of two kings in the previous 65 years, and had executed the Queen of Scots prior to that. He preferred to rely on his German ministers and, since he could not speak a word of English, George ran his kingly affairs from Hanover with his prime minister Robert Walpole holding the reins at Westminster from 1721.
George II succeeded his father in 1727, only to display a similar lack of empathy with the populace. Ten years later, however, King George’s eldest son Frederick, Prince of Wales, was initiated into Freemasonry at Kew, and Grand Lodge thereby gained its first royal member.9 His membership was of little consequence though—and in opposition to his father, Frederick joined the Stuart cause after the 1745 Jacobite Rising of Bonnie Prince Charlie. During the course of this civil war and the simultaneous War of Austrian Succession (1740-48), there was very little lodge activity recorded, and it is claimed that, because of these campaigns, English Freemasonry fell into a severe decline. That is the official story—in practice quite the reverse was the case; the lodges were never so lively as they were during that era.
Divided Loyalties
So much has been written about Charles Edward Stuart and his attempt to regain the crowns of his grandfather, King James II (VII), that it is not possible to retell the whole story here, except for those parts of it that directly concern Freemasonry.
Despite an encouraging start in September 1745, and some Scots victories against the troops of King George’s son William, Duke of Cumberland, the campaign met a disastrous end at Culloden Moor on 16 April 1746. There followed the Prince’s dramatic flight to Skye with Flora Macdonald—the rest is romantic history. In the course of all this, masonic lodges (by virtue of their secrecy) became the perfect centres for intelligence operations on both sides. Notwithstanding the regulations imposed by Grand Lodge for the licensed constitution of all other lodges, there were many lodges in London and the provinces that ignored this directive. Just because the Whig aristocracy had established their presence within the premier Grand Lodge, this did not mean there were no Tory lodges classified as ‘Irregular ‘ by the tavern-club movement. Such lodges were especially prevalent in Wales and the West of England, and the Whig and Tory opposition lodges became nests of spies and secret agents, each endeavouring to infiltrate the other to gain inside information.
Although many of the aristocratic families created after 1688 were inclined to be Whigs, many of the older landed families retained their Tory position and their traditional Stuart support—which did not end with the Battle of Culloden. Even after the Rising, Jacobitism was rife in Northumbria, through the Midlands, down to the south of the country. Across the land there was an active network of Jacobite societies and Tory lodges in major centres such as London, Liverpool, Preston, Norwich, Bristol and Manchester.
Wherever Charles Edward travelled south of the Border, there were prestigious safe houses at his disposal. They included Stoneleigh Abbey (baronial seat of the Leighs of Warwick), Marbury Hall, Cheshire (the home of James, Earl of Barrymore—Member of Parliament for Wigan and leader of the English Jacobites),10 Malpas Hall, Cheshire (belonging to the Stuart envoy Richard Minshull) and Blythefield Hall, Staffordshire (seat of the noble Bagot family). In London, Charles stayed at the Essex Street home of Lady Anne Primrose, the widow of Hugh, 3rd Viscount Primrose (ancestor of Lord Rosebery). Anne had been involved with the Jacobite cause during the 1745 Rising and, following Flora Macdonald’s imprisonment in England, it was Lady Anne who secured her release and gave her financial aid. A particularly significant visit by the Prince to Lady Anne’s London house is recorded in the Stuart Papers at Windsor as having occurred on 16-22 September 1750, some years after the Rising.11
In 1752, Charles stayed at Westbrook House in Godalming, Surrey, with Eleanor Oglethorpe,12 sister of the Crown agent James Oglethorpe, who founded Georgia, USA, and built Savannah. Eleanor worked for the Stuarts with the famed Jacobite agent Dr Samuel Johnson, and with Dr William King, Principal of St Mary Hall, Oxford. Other English supporters of the Prince included the Earls of Cornbury and Derwentwater, the Lords of Chesterfield, Bath, Sandwich and Pultney, along with the Dukes of Somerset, Westmorland, Beaufort13 and, perhaps most surprisingly, King George II’s own son Frederick, Prince of Wales, who was instrumental in helping Lady Anne to secure the release of Flora Macdonald.14
In the Welsh sector (which included the Shropshire and Cheshire border country) there were three prominent Jacobite lodges to which many of the nobility and gentry belonged. In the south were the Sea Serjeants of Carmarthen, whose headquarters was the Masonic Lodge at the Red Lion in Market Street.15 In mid-Wales was the Tory gentle-men’s Montgomeryshire Club of Twenty-Seven, while the north oper ated through another Tory lodge called the Cycle of the White Rose.16 This was headed by Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, Lord Lieutenant and Member of Parliament for Denbighshire. The Cycle was headquartered at Sir Watkin’s house at Winnstay; then (following his death in 1749) at his widow’s property, Llangedwyn Hall near Oswestry.
In 1747, the estate house of Berse Drelincourt was built near Wrexham for Mary, the widow of Peter Drelincourt, Dean of Armagh, to become a masonic charity school for the residential education of children born to exiled Jacobite nobility. Technically, the school was registered as an orphanage and, for reasons of strict security, access was forbidden to outsiders. Lady Anne Primrose (Mary’s daughter) eventually became director of operations.
The style of Freemasonry worked within Tory lodges (such as the Sea Serjeants and the Cycle of the White Rose in the Welsh regions) was somewhat akin to that which led to the Antients’ Grand Lodge foundation in 1751, thereafter referring to the premier Grand Lodge as the Moderns. In 1760, Robert Jones of Glamorgan became Grand Master of the Welsh Freemasons, and was also a member of the One Ton lodge in Noble Street, London, along with the Black Lion lodge in Jockey Field.17 A close friend of the political activist John Wilkes, he also attended other Tory lodges in London at the Antwerp Tavern, the Turk’s Head and The Shakespeare. Prior to Jones’ appointment, the Carmarthen Grand Masters of the 1750s were Sir Edward Mansell of Trimsaran and David Gwynne of Talaris from 1754. (Plate 10 illustrates a summons of The Globe Lodge, Fleet Street, during this era.)
The following example of the scale of the inter-lodge hostility that prevailed at this time comes from the Transactions of the Antiquarian Society and from London’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review, 1755. Unable to infiltrate the Tory’s Red Lion lodge in Market Street, Carmarthen, at a time when borough elections were taking place, the Whigs instituted their own new lodge at the nearby Greyhound in Bridge Street. Arguments led to scuffles which, in turn, led to several injuries and the killing of the Red Lion barber, whereupon wholesale warfare erupted in the streets as reinforcements came in from out of town. The Tories occupied the castle, and the Whigs took the town hall. ‘In short’, wrote one correspondent, ‘the town is full of fire, smoke and tumult.’18 Another report stated that people were ‘armed with guns, swords and other offensive weapons—threatening, assaulting, beating, knocking-down, wounding, maiming, shooting at and killing several’.19 After the disturbances had died down, the rival masonic lodges each began legal proceedings against the other.
This was the state of Britain’s Freemasonry in the 1740s and 1750s, at a time when the premier Grand Lodge lost 72 of its 271 member branches, yet the official records are remarkably quiet. William, 5th Lord Byron (great-uncle of the poet), was elected as Grand Master in 1747, and was never seen again in a masonic lodge until he nominated a successor in 1752.20 Subsequently, he caused public feeling to well up against Freemasonry when he killed his neighbour, William Chatworth, in a sword fight at the Star and Garter in London’s Pall Mall.
Even the individual member Freemasons whose lodges were tied to premier Grand Lodge were unhappy at this time, and they were especially angered when a Bill of Incorporation was presented to Parliament by their masters in 1768. By virtue of its terms, the feeling against the concept was intense,
