the birth of constitutional government bound by laws or rules. It speaks in passing about “parliament” and further admonishes its members: “You shall … truly observe the Charges in the Constitution.” It also invokes the ancient teacher and philosopher Hermes and the sciences that he taught. As we shall see in chapter 3, the document had been collected by the new Royal Society because it was attempting to write a history of all the trades and crafts—a project it never completed.
As the Oxford English Dictionary shows, the use of the term “constitution” to mean “rules, statutes, or charges” adopted by a body has few if any precedents prior to the 1650s. In that revolutionary decade, after the execution of Charles I in 1649, parliament enacted laws for the new republic. Simultaneously, voluntary societies with constitutions, however loosely structured, came into existence. At one point the 1659 document speaks quaintly of a French king as having been “elected,” at another it speaks of a biblical time when “the King … made a great Councell and parliament was called to know how they might find meanes” to provide for the unemployed.12 The English masons saw their history as inextricably bound up, not always happily, with the fate of kings and states. After 1700 they also came increasingly to be associated with a new cultural movement in favor of religious toleration and the end of censorship, the Enlightenment. Where we find the word “constitutions” being used in French for the first time to denote the rules or statutes of an organization (in 1710) the context is masonic and employs terms like “brothers” and “Grand Master.”13
Of the many forms of new social behavior to become an integral part of enlightened culture during the eighteenth century, freemasonry has been the most difficult to understand. Secretive, ritualistic, devoted in many Grand Lodges to hierarchy—that would be one set of characteristics! But the eighteenth-century lodges also consistently spoke about civic virtue and merit, about men meeting as equals, about the need for brothers to become philosophers, about their being “enlightened.” They said it in every European language: brothers must become in French éclairé, in Dutch verlichte, in German aufgeklärt.14 Such lofty ideals surfaced early in the transition from masonic guild to the society of freemasons. With ideals and myths went a set of ancient practices and beliefs born in the guilds, but capable of being given modern meaning. By late in the century the egalitarian logic had spread—particularly in France—where, as shall see in the last chapter, women flocked to the new “lodges of adoption.”
Now seen to be enlightened, masonic practices such as elections, majority rule, orations by elected officials, national governance under a Grand Lodge, and constitutions—all predicated on an ideology of equality and merit—owed their origin to the growth of parliamentary power, to the self-confidence of British urban merchants and landed gentry, and not least, to a literature of republican idealism. John To-land, a major republican Whig activist of the early eighteenth century, and his patron the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Robert Clayton, can be linked directly to London lodges that may have formed the nucleus of the Grand Lodge.15 The masonic ideology of rising by merit, which justified egalitarian fraternizing among men of property free to chose their governors, belonged first and foremost to the English republican tradition. This identity did not prevent the lodges from being hierarchical and everywhere eager for aristocratic patronage, but it did ultimately tilt the lodges in the direction of being schools for government—more, rather than less, democratic government.
Such practices when taken onto the European Continent played into the love of secrecy found in court culture and imitated by elites, but in the new lodges secrecy and clubbing also inspired new degrees and ceremonies, and new political aspirations. By the later part of the century imitations of freemasonry appeared: such were the radical Illuminati founded in Bavaria in 1776.16 They were an overtly political group, eager to reform German society. In general, whether in Europe or America, masonic lodges sought never to be overtly political, never to take sides publicly. But the format of the lodge offered a template that other groups could imitate or embrace; it also offered men and some women the chance to imagine that they governed themselves competently.
The 1720s in London were critically important. The decade spawned the earliest lodges of literate gentlemen where few, if any, working stonemasons can be found. The evidence before 1717 shows lodges of gentlemen in London by the 1690s. Somewhere before 1717 the great architect, Sir Christopher Wren, presided as Grand Master, and the Grand Lodge took shape. By the 1730s the engraved picture that celebrated the lodges, and came from a Dutch source, had over one hundred meeting in pubs and claimed Sir Richard Steele, the great journalist of the period, as their guiding spirit.17
Sometime between the 1690s and 1723, when the Grand Lodge of London published its soon to be famous and often translated, Constitutions, the lodges became ever more fashionable.18 The use of the plural, rather than the singular “constitution” in the 1723 document revealed it as an amalgam of various constitutions used by individual lodges. The term was unmistakably English. At this time in French, une constitution denoted the fact that a thing, like the human body, or eventually the government of a country, is composed of its constituent parts. The body’s constitution is merely the sum of its organs and limbs, healthy or diseased. Only gradually in eighteenth-century French did the term come to denote rules and statutes, or an activity, as in a law not being constitutional and hence useless, or as in government by contract made by men who give it a constitution. That usage appears in a French book about the English “revolution” published in 1719.19 As early as the first decade of the century, by contrast, the Grand Lodge of London was being constituted and governed by its brothers who have become very secular indeed.
The secular, even outrageously nonreligious side of freemasonry appeared very early in its history. The papers of John Toland now preserved in the British Library tell the story. He kept one meeting record of a group living in The Hague (where he was at the time), and, although written in French by men who had never been to England, the meeting used masonic words and phrases. They called one another “brother,” they had a Grand Master, and constitutions, and they practiced secrecy.20
Thus in one of the early French documents from the new century that describes a voluntary society, we find a libertine and masonic group that met under their statutes or constitutions. The libertinism appears in the list of food and drink, and in the noticeable deterioration of the handwriting as the meeting proceeds. Associates of this group, among them a man who would become the leader of Amsterdam freemasonry, Jean Rousset de Missy, put into circulation the most outrageous document of a century filled with heresy. It argued that Jesus, Moses and Mohammed had been the three great imposters.21 Even Voltaire was horrified by it when he read it.
Not surprisingly, the club, or society in The Hague, or as they called themselves, the order was composed not of English visitors, but of French Huguenot booksellers, journalists, publishers and probably one or two local men of science.22 Many of its signatories were associates of the secretary of the group, the French refugee, Prosper Marchand. This French Protestant journalist, whose manuscripts are now housed at the University Library in Leiden, left behind one of the most important sources of information about early Continental freemasonry. He, or his friends, knew Toland who had traveled extensively on the Continent. Marchand and Rousset de Missy corresponded as close personal friends right up to Marchand’s death in 1756. His last will and testament shows a palsied hand that wrote about religious ceremonies as “vain and contemptible.”23 A lodge could appeal to the uprooted, the mercantile, and the cosmopolitan, or the heretical: it was of ancient origin, democratic in its ethos, associated with the most advanced form of government to be found in Europe, and capable of being molded to one’s tastes while offering charity and assistance to all brothers.
The group in The Hague used masonic terms like “Grand Master” while basically devoting themselves to eating and drinking. Yet among Marchand’s closest friends, Rousset de Missy, another refugee, led Amsterdam freemasonry and became a political agent first for the House of Orange and
