For his part Evelyn simply wrote in his diary: ‘Dr. Wren had got a start on me.’106 However historian Adrian Tinniswood is satisfied that there was much closer collusion between the two men than such remarks suggest: Striking similarities between the two schemes show that they [Wren and Evelyn] must have discussed their dream of an ideal London either before the fire brought those dreams a dramatic step closer to realization, or when they were both working on them in the second week of September. They both proposed that the area between Temple Bar and the Fleet should be given over to a piazza which would form the intersection of eight streets radiating out on the points of the compass. They both enclosed the buildings which fronted onto this piazza with an octagon of connecting streets. They both made the entrance to the northern end of London Bridge a focal point of their plan, and created a semicircular piazza as a grand introduction to it. They both sent main thoroughfares in from the east to converge at St. Paul's…Apassing reference in the explanatory discourse that Evelyn submitted along with his plan confirms some sort of collaboration, and suggests that he adopted some of Wren's ideas. He implied that the two men discussed their respective schemes on or immediately before 11 September, and says that the ‘street from St. Paul's maybe divaricated like a Pythagorian, as the most accurately ingenious Dr. Wren had designed it, and I willingly follow in my second thoughts.’ …107
It cannot be a coincidence that the plans of Evelyn and Wren both incorporate the same meaningful Templar symbol of the octagon in exactly the same meaningful place: i.e. overlapping the old London headquarters of the Knights Templar close to Temple Church. We note also that on Evelyn's plan the octagonal plaza is placed directly west of St. Paul's Cathedral in such a way that its centre aligns with the axis of the cathedral – the two points being joined together by the wide avenue of Fleet Street.
Most intriguing of all, is the clear, purposeful definition with which Evelyn's plan is so obviously structured around the Sephirothic Tree of Life. If there is some ambiguity in Wren's case, Evelyn's plan certainly leaves no doubt as to his motive. For despite some minimal variations required for practicality, the similarity between Evelyn's geometrical pattern and that of the Sephirothic Tree of Life is unmistakable.
Presumably by firing their ‘double salvo’ on 11 and 13 September Wren and Evelyn must have hoped that the Sephirothic Tree of Life, as well as the other shared elements concealed in both their plans, would quickly be approved by the king. We suspect also that in the minds of both men must have been the well-known final verses from the book of Revelation which evoke the creation of the ‘New Jerusalem’ and the ‘Tree of Life’: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had vanished…I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready like a bride adorned for her husband … It had a great high wall, with twelve gates, at which were twelve angels, and on the gates were inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of Israel … the city had twelve foundation-stones, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles … Then I was shown the river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, flowing … down the middle of the city's streets. On either side of the river stood a Tree of Life, which yields twelve crops of fruits … Happy are those who wash their robes clean! They will have the right to the Tree of Life and will enter by the gates of the city …108
It is quite obvious from this scheme of things in the book of Revelation that the design of the ‘New Jerusalem’ was to incorporate the number ‘12’ and, more importantly, that the holy city should rest upon a matrix of 12 ‘foundation-stones’ or foci. Interesting then, as historians Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde point out, that: Evelyn wanted twelve interconnecting squares and piazzas … [and] a straight east-to-west thoroughfare [that would] cut its way for a mile and a half from ‘King Charles Gate’ [in the London wall, south of Aldgate] to Temple Bar where there was a piazza with eight radiating roads like Wren's.109
Interesting, too, that if we superimpose Evelyn's obviously ‘sephirothic’ plan on the actual geometry of a Sephrothic Tree of Life, it can be seen that St. Paul's Cathedral corresponds to the one sephirah, the divine emanation known as Tipheret, which means ‘Beauty’. Astrologically this sephirah represents the Sun, the centre of the universe, from which emanates all life and light. The analogy is obvious: St. Paul's was to be the spiritual centre of the regenerated city as it rose from the ashes like a solar phoenix to guide the restored Stuart monarchy on the true path of the reformed Christianity.
Corresponding to the large ‘Templar’ octagon in Evelyn's plan is the sephirah known as Yesod, which means ‘Foundation’. Could this mean that the new world order which was to emerge from the ‘New Jerusalem’ had its foundations in the Order of the Temple or, more precisely, the new Masonic order which had emerged from Templar ideologies and to which the Stuart monarch had given his royal protection?
Another curious feature of Evelyn's plan is that he moved the Royal Exchange away from the centre of the city (whereas Wren had kept it there on the original site of Thomas Gresham's building).110 Evelyn placed it nearer to the river, further upstream from London Bridge – most likely because he wanted to have at the heart of his planned ‘New Jerusalem’ another more relevant symbol which would correspond to the appropriate sephirah in the Tree of Life. This came in the form of the fountain he envisaged for the marketplace on Gracechurch Street, which may represent the so-called 11th hidden sephirah, known as Daat, from which emanates the fountain of knowledge that irrigates the whole.111
Solomon's Temple veiled in Saint Paul's Cathedral?
In addition to serving as the spiritual centre and solar symbol of the regenerated London, logic suggests that Saint Paul's Cathedral also came to symbolise Solomon's Temple in the New Jerusalem that Wren and Evelyn had in mind. Christopher Wren was subsequently made surveyor of St. Paul's Cathedral in 1668 and surveyor general for the King's Works a year later. In this capacity he produced a design for the rebuilding of St. Paul's which, finally, in 1671 he presented to Charles II. Here is Tinniswood's assessment of the design: The building was quite unlike anything seen in Britain before. A round central space more than 120 feet in diameter had four stubby arms of equal length projected out to north, south, east and west. The sloping sides of the octagon thus formed were concave, so that in plan the cathedral looked like a Greek cross. And inevitably, the central space was crowned with a monumental dome supported on a ring of eight pillars …112
It is true that Wren's octagonal floor-plan for St. Paul's was something totally ‘unseen in Britain before.’113 But it most certainly had been seen by those who had visited the Holy Land and Jerusalem and studied the Dome of the Rock which the Knights Templar had much earlier adopted as their symbol for Solomon's Temple. Viewed in profile, Wren's design for the new St. Paul's does in fact bear an uncanny resemblance to the Dome of the Rock: both have the same octagonal floor-plan; both have the same rotunda or rounded central space; both have the massive cupola supported by eight pillars; both have been deliberately aligned to the four cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. Last but not least, from both the eight-sided Templar Cross can easily be derived.
What Masonic game was Wren playing in his plans for London and for Saint Paul's Cathedral? And why did it involve the symbols of an ancient heresy?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FROM SECRET SOCIETY TO SOCIETY WITH SECRETS
In February 1685 Charles II died peacefully at Whitehall, having made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism that left the nation somewhat confused. Since there were no legitimate sons the succession went to his autocratic brother, James, Duke of York, a devout and zealous Catholic. In 1673 James had married Mary of Modena, also a staunch Catholic. And not surprisingly, as soon as he was safely crowned he placed Catholics in important positions within the government. This raised fears, even amongst his Anglican supporters, that he was on the verge of reimposing Roman Catholicism as the state religion in Britain. The situation reached
a crisis in 1689 when, on 22 February, James II was forced to abdicate in favour of William of Orange and his wife Mary, the heiress presumptive, who were both staunch Protestants.
This marked the end for the Stuarts as a ruling dynasty, but not yet for James II and his ‘Jacobite’ supporters (the latter being a name derived from the Latin version of ‘James’ i.e. Jacobus). As Charles II had done before him, James went into exile in France at the court of Louis XIV. He took along with him his whole family and a large band of Jacobites, and they all settled in the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris. It was there, according to some Masonic researchers, that the first official Masonic lodges on French soil began to emerge.
When James II died in 1701, his 13-year-old son, Prince James Francis Edward, was immediately recognised by Louis XIV as James III, the British king-in-exile. In 1713, however, Louis made peace with Britain, and the ‘Old Pretender’, as James III was now being called, left for Rome along with his family and his Jacobite court. In 1714 his half-sister, Queen Ann, died leaving no surviving children. But because of an act of Parliament that precluded James from the succession on account of his Catholic faith, the British throne went to the Protestant elector of Hanover, who became King George I.
Within the small group of Jacobites in Rome making up the increasingly decrepit Stuart court-in-exile was a well-educated Scotsman called Andrew Michael Ramsay who served as private tutor of the children of the Old Pretender. Ramsay, who is better known to Freemasons as the ‘Chevalier Ramsay’, was soon to play a pivotal role in the evolution of Freemasonry.
Meanwhile in Britain the official ‘coming out’ of the Craft took place when the so-called Grand Lodge of England was created in London on 24 June 1717 – St. John's Day, the attested feast and ‘new year’ of the Freemasons.1 In the New Testament, St. John the Baptist is depicted as the forerunner of Christ the Messiah, and in Eastern Christian tradition he is regarded as the most important saint after the Virgin Mary. Indeed, in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus himself is made to praise Saint John as follows: Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist.2
A prophet in his own right John the Baptist supposedly stepped aside to prepare the way for the Christ-Messiah by saying: ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’3 In this apparently cryptic remark there is obvious solar symbolism which accomplished Freemasons will surely understand – for by 24 June the Sun's altitude in heaven does indeed decrease after passing the apogee of the summer solstice.
The celebration of St. John's Day traditionally began on the night of St. John's Eve i.e. 23 June, and was at one time called ‘Bonfire Night’ in parts of Europe and Ireland. But there was an inherent error in the Julian calendar relative to the true solar year (and thus also relative to the new, more accurate, Gregorian calendar). Accumulating year by year, the effect of this error was that ‘23 June Julian’ was forever slipping further away from the summer solstice – such that it fell some 13 days after the solstice by 1717. At that time, Britain and its American colonies had not yet adopted the new Gregorian calendar (which they regarded as a Catholic, and thus tainted, innovation). The official calendar in Britain was therefore still the Julian calendar, which was 11 days ahead of the new Gregorian calendar.
St. John's Eve, 23 June 1717 on the Julian calendar corresponds with 4 July in the Gregorian calendar. Let us keep this curious conversion in mind since 4 July is clearly a date which would soon have a great symbolic resonance in the American colonies and in France.4
Recruiting from the ruling classes
On 24 June 1717 the formation of the Grand Lodge of England was achieved by the amalgamation of four older lodges in London. From this date onwards Freemasonry was no longer a secret society but began to operate very much out in the open, and in a manner that would certainly have attracted heresy charges in earlier, less enlightened, centuries.
A certain Mr. Anthony Sayer was appointed the first Grand Master of the new united body.5 Very little is known of Sayer. He remained at his post for only a year and was succeeded by George Payne in 1718, then by the celebrated Dr. John Theophilus Desaguliers in 1719.6 Of French birth, Desaguliers had been brought to England as an infant by his Huguenot parents who had fled from La Rochelle during the persecution of Protestants by Louis XIV. He grew up to become a brilliant scholar, and studied law at Oxford. In 1714 Desaguliers was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and eventually became its curator. There he befriended several famous scientists, including the great Isaac Newton. It was Desaguliers who was responsible for attracting into Freemasonry many men from the nobility, amongst them the Duke of Lorraine, the future Holy Roman Emperor Francis I, and Frederick Prince of Wales, the son of George II, to whom Desaguliers was appointed tutor.7 It is thus that from 1721, and much thanks to Desaguliers, the Grand Lodge of England has always been headed by a member of the royal family.8
Such illustrious sponsorship and royal approval, as well as its policy of religious tolerance and freedom of thought and, paradoxically, its stringent oath of secrecy, made Freemasonry an exceedingly popular fellowship amongst the aristocracy and the educated middle classes. Masonic lodges began to flourish everywhere in Europe, and the first Parisian lodge of English origin, which went under the name of St. Thomas, was opened in 1726 by Charles Radclyffe, who belonged to an old Scottish family loyal to the Stuarts. It seems that Charles Radclyffe himself was the son of a natural but illegitimate daughter of Charles II.9 Radclyffe unwisely attempted to return to England in 1746 where he was arrested as a Jacobite spy and executed.
Another illegitimate descendant of Charles II, who presided in the French lodge, La Loge d’Aubigny, was the Duke of Richmond, grandson of the Duchess of Portsmouth, Louise de Kérouaille, a favourite mistress of Charles II.10 The Duke of Richmond had also put in a spell as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of England in 1724.
The Jacobite community in Paris at the time also included the Duke of Wharton, who had likewise been Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of England – in his case in 1722. The Duke of Wharton, who was expelled from the Grand Lodge in 1723 after a serious scandal, fled to Europe where he eventually settled in Paris to become the first Grand Master of French Freemasonry in 1728, later to be called the Grande Loge de France.11 It was about this time that the Scotsman, Ramsay, who was also now in Paris, began to nurture radical ideas about how Freemasonry might be developed in France and in other lands.
The Knight Ramsay
Freemasonry's famous ‘Scottish Rite’ is often said to have originated in France in 1725, that is eight years after the formation of the Grand Lodge of England in 1717. The well-known Masonic historian Jasper Ridley has this to say: During the eighteenth century other Masonic rites developed in various parts of the world, of which the most important was the so-called Scottish Rite. It had never, in fact, existed in Scotland, but had originated in France, and was called the Rite Écossais – the Scottish Rite – because the Scotsman, the Chevalier Ramsay, was thought to have started it …12
Other researchers think there's more to the story. It does seem almost certain that Andrew Michael Ramsay, better known as the Chevalier Ramsay, and indeed a Scotsman, was responsible for the formation of what became known as the Scottish Rite throughout the world. But there is much to suggest the that this rite was an amalgamation of older ideas that had circulated among earlier Scottish lodges in Scotland itself and that Ramsay had simply synthesised and brought to France.13
Andrew Michael Ramsay was born in 1686 in Ayr, a town about 40 miles southwest of Glasgow in Scotland, and not far from Kilwinning, ‘the traditional birthplace of Scottish Freemasonry.’14 Although the son of a lowly baker, Ramsay was to become a refined man of letters. Educated at the University of Edinburgh, he eventually received a degree in law from Oxford. After serving as an officer with the Duke of Marlborough in Flanders in 1706, Ramsay decided to remain in the Netherlands. There he met a Frenchman, Pierre Poiret, a disciple of Madame Guyon, a popular Frenc
h Catholic mystic who was closely associated with the great French scholar and author, François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, the bishop of Cambrai. Fénelon was famous throughout Europe, and was particularly well known for having written Les Aventures de Télémaque, a very popular book at the time, in which he presented to the French court an allegory, set in historical locations such as ancient Egypt and Phoenicia, of the ideal utopian state.15
For a long time Fénelon had entertained excellent connections at the French court in Paris when he was tutor to the heir apparent and grandson of Louis XIV, the Duke of Burgundy. Indeed, Fénelon originally wrote the Adventures of Télémaque while he was at court – apparently for the benefit of the young prince, who he hoped would one day become king of France and put into practice the perfect state and the ideal government modelled on the golden age of the ancient world.16 But Fénelon's unorthodox relationship with the Catholic mystic Madame Guyon eventually lost him the support of Louis XIV, who had him exiled to his diocese at Cambrai in 1709.
Now it seems that Ramsay may have acted as some sort of secretary for Madame Guyon, which might in turn explain why in 1710 he suddenly received an invitation to visit Fénelon at Cambrai.17 There Ramsay and Fénelon developed a warm friendship which lasted until Fénelon's death in 1715. So influenced was Ramsay by Fénelon that he converted to Catholicism at his request.