The Golden Builders

by Tobias Churton

  Christ was thy Corner-stone, Christians the rest, Hammer the word, Good life thy line all blest, And yet art gone, t'was honour not thy crime, With stone hearts to worke much in little time, Thy Master saws't and tooke thee off from them, To the bright stone of New Jerusalem, Thy worke and labour men may esteem a base one, Heaven counts it blest, here lies a blest free-Mason.

  (Devon & Exeter Gazeteer, 8 Oct. 1909, p.7, brought to my attention, as with that following, by Matthew Scanlan)

  Again, we have the plaque raised to the memory of John Stone, now at S. Giles, Sidbury:

  An epitaph upon ye Life and Death of JOHN STONE, FREEMASON, who, Departed Ys Life ye first of January, 1617, & Lyeth heer under buried.

  On our great Corner Stone this Stone relied, For blessing to his building loving most, To build God's Temples, in which workes he dyed, And lived the Temple, of the Holy Ghost, In whose lov'd life is proved and Honest Fame, God can of Stones raise seede to Abraham.

  To call the Almighty Himself a ‘Freemason’ was neither an unknown nor empty epithet. Witness Cawdrey's Treasure of Similes (London, 1609, p.342): “As the Freemason heweth the hard stones… even so God, the Heavenly Free-Mason, buildeth a Christian Church.”

  Few have fully grasped the gnostic import and transformative power of these symbolic ideas and ideal symbols. The accepted freemason is to be a microcosm wherein the mystery of cosmic redemption is to be enacted and realised. “Who is that on earth that is greater than a freemason?” asks the Sloane Ms. catechism, sternly. “He it was carried to ye highest pinnacle of the Temple of Jerusalem”, that is, Jesus, the slain Master, tempted of Satan but raised and triumphant.

  These and related ideas permeate what has become known as ‘speculative’ freemasonry, generally regarded as something independent of the so-called ‘operative’ craft – as if the tool could be meaningfully detached from the mind that made it. Christianity was born of free theology forged in the spirit. An analagous case may be made for freemasonry.

  Professor David Stevenson's The Origins of freemasonry: Scotland's century makes a good case for the Hermetic inspiration behind some of William Schaw's reforms of Scottish masonry in the 1590s (Schaw's Statutes). He also highlights the probable hoped-for inclusion of some aspect of the Art of Memory in a Scots mason's utility kit. Frances Yates has shown how this Art was related to neo-Neoplatonic symbology by Hermetists such as Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). Bruno spread the mnemonic magic about Europe during the 1580s, believing it to be linked to a liberating gnosis of Egyptian provenance.

  It is now clear that the love of Renaissance men of learning for polyvalent symbolism, riddles, metaphors, paradoxes and hidden keys was not alien to the life of the architect and sculptor – the apostle of the substantial Renaissance.

  Masons, associated with so many medieval lay confraternities across Europe had been ‘speculating’ (geometry, mathematics, plus symbolic theology) for centuries. Indeed, the term could simply mean mathematics, viz: The City and Country Purchaser and Builder's Dictionary: or the Compleat Builder's Guide (TN Philomath, London 1703) in which the author, Richard Neve, writes in his fifth section on the ‘Freemason's Work’: “Some ingenious Workmen understand the Speculative Part of Architecture or Building: but of these knowing sort of Artificers there are few because few workmen look any further than the Mechanical, Practick or Working part of Architecture; not regarding the Mathematical or Speculative part of Building,…”

  In fact, the earliest known use of the appellate ‘speculative’ to distinguish Grand Lodge from the world of practical architecture, occurs as late as 12 July 1757. It appears in a letter from Dr Manningham, Deputy Grand Master of the Premier Grand Lodge in London, writing to a Brother Sauer at the Hague.

  For the man who most inspired Elias Ashmole, namely John Dee, as well as for many other men of learning in the 16th and 17th centuries, mathematics was simply a branch of what was called ‘natural [or non-demonic] magic’. This conception derived from the Sabians of Harran and Baghdad, as described in the first part of this book, and was restated by Renaissance genii of the calibre of Pico della Mirandola.

  Serious knowledge, then as now, simply holds the ignorant spell-bound, that is, bound by a spell. (‘Spelling’ means getting the words right.) Such ignorance persists to this day. In some parts of India, masonic lodges are called by locals, ‘magic houses’ (Jadu Ghar), while in Britain anti-masonic propaganda still asserts some mysterious relationship between the Craft and witchcraft, in spite of every contrary assertion. Sound education, for masons and non-masons alike, is of course the cure for such fears. Electricity holds little mystery to the man who has made his own wireless.

  Elias Ashmole was not the first ‘speculative mason’, nor was the Warrington microcosm the first speculative lodge. Ashmole's record concerning 1646 has come to represent the first known record of a lodge of Free Masons apparently unrelated to the ‘operative’ craft. But was it really unrelated to the sculptors and architects?

  As we have seen, it is highly likely that the Richard Ellam mentioned in Ashmole's record was a freemason as full-time occupation. (The will of Richard Ellom of Lymm, Cheshire, 7 September 1667, describes him as a ‘freemason’, which can only mean the Art and Craft. The will mentions brothers John and Peter, to whom Richard left his messuage and tenement in Lymm. Ashmole refers to Richard Ellam's brother, John.) A copy of the Old Charges from the 1660s among the Harleian Mss. (Ms. 1942, British Library) requires a lodge to consist of one warden, five brothers and a minimum of one other “of the Trade of ffreemasonry”. Warrington would have had the blessing of all freemasons, whether ‘accepted’ or not – and we must get used to thinking of accepted masons rather than ‘speculatives’. Being ‘speculative’ as opposed to ‘operative’ constitutes the basis for the claims of the United Grand Lodge of England to govern Free and Accepted Masonry in England and Wales, ie: that it is the first wholly speculative masonic institution.

  Architecture, since the heyday of the Renaissance, was not only a freemason's business; it was a gentleman's accomplishment. Furthermore, the Craft needed patrons: informed patrons who appreciated the true value of the freemason – people, one suspects, who looked with horror at the Tudors' pillage of the ancient religious houses of England and Wales. People, perhaps, like Penketh, Ashmole and Mainwaring. Or – before we get too romantic – people who had done well out of the Dissolution of the monasteries and had new houses to renovate and construct, from the stones of the old.

  This line of enquiry would probably remain purely conjectural were it not for Elias Ashmole's second surviving record of masonic involvement, dated 10 March 1682. This record makes all the difference to the way in which we must see the first record of masonic activity in Ashmole's life. It also helps us to understand exactly what is meant by the term ‘accepted’ Free Mason, an epithet unique to English freemasonry in the period. It is noticably lacking in 17th century Scottish practice, even though the quantity of 17th century Scottish evidence greatly exceeds English masonic evidence for the same period, as David Stevenson is at pains to emphasise in his study.

  Ashmole gives us a living snapshot of an afternoon in the heart of the busy City of London in the 1680s, a place pullulating with well-paid masons, eighteen years after the Great Fire created an architectural vacuum.

  March 10. 1682 : About 5pm I received a summons, to appear at a Lodge to be held the next day at Mason's Hall London. Accordingly I went, and About Noone were admitted into the Fellowship of Free Masons, Sir William Wilson Knight, Capt. Rich: Borthwick, Mr Will: Woodman, Mr Wm Grey, Mr Samuell Taylour & Mr William Wise. I was the Senior Fellow among them (it being 35 years since I was admitted). There were present beside my selfe the Fellowes after named. Mr Thos. Wise Mr. [Master] of the Masons Company this present year. Mr Thomas Shorthose, Mr Thomas Shadbolt, Waindsford Esq. Mr Nich: Young. Mr: John Shorthose, Mr William Hamon, Mr John Thompson, & Mr. Will: Stanton.

  We all dyned at the Halfe Moone Taverne in Cheapside, at a Noble Dinne
r prepared at the charge of the New-accepted Masons.

  The Masons Hall referred to stood in Mason's Avenue, Basinghall Street, the headquarters of the London Company of Masons (formerly the Company of Freemasons) since 1463. The Company was awarded its arms in 1472, its main feature being the outstretched compasses and three castles so familiar to students of the Craft. By the time of the Stuarts, the London Company of “ffreemasons” consisted of a master, two wardens, a court of assistants (the ruling body), a livery, and a body of freemen or yeomen. Before we look more closely at this hoary Company, the name Sir William Wilson, mentioned by Ashmole, should be noted.

  Wilson (1641-1710), architect and stone-mason, had been knighted a few days before. A native of Sutton Coldfield, eight miles from Lichfield, he had carved a still-extant statue of Charles II. It used to stand at the very top of the western façade of Lichfield cathedral, looking over all who entered therein and clearly linking the reconstruction of the cathedral to the patronage and care of the restored monarch, guardian of the privileges and tradition of the Church of England. (Charles is boldly described as Restaurator at the foot of the statue). The statue may still be seen by the south door of the cathedral, its provenance a mystery to visitors and locals alike. Who would have thought that this eroded larger-than-life-size monument, sculpted by an architect of Nottingham Castle, might yet represent Ashmole's union of Monarchy, Church and Free Masonry in a single lump of durable sandstone?

  Some years ago, when I first came to consider the case of Sir William Wilson's becoming an accepted mason, I could not see how a practising stonemason-architect could have been initiated into a freemasonic fellowship, long after becoming a fully functioning, professional master freemason. More research was required. Fortunately, the requisite clues have been uncovered.

  In his article Nicholas Stone and the Mystery of the Acception, (Freemasonry Today, Spring 2000), masonic historian Matthew Scanlan has written of how another and even more illustrious professional freemason-architect apparently became an Accepted Fellow in 1638, while at the time holding the position of King Charles I's master mason. This was Nicholas Stone the elder (1586-1647), whose father's memorial plaque we had cause to quote from earlier.

  Given the paucity of evidence, Scanlan is to be congratulated for penetrating the mystery and recognising its historical significance. When one grasps this significance, it renders one incredulous as to how it could have taken so long to put ‘two and two together’. Then again, the path had been obscured by masonic historians (who have enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the subject) with peculiar vested interests in separating as far as possible the lineage of ‘speculative’ (Grand Lodge) from ‘operative’ (respectable working-class) masons. The reasons for this can only have been academic, social and political, deriving perhaps from the extraordinary period of confusion and obfuscation following the establishment of Grand Lodge in 1717 during the long sunset of the Jacobite challenge to the House of Hanover. Furthermore, there was an attested desire among Grand Lodge apologists to transform their masonic inheritance into a proto-enlightenment moral club system, while squeezing its mystical theological basis into what Blake and Coleridge – to name but two – considered the dull, reasonable tick-tock philosophy of ‘natural religion’.

  William Blake parodies the god of the oh-so-rational natural religionist in his famous watercolour, The Ancient of Days (1793), even giving “Old Nobodaddy” some rather pointed compasses with which to bind and limit his universe. If this quasi-deity had been asked ‘how high is your lodge?’, he might have replied, “Oh, about 100 million miles, give or take a few feet.” The Lodge in the Head is, of course, like the imagination, infinite.

  Contemporary English freemasonry, not surprisingly, does not appear comfortable with the muddying of its version of the historical water which a reconsideration of the word ‘speculative’ involves. Masonic historian John Hamill's standard account, The Craft (Crucible 1982), for example, regards the locus of Ashmole's second masonic diary reference as little more than incidental. According to Hamill, the lodge which accepted Wilson in the presence of “senior Fellow” Elias Ashmole was most likely “an occasional lodge”, his summons to that place doubtless due to the Masons Company connections of some of those present. It is as if a group of dairy farmers had dinner at the offices of the National Farmers Union, of which they were nearly all members, and then it was denied that there was any serious link between the NFU and dairy farming! In retrospect, the lack of interest displayed in such connections is to say the least, surprising.

  Thankfully, Scanlan finds the connections worthy of scholarly attention, keenly aware how much contemporary masonic history of pre-1717 conditions has been composed with the latterday phenomenon of Grand Lodge in mind.

  Scanlan examined the Renter Warden accounts for the London Company of ffreemasons, now held in the Guildhall Library, London. Records for 1638 describe a meeting that took place some time between March and midsummer 1638, the year, incidentally, in which Elias Ashmole married Eleanor Mainwaring.

  Pd wch the accompt [accountant] layd out Wch was more than he received of them Wch were taken into the Accepcon Whereof xs [ten shillings] is to be paid by Mr. Nicholas Stone, Mr Edmund Kinsman Mr John Smith, Mr William Millis, Mr John Coles.

  Nicholas Stone was no footnote to history. King's master mason, close working colleague of Inigo Jones, architect of the magnificent Banqueting House, Whitehall, “ffreemason and citizen of of the City of London”, sometime Master of the London Company of Freemasons, sculptor of one of the finest sepulchral monuments known to 17th century history, (the effigy of John Donne, S. Paul's), Stone was learned in classical mythology and theological symbolism, and encouraged his son to travel to Italy to further such and related practical studies. Nicholas Stone the younger (a Royalist) was the author of the Enchiridion of Fortification (1645) – a most suggestive title when one realises that in the year prior to publication, Elias Ashmole was put in charge of the City of Oxford's eastern defences and a year later, made a Free Mason .

  And yet, for all this, Stone, along with the four other men referred to in the Renter Warden's accounts, while still a member of the London Company of Freemasons, had yet remained a stranger to the “Accepcon” until 1638, when he, along with his colleagues, were prepared to pay the large sum of 10 shillings for the privilege. At that price, it was unlikely to have been a long-service award ceremony!

  Ashmole, in 1682, is specific about the events that took place on March 11th – the “new accepted” masons paid for the noble dinner at the Half-Moon Tavern. What was this Acception, which had apparently grown up within the London Company? Scanlan writes: “From the scant records, it appears to have involved some kind of a meeting, followed by a dinner paid for by those who had been ‘accepted’. Was it that the acception dealt with the symbolic and so-called ‘speculative’ side of architecture?” Scanlan saved his definitive ‘sting in the tail’ for the last paragraph of his article:

  “It is perhaps curious to note that in 1718, when the Grand Master [of the Grand Lodge] George Payne requested brethren to bring to Grand Lodge “any old writings and Records concerning Masons, …to shew the usages of Antient Time”, that it was also recorded that “several very valuable manuscripts” were tragically lost. Interestingly, the Rev. James Anderson specifically records that one particular manuscript, “writ by Mr. Nicholas Stone the Warden of Inigo Jones, were too hastily burnt by some scrupulous Brothers, that those Papers might not fall into strange hands” (Anderson's Constitutions, 1738, p.111).

  “Could it be that there was a ritualistic form of Accepted Free Masonry prior to 1717 that was unpalatable to those who wished to ‘revive’ the movement in the 1720s?”

  Obviously, Scanlan thinks so. The implication, surely, is that an earlier movement was in some way ‘hi-jacked’, rather than having simply, or even complicatedly, evolved from antecedent conditions. However, thanks to the “scrupulous Brothers”, we may never know for sure. How convenient, a cyni
c might think, for a new kind of Freemasonry, severed from its paternity, to so inherit – or acquire – the title deeds.

  Ashmole's references to his fellowship with the Free Masons are few indeed, and this has led some commentators rashly to imagine Ashmole's commitment to the craft was slight. They would do well to remember not only the prohibition on committing to writing masonic rituals, but also that Ashmole's diary - vitally interesting as it is - is a highly selective work, accomplished for personal reasons of which we are ignorant. We do know that he wished to write a history of the craft, and made notes for the same, the which have disappeared.

  Free Masonry bound him in fellowship to men great and small in his time. A man of Ashmole's attested sociable and good character would be unlikely to disregard his obligations - and those obligations demanded secrecy. It is highly possible that the circles in which Ashmole moved included more than a few accepted masons (the example of Sir Robert Moray - another Hermetic enthusiast and accepted mason stands out), of whose fellowship we are ignorant simply because they kept their obligations in the matter. We must be grateful indeed for the few clues Ashmole did choose to leave to posterity.

  Furthermore, Ashmole never stopped contributing to church restoration - especially in Lichfield - and were we to have the records of construction-work, our knowledge of seventeenth century freemasonry, in its united operative and accepted aspects would be that much the richer. (Acceptation directly suggests an invitation to the operative world. Symbol and allegory permeate the operative catechism given above - and it is operative; Sloane mentions the placing of tools in special ways on site to indicate a summons for help from other freemasons). There was no such thing as ‘speculative Freemasonry’ at the time Ashmole was initiated, though it seems reasonable to suppose that having been initiated, accepted (and educated) masons did ‘speculate’. However, the term ‘speculative Freemasonry’ has been used to make a spurious distinction between post-1717 ‘symbolic’ masonry and the old trade which ‘preceded’ it, in effect drawing a cautious (and unnecessary) veil over the movement's genuine past. Speculation on secret allegorical and symbolic riddles was a general characteristic of the Renaissance in both its continental and English phases. Classicism, the Greek Mysteries, old English and Scottish pagan (country) traditions and Hermetic philosophy all played a part in this. For in that melancholy twilight later seen as the dawn of rationalism, these traditions could all be viewed as interweaving parts of the ‘old religion’ : hearty, gargantuan, fair. It would be surprising if, after the removal of the Puritan-dominated Protectorate of Cromwell, Renaissance modes of thought did not attempt a re-emergence, but how far such a movement may have influenced Free Masonry - or to what degree Free Masonry was indeed a part of that movement - is unclear, especially as one must consider that the operative freemason was himself the very practical instrument of the Renaissance. While philosophers dreamed, freemasons cut. For all the benefits of modern research, there is still a mystery in the matter.