the support of the Anglican Whig aristocracy,6 Prince William convened an illegal Parliament at Westminster on 26 December 1688, and the politicians were held at gunpoint to vote in respect of a dynastic change, with the majority voting in favour (although it was still a very close contest). The press later reported that ‘the Convention Parliament was in no way at liberty to vote according to conscience because Prince William’s soldiers were stationed within the House and all around the Palace of Westminster’.7 The press report illustrates the effect that this mil-itarily-obligated Parliament had on the monarchical structure:
King James was gone, and William was present with the Dutch Guard at Westminster to overawe, and with power to imperil the fortunes and lives of those who stood in the way of his advancement…William employed actual intimidation which resulted in majorities of one vote, in two of the most important divisions in the history of Parliament…In our time, governments have resigned when their majority over a censuring opposition has not been so small. Yet a majority of one is held to be adequate justification for a revolution involving the fundamental principle of primogeniture upon which our social fabric is based!
Not all the Church of England hierarchy in the House of Lords were in opposition to King James, however. His supporters included Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury, and the Bishops of Bath and Wells, Ely, Gloucester, Norwich, Peterborough, Worcester, Chichester, and Chester. When James was deposed, they were all deprived of their sees and incumbencies. History has since been manipulated to suggest that James was displaced because he was a Catholic. In truth, he was deposed to guarantee power to a Parliament that was controlled by Anglican supremacists and not elected by a democratic vote of the people.
William did not get everything his own way though. He gained the crown as King William III only with the proviso that his wife, Mary (James’s daughter), held equal rights as Queen Mary II, instead of being ranked Queen Consort as is the norm. Consequently, the reign is known in history as that of William and Mary. At the same time, the 1689 Bill of Rights was introduced, stating that future British monarchs could reign only with parliamentary consent, and that MPs should be freely elected. In reality, MPs of the era were certainly not freely elected. Only a very limited number of male property-owners who enjoyed high incomes were allowed to vote, and the House of Commons was far from characteristic of the populace it was supposed to represent. The monarchical situation remains the same today in that HM Queen Elizabeth II reigns only with governmental consent as a parliamentary monarch. She is not a constitutional monarch (appointed by the provisions of a people’s written Constitution) as are other kings and queens in Europe.
The reason why the 1689 Act came into being was that, although Queen Mary was a devout Protestant, the ministers were concerned about William’s personal relationship with Rome. Holland was the chief northern province of the independent Netherlands which had previously been attached to the Holy Roman Empire, and it was known that William’s army consisted largely of Catholic mercenaries paid from the papal purse. King James II had assisted Louis XIV of France in his nation’s opposition to the Catholic empire, and it was anticipated by the Pope that, with William in charge of Britain, this support would cease, thereby weakening the French position.
On 23 September 2001, Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper ran an article entitled ‘William of Orange funded by the Pope’, explaining how documents discovered at the Vatican reveal that Pope Innocent XI had provided William with 150,000 scudi—equivalent to more than £3.5m today. This came as a surprise to the people of Northern Ireland, who always felt that William’s Orangemen (who prevented James Stuart’s restoration attempt at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690) were a Protestant army.8 Cecil Kilpatrick, archivist for the Orange Order, acknowledged that there had already been embarrassing indications of ties between William and the Pope. He said that in the 1930s, when they discovered Pope Innocent XI depicted with Prince William in a portrait at Stormont (the Northern Ireland Parliament), they ‘had to get rid of it’!
Despite William’s outwardly routine aspirations in what his supporters called the Glorious Revolution, the Whig politicians determined that, having facilitated his invasion, they were in a position to impose certain restrictions for the future. Notwithstanding protests from Stuart adherents on the Tory benches, they laid immediate ground rules. The Bill of Rights, with its inherent Declaration of Rights, stipulated that Parliament retained absolute rights of consent over the monarchy, the judiciary and the people. Furthermore, it was henceforth illegal for a monarch to make or amend any laws of the land. So, although William made a great show of strength at his initial Convention Parliament, the politicians maintained the upper hand by granting his kingship on a conditional basis. These measures, coupled with Queen Mary’s Protestantism, curtailed the papal ambitions, but following Mary’s childless death in 1694 the inevitable dilemma of succession arose.
To establish fully the Anglican Parliament’s supreme position over the monarchy during the balance of William’s reign, the 1701 Act of Settlement was introduced to secure the throne of Britain for Protestants alone, and the Act remains in force today—even though it was passed in the House of Commons by a majority of only one vote (118 for, and 117 against). The earlier Act of Abjuration (requiring all government officials to renounce King James) was similarly passed by one vote (193 to 192), and there was no true parliamentary majority for either of these Acts which set the constitutional scene for everything that followed concerning the operational nature of the British monarchy.
Religion and the Great Lights
The much publicized Orange Order was founded in 1795 in the wake of the Williamite revolution and the continuing aggression between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. The Order is often portrayed as being a masonic lodge in Ulster, but it is not. Indeed, the very nature of its constitution provides us with a good example as to the contrasting religious stance taken by authentic Freemasonry.
The Orange Order is pseudo-masonic in its presentation, but stipulates that its members must be Protestant Christians. There is no such requirement, nor indeed any religious stipulation in legitimate Freemasonry. Those of any religion (or none) are welcomed into the ranks, and the godhead of Creation is defined not in religious denominational terms, but as the Great Architect of the Universe. The Three Great Lights of Freemasonry (the so-called ‘furniture’, without which no lodge can be convened) include a volume of the Sacred Law. This might be the Judaeo-Christian Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Vedas or the Zend-Avesta, depending on the predominant culture of the lodge concerned. Each and all are acceptable to attendant or visiting masons since the volume is representative of an essential belief in some form of supreme authority, by whatever definition. Outside that, discussion of religious matters is not permitted within the lodge environment.
The other Great Lights of Freemasonry are the square and compasses, representing the psyche and spirit respectively. The configuration in which these physical items are displayed within an active lodge (for instance, with one, two or neither of the compass points revealed in front of the square) denotes the degree in which the prevalent meeting is being conducted. The Three Great Lights in unison denote the extent of a mason’s qualifying achievement within an overall environment of divine consciousness, while the lodge itself is perceived as a bridge between the material and spiritual worlds.
This aspect of lodge working demonstrates that there is something more to Freemasonry than is immediately apparent from its superficial image. The masonic hierarchy is always quick to assert that Freemasonry is not a religion—and indeed it is not—but something else is indicated here: divine consciousness and a recognition of different material and spiritual worlds. If not religious, then there is clearly a spiritual aspect to consider, and the concept of ‘worlds’ is somewhat kabbalistic in nature. In fact, the levels of masonic spiritual attainment between the mundane environment and the higher levels of enlightenment are represented by Jacob’s Ladder from the Genesis story of Jacob’s dream.9 This was depicted in Georgian times by the Rosicrucian poet and artist,
