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,"[359] 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."[360] 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.[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.
Unfortunately, however, as too frequently happens when men form secret confederacies for a wholly honourable purpose, their ranks were penetrated by confederates of another kind. It has been said in an earlier chapter that, according to the documents produced by the Ordre du Temple in the early part of the nineteenth century, the Templars had never ceased to exist in spite of their official suppression in 1312, and that a line of Grand Masters had succeeded each other in unbroken succession from Jacques du Molay to the Duc de Cossé-Brissac, who was killed in 1792. The Grand Master appointed in 1705 is stated to have been Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, later the Regent. Mr. Waite has expressed the opinion that all this was an invention of the late eighteenth century, and that the Charter of Larmenius was fabricated at this date though not published until 1811 by the revived Ordre du Temple under the Grand Master, Fabré Palaprat. But evidence points to a contrary conclusion. M. Matter, who, as we have seen, disbelieves the story of the Ordre du Temple and the authenticity of the Charter of Larmenius in so far as it professes to be a genuine fourteenth-century document, nevertheless asserts that the savants who have examined it declare it to date from the early part of the eighteenth century, at which period Matter believes the Gospel of St. John used by the Order to have been arranged so as "to accompany the ceremonies of some masonic or secret society." Now, it was about 1740 that a revival of Templarism took place in France and Germany; we cannot therefore doubt that if Matter is right in this hypothesis, the secret society in question was that of the Templars, whether they existed as lineal descendants of the twelfth-century Order or merely as a revival of that Order. The existence of the German Templars at this date under the name of the Stricte Observance (which we shall deal with in a further chapter) is indeed a fact disputed by no one; but that there was also an Ordre du Temple in France at the very beginning of the eighteenth century must be regarded as highly probable. Dr. Mackey, John Yarker, and Lecouteulx de Canteleu (who, owing to his possession of Templar documents, had exclusive sources of information) all declare this to have been the case and accept the Charter of Larmenius as authentic. "It is quite certain," says Yarker, "that there was at this period in France an Ordre du Temple, with a charter from John Mark Larmenius, who claimed appointment from Jacques du Molay. Philippe of Orléans accepted the Grand Mastership in 1705 and signed the Statutes."[364]
Without, however, necessarily accepting the Charter of Larmenius as authentic let us examine the probability of this assertion with regard to the Duc d'Orléans.
Amongst the Jacobites supporting Lord Derwentwater at the Grand Lodge of Paris was a certain Andrew Michael Ramsay, known as Chevalier Ramsay, who was born at Ayr near the famous Lodge of Kilwinning, where the Templars are said to have formed their alliance with the masons in 1314. In 1710 Ramsay was converted to the Roman Catholic faith by Fénelon and in 1724 became tutor to the sons of the Pretender at Rome. Mr. Gould has related that during his stay in France, Ramsay had formed a friendship with the Regent, Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, who was Grand Master of the Ordre de Saint-Lazare, instituted during the Crusades as a body of Hospitallers devoting themselves to the care of the lepers and which in 1608 had been joined to the Ordre du Mont-Carmel. It seems probable from all accounts that Ramsay was a Chevalier of this Order, but he cannot have been admitted into it by the Duc d'Orléans, for the Grand Master of the Ordre de Saint-Lazare was not the Duc d'Orléans but the Marquis de Dangeau, who, on his death in 1720, was succeeded by the son of the Regent, the Duc de Chartres.[365] If, then, Ramsay was admitted to any Order by the Regent, it was surely the Ordre du Temple, of which the Regent is said to have been the Grand Master at this date.