Freemasons and the Political Culture of the British Atlantic World, 1717-1798 Part one of two
By Dr. Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs
B
ritish Freemasonry’s first Constitutions, compiled by James Anderson for the Grand Lodge of England in 1723, urged a Mason to “be a peaceable subject to the civil powers” and avoid plots and conspiracies against the state. It claimed that kings and princes encouraged the fraternity because of its members’ reputation for “peaceableness and loyalty.” If a brother did rebel against the state, he was to be discountenanced, but the regulations made clear that he could not be expelled from his Lodge on the basis of his being a rebel. His relationship to his Lodge “remain[ed] indefeasible.” The Constitutions even went so far as to ban the discussion of politics—the brethren were enjoined to leave their “Quarrels about religion, or nations, or state policy” outside their Lodges. For much of the eighteenth century, these words constituted the extent of the British Grand Lodges’ directives to individual Masons concerning politics. When the English Grand Lodge published a revised version of The Constitutions almost a century later in 1815, the clause protecting political rebels from expulsion was conspicuously absent. It took a Mason’s loyalty for granted: “A Mason is a peaceable subject to the civil powers wherever he resides or works and is never to be concerned in plots and conspiracies against the peace and welfare of the nation.” During the early nineteenth cenknight templar
tury, British Freemasonry did everything in its power to cultivate its reputation as a loyalist institution. It made a conscious effort to identify itself with the defining features of the British state: constitutional monarchy, protestantism, and empire. This effort marked a dramatic departure from the brotherhood’s relationship to politics during the eighteenth century— the focus of this article—when Freemasons could be found along the complex political spectrum of the period between the 1720s and the 1790s. The changes in the language of Freemasonry’s Constitutions are thus emblematic of a broader shift in the nature of the brotherhood’s role in the political culture of the British Atlantic world. Although historians have written more about Freemasonry between 1720 and 1800 than any other period and added significantly to our understanding of the relationship between Masonry and politics, they have seemed too eager to see Freemasonry as either fundamentally conservative or fundamentally radical. Examining English Freemasonry in the second half of the eighteenth century, John Money, for example, argues that the brotherhood was a “major agent” in the process by which “the varied potential elements of loyalism at the grass roots [were] drawn together in a single chorus of national devotion to the Crown.” H. T. Dickinson, on the other 21