In reviewing with Freemasons and others the conclusion that the central purpose of Secret Masonry had been the protection of its members from discovery and punishment by the established Church, several asked how that objective could have held Secret Masonry together for the two centuries after Henry VIII took England away from the supremacy of the Roman church, a period during which such secret protection was no longer necessary. Why would Masons need to wait two hundred years, until 1717, to make themselves known? It turned out to be a common perception, at least in the United States, that England had stopped being Catholic during the reign of Henry VIII and had become irrevocably Protestant, as though by the throwing of a switch. A brief look at the religious climate in Britain from the first break with Rome to 1717 should make clear the answer to the important question of the timing of Freemasonry’s abandonment of total secrecy.
On August 22, 1485, King Richard III of England lost his throne, and his life, at the Battle of Bosworth. The victor was Henry Tudor, the Welsh earl of Richmond, who ascended the throne as King Henry VII. He had to solidify his position not only at home, as the new king, but among the nations of Europe as well, as the founder of a new dynasty. His first effective move at home was to marry Elizabeth of York, the heiress to his greatest rivals at home. Looking to the continent for alliances, he was eager to make a strong affiliation with the new Spanish power that had been created by the marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon to Queen Isabella of Castile, who together were acquiring more territory by pushing back the Moors in Spain. He was delighted to arrange the betrothal of his eldest son, Prince Arthur, to the Princess Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. His younger son Henry was trained for service in the Church, which was tantamount to an alliance with Rome. His daughter Margaret was married to King James IV of Scotland. His daughter Mary was betrothed to the much older king of France, who died just months after their marriage. She then married the duke of Suffolk, a union that produced the tragic Lady Jane Grey.
Henry Tudor’s major European alliance appeared to shatter upon the death of Prince Arthur, who died of tuberculosis in 1502. The second son, Henry, was now heir to the throne, but he could not maintain the alliance with Ferdinand and Isabella by marriage to his brother’s widow because the church held that marriage to an in-law was as much incest as marriage to a near blood relative. The answer was for Henry VII and Ferdinand to join forces to get a papal dispensation setting aside that church policy, and they were successful. The English throne went to the eighteen-year-old Henry VIII in 1509, and within six weeks he married the widowed Catherine of Aragon with the blessings of the Holy See.
The firm establishment of the Tudor dynasty was just as much a preoccupation for him as it had been for his father, but Henry VIII and his queen just did not seem capable of producing a healthy male heir. In eighteen years of marriage the queen experienced a series of stillbirths and miscarriages. Just one son had survived the pangs of birth, in 1511, only to die a month and a half later. Then in 1516 a daughter was born and survived and appeared healthy, living on as the Princess Mary. Finally Henry conveniently convinced himself, and tried to persuade others, that God was denying him a male heir as a punishment for the grievous sin of marrying his brother’s widow. His solution was to petition Pope Clement VII to rescind the earlier papal dispensation that had permitted the marriage outside the rules of the church, an act that would set aside his unproductive long-term marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It would also render the birth of the Princess Mary illegitimate.
Henry might have had his way, but his timing was bad. The emperor Charles V had invaded Italy and was in Rome with an army. He was not about to let the pope cancel out the legal marital status of the queen of England, who was his aunt. The argument raged for five years, during which time Henry VIII determined to and did marry Anne Boleyn, the mother of the future Queen Elizabeth I.
The failure of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry’s lord chancellor, to arrange the rescission of the papal dispensation brought about his downfall, to the great satisfaction of many at the English court. Wolsey’s power had been great and his greed was legendary. Over a thousand servants catered to his needs at a number of palaces, including the magnificent Hampton Court Palace, which he had built for himself with both church and state revenues. He had enriched his illegitimate son with church benefices that brought that fortunate young man an incredible income of over twenty-seven hundred pounds a year, more than enough to arouse the envy and the enmity of barons and earls. And then there was the question of land: The church never seemed to be able to get enough of it, and seldom parted with any, even by sale. It was given land, it purchased land, and it seized land as fines and punishments. That land remained largely untaxed, and much of its revenues went to Rome or to absentee holders of English benefices.
The point is that Henry alone could not have broken with Rome, but in the atmosphere surrounding the church in England he had support at every level of society. Nor did Henry VIII have in mind a Protestant church when he broke with Rome. He considered himself a very devout Catholic in all but papal supremacy. He was proud to have been awarded the title Defender of the Faith by Pope Leo X as a reward for his scholarly treatise In Defense of the Seven Sacraments, a work that categorically exposed and condemned the heresies of the Augustianian monk Martin Luther. He reinforced support for burning at the stake as the proper punishment for disavowal of the doctrine of transubstantiation. What Henry wanted was an English (“Anglican”) Catholic church administered by the ruler of England, rather than a Roman Catholic church administered by a foreign pope. Protesters and dissenters from the Catholic doctrine in England had every bit as much to fear from Henry VIII as they did from Clement VII. The pope declared that the subjects of Henry VIII would no longer enjoy papal protection from enslavement by their fellow Christians, and that any conqueror of the English was now free to sell them in the slave markets. Henry did permit the publication and distribution of the Bible in English, but came to regret it. He later tried to limit its use to privileged classes, but it was too late: Another generation had tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and wanted more.
And then there was all that land. The courtiers around Henry VIII never tired of reminding him how many supportive knights, barons, and earls could be maintained by a redistribution of that almost unfathomable wealth, over a third of the land surface of the whole country. Then, too, they pointed out that every monastic center could be depended upon to plot and subvert to return England to the supremacy of Rome. The religious communities had little to offer in rebuttal, since generations of idle “country club” living with armies of serfs, villeins, and servants had made many indolent and often blatantly immoral. In 1536 and 1539 the monasteries were dissolved. The king did not keep all of the lands for the crown but sold major holdings at bargain rates to his followers, thus locking in their determination to keep England separate from Rome. The profit taking produced a great anti-Roman euphoria in the largest transfer of land titles since William the Conqueror in 1066.
Those landholders provided a solid backing for Henry’s son, Edward VI, who came to the throne in 1547 at the age of ten. He ruled for just six years and died short of his sixteenth birthday, but of his own tendencies and those of his advisors, he opened the doors to Protestant reformation. He repealed the laws of heresy. It was in the second year of his reign that England saw the publication of Archbishop Cranmer’s English-language Book of Common Prayer, which presented a program of uniform worship in the English church that diverged enough from the Roman practice to cause an almost immediate armed rebellion in the southwest of England.
As the young king was dying of tuberculosis, his principal “protector,” the duke of Northumberland, used the king’s devotion to church reform to implement a scheme of his own. Based on the fact that Edward’s half-sister Mary, the heiress to the throne, was a staunch Catholic, Northumberland got Edward VI to designate his cousin Lady Jane Grey as heiress to the crown. She stood only fifth in line of succession but ranked first in Northumberland’s schemes, for he had arranged her marriage to his own son.
Death claimed Edward VI in 1537. Henry VIII had left England Anglican Catholic. Edward VI had moved it off-center in the direction of Protestantism.
The duke of Northumberland’s plan to be the real power behind Queen Jane I fell apart in little more than one week, and it cost him his head. Lady Jane Grey sat on the throne of England for just nine days before being ousted by the superior claim of Henry’s daughter Mary, who ruled for five years as Queen Mary I, but who is almost always referred to as “Bloody Mary.” The new queen had gained support by promising religious tolerance and, more important, by assuring the great lords that they would not have to return the monastic lands they had acquired at such great advantage. She kept the latter promise but completely disregarded the former. She canceled the anti-Roman laws initiated by her father and brother and restored the English church to the supremacy of Rome in a spirit of ruthless dedication. She saw opposition to the Roman church as treason as well as heresy. She burned the Anglican bishops Latimer and Ridley at the stake at Oxford in 1555, permitting them the mercy of sacks of gunpowder hanging from their necks, and burned Archbishop Cranmer at the same location the following year. Elizabeth I would order three hundred executions in her forty-five-year reign. Mary managed to match that record in three. Seeking a Catholic monarch to rule beside her, she married the king of Spain and insisted that he reign as king of England and not as prince consort, a concept that not even her Catholic subjects could easily accept because of their fears of Spanish political domination. Mary created a reign of terror, with burnings and beheadings that drove dissenters from the Roman church deeper into secrecy than ever before.
One of the heads that was expected to drop at any moment was that of Mary’s younger sister Elizabeth, a secret Protestant who preserved her life by adopting the attitude of total servility and by having mass said every day in her country home. She was determined that no more devout Catholic should be found anywhere in England, her only hope of protection from her bloody sister.
Accordingly, it was assumed by almost everyone, including the pope, that as she ascended the throne as Queen Elizabeth I she would continue to maintain the Roman church’s exclusive position in England. Negotiations actually went forth to attempt her betrothal to Philip of Spain, a champion of the church. But bit by bit, Elizabeth’s true feelings came out as she organized her court around her. She reinstated the anti-church laws of her father and brother, which Queen Mary had set aside, and was ultimately excommunicated by the pope, who decreed that Catholic Englishmen no longer owed her any allegiance or obedience. The definitive break with the church gave Elizabeth three determined Roman Catholic enemies; one to the north, one to the south, and one underground.
The threat from the north was possible assassination, because the heiress to the throne in the event of Elizabeth’s death was her cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, who was a staunch Catholic and could count on aid from the church and from the continental Catholic monarchies. A rebellion broke out in 1569, led by the Catholic earls in the north of England, and the next few years saw a wave of plots to assassinate the English queen. In 1586 Mary Stuart foolishly allowed herself to get involved with a group headed by an angry Catholic named Anthony Babington, who extracted a pledge from his followers to murder Elizabeth. Although Elizabeth attempted to avoid personal involvement, Mary Queen of Scots was arrested for high treason and executed the following year.
The enemy to the south was King Philip of Spain, His Most Catholic Majesty, who was intellectually dedicated to pulling down the heretical queen of England and economically exasperated by the sea-going successes of Drake, Hawkins, Grenville, and Raleigh, who had successfully challenged the supremacy of Spain in the Americas. Just to teach the English a lesson would not do. All that would do was the invasion and total conquest of the island kingdom and its total return to Rome. By May of 1588, Philip was ready. He had assembled a naval force of a hundred and thirty ships, including Portuguese and Venetian galleys. His intent was to transport twenty thousand soldiers, then pick up sixteen thousand more from the Spanish Netherlands, and proceed to invade the south coast of England. Fortunately for England, the Spanish Armada was poorly planned, poorly led, and unlucky. The English wreaked havoc with their faster craft and longer-range guns, and the winds favored their fire-ships. As the Spanish broke for home by sailing north around Scotland and Ireland, they were broken up by the fierce “Protestant Gale” off the rocky coasts and suffered more from the weather than from the enemy. The anti-Roman population of England rejoiced in the confidence that God was on their side.
The third enemy was not so easy to blow away. This was the Jesuit order, dedicated and well trained, which prepared numbers of its Soldiers of Christ specifically for covert service in England, where they were to organize local Catholics, provide leadership, and pull Elizabeth down from her heretical throne, by her death if necessary. In some cases they moved openly in disguise, as stewards or other servants of the Catholic nobility. Many stayed hidden, serving mass in Catholic houses, ready to run to their secret hiding places, or “priest-holes,” upon the approach of priest-hunting pursuers. Many of these hiding places were extraordinarily ingenious, but none more so than those planned and built in the homes of loyal Catholics by the master of priest-holes, Nicholas Owen. He was captured, tortured, and finally executed in 1606, but his unusual services were not forgotten. He was canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church over three hundred and sixty years later, in 1970.
England under Elizabeth I leaned more toward the Protestant, but much more Protestant than she had in mind. As far as she went, she had subjects who wanted to go further. Some rejected not only the over-lordship of the Church of Rome but the rule of the English church by the throne as well. Thus Elizabeth’s reign saw the birth of Puritanism and of the concept of the “presbytery,” the rule of the congregation by its own ministers and elders. The Puritan backlash against the rich ceremonials, vestments, and decoration of the churches introduced a note of stern compassionless austerity into the new Protestantism. Their influence spread, in Parliament as well as throughout the towns and villages. For them, the Anglican church and its hierarchy were not only too much like the Roman Catholic denomination but were contrary to scripture. But they were very like the medieval popes in one thing: They asserted the right to determine morality, coupled with the right to punish those who departed from that determination.
That was the religious situation that Elizabeth left upon her death in 1603: the Roman Catholics subdued, the Anglican Catholics in control of the court, the new Protestants on the rise. It was a turmoil that led to more turmoil and ultimately to civil war. In the meantime, the House of Tudor gave way to the House of Stuart and the union of the English and Scottish crowns in a monarch of whom Thomas Macaulay said, “He was made up of two men—a witty, well-read scholar who wrote, disputed and harangued, and a nervous, driveling idiot who acted.”
James VI of Scotland was the son of Mary Queen of Scots and a great-grandson of Henry VII. The Stuart dynasties of England and Scotland came together in him when he assumed the English crown as James I upon the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. He was happy to leave the irritating Presbyterians, who were expanding rapidly in Scotland, but less than joyful at the expanding Puritan sect he found in England. As for himself, he was content to serve as governor of the Anglican church, although he glorified that role more than did those around him when he wrote, “Kings are breathing images of God on earth.”
Secret Catholic opposition continued from Elizabeth’s reign, complete with assassination plots, culminating in the scheme of a group of Catholics who rented a coal cellar under the parliamentary chamber. They stacked the cellar with barrels of gunpowder, planning to blow up the king and the entire Puritan-Anglican Parliament on its opening day, November 5, 1605. The plot was discovered, the gunpowder removed, and a conspirator, Guy Fawkes, was arrested and executed. The only explosion caused by the Gunpowder Plot was one of intensified anti-Catholic anger. To this day, people all over England remember Guy Fawkes each November 5 with fireworks and with bonfires on which they burn a stuffed figure of a man. Today everyone seems to assume that the figure is that of Guy Fawkes, having forgotten that until a few generations ago the height of Guy Fawkes Day excitement in many villages in England was the burning of the pope in effigy.
James I did not get along with the House of Commons, nor with the growing number of Puritans in it, but he did allow himself to be persuaded that individual Britons would benefit from Bible study. He authorized a group of scholars to translate the Bible into English, and his “King James Version” of the Bible became an instant best-seller. To this day it remains the bestselling book ever printed. Unfortunately for his point of view, it enhanced the cause of Protestantism. Men could read, ponder, debate, and band together with others who came to similar scriptural conclusions, conclusions that in James’s time sometimes led to persecutions such as that which launched the journey of the Mayflower during his reign.
When he died in 1625, James I left a combined British kingdom that had experienced new hatred and fear of Roman Catholicism. The Anglican Catholic church was the official state religion, but the new Protestant movements were flexing their muscles in the shires and especially in the House of Commons.
His successor, King Charles I, has been described as “a saintly young man of twenty-four.” Saintly he may have been, but he lived all his life as though the real world was just off there in a fog where he couldn’t quite make it out. He married the very Catholic Princess Henrietta Maria of France, and apparently couldn’t grasp why his Anglican barons and parliamentarians expressed concern over the influx of foreign Catholics to the English court. At odds with the House of Commons, which alone could impose taxes, Charles raised crown funds with ingenious schemes of his own, such as imposing heavy charges for the bestowal of knighthood, then imposing heavy punishments on the wealthy gentlemen who declined the expensive honor. His chief advisor on religious matters was Archbishop Laud, who worked to restore complex ritual and elaborate vestments to the English church, precisely opposite the view of the Puritan parliamentarians. Laud imposed his ritualistic ideas on the church in Scotland, and the result was an armed revolt. Charles I rejected the assertions of Parliament that they had any say over the structure or conduct of the Anglican church, and that they had any control over the military. In his view, the church and the army belonged to the king alone. The dissension grew until the day in January of 1642 when the king entered the House of Commons with an armed guard, intending to personally arrest five of its members. None of them was in attendance, and all that Charles got in return for his dramatic interruption of the proceedings was a royal dressing down from the Speaker. (His words were apparently heard, for no British sovereign has crossed the threshold of the House of Commons from that day to this.) By August of that year, the situation had degenerated into a state of civil war, with Charles I on one side backed by the church, Oxford University, and the rural gentry of the north and west. On the other side, the Puritanical House of Commons could call on the wealth of the trading cities of the south, including London. Charles had the backing of ideas; the Commons had the money. With it, they created a New Model Army under a fellow member, Oliver Cromwell, which finally defeated the royal forces in 1646. To cement that victory, they determined to place the king on trial. To his credit, Charles I defended himself with clear logic and royal dignity, but with no apparent grasp of the fact that he had not been placed on public display to be tried, but to be found guilty. Tourists today are shown the window through which the king was brought from the banqueting hall of his new palace of Whitehall on January 30, 1649, to a high scaffold where his head was chopped off in view of the crowd in the street. A few days later the Commons voted to abolish the monarchy as “unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interests of the people.” The king’s heir, who would become Charles II, was living in exile in Catholic France. The country he would one day rule was now firmly, even rigorously, Puritan.
Cromwell, who ruled as virtual dictator with the title of lord protector, had no room in his heart or mind for tolerance and set out to prove just how joyless a religion can be. Endless laws were passed against such practices as labor on the Sabbath, and stiff penalties were imposed for profanity, creating an atmosphere that depressed the people and disgruntled the army. Cromwell had the strength of will and the devotion to discipline necessary to hold such a society together, but the task was beyond his son, who took over the mantle of government upon the death of his father in September 1658. Finally the army stepped in, deposed the ineffective young protector, and invited Charles II to come home to his crown. He arrived in London on his thirtieth birthday, May 29, 1660.
Charles II was a secret Catholic but had sense enough to realize that his best course to hold on to the crown was to provide a strong force for moderation and tolerance, working against such proposals as the exclusion of all except Anglican Catholics from government service. Rumors have persisted that Charles II had made a secret treaty with the king of France in which he had agreed to work to return Britain to the Roman church, in exchange for a large sum of money. Those rumors were given substance very recently in 1988, when Lord Clifford of Chudleigh declared that he was going to auction off some old documents from the archives of his family. They included a signed copy of the agreement under which Charles would work to return Britain to the Roman church in exchange for a payment of 1.2 million gold livres. (There is no record that the sum was ever paid.)
The most dramatic event of Charles’s reign was the Great Fire of London in 1666. Once more, the mood of the people was inflamed against the Catholic church as rumors were spread, and believed, that the fire was started by agents of the pope. Nell Gwynn, one of the king’s mistresses, saved herself by declaring to an angry mob that blocked her path, “Good people, I am the Protestant whore!” The king’s own true feelings came out during the last hours of his life in February 1685, when at his request a Catholic priest was brought up the back stairs to administer the last rites of the church.
Throughout the final years of his reign, Charles II had been repeatedly asked to exclude his younger brother James from the succession, because James was a devout Roman Catholic. The courtiers wanted the king’s illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth, who was just as strong a Protestant. Charles consistently refused, so that upon his death the crown passed to a determined Catholic monarch, James II. Monmouth did make a try for the throne, landing in the West Country, where he tried to promote a rebellion. His forces were quickly put down, but the people were shocked by the brutality of the punishments levied by Judge George Jeffreys. Men were executed, branded, and sold into bondage to the Caribbean sugar planters. One villager was executed for selling some fish to the rebels, a matter in which the poor man had no choice whatever. That brutality carried over into the government, where a new wave of Protestant persecutions was launched. James II replaced government officials, including admirals and generals, with his Catholic appointees. He also prosecuted seven Anglican bishops.
The existence of Freemasonry during the reign of Charles II has been well documented, and in the succeeding reign of James II it could only have grown, with the king himself as the master catalyst for recruitment. By his unrelenting campaign to return the Roman church to supremacy in Britain by any means available to him, James drew all of the anti-Roman sects together for the first time in a common cause. There were plots and schemes and secret meetings, and we can be certain that, as the best-established secret society, Freemasonry was playing a major role.
The people bided their time, however, because there was no heir. The Catholic crown would die with James II. Then in June 1688 the queen give birth to a son, and the king declared that the boy’s education and upbringing would be in the care of the Jesuits. Protestants started the rumor that the succession was a Jesuit plot, that there was no crown prince, and that the baby had been smuggled into the royal bedchamber in a warming pan.
Finally a group of Protestant leaders, which included the bishop of London, decided to act. They turned to Mary, James’s own daughter, who had married her cousin William of Orange, a nephew of Charles II. Together they were the strongest female and male claimants to the throne after the newborn son of James II. More important, William was the leader of the Protestant Dutch against the Catholic Louis XVI of France. On the premise that the baby was not the true son of James II, William and Mary were invited to share the English throne. As William arrived on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, 1685, the support for James II fell away. It was just thirty-two years before Masonry would make itself known in London in 1717.
Sixteen years later, in 1701, a law was passed that excluded from the throne all except members of the Church of England, and a religious settlement was reached to guarantee limited freedom of religious worship to non-Anglican Protestants (the “nonconformists”). Significantly, this was the end of the divine right of kings in Britain. It was clear now that Parliament would decide who occupied the royal seat.
Although William purported to espouse religious tolerance, one blot on his record speaks to the contrary. He required that all of the leaders of the Catholic clans of Scotland sign documents of submission. The leader of a small group of the MacDonald clan in the valley of Glencoe missed the deadline by a few days, as he beat his way through a winter storm to sign for his people. The price paid is remembered as the Massacre of Glencoe, a highland bloodbath in which all ages and both sexes were butchered as punishment for the tardiness of their chief. Religious feelings remained high, and William’s death was ceremoniously remembered for years after it occurred. He died from injuries sustained when his horse stumbled in a molehill at Hampton Court, and Jacobites gratefully memorialized the mole with the quiet toast, “To the little gentleman in black velvet.”
Thus, in 1701, the crown passed to Anne, Protestant daughter of James II, whose thirty-seven-year-old body had been battered by seventeen pregnancies, none of which resulted in a living heir to the throne.
Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, was an unspectacular sovereign, but a number of spectacular events occurred during her reign. The wave of continental victories under the duke of Marlborough established new respect for British military prowess. The Royal Society flourished with men of letters and science, such as John Locke and Isaac Newton, and Freemason Sir Christopher Wren continued to express his genius in the restoration of St. Paul’s Cathedral. In 1707 the Act of Union between England and Scotland combined those crowns irrevocably and formed Great Britain.
As to religion, Anne was firmly Church of England and even yielded up royal funds to increase the livings of the lower clergy, a grace those gentlemen called “Queen Anne’s Bounty.” In Rome, the Holy See still remembered his family’s loyalty and willingly played host to the man who would have been James III. There were still Jacobite plots in Britain to restore the Roman Catholic claimants to the throne, but such restoration would need to be by force, since it was expressly prohibited by law. In 1689 James II and his son had specifically been denied the succession by an act of Parliament that stated categorically that no Roman Catholic or spouse of a Roman Catholic could occupy the British throne. Then, in 1701, Parliament had been even more specific. In the Act of Succession they decreed that after Queen Anne the crown would pass to the nearest Protestant relative of the House of Stuart. That turned out to be Sophia, a granddaughter of James I, who was married to the elector of Hanover.
Thus, upon Anne’s death in 1714, Sophia’s son founded the Hanoverian dynasty in Britain as King George I. He never bothered to learn English and spent more time at home in Germany than at his court in London, but it didn’t matter anymore. The country was ruled by Parliament, as the new monarchy took shape and Robert Walpole became England’s first prime minister.
In the following year the long-awaited Jacobite rebellion was launched and was a short-lived dismal failure. It was put down so quickly that it was over before James could arrive in Britain to join it. The Jacobite cause, the struggle to return Britain to the Roman church, was effectively broken—just two years before four Masonic lodges in London decided to reveal themselves to the world. Now, indeed, Freemasons had no more need for secrecy, no reason to hide from the establishment, or to plot against the establishment. Freemasonry had become the establishment.