The Shadow of Solomon: The Lost Secret of the Freemasons Revealed

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.

Newton’s religious leaning was distinctly Arian, a form of early Christianity which rejected any concept of the Holy Trinity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

5 Power and Politics (#ulink_5673cea9-fb9f-5e9e-b6e0-9f07d509a8d9)

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 used as an alternative to ‘non-operative’. Freemasons use a system of signs, tokens and passwords in accordance with medieval masonic practice, and the Great Lights and working tools of lodges include various implements associated with architectural design and building: compasses (dividers), a setsquare, a ruler (called a 24-inch gauge), a plumb line and so forth. But that really is about as far as lodge-working goes in symbolic stonemasonry terms, apart from allegorical representations to alignment, rectitude and perfection in life as they might be construed in practical building.

It is only since the 18th century that the term ‘speculative’ has fallen into common masonic use since its inclusion in a letter from the Deputy Grand Master of the premier Grand Lodge in London to a colleague at The Hague on 12 July 1757. Significantly, however, an earlier building trade publication in 1703 had used the term in a very specific way, explaining:

Some ingenious workmen understand the speculative part of architecture or building. But of these knowing sort of artificers there are few because few workmen look any further than the mechanical, practick or working part of architecture; not regarding the mathematical or speculative part of building.

In architectural terms, a building is speculative before it becomes a physical reality. That is to say, when it is the province of the speculator—the architect—rather than the builder. At that stage, when at the drawing board, the architect is free of the masonry, but must have knowledge of all the operative practicalities. This includes not just an awareness of stone and building materials, but also the scientific aspects of stresses, strains and other such matters. The true free-mason is therefore the architect, just as Hiram was the architect for King Solomon’s Temple, while in a broader sense the Supreme Being of Freemasonry is defined as the Great Architect of the Universe.

Historically, architects and surveyors have often been practical builders too, and have certainly operated as site overseers or masters of works. In this sense, speculative masons are not, therefore, a product of modern symbolic Freemasonry. Back in 1620, when operative members were ‘admitted’ into the Worshipful Company of Masons of the City of London, it was stated that speculative mem bers were also ‘accepted’.

When considering the furniture and tools of Freemasonry, their scope moves from the compasses of the architect to the trowel of the artisan, with the compasses and square being two of the Three Great Lights along with the volume of Sacred Law. In the 18th-century, William Blake portrayed the Great Architect with his compasses in his depictions of the Ancient of Days (see plate 1), but this was not a newly contrived image. The French illuminated Bible Moralisée used the same theme back in 1245 (see page 236), as did the vernacular encyclopedia, Li Livres dou Tresor, by Dante Alighieri’s mentor, Brunetto Latini, from the same era.

Greatly admired by Isaac Newton was the Rosicrucian alchemist Michael Mair (b. 1566), physician to the German Emperor Rudolph II and a colleague in England of Robert Fludd. His book Atlanta Fugiens became one of the earliest textual models for the Royal Society.

In this work, Mair introduced the image of a master mason using compasses to prepare the architecture of the Philosophers’ Stone as described in the Rosary of the Philosophers

—the Rosarium Philosophorum:

Make a round circle of the man and the woman, and draw out of this a square, and out of the square a triangle. Make a round circle, and you will have the stone of the philosophers.

For his symbol of London’s rebirth from the fire, Christopher Wren selected the phoenix—the mythical bird which rose from the ashes in a blaze of new enlightenment. The great phoenix effigy which commands the south portico pediment of St Paul’s Cathedral was carved by the Danish sculptor Caius Cibber, who also produced the distinctly masonic plaque at the base of the Monument. This image shows London as a collapsed and grieving woman,

holding the sword of the City (see plate 32). Accompanying her is the figure of Expedition and some citizens, with the buildings aflame behind them. To the right of the plaque, the masons construct the new city, while Envy skulks in the gutter below. Peace and Plenty survey the scene from above, and King Charles II approaches (wearing Roman attire), along with Justice, Victory and Fortitude. Central to the scene is Natural Science, accompanied by Liberty and Architecture who carries the requisite square and compasses.

And between the figures of London and Natural Science there is a beehive.

Not only are bees the biblical creature most associated with King Solomon, the beehive is also a recognizable emblem of Freemasonry, and it denotes industry. Honeycomb, being constructed of hexagonal prisms, was considered by philosophers to be the manifestation of divine harmony in nature, and bees have always been associated with insight and wisdom, as defined in the Proverbs of Solomon 24:13-14:

My son, eat thou honey, because it is good…So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul.

The hexagon is formed by dividing the circumference of a circle by chords equivalent to its radius. This produces a figure of six equal straight sides, as found in the cells of some organic life. Consequently, bees were held to be endowed with geometrical forethought, employing strength with economy of space as their guiding principles. King Solomon’s Seal (two interlaced equilateral triangles within a circle) incorporates a natural hexagon, and the resultant hexagram symbolically denotes the unity (if not the harmony) of opposites: male and female, fire and water, hot and cold, earth and air, and so on. The bee was also a traditional device of the Royal House of Stuart, and is often seen engraved as a distinguishing mark of Jacobite glassware.

To the early Merovingian Kings of the Franks (AD 451-751),

King Solomon was the model of earthly kingship, and the bee was a most hallowed creature. When the grave of the 5th-century King Childeric I was unearthed in 1653, some 300 small golden bees were found stitched to his cloak. Emperor Napoleon I Bonaparte had these attached to his own coronation robe in 1804—claiming his right by virtue of a family descent from James de Rohan-Stuardo, the natural son (legitimized 1677) of Charles II Stuart of Britain by Marguerite, Duchesse de Rohan. In modern Freemasonry, the beehive is used as an emblem of industry, bonding and mutual service.

The New Foundation

Following the death of Sir Christopher Wren in 1723, those at the forefront of Hanoverian Freemasonry began to formulate an historical backdrop for their evolving, non-operative Craft. Such things as tolerance and benevolence were cemented as objectives, while signs and tokens were established, along with the aim of building a socially aware community. There was little similarity between this and the more scientific or architecturally based movements whose format they endeavoured to emulate, but a convenient biblical metaphor was to hand—the building of Solomon’s Temple. By way of allegory and symbolism, the methods of the Hiramic masons of Jerusalem could be used as emblematic models for building an exemplary Craft culture—and within such a framework it was logical enough to adopt the guise of a stonemasons’ guild. That apart, there does appear to have been some friction at the outset between the premier Grand Lodge and the operative trade guilds with which they sought alignment, but this was soon overcome.

This seems to have been effected by enticing high-ranking nobility into the fold, with John, 2nd Duke of Montagu accepting the Grand Mastership in 1721, followed by Philip, Duke of Wharton on 17 January 1723.

Only from that date were any Minutes kept of the meetings. Anderson’s first Constitutions were officially sanctioned, and it was determined that new lodges could only be considered ‘Regular ‘ (legitimate) if they were constituted by the Grand Master or an appointed deputy. So, in spite of the initial socially-minded objectives, the first real moves in the process of establishing an institute of fraternal ‘equality’ were actually the denial of freedom in the field, and the creation of a dictatorial hierarchy! In parallel, much the same was happening within the confines of the Royal Society as it became more bureaucratic and exacting in the Georgian style.

Although installed as King of Britain in 1714, George I openly mistrusted the English since they had already rid themselves 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.

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),

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.

In 1752, Charles stayed at Westbrook House in Godalming, Surrey, with Eleanor Oglethorpe,

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, Beaufort

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.