1663 was the date Ashmole had predicted in 1652 by astrological means as the time when the Rosicrucian-style dream of the coming of the “more pregnant and famous philosophers” would be fulfilled. Ashmole may have thought that the Royal Society would be an invaluable aid in realizing this dream. Sir Robert Moray, a man described in his own time as “a great patron of the Rosie-Crucians” would doubtless have shared Ashmole's view. Furthermore, 1663 saw the appearance of a “Fiery Trigon” of Saturn and Jupiter : an unmistakable sign for Ashmole of the ‘coming philosophers’ who would “Illustrate, Enlarge and Refine the Arts like tryed Gold.”
In 1663 Isaac Newton was at Cambridge and after graduating (1664) he spent the two plague years (1665-1666) largely at home in Woolsthorpe in the Fens investigating the properties of light. Why light? Jacob Bronowski wrote in The Ascent of Man that it is natural for the physicist to think of the universe in terms of light and matter in energetic inter-action. “We see matter by light; we are aware of the presence of light by the interruption of matter.” Suffice to say, Newton became aware of universal gravitation in the period 1665-1666. Newton, alchemist and mathematician, would of course fit the bill as “a more pregnant and famous philosopher”.9
In the year of Newton's graduation, Ashmole was appointed as a member of the Royal Society's committee charged with “collecting all the phenomena of nature hitherto observed, and all experiments made and recorded.”- an activity very much in tune with that of the fictional Fraternity of the Rose-Cross and certainly with the work of Bacon's “Merchants of Light” in the latter's New Atlantis. (1627).
On 23 October 1667 Ashmole made a horoscope to determine a propitious time for King Charles to lay the first stone of the Royal Exchange. The masonic researcher E. Conder suggested that Charles II laid this foundation stone “in true masonic form” and that for this reason, Ashmole the Free Mason, was asked to compile the horoscope10 . In the following year, Ashmole married for the third and last time : Elizabeth, the daughter of his friend William Dugdale. He had no children from any of his three marriages.
In 1672 Elias Ashmole released his opus magnum of antiquarian study and research discipline, The Institution, laws and ceremonies of the most noble Order of the Garter. This work brought Ashmole even more fame at home and abroad.
Ashmole's magical interests certainly did not come to an end on his becoming friendly with Charles II. On the flyleaf to Ashmole's copy of John Dee's Liber Mysteriorum 1-V11 there is recorded in his own hand the story of how he was brought a valuable cache of John Dee's “spiritual diaries”, in particular that magical system called the Heptarchia Mystica : a guide to the seven orders of angels and their operations in the governance of the universe :
Be it remembered, that the 20th August 1672, I received by the hands of my servant Samuell Story, a part of Dr. Dee's manuscripts all written with his own hand; viz : his conference with Angello, which first began the 22nd December Ano 1581, and continued to the end of May Ano 1583, where the printed Booke of the remaining conferences (published by Dr Casaubon) begins, and are bound up in this volume.
The story of how Ashmole obtained these manuscripts is itself extraordinary and is told by Ashmole on the fly-leaf. They were brought to him (in exchange for a gilt-copy of the Garter book) by one of the wardens of the Tower, Mr Thomas Wale. Wale's wife had formerly been married to a Mr Jones, a confectioner of Lombard Street, London. Shortly after the latter marriage the couple had gone to look at some stuff put up for sale by a joiner. Among the household items was a chest of fine workmanship, formerly belonging to a Mr John Woodall who had bought the chest “very probably” after Dee's goods were exposed to sale after his death in 1608. About four years before the great Fire of London (1666) the couple had moved the chest, heard rustlings inside and on inspection and with the help of a piece of iron, they discovered a secret drawer full of books together with a rosary. A maid burnt about half of the collection but the then Mrs Jones put the rest safely away. They even survived the Great Fire when the chest itself was destroyed. The manuscripts were taken out with the rest of the saveable goods to Moon Fields and then, after the Fire, finally returned home. On marrying Mr Wale, Mrs Wale informed her husband about the books and he, on hearing that Ashmole had lately passed through London, brought them to him. Ashmole's reputation was pervasive. Whether or not Ashmole ever tried to ‘re-activate’ the angelic calling-system of Edward Kelley and John Dee is unknown, but it is certain that he did take the work very seriously and in no wise found it reprehensible that Dee should have attempted to crown and complete his scientific knowledge by making contact with the spiritual powers believed to be ‘behind’ those physical manifestations which he had spent his life in observing.
A year later (4 July 1673) Ashmole recorded in his diary that “The learned and ingenious Sir Rob: Murrey died.” ‘Learned and ingenious’ is a phrase reserved by Ashmole for those versed in the Hermetic Art, and that is certainly true of Robert Moray, patron of Thomas Vaughan and friend of Elias Ashmole. Within six months of obtaining the Heptarchia Mystica, Ashmole had asked the antiquary John Aubrey (in whose Lives Ashmole features) to enquire after contemporary accounts of Dee in Mortlake (Dee's principle place of residence) and received a report from Aubrey on 27 January 1673 with which he was dissatisfied. Aubrey had, however, made contact with an 82 year old widow, Widow Faldo, and Ashmole went to interview her on August 11 1673, a month after hearing of the death of Moray. One wonders what his thoughts were as he approached Mortlake, last home of his Hermetic hero. Widow Faldo told Ashmole that she had known Dee well and had been inside his house, four or five rooms of which had been “filled with bookes.” He kept a “plentifull Table and a good Howse” and once permitted Faldo and her mother the vision of “the Ecclips of the Sun in one of his Roomes, which he had made darke.”
In 1675 Ashmole executed work on the history of Windsor Castle, notes for a projected biography of John Dee and according to Dr Campbell's biographical article on Ashmole (Biographia Britannica 1747), he collected material for a History of Freemasonry, the notes for which existed among Ashmole's papers in 1687. Campbell's account reads as follows :
As to the ancient history of Freemasons, about whom you are desirous of knowing what may be known with certainty, I shall only tell you, that if our worthy brother E. Ashmole Esq; had executed his intended design, our fraternity had been as much obliged to him as the brethren of the most noble Order of the Garter. I would not have you surprised at this expression, or think it at all too assuming. …What from Mr E. A's collection I could gather, was, that the report of our Society's taking rise from a Bull granted by the Pope in the reign of Henry III, to some Italian architects, to travel all over Europe to erect chapels was ill-founded. [the ‘Comacene theory’ of Masonic origins - the architects were supposed to have come from round Lake Como, survivors of the fall into barbarism.] Such a Bull there was, and those architects were Masons; but this Bull, in the opinion of the learned Mr A was confirmative only, and did not by any means create our fraternity, or even establish them in this kingdom.
Dr Campbell then went on to suggest that enquirers look into the stories of S. Alban and King Edwin, in whose time masons were supposed to have been active. Campbell asserted that Mr Ashmole was more understanding of, and better acquainted with these stories of masonic origins than those who would ascribe a late date to Free Masonry.
Between 1679 and 1683 Ashmole was busy with another great project. This project was to succeed and bring him the fame on which his name now definitively rests. He was in the process of establishing the first-ever public museum in Britain, a museum of natural science built up from his own purchases and from material inherited through his association with the Tradescant family through his second marriage. The Ashmolean now stands as a great neo-classical structure on Beaumont Street and S. Giles, Oxford. The original building included a unique chemical laboratory in the basement, the first of its kind in a British university. Ashmole was ahead of his time in this work,
for after his death the laboratory was reported as being in a disgraceful state of damage and neglect. Ecclesiastical influence prevented the foundation of an Ashmolean Professorship in chemical and natural history but the University did appoint the first Keeper of the Museum, Dr Robert Plot, as Professor of Chemistry. (Plot also wrote the exquisite Natural History of Staffordshire, which refers to the very large number of Free Masons in that county12). 1,758 of Ashmole's books are today housed at the Ashmolean, and for more than 150 years after its foundation the Museum remained the centre for scientific studies in Oxford - a great tribute to the powerful spiritual impulse which drove Ashmole's great energies into such a life-enhancing and generous direction. If there ever was an invisible spiritual Fraternity, Ashmole certainly paid his membership-dues.
In 1685 Charles II died and his Catholic son James II succeeded him. The bailiffs of Lichfield begged Ashmole to be their MP. Ashmole was delighted to accept. James II opposed Ashmole's candidature, having promised the seat to a favourite and asked Ashmole to stand down, claiming he had known nothing of Ashmole's acceptance. In spite of this, many citizens of Lichfield still voted for Ashmole, deeply regretting that their wishes were so high-handedly overturned. Ashmole wrote the bailiffs a letter, giving money for a coronation party and telling them :
You cannot but imagine I looke upon my selfe as a very unfortunate man, that finde the love of my country men (almost without parallel) so great, and yet cannot accept their votes.
Three years later, in the year that James II fled the country in the bloodless Revolution which ousted him in favour of William and Mary, Dean Addison begged Ashmole to pay for the completion of the Cathedral's ten-bell peal :
Whatever interest this City and Church have in your Birth and Education, hath already redounded, insomuch honour thereby, and in your continual bounty, to both…nor in truth have we any other Argument, but your Charity and our necessity.
Sometime between the 18 and 19 May 1692, Elias Ashmole died. His tombstone in the Howard Chapel of S. Mary's Lambeth reads : While the Ashmolean endures, he will never die. John Aubrey, who knew Elias Ashmole, declared, simply, that “he was a mighty good man.”
Chapter Twelve
Elias Ashmole and the Origins of Free Masonry
Ashmole's employee, Dr Robert Plot, wrote of ‘Free-masons’ in Staffordshire in his Natural History of that County13 :
To these add the Customs relating to the County, whereof they have one of admitting Men into the Society of Free-masons, that in the moorelands of this County seems to be of greater request, than anywhere else, though I find the Custom spread more or less over the Nation;
Why more numerous in the moorlands of Staffordshire than elsewhere? There are a number of significant factors which emerge from close acquaintance and study of the area - factors which were, in the main, well known to Ashmole the antiquarian.
In the Middle Ages the Staffordshire moorlands drew those monks who followed the teachings of the mystic and practical man of genius Bernard of Clairvaux : the Cistercians, the which order began in 1098 when St Robert, the Abbot of Molesmes founded a monastery for the reform of the Cluniacs' Rule of Benedict in the middle of the forest at Cîteaux in the diocese of Langres. In 1112, a young nobleman arrived at Cîteaux with some friends, all of them in search of God. This nobleman was the Bernard who was to become the soul and inspiration of the order of ‘white monks’, and the unofficial head of Christendom. In 1129 he provided the Knights Templar with their original Rule (based on Cistercian principles) - he was the nephew of one of the founders of the Templars, André de Montbard - and from 1147 organised the Second Crusade, in which the Templars distinguished themselves with legendary valour. By the time Bernard died in 1152, the Cistercian order held 343 monasteries, and before the end of the twelth century there were 530. One of these monasteries was founded by the crusader-knight, Bertram de Verdon in Staffordshire in 1176, at a place called Croxden near to his castle at Alton, ten miles south-east of Leek.
In about 1214, on returning from the Holy Land, the sixth earl of Chester, Ranulphus de Blondeville, founded the Cistercian Abbey of Dieulacres, just north of Leek with pasturing-rights across Biddulph Moor and elsewhere. In 1223, Henry de Audley founded the Cistercian Abbey of Hulton, five miles south-west of Leek. Adjacent to his lands, a few miles south-west of Hulton, stood (after 1168) a Templar preceptory, at Keele. The relationship between the Cistercians and the Templars was very close-knit. Between them, these three Cistercian monasteries dominated the life of the moorlands of Staffordshire throughout the Middle Ages until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, a century before Ashmole's marriage to Eleanor Mainwaring (1638). Needless to say, they were built and structurally sustained by lodges of masons, stone-cutters and freemasons : sculptors of that chalky stone, so good for fine carving, known as freestone14.
The rule of the white monks themselves was to keep to the cloister, to be silent, to own no property, to be obedient, to suffer no distraction or murmuring, to confess frequently, to perform the appointed duties and to be bound to one another in mutual love. The appointed duties involved caring for their clothes, their shoes, their kitchen; to rise at midnight and spend the early hours in chant and then to work until sundown when they were to retire to sleep. They did not eat flesh (except when ill), fish, eggs, butter, milk or cheese - except when given in charity. Alongside the monks lived the conversi : the masons, smiths, weavers, shoemakers, fullers, tanners and bakers : often the drudges of the establishments. Their domicile was scant (they usually lived at the western end of the building), and their food poor. According to Jean Gimpel15 the spirit of the Rule of Saint Benedict did not permit the monks to do heavy manual labour such as quarrying, stone-cutting or sculpting.
In 1119 the Cistercians produced a rule of ‘usages and customs’ with regard to the work of lay brothers, who had to take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but who never became priests. While the services of lay-masons were necessary to some of the initial construction and later repair of monasteries, builders, especially specialist sculptors, were often brought in from outside, as the numerous masons marks around many Cistercian monasteries demonstrate. Sculpting was the work of the freemason, a highly skilled man who had graduated from stone-cutting (itself an exact art) and who met his fellows in ‘lodges’, often constructed in wood on site, where simple economics and pride in their craft dictated that their ‘secrets’ be transferred only among themselves. It is very important to understand the scope of their craft. To imagine that these freemasons were simply highly skilled workmen (or ‘operatives’) with little or no intellectual and spiritual grasp of their work would be a great mistake. Among the company of freemasons we do in fact see the origin of the western ‘artist’ who attempts to emulate the divine Art which his own art has opened his eyes to, and who was naturally disposed to think of the maker of the universe as a ‘Great Architect’. As Jean Gimpel expressed the matter :
By becoming a sculptor, the stonecutter graduated to the intellectual world. He came into contact with theologians and learnt from them; he had the wonderful opportunity of looking through the abbey's precious manuscripts. He learnt to look, to observe and to think. His intellectual horizon broadened, which meant that his carvings benefitted both materially and spiritually. Thanks to the miniatures and manuscripts which he had seen and admired in other abbeys, the sculptor could humbly suggest slight variations to themes put forward by the Fathers. As the sculptor and the theologian were working towards the same end, the former could feel free, for within this association there was no compulsion.16
An era (such as the early 17th century), whose intellectuals and others were fascinated by symbols and esoterica, could hardly fail to wonder at what the country's freemasons had been doing for centuries, and who perhaps had begun to miss something of the ‘medieval’ world, a longing which we, juggled, as it were, differently in time, cannot properly see, or better, feel. By Ashmole's time, there was a widespread feeling among the educated tha
t something vital in the ancient world had undoubtedly been lost (and needed to be recovered, viz : Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, 1627), as the monastic world, with all it involved, and the age of chivalry, had likewise been lost (Ashmole's most famous work in his day was a history of the Order of the Garter - a book which fascinated his contemporaries). The early seventeenth century saw new interest in the mythology of Atlantis, in alchemy, and in the Hermetic ‘pristine theology’ idea : that kernels of primary wisdom had been handed down from the earliest antiquity in Hermetic, initiated circles. Perhaps to become an ‘accepted’ mason in Ashmole's day was a way of keeping hold of some sense of rootedness, while the state was busy decapitating itself after a century of religious turmoil.
Freemasons had not vanished from the moorlands of Staffordshire at the time of Elias Ashmole. In spite of the devastating effects of the Dissolution of the Monasteries begun by Henry VIII in 1536, it may be that at the beginning of the following century, some freemason lodges were undergoing a mild revival.17 Many of the great houses of Staffordshire illustrated in Dr. Plot's Natural History of Staffordshire were constructed in that period - and Jacobean architecture delighted in intricate decoration and visual allegory (Inigo Jones is an obvious example of the standard attained and practised in the early seventeenth century). It should not be forgotten that the freemasons were extraordinarily secretive. Had not Ashmole recorded his 1646 initiation in his diary, and had not his employee Plot made reference to Free-masons in the Staffordshire moorlands, this research could never have begun.
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