Judaized Scots, Jacobite Jews, and the Development of Cabalistic Freemasonry
Marsha Keith Schuchard, Ph.D.
Revision of Paper Presented at Symposium on “Western Esotericism and Jewish Mysticism,” 18th International Congress of International Association for History of Religions (Durban, South Africa, August 2000).
The following quotations, which span seven centuries, point to an ancient and enduring tradition that identified operative stonemasons and Scottish Freemasons as Jews. Moreover, their “craft” was a mixture of technology and magic, as developed in the esoteric teachings of the architects and builders of the Temple in Jerusalem and preserved by the kings of Scotland. The appearance of such claims in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political and Masonic literature has long puzzled scholars, who must explore murky oral traditions and anachronistic documents in their search for historical context and credibility. However, two overlooked keys to this mystery lie in the history of Jewish architectural technology and the medieval foundation-myths of Scottish nationalism. By examining the historical context of these quotes, we can begin to understand the international emergence of “higher degrees” of Cabalistic mysticism in the Écossais Masonic lodges that wielded such a mysterious and powerful influence on the culture of the “enlightened” eighteenth and “progressive” nineteenth-centuries.
The occupation of mason is the exclusive preserve of the Jews.
— Al-Bakri, Description of North Africa (1068).1The first Christian Prince that expelled the Jews out of his territories, was that heroick King, our Edward the First, who was such a scourge also to the Scots; and it is thought diverse families of these banished Jews fled then [1290] to Scotland, where they have propagated since in great numbers; witness the aversion that nation hath above all others to hogs-flesh.
— James Howell, History of the Latter Times of the Jews (1653).2And after many days Charles did reign in ye land and lo his blood was spilled upon ye earth by ye traitor Cromwell. Behold now ye return of pleasant [illegible] for doth not ye Son of ye blessed Martyr rule over ye whole land. Long may he reign in ye land and govern ye Craft. Is it not written ye shall not hurt ye Lords anointed.
— Thomas Treloar, MS. “Ye History of Masonry” (1665).3Some likewise say our Masons now
Do circumcision undergo,
For Masonry’s a Jewish Custom. . .
— The Free Masons: An Hudibrastick Poem (1723).4The Branch of the Lodge of Solomon’s Temple, afterwards called the Lodge of St. John of Jerusalem, is as I can easily prove, the Antientist and Purest now on Earth. The famous old Scottish Lodge of Kilwinning of which all the Kings of Scotland have been from Time to Time Grand Masters without Interruption down from the days of Fergus . . . [who] was carefully instructed in all the Arts and Sciences, especially in the natural Magick, and the Caballistical Philosophy (afterwards called the Rosecrution) . . . Speaking of the Cabala, as Masonry was call’d in those days.
— Jonathan Swift, Letter from the Grand Mistress of the Female Free-Masons (1724).5Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from the beginning to the end, with the exception of only one by-degree and a few words in the obligation . . . The beauty and pride of Masonry is its universal character, its tendency to fraternize mankind.
— Rabbi Isaac Wise, Scottish Rite Mason, The Israelite (1855).6
Since the discovery in 1941 of the eleventh-century Jewish origins of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, revisionist historians have transformed our knowledge of the participation of medieval Jews in architecture, technology, mathematics, and science, not only in Palestine but throughout the Hebrew Diaspora.7 At the same time, revisionist historians of Scotland and the Stuart Diaspora have forced us to re-examine the role of the Stuart kings as agents of scientific enlightenment and religious toleration, who utilized Freemasonry as a vehicle for their Solomonic culture and dynastic preservation.8 The identification of Scots with Jews emerged most strikingly in the fourteenth-century, when Scotland fought for national survival against her southern enemies in England.9 The identification was reinforced by an accident of geology—the abundance of hewable stone for monumental building—in Palestine and Scotland, which led to similar techniques of architecture and construction.
Modern historians of Jewish architecture and technology have overturned the conventional wisdom that the Jews of the Diaspora did not participate in artisan crafts or building projects. According to Baron and Wischnitzer, Jews dominated the building trades of the Middle East, North Africa, and southern Europe, where they controlled the stone quarries and utilized sophisticated techniques of stone-cutting, mathematical analysis, and architectural design.10 In 568 Cosmas Indicopleustes, a widely-travelled Christian merchant from Alexandria, praised the God-given architectural skills of the Jews who constructed the Tabernacle, adding that “up to this very day most of these arts [of building] are most zealously cultivated among the Jews.”11 Other Christians described the flourishing crafts of the Jews of Alexandria, especially in stonemasonry, woodcarving, and metalworking.12 Wischnitzer further argues that Jewish handicraftsmen brought “the idea of the guild” from the near East and that Jewish guilds played a vital role in the transmission of crafts within the Byzantine Empire.13
During this period of Jewish masonic-craft transmission, there was also a proliferation of Jewish mystical fraternities, who developed a visionary theosophy centered on the building of Solomon’s Temple. The seminal work of this movement, the Sepher Yetzirah (ca. 3rd century) revealed an architectural mysticism based on disciplined techniques of meditation. As Idel explains, the mystical language of the Sepher Yetzirah has a “masonic” function, for the letters and words serve as building blocks:
Letters are regarded as stones, as full-fledged entities, as components intended to build up an edifice of words to serve as a temple for God and a place of encountering Him for the Mystic. After the Temple was destroyed . . . man is supposed to rebuild the Temple in his ritual use of language . . . . The “masonic” aspects of the divine and human activity reveal a hidden and mighty dimension of the Hebrew letters . . . [which enable] operations that can bridge the gap between the human—or the material—and the divine.14
The Hebrew letters also had numerical correspondences, and the complex linguistic-numerical computations of the Sepher Yetzirah became relevant to the mathematical skills of architects and masons. Imitating God’s creative process, the adept undertakes a “masonic” process of letter-number combination, meditation, and visualization: “Twenty-two letters are the foundation: He engraved them, He hewed them out . . . and He formed through them everything that is formed.”15 From the foundation stone, He engraved out “a kind of furrow,” and “He raised it like a kind of wall. He surrounded it with a kind of ceiling.” He then “hewed out great columns from Air which is not tangible.” Each stone represents a process of Gematria which stimulates abstruse intellectual calculations. The intense concentration, combined with regulated breathing, could put the adept in a state of trance, as he rebuilt the visionary Temple:
Two stones build two houses,
Three stones build six houses,
Four stones build twenty-four houses,
Six stones build one hundred and twenty houses,
Seven stones build five thousand and forty houses.
From here on go out and think what the mouth is unable to speak, and the ear is unable to hear.16
The great significance of the Sepher Yetzirah to both Jewish and Christian masonic traditions lies in this interpretation of meditation techniques in terms drawn from operative masonry. Kaplan notes that “the Hebrew letters can be used as a powerful means of drawing down spiritual energy,” especially through the technique of “holding an image in the mind’s eye”:
the Sefer Yetzirah refers to two processes in depicting the letters, “engraving” (chakikah) and “hewing” (chatzivah) . . . The term “engraving” denotes fixing an image in the mind’s eye so that it does not waver or move . . . when the image is clear and steady—”engraved”—in the mind, as it were—it is usually surrounded by other images. The next step is to isolate it and rid the mind’s eye of all other imagery. This is known as “hewing” or chatzivah. The analogy is to hewing out a stone from the surrounding rock. The process consists in designating the desired stone and then hewing away all extraneous imagery surrounding the desired form.17
Blumenthal’s startling computer analysis of the “masonic” Gematria process of meditation—based on the incantation, “He put them in order like a kind of wall”—reveals that the letters and their numerical equivalents actually form a pictorial wall when printed out from the computer.18 Similarly, the computer prints out the Gematria of “He made them like a kind of sunset” as a picture of a radiating sunset.
This mystical capacity to visualize the architectural and pictorial expression of complex mathematical and geometrical speculation became associated with the practical expertise of the architect and master mason. In the schools of Merkabah mysticism, Jewish adepts increasingly portrayed Solomon as an architetural magus and his master mason Bezalel as a craftsman magus, initiated in the secrets of the Sepher Yetzirah. Thus, “Bezalel knew how to combine the letters by which heavens and earth were formed,” while he and his Merkabah heirs could visualize and manipulate the “measure of the body” of God (called the Shi’ur Komah).19 At a time when Christian church architecture was beginning to develop from its Jewish Temple and synagogue roots, there was cross-cultural interest in Hebraic architectural mysticism.20
In the fifth century, at the unusual dedication of a church at Tyre, Eusebius expressed his awe at the Christian builder, whom he portrayed as a new Bezalel, Solomon, and Zerobabbel:
[The builder] doth in no way fall behind that Bezalel, whom God himself filled with the spirit of wisdom and understanding and with the knowledge of the crafts and sciences, and called him to be the workman that constructs the temple of heavenly types in symbolic fashion.21
In the sixth century, Cosmas Indicopleustes not only admired the Jews’ construction skills but he shared the doctrines of cosmic architecture advanced in the Sepher Yetzirah and other Jewish esoteric works.22 Kretchmar suggests that “pattern books,” as well as oral instruction, were involved in the transmission of Jewish architectural symbolism to early Christian builders, who participated in craft exchanges.23
With the spread of Islam, the pattern of sectarian warfare was occasionally broken by periods of toleration in Moslem-controlled territories, when there was much interchange between Moslem, Jewish, and Christian architects and masons, who developed shared guild traditions of Solomon as magical architect of the Temple.24 In the tenth century, the Sufi “Brethren of Sincerity,” an esoteric religious fraternity of craftsmen, affirmed the Jewish origins of philosophy and science, and they assimilated Merkabah meditation techniques and Solomonic Temple mysticism into their guild teachings.25 Like the Jewish mystics, the brethren used Gematria, by which they made identical the Arabic words for architect, geometer, and point or dot (muhandis)—a magical process which revealed the secrets of the Prime Builder.26 This mystical architectural terminology was taught through a dialogue between the Sufi master and his apprentice, while the initiatory relationship was patterned on that of the craft guilds. Trimingham notes that,
As the latter had a grandmaster and a hierarchy of apprentices, companions, and master-craftsmen, so the religious orders acquired a hierarchy of novices, initiates, and masters. Since legal Islam tolerated the secret character implications of the act of allegiance to the shaik-at-tariqa [master of the guild] when Shi’i practice was maintained.27
Shah sees the origin of Gothic and modern Freemasonry in these Sufi fraternities and, though his argument seems overly-simplistic, the development of Moslem mystical-craft fraternity certainly bears striking similarities to those of later Christian Freemasons.28 Sarton’s more cautious summary of the Moslem guilds can almost be read as a capsule definition of the later Masonic orders:
They are always real fraternities . . . they have strong mystical tendencies; they attach great importance to their peculiar traditions and rites, which may be strange, complicated, moving, beautiful. They manage to combine the most mulish obscurantism in certain matters with liberalism in others, or rather receptiveness to erratic ideas, unpopular outside the tariqa [guild] . . . . they often obtained considerable popularity, influence, and power. Their power might become political, even military . . . 29
From the ninth through twelfth centuries, the esoteric traditions of Jewish and Moslem mystical fraternities gradually penetrated Christian Europe in a mixed Judeo-Arabic form. When Christian scholars tried to gain access to the “lost” mathematical and scientific works of the Greeks and Romans, they often relied upon Hebrew translators of Arabic versions, which included Jewish and Moslem mystical elaborations.30 Because orthodox officials of all three religions tended to scorn the study of mathematics and natural science as leading to forbidden magic and heresy, the building guilds—for whom such study was necessary to their craft technology—strengthened their traditions of oath-bound secrecy. However, study in the natural sciences and mathematics led some heterodox Jews in southern Spain to affirm that physical beauty and erotic desire were esoteric emblems of divine nature, which should be expressed exoterically in the mathematical and geometrical emblems of Solomonic architecture. They felt free to defy the Biblical injunction against graven images, because Solomon, “the builder of fabled palaces and temples” was the “Biblical champion of these heresies.”31
In eleventh-century Granada, under a tolerant Moslem government, the Jewish Naghralla family drew on the esoteric lore of the Sepher Yetzirah to create a new “symbolistic architecture,” which expressed their dream of “an imminent re-establishment of a Solomonic kingdom of art, wisdom, and power.”32 The “Jewish Alhambra” featured spectacular stone carvings, pointed arches, rotating glass dome, and stained glass windows, which revealed the pre-eminent expertise of its Jewish architects, masons, and glaziers, who contributed skills developed in the Middle East and North Africa. When the Naghrallas’ contemporary, Al-Bakri, observed that in Morocco “the occupation of masonry is the exclusive preserve of the Jews,” he added that these masons carried their skills to all countries of the world, especially into Spain, where his own participation in the “Solomonic renaissance” earned him the name of “the Cordovan.”33 During this period of Spanish “enlightenment,” Christian and Jewish craftsmen were allowed to join Moslem guilds, and their possible participation in the Alhambra project is especially provocative because of the surprisingly proto-Gothic designs in the palace.34
According to the Naghralla’s poetic spokesmen, Solomon ibn Gabirol, the father was a new Solomon and the son a new Hiram of Tyre, “the father of all inventors,” who “wrought all the works of the House of God.”35 Ibn Gabirol’s poetry of architectural mysticism drew on the Sepher Yetzirah, and it became a significant influence on medieval Christian philosophers—who eventually believed that he was an Arabic philosopher, known as “Avicebron.”36
One Christian student of this Avicebronist synthesis was Michael Scot (fl.1217-40), who left his native Scotland to study with Jews and Arabs in Toledo, Spain, where he incorporated the number symbolism of the Sepher Yetzirah into his mathematical, astronomical, and linguistic theories.37 Moving to Sicily, Scot worked with the Jewish savant Jacob ben Anatoli on Latin translations of Aristotle, Maimonides, and other non-Christian philosophers. Newman characterizes the friendship between Scot and Anatoli as “one of the most significant in medieval thought.”38 Fascinatated by Solomonic traditions, Scot gained access to Jewish and Arabic mystical works on mathematics, magic, and alchemy.
After consulting with the Grand Master of the Templars, the heterodox Emperor Frederick II asked Scot to accompany him to Jerusalem, where he won the peaceful surrender of the city by promising religious toleration to the Jewish and Moslem inhabitants. Scot made notes on his observations in Palestine, and when he returned to Scotland circa 1230, he brought with him a unique knowledge of Jewish, Moslem, and Crusader lore. Faivre stresses Scot’s seminal role in transmitting Arabic theosophical methods to the West, especially the “distinction between esotericism and exotericism, the complementary nature of which can be understood thanks to a spiritual exegesis, the ta’wil.”39 A tradition developed in Scotland that Scot also brought back architectural skills, which he used to build a great stone bridge across the Tweed. In the nineteenth century, when Sir Walter Scott, an active Freemason, described “auld Michael” as a Scottish patriot, Cabalistic magician, and “infernal architect,” he drew on earlier fraternal lore.40
In the thirteenth century, the conception of “sublimated matter,” advocated by Avicebron and expressed in Hebrew mystical poetry, was viewed as subversive to Catholic teaching by Thomas Aquinas, who also chastized the Gothic “architects who call themselves sages” for similar heresies.41 However, another Scottish scholar, John Duns Scotus, imitated Michael Scot and left his northern homeland in search of Hebrew and Arabic learning. In Paris he studied with Jewish instructors and became a great admirer of Jewish mathematical and mystical learning. In De Rerum Principio, Duns Scotus declared that he wished to return to the standpoint of Avicebron, in direct contrast to Aquinas, and his writings in turn influenced Jewish philosophical thought.42 His development of a theory of “living stones” drew on the architectural mysticism of his Jewish mentors.43
In Spain, once the scene of multi-cultural mystical and architectural exchange, the tolerant Naghralla era ended in violent persecution, which forced many Jewish masons to migrate north. According to Baron, they brought Palestinian stone technology to northern France and Britain, where they employed Christian labor and instructed them in their techniques.44 In Angevin England (1066-1290), Jews designed and built palatial stone houses, whose fortress-like quality imitated that of the Jerusalem Temple.45 In York wealthy Jews contributed to the cathedral building fund and influenced the unusual design of the stained glass window of the north transept. Often called the “Jewish Window,” it featured geometrical patterns consistent with the Old Testament prohibition of graven images and reflected “a Jewish connection with the window’s origin.”46 The Jewish relationship with the craftsmen who built York is further illustrated by the Jesse Window, which includes a Seal of Solomon enclosing an all-seeing eye and mason’s compass. That fragments of the traditional lore of the Jewish guilds were preserved by Christian masons is revealed in a surviving English document of operative masonry, the Cooke MS. (ca. 1400), in which the scribe drew on the Sepher Yetzirah and extra-Biblical Jewish sources when he described the origins and development of the craft.47
The Jewish-Christian masonic synthesis flourished during rare periods of toleration, but it also developed during the intolerant Crusades, when knights from Scotland, England, France, and other Christian kingdoms observed, analysed, and sketched the great stone palaces and fortifications that Jews and Moslems had built in the Middle East. The Knights Templar assimilated Eastern design and technology into their enormous fortified castles, and in Jerusalem their efforts provoked the admiration of the Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela (ca. 1170).48 In Spain the Templars employed Jewish surveyors and “geometricians,” such as Abraham Bar Hiyya and the Cavalleria family, who were familiar with Solomonic architectural mysticism.49 In order to attract donations for their architectural projects, the knights publicized throughout Europe the immense resources that they poured into the construction and maintenance of fortresses.50 Detailed accounts of the building of the great “Castle Pilgrim” at Acre were sent home and published, and the Templar as architect-in-stone became a fixture in the popular imagination.
In England especially the Templars used architecture as a “visual aid” to impress the populace by their “direct connection with Jerusalem,” which they expressed in the round church built in London in 1185.51 The design was based on the Dome of the Rock (a mosque), which they believed was the plan of Solomon’s Temple—a belief long preserved in English annals and building archives. In 1615, when an English scholar presented a favorable report on the Templars to King James VI and I, he stressed that the surviving documents of the medieval masons showed that the knights were so devoted “to the most holy and famous Temple of Jerusalem” that their architect designed the church to “look like a Jewish temple or synagogue.”52 This report was especially interesting to James, an initiated Freemason, who pursued a Solomonic building program.53
After the construction of their “Jewish” church, the Templars continued to have a significant influence on operative masonry in England. In 1271 the future Edward I visited Palestine, where he collaborated with the Grand Master of the Templars; on his return, he determined to build Templar-style castles as part of his secret plan to first fortify London and then conquer Wales and Scotland. He ordered his Keeper of the Works to “manage” the craftsmen and to “extract money from reluctant Jews” to help finance his architectural projects.54 Like his father, Edward made the Templars guardians of the royal treasury, and they also held “the tallage of London and of the Jews”; thus, the knights were involved in these masonic-Jewish negotiations. Closely affiliated with the Templars was the crusading Order of St. Thomas of Acre, and Edward I employed “Brother John” of St. Thomas as Master of the King’s Works.55 An operative mason who worked with the Keeper of Works and the master mason, John was given responsiblity over the Tower, Westminster Palace, and King’s Mews.
Heisler argues that Brother John’s architectural expertise came from his experience in the near East, where his order carried out ambitious building projects in Acre, Tyre, and Cyprus.56 Acre served as a center for Christian and Jewish pilgrims to Jerusalem, and it gave refuge to hundreds of rabbis from England and France.57 The city had a flourishing artisan culture, and it attracted Jewish scholars and theosophers, such as the great Cabalist Abraham Abulafia (1240-after 1292), who merged the meditation techniques of the Sepher Yetzirah with those of Sufi and Christian mystics to develop a complex, methodical technique for achieving a visionary marriage with the Shekinah, an experience of psycho-erotic ecstasy.58 Abulafia reached out to Christians and even hoped to convert the Pope to his Cabalistic theosophy. His efforts resulted in the apostasy to Christianity of some of his followers, and it is possible that Abulafian interpretations of the Sepher Yetzirah influenced the architectural mysticism of Christian as well as Jewish masons.
Meanwhile, Brother John continued his masonic labors in London until 1297, and over the next hundred years his order would receive bequests from masonic guilds. A document from 1389 reveals that an operative mason, William Hancock, left a bequest to the “Fraternity of Masons, London, founded at St. Thomas of Acre.” Williams notes that this is “the first known mention of a Gild of Masons in the City of London.”59 Unfortunately, it is unknown if the Knights of St. Thomas were similarly engaged on architectural projects in Scotland. Certainly, they had been active in the northern kingdom since the early twelfth century, when Alan the Steward granted lands to the order in his family’s domains at Ayrshire.60 That Alan allegedly went on the Third Crusade to recover Jerusalem in 1190 makes his patronage of St. Thomas provocative, because his descendants would later become founders of the Stewart dynasty.
Through most of the thirteenth century, England and Scotland maintained peaceful relations, and they shared similar guild traditions among operative masons. However, a complicated succession dispute in Scotland in the 1290’s led to Edward I’s invasion of the vulnerable kingdom. Edward had used his Templar-Palestinian techniques in the construction of great stone castles in order to maintain his military occupation of Wales. Though he built similar fortifications along the border with Scotland, he was unable to impress enough Scottish masons to implement this policy throughout the turbulent countryside.61 When Sir William Wallace raised a popular rebellion against the occupying English forces, he was aided by the prophecies of the “second-sighted” bard Thomas the Rhymer, whose political and military pre-cognition became part of Scottish patriotic and masonic legend.62 Rhymer’s prophecies were subsequently embellished with Solomonic imagery which portrayed future Scottish kings marching into Jerusalem.
This development was possibly associated with the increasingly public identification of nationalistic Scots with the Jews of the Old Testament—an identification that many believed was reinforced by blood relation. From the eleventh century, Scots prided themselves on their racial descent from the ancient Eygptians of Mosaic times. According to their national founding myth, a spirited young Greek named Gathelus joined Moses’s army in Egypt, when Moses defended the Pharaoh from invading Moors and Indians.63 After Moses fell into disfavor, Gathelus became leader of the Egyptian army and married Pharaoh’s daughter, Scota. However, Moses was friendly with the young couple, and he gave them the Stone of Destiny (or Jacob’s Pillow), which they carried to Spain, Ireland, and finally Scotland, where it became the coronation stone for Scottish kings. The stone’s connection with Jacob’s visions fed into Scottish traditions of second sight and bardic prophecy. For early Christian writers, Scotland’s conversion to Christianity was consistent with this Egyptian-Mosaic heritage, and they stressed the Jewish origins of St. Andrew, their founding saint. By the early twelfth century, the Scottish king David I (close friend of the first Grand Master of the Templars and major employer of the knights) was portrayed by an English chronicler as a descendant of the Biblical David, whose royal image as patron of temple-church building he reflected.64 Elaborating on these Jewish roots, Scottish writers would proclaim David I’s descent from Japhet, son of Noah.
These nationalistic traditions became acutely relevant in the 1290’s, when the English army threatened Scotland’s survival as an independent kingdom. Moreover, since Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, rumors circulated that many Jews escaped to Scotland, beyond the reach of English law, and merged into the local population. These charges of ancient and current blood-kinship with the Jews were repeated and elaborated over the next centuries by Scotland’s critics and enemies.65 Unfortunately, because of Edward’s policy of destruction of Scottish archives and records (an early example of “cultural genocide”), there is little surviving documentation to substantiate the oral tradition of this Jewish migration. If Scotland did provide refuge to Jews from England, it may explain the increasing identification of nationalists with the Maccabees, which crystalized around Wallace’s movement.
In the Books of the Maccabees, the stirring story of Mattathias and his sons, who refused to submit to the Syrian king Antiochus when he ordered the Jews to forsake their ancestral laws and religion (in 169 B.C.), bore startling parallels with the situation of Wallace and his partisans. The Maccabean saga was now merged with the Eygptian story of Gathelus and Scota.66 Thus, Gathelus, portrayed as Moses’s confidante, led the way for Mattathias, as the Scottish patriots resisted the imposition of a foreign reign and religion. Moreover, the Scots identified their national church with the Temple in Jerusalem, which Antiochus had sacked and defiled. In 1301 the Scottish envoys to the Papal court affirmed their Egyptian-Hebraic heritage (with Scota herself carrying the Stone of Destiny to Scotland).67 They condemned Edward I because, “Like Antiochus he defiled despotically with sacreligious recklessness its *Scotland’s] church with abominations of various kinds.”68
After Wallace’s capture and execution in 1305, Robert the Bruce’s seizure of the throne in 1306, and Edward I’s death in 1307, Scottish historical traditions were increasingly mocked by the English. In London, when balladeers boasted of the late King Edward’s military conquest and theft of the Stone of Destiny, they repeated the Scottish envoys’ claim about its origin:
In Egypt Moses preached to the people. Scota, Pharaoh’s daughter, listened well, for he said in the spirit, “Whoso will possess this stone, shall be the conqueror of a very far-off land.”
Gaidelon and Scota brought this stone, when they passed from the land of Egypt to Scotland . . . 69
The linking of the Stone with Moses’s prophetic trance state (“he said in the spirit”) revealed accretions to the myth which stressed the Scots’ nationalistic claims to visionary expertise.70
In the continuing struggle against Edward II, Robert the Bruce took up the role of Judas Maccabeus, son of Mattathias, who not only fought the foreign troops but those apostates from Judaism who collaborated with Antiochus. Judas “raised a mixed force of believers and seasoned fighters,” who “made a sudden sally” against the much larger enemy and achieved a spectacular victory.71 Judas and his brothers then reclaimed and purified the Temple. According to another murky but persistent tradition, Bruce gained the secret assistance of a band of Knights Templar, who escaped from England and who contributed their Saracenic tactics of sudden sallies from behind the lines.72 Like the Scots, the Templars—exiled from Jerusalem, France, and England—identified with the Maccabees, who fought to preserve a covenanted land and sacred Temple. Before the battle of Nazareth in 1187, one Templar exhorted his men to “Remember your fathers the Maccabees,” who overcame the enemy not by force of numbers but by faith and observing God’s mandates.73
After Bruce defeated the English at Bannockburn in 1314, the Scots still labored to prove the antiquity and independence of their kingdom. Thus, a group of nobles gathered in 1320 and produced the Declaration of Arbroath, which compared the Jewish and Scottish experience as “chosen people,” including their migration from Egypt, their suffering under treacherous foreign kings, and their heroic defense of their ancestral laws and religion.74 The defiance of Robert the Bruce, who “like another Joshua or Maccabeus,” saved “the laws and customs of the kingdom (which we will defend till death).” It was probably during this period that the Scottish antipathy to pork—the unclean food that Antiochus tried to force the Maccabeans to eat—became entrenched in the nation’s mores.75
As King Robert I, Bruce recognized the critical role of operative masonry in Scotland’s survival. Like Joshua, he tore down the walls of fortresses built by English troops of occupation.76 Like Maccabeus, he strengthened the stone work of native homes and castles. He also exerted control over the Templars, who were merged with the Knights of St. John of the Hospital, to ensure that they could not serve an English king against the Scots.77 The local masons now gained access to the knights’ expertise in Eastern or Palestinian methods of quarrying, designing, hewing, and setting stone—skills which became part of the Egyptian-Jewish heritage of the nationalists. Surviving tombstones over the next decades reveal a profusion of Templar and masonic emblems, with many repeating motifs carved into the great Templar castle at Athlit, near Acre.78
In 1291 both Acre and Athlit had fallen to the Moslems, despite the “stupendous fortifications” and stubborn defenses mounted by the Knights of St. Thomas, the Templars, and a mixed force of Jews and Christians.79 In his Chronography, the Jewish traveller Bar Hebraeus gave a positive description of the Templars and Hospitallers and their great edifices at Acre, and his continuator lamented the loss of the fortified city.80 There is evidence of refugee knights reaching London and, given Edward I’s recent expulsion of the Jews, it is quite possible that their Jewish comrades moved on to Scotland. At least two Scottish Templars managed to flee Athlit, but one, “Robert le Scot” was later arrested by Edward II in England.81 At the London trials of the Templars, the knights revealed that many of their brethren had escaped to the northern kingdom. Thus, a transmission of masonic lore from Athlit to Scotland is historically plausible. Moreover, it may have had Jewish accretions from the earlier collaboration of Jews and knights in Palestine.
Over the next decades, the histories of Scottish and English architecture and masonry took divergent paths, as the Bruces and their Stewart successors drew on Continental designs and made stonemasonry an expression of national independence.82 When the English king Edward III invaded Scotland in 1338, he employed an official called “the king’s Free-Mason,” one of the earliest known uses of the term. However, his attempt to impress Scottish masons to work under English supervisors was stubbornly resisted, and the Scots’ lack of cooperation meant that he could not build castles of occupation.83 From that time on, the policy of impressment of masons—forced labor—was rarely if ever implemented by Scottish kings. After Edward was driven out of Scotland, he faced a rebellion of operative masons in London, who in 1348 went on strike and defied his impressment orders. Over the next twelve years, coercive regulations were imposed on the masons, who were forbidden to meet in assemblies, take fraternal oaths, or resist impressment (resisters had the letter “F” burned on their foreheads).84 Antagonism between the craftsmen and their royal masters continued to erupt in London over the next two centuries, while in Scotland the masons were treated as valuable allies of the kings and patriotic defenders of the realm.
Scotland’s close ties with France (the “auld alliance”) resulted in an exchange of domestic and military masons, who were employed on Robert II’s extensive building program. This first Stewart king made the years 1371-1424 “the most seminally creative in the history of Scottish Gothic architecture.”85 During this period, France—unlike England—had readmitted the Jews, and scholarly and artisan contacts were resumed between the religious communities.86 In Scotland, nationalists were encouraged to proclaim anew their Judaic heritage, as in John Barbour’s romance of The Bruce (1375). Thus, Barbour portrayed Bruce’s partisans as “simple folk and worthy,” who
. . . like to the Maccabees,
That, as men in the bible says,
Through their great worship and valour,
Fought in-to many stalwart stour [battle],
For to deliver their country
From folk that, through iniquity,
Held them and their’s in vassalage . . . 87
Barbour also boasted that the Scots shared the Jews’ capacity for “second sight,” which contributed to their victories over the English.88 As we shall see, the capacity for “second sight” would later be claimed as a masonic expertise, and the seventeenth-century tradition may have drawn on earlier developments in Scottish theosophy and architecture.89
At his accession in 1424, King James I launched an ambitious architectural program, in which he recruited masons from the Continent to help train a new generation of builders, because so many Scottish craftsmen had been killed in the wars with England. The chronicler Hector Boece suggested that he was responsible for the revival of masonry as an organized activity, thus giving an early hint of the traditional link between the Stewart dynasty and the masonic fraternity.90 Moreover, the king planned to use architecture to regenerate Scotland both spiritually and materially. In a pattern that would be repeated by his successors, the king took an active interest in the construction projects, held discussions with the craftsmen and, in effect, stood “on the level” with his masons.
In 1429 James I oversaw the building of a great Charterhouse at Perth, and the mystical architecture, magical mathematics, and multi-national masons would later be eulogized by Henry Adamson in The Muses Threnodie (1638).91 Adamson praised the king for studying pattern books and models from many countries, thus re-enacting the role of the Hebraic David and Scottish David I, whose zeal for Temple and church design were said to be identical. In 1738, when the Masonic historian James Anderson characterised James I as “the best King of Scotland,” who “countenanced the Lodges with his presence as the Royal Grand Master,” he added a marginal note, “This is the Tradition of the old Scottish Masons, and found in their records.”92 Though the term Grand Master was probably anachronistic, the tradition was based on James I’s real contributions to architecture and the masonic craft.
The chronicler Walter Bower was haunted by the political assassination of James I, and he lamented that the king did not copy the practice of the French kings, who maintained a personal bodyguard of Scottish archers (the Garde Écossais). He thus urged future kings to follow “the wisdom of Solomon,” who was escorted by “sixty of Israel’s bravest warriors,” all carrying swords “to ward off the demons of the night.”93 Besides fighting for the king, the Scots Guard performed ceremonial duties at coronations, state entries, and royal funerals.94 In 1736 the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Jacobite Mason, would assert that “our Order” was preserved among “those Scotchmen to whom the Kings of France confided during many centuries the safeguard of their royal persons.”95 Baigent and Leigh argue, controversially, that the Scots Guard was a neo-Templar institution, which was the ancestor of the quasi-Masonic “Order of the Temple” maintained by the Scottish Seton and Montgomery families.96 An important Scottish Freemason—Sir Robert Moray—would serve as Colonel in the Scots Guard in the seventeenth century.97
During the same period when the Bruces and succeeding Stewarts developed their Solomonic and Maccabean identification, there was great interest in the Cabalistic-Lullist Art of Memory, a technique of geometric and architectural visualization that enhanced one’s mathematical and mnemonic capacity and thus provided an encyclopedic key to “all the arts and sciences.”98 Ramon Lull (1235-1316) was born in Majorca and grew up in a mixed Christian-Jewish-Moslem culture, which enabled him to study the meditation techniques of the ninth-century John Scotus Erigena (who was believed to be Scottish), Jewish Cabalists, and Moslem Sufis, which he developed into a visionary and encyclopedic ars combinatoria or Art of Memory. According to Wolfson, Erigena and certain Cabalists made study of the Sephiroth “an exercise in imaginary visualization.”99 Lull believed their techniques could enhance one’s mathematical, technological, and theosophical expertise. Influenced also by the teachings and methods of the Sufi “Brethren of Sincerity,” Lull aimed his Art not only at scholars but at craftsmen.
As Yates observes, “the Art works out the structure of the universe in terms of the circle, the triangle, and the square,” and Lull determined to make it accessible to artisans by writing simplified, illustrated versions in the vernacular, especially concerning geometry, measurement, and mechanics.100 He further hoped that these illuminated craftsmen would join similarly instructed Templars and Hospitallers in an international crusade to recover Jersualem, convert Jews and Moslems, and establish a universalist religion.101 After the French king Phillip the Fair launched his persecution of the Templars, Lull’s projects were not realized; however, they remained the dream of Lullists over the next centuries, especially in Spain and Scotland. After Lull’s death in 1316, claims were made that he had visited the British Isles in 1311 and produced alchemical gold for “King Robert,” who planned to use it for a crusade to reclaim Jerusalem.102 The story was probably apocryphal, but it does point to the strong Lullist-crusader tradition that developed in Scotland, which eventually merged with Maccabean-masonic lore. By the fifteenth century, that eclectic tradition received full architectural expression in the fantastic Gothic chapel at Roslin.
In 1446 Sir William St. Clair, whose ancestors had signed the Declaration of Arbroath and served in the Scots Guard, began constructing a great Gothic church near his castle at Roslin, which revealed his devotion to the Solomonic themes of operative masonry and the chivalric themes of the Templars.103 Later Freemasons asserted that St. Clair was appointed “Patron and Protector of Scottish Masons” by King James II and that the office became hereditary in the family.104 In 1678 an English visitor reported that this role was still recognized in Scotland:
The Lairds of Roslin have been great architects and patrons of buildings for many generations. They are obliged to receive the Mason’s word which is a secret signal masons have throughout the world to know one another by. They allege it is as old as since Babel, when they could not understand one another and they conversed by signs. Others would have it no older than Solomon.105
The sense of Hebraic-Solomonic heritage was expressed in the chapel’s design and symbolism, which also suggest St. Clair’s awareness of the Judeo-Arabic lore that infused Gothic architecture in the Middle East and Spain. Moreover, it was probably a Spanish mason—or a mason who had visited Spain—who executed St. Clair’s Solomonic vision.106
Baron notes that during this period (the 1450’s) in Spain, there was much collaboration between Jewish and Christian artisans, for “Jewish apprentices were often trained by Christian masters and vice versa.”107 It was probably through Jewish masons that Cabalistic influences emerged in Spanish architecture—influences reflected also in contemporary Spanish Bible illustrations which portrayed Solomon’s Temple as a Gothic church.108 This collaborative training and cross-fertilization also occurred in the building guilds of Sicily, where a Jewish master-builder was in charge of building the royal palace, and in the southern communities of Italy and France. In 1700 Richard Hay revealed, on the basis of St. Clair family papers, that his ancestor “caused artificers to be brought from other regions and foreign kingdoms” that the work at Roslin “might be more rare.”109 Thus, use of the Mason’s Word for a multi-lingual workforce served a practical purpose. However, it is unclear if the Word already had the Cabalistic-“rabbinic” associations that would emerge in the seventeenth century.110
Among the profusion of lavish and bizarre carvings in the chapel, the most striking is the “Apprentice Pillar,” which features spiraled bands of foliage wrapped around bundled miniature shafts.111 The pillar was based on the spiraled pillars at St. Peter’s in Rome, which were believed to come from Solomon’s Temple. After seeing a model sent “from Rome, or some foreign place,” the Roslin master mason determined to travel abroad to inspect the original.112 However, while he was away, the apprentice carved the pillar and was subsequently murdered by the jealous master mason. Carved stone heads of both men were placed in the chapel by their brethren, with the unusually bearded master mason giving a Jewish resonance to his role in this Solomonic-masonic affair. Given St. Clair’s historic role as aristocratic patron of the masonic fraternity, it is provocative that he personally acted as “master of the works” and supervised the designing and cutting of patterns for the exotic designs carved in the chapel. Cruden argues that his “keen and practical interest” in architecture and masonry was undeniable; however, “the sculptural oddities, peculiarities of construction, the difficulties the masons got themselves into, the mystery of the great closing wall” indicate the work of “an inspired amateur with pronounced heraldic tendencies.”113
Much of the Jewish, Hermetic, and Templar symbolism of the chapel grew out of St. Clair’s esoteric and chivalric interests, which he pursued while supervising the practical construction work. In the process, he became an important vehicle of Lullism into the Scottish masonic milieu and mentality. In 1456 St. Clair commissioned Sir Gilbert Hay, another descendant of Arbroath and the Scots Guard, to translate into Scots English Lull’s treatise, The Order of Chivalry, which advocated instruction in the Art of Memory for crusading knights and craftsmen. This was the first English translation of Lull, and it signalled an enduring interest in his Art among Scottish kings, nobles, and architect-masons. That Lull actually instructed various Templars and Hospitallers in his Art suggests the possibility that he also instructed the masons and artisans who accompanied the knights.114
While the Roslin masons labored on the chapel, Hay worked in the adjoining scriptorium, where he translated Lull’s description of “the form of the examination how the bachelor squire should be examined by the fathers of the order.”115 Did St. Clair compare it to the examinations required of his stonemasons by their master masons? Lull’s requirement that “gloves of plate” be given to the newly initiated knight seems close to the similar requirement about gloves of leather for the masons. In 1737 an anti-Jacobite critic would warn the English government about the hidden military significance of Scottish Masonic traditions concerning gloves: “There seems to be something emblematical in the Glove,” which is “only another Word for a Gauntlet, which is a Piece of Armour for the Hands.”116
After Lull referred to the “good ancient customs” that made earlier knights yearn “to go in the Holy Land,” he called on new knights to imitate Judas Maccabeus, who led the Jews in their great revolt against the Syrian king Antiochus and won back control of Jerusalem.117 Like Hay’s hopes for the Stewart kings of Scotland, the Maccabean dynasty maintained the independence of Israel and governed successfully for the next hundred years. Adding his own Scottish interpretation of Lull’s allusion to I Maccabees 3:13-26, Hay stressed the capacity of a small force to defeat a vastly larger one, if they are unified and devoted to virtue, reason, and justice. Such Maccabean-chivalric values will earn divine grace, which gives victory over the greatest odds. He thus reminded Scottish nationalists of their Jewish heritage, which required constant defense against the “Syrian” English. St. Clair and the masons were perhaps inspired by the heroic construction work of the Maccabeans, whose masons “encircled Mount Zion with high walls and strong towers to prevent the Gentiles from coming and trampling it down as they had done before.”118 Similar motives lay behind the fortification of Roslin Castle.
In more works commissioned by St. Clair, Hay translated Bonet’s treatise, The Buke of the Law of Armys, which stressed the superior role of the Pope over the Emperor—an argument that would fuel Scottish struggles against the English king in the next century. In a statement particularly significant in Scotland, Bonet argued that the Pope should not punish Jews and Saracens for their refusal to accept the Gospel, “for faith should not be compelled by force.”119 Thus, it is unlawful to make war against the Jews, for from their subjection they cannot hurt the Church, and there is prophecy to be fulfilled with which Christians should not interfere. Not only Jews but Egyptians were important to a kingdom’s moral fitness and military survival, and it is relevant to the St. Clairs’ masonic role that the family granted refuge at Roslin to local “Egyptians” (gypsies), who were believed to possess Cabalistic secrets.120 In The Buik of King Alexander the Conqueror, Hay described the “magical and mathematical instruments” that enable a king to see and interpret visions which give foreknowledge of events that will effect the realm.121 Both of Hay’s translations were consistent with Lull’s Art of Visualization by which king, knight, and craftsman could become expert in prediction and divination or, in Scottish terminology, second sight.122
In Hay’s translation of The Buke of the Governaunce of Princes, he provided his patron with a plethora of Cabalistic and Hermetic themes, many of which became part of the secret traditions of Scottish Freemasonry—perhaps through the St. Clair family. Working from a French translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum, which included accretions from the Sepher Yetzirah and Judeo-Arabic mystical lore, Hay described how Aesculapius hid Aristotle’s book in the Temple of Sun (Heliopolis in Egypt).123 Aristotle had instructed the young Alexander in the “art magical” and “art alchemical,” which drew on Hermes Trismegistus’s theosophy of man as microcosm, the correspondences between the natural and supernatural world, and the mystical relationship of each man and his two angels. Aristotle emphasized the esoteric nature of these teachings, which must not be revealed to the unworthy, and he exacted an oath of secrecy from his royal pupil.
Thus, a wise prince must learn to use secret means of communication (“documents in secret words by examples, signs, and figures covertly”), and he and his oath-bound messengers must develop a strong memory in order to maintain their secret lore and communication techniques. They must also develop related skills in mathematics and accounting so that numbers stored in the memory can be retrieved at will. Monarchs should further establish schools for training in astrology and physiognomy, for the latter science (revealed by God to the Hebrew prophets) illuminates the adept’s spirit to know the secrets of God. The capacity to read signs and tokens of a person’s inner nature as a correspondence to celestial governance is to be used as a service to the prince and his realm. The Secretum Secretorum was particularly relevant to Scotland, for Michael Scot believed in its revelations, and some fifteenth-century scholars argued that the pseudo-Aristotelian work was really written by John Scotus Erigena, whom they assumed to be Scottish. By the time of St. Clair and Hay, its themes were assimilated into the burgeoning Lullist tradition.
In The Book of Governaunce, Hay emphasised the importance of social mobility by merit, for the king is advised to recognize that a virtuous man who possesses talent should be allowed to rise in the royal service, regardless of his low birth. St. Clair, who worked as an architect and Master of Works with his artisans, may have implemented this “illuminated” advice in his relationships with the masons. The equality “on the level” of aristocrat, gentleman, and artisan within the lodge became the hallmark of later Freemasonry. At this time, there is evidence of “a gradual emergence of local schools of stone-building through most of Scotland, extending to a widening circle of patrons.”124 Under the influence of the masonic leader St. Clair, they may have incorporated the esoteric lore advocated by the Secretum for Alexander’s schools and by Lull for the Templar and Hospitaller schools.
After the death of James II, St. Clair served as Regent during the minority of the young James III, who as king implemented an ambitious architectural program. Like his mentor, James III stood “on the level” with his masons, and contemporary chroniclers noted that he “prized arts and learning, and admitted to his friendship not only scholars, but craftsmen who had shown skill above the ordinary in what were counted base and mechanic arts.”125 Later iconoclastic critics accused his favorite, Thomas Cochrane (whom they described variously as Master of Works, architect, master mason, or mason) of exercising a negative and extravagant influence on him. In 1738 Anderson claimed that James III named Cochrane a Grand Master.126 Cochrane was assisted in royal architectural projects by Anselm Adornes, an Italian traveller, who dedicated his account of his voyage to Jerusalem to the Scottish king.127 While at Rhodes, Adornes was the guest of the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller, and he may have learned of the unusual collaboration between the Hospitallers and Jewish craftsmen, who manufactured swords for them and helped them defend Rhodes against Turkish attacks.128 One Scottish knight among the defenders wore a magical charm stone, evidently produced by a Jewish artisan, which was celebrated in Scottish chronicles.129 Adornes’s descriptions of the architecture of Rhodes influenced James III’s designs for an unusual hexagonal chapel for the Scottish Hospitallers; curiously, according to local tradition, the chapel really belonged to the surviving Templars.130
James III’s far-reaching architectural program was part of his chivalric revival, which reconfirmed the Scottish monarchy’s Solomonic role and the kingdom’s identification with Jerusalem. In 1488 his fifteen year-old son, James IV, signed a charter confirming grants of land to the unified orders of the Hospital and Temple (Deo et Sancto Hospitali de Jerusalem et fratribus ejusdem Militiae Templi Salomonis), which revealed the survival of the Temple and its unification with the Hospital, with both orders represented in the Scottish parliament by the Preceptor of St. John.131 James IV hoped to lead a crusade to recover Jerusalem, and at Linlithgow Palace he expressed his vision in architectural designs based on crusader descriptions of the Templum Domini in Jerusalem.132 He invited William St. Clair to participate in his Solomonic-chivalric projects, which were praised in a mystical-architectural poem, The Palace of Honour, dedicated to the king by Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld.
Douglas seemed to draw on Cabalistic-Lullist visionary traditions when he described his meditation that produced a psycho-erotic vision of Venus’s “bliss perfect” and then subsequent visions of Jewish history in a magic mirror.133 He visualized Solomon’s rich Temple, Ezekiel’s fiery chariot to Paradise, Antiochus’s despoliation of the Temple, and the Maccabeans’ “knightly deeds.” His meditation also enabled him to see the “Palace of Honour,” which was an idealized version of Linlithgow:
That heavenly Palace all of Crystal clear,
Wrought as me thought of polished beryl stone.
Bezaleel nor Aholiab . . .
Which Sancta Sanctorum made most rich and dear,
Nor he that wrought the Temple of Salomon,
. . . . . . . . . .
Could not perform so craftily a cure [piece of work].134
Douglas’s direct allusions to Bezalel and Aholiab and indirect allusion to Hiram Abif suggest his familiarity with the traditional lore of operative masonry. Moreover, Bawcutt notes that he used “highly technical building terms” in his architectural descriptions, which suggests his close observation of masonic practices.135 In 1738 Anderson would add Douglas to his list of Scottish Grand Masters.136
Anderson further claimed that William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen, succeeded Douglas as Grand Master and, though that title may be anachronistic, he once again drew on authentic architectural history.137 While James IV and Bishop Elphinstone worked together on designs for new castles and colleges, the latter “collected great heaps of lime and stones” and “selected and encouraged skillful stonecutters, masons, and artists.”138 Elphinstone studied Nicholas of Lyra’s diagrammatic illustrations of Solomon’s Temple, which were derived from Jewish informants and authentic Hebrew sources. In fact, so great was his Hebrew knowledge that many contemporaries believed Nicholas (d. 1349) was a convert from Judaism.139 Particularly relevant to Scotland was Nicholas’s debt to the Temple mysticism of John Scotus Erigena and philosophy of Duns Scotus, as well as his acquaintance with Lull, with whom he shared an interest in Jewish and Arabic lore.
Edwards argues that Nicholas’s commentaries and drawings were the inspiration for the design of King’s College Chapel in Aberdeen, which revealed the Solomonic idealism of James IV and Elphinstone—an ideal expressed by the masons when they carved on the college wall a Latin inscription noting that by grace of the king, “the masons [latomi] began this exellent college” on 2 April 1500.140 The bishop chose that date because he believed that Solomon began building the Temple on 2 April. Moreover, the Latin word latomi appeared in the Vulgate only in references to the builders of Solomon’s Temple, and the surviving building accounts make clear that the builders were aware of their Solomonic task. Stevenson comments that “it is surprising that an inscription of this sort should specifically mention the craftsmen,” yet “there they are standing beside the king.”141
The suggestion of egalitarianism between monarch and mason—within an architectural context—was reinforced by the spread of fine stonemasonry from the king’s castles to the lairds’ homes. Barrow points to the “emermegence of even greater numbers of Scottish nobles into the stone-building classes from the late fourteenth-century onwards,” which led the Spanish ambassador in 1498 to report the singular fact that “the houses of Scotland are all good, all built of hewn stone.”142 Fawcett observes that under James IV, “the Middle Ages passed into the age of the Renaissance on a triumphant note with the construction of a series of magnificent royal residences,” which were the “swaggering architectural expression of the claim of the Scottish monarchy on the wider European scene.”143 Unfortunately, the king’s death in battle against the English in 1513 meant that he could not pursue his dream of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In popular legend, James IV did not die but made it to the Temple; he lived on as a Maccabean hero, whose Solomonic constructions were revered as embodiments of Scottish independence.
In 1736, when the Chevalier Ramsay informed his Parisian lodge brothers about the period of James IV’s reign, he noted that the Scottish masons followed “the example set by the Israelites when they erected the second Temple, who, whilst they handled the trowel and mortar with one hand, in the other held the sword and buckler.”144 During the minority of James V, increasing threats from the English king Henry VIII led the patriotic party to invite John Stewart, Duc d’Aubigny, to come from France to assume the Regency. He ordered extensive stone reconstruction and fortification of buildings at all levels of society, in preparation for an expected English invasion.145 He also led a party of Scottish nobles to France, where they observed the great Renaissance building projects in the Loire valley, and one member—James Hamilton of Finnart—allegedly contacted Leonardo da Vinci at Amboise, who influenced his later architectural designs in Scotland.146
Throughout this period of strengthened ties with France, many important Scots studied in Paris and participated in the “tremendous revival of Lullism” led by Lefèvre d’Etaples (d. 1536), who established a chair of Lullist studies at the Sorbonne and legitimized this essentially Cabalistic science as an area of Catholic inquiry.147 Lefèvre had met Pico della Mirandola in Italy, and he was impressed by Pico’s collaboration with Jewish scholars. Pico argued that Lullism was a form of Cabalism, an ars combinatoria, which provided a key to the universalist science that Lull’s illuminated Hospitallers were supposed to disseminate. Returning to Paris, Lefèvre published Lull’s works on the crusading orders, visionary techniques, and mystical mathematics. In the process, he made the first recorded reference to the Cabala in France. He revealed to his students that the aim of the Hebrew sages was “to translate the Cabala of letters into the secret magical philosophy of numbers,” which was the source of “the secret philosophy of Pythagoras.”148
Mastering the numerical-linguistic permutations of the Sepher Yetzirah, Lefèvre also experimented with the architectural visualizations involved in Jewish Temple mysticism. Like Lull, he seemed to incorporate these Cabalistic visionary techniques into an architectural world view, as suggested by a passage in his treatise, De Magia Naturalis:
Heaven imprints on the minds of those influenced by [the constellation] Pegasus a true outline of future events. Just as the architect, before he puts up a building, makes preparatory drawings from which he can visualize the structure that his fellow citizens will eventually see in reality, so heaven can instruct the eye of the mind to see past, present, and future.149
Influenced by Lull’s praise of the unspoiled idiota, Lefèvre believed that simple, unlettered folk were capable of learning the Art of Memory, which would improve their practical skills.150
Encouraged by James V, Scottish students brought back the fruits of their Parisian studies in Renaissance Hermeticism and Christian Cabalism, which were undertaken in the hope of reforming and universalizing the Catholic church. The brilliant Scottish scholar George Buchanan, who praised his teacher Lefèvre for “bringing light out of darkness,” would subsequently influence the “Judaizing” trend of James V’s studies and religious practices.151 When Buchanan urged the king to eat “the paschal lamb,” critics charged that he wanted James “to become a Jew and live as Jews do.” Williamson argues that Buchanan was influenced by his Parisian contacts with Iberian Marranos, who retained much of their Jewish mentality after converting to Christianity.152
In the 1530’s, James V directed a major architectural program, in which he called upon Hamilton of Finnart to reconstruct the royal palaces for his successive French brides. Finnart then played a pioneering role, in which he functioned more like a Vitruvian architect than a medieval Master of Works or master mason. He worked closely with the king, who was determined “to use architecture as one of the principal symbolic activities of his reign.”153 The two men collaborated on designs and practical instructions for their masons and may even have attended lodge meetings. The chronicler Lindsay of Pittscottie praised James’s international outreach, for he “plenished the country with all kinds of craftsmen out of other countries, as Frenchmen, Spaniards, Dutchmen and Englishmen which were all cunning craftsmen, every man for his own hand,” in order to “apparel his palaces.”154
In 1537 James appointed John Scrymgeour of Myres as Master of Works, and in that same year Scrymgeour prepared a transcript of Gilbert Hay’s translation of Lull’s book of knighthood.155 The king, who was a student of Lullist alchemy, apparently commissioned the transcript, which was taken from the St. Clair manuscript at Roslin. James praised his friend Henry St. Clair as “very serviceable in the intimate affairs of the royal court.”156 It is possible that training in the Lullist Art of Memory, which would be required of Scottish masons in 1599, was already a part of their craft education, for Finnart demonstrated a striking ability to “plan in three dimensions a priori,” suggesting his own practice of Lullist architectural visualization.157 James and Finnart made Stirling Castle a spectacular expression of Renaissance Humanism, with stone sculptures of Hermetic emblems and a Sun God shining blessings on the alchemical king, while behind the carvings “the ashlar is amongst the finest stonework ever seen in Scotland, so close-jointed that after 450 years of windy exposure, there is virtually no weathering.”
When James brought his bride, Queen Madeleine, from France, he was accompanied by a French master mason, Moses (or Mogyne) Martyne, whose unusual forename suggests a Jewish or Marranist background.158 After Madeleine’s death, James travelled with Martyne to France, where they studied together the Renaissance features of palaces built for François I, a friend and patron of Lefèvre d’Etaples.159 If Martyne had an Iberian Marranist background, he or the king’s Spanish masons may have influenced James’s unusual design for a “Solomonic,” Gothic fountain at Linlithgow, which bore a striking resemblance to the Fountain of Lions at the Alhambra. Returning with a new bride, Mary of Guise, he asked his Guise in-laws, who were great builders, to send talented French masons to Scotland.160 That the Guises were often compared to the Maccabees, because of their “feeling of blood brotherhood” and devotion to sacred architecture, gave them an unusual affinity with the Maccabean-masonic traditions of Scotland.161
James V entrusted Finnart with important affairs of state, and the courtier-architect became a powerful figure in Scottish governance.162 Working with the Master of Works was John Aytoun, master mason, whose family would provide masonic service to the Stuart kings until 1638, when they helped organize the “Judaizing” Covenanters’ rebellion. That turbulence—which led to the British civil war—was foreshadowed in the sudden fall of Finnart, who was accused of treason and executed in 1540. McKean suggests that he fell victim to “a Protestant ambush,” for several notable Reformers contributed to his downfall.163 Hamilton’s role as “architect for the greatest and most prolific of all Scots building monarchs” made his downfall “a wonder of the age.” For masonic history, it marked the beginning of a destructive period of political turbulence, religious hostilities, and architectural neglect, as the violent forces of the Protestant Reformation swept into Catholic Scotland.
After Henry VIII broke with the Roman Church and declared England a Protestant country, he pressured James V to follow his example and join an anti-Papist campaign. However, James remained loyal to Rome and the French alliance, which drove Henry to mount an invasion of Scotland in 1542. Shocked by the death of his favorite, Oliver St. Clair, in battle, the king went into a decline and soon died. His and Finnart’s dream that Scotland would “earn its place upon the European stage as much by architecture as it had by arms” was frustrated for the next fifty years, as a series of regents and queens struggled with the turbulent changes of the Reformation. Encouraged and financed by Henry VIII, the more radical Scottish Protestants joined his campaign to destroy “Papist” images and architecture—a campaign which Colvin calls the greatest single act of architectural vandalism in English, perhaps even European, history:
In England between 1536 and 1540 every monastery was dissolved . . . and the great majority of their buildings were . . . “plucked down” or “defaced.” This was done by the authority of a grasping and tyrannical king, and effected by his minister, Thomas Cromwell, through subordinates who were for the most part ruthless, cynical, and philistine men.164
Among Cromwell’s targets was the Hospital of St. Thomas of Acre, whose knights had long supported the masonic fraternity. After a Protestant mob smashed the “images” of Becket in sculpture and stained glass, Henry VIII dissolved the order and sold the severely damaged building.165
Over the next decades, the rivalry between Catholics and Protestants was often interpreted in terms of the image versus the word, of visualization versus verbalization. In 1542-64, when the Council of Trent launched the Counter Reformation, the Roman churchmen advocated the use of beautiful art and architecture as a weapon in the war for hearts and minds. In England and Scotland, this manifesto hardened the iconoclastic attitudes of radical Protestants, who not only destroyed ecclesiastical and royalist architecture which expressed Papist themes but condemned the Lullist Art of Memory as Papist image worship.166 In still-Catholic Scotland, the widowed Mary of Guise served as de facto Regent for her infant daughter Mary Stewart and, as Queen Mother she struggled to continue her predecessors’ architectural policies and collaboration with masons.
Like James IV and James V, she relied on her Master of Works for sensitive political and diplomatic missions, and she worked closely with loyal teams of masons, whose social and political prestige she tried to elevate.167 This collaboration contrasted starkly with the current situation in England, where the Reformed Parliament passed acts in 1548 against the masons and other craftsmen who “conspire” to raise their wages.168 Because of rapidly rising food prices and the loss of work after the dissolution of the monasteries, the living standards of masons in England declined precipitously over the next decade. Newly hewn stone was replaced by brick on major building projects, while so many Reformers stripped the stone off ecclesiastical buildings (for their private use) that many Gothic edifices simply disappeared.
In 1548 Mary of Guise commissioned Robert Wedderburn, chamberlain to the Knights Hospitaller, to write The Complaynt of Scotland, a passionate argument for Scottish independence and the French alliance, which was replete with Maccabean, masonic, and crusader imagery.169 Wedderburn’s two brothers had converted to Protestantism, but he worried about the increasingly violent religious polarization and English intrusion into Scottish governance. Thus, he urged the Scots to undertake reforms within the Catholic church and to remain faithful to their Hebraic heritage, which the Protestant dissidents threatened to corrupt. Comparing the Queen Mother to the great Jewish heroines Esther and Judith, who saved their people in dangerous times, he identified Scottish nationalists with the Maccabeans, who refused foreign domination and the destruction of their national Temple. Evoking memories of the recent burning of Edinburgh, he described the similar destruction of Jerusalem. Despite the temporary victories of their enemies, the Maccabeans remained faithful to their traditions and drove the invaders out of Jerusalem. Then, they “reformed the destruction of the Temple.” Like the Jewish heroes, Scottish patriots should “be zelators of the law of God” and “give your souls for the alliance of your forefathers.” Curiously, by the eighteenth century, a Cabalistic degree of “Zelator” would emerge in Écossais Freemasonry.170
In his approach to history, Wedderburn utilized the Hebraic conceptions of Paul of Burgos, a Jewish convert who drew on the Talmud; in his approach to narrative, he imitiated “the Hermetic use of actor and author as teacher, master of disciples, guru.”171
These two strategies were applied especially in his description of the two pillars built by Seth to preserve the world’s knowledge in time of flood and fire. He elaborated the account in Josephus to include Hermetic and “masonic” accretions, which stressed the importance of mathematics, geometry, astronony, and cosmography, whose secrets were engraved on the pillars. Foreshadowing later Freemasonic developments, he referred to the magical roles of Hermes and Joseph in Egypt, when the latter taught the Pharaoh the secrets of Jewish science. The outstanding Hebrew and Egyptian rulers all stressed the importance of the sciences, crafts, and mechanics to a nation’s well-being.
Wedderburn’s usage of Jewish lore in his propaganda tract would find a receptive audience among young Scots, for many were studying Hebrew in local grammar schools. Hume Brown notes that, except for the Netherlands, Scotland had more primary and secondary schools than any other country in Europe, and that education was placed within the reach of all classes.172 Moreover, Hebrew was currently spoken and read in these schools, long before it became established in the universities.173 George Buchanan, who was still Catholic but increasingly sympathetic to Protestantism, drew on his Hebrew studies under Lefèvre and contact with Marranos in Bordeaux to write two “Judaized” dramas, The Baptist or Calumny and Jephtah or the Vow, which alluded to Antiochus’s desecration of the Temple, once “the crown of Solomon’s magnificence,” and the Jews’ determination to maintain the “covenant of old” in the face of foreign challenges.174 As Williamson observes, Buchanan experienced a “signicantly crypto-Jewish” environment, which appeared publicly as “faultlessly Catholic” but was privately “informed by elements of Jewish religion and identity.”175
Assisted by the Knights Hospitaller and Garde Écossais, Mary of Guise got her young daughter safely off to France. She then worked with Archbishop John Hamilton, a kinsman of Finnart and discerning patron of architecture, to repair the damage to castles and churches caused by the latest battles with radical Protestants.176 When the archbishop became ill in 1552, she recruited Girolamo Cardano to Scotland, for she hoped to exploit his expertise in Hermetic medicine, military engineering, and masonic fortification in her struggle against England.177 Though Cardano was scorned as a “Papist magician” by Reformers, Mary believed he could provide similar services to Scotland as Nostradumus, employed by the Guises, did for France. Moreover, Cardano had met Nostradamus and was aware of his Jewish ancestry and of his boast that he inherited the predictive powers of the “tribe of Issacher.”178 He himself explored Cabalistic theosophy, which he utilized for experiments in ars combinatoria.
Cardano cured the archbishop and many others, while he won admirers by his phenomenal feats in mathematics, memory, and precognition (second sight), which he attributed to his mastery of the Lullist Art.179 Given his hosts’ interest in improving the expertise of Scottish architects, masons, and artists, his argument that many men can be trained in his art of visualization and divination was important; moreover, he observed that “those predictions are most reasonable which concern the development of the arts, such as the craftsman’s art.”180 Among the witnesses to his Lullist demonstrations may have been the young William Schaw, who served as a page to Mary of Guise and who, as Master of Works in 1599, would make training in the “art and science of memory” a requirement for operative masons.181 A nineteenth-century Écossais Mason, J.M. Ragon, would claim that Cardano made a significant contribution to Masonic “science.”182
Like many intellectuals, Cardano was a liberal Catholic who hoped for reform within the church, a position advocated by his patient Archbishop Hamilton in 1552. While he disapproved of the persecution of Protestant “heretics,” Cardano perceived the Reformation party in Scotland as intolerant and prone to violence.
When Mary of Guise became official Regent in 1554, she called for a policy of liberty of conscience. Hoping to recreate the more tolerant atmosphere of the early Humanist era in Paris, she determined to endow royal lectureships to train young Scots in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. However, as Durkan notes, “her wider scheme, involving Hebrew and thus divinity” seemed too threatening to Protestant forces in the universities.183 Her effort was supported by John St. Clair, Dean of Restalrig, who returned from Paris to argue that freedom of worship be granted to Catholics and Protestants.
Meanwhile, in England the death of the Catholic Mary Tudor in 1558 and succession of the Protestant Elizabeth I accelerated the iconoclasts’ campaign. While Elizabeth cracked down on masonic organizations and allowed the further deterioration of the English Office of Works, Mary of Guise elevated the status of royalist masons and influenced the election of her French master mason, Thomas Roytell, as a burgess in Edinburgh.184 With the Fifth Lord Seton, an architectural enthusiast, serving as Provost in Edinburgh, she determined to protect the churches from attacks by radicals bent on destruction of Gothic “images.” Among the targeted buildings was the great Charterhouse at Perth, founded by James I, which was destroyed by a Protestant mob. John Knox, the charismatic Reformer whose violent sermon inspired the attack, expressed his delight at the expulsion of friars, the smashing of “the tabernacle” on the altar, and the destruction of Gothic carvings:
within two days, these three great places, monuments of idolatry, to wit, the Grey and Black thieves, and Charterhouse monks (a building of wondrous cost and greatness) were so destroyed that the walls only did remain of all those great edifications.185
The destruction of the Charterhouse would reverberate in masonic memory for decades and, in The Muses Threnodie (1638), Henry Adamson paid tribute to its multi-national masons and to those Hebraically heroic citizens who tried to defend it. Like “Manasseses half tribe, Ruben, Gad,” who left their cattle and Mount Gilead, many Perthians fought back against Knox’s radicals.186
After Mary of Guise’s death in 1560, the Protestant-dominated Parliament in Edinburgh abolished the jurisdiction of the Pope and banned the Catholic mass. Protestantism became the official—though not the majority—religion in Scotland. Moreover, despite Knox’s harangues against Papist architecture and the superstitious rituals and festivals of the craft guilds, the greater number of masons and artisans remained Catholic.187 With the return from Paris of the new queen Mary Stuart (her French spelling of the surname), there was a revival of courtly interest in Hebraic and Hermetic mystical traditions (an interest the queen shared with her Guise kinsmen). She welcomed a delegation of French Humanist scholars who were dedicated to a Cabalistic-Hermetic-Platonic regeneration of the Catholic church. Dorsten points out that “religious Hermeticism” encouraged its adepts to work for toleration and conciliation and that their message received a warmer welcome in Edinburgh than London at this time.188 One French poet praised the queen and her scholarly mentor, the “Judaizing” Buchanan, for reviving the traditions of religious verse immortalized by “the great David, King of the Jews.” Mary not only acquired the “Poemander of Hermes Trismegistus” but the Dialogues d’Amour of “Leon the Hebrew” (Abravanel), a work that merged the architectural mysticism and sexual theosophy of the Cabalists with Hermetic and neo-Platonic themes.189 Her son would later draw on both works.
Though Cardano could not accept the queen’s invitation to return to Scotland, the brilliant Huguenot scholar Joseph Scaliger paid an influential visit, in which he reinforced the Hebrew interests of Buchanan and other courtiers.190 Scaliger had been so inspired by the expertise in Jewish lore of Guillaume Postel that he learned Hebrew, visited Jewish communities in France and Italy, and conversed with masters of Cabala and Talmud. He was also intrigued by the Lullist Art of Memory, and he described spectacular demonstrations of its effectiveness which he witnessed in Italy.191 Scaliger’s subsequent studies of ancient Jewish mystical fraternities and masonic guilds would have a significant influence on Mary Stuart’s son, James VI, when the latter undertook the revival of royalist masonry.
Despite her desire to maintain the Stuart-Guise tradition of emblematic architecture, Queen Mary was unable to launch any ecclesiastical or royal building projects because of the religious and financial austerity imposed upon her by Parliament. Thus, her reign represented a hiatus in the long tradition of practical collaboration between “masonic” monarch and craftsmen. Nevertheless, according to eighteenth-century Freemasons, the lodges maintained their secret teaching and preserved it until better days. In 1733 a London periodical, The Free-Mason, summed up this period of masonic history: “On the sunset of Masonry in the Southern and Western parts of the Globe, the antient Masons of Scotland, Stars of the North, preserv’d its Light and return’d it to Mankind.”192 According to Chevalier Ramsay, the special Scottish “light” was the visionary theosophy of the Cabalists, “handed down by oral tradition from him *Grand Master Noah] to Abraham and the Patriarchs, the last one of which carried our sublime Art into Egypt.”193 Since then, “the secret Science can be preserved pure only among God’s people,” the mystical Jews. However, religious polarization made the question of which Scots were “God’s people”—Catholics or Protestants?—a provocation to violence, as both parties struggled for Scotland’s Maccabean soul.
During the imprisonment of Queen Mary by the Elizabethan government, Scotland was ruled by a Regency during the minority of her son James VI. Protestantism now became the majority religion of the kingdom, though it was split between the Presbyterian “kirk” with congregationally elected elders and the Episcoplian church with royally appointed bishops, while a substantial minority remained “stubbornly” Catholic. James was tutored by Buchanan, who inculcated staunch Protestant beliefs in his intellectually-gifted and erudite pupil. Though Buchanan had become rigidly Presbyterian, he still maintained contact with Christophe Plantin, whose Antwerp press—the “Golden Compasses”—published works by the Family of Love, an international secret society that included Protestants, Catholics, and Marranos, and which maintained strong Lullist interests.194 Chafing under his tutor’s severity, James developed private irenic beliefs quite similar to the Familists, who worked for religious conciliation.195 Their hierarchical structure, esoteric theosophy, and ecumenical goals led some historians to characterize them as “pre-Masonic.”196
Sharing the royal classroom were several precocious youths, such as the “Admirable Crichton,” who would gain European fame as an expert in Cabala and the Art of Memory, and George Erskine of Innertiel, who would develop Cabalistic, Rosicrucian, and Masonic interests.197 From his mother’s library, James gained access to the Hermetic, Cabalistic, and Lullist works of earlier French Humanists, and he developed a strong sense of Scotland’s Hebraic-Egyptian traditions. At his accession in 1579, the iconic figure of “Dame Scota” appeared and spoke to the new king in Hebrew.198
As Hebrew studies became more widespread, a young stonemason, William Erde, became so expert in the language that he was urged to leave “his handie craft” to become a Presbyterian minister. However, he continued working with his “fellow laborars” and was perhaps the source of the Hebrew manuscripts later found among a cache of masonic documents and mentioned in an Aberdeen text of 1670.199 Erde was friendly with Andrew Melville, a radical Presbyterian and learned Hebraist, who brought many Jewish and Cabalistic works to Scotland—including Johann Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico, which allegedly influenced the increasing mystical sense of the Mason Word.200
In 1581 James VI’s religious tolerance and interest in Continental scholarship so worried the radical Presbyterians that they pressured him to sign the “King’s Confession,” which repudiated the Papacy and affirmed Scotland’s role as Hebraic preserver of the “true religion.” As Williamson notes, the oath “became a covenant, involving the full-hearted consent of the people and king, whose act, in unison with God, bore a genuine resemblance to the Jewish experience.”201 By 1583 James’s distress at increasing religous discords made him determine “to draw the nobility to unity and concord and to be known as a universal king.”202 He took as his motto, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and he portrayed himself as “Scotland’s Solomon.” He also determined to revive royalist and religious architecture as the unifying expression of Scotland’s heritage and independence.203 He thus appointed a political moderate and private Catholic, William Schaw, as King’s Master of Works, and he worked closely with him in architectural, political, and diplomatic affairs.204 Since his youth at Mary of Guise’s court, Schaw was familiar with Cardano’s advocacy of the importance of the Lullist Art to the improvement of arts and crafts, and James was also a student of Cardano’s writings.205
At this time, James VI was translating the poetry of Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur de Bartas, a French Protestant, who included the Solomonic themes and technical terminology of operative masonry in his epic work, the Semaines (“Divine Weeks”). When James translated Du Bartas’s Uranie, he found reinforcement for his commitment to architectural and masonic revival:
. . . Hirams holy help it war unknowne
What he in building Izraels Temple had showne,
Without Gods Ark Beseleel Jewe had bene
In everlasting silence buried clene.
Then, since the bewty of those works most rare
Hath after death made live all them that ware
Their builders; though them selves with tyme be failde,
By spoils, by fyres, by warres, and tempests quailde.206
Of particular relevance to James and Schaw was the section of Semaines called “The Columnes,” in which Du Bartas argued that the masonic traditions of Seth’s two pillars were preserved and transmitted by the Jewish Cabalists. Thus, “Old Seth” taught his children how to construct “a sumptuous building”:
But (by tradition Cabalistike) taught
That god would twice reduce this World to nought,
By Flood and Flame; they reared cunningly
This stately payre of Pillers, which you see:
Long-time safe-keeping for their after Kin,
A hundred learned Misteries therein.207
Drawing on the Sepher Yetzirah and esoteric geometry, Du Bartas described the number mysticism and practical tools which could produce great architecture and masonic expertise:
. . . It is Geometrie,
The Crafts-mans guide, Mother of Symetrie,
The Life of Instruments of rare effect,
Law of that Law which did the World erect.
Heere’s nothing heere, but Rules, Squires, Compasses,
Waights, Measures, Plommets, Figures, Ballances,
Lo where the Work-man with a stedie hand
Ingeniously a levell Lyne hath drawn,
War-like Triangles, building-fit Quadrangles . . . 208
In 1587 James invited Du Bartas to Scotland, where they translated each other’s works and exchanged ideas about God as Divine Architect, Solomon as visionary architect, and Cabalists as masonic word-builders.209 The king was currently reading French editions of the Book of Maccabees, Philo, Josephus, and Leo Hebraeus (Abravanel), while Du Bartas was immersed in further Cabalistic studies.210 When Du Bartas returned to France, he praised James as the embodiment of the great Jewish kings (“the Scottish, or rather th’ Hebrew David”), whose religious poetry “shal sound in high-built Temples,” where the unilluminated “with hands profanely-vile” cannot enter:
For He (I hope) who no lesse good then wise,
First stirr’d us up to this great Enterprise,
And gave us hart to take the same in hand,
For Levell, Compasse, Rule, and Squire will stand;
. . . . . . . . . .
And will not suffer in this pretious Frame
Ought that a skilfull Builders eye may blame . . . 211
The English Masonic historian Hamill, who was unaware of Du Bartas’s influence on James and Schaw, observes that the French poet’s masonic imagery and emblematic pillars seem “to foreshadow” modern Freemasonry.212
Du Bartas made poetic references to the Art of Memory, and he urged the craftsman to imitate Moses and Bezalel: “Print ever faster in thy faithfull braine” the mathematical and technical skills necessary to “modelize” to “inward sight” the “admirable Forme.”213 Thus, it is not surprising that James VI welcomed to his court disciples of the Hermeticist Giordano Bruno, whose advocacy for the Lullist Art of Memory was scorned in England as Papist image-making.214 Though Bruno was essentially anti-Jewish, he drew on Cabalistic traditions when he instructed students in the Art; moreover, according to his Scottish confidante, Alexander Dickson, he included a practical form of the Art which stressed the technique of architectural visualization.215
Dickson, in turn, instructed Hugh Platt, an alchemist and inventor, in a simplified, non-mystical version of the Art:
You must make choice of some large edifice or building, whose Chambers or Galleries bee of some reasonable receipt, and so furnish unto you, as that everie part of each of these may present itself readily unto the eyes of your minde when you will call them. In everie of these rooms you must place ten severall subjects at a reasonable distance one from the other . . . These subjects should bee such as are most apt . . . as Maister Dickson tearmed it, to animate the umbras or ideas rerum memorandirani.216
Platt, who tried unsuccessfully to interest some operative masons in London in his inventions, would later be knighted by James VI and I for his technological contributions.217 After Bruno and Dickson were attacked by Scottish Calvinists at Oxford, they left England, but Dickson later participated in James VI’s court in Edinburgh, where as “master in the art of memory” he befriended several architecturally-ambitious courtiers.218
With his interest stimulated by Du Bartas and Cardano, James asked the poet William Fowler, a friend of Bruno, to instruct him in the Art of Memory, and Fowler wrote a treatise (now lost) on the subject.219 Schaw had been in Paris when Henri III made Bruno a royal reader, and he was familiar with Catholic acceptance of Cabalistic-Lullism as a legitimate Art. He soon had an opportunity to give it architectural and theatrical expression. In 1594, to celebrate the baptism of Prince Henry Stuart, Schaw collaborated with James on a plan for the rebuilding of the chapel royal at Stirling Castle; by imitating the measurements of Solomon’s Temple, the design would proclaim “James as Solomon.”220 Fowler, the Memory expert, wrote the script for a great masque which featured “the great Temple of Solomon which is abuilding.”221 Schaw’s craftsmen from the Office of Works (who included masons, hammermen, carpenters, and painters) participated in the design, construction, and staging of the “mistique and Hierogliphique scene,” which also featured the initiation and oathing ceremonies of the crusading Knights of Malta.222
In 1598-99, when Schaw reorganized the masons’ craft and virtually created modern Freemasonry, he made training in “the art of memorie and the science thairof” a requirement for initiates into the fraternity.223 Though his explicit requirement seems innovative, Stevenson notes that the “statutes speak of it as something long established.” Significantly, the master masons had to be expert enough in the “art” to test every entered apprentice and fellowcraft in the “science.” Thus, these leading operatives must have studied Lullist and Brunonian treatises on the subject. Jonathan Swift would later draw on seventeenth-century Scots-Irish traditions when he affirmed that “it’s impossible to come at the Quintessence of Free Masonry” without “a Key to Raymundus Lullius.”224 From surviving Scottish lodge records and literary allusions, it is clear that “speculative” gentlemen as well as operative craftsmen gained access to the esoteric traditions, as well as the practical skills, of the fraternity.225
Circa 1601, the king asked to be admitted into the masonic lodge at Perth, and he continued to participate in the fraternity’s affairs through the rest of his reign.226 With his and Schaw’s commitment to the craft, the transformation that made “speculative” gentlemen and operative masons into Freemasons was now underway. At Schaw’s death in 1602, he was praised as a great architect, cosmopolitan intellectual, and devoted servant of the king. In 1603, when James VI became James I of the united kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Ireland, he proclaimed himself “Great Britain’s Solomon.” He and his architecturally-ambitious courtiers now took their Hebraic mystical and technological lore south to London. However, they soon learned that there was no equivalent “Freemasonry” in England, where royal and ecclesiastical architecture had long been neglected, and the masons’ craft had seriously deteriorated.227 As the Stuart loyalist John Aubrey lamented, “In Queen Elizabeth’s time Architecture made no growth: but rather went backwards.”228
Many of James’s new English subjects openly mocked the Scots’ Jewish identification and made fun of the king’s aversion to pork; even more laughable were his attempts to discuss his studies in natural magic and second sight.229 However, the king determined to continue his Scottish architectural program by re-designing London as a fire-proof city of brick and stone. In the face of Puritan opposition to his Solomonic pretensions, he received enthusiastic support from John Gordon, a Scottish Hebraist and friend of Du Bartas, who was named Dean of Salisbury by the king.230 In Enotikon, or a Sermon on Great Britain (1604), Gordon explained how “the order Architectonicke of building” is based on Hebrew traditions of Cabalistic word-building, which justify the king’s policy of church reconstruction and revitalized ceremony.231 A critic complained that “Deane Gordon, preaching before the king,” used “certain hebrue characters, and other cabalisticall collections” to approve Papist-style art and ceremonies.232 The “Judaizing” dean then devoted much revenue and time to the masonic repair of the Gothic cathedral at Salisbury. Further reinforcement came from Joshua Sylvester, who dedicated to James his English translation of Du Bartas’s Divine Weeks (1605), which featured an architectural poem in the shape of two pillars that form a temple and another that forms a pyramid—both emblematic of the Temple of Jerusalem.233
To improve the expertise of London masons, James brought south his Scottish Master of Works, Sir David Cunningham, who had collaborated with Schaw and was evidently trained in the Art of Memory.234 James appointed Cunningham as co-Surveyor of Works with the aged mason William Spicer, a move which created English resentment at “this Scottish intruder,” who was honored as the “Lord Architect” by the king.235 As in Scotland, the king encouraged the elevation of talented artisans into gentleman and even noble status. Ben Jonson, a former brick-layer, and Inigo Jones, a former joiner and painter, were employed to develop architecturally-themed masques which expressed James’s Solomonic policies and Hermetic-Cabalistic interests.236 Howarth notes that the Stuart masques were “an inventive type of temporary architecture,” and their production involved teams of craftsmen from the Office of Works, led by Jones who became the King’s Master of Works in 1615.237 Over the next decades, Jones infused his “most serous theoretical assumptions about architecture” into the texts of his masques.238
James hoped that Jones’s recent visit to Italy, where he observed Palladian design and operative masonry, would enable him to become the William Schaw of England. Jones in turn sent his master mason Nicholas Stone to Edinburgh, where he became a close friend of Sir David Cunningham, son of the former Master of Works, who would later organize a quasi-Masonic, secret fraternity among the Scottish courtiers in London.239 Stone worked closely with Scottish master masons, and he gained access to their sophisticated techniques of stone work and, at least partially, to their esoteric Hebrew lore. When Nicholas’s kinsman “John Stone, Freemason” died in 1618, one of James’s master masons carved an epitaph about his labors “to build God’s Temples,” which proved that “God can of Stones raise seed to Abraham.”240 Like the Scottish masons, Nicholas now identified with the Jewish builders of the Temple, and he would later carve Solomonic spiralled pillars.
A top priority for the king was the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral, for its derelict state was cited by foreign Catholics (and Bruno) as a sign of the degraded state of Protestantism in England. However, he was surprised to meet stubborn resistance from many preachers and parliamentarians, who carried on the Tudor tradition of devaluing the visual arts and architecture as Papist in essence and ungentlemanly in practice.241 That Jonson and Jones, producers of his architectually-themed masques, were private Catholics (who attended Anglican services) made their role a provocation to resistance by Puritan iconoclasts.
In 1610 the Scottish writer George Marcelline hoped to counter the xenophobic and Puritan critics of the king’s architectural policies by publishing The Triumphs of King James the First. Interpreting the peaceful unification of Scotland and England in terms of musical harmony, Marcelline noted that the Cabalists affirm that the Fall led to the loss of harmony or wisdom which was in primordial man. By manipulating Hebrew letters and numbers, Marcelline portrayed James as the Cabalistic and Pythagorean restorer of unity:
And comming to Divination, by the numbers appropriated to their Characters, excogitated first of all by Pythagoras, the Traditions whereof are no other thing, but a very Hebrew Cabala, grounded upon this place in the Booke of Wisdome: God hath made all things in number, weight, and measure. . . . As the hundred seventh King of Scotland, he hath contributed more alone by himself, to build a Temple of God, and to reforme the service therein, then all the Kinges together have done.242
Speaking to the often antagonistic English Parliament in 1619, James portrayed himself not only as Solomon but as Pythagoras, who took an oath of silence and then underwent two seven-year apprenticeships in the art of kingship.243 While his supporters continued to draw on Hebrew traditions to defend his policies, his enemies condemned them as the crypto-Papism of Scottish Judaizers—an odd linking that would be repeated over the next decades. His critics also disapproved of the royal permission given to Jewish scholars, such as Jacob Barnet, to work with Isaac Casaubon and other Hebraists on the King James authorized edition of the Bible. When Calvinists at the universities tried to arrest Barnet after he refused to convert, James provided him protection and a safe conduct out of the kingdom.244
The king also encouraged the studies in Cabalism inspired by the Rosicrucian movement on the Continent, and he employed many figures associated with Rosicrucianism (such as the Welsh John Dee, English Robert Fludd, and Scots David Ramsay, Robert Kerr, and the Macolo brothers).245 However, he did not approve of the rabid anti-Catholicism of the more militant Rosicrucians, who pressured him to mount an anti-Catholic military campaign in Europe. James was scorned by many parliamentarians and preachers for his refusal to defend his son-in-law’s assumption of the Bohemian crown, which he believed was illegal and would lead to widespread religious war. Many historians now argue that his determined and wise pacifism allowed Britain to avoid the carnage of the Thirty Years War.246 At James’s funeral in 1625, Bishop Williams urged his audience to read the king’s “Proclamations for Buildings” and the scriptural chapters which describe the collaboration between Solomon and Hiram of Tyre.247 Because James’s efforts to build up the church replicated Solomon’s building of the Temple, he will be remembered forever as “Great Britain’s Solomon.”
His son Charles I, “being also a Mason,” continued and elaborated his Solomonic architectural policies and encouraged pacific Rosicrucianism among his courtiers—especially among those Scottish royalists who merged Rosicrucian themes into Freemasonry.248 In 1630, when Charles planned a journey to Scotland in order to be crowned at Scone, Henry Adamson composed a long welcoming poem, The Muses Threnodie, which expressed the Scottish masons’s pride in their ancient architectural heritage and their regret at the destruction carried out by radical Reformers—even though Adamson now shared their Protestant beliefs. Most provocative, however, was his linking of the masonic craft with Rosicrucianism and visionary capacity:
For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse,
We have the Mason word and second sight,
Things for to come we can foretell aright.
And shall we show what misterie we mean,
In fair acrosticks Carolus Rex is seen . . . 249
The high prestige given to architecture and its associated Rosicrucian arts by the Stuart kings provoked a jealous reaction in Ben Jonson, who lambasted Inigo Jones, the King’s Master of Works, for presuming that the architect ranked higher than the poet.250
More trouble-making, however, was Archbishop Laud’s support for Charles’s architectural policy as emblematic of his religious policy—to conciliate divided Jerusalem and unify the Anglican church within Solomon’s Temple. Laud’s sermons—heavily laced with masonic terminology—provoked increasing opposition from Puritans who perceived creeping Papism in the “image-worshipping” campaign.251 The greatest problem arose in Scotland, where Laud’s ill-advised effort to intrude Anglican practices into the Scottish kirk drove many Freemasons into the opposition camp. Macinnes argues that the subsequent development of the Covenanting Movement was based on Masonic organizational and security strategies, with nobles and artisans joining in a nationwide resistance movement which revived calls for Maccabean defiance.252 A beautifully illuminated copy of the National Covenant of 1638 was produced by William Aytoun, master mason of Heriot’s Hospital, who signed himself “maison.”253 Proclaiming Scotland’s refusal to accept foreign-intruded religious and legal practices, the Covenant was not anti-monarchical. Like the Maccabeans and their fourteenth-century heirs at Arbroath, the Covenanters believed in anointed kings—as long they maintained Scotland’s ancient rights and independence.
In London, the reaction of Charles I and Jones to the turmoil in Scotland was the production of spectacular masques, which utilized Cabalistic, Hermetic, and Pythagorean ritual and imagery to “heal the land.” As a Freemason himself, Jones evidently hoped to counter the Masonic Covenanters by utilizing their Hebraic imagery in support of the king.254 Much of this theatrical symbolism would later emerge in the high-degree lodge rituals developed by Écossais Masons after the 1688 Stuart Diaspora.255 When the Scottish army marched into England, it was led by Freemasons who had long experience abroad (especially in France and Sweden), and who would soon make their peace with the king.256 Sir Robert Moray, quarter-master general, would subsequently become an important leader and innovator within Stuart Freemasonry, and his surviving correspondence makes clear the continuing identification of Scottish nationalists, Stuart kings, and Cabalistic Jews.257
After the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the establishment of the Cromwellian Commonwealth, his exiled son Charles II was initiated into Freemasonry, probably by Moray, who then utiilized fraternal bonding with other Scottish royalists (such as Alexander Bruce, William Bruce, Earl of Balcarres, Earl of Lauderdale, Dr. William Maxwell, Robert Montgomery, Dr. Alexander Frazer, Dr. William Davison, and Sir William Davidson) to maintain secret communication and mystical morale during the long struggle to reclaim “Jerusalem,” as Moray called Great Britain.258 Charles I’s widow, Queen Henrietta Maria, had long enjoyed good relations with Jews; she included a Hebrew favorite in her entourage, and she patronized Jewish scholars who “practised divination through the medium of the Cabbalah.”259 In 1642, when she tried to raise money for her husband in Holland, she visited the Portuguese synagogue and the residence of Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon, where she examined his model of the Temple of Jerusalem and studied his explanatory pamphlet.260 Leon would later proudly announce that the Stuart queen approved of his explications.
In Cromwellian propaganda tracts, the poet John Milton ridiculed the Hebraic pretensions of the Scottish royalists, those “blind and lame Defenders of Jerusalem,” who were really cacomagicians like Simon Magus.261 Recognizing the potency of Charles I’s posthumous manifesto, Eikon Basilke (1649), which drew on Hebrew precedents and architectural-masonic imagery, Milton responded with Eikonoklastes, which rejected the king’s argument that “lik’ns us to those seditious Zelots whose intestine fury brought destruction to the last Jersualem.” The Stuarts’ Solomonic architecture and masques reeked more of Papism than Hebraism, which justified the destructive rampages of the iconoclasts. Referring to Charles I’s expertise in numerical-linguistic codes and invisible inks, Milton scorned his royalist correspondents as “a Sect of those Cabalists,” who deserved exposure and punishment.262
Despite these polemics from London, the Scottish exiles in Holland continued to solicit Jewish support, while maintaining clandestine contacts with sympathetic Freemasons in Britain. The English Hermeticist and artillery officer Elias Ashmole had been initiated in 1646, apparently in a Scottish-style ambulatory military lodge, and in 1652 he befriended Solomon Franco, a royalist Jew who shared his interest in Cabala and the architecture of the Temple.263 While Franco instructed him in Hebrew and was probably the source for his manuscript “Of the Cabalistic Doctrine,” Ashmole carried out intelligence work for the cause.264 A Stuart supporter, Franco believed in the Hebrew traditions of anointed kingship, and he looked for spiritual portents in the experiences of Charles II, whose eventual restoration brought him great joy.265
Though historians have long argued that Cromwell and various parliamentarians wanted to lift the ancient ban on Jewish residence in England, their “philo-Semitic” position was based on a conversionist agenda which was resented by many Jews in Europe.266 In the meantime, Charles II had signed the Covenant in Scotland, which re-affirmed the northern kingdom’s unique Hebraic role. In London the parliamentary writer Edward Spencer worried about rumors of Jewish-Stuart collaboration, and he warned the Jews not to be misled by the alleged Hebraic-Scottish affinities (“Ye love Musique, your brethren the Scots hate all but the bagpipes”) nor by claims that Charles II is “your new Messias.”267 The Cromwellian apologist James Howell further accused the Scots of being blood kin of the Jews, who had found refuge in Scotland after their expulsion from England in 1290.268 Harking back to Milton’s portrayal of Stuart partisans as a “Sect of those Cabalists,” Howell ridiculed the malodorous Jews, who “much glory of their mysterious Cabal,” and he prayed that “England not be troubled with that scent again.”269
Such attacks only enhanced Jewish sympathy for Charles II, who reinforced their interest by visiting the synagogue in Frankfurt in 1655.270 A year later, a delegation of prominent Jews in Amsterdam called on the Scottish agent John Middleton to pledge their secret support for the royalists’ restoration effort.271 To repay their financial and organizational assistance, Charles II promised them freedom to live and worship as Jews in Britain. In a point generally overlooked by Whig historians, the king did not expect them to convert—liberty of conscience for all religions was his goal. To consolidate Jewish financial backing, Charles called upon Sir William Davidson, a Scottish merchant based in Amsterdam, who collaborated with Jewish trading partners and who was widely respected as a tolerant and humane friend to the Hebrew community.272 That Davidson worked closely with Moray, Alexander Bruce, and other Scottish Freemasons provides a new context for the long-puzzling account of the Masonic initiation of certain Dutch Jews in Rhode Island in 1658, for they were probably Davidson’s partners in mercantile and political affairs.273
One likely member of the Jewish delegation was Rabbi Leon, who was the Hebrew instructor of the Dutch savant Constantijn Huygens and possibly also of Huygens’s friends Moray and Davidson.274 An architectural enthusiast and Stuart supporter, Huygens frequently used masonic terminology in his writings, and there is a controversial Dutch tradition that he joined a “lodge.”275 Moray consulted on architectural projects in Maastricht, where he was made an honorary member of the mason’s guild, and his use of his Mason’s Mark in letters to Huygens suggests a fraternal relationship.276 Their royalist network may have included Leon, whose models of the Tabernacle and Temple had become famous among Christian and Jewish architects and scholars.
Leon was also close to Rabbi Jacob Abendana, who greatly admired Davidson and planned to dedicate his Spanish translation of Judah Halevi’s Kuzari (ca. 1130) to his Scottish friend.277 Abendana praised Davidson’s tolerance, respect for Jewish beliefs, and interest in Halevi’s “wholly intellectual and scientific” work, in which Hebrew traditions were unapologetically presented as authentic, enduring, and admirable.278 Proudly proclaiming the priority and superiority of Jewish scientific and intellectual traditions, Abendana praised Davidson as an embodiment of these Solomonic qualities, as well as an Hebraic capacity for loyalty to Charles II:
your natural Lord and Master, who, absent from his opulent Provinces, has experienced in your worship the height to which Royal felicity can reach, in finding a vassal who by continued help has considerably relieved the cares of an offended Majesty, preserving, amid the tumult of the greatest disturbances, and of the most detestable ingratitude of many, the love which makes up for that of all others, and is constant both as regards the laws of nature and of duty.279
Halevi’s treatise was especially relevant to the exiled Scottish Masons, for he utilized architectural terminology and demonstrated a method of “visual thinking” by which the exiled Jews could regain imaginative access to their lost homeland and Temple.280 Arguing that Solomon was expert in all sciences, he noted that “the roots and principles of all sciences were handed down from us,” especially through the Sepher Yetzirah tradition:
To this [science of vision] belongs the “Book of Creation” by the Patriarch Abraham . . . Expansion, measure, weight, relation of movements, and musical harmony, all these are based on the number expressed by the word S’far. No building emerges from the hand of the architect unless its image had first existed in his soul.281
Moray was probably familiar with Abendana’s work on Halevi, for he praised the writings of medieval Jews on mathematics, astronomy, and cosmology in his letters to his Masonic protégé, Alexander Bruce.282 He further recommended the works of Christian Hebraists, such as Drusius, Scaliger, and Amama, who provided scholarly reinforcement for Scottish Masonic traditions. Drusius and Scaliger utilized their extensive research in Hebrew and Cabalistic literature to argue that the Hassidim-Essenes, descendants of the Maccabeans, were a guild of religious craftsmen who played a key role in developing the mystical traditions of the Temple.283 Drusius stressed the fraternal relationship between Solomon and Hiram, while Scaliger compared the Jewish Hassidim to contemporary craft guilds (“cum toto corpore Hasidaeorum, quam Confratrium vulgo vocant, Teutones inferiores, Gilde-Broeder, Broederschap”).284 In 1804, when Alexander Lawrie used Scaliger’s work to trace the Jewish origins of Scottish Masonry, he may have drawn on oral traditions developed by Moray and the royalist exiles in the 1650’s.285
With the connivance of Charles II, the Scottish-Jewish collaboration in restoration efforts was kept secret from Edward Hyde (Lord Clarendon) and his English faction and, as Samuel notes, Davidson’s key role was not mentioned in subsequent English histories of the time.286 According to Chevalier Ramsay, the Scottish Masonic network that helped General Monk organize the Restoration was also kept secret—a claim that gains plausibility from Moray’s correspondence and from Clarendon’s complaint that the Scots determined to distance themselves from him and his partisans.287 After the Stuarts returned to Jerusalem (Britain) in 1660, Charles II granted his personal protection to the Jews, despite attempts by various Puritans to persecute or exploit them.288 He also responded positively to Moray’s plan to establish the Royal Society of Sciences as a Solomonic organization for the non-sectarian, universalist exploration of the natural and supernatural sciences.289 Both Huygens and Leibniz, whom Moray nominated as Fellows, believed that the Scot was the “soul” of the society, which included various Cabalistic, Rosicrucian, and Masonic enterprises.290
In 1665 the identification of Stuart Masons with Jews was given passionate expression in a rare manuscript, “Ye History of Masonry,” written by Thomas Treloar.291 Using Hebrew lettering and emblems, Treloar gave a highly Judaized version of the Old Charges of operative Masonry, in which Solomon and Hiram play much greater roles than in previous English texts. He drew on earlier Scottish traditions of Hiram, the murdered architect who could be rejuvenated by certain Cabalistic and necromantic rituals.292 In some Jacobite rites, the Hiramic myth would be elaborated to identify Hiram Abif with “the widow’s son,” a reference to the “rejuvenated” Charles II as son of Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I. Treloar’s characterization of Cromwell as a traitor who spilled the blessed Martyr’s blood was reinforced by his quotation in Hebrew of a Biblical verse applied to the radical Protestants of the Interregnum—”Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?”
Treloar portrayed Charles II as the restored, anointed king who now reigned over “the Craft,” and it is significant that Scottish-style Freemasonry included a wide range of scientific and mechanical skills beyond the obviously architectural (i.e., mathematics, surveying, fortification, gunnery, optics, dialling, metallurgy, etc.).293 Thus, it is not surprising that there was a substantial Masonic influence on the organization, rules, and ambitions of the Royal Society.294 However, after Moray’s death in 1673, Constantijn Huygens worried that the Society had deviated from its original goals and deteriorated in experimental expertise; thus, he hoped the virtuosos could benefit from conversations with Rabbi Leon, who planned to take his Temple model to England. In 1674 Huygens wrote recommendation letters for Leon, addressed to the late Moray’s close friends and collaborators—Christopher Wren (F.R.S. and Freemason), Lord Arlington (Freemason and king’s defender of Jews), and Henry Oldenburg (F.R.S. and philo-Semite).295 From Robert Hooke’s diary, it is clear that he, Wren, and various master masons (who collaborated on the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire) inspected Leon’s model of the Temple, and they may have talked with him during his visit in 1675.296 According to Jewish and Masonic historians in the eighteenth-century, Leon was welcomed by Charles II as a “brother Mason,” and he designed a coat of arms for the restored Stuart fraternity.297
After Charles II’s death on 6 February 1685, his Catholic brother James VII and II continued his support of virtuoso culture, emblematic architecture, and religious toleration. Although Anderson, the anti-Jacobite Masonic writer, suggested that James was not a Mason, there is some evidence that he was associated with the fraternity during his residence in Edinburgh. Certainly, the Scottish Freemasons published a rather bizarre manifesto in support of his succession, in which they utilized “cryptick” architectural and numerical symbolism to justify his legitimacy.298 Eighteenth-century Jacobite Masons claimed that all the Stuart kings were hereditary patrons of the fraternity—a view supported by Jonathan Swift in his own defense of “ancient,” Celtic Masonry.299
The Scottish Masonic manifesto was reinforced by a loyal address on parchment, presented to James by the Jewish community in London, whose leaders visited his palace five times during the first two months of his reign.300 This support would long be remembered and resented by anti-Jacobites, who preserved an odd tradition about the Jews’ claim of heavenly support for James’s succession. Writing in 1748, in the wake of the recently crushed Stuart rebellion, the Whig propagandist Henry Fielding attacked the insidious combination of Jacobites, Jews, and Freemasons. In passing, he referred to the Jewish support of James II:
. . . the Jacobite rabbins tell us, that on Friday, Feb. 6, 1685 one of the Angels, I forget which, came to Whitehall at Noon-day, without being perceived by anyone, and brought with him a Commission from Heaven, which he delivered to the then Duke of York, by which the said Duke was indefeasibly created King of England, Scotland, and Ireland . . .
And as there is so great an Analogy between the Jews and Jacobites, so hath there been the same likeness between their Kings.301
In May 1685, when the Jews petitioned James for help in a legal battle with City merchants, the king issued an order to stop all proceedings against the community: “His Majesty’s intention being that they *Jews] should not be troubled upon this account, but quietly enjoy the free exercise of their Religion, whilst they behave themselves dutifully and obediently to his Government.”302 Barnett stresses the historical importance of James’s order: “Here was a clear statement of toleration, well in line with, or even ahead of, the most advanced nations in Europe—by which the Anglo-Jewish community was at last made safe.”303 However, the Jews’ privileges were closely bound up with the king’s prerogative, which his parliamentary opponents disputed because of his toleration for Catholics.
Despite the growing hostility to his alleged “Papist” agenda, James issued a “Declaration of Indulgence,” which declared complete liberty of conscience as royal policy. John Evelyn, a Masonic confidante of Moray, noted that the king also promised to establish religious toleration “by law, that it should never be altered by his successors.”304 Though many Whig historians argue that he must have been “insincere,” James was willing to risk his throne for this Stuart and Masonic creed. Morever, the Jews, Quakers, Familists, and even many free-thinkers believed him. Unfortunately, the visceral hatred of most Englishmen for Catholicism meant that his humane and “modern” policy led to his dethronement and exile.305
Though William of Orange believed in the Dutch tradition of religious freedom, he did not implement it in England after he became King William III of Great Britain. Moreover, in order to gain financial support for his war policy, he imposed exorbitant taxes on the Jews in London and excluded them (as non-Trinitarians) from his version of toleration.306 In 1689 a Williamite bishop, Edward Stillingfleet, quizzed his Scottish visitor, Reverend Robert Kirk, about the Scottish phenomenon of second sight and the Mason Word. Rejecting Kirk’s semi-scientific explanation of second sight, Stillingfleet called it “the work of the devil” and then scorned the Mason Word as “a Rabbinical mystery.”307 Provoked by this conversation, Kirk visited the Bevis Marks synagogue in order to observe the ceremonies, which were led by Rabbi Solomon Allyon, a leading Cabalist.308 After returning to Scotland, Kirk published his findings in 1691:
The Mason-Word, which tho some make a Misterie of it, I will not conceal a little of what I know; its like a Rabbinical tradition in a way of comment on Jachin and Boaz the two pillars erected in Solomon’s Temple; with an addition of some secret signe delivered from hand to hand, by which they know and become familiar with another.309
In the wake of William III’s victories in Ireland in 1690, the Irish Masons evidently curtailed their use of Rabbi Leon’s coat of arms, but it would re-emerge during the revival of Scots-Irish, “ancient” Masonry in London in 1756-64.310 Under the Williamite regime, at least one Jewish royalist, Francis Francia, boldly continued his support for the exiled James, and in 1702 he risked a court appearance to praise the legitimate Stuart descent of Queen Anne.311 Three years later, a Scottish Jacobite would boast of revived swinophobia, when he published A Pill for Pork-Eaters: or, a Scots Lancet for an English Swelling (1705). Calling upon Scots to re-enact the patriotic defiance of Wallace and Bruce, he threatened to use a military laxative (“purge”) against England’s “Base Epicures with Pork and Pudding cramm’d.”
After August 1714, when the Elector of Hanover became King George I of Britain, Francia collaborated with the Swedish ambassador Carl Gyllenborg and an international network of Jacobite supporters. Francia allegedly became a Mason and organized “a noble society” or “club” of Jews, perhaps a Jacobite lodge.312 Stuart partisans increasingly utilized Jewish traditions and terminology in their propaganda, which provoked the radical Whig John Toland to publish once again the charge that the Scots were blood-kin of the Jews. In October, while sardonically addressing the bishops of Great Britain, Toland reminded them, “you further know how considerable a part of the British inhabitants are the undoubted offspring of the Jews,” because “a great number of ’em fled to Scotland, which is the reason so many in that part of the Island, have such a remarkable aversion to pork and black-puddings to this day, not to insist on some other resemblances easily observable.”313
In 1717, in the wake of Francia’s arrest on treason charges and the subsequent exposure of the Swedish-Jacobite plot (which included an international Masonic component), supporters of George I organized a new system of “modern” Masonry, which was devoted to the Hanoverian succession, Newtonian science, and Whig politics.314 However, Francia was acquitted by a London jury opposed to Hanoverian policies, and he moved to northern France, where he continued to act as financial and diplomatic liaison between Jacobites and their French, Swedish, and Russian supporters.315 The sensational trial, in which the “Judaized” Jacobites were excoriated by government prosecutors, perhaps influenced the anti-Hanoverian satire of The Freemasons: an Hudibrastick Poem (1723). After noting that “Some likewise say our Masons now/ Do circumcision undergo,/ For Masonry’s a Jewish Custom,” the author further observed that “From hence they’ve been for Traitors taken,/ But still have Masons sav’d their Bacon,” for “They never once have been detected:/ As Plotters and Confederates.”316
Francia’s career as an intelligence and financial agent set the stage for other Jewish Masons, who utilized Cabalistic expertise and international connections in their service to the Écossais cause. Despite continuing Whig propaganda about the absolutist and bigotted goals of the Stuart Pretenders, many Jews continued to believe in their declarations of tolerance. Over the next decades, new Jewish actors appeared on the Écossais stage, such as Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk (the Baal Shem of London), Martines de Pasqually (chief of the Élu Coens), and the Comte de Saint-Germain (crypto-Jewish Rosicrucian).317
For the rest of the century, rival systems of Masonry—”antient” Jacobite versus “modern” Hanoverian—would struggle for dominance in Britain and abroad.318 Though Jews joined both systems, the greater number were attracted to the Hebraic and Cabalistic themes of the Écossais higher degrees. In the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, when Jews in North and South America became princes of the Temple in Scottish-rite lodges, they seemed to re-enact the great Stuart masques which had failed to heal the old kingdoms but helped to liberate the new republics.319 As Dr. Isaac Wise, Scottish-rite Mason and leader of American Reform Judaism, would affirm in 1855, “Masonry is a Jewish institution,” but its beauty and pride is “its universal character, its tendency to fraternize mankind.”320
Selected Documentation
This paper draws on the extensive documentation in my book, Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Leiden: Brill Academic Press, forthcoming in 2002).
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Al-Bakri, Description de l’Afrique Septentrionale, rev. ed., trans. Mac Guckin de Slane (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1965), 284.↩︎
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James Howell, The Wonderfull, and Most Deplorable History of the Latter Times of the Jews, of the City of Hierusalem (London, 1653), Epistle Dedicatory.↩︎
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MS. reproduced in John Thorpe, “Old Masonic Manuscript. A Fragment,” Lodge of Research, No. 2429 Leicester. Transactions for the Year 1926-27, 40-48.↩︎
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Anon., The Free Masons: An Hudibrastick Poem (London: A. Moore, 1723); reprinted in Wallace McLeod, “The Hudibrastick Poem of 1723,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 107 (1994), 13-20.↩︎
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Reprinted in Appendix to Jonathan Swift, Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1962), 324-33, 358-59. Though published anonymously during Swift’s lifetime, the pamphlet was attributed to Swift by his close friend and publisher George Faulkner, who reprinted it as an anonymous work in 1731 and as Swift’s work in his Dublin edition of the complete works (vol. X, 1762). It was included in Swift’s Miscellanies (London, 1746); Works (London, 1755 and 1774); and German edition (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1760). Some English critics doubt the attribution, but Irish Masonic scholars have long argued for Swift’s authorship; see Henry Sadler, Masonic Reprints and Historical Revelations, introd. Chetwode Crowley (London: George Kenning, 1898), 32; John Herron Lepper and Philip Crossle, History of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Ireland (Dublin: Lodge of Research, 1925), I, 448, and “Freemasonry in Ireland, 1725-31,” Lodge of Research, No.CC., Ireland. Transactions for the Year 1924 (Dublin, 1931), 107 ff.↩︎
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Dr. Isaac Wise, The Israelite (3 and 17 August 1855); quoted in Samuel Oppenheim, The Jews and Masonry in the United States before 1810. Reprint from Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 19 (1910), 1-2.↩︎
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Frederick Bargebuhr, “The Alhambra Palace of the Eleventh Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 19 (1956), 192-258; Leon Weinberger, Jewish Prince in Moslem Spain: Selected Poems of Samuel Ibn Gabirol (Tuscaloosa, 1973), 4.↩︎
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For revisionist arguments, see Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988); J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds., Theatre and Government Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993); Vaughan Hart, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London: Routledge, 1994); Edward Corp and Eveline Cruickshanks, The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites (London: Hambledon, 1995).↩︎
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Edward Cowan, “Myth and Identity in Early Medieval Scotland,” Scottish Historical Review, 63 (1984), 116-22.↩︎
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Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York: Columbia UP, 1966), VIII, 148-79; Mark Wischnitzer, A History of Jewish Crafts and Guilds (New York: Jonathan David, 1965), 65, 74.↩︎
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J.W. McCrindle, ed., The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk (1897; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1964), 122-23.↩︎
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Franz Landsberger, A History of Jewish Art (Cinncinnati: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1946), 190.↩︎
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M. Wischnitzer, History, 67.↩︎
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Moshe Idel, “The Reification of Language,” in Mysticism and Language, ed. Steven Katz (New York, 1992), 43.↩︎
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David Blumenthal, Understanding Jewish Mysticism: the Merkabah Tradition and the Zoharic Tradition (New York: Ktav, 1978), 21-26.↩︎
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ibid, 37.↩︎
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Aryeh Kaplan, Jewish Meditation: A Practical Guide (New York: Schocken, 1985), 78-79.↩︎
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ibid., 27.↩︎
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Jacob Neusner, A History of the Jews of Babylonia (Leiden: Brill, 1966), II, 155. See also Ithamar Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism (Leiden: Brill, 1980).↩︎
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E.L. Sukenik, Ancient Synagogues in Palestine and Greece (London: Oxford UP, 1934), 67; Joseph Guttmann, No Graven Images: Studies in Art and the Hebrew Bible (New York: Ktav, 1971), xxxviii, 40, 48, 409-16.↩︎
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Jacob Guttmann, The Temple of Solomon: Archaeological Fact and Medieval Tradition in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Art (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1976), xii.↩︎
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Shlomo Pines, Studies in the History of Jewish Thought, eds. Warren Harvey and Moshe Idel (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1997), 136-39.↩︎
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J. Guttmann, No Graven Images, xxxviii.↩︎
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On the cross-fertilization of Jewish, Moslem, and Christian masons and craftsmen, see S. Baron, History, VIII, 148; J. Guttmann, Temple, xvi-xxii; A.H. and H.E. Cutler, The Jew as Ally of the Muslim (Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1986); George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1947), I, 208.↩︎
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G. Sarton, Introduction, II, 154, 246; Y. Marquet, “Ikhwan al-Safa,” Encyclopedia of Islam, rev. ed. (London: Luzac, 1971), 1071-76.↩︎
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Idris Shah, The Sufis (London: W.H. Allen, 1964), 220.↩︎
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J.S. Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 25.↩︎
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I. Shah, Sufis, 173, 372.↩︎
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G. Sarton, Introduction, II, 421.↩︎
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S. Baron, History, VIII, 25; Israel Efros, Studies in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (New York: Columbia UP, 1974), 46.↩︎
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F. Bargebuhr, “Alhambra,” 232.↩︎
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ibid., 192-258.↩︎
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Al-Bakri, Description, 11, 19, 226, 284.↩︎
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Leon Weinberger, Jewish Prince in Moslem Spain: Selected Poems of Samuel Ibn Gabirol (Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 1973), 4.↩︎
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Israel Davidson, Selected Religious Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol (1923; rpt. New York: Arno, 1973), 83, 88, 100, 121, 173.↩︎
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Solomon Munck, Mélanges Philosophiques Juives et Arabes, nouv. ed. (1857; rpt. Paris: J. Vrin, 1955), 283-90.↩︎
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For Scot’s multifaceted career, see Lynn Thorndike, Michael Scot (London: Thomas Nelson, 1965).↩︎
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Louis Newman, Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Movements (1925; rpt. New York: AMS, 1966), 296-97, 357-58.↩︎
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Antoine Faivre, “The Ancient and Medieval Sources of Modern Esoteric Movements,” in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, eds. Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 71-100.↩︎
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See his “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” in Walter Scott, Castle Dangerous (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1923), 187-91, 355-61.↩︎
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Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretation Through Eight Centuries (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1960), 35.↩︎
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Shlomo Pines, “Scholasticism after Thomas Aquinas and the Teachings of Hasdai Crescas and his Predecessors,” Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, I (1967), 3, 23-50.↩︎
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L. Thorndike, History, III, 3-7.↩︎
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Salo Baron, Ancient and Medieval Jewish History, ed. Leon Feldman (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1972), 250.↩︎
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S. Baron, Social, IV, 75, 85, 281n.112, 320-21; VIII, 159.↩︎
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The Jews in Medieval York (York: York Minster Education Department, 1998), 15-20.↩︎
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Douglas Knoop, G.P. Jones, and Douglas Hamer, The Two Earliest Masonic MSS. (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1938), 331, 100, 159.↩︎
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Helen Nicholson, Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights: The Image of the Military Orders, 1128-1291 (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1993), 77.↩︎
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“Abraham bar Hiyya (Savasorda)” and “Cavalleria, de la,” Encylopaedia Judaica; on links between Jews and Templars, see S. Baron, Social, IV, 37; X, 67, 331.↩︎
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H. Nicholson, Templars, 106.↩︎
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ibid., 108.↩︎
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Edmund Hawes, Annales, or a General Chronicle of England (London, 1615), 1069-70.↩︎
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For the 1658 document referring to James VI’s initiation (ca. 1601), see Robert Mylne, The Master Masons to the Crown of Scotland and Their Works (Edinburgh: Scott, Ferguson, and Burness, 1893), 128-30. For his Solomonic role, Maurice Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana: Illinois UP, 1990).↩︎
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Eleanor Ferris, “The Financial Relations of the Knights Templars to the English Crown,” American Historical Review, i (1902), 1-17.↩︎
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A.J. Forey, “The Military Order of St. Thomas of Acre,” English Historical Review, CCCLXIV (1977), 492-96.↩︎
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I am grateful to Ron Heisler for giving me this information, from his unpublished essay, “Crusading Orders and the Early Freemasons.” See also W.J. Williams, “Archbishop Becket and the Masons’ Company of London,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 41 (1928), 130-57.↩︎
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“Acre,” Encyclopaedia Judaica.↩︎
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Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Albany: State University of New York, 1988).↩︎
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Williams suggests that the order’s foundation was connected with the construction of the Hospital of St. Thomas in London; see his “Masons of the City of London: Gleanings from the Letters Books and Other Records A.D. 1293 to A.D. 1654,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 45 (1932), 117-64. Also, Douglas Knoop and G.P. Jones, The Genesis of Freemasonry (London: Quatuor Coronati Lodge, 1978), 152.↩︎
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Alan Macquarrie, Scotland and the Crusades, 1095-1560 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985), 30-31.↩︎
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David Macgibbon and Thomas Ross, The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1887), I, 514-15.↩︎
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James A. Murray, ed., The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune. Early English Text Society, o.s. LXI (London: N. Trübner, 1875), xiii-xvii, xl, 59, 61. In 1658 the exiled Scottish Freemasons Sir Robert Moray and Alexander Bruce discussed the Rhymer’s prophecies in the context of Stuart-Masonic restoration efforts; see National Library of Scotland, Transcript of Kincardine MS. 5049, f.62.↩︎
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William Matthews, “The Egyptians in Scotland,” The Political History of a Myth,” Viator (1970), 291-92.↩︎
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Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regnum Britanniae (1136); see E. Cowan, “Myth and Identity,” 111-35.↩︎
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See J. Howell, History, sig A5v; John Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1714), 37-38.↩︎
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W. Matthews, “Egyptians,” 291-92.↩︎
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W.F. Skene, Chronicles of the Picts, Chronicles of the Scots (Edinburgh, 1867), 242; also, “The Coronation Stone,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 8 (1868-70), 27-30.↩︎
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Edward Cowan, “Identity, Freedom and the Declaration of Arbroath,” in Image and Identity: The Making and Re-making of Scotland Through the Ages, ed. Dauvit Broun, R.J. Finlay, and Michael Lynch (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1998), 42.↩︎
-
M. Dominica Legge, “La Piere d’Escose,” Scottish Historical Review, 38 (1959), 109-134.↩︎
-
On similarities between Jewish and Scottish notions of second sight or clairvoyance, see Hilda Davidson, The Seer in Celtic and Other Traditions (Edinburgh, 1989).↩︎
-
John Bartlett, ed., The First and Second Book of Maccabees (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973).↩︎
-
Some Templars fled England to Scotland, where most of the local knights escaped before the attempted arrests by reluctant law officers. See C.G. Addison, The Knights Templar History (1912; New York, 1978), 545-69; I. Cowan, P. Mackay, and A. Macquarrie, The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1983), 97, 369. For the popular tradition, see “Bruce’s Secret Weapon,” Scots Magazine (June 1991); Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, The Temple and the Lodge (1989; London, 1993), 62-65; C.B. Hunter and A.C. Ferguson, “The Role of the Royal Order of Scotland in the Schism of 1751 and the Union of 1813,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 109 (1996), 233-39.↩︎
-
H. Nicholson, Templars, 15, 140n.1.↩︎
-
Gordon Donaldson, ed., Scottish Historical Documents (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic, 1970), 55-58.↩︎
-
On Scottish swinophobia, see Arthur Williamson, “‘A Pil for Pork-Eaters’: Ethnic Identity, Apocalyptic Promises, and the Strange Creation of the Judeo-Scots,” in The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After, ed. R.B. Waddington and A.H. Williamson (New York, 1994), 237-58.↩︎
-
Howard M. Colvin, The History of the King’s Works (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1963), I, 419-20↩︎
-
Ian Cowan, P.H. Mackay, Alan Macquarrie, The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in Scotland, Scottish History Society, 4th s., IX (1983), 51-53.↩︎
-
M. Baigent and R. Leigh, Temple, 22-34.↩︎
-
C. Perkins, “Military Orders,” 488-89; C. Addison, Knights, 391-96; “Athlit,” Encylopaedia Judaica.↩︎
-
Bar Hebraeus, The Chronography of Gregory Abû’l-Faraj, 1225-1286, the son of Aaron the Hebrew Physician, trans. E.W. Budge (1932; rpt. Amsterdam, 1976), I, chapter 7; H. Nicholson, Templars, 77, 159n.124.↩︎
-
I. Cowan, et al., Knights of St. John, xx.↩︎
-
See Richard Fawcett, Scottish Architecture: From the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation, 1371-1560 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1994); Miles Glendinning, Ranald Macinnes, Aonghus MacKechnie, A History of Scottish Architecture: From the Renaissance to the Present Day (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996).↩︎
-
H. Colvin, History, I, 420-22; Douglas Knoop and G.P. Jones, The Scottish Mason and the Mason Word (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1939), 48-50.↩︎
-
Robert F. Gould, History and Antiquities of Freemasonry, 3rd. rev. ed. (1882-87; rpt. London, 1951), I, 327-47.↩︎
-
R. Fawcett, Scottish Architecture, xvii-xxi, 24, 29, 35, 41.↩︎
-
M. Wischnitzer, History, 108, 118-19.↩︎
-
John Barbour, The Bruce, ed. Walter W. Skeat (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1894), I, 20. I have modernized the spelling.↩︎
-
ibid., 106.↩︎
-
See Henry Adamson, The Muses Threnodie (Printed at Edinburgh in King James College by George Anderson, 1638), 32.↩︎
-
J. Hector Boece, The History and Chronicles of Scotland, trans. John Bellenden (Edinburgh: Tait, 1821), II, 486, 505.↩︎
-
H. Adamson, Muses Threnodie, 9-10, 22, 83.↩︎
-
James Anderson, The Constitutions of the Free-Masons (1723) and (1738), ed. Eric Ward (Facs. rpt. Abingdon: Burgess, 1976), 88. Anderson was an anti-Jacobite Scot, whose official history was published as Whig propaganda for the “modern” Grand Lodge and Hanoverian government. Despite the distortions and omissions in his work, his claims about various individuals’ Masonic affiliation should not be ignored but evaluated within their biographical and historical context. Many of his alleged Masons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries still had living relatives, heirs, and colleagues in 1723, who did not challenge his assertions.↩︎
-
Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. D.E.R. Watt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1987), VIII, 329.↩︎
-
Eileen Cassavetti, The Lion and the Lilies: The Stuarts and France (London: Macdonald and Janes, 1977), 419.↩︎
-
C.N. Batham, “Chevalier Ramsay: a New Appreciation,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 81 (1968), 303.↩︎
-
M. Baigent and R. Leigh, Temple, 135, 148-57. Curiously, they seemed unaware of Ramsay’s claim.↩︎
-
For Moray’s military career, see Alexander Robertson, The Life of Sir Robert Moray (London: Longman’s Green, 1922); for his Masonic interests, see David Stevenson, “Masonry, Symbolism, and Ethics in the Life of Sir Robert Moray,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 114 (1984), 405-31.↩︎
-
Frances Yates, “Ramon Lull and John Scotus Erigena” and “The Art of Ramon Lull,” Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 17 (1954), 115-69, 142-55. Also, Moshe Idel, “Ramon Lull and Ecstatic Kabbalah,” Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 51 (1988), 70-74.↩︎
-
Elliot Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), 204, 280, 293.↩︎
-
F. Yates, “Art of Lull,” 155.↩︎
-
J.N. Hillgarth, Ramon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 214-15; Anthony Bonner, Selected Works of Ramon Llull (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), I, 292n.26.↩︎
-
In the pseudo-Lullian literature, both Edward II and Robert I are mentioned, but the Scottish king was the one who hoped to mount a new crusade; see Michael Pereira, The Alchemical Corpus Attributed to Raymond Lull (London: Warburg Institute, 1989), II, 11, 19, 37-49.↩︎
-
Barbara Crawford, “William Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, and His Family: A Study in the Politics of Survival,” in Essays on the Nobility of Scotland, ed. K.J. Stringer (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985), 232-51.↩︎
-
J. Anderson called him a “Grand Master” in Constitutions (1738), 89. It is unclear whether his use of that term drew on oral tradition or was a retrospective anachronism.↩︎
-
Historical Manuscripts Commission 29: 13th Report, Appendix ii, Portland MSS. (1893-94), II, 56.↩︎
-
R. Gould, History, I, 286.↩︎
-
S. Baron, Social History, XII, 49-55.↩︎
-
William Swaan, The Gothic Cathedral (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 84; J. Guttman, Temple, 58.↩︎
-
Richard Hay, Genealogie of the Saintclaires of Rosslyn (Edinburgh, 1835), 27.↩︎
-
D. Stevenson, Origins, 133-34; Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth and a Short Treatise on Charms and Spells (1691), ed. S. Sanderson (London, 1976), 88-89.↩︎
-
R. Fawcett, Scottish Architecture, 172 and plate 5.34.↩︎
-
Philo-Roskelynsis, An Account of the Chapel of Roslin (Edinburgh, 1774), 28.↩︎
-
Stewart Cruden, Scottish Medieval Churches (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), 196.↩︎
-
F. Yates, “Art,” 142; E. Allison Peers, Ramon Lull: A Biography (London: SPCK, 1929), 305; Anthony Bonner, Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Lull Reader (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), 33-34.↩︎
-
Gilbert Hay, The Prose Works of Sir Gilbert Hay, ed. Jonathan Glenn (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1993), III, 13-14, 26, 36, 51. I have modernized the spelling.↩︎
-
Letter from “Jackin” in Gentleman’s Magazine (April 1737), VII, 226-28.↩︎
-
G. Hay, Prose, III, 40-41, 150-51.↩︎
-
J. Bartlett, Book of Maccabees, 63.↩︎
-
G. Hay, Prose, I, lxxxv-vi, 104-07, 294-45.↩︎
-
R. Hay, Genealogie, 136.↩︎
-
Gilbert Hay, The Buik of King Alexander the Conqueror, ed. John Cartwright (Edinburgh: Scottish Texts Society, 1986), XVI, ix-xx, 8, 12; XVIII, 22-23.↩︎
-
His meditative technique was “above all, an art of predestination, which would revise and correct the popular arts of divination”; see J. Hillgarth, Ramon Lull, 8.↩︎
-
G. Hay, Prose, I, ix; W.F. Ryan and Charles Schmitt, Pseudo-Aristotle, the Secret of Secrets: Sources and Influences (London: Warburg Institute, 1982), 55-72.↩︎
-
Geoffrey Stell, “Architecture: the Changing Needs of Society,” in Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Jennifer Brown (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 165.↩︎
-
R. Fawcett, Scottish Architecture, xix, 303; Norman Macdougall, James III: A Political Study (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982),288-89; Robert Mackie, King James IV of Scotland (Edinburgh: Tweeddale Court, 1958), 12, 256, 304.↩︎
-
J. Anderson, Constitutions (1738), 89.↩︎
-
M. Glendenning, History, 9; M.E. de La Coste, Anselme Adorne (Brussels, 1855).↩︎
-
For the Hospitallers’ tolerant attitude and collaboration with Jewish craft guilds on Rhodes, see M. Wischnitzer, History, 135-36.↩︎
-
A. Macquarrie, Scotland, 93.↩︎
-
D. Macgibbon and T. Ross, Castellated, I, 508-13.↩︎
-
C. Addison, Knights, 545.↩︎
-
M. Glendinning, History, 10-11.↩︎
-
Gavin Douglas, The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1967), 95-101. I have modernized the spelling.↩︎
-
ibid., 93.↩︎
-
ibid., 200.↩︎
-
J. Anderson, Constitutions (1738), 90.↩︎
-
ibid., 89; R. Fawcett, Scottish Architecture, 304-14; Leslie Macfarland, William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland, 1431-1514 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP, 1985), 326-37.↩︎
-
Hector Boece, Murthalacensium et Aberdonensium Episcoporum Vitae, trans. James Moir (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1894), 326-37.↩︎
-
The subject of Nicholas’s “Jewish extraction” remains controversial; see Helen Rosenau, Vision of the Temple: the Image of the Temple of Jerusalem in Judaism and Christianity (London: Oresko, 1979), 43-45.↩︎
-
G. Patrick Edwards, “William Elphinstone, His College Chapel, and the Second of April,” Aberdeen University Review, 51 (1985), 1-17.↩︎
-
D. Stevenson, Origins, 24.↩︎
-
Geoffrey Barrow and Ann Royan, “James Fifth Stewart of Scotland, 1260?-1309,” in Stringer, Essays, 207n.40; G. Stell, “Architecture,” 161.↩︎
-
R. Fawcett, Scottish Architecture, 301.↩︎
-
C. Batham, “Ramsay,” 303.↩︎
-
M. Glendinning, History, 16.↩︎
-
Charles McKean, “Sir James Hamilton of Finnart: a Renaissance Courtier-Architect,” Architectural History, 42 (1999), 141-42.↩︎
-
Frances Yates, Lull and Bruno: Collected Essays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 227n.88; Augustin Renaudot, Préréforme et Humanisme à Paris, 2ème ed. (Paris: Librairie d’Argences, 1953), 378-79, 464, 661, 699; J. Hillgarth, Ramon Lull, 282-87.↩︎
-
Philip E. Hughes, Lefèvre: Pioneer of Ecclesiastical Renewal in France (Grand Rapids: W.E. Eerdmans, 1984), 19, 24.↩︎
-
Eugene Rice, “The De Magia Naturalis of Jacque Lefèvre d’Etaples,” in Philosophy and Humanism: Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. E.P. Mahony (New York: Columbia UP, 1976), 23.↩︎
-
ibid., 15, 50, 127.↩︎
-
P. Hume Brown, George Buchanan: Humanist and Reformer (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890), 18; I.D. Macfarlane, Buchanan (London: Duckworth, 1981), 4-5, 40-41; John Durkan, “Buchanan’s Judaizing Practices,” Innes Review, 15 (1964), 186-87.↩︎
-
Arthur Williamson, “British Israel and Roman Britain: The Jews and Scottish Models of Polity from George Buchanan to Samuel Rutherford,” in R.H. Popkin and G.M. Weiner, eds., Jewish Christians and Christian Jews (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1994), 98-105.↩︎
-
C. McKean, “Hamilton,” 145, 151, 166.↩︎
-
Robert Lindsay of Pittscottie, A History of the Stuart Kings of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1778), 252.↩︎
-
M. Glendinning, History, 17.↩︎
-
Denis Hay, ed., The Letters of James V (Edinburgh: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1954), 419, 541.↩︎
-
On the 1599 requirement, see D. Stevenson, Origins, 49; on Finnart’s expertise in visualization, see C. McKean, “Hamilton,” 159-64.↩︎
-
R. Mylne, Master Masons, lxii, 42. That Martyne passed his forename on to his son, also a mason, reinforces the possibility that Moses was a Marranist family name.↩︎
-
P. Hughes, Lefèvre, 190.↩︎
-
ibid., lxii.↩︎
-
Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (1969; rpt. New York: Dell, 1971), 65, 91.↩︎
-
R. Fawcett, Architecture, 290, 326-27; Jamie Cameron, James V: The Personal Role, ed. Norman Macdougall (Phantassie: Tuckwell, 1998), 191-227.↩︎
-
C. McKean, “Hamilton,” 144-45, 170n.34. I will use a capital R for Protestant Reformers versus a small r for reformers within the Catholic church.↩︎
-
Howard Colvin, “Recycling the Monasteries: Demolition and Reuse by the Tudor Government, 1536-47,” in his Essays on English Architectural History (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999), 52.↩︎
-
W. Williams, “Archbishop Becket,” 135-36.↩︎
-
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1972), 261-62.↩︎
-
Henry Paton, Accounts of the Masters of Works (Edinburgh: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1979), I, 16; John Knox, John Knox’s History of the Reformation, ed. W.C. Dickinson (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), I, 28-29; I, 11, 76-77; R. Fawcett, Scottish Architecture, 297.↩︎
-
Douglas Knoop and George Jones, The Genesis of Freemasonry(London: Quatuor Coronati Lodge, 1978), 207-08.↩︎
-
Robert Wedderburn, The Complaynt of Scotland (c. 1550) (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1979), lvi-lvii, 36-37, 59-60, 69.↩︎
-
Kenneth R.H. Mackenzie, The Royal Masonic Encyclopedia, ed. John Hamill and Robert Gilbert (1877; Wellingborough: Aquarian, 1987), 616, 776.↩︎
-
R. Wedderburn, Complaynt, lvi-lvii, 36-37, 69.↩︎
-
H. Brown, Buchanan, 12.↩︎
-
George Black, “The Beginnings of the Study of Hebrew in Scotland,” in Studies in Jewish Bibliography, ed. Louis Ginzburg (New York: Alexander Kohut Memorial Fund, 1929), 463-78.↩︎
-
George Buchanan, The Sacred Dramas of George Buchanan, trans. Archibald Brown (Edinburgh: James Thin, 1906), 4-5, 31, 94, 157-58.↩︎
-
A. Williamson, “British Israel,” 101.↩︎
-
R. Fawcett, Scottish Architecture, 280, 296, 330.↩︎
-
For his experience in Scotland, see Jerome Cardan, The Book of My Life, trans. Jean Stoner (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1930), 16, 97, 130, 299 n.20.↩︎
-
Harry Friedenwald, The Jews and Medicine (1944; rpt. New York: Ktav, 1967), I, 232, 246.↩︎
-
Markus Fierz, Girolamo Cardano, 1501-1576, trans. Helga Niman (Boston: Burkhauser, 1983), 106-07.↩︎
-
J. Cardan, Book, 165, 168, 203.↩︎
-
D. Stevenson, Origins, 27-28, 49.↩︎
-
J.M. Ragon, De la Maçonnerie Occulte et de l’Initiation Hermétique, rev. ed. Oswald Wirth (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1926), 66-67.↩︎
-
John Durkan, “The Royal Lectureships Under Mary of Lorraine,” Scottish Historical Review, 62 (1983), 73-78.↩︎
-
H. Paton, Accounts, xxxiv. On Elizabeth’s suppression of the masons, see J. Anderson, Constitutions (1738), 81; on her anti-architectural policies, see Robert Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999), 6, 10.↩︎
-
J. Knox, History, I, 163.↩︎
-
H. Adamson, Muses Threnodie, 9-10, 55-58.↩︎
-
J. Knox, History, I, 357; D. Stevenson, Origins, 122.↩︎
-
J.A. Van Dorsten, The Radical Arts (London: Oxford UP, 1970), 6-9, 24-25.↩︎
-
H. Brown, Buchanan, 164; [J. Robertson], ed., Inventaires de la Royne Descosse Douairiere de France (Edinburgh: Scottish Texts Society, 1863), civ.↩︎
-
Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983), I, 104, 275; Jacob Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger (1855; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1965), 139.↩︎
-
Anthony Grafton, “Close Encounters of the Learned Kind: Joseph Scaliger’s Table Talk,” The American Scholar, 57 (1988), 586-87.↩︎
-
The Free-Mason, no. 5 (11 December 1733).↩︎
-
C. Batham, “Ramsay,” 302.↩︎
-
I.D. Macfarlane, Buchanan, 255, 259-60; Leon Voet, The Golden Compasses (Amsterdam: Vangendt, 1969), I, v. 12-31; B. Rekers, Benito Arias Montano (1527-1598) (London: Warburg Institute, 1972), 70-74, 126.↩︎
-
Roger Lockyer, James VI and I (London: Longman’s, 1998), 124-33.↩︎
-
Jean Dietz Moss, “Godded with God”: Hendrik Niclaes and His Family of Love (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1981), 21.↩︎
-
Patrick Tytler, The Admirable Crichton, 2nd. rev. ed. (Edinburgh: W. and C. Tart, 1823), 81, 118, 227-29. For Erskine, I am grateful to Adam McLean for sharing his paper, “The Manuscript Sources of the English Translations of the Rosicrucian Manifestos,” conference on “Rosenkreuz als europaïsches Phänomen im 17. Jahrhundert,” Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttl (1994). See also, Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh: Sir George Erskine Alchemical MSS, vols. I-VI.↩︎
-
Michael Lynch, “A Nation Born Again? Scottish Identity in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in D. Broun, et al, Image and Identity, 86-87.↩︎
-
James Melville, The Diary of Mr. James Melville, 1556-1601 (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1839), 145-56; J. Anderson, Constitutions (1738), 375.↩︎
-
P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, “De Verbo Mirifico: Johannes Reuchlin and the Royal Arch,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 99 (1986), 206.↩︎
-
Arthur Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1979), 68.↩︎
-
M. Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon.↩︎
-
R. Lockyer, James VI and I, 172.↩︎
-
D. Stevenson, Origins, 26-28.↩︎
-
James VI, New Poems of James I of England, ed. Allan Westcott (New York: AMS, 1966), xxi-xxii, 80-81; and Minor Prose Works of James VI and I, eds. James Craigie and Alexander Law (Edinburgh: Scottish Texts Society, 1982), 9.↩︎
-
James VI, The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. James Craigie (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1955), I, 31-32.↩︎
-
Sieur Du Bartas, The Divine Weeks and Works, trans. Joshua Sylvester; ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), II, 468-69.↩︎
-
ibid., II, 472-73.↩︎
-
ibid., I, 117, 119, 218, 274-75, 295, 328; II, 431-37, 490, 673, 717. Nearly every theme of royalist, Cabalistic Freemasonry is expressed in Du Bartas’s work, which drew on his own experience of architectural construction and probable contact with the compagnonnage, the French craft fraternity whose members were called “the Sons of Solomon.”↩︎
-
George Warner, The Library of James VI, 1573-1583. Miscellany of Scottish Historical Society, XV (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1893), xxvi, l-liii.↩︎
-
Du Bartas, Divine Weeks, II, 490-91.↩︎
-
John Hamill’s note in Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 103 (1990), 261.↩︎
-
Du Bartas, Divine Weeks, II, 576-77.↩︎
-
John Durkan, “Alexander Dickson and S.T.C.,” The Bibliotheck, 3 (1962), 183-90. For Thomas Vautrollier, Bruno’s London publisher, who found refuge in Scotland, see Joseph Ames, Typographical Antiquities (London: W. Faden, 1749), 352-56, 586-87.↩︎
-
Karen Silvia de Léon-Jones, Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), 11-14, 44, 146; John Durkan, “Alexander Dickson and S.T.C., The Bibliothek (1962), 183-90.↩︎
-
Sir Hugh Platt, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (London: Peter Short, 1594), 81-82.↩︎
-
“Hugh Platt,” Dictionary of National Biography.↩︎
-
Annie Cameron, ed., Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Mary, Queen of Scots, 1547-1595 (Edinburgh: H.M. General Register House, 1936), XI, 626.↩︎
-
William Fowler, The Works of William Fowler, eds. Henry Meikle, James Craigie, and John Purvis (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1940), II, 168; III, x, xix.↩︎
-
Aonghus MacKechnie, “James VI’s Architects and their Architecture,” in Juian Goodare and Michael Lynch, eds., The Reign of James VI (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000), 163.↩︎
-
W. Boyd and H. Meikle, Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland (Edinburgh, 1936), X, 377.↩︎
-
W. Fowler, Works, II, 171, 184, 189.↩︎
-
Stevenson, Origins, 45, 49-50, 87-96; George Draffen, “The Schaw Statutes,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 94 (1981), 138-40. I will henceforth distinguish between operative masons and initiates of the post-Schaw mixed operative-speculative lodges by capitalizing Masons and Freemasons.↩︎
-
J. Swift, Prose, V, 328.↩︎
-
D. Stevenson, Origins, 126-27; First Freemasons, 26-28.↩︎
-
Claim made in masonic document dated 1658; quoted in Robert Mylne, The Master Masons to the Crown of Scotland and Their Works (Edinburgh, 1893), 128-30. Anderson claimed that “Claude Hamilton Lord Paisley (Progenitor of our late Grand Master Lord Abercorn)” presided over James VI’s initiation; see Constitutions (1738), 91.↩︎
-
H.M. Colvin, The History of the King’s Works (London, 1963), III, part 1, 108.↩︎
-
Bodleian Library: John Aubrey, “Chronologia Architectonica” (1671), MS. Top. Gen. C.25.f.168.↩︎
-
A. Williamson, “A Pil,” 245-47; James Harington, The Letters and Epigrams of Sir James Harington, ed. N.E. McClure (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1930), 110-11.↩︎
-
Dorothy Quinn, “The Career of John Gordon, Dean of Salsibury, 1603-1619,” The Historian, 6 (1943), 76-96.↩︎
-
John Gordon, Enotikon (London: George Bishop, 1604), 2-3, 22-26, 33-41.↩︎
-
V. Hart, Art and Magic, 111.↩︎
-
G. Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 24.↩︎
-
H. Colvin, History, IV, 323-34; D. Stevenson, Origins, 61.↩︎
-
John Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830 (London, Penquin, 1953), 26-27, 105.↩︎
-
A.W. Johnson, Ben Jonson: Poetry and Architecture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); John Harris, Stephen Orgel, and Roy Strong, eds., The King’s Arcadia: Inigo Jones and the Stuart Court (London: Arts Council, 1973).↩︎
-
David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1997), 203.↩︎
-
Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (Los Angeles: UCLA, 1973), I, preface.↩︎
-
D. Stevenson, Origins, 186-87; Howard Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of Architects, 3rd. ed. (London, 1995), 1018.↩︎
-
W.J. Williams, “Use of Word,” 255.↩︎
-
R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1987), 145.↩︎
-
George Marcelline, The Triumphs of King James the First (London, 1610), 55-58.↩︎
-
James VI and I, The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles McIlwain (Cambridge, 1918), 328.↩︎
-
Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 1559-1614 (London, 1875), 411-12; Acts of the Privy Council of England. 1613-1614 (London, 1921), 257, 272, 416.↩︎
-
Frances Yates was wrong about James’s rejection of Dee; for a corrective, see John Dee, To the King’s Most Excellent Majestie (London, 1604), and Richard Deacon, John Dee (London: Frederick Muller, 1968), 270-71. On James’s employment of Fludd, see William Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1988), 36-38; of David Ramsay, see D. Stevenson, First Freemasons, 27, and Ron Heisler, “Phillip Ziegler—the Rosicrucian ‘King of Jerusalem,’” The Hermetic Journal (1990), 3-10; of James and John Macolo, see Paolo Galluzi, “Motivi Paracelsiani in la Toscana de Cosimo II e di Don Antonio dei Medici,” in Scienze Credenze Occulte Livelli di Cultura (Firenze: Leo Olscki, 1982), 44-47, 57-58, and Historical Manuscripts Commission: Report of the MSS. of the Earl of Mar and Kellie Preserved at Alloa House (London, 1904), 119.↩︎
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Though Yates argued that James’s failure to join the Protestant military campaign arose from cowardly truckling to Spain, more recent scholars argue the sincerity of his hopes for religious conciliation and the prescient wisdom of avoiding the sectarian warfare on the Continent. See D. Willson, King James, R. Lockyer, James VI and I, and M. Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon.↩︎
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John Williams, Great Britain’s Solomon (London: Job Bill, 1625), 22-24, 38-39, 47, 62.↩︎
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J. Anderson, Constitutions (1723), 40.↩︎
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Henry Adamson, The Muses Threnodie (Edinburgh, 1638). The poem was drafted ca. 1630-31.↩︎
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D.J. Gordon, “Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel Between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 12 (1949), 159-75.↩︎
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William Laud, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, D.D. ed. William Scott (Oxford,1847), I, 63-75. Laud worked closely with the operative masons at St. John’s College, Oxford, where he participated in their ceremonies. He was praised by a self-described “Freemason” as a special friend and benefactor to the fraternity; see W.J. Williams, “A Selection of Wills Made by Testators Described as Freemasons Dated Between 1605 and 1675,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 52 (1941), 164.↩︎
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Allan Macinnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625-1641 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1991), 168.↩︎
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Stevenson, Origins, 199.↩︎
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For Jones as “our great Master Mason,” see J. Anderson, Consitutions (1723), 39. The sources of much eighteenth-century Écossais Masonic symbolism can be found in Jones’s masques, Coelum Brittanicum (1634), Brittania Triumphans (1638), and Salmacida Spolia (1640). For the texts and commentary, see S. Orgel and R. Strong, Inigo Jones, I-II, and John Harris, Stephen Orgel, and Roy Strong, eds., The King’s Arcadia: Inigo Jones and the Stuart Court (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1973).↩︎
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For the rituals, see René Le Forestier, La Franc-maçonnerie Templière et Occultiste aux XVIIe et XIXe Siècles, ed. Antoine Faivre (Paris: Louvain, 1970); André Kervella, La Franc-maçonnerie Écossaise dans l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 1999).↩︎
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D. Stevenson, Origins, 73-75; R. Mylne, Master Masons, 135, 167-69; Alexander Robertson, The Life of Sir Robert Moray (London: Longman’s Green, 1922), 3-4.↩︎
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Moray’s correspondence is preserved in the Kincardine Papers, transcripts in National Library of Scotland and Royal Society in London. He gives detailed accounts of his practical and spiritual interests in operative and symbolic Masonry, which make clear his commitment to many themes of “modern” speculative Freemasonry. See especially NLS: Kincardine MS. 5050, ff. 3-7; also David Stevenson, “Masonry, Symbolism, and Ethics in the Life of Sir Robert Moray,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 114 (1984), 405-31.↩︎
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For Charles II’s initiation, see J. Anderson, Constitutions (1723) and (1738), 41, 101. In a letter to Charles II, Moray used Masonic terminology to stress his loyalty to the king, his “Master Builder,” and signed it with his Mason’s Mark; see National Library of Scotland: Balcarres Papers, MS. 29.f.243, and D. Stevenson, “Masonry,” 409. For claims about a Stuart lodge at St. Germain, see J. Bertellot, “Les franc-maçons devant l’histoire,” Monde Neveau (1949), 43-44; Ch. Chevalier, “Maçons écossais au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Françcaise (September 1969), 393-408. For Moray’s designation of Britain as “Jerusalem,” see NLS: Kincardine Papers, MS.5050, ff. 84-85. Moray often used his Mason’s Mark and Masonic terminology when corresponding with his network of Scottish royalists, most of whom shared his interest in operative masonry, architecture, and Jewish lore. In Restoring the Temple of Vision, I give detailed documentation of the Masonic associations of his Scottish collaborators.↩︎
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James Picciotto, Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History, ed. Israel Finestine (1875; rev. ed. Soncino Press, 1956), 41; Cecil Roth, “The Middle Period of Anglo-Jewish History (1290-1655) Reconsidered,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 19 (1955-59), 11.↩︎
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Arthur Shane, “Jacob Judah Leon of Amsterdam (1602-1675) and his Models of the Temple of Solomon and the Tabernacle,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 96 (1983), 146-69.↩︎
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For Milton’s linkage of Scots-Stuarts-Jews, see The Works of John Milton, ed. F.A. Patterson (New York: Columbia UP, 1932), V, 38, 57-59, 272.↩︎
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On Charles I’s “Cabalistic” techniques, see James Thompson and Saul Padover, Secret Diplmacy: Espionage and Cryptography (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1963), 261.↩︎
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D. Stevenson, Origins, 219-20; C.H. Josten, Elias Ashmole (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), I, 92; II, 395-96, 609. On seventeenth-century ambulatory military lodges, see John Herron Lepper, “‘The Poor Common Soldier,’ a Study of Irish Ambulatory Warrants,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 38 (1925), 149-55.↩︎
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Edward Bernard, Catalogus Librorum Manuscritorum Angliae et Hiberniae (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1697), I, “Ashmole’s MSS.,” 351.↩︎
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Solomon Franco, Truth Springing Out of the Earth (London, 1668). After the Restoration, Franco converted to Christianity, persuaded by his belief that God had a providential design for Charles II. He gave a copy of his book to Ashmole.↩︎
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On these conversionist efforts, see David Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603-1655 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970).↩︎
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Sir Edward Spencer, A Breife Epistle to the Learned Menasseh ben Israel, in Answere to his, dedicated to the Parliament (London, 1650), 248.↩︎
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J. Howell, History, Epistle Dedicatory. Though Howell earlier issued royalist tracts, by 1652 he had transferred his loyalties to Cromwell.↩︎
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J. Milton, Works of John Milton, V, 68.↩︎
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Edward Nicholas, The Nicholas Papers, ed. George Warner (LOndon: Camden Society, 1892), III, 51.↩︎
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C.H. Firth, Scotland and the Protectorate (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1899), 342-43.↩︎
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Wilfrid Samuel, “Sir William Davidson, Royalist, and the Jews,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 14 (1940) 39-79.↩︎
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On Moray’s collaboration with Davidson, see NLS: Kincardine MS. 5049, ff.3, 28; MS. 5050, ff.49, 55. On the Jewish initiations, see Samuel Oppenheim, “The Jews and Masonry in the United States before 1810,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 19 (1910), 9-17; David Katz, Sabbath and Sectarianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 155-64.↩︎
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A. Shane, “Leon,” 146-69. On Moray’s Hebrew studies, see NLS: Kincardine MS. 5049, ff. 117, 150; MS. 5050, f.28.↩︎
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For Huygens’s alleged Masonic and Rosicrucian interests, see L.A. Langeveld, Alchemisten en Rozekruizers (Epe, 1926); cited in Susanna Akerman, Rose Cross Over the Baltic (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 146, 224-25. For his architectural interests, see H.J. Louw, “Anglo-Netherlandish Architectural Exchange, c. 1600-c.1660,” Architectural History, 24 (1981), 14-23; Katherine Fremantle, The Baroque Town Hall of Amsterdam (Utrecht: Haentjens, Dekker, and Gambert, 1959), 97-109.↩︎
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Gerard Dielemans, “Een macconieke (liefde) brief uit Maastricht A.D. 1658,” Acta Macionica, 10 (2000), 180. I am grateful to Jan Snoek for sending me this article. For more on the probable Masonic relationship between Huygens and Moray, see M.K. Schuchard, “Leibniz, Benzelius, Swedenborg: the Kabbalistic Roots of Swedish Illuminism,” in Leibniz, Mysticism, and Religion, ed. A.P. Coudert, R.H. Popkin, and G.M. Weiner (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 89-92, 102-04.↩︎
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Judah Halevi, Cuzary, trans. from Hebrew to Spanish by Jacob Abendana (Amsterdam, 1663).↩︎
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W. Samuel, “Davidson,” 40-41, 65-66.↩︎
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ibid., 40-41.↩︎
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Eliott Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), 50-167.↩︎
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Judah Halevi, The Kuzari, ed. Henry Slonimsky (New York, 1964), 228.↩︎
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NLS: Kincardine MS. 5049, ff. 117, 151; MS. 5050, f. 28.↩︎
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Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), I, 226, II, 183, 299-324.↩︎
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Johannes Drusius, Ad Minerval Serarrii Rsponsio, 19; published in Elohim sive de nomine Dei (Frankerae, 1604). Joseph Scaliger, Elenchus Tri haeressii Nicolaus Serrarius, 30; published in Sixtini Amama’s edition of Drusius’s De Tribus Sectis Judaeorum (1619).↩︎
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Alexander Lawrie, The History of Freemasonry (Edinburgh: A. Lawrie, 1804), 33-39.↩︎
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W. Samuel, “Davidson,” 63.↩︎
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Ramsay’s account in Anton F. von Büsching, Beiträge zu der Lebensgeschichte Denkwürdiger Personen (Halle, 1783-89), VI, 329; NLS: Kincardine MS. 5050, ff. 68-85; Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W.D. Macray (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888), V, 170-71, 316, 324-29.↩︎
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David Katz, The Jews in the History of England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), 143; Shane, “Leon,” 157-58.↩︎
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Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science: the Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989), 17-21, 42, 115, 233.↩︎
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See Philosophical Transactions, I, 177; II, 602-03; IV, 1093; VI, 6010-15. The minutes reveal even more “esoteric” interests.↩︎
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John Thorpe, “Old Masonic Manuscript. A Fragment,” Lodge of Research, No. 2429 Leicester. Transactions for the Year 1926-27, 40-48; Wallace McLeod, “Additions to the List of Old Charges,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 96 (1983), 98-99.↩︎
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D. Stevenson, Origins, 163.↩︎
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ibid., 73-75, 219; R. Mylne, Master Masons, 140.↩︎
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D.C. Martin, “Sir Robert Moray, FRS,” in Harold Hartley, ed., The Royal Society: Its Origins and Founders (London, 1960), 246.↩︎
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A. Shane, “Leon,” 157-61. On Wren and Arlington as Masons, see J. Anderson, Constitutions (1723) and 1738), 101-05; J.R. Clarke, “Was Sir Christopher Wren a Freemason?” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 78 (1965), 201-06; Vaughan Hart, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sir Christopher Wren (London: Phaidon, 1995), 7-9.↩︎
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Robert Hooke, The Diary of Robert Hooke, ed. H.W. Robinson and W. Adams (London: Taylor and Francis, 1935), 208-11.↩︎
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A. Shane, “Leon,” 146, 161; Richard Popkin, “Some Aspects of Jewish-Christian Theological Interchange in Holland and England, 1640-1700,” in Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. Van den Berg and Ernestine Van der Wall (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 24.↩︎
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Caledonia’s Farewell to the most Honourable James, Duke of Perth, etc. Lord High Chancellor, and William, Duke of Queensberrie, etc. Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, when Called up by the King (Edinburgh, 1685). A rare copy of this broadside is in the National Library of Scotland. On its Masonic provenance, see Hugh Ouston, “York in Edinburgh: James VII and the Patronage of Learning in Scotland, 1679-1688,” in New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland, ed. John Dwyer, Roger Mason, and Alexander Murdoch (Edinburgh, 1983), 135-36.↩︎
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J. Swift, Prose Works, V, 329.↩︎
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D. Katz, Jews in History, 146-52.↩︎
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Henry Fielding, The Jacobites’ Journal and Related Writings, ed. W.B. Coley (Wesleyan UP, 1975), 282, 285. For his linking of Jacobites, Freemasons, and Cabalists, see 95-98, 103, 109.↩︎
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D. Katz, Jews in History, 149-50.↩︎
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R.D. Barnett, “Mr. Pepy’s Contacts with the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in London,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 29 (1986), 31.↩︎
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John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Austin Dobson (London, 1906), III, 223-24. Evelyn exchanged Masons’ Marks with Moray, studied the operative fraternity in London, contributed Masonic emblems to the Royal Society, and planned a treatise on Freemasonry; see D. Stevenson, “Masonry,” 418-19; M. Hunter, Establishing, 17, 41-42; British Library, Evelyn MS. 65, f.243, on the necessary skills of “the Free-Mason.”↩︎
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For the intensity of English anti-Catholicism and its destructive influence on the greatest masonic-engineering project of the century, see J.C. Riley, “Catholicism and the Late Stuart Army: the Tangier Episode,” Royal Stuart Papers XLIII (Huntington: Royal Stuart Society, 1993), 1-28.↩︎
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D. Katz, Jews in History, 161-73; Norman Roth, “Social and Intellectual Currents in England in the Century Preceding the Jew Bill of 1753” (Cornell University, Ph.D. Thesis, 1978), 189-90.↩︎
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Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth (1691), ed. S. Sanderson (London, 1976), 88-89; D. Stevenson, Origins, 133-34.↩︎
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D. Katz, Jews in History, 161-62.↩︎
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R. Kirk, Secret, 88-89.↩︎
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A. Shane, “Leon,” 164-65. On the Jacobite background of Laurence Dermott, Scots-Irish author of Ahiman Rezon (1764), who described Leon as a brother Mason, see Sean Murphy, “Irish Jacobitism and Freemasonry,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 9 (1994), 82.↩︎
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Marcus Lipton, “Francis Francia—the Jacobite Jew,” Transactions of Jewish Historical Society of England, 11 (1911), 190-205.↩︎
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John Shaftesley, “Jews in English Regular Freemasonry, 1717-1860,” Transactions of Jewish Historical Society of England, 25 (1977), 159.↩︎
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J. Toland, Reasons, 37.↩︎
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For the international Masonic element in the Swedish-Jacobite plot, see Elis Schröderheim, Anteckningar till konung Gustaf IIIs:s historia (Örebro, 1851), 81; Claude Nordmann, Le Crise du Nord au debut du XVIIIe siècle, Bibliothèque d’histoire du droit et droit humaine, 7 (Paris, 1962), 10, and Grandeur et Liberté de la Suède, 1660-1792 (Paris: Beatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1971), 199, 424; Stanislas Mnemon, La Conspiration du Cardinal Alberoni, la Franc-Maçonnerie, et Stanislas Poniatowski (Cracovie, 1909), 60-67. In 1714, as Jacobite Masons in Scotland and Russia tried to win Czar Peter to the cause, they referred to Peter’s Masonic affiliation and their mutual bonds through the Mason Word; see Robert Paul, “Letters and Documents Relating to Robert Erskine, Physician to Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, 1677-1720,” Miscellanies of Scottish History Society, 2 (1904), 372-420.↩︎
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Though Cecil Roth and other historians have assumed that Francia became a double agent after his trial, documents in the unpublished Stuart Papers at Windsor Castle reveal his continuing loyalty to the Jacobite cause over the next decades. His family was still receiving a pension from the Pretender in 1750. See Royal Archives, Stuart Papers: 191/149, 227, 164, 247, 178, 295, 146, 303/6.↩︎
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W. McLeod, “Hudibrastick Poem,” 15, 20.↩︎
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M.K. Schuchard, “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk: a Sabbatean Adventurer in the Masonic Underground,” in Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture: Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World, eds. Matt Goldish and Richard Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, forthcoming); Gérard van Rijnberk, Un Thaumaturge au 18e Siècle (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1935); R. Leforestier, Franc-Maçonnerie, 290-300; Horace Walpole, The Correspondence of Horace Walpole, ed. W. Lewis (New Haven: Yale UP, 1937‑), XIX, 181-82, Appendix 6:21; Jean Fuller, The Comte de Saint-Germain (London: East West, 1988), 227.↩︎
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James Anderson’s Constitutions of the Freemasons (1723) and (1738) served as propaganda for the Modern, Hanoverian system. For its Whig-Newtonian agenda, see Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford UP, 1991).↩︎
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For the re-emergence of Stuart masque scenarios, see C. Lance Brockman, ed., Theatre of the Fraternity: Staging the Ritual Space of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 1896-1929 (Minneapolis, 1996). American Jews played a central role in this Masonic theatrical development.↩︎
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S. Oppenheim, Jews and Masonry, 1-2.↩︎