masonic history—not even King Solomon— has done so much as Sir Christopher Wren to further the masonic cause. And yet, for all that, James Anderson—the very man who compiled the Constitutions on which modern Freemasonry rests—wrote in those Constitutions that Wren had allowed Freemasonry to fall into ‘decay’. Even the librarian and curator of the United Grand Lodge of England expressed his bewilderment at this some years ago.15
Gravity on a Plate
The greatest of all misfortunes to settle upon the Royal Society followed Isaac Newton’s arrival on the scene in 1672. From the very beginning, Newton and Hooke were on a wrong footing, which began with a disagreement over light refraction; also because Newton lodged a formal objection to Hooke’s fee-exempt status as Curator. After only a few months, Newton threatened to leave the Society, but the Secretary, intelligence agent Henry Oldenburg, pleaded for him to stay, waiving his dues too, much to the annoyance of the other Fellows.
A major argument ensued in 1675 when Newton gave a lecture entitled Discourse on Colour, claiming originality when, as Robert Hooke stated, ‘The main of it was contained in Micrographia.’ This set Oldenburg firmly against Hooke, leading to regular disputes. In 1678, Oldenburg died and Robert Hooke was elected to become the new Secretary, which upset Newton even further.
Isaac Newton was a man of incredible talent and, like Boyle, Wilkins, Ashmole and others, he was an ardent alchemist. He was, however, a curious character and the others could not fathom him at all. Having embarked on a translation of the Emerald Text of Hermes, Newton recalled from his youth that phoenix was an old Graeco-Phoenician word for ‘crimson’, and his quest for the great enlightenment led to a new decoration of his quarters—crimson furniture, carpets, curtains, quilts, cushions and hangings. At his eventual death, no other colour was mentioned in the inventory of his furnishings.16
Newton’s religious leaning was distinctly Arian, a form of early Christianity which rejected any concept of the Holy Trinity.17 One of his foremost studies concerned the structure of the ancient kingdoms, and he claimed the pre-eminence of the Judaic heritage as an archive of divine knowledge and numerology. Although he was a deeply spiritual man and a true authority on early religion, he refused (like Boyle) to take Holy Orders, and constantly maintained that the New Testament had been strategically distorted by the Church before its publication.
In January 1684, Robert Hooke was in London at Garaway’s coffee house, off Cornhill, with Newton, Wren and the debonair Edmund Halley who (as an honorary Oxford graduate) had become a Society Fellow four years after Newton. They were discussing celestial harmony—the relationship between heavenly bodies and ratios in accordance with Pythagoras’ Music of the Spheres. In the course of this, the questions were posed: What kept the planets suspended in their orbital positions around the sun? Why do they not fall down?
Letters written by Hooke to Newton between 1677 and 1680 make it clear that in his earlier research Hooke had discovered gravitational law to be based upon the principle of an Inverse Square (the force of the attraction is proportionate to the inverse square of the distance), but Newton had responded stating that he was not interested because he was working on other things. Nevertheless, at Garaway’s the matter was raised again, with Wren and Halley agreeing with Hooke’s Inverse Square principle, while Newton apparently did not—and so the matter rested.
Then, in 1685, Hooke’s long-standing ally King Charles II died, and within two years Newton produced his Principia Mathematica in which he stated the very same Inverse Square principle that Robert Hooke had handed to him on a plate. It became known as the Law of Gravity and, with no acknowledgement of Hooke’s research, it gained Newton a primary place in scientific history. Since no one knew how he had come to his discovery, the antiquarian William Stukeley explained in 1752 (25 years after Isaac Newton’s death) that Newton was inspired by an apple falling from a tree—the same dubious tale that students are taught to this day.18
In practice, the big difference between Hooke and Newton (and Hooke and Halley) was that so many aspects of research begun by Robert Hooke were never properly concluded. He made some amazing discoveries, and his Micrographia is acknowledged as one of the greatest scientific works ever written. But comet periodicity and gravity fell into the same pending tray as his marine chronometer. It is perfectly true that Hooke theorized the Inverse Square principle—but it was Newton who proved it.
Genius of the Few
The rebuilding of London continued through 42 years, during the course of which Isaac Newton became President of the Royal Society in 1703. Christopher Wren had been knighted by King Charles II in 1673, and Isaac Newton was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. It is in English masonic records that, on 18 May 1691, a great meeting of accepted masons took place at St Paul’s to adopt Sir Christopher Wren as a brother. The lodge to which this refers is uncertain, but it is presumed to be the Goose and Gridiron lodge, which actually dates from that year, and later became known as the Lodge of Antiquity. Wren is now listed as having been Master of that lodge, but this is fanciful myth.19 Wren was a staunch Tory supporter, a well-known Jacobite, and already a long-term mason who would certainly not have joined a Whig lodge to become its Master. There never was any such meeting at St Paul’s. In fact, there was no St Paul’s. The old building had been completely demolished; work was not begun on the new cathedral until 1675, and the scaffold and screens were not taken down until the winter of 1708. Meanwhile, no one but the workmen were allowed beyond the screens, and in May 1691 Christopher Wren was busy in Richmond, working at Hampton Court Palace for Queen Mary.20
St Paul’s Cathedral was the last of London’s reconstructions and, with the work finished, the once low-slung, shambling city displayed an elegant skyline of towers, domes, steeples and spires. It should have been the most wonderful culmination, but by that time Wren had few surviving friends or family with whom to share his triumph. Twice a widower and not marrying again, he had also lost his beloved daughter Jane. His dear friend Robert Hooke, with whom he rebuilt the City, had died in 1703, as had Samuel Pepys, while Robert Boyle had died earlier in 1691, and John Evelyn in 1706.
King Charles had been succeeded by his brother James, who was deposed by the Whigs, in favour of William and Mary in 1688, and the Royal House of Stuart—Europe’s longest reigning dynasty—had reached its monarchical end. So too went the heritage of the Rosicrucian Order from Britain, and the philosophical mind-set which had inspired and fuelled the pioneers of the Gresham brotherhood, moved into France and Italy.
It was Christopher Wren’s inaugural Gresham College lecture in 1657 which had cemented the original group into a formal Society. But now his visits to the coffee houses and theatres were over, for the old haunts had gone and the new ones were quite different without his friends. They had become business places for a new breed of financial marketeers. As the resurrected city became operative once again, so the fraternity of Wren’s early years became a figment of history. The days of their pioneering collaboration were done, and irrespective of how the Royal Society might progress in the future, that magical half-century could never be repeated. Nevertheless, as Britain moved towards a new era of Industrial Revolution, everyone knew that none of it would have been possible were it not for the grand legacy of invention, design and discovery, unrivalled in all history, and the incomparable genius of those few.
Builders and Bees
Freemasonry is described these days as being concerned with speculative rather than operative stonemasonry, but the word ‘speculative’ is an odd choice when
