Now, the infamous character of the Duc d'Orléans is a matter of common knowledge; moreover, during the Regency--that period of impiety and moral dissolution hitherto unparalleled in the history of France--the chief of council was the Duc de Bourbon, who later placed his mistress the Marquise de Prie and the financier Paris Duverney at the head of affairs, thus creating a scandal of such magnitude that he was exiled in 1726 through the influence of Cardinal Fleury. This Duc de Bourbon in 1737 is said to have become Grand Master of the Temple. "It was thus," observes de Canteleu, "that these two Grand Masters of the Temple degraded the royal authority and ceaselessly increased hatred against the government."
It would therefore seem strange that a man so upright as Ramsay appears to have been, who had moreover but recently been converted to the Catholic Church, should have formed a friendship with the dissolute Regent of France, unless there had been some bond between them. But here we have a possible explanation--Templarism. Doubtless during Ramsay's youth at Kilwinning many Templar traditions had come to his knowledge, and if in France he found himself befriended by the Grand Master himself, what wonder that he should have entered into an alliance which resulted in his admission to an Order he had been accustomed to revere and which, moreover, was represented to him as the fons et origo of the masonic brotherhood to which he also belonged? It is thus that we find Ramsay in the very year that the Duc de Bourbon is said to have been made Grand Master of the Temple artlessly writing to Cardinal Fleury asking him to extend his protection to the society of Freemasons in Paris and enclosing a copy of the speech which he was to deliver on the following day, March 21, 1737. It is in this famous oration that for the first time we find Freemasonry traced to the Crusades:
At the time of the Crusades in Palestine many princes, lords, and citizens associated themselves, and vowed to restore the Temple of the Christians in the Holy Land, and to employ themselves in bringing back their architecture to its first institution. They agreed upon several ancient signs and symbolic words drawn from the well of religion in order to recognize themselves amongst the heathens and Saracens. These signs and words were only communicated to those who promised solemnly, and even sometimes at the foot of the altar, never to reveal them. This sacred promise was therefore not an execrable oath, as it has been called, but a respectable bond to unite Christians of all nationalities into one confraternity. Some time afterwards our Order formed an intimate union with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. From that time our Lodges took the name of Lodges of St. John.[366]
This speech of Ramsay's has raised a storm of controversy amongst Freemasons because it contains a very decided hint of a connexion between Templarism and Freemasonry. Mr. Tuckett, in the paper referred to above, points out that only the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem are here mentioned,[367] but Ramsay distinctly speaks of "our Order" forming a union with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, and we know that the Templars did eventually form such a union. The fact that Ramsay does not mention the Templars by name admits of a very plausible explanation. It must be remembered that, as Mr. Gould has shown, a copy of the oration was enclosed by Ramsay in his letter to Cardinal Fleury appealing for royal protection to be extended to Freemasonry; it is therefore hardly likely that he would have proclaimed a connexion between the Order he was anxious to present in the most favourable light and one which had formerly been suppressed by King and Pope. Moreover, if the Charter of Larmenius is to be believed, the newly elected Grand Master of the Temple was the Duc de Bourbon, who had already incurred the Cardinal's displeasure. Obviously, therefore, Templar influence was kept in the background. This is not to imply bad faith on the part of Ramsay, who doubtless held the Order of Templars to be wholly praiseworthy; but he could not expect the King or Cardinal to share his view, and therefore held it more prudent to refer to the progenitors of Freemasonry under the vague description of a crusading body. Ramsay's well-meant effort met, however, with no success. Whether on account of this unlucky reference by which the Cardinal may have detected Templar influence or for some other reason, the appeal for royal protection was not only refused, but the new Order, which hitherto Catholics had been allowed to enter, was now prohibited by Royal edict. In the following year, 1738, the Pope, Clement XII, issued a bull, In Eminenti, banning Freemasonry and excommunicating Catholics who took part in it.
But this prohibition appears to have been without effect, for Freemasonry not only prospered but soon began to manufacture new degrees. And in the masonic literature of the following thirty years the Templar tradition becomes still more clearly apparent. Thus the Chevalier de Bérage in a well-known pamphlet, of which the first edition is said to have appeared in 1747,[368] gives the following account of the origins of Freemasonry:
This Order was instituted by Godefroi de Bouillon in Palestine in 1330,[369] after the decadence of the Christian armies, and was only communicated to the French Masons some time after and to a very small number, as a reward for the obliging services they rendered to several of our English and Scottish Knights, from whom true Masonry is taken. Their Metropolitan Lodge is situated on the Mountain of Heredom where the first Lodge was held in Europe and which exists in all its splendour. The General Council is still held there and it is the seal of the Sovereign Grand Master in office. This mountain is situated between the West and North of Scotland at sixty miles from Edinburgh.
Apart from the historical confusion of the first sentence, this passage is of interest as evidence that the theory of a connexion between certain crusading Knights and the Lodge of Heredom of Kilwinning was current as early as 1747. The Baron Tschoudy in his Étoile Flamboyante, which appeared in 1766, says that the crusading origin of Freemasonry is the one officially taught in the lodges, where candidates for initiation are told that several Knights who had set forth to rescue the holy places of Palestine from the Saracens "formed an association under the name of Free Masons, thus indicating that their principal desire was the reconstruction of the Temple of Solomon," that, further, they adopted certain signs, grips, and passwords as a defence against the Saracens, and finally that "our Society ... fraternized on the footing of an Order with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, from which it is apparent that the Freemasons borrowed the custom of regarding St. John as the patron of the whole Order in general."[370] After the crusades "the Masons kept their rites and methods and in this way perpetuated the royal art by establishing lodges, first in England, then in Scotland," etc.[371]
In this account, therefore, Freemasonry is represented as having been instituted for the defence of Christian doctrines. De Bérage expresses the same view and explains that the object of these Crusaders in thus binding themselves together was to protect their lives against the Saracens by enveloping their sacred doctrines in a veil of mystery. For this purpose they made use of Jewish symbolism, which they invested with a Christian meaning. Thus the Temple of Solomon was used to denote the Church of Christ, the bough of acacia signified the Cross, the square and the compass the union between the Old and New Testaments, etc. So "the mysteries of Masonry were in their principle, and are still, nothing else than those of the Christian religion."[372]
Baron Tschoudy, however, declares that all this stops short of the truth, that Freemasonry originated long before the Crusades in Palestine, and that the real "ancestors, fathers, authors of the Masons, those illustrious men of whom I will not say the date nor betray the secret," were a "disciplined body" whom Tschoudy describes by the name of "the Knights of the Aurora and Palestine." After "the almost total destruction of the Jewish people" these "Knights" had always hoped to regain possession of the domains of their fathers and to rebuild the Temple, and they carefully preserved their "regulations and particular liturgy," together with a "sublime treatise" which was the object of their continual study and of their philosophical speculations. Tschoudy further relates that they were students of the "occult sciences," of which alchemy formed a part, and that they had "abjured the principles of the Jewish religion in order to follow the lights of the Christian faith." At the time of the Crusades the Knights of Palestine came out from the desert of the Thebaïd, where they had remained hidden, and joined to themselves some of the crusaders who had remained in Jerusalem. Declaring that they were the descendants of the masons who had worked on the Temple of Solomon, they professed to concern themselves with "speculative architecure," which served to disguise a more glorious point of view. From this time they took the name of Free Masons, presented themselves under this title to the crusading armies and assembled under their banners.[373]
It would of course be absurd to regard any of the foregoing accounts as historical facts; the important point is that they tend to prove the fallacy of supposing that the Johannite-Templar theory originated with the revived Ordre du Temple, since one corresponding to it so closely was current in the middle of the preceding century. It is true that in these earlier accounts the actual words "Johannite" and "Templar" do not occur, but the resemblance between the sect of Jews professing the Christian faith but possessing a "particular liturgy" and a "sublime treatise"--apparently some early form of the Cabala--dealing with occult science, and the Mandæans or Johannites with their Cabalistic "Book of Adam," their Book of John, and their ritual, is at once apparent. Further, the allusions to the connexion between the Knights who had been indoctrinated in the Holy Land and the Scottish lodges coincides exactly with the Templar tradition, published not only by the Ordre du Temple but handed down in the Royal Order of Scotland.