called one another “brother,” they had a Grand Master, and constitutions, and they practiced secrecy.²⁰

Thus in one of the early French documents from the new century that describes a voluntary society, we find a libertine and masonic group that met under their statutes or constitutions. The libertinism appears in the list of food and drink, and in the noticeable deterioration of the handwriting as the meeting proceeds. Associates of this group, among them a man who would become the leader of Amsterdam freemasonry, Jean Rousset de Missy, put into circulation the most outrageous document of a century filled with heresy. It argued that Jesus, Moses and Mohammed had been the three great imposters.²¹ Even Voltaire was horrified by it when he read it.

Not surprisingly, the club, or society in The Hague, or as they called themselves, the order was composed not of English visitors, but of French Huguenot booksellers, journalists, publishers and probably one or two local men of science.²² Many of its signatories were associates of the secretary of the group, the French refugee, Prosper Marchand. This French Protestant journalist, whose manuscripts are now housed at the University Library in Leiden, left behind one of the most important sources of information about early Continental freemasonry. He, or his friends, knew Toland who had traveled extensively on the Continent. Marchand and Rousset de Missy corresponded as close personal friends right up to Marchand’s death in 1756. His last will and testament shows a palsied hand that wrote about religious ceremonies as “vain and contemptible.”²³ A lodge could appeal to the uprooted, the mercantile, and the cosmopolitan, or the heretical: it was of ancient origin, democratic in its ethos, associated with the most advanced form of government to be found in Europe, and capable of being molded to one’s tastes while offering charity and assistance to all brothers.

The group in The Hague used masonic terms like “Grand Master” while basically devoting themselves to eating and drinking. Yet among Marchand’s closest friends, Rousset de Missy, another refugee, led Amsterdam freemasonry and became a political agent first for the House of Orange and then for the Austrians. His lifelong passion included a hatred of French absolutism, while in religion he privately described himself as a “pantheist.”²⁴ The word had been invented by Toland to describe his personal creed.²⁵ Rousset passionately loved his lodge in Amsterdam and wanted it to be a place where virtue and probity, tied to no religion, could be cultivated.

A mason of any lodge had to be “of the religion of that country or nation whatever it was,” but the 1723 Constitutions said that “tis now thought more expedient only to oblige [the freemason] to that religion in which all men agree.”²⁶ In deference to the deep religious divisions in Britain, freemasonry endorsed a minimalist creed which could be anything from theism to pantheism and atheism. Not surprisingly, the lodges in England had a high representation of Whigs and scientists, while in Paris at mid-century the freemason Helvétius was a materialist and in Amsterdam, Rousset de Missy was a pantheist. The great political theorist, Montesquieu, also a freemason, was probably some kind of deist. In both London and Amsterdam Jewish names can be found in the lodge records. In France there were lodges for both Protestants and Catholics, indeed even actors, often scorned in polite society, were admitted. In one Paris lodge letters between brothers mention a “Negro trumpeter” in the King’s regimen.²⁷ Rarely do lodge ceremonies, even in Catholic countries, contain overtly Christian language.

When the Catholic Church condemned lodge membership in 1738 it objected that freemasonry constituted a new form of religion. It also condemned frequent elections as being republican.²⁸ For some men freemasonry expressed new beliefs that were tolerant and endorsed practices ultimately at odds with traditional religiosity and monarchical absolutism. The Church’s condemnation only made the lodges more attractive to the secular-minded and the progressive. It is hardly surprising that by 1750 membership in a masonic lodge had come to denote enthusiasm for the new, enlightened ideas, although not necessarily for the materialism and atheism associated with some of the philosophes.

Thanks to the records that came back from Moscow only in 2000, the evidence is now clear that in the 1740s in France women also belonged to lodges. A note on the bottom of one record mentions the local women’s lodge in Bordeaux. In The Hague in 1751 a lodge of men and women used French as its first language and left a list of its officers in both the masculine and the feminine, Le Maitre, La Maitresse, and so on. Local actors and actresses in the Comédie française housed in the town fraternized with nobleman and wealthy merchants.²⁹ They were even attacked for doing so by a local abbé. Traditionally we see eighteenth-century women as less attracted to the heresies associated with the Enlightenment than men. But the masonic ceremonies we can trace to them suggest an ability to be just as secular as their brothers. We will learn more about these women in Chapter five.

But the lodges were about more than social and intellectual life. The self-governance of lay elites outside of confraternities or town councils, and operating in local groups joined on a national scale, was rare in continental Europe during the eighteenth century. Within the masonic lodges as they spread first to the Dutch Republic and France, then as far east as Prague and Moscow, and as far west as Philadelphia and Cap Français (Haiti), secular-minded, affluent men, and some women, began governing themselves: in colonial settings as part of their empires, at home as part of their localities and through the Grand Lodges, their nations. Lodge membership became a symbol of independence from clerical authority and a sign of political maturity. It also became one means of insuring cultural cohesion among Europeans in their colonies, an expression of imperial status just like that offered by the churches and scientific societies.

Government ministers, state employees, liberal professionals like lawyers, doctors and teachers, as well as merchants, flocked to join the lodges. In Sweden the entire court from the king and his ministers on down joined lodges that were feted at the royal palace.³⁰ There, as in Britain and the American colonies, the lodges paraded in public, a sign of their acceptance. In Paris and The Hague British ambassadors played a role in spreading the fraternity. We know about the French connection because in the 1730s the police raided the Paris home of the British ambassador, Lord Waldegrave, in part because a lodge was meeting there.³¹ In Berlin by 1750 Frederick the Great used the lodges to enhance his own cultlike following. In Vienna in the 1780s Joseph II’s influence permeated the lodges where Mozart sought out his musical commissions.

Everywhere they spread, the lodges also denoted relative affluence, drinking, and merrymaking. Despite their conspicuous consumption, the lodges were also places that sought to instill decorum, at least before dinner. Modifying the behavior of men helped to internalize discipline and manners. In London lodges would sometimes take over the theater for a performance, and there is evidence that brothers behaved better than audiences did typically. The habits of listening and silence in theaters and concerts developed only slowly, largely by the second half of the eighteenth century and as part of a general growth of decorum, politeness, and interiority. The masonic lodges played a role in that self-disciplining process. The Enlightenment needs to be seen as a complex mix of new ideas as well as habits: public discussion, sociability, private, uncensored reading. All required a new, more commonplace sense of an inner self that took pride in discipline and decorum. Lodges, like other forms of sociability, helped to instill it.

In every European country masonic dues were substantial (although graded by ability to pay), and each lodge came to possess a social persona and to give loyalty to a national Grand Lodge. Some lodges spurned anyone but the noble-born; others were entirely for students or doctors. Some lodges admitted lowly merchants, even actors; others banned them. Dues varied according to the means of the brothers and the relationship between the lodge and a brother was partly contractual, based upon dues paid, and partly filial.

In the 1780s, when the French Grand Lodge was dispensing charity to brothers, widows, and aged women freemasons, their letters tell much about being caught between two worlds: one modern and based upon contract, the other essentially feudal and based upon birth and deference. As we will see in greater detail in chapter 4, in the same letter freemasons could beg and supplicate while noting that in their youth or wealth they had paid their dues, feted their brothers, and been good citizens in their respective lodges. They were owed assistance, they implied, yet they knew that it had to come from the aristocratic leadership of the Grand Lodge—hence they pleaded.

Lodge membership could begin to resemble citizenship in a state, a presumed right to participate or even to govern. We can see this forward-looking aspect of lodge membership most clearly in the Austrian case. In the very Catholic Austrian territories after 1750 lodge membership signaled support for enlightened reform against the traditional privileges of the clergy. Men in the secular professions were drawn into such lodges. By the 1780s the Grand Lodge in Vienna worked with the government, in one instance to suppress lodges in the restless western colony of the southern Netherlands, Belgium. The Viennese Grand Lodge authorized only three lodges, closed down all others and drew up lists of appropriate members. In July 1786 the Vienna lodge proudly informed Joseph II that “the General Government of masonry is now in conformity with your edicts.”³² As we shall see in greater detail in Chapter 3, on this occasion a fraternal organization, commonplace in European civil society, assisted the state in remaking the contours of another colonial society under its jurisdiction.

The masonic instinct for governance fueled identification with the center, with national institutions. In 1756 when Dutch freemasons organized their national system of authority and governance, the Grand Lodge of the Netherlands, they adopted “the form” of the Estates General of the Republic. Furthermore they recommended it to German lodges that were having difficulty arriving at a comparable system of national cohesion. An Estates General, the Dutch said, could work as “the sovereign tribunal of the Nation.”³³ They meant the masonic nation. Just like the Estates General where each province retained a high degree of sovereignty, in the Dutch lodges decentralized governance permitted independence. In the 1750s the Grand Master in The Hague, the Baron de Boetzelaer, spoke about the freemasons holding a “national assembly” there. At these assemblies the ceremonies placed brothers standing in rows, the first row symbolizing the “Staten van Holland,” the legislative body of the province of Holland.³⁴ After a detailed symbolic arrangement, they affirmed national unity. By the 1750s nationalism was rising throughout western Europe, possibly aided by masonic practices.

Identity with the nation did not inhibit masonic cosmopolitanism. We see it in every major city where lodges might have regular visitors from anywhere in the Western world and its colonies, correspond likewise throughout the world, and yet, simultaneously, see the nation as a site where virtue and merit should be rewarded. In the early 1780s the lodge in Amsterdam entertained a brother from Philadelphia.³⁵ We may easily imagine that the American Revolution, which the Dutch had partly financed, was high on the list of topics under discussion. The Enlightenment initiated reforming impulses that were felt in many areas, but its assault on privilege and corruption also suggested to secular-minded elites that new men were needed in government service. More than any other new form of sociability, the lodges became schools of government, places where the reformist impulses of the Enlightenment could be focused on one’s immediate surroundings, potentially on one’s immediate province or state. They were also places where brothers could hear a firsthand account of revolutions on distant shores as models for their own revolutions. In the late 1780s these broke out in Amsterdam and Brussels, most spectacularly in Paris.

The masonic gestures imitative of national government can also be seen in the records of French freemasonry. In 1738 in Paris a Jacobite refugee from Scotland, the Chevalier Ramsay, gave what became a famous oration, in which he said that freemasonry attempts to create “an entire spiritual nation.” Copies of the oration turn up in Reims, Dijon, and The Hague. In the 1760’s a piece of French masonic jewelry, confiscated from its Jewish engraver by the authorities in Brussels, displayed “the arms of France illuminating the attributes of freemasonry.”³⁶ By the 1770s the unified French lodges were focused on the institutions of central authority, beginning with a revitalized Grand Lodge.

In 1774 the new Grand Lodge of Paris chose to establish a national assembly. Representatives came from all over the country and each had one vote.³⁷ All were expected to pay taxes to the Grand Lodge. At the time of the first national assembly, no such institution existed in France. If a man or a woman was a freemason, might the conclusion be that masonic government was superior to what existed in France? In 1779 an orator in Grenoble lamented that “in our modern institutions where the form of government is such that the majority of subjects must stay in the place assigned them by nature, how is it possible to contribute to the common good?”³⁸ In the 1770s the French Grand Lodge sought to contribute to the common good by having a public presence in Paris. The relationship between the French lodges and the state had gotten off to a bad start when, in the early 1740s, the chief minister of state, Cardinal Fleury, had them spied upon. By the 1770s the Grand Lodge presented a public face of absolute loyalty to church and crown. But ordinary brothers had begun to resent the sycophantic aristocrats who controlled it.

In addition to a national representative assembly with one man, one vote, the Grand Lodge set up charity funds for brothers and sisters fallen on hard times. Seeing oneself as capable of constituting the polity and tending to its needs made freemasons into a new breed of political men—not necessarily disloyal or even republican—but with a new, and potentially dangerous, confidence about self-governance. In the case of charity they even supplanted the government in an age when governmental welfare was unknown. The freemasons did not cause the French Revolution of 1789, as the conspiracy theorists right up to the Nazis claimed, but they did make it more rather than less likely to happen.

The same impulse to govern surfaced in the women’s lodges which spread rapidly on the Continent. In them women could identify themselves as enlightened, worship the God of Newtonian science, the Grand Architect, as He was called by the freemasons, invent rituals, and give orations. In one women’s ritual the principal figure was the Queen of the Amazons. She ran the ceremonies, despite the 1723 Constitutions, which had said that women could not even join lodges. The Queen initiated both men and women and her female officers had military titles. The catechism of the lodge called on women to recognize the injustice of men and to throw off the masculine yoke, to dominate in marriage and to claim equal wealth with men. In one ceremony the Queen holds the constitutions and queries the “Grand Patriarch:” How do men keep women under them? She then urges her sisters to cast off the bondage imposed by men, to regard as tyrants those who will not obey women.³⁹ By the 1780s the lodges in France had become focuses for innovation, particularly in the area of relations between men and women.

Freemasonry could make abstract ideals like reason, equality, and self-governance concrete, even if difficult to attain. By 1750 around fifty thousand European and American men had joined lodges; by 1785 there were probably well over fifteen hundred women freemasons. The colonial numbers are unknown, but the lodges, like the churches, spread with empire. They expressed the highest ideals articulated during the age of Enlightenment; they could also be places of exclusion, purposefully remote from peasants, workers, in many places women, and in all places slaves. Yet in their search for equality and merit, for self-governance, free speech and religious toleration, the lodges look to the future, toward human rights and egalitarian ideals. For that reason alone they would be hated by the enemies of democracy, both in the eighteenth century and also in some of the recently created emerging eastern European and Russian democracies. It is still possible to get into a taxi in Moscow and be told that the country is being run by Jews and freemasons.

Many of these aspects of eighteenth-century freemasonry are explored in the pages ahead. We will examine the role of governance in the lodges and the symbiotic relationship between civil society and the growing power of the state. We will also look at the masonic charity funds that operated in France during the 1780s and examine the tensions they reveal in a society soon to be convulsed by revolution. Women’s freemasonry also receives attention; it is a subject too long neglected in books about freemasonry. But before these specific topics can be broached, we need to know something about the daily lives and ideals of the fraternity.

In the next chapter I try to give a sense of what daily life may have been like for brothers and sisters. We have a superb collection of pocket diaries or almanacs, largely from the Library of the Grand Lodge in The Hague, which tell us a great deal about what the user may have thought as he or she recorded tasks or appointments; checked for the times of coaches; and in rare moments of leisure, read the almanac with its masonic orations, engraved ceremonies, and moral admonitions. For its true believers freemasonry was meant to be lived, not simply joined. The most startling aspect of masonic day-to-day living lay in the penchant of the lodges to invent forms of governance. These began with dues and oaths of loyalty, but then extended to behavior that suggests citizenship: voting, orating before one’s brothers, setting the terms of officers and elections, and offering prescriptions for civic life within the lodge, even policing mores. Such habits have become harmless enough, but in the eighteenth century governance everywhere was the designated work of kings, churches, or elites. Blood and ordination counted in matters of government, but in the lodges—it was claimed—merit and discipline determined status. Perhaps it was inevitable that the enemies of democracy would come late in the century to blame the freemasons for its revolutionary manifestations.