by Craig Murray
James added in a footnote that he had actually seen the charter and documents of the Templars in Paris, by permission of the Grand Master and of Admiral Sir Sydney Smith, a naval hero who James names as a leading British Knight Templar. He gives Sydney Smith’s Templar commission in his book’s appendices.
James had indeed been in Paris on his way back from India; he had, unusually for a Company officer, come overland through Europe, calling at Malta, Sicily, Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice, Geneva and Paris. All these locations bar Florence feature in his History of the Knights Templar. In Edinburgh he had ‘been encouraged to undertake the work by offers of valuable documents in the possession of old and noble families’.2 These included the Sinclairs and the Ramsays.
James had been presented at Court to William IV by the Earl of Dalhousie, and the King had created him a Knight of the Royal Order of the Guelphs of Hanover. This Order had been founded in 1815 by the Prince Regent;3 it was used to honour his personal friends. No such honour had been given to Alexander when he met the King, yet Alexander was a great deal more famous than James. Indeed, why should the King be meeting James, an obscure doctor, at all?
James also was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and given an honorary LLD from Glasgow University.4
There is a genuine mystery here, and it is not whether the Templars hid anything in Rosslyn Chapel. The question is why was James treated as so important? It was not professional attainment. He was Surgeon to the Residency of Cutch. Within the EIC, surgeons were the most junior of British officers, which rankled with them greatly.5 James’ successful foray into the world of diplomacy had been eight years previously and caused no great stir; he had written slim books on Sind and Cutch, self-published.
Before returning to India, James received a farewell banquet in Edinburgh, which gives the key. He ‘received the present of a magnificent silver vase, bearing […] a masonic inscription’.6 Lord Ramsay, chairing the dinner, was the ‘Grand Master of England’.7 Also at the top table was Lord Sinclair, the owner of Rosslyn Chapel. Yet extraordinarily, James had only become a freemason in August 1834, at that ceremony at St Peter’s Lodge, Montrose.8
It is all a little startling. In a listing of the members of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, dated 1869, we find the following listed under ‘deceased members’:
James Burnes, Baron of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg Gotha; Knight of the Royal Hanoverian Guelphic Order; Grand Précepteur de l’Ordre Souverain Du Temple; LLD, MD, FRS, Late Physician General of the Bombay Army9
All of which except ‘Grand Précepteur de l’Ordre Souverain Du Temple’ is verifiable.10 There is good reason to believe the last is also true. In his book on the Templars, James writes of their links to the Order of St John of Jerusalem. This was a broadly open body, engaged in dining and charitable work, whereas the Knights Templar were a secret, hermetic society. But the more open Order is easy to trace; here is a roll of one of their meetings:
On Thursday 24 June a Chapter General of the British Langue of the Sovereign and Illustrious Order of St John of Jerusalem took place at the Gate House of Clerkenwell priory.
The Grand Prior, Sir Charles M Lamb, presiding, followed by dinner in the Hall of the Gate House.
The Chair was again filled by Preceptor Burnes, supported, on the right and left by Count Fane De Salis and Vice-Admiral Watts, C.B.; the Grand Secretary acted as croupier, supported by Sir Edward Hoare, Bart., and George H Ryland Esq, Lieut.-Col of the Militia of Canada, and Registrar of the District of Montreal.11
A list of office bearers from two years later, in 1860:12 Grand Prior of England, Vice Admiral Sir A D Arbuthnott; Bailiff of Aquila, the Duke of Manchester; Chief Preceptor of Scotland, J. Burnes KHFRS; Secretary General, Maj Gen J. Ramsay. Preceptor is also James’ quoted Templar rank. In both freemasonry and the Knights of St John, James is coupled with the Ramsay family. The 1869 full membership list of the Order of St John of Jerusalem includes princes, dukes, marquesses, earls and barons. But the family name which occurs most often is Burnes, with nine members. The second is Ramsay, with six.
According to an obituary of James, his house in Notting Hill was:
the resort of the society of the most learned and distinguished men of the day. He also and for many years took part in the resuscitation of the English Langue (or national branch) of the illustrious and Sovereign Order of St John of Jerusalem […]13
There appears to have been a very strong coincidence in both membership and office bearers of the Knights of St John and the Knights Templar. One may be perceived as the public face of the other.
James had left Bhuj in October 1833 through ill health, the malaria or ‘intermittent fever’ he had reported as endemic. In February 1834 he set off on his European tour, and did not return to India until December 1837. It was in 1836, in the midst of this extended absence from India, that he was appointed by the Masonic Grand Lodge of Scotland in Edinburgh as Provincial Grand Master for Bombay and its Dependencies.
But it was Alex who had been the active freemason, joining in Kira in 1828. James was not a member of any Indian lodge until he returned to Bombay in December 1837 and enrolled in Lodge Perseverance no. 546 – as the Provincial Grand Master, immediately. Within less than a year of this, James was presented at another celebratory banquet by the Scottish masons of Bombay with ‘three massive silver pillars, surmounted by the emblems of faith, hope and charity, to mark their deep felt gratitude for his conduct to themselves, and their high sense of his brilliant efforts’. What can he possibly have done inside his first year of office to justify this lavish gift? When James Burnes visited Calcutta a few months later, it was considered worthy of an entire series of public banquets.14
His memorialist wrote of his peregrinations on sick leave, that ‘A great portion of his stay in Europe was devoted to visiting the countries on the Continent, and we believe that he has seen more of the eminent men of the present day than any other individual from India.’ But he was only the Resident Surgeon in Bhuj. Why did the eminent men of Europe want to meet him?
The answer has to lie in the Freemasons and Knights Templar. He ultimately became Grand Master of All India in the Freemasons and Grand Preceptor in the Knights Templar. There are two possible explanations for his incredibly swift rise – that his claims were hereditary, or were due to some acquirement.
That James Burnes’ influence in Freemasonry and the Templars was in some way hereditary I do not discount. The Burnes family appear all to have been Masons. Robert Burns joined the Lodge Tarbolton Kilwinning in 1781,15 and was portrayed in his Masonic regalia. Montrose was a centre of Freemasonry; there was a permanent Masonic Lodge near the Town Hall, when such halls were unusual. A pub opposite is called The Royal Arch – a level of Scottish Freemasonry – and replete with openly Masonic symbolism. The Ramsay family, patrons of the Burnes, provided two Grand Masters of Scottish and two of English Freemasonry in the nineteenth century (and more in the twentieth). The inventor of Royal Arch Freemasonry was Chevalier Andrew Ramsay. It may be significant that in Masonic circles James was designated as Chevalier Burnes.16
As noted throughout James Burnes’ History of the Knights Templar, Scottish Freemasonry and Chevalier Ramsay were closely connected to the Jacobite cause. The Burnes family fought in that cause as tenants of Earl Marischal Keith, who is specifically cited by James as a Freemason. It is not the historic truth or fiction of these stories which is important here – it is that they carried a persistent resonance. The position of the Burnes family in these traditions may have contributed to James’ advancement within these organisations.
It is a fact of history that these organisations existed, that they included very powerful men (and no women) and that James held very senior positions within them. They involved rituals of a quasi- religious nature, which in James Burnes’ time were entirely hermetic. Aspects of those beliefs may have played a part in James’ rise within the organisations, in just the same way that theology might affect who becomes Pope.
Writing in 1899, the official Masonic historian Robert Freke Gould, himself the ‘Senior Grand Deacon of England’, was plainly as baffled as I am:
there is nothing more remarkable in the annals of Masonry, than the absolutely unique position which he attained in the Craft within less than three years of his initiation at Montrose. In 1836 he was appointed Provincial Grand Master for Western India, where on his return, Scottish masonry flourished and English masonry became quite dormant.17
Freemasonry was not an insignificant organisation. The Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Bombay were members and a great many officers. Hundreds of Freemasons outranked James in the military and almost all had been Masons for longer. So how did he become Provincial Grand Master, and why did everyone switch from English to Scottish Masonry to follow him? Unsurprisingly, the Ramsay family were involved as ‘Brother Dr Burnes […] had come out with special powers from the Grand Master of England, the Right Honorable James, Lord Ramsay, to create Provincial Grand Lodges, but under terms that they should be constituted under the Grand Lodge of Scotland.’18
In 1848 this James, Lord Ramsay was to become Governor-General of India.
James’ relationship to Robert Burns was important, because Robert was already the object of veneration. The first Burns Club had been set up in Greenock in 1801, and by 1830 they existed in most major cities. The first Burns Supper had been held in Alloway on 29 January 1802 (they got his birthday wrong). By 1827 £3,000 had been raised for a monument at Burns’ grave, and in August 1844 James Burnes was guest of honour at a banquet of thousands in Alloway.
The other literary cult of the time was that of Sir Walter Scott, a Freemason of St Mary’s Lodge, Edinburgh, to whom Scots raised an even more imposing monument. Scott’s Ivanhoe was immensely popular, and Knights Templar were major protagonists of that story. By producing a history that could link Scotland’s nobility with the Templars through Freemasonry, James Burnes was enabling them to take part in a fantasy which was highly fashionable at the time. On 13 December 1836 James was made an honorary member of Scott’s lodge of St Mary’s. On 7 May he had been deputed by Lodge Canon-gate Kilwinning of Edinburgh to visit the aged James Hogg and confer on him the Lodge’s poet laureateship, previously held only by Hogg’s old friend Robert Burns.19
In December 1865 another famous Freemason was born in Bombay, and baptised in St Thomas’ Cathedral, where some of James Burnes’ children still attended. The baby’s name was Rudyard Kipling. He viewed himself as an Anglo-Indian and much of his life was spent in Bombay and Lahore, the scenes of Alexander’s life. Rudyard Kipling became a senior Mason of the Royal Arch. He wrote:
In ‘85 I was made a Freemason by dispensation […] being under age, because the Lodge hoped for a good Secretary […] Here I met Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs […] and a Jew tyler, who was priest and butcher to his little community in the city.
As a young newspaper correspondent, Kipling’s patch was the scene of many of Alexander Burnes’ adventures fifty years before, and the issues remained very much the same. Kipling covered:
reviews of Armies expecting to move against Russia […] receptions of an Afghan Potentate, with whom the Indian Government wished to stand well (this included a walk into the Khyber, where I was shot at, but without malice, by a rapparee who disapproved of his ruler’s foreign policy)
Kipling had a keen sense of the past:
The dead of all times were about us – in the vast forgotten Muslim cemeteries round the Station, where one’s horse’s hoof of a morning might break through to the corpse below; skulls and bones tumbled out of our mud garden walls […] and at every point were tombs of the dead. Our chief picnic rendezvous and some of our public offices had been memorials to desired dead women; and Fort Lahore, where Runjit Singh’s wives lay, was a mausoleum of ghosts.20
There can be no doubt that this inquisitive young correspondent would have known about the pioneering young Freemason who covered the same territory, Alexander Burnes.
Kipling’s most famous openly Masonic work was The Man Who Would Be King. The narrator, a Masonic journalist clearly a self-portrait, meets two tough Freemason adventurers named Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan. They travel to Kaffiristan in remotest Afghanistan and carve out an empire. They discover that the native religion is based on Freemasonry, and add the Master Mason rituals, gaining an ascendancy and conquering neighbouring tribes. Local Masonic traditions date back to Alexander the Great, and ancient Masonic carvings match the Masonic symbols on Daniel’s regalia. It all goes wrong when Danny – who is known by his subjects as ‘Sikander’ – forsakes his vow of chastity for love of the beautiful Roxanne.
There can be no doubt this story was inspired by the tale of another ‘Sikander’. As one recent historian put it: ‘His fate echoes that of Alexander Burnes, another prideful man who called himself Sikandar, who shattered his own mystique with a taste for Afghan maidens and was destroyed.’21 Those are not the only parallels; Burnes’ active Freemasonry is a still greater clue, and he had written a whole chapter on the ‘Kaffir tribe’ of Afghanistan in his Travels; hence Kipling’s setting in ‘Kaffiristan’.
Kipling’s recent biographer, David Gilmour, tells us that The Man was ‘inspired by a meeting with an unknown Freemason, who persuaded him to deliver a mysterious message to another unknown Freemason at a railway junction on the edge of the Great Indian (or Thar) desert’.22 The Great Indian (or Thar) desert was of course the scene of Burnes and Holland’s first explorations. What this mysterious message was, Kipling did not say. As it inspired The Man, it is reasonable to assume this message was connected with the subjects of that book: Afghanistan, Masonic traditions and Alexander.
Alexander Burnes believed that he had proved the existence of ancient Freemasonry in Afghanistan. As he told St Peter’s Lodge in Montrose in February 1834:
even in the most remote and rude districts of Asia which he had visited, he had traced that Masonry had once existed there, from tradition and the remains of Masonic symbols which he particularised.23
This casts an entirely new light on Alexander Burnes’ travels in Central Asia, and particularly the amount of time he spent recording in great detail ancient architectural structures, carved symbols and religious images on old coins. He employed people to dig at many ancient sites he visited. Did the message Kipling carried refer to the Masonic symbols the British ‘Sikander’ said he had discovered in Afghanistan?
Alexander Burnes makes no reference to Freemasonry in any of his published works. This is in itself strange. He was an active Freemason, and we know from private letters that he discussed Freemasonry with Jabbar Khan. He published nothing on the square and compasses he said he found near Bokhara, but plenty on other coins, artefacts and discoveries. By contrast, Mountstuart Elphinstone, another Scottish Freemason, published that in 1809 he found among the Afghans ‘a lively curiosity about Freemasonry. I have often been questioned regarding it.’ Elphinstone even met an Afghan dervish who had been initiated into Freemasonry in Europe,24 while Harlan was close friends with an Afghan Rosicrucian.25 Alex’s not even mentioning Freemasonry looks like concealment.
Devoted Freemasons like the Burnes would have another reason to trace an Alexandrian connection. The esoteric beliefs of Freemasonry are influenced by the alchemical works of Hermes Trismegistus, highly influential from their release in translation during the Italian Renaissance. His name is the source of the word ‘hermetic’. He allegedly lived in Egypt under the Greek rule established by Alexander. In a section on Trismegistus, Robert Cooper, official Librarian of Scottish Masons’ today, and like James Burnes a member of both the Supreme Grand Royal Arch Chapter and the Knights Templar, writes that ‘Because symbols could simultaneously reveal and conceal the divine essence, they could never be fully understood by the use of mere words, whether written or spoken.’26
Given the peculiarly elastic meaning of such symbols, it was not difficult for Alexander and James to fit an appropriate Bactrian symbol or two
into the Masonic iconology, as a link to Hermes Trismegistus. It is also worth pointing out that Trismegistus claims a derivation from Zoroaster. Central Asia was the heartland of Zoroastrianism and Alexander Burnes references Greco-Bactrian coins with a symbol showing what he interprets as a Zoroastrian fire altar.27
I do not accept that there really is such a thing as a Masonic inscription from the time of Alexander the Great. But the Burnes brothers interpreted ancient inscriptions that way, and convinced others at the esoteric end of Freemasonry to accept this. In an age when the study of classical accounts of Alexander’s travels was a foundation of every gentleman’s education, to be linked to Alexander the Great would give cachet to the institutions of Freemasonry. This material would, like Freemasonry in general, give adherents the satisfaction of knowing a secret others could not know. Freemasons were thus socially incentivised to believe it.
There is a precedent here in the work of another Scottish Freemason, James Bruce, who a generation before Burnes had been motivated by specifically Masonic goals in his exploration in Abyssinia that led to the discovery of the source of the Blue Nile.28 His quest brought the first introduction to Europe of the Book of Enoch.
Burnes’ predecessor in Afghanistan, Edward Stirling, was also a Scottish Freemason. On retirement he built a mansion in Jersey named Stirling Castle. It contains a Masonic Temple in oriental style.29 There is no doubt that Afghanistan held an allure for Freemasons. This also raises a natural question. When James Lewis deserted and fled to Afghanistan, why did he choose the name Masson for his alias?
Alexander and James had the opportunity to discuss the Masonic ‘symbols and traditions’ which Alex believed he had uncovered in Afghanistan, when Alex returned to the Bombay Presidency in 1833. He met James when their sister Ann married in Bhuj on 6 April 1833. It was after these meetings that James set off to meet the ‘eminent men’ of Europe and had that secret meeting in Paris where he was shown the charters and documents of the continuing Knights Templar.