THE Grand Lodge of 1717 was generally known by its opponents as the Moderns,’ and by that unfortunate name history still knows them. Their official attitude of indifference to the Royal Arch may have largely turned, as the years went by, upon the zealous adoption by their opponents of the ‘new’ ceremonial. Officially they regarded the Antients’ as ‘irregular’ and ‘illegal,’ would not therefore countenance them, and threatened any of their own members with the ‘severest censure’ for associating Masonically with them. Visitors to Moderns’ lodges were compelled to take an oath on the V.S.L. that they had been regularly made in a lodge constituted under the premier Grand Lodge, or, if they had not been so made, to submit to be reinitiated. Naturally the Antients’ bitterly retaliated in the same way.
In such an atmosphere as this it was unlikely that the Moderns’ Grand Lodge would look with a kindly eye upon a degree with which the rival body was closely identified, and there is an indication of this in some curious happenings centred around a lodge that met in 1755 at Ben Jonson’s Head, Pelham Street, Spitalfields, London. This lodge, founded as far back as 173 a at the Nag’s Head, South Audley Street, West London, must have had a somewhat chequered career, and was erased in 1755. The happenings are mentioned in the 1787 edition of Ahiman Rezon, while in Dr George Oliver’s Revelations of a Square (1855) are given further details, although these must be looked at somewhat narrowly. We have drawn upon both of these sources, and believe that the story as now told represents the approximate truth. Certain members of the lodge “had been abroad and had received extraordinary benefits on account of Antient Masonry.” This Dr Oliver embroiders, and says (on unknown evidence) that these Brethren brought back with them certain rituals, including that of Ramsay’s Royal Arch, and these they practised secretly every third lodge night under the designation of Antient Masonry.’ Dr Oliver’s story is that Dr Manningham, the Deputy Grand Master, was reluctantly admitted on one of these occasions, and he in due course reported that the ceremony he had witnessed was a reconstruction of Ramsay’s Royal Arch (how could he know this?) to which had been transferred the real landmarks of a Master Mason. W. J. Hughan, much more cautious, says that the working in the Ben Jonson Lodge probably referred to the Royal Arch and that the necessary changes would be in the Third Degree, but even his statement is nothing more than guesswork. Another version is that Dr Manningham with other Brethren called at the lodge and was refused admission; consequently a complaint was made at the next meeting of Grand Lodge, and as a result the lodge was severely censured and instructed that any Brother should be eligible for admission as a visitor on any of its regular nights. The lodge resented the censure, issued a manifesto accusing the Grand Lodge of partiality, innovation, and deviation from the ancient landmarks, and publicly renounced allegiance to it. The sequel was an unanimous resolution of Grand Lodge on St John the Baptists’ Day 1755 to erase the lodge from the list. This is a celebrated case, but amounts to just this: the Ben Jonson Lodge insisted on working a ceremonial unknown to the ‘Moderns’ ‑ possibly and even probably an early form of the Royal Arch ‑ and, in consequence, was erased.
The official attitude notwithstanding, many Moderns’ lodges did work a Royal Arch ceremonial, evidence thereof being the oldest English minute recording the raising of Brethren to the Royal Arch Degree. This minute is of a Moderns’ lodge, then No. 220, meeting at the Crown, Christmas Street, Bristol, in 1758, obviously a lodge of the Traditioner type. Grand Lodge is not known to have taken any steps against this lodge, and we may safely assume that from some such period as this, or even earlier, many Moderns’ lodges were working the Royal Arch. As an indication that their Grand Lodge could not have been unaware of what was going on but thought it better to adopt an attitude of studied indifference, let us adduce one of the most quoted phrases in the history of freemasonry. It occurs in a written reply by Samuel Spencer, the Moderns’ Grand Secretary in 1759, to an Irish Brother who asked for charity: ” Our Society is neither Arch, Royal Arch or Antient, so that you have no right to partake of our Charity” ‑ a statement which may have been icily correct, but was just a gift to his opponents, whose Grand Secretary, Laurence Dermott, gladly incorporated it in his records. The petitioner, William Carrall or Carroll, “a certified sojourner in distress,” coming from Dublin and possibly unaware of the division in English freemasonry, petitioned the Premier Grand Lodge for help, which unfortunately was not given him. But let us be fair in this matter; in view of the reciprocal agreement mentioned in the preceding section would any English Modern’ have fared any better in Dublin either then or, say, only three years later? The same Grand Secretary, Spencer, wrote in 1767 to a Brother in Frankfurt who was making inquiries: “The Royal Arch is a society which we do not acknowledge and which we hold to be an invention to introduce innovation and to seduce the brethren.” There speaks the official Spencer, but the unofficial Spencer had been exalted and admitted a joining member of a prominent chapter the year before! And the anomaly is all the more marked when we bear in mind that Samuel Spencer’s Grand Master, Lord Blayney, had only recently erected the first Grand Chapter.
In 1768 Samuel Spencer’s successor, Thomas French, in a letter to the Master of Sun Lodge, Bristol, said:
There is only one circumstance in your minutes which you are requested to correct, and that concerns Royal Arch Masonry, which comes not under our inspection. You are desired never to insert the transactions thereof in your Regular Lodge Books, nor to carry on the business of that degree on your stated Lodge nights.
The Charter of Compact carries French’s signature. Another signatory of the Charter, James Heseltine, one of the best of the Grand Secretaries of the day and at one time an officer of the Grand Chapter, writing to J. Peter Gogel, Past Grand Master of Frankfurt in 1774, did, indeed, acknowledge that the Royal Arch is “part of Masonry”; he clearly puts the anomalous position in which he found himself:
It is true that many of the Fraternity belong to a Degree in Masonry which is said to be higher than the other, and is called Royal Arch … I have the honour to belong to this Degree … but it is not acknowledged in Grand Lodge, and all its emblems and jewels are forbidden to be worn there…. You will thus see that the Royal Arch is a private and distinct society. It is part of Masonry but has no connection with Grand Lodge and this is the only further Degree known to us in England.
And only twenty‑one years before the Craft Union we find the Moderns’ Grand Lodge resolving (November 21, 1792) “That this Grand Lodge do agree with its Committee that Grand Lodge has nothing to do with the proceedings of the Society of Royal Arch Masons.”
The Unofficial Attitude
Many students of repute have held the opinion that the Moderns’ worked the Royal Arch in London and perhaps in the provinces long before the Antients’ did so. Henry Sadler thought that, “notwithstanding that the Royal Arch was first mentioned by Dermott in the records of the Antients,’ it was not generally adopted by them until some years after it had become exceedingly popular with the Moderns.”‘ Alas! where is the evidence in support? We simply do not know who first worked the Royal Arch, but, judging from the known circumstances, the present author tends to give the Antients’ the credit. Their Grand Lodge minutes of 1752 (already quoted) cannot be forgotten, but we certainly find the oldest record of the raising of Candidates, in England, in connection with a Moderns’ lodge ‑ that at the Crown Inn, Christmas Street, Bristol, to which reference has been made at p. 50. The day was Sunday, the date August 13, 1758; four other meetings of this lodge were held, also on Sundays, during the next twelve months, but there are no later mentions of the Royal Arch in these minutes, and it is possible that Grand Lodge had warned the lodge not to continue in its new course. It is known that some or many lodges owning allegiance to the Moderns’ practised an Antient’ form of working and had considerable respect for their opponents’ customs and traditions, a feeling that was far from being reciprocated, and it is not without significance that a Brother in Wakefield wrote to somebody apparently connected with the Moderns’ Grand Lodge in London, asking to be sent a copy of Ahiman Rezon (the Antients’ Constitutions).
Much has always been made of the fact that the Antients’ worked the Royal Arch without specific authorization in their warrants. But what of the Moderns’? Did they not (until such time as the separate chapter became the vogue, say, in the 1770s or even later), did they not work the Royal Arch in their private lodges? They too had no specific warrants! The only difference is that in one camp the lodges were doing it with implied and understood authority and in the other without! Thomas Dunckerley, a high officer and the opposite number to Laurence Dermott (Antients’ Grand Secretary), conferred the Royal Arch Degree in private lodges which could not possibly have been authorized to work it; a certificate issued to him in February 1768 by a lodge in Plymouth Dock (Devonport) states that he had presided as Master for two years, “during which time his Masonic skill, knowledge and experience hath been manifested in the care he hath taken in Governing, Instructing and Improving said Lodge in the several degrees of E.P., F.C., M.M. & R.A. ” The lodge issued this certificate at a time before the Grand Chapter had begun to issue warrants for private chapters: quite obviously Dunckerley was doing as many other Masters and lodges were doing ‑ he was working the Royal Arch ceremony in his Craft lodge and taking for granted the complete regularity of his course.
As from the erection of the Grand Chapter in 1766 Brethren could regularize themselves by taking a warrant from the Grand Chapter and founding a private chapter. But the lodges showed no undue haste to put themselves right in this way, for even seven years after the coming of Grand Chapter the warranted private chapters were only twenty or so, surely a small number in relation to the Craft lodges which continued, on their own authority, to confer the degree. As definite instances we may quote the Anchor and Hope Lodge, No. 37, Bolton, founded in 1732, which worked the degree from 1767 until a warrant for a chapter was issued in 1785, and the Lodge of St John, No. 191, founded in Manchester in 1769 (meeting in Bury since 1845), which at a very much later date was continuing to work the degree in lodge, and did not have at any time a chapter associated with it.
There is a sequel to all this in the warranting of chapters in considerable number in the closing years of the eighteenth century, but that is a matter for a later section.
Masters’ Lodges
It has commonly been advanced that Masters’ Lodges, of which first recorded mention is made in the 1730s, played a part in the early development of the Royal Arch. It is accepted that these lodges came into being to meet a need of their day ‑ namely, to raise Fellow Crafts to the Third Degree, the Hiramic Degree having only late in the 1720s reached some of the lodges, few of which knew it well enough to be able to confer it. It is reasonably assumed that Fellow Crafts wishing to be ‘Passed’ to the Master Mason’s grade often resorted to the Masters’ Lodges, where the ceremony was worked by particularly keen and knowledgeable Brethren, but as from the middle of the eighteenth century the ordinary lodges were able to work the degree. Consequently, as Third Degree lodges pure and simple, the Masters’ Lodges had now served their purpose, and if and where they continued to exist they had to find other employment.
What that employment was nobody knows. There has been plenty of guessing, plenty of downright assertion, but (and here the writer is supported by J. Heron Lepper, no mean student of Royal Arch history) we have no evidence ‑ no positive, definite evidence ‑ that it was the conferment of the Royal Arch Degree. Only a relatively small number of Masters’ Lodges were at work in the second half of the eighteenth century. Between 1760 and 1780, for example, the most likely period of their being used as Royal Arch lodges (if they ever were so used), seven are on record in the 1760s, of which six met once a month and one every two months, and only six in the 1770s, of which five met once a month and one quarterly. So in one decade, so far as is known, only seventy‑eight and in the other only sixty‑four Royal Arch meetings could have been available in each year to Brethren looking to the Masters’ Lodges for Exaltation ‑ this at a time when both the lodges and increasingly the chapters of the Moderns’ were exalting Brethren in numbers. (The Antients,’ making their Royal Arch masons in their ordinary lodges, had no use for Masters’ Lodges.)
There is a feeling that late in the century Master Masons could have gone to the Masters’ Lodges to be made virtual Past Masters for the purpose of qualifying them as Royal Arch Candidates, but there is no evidence of it. At different times in, but not all through, the thirteen years immediately preceding the Union five Masters’ Lodges met monthly and six quarterly, all of them apparently disappearing with the Union. Even if the possibility is conceded that Masters’ Lodges worked the Royal Arch in the second half of the eighteenth century it is fair to assume that any part they played in the history and development of the Royal Arch was negligible. It is likely (again no evidence) that they worked some of the many added degrees known late in the eighteenth century.
The student may be informed that the “somewhat tantalizing” subject of the Masters’ Lodges is well treated by John Lane in A.Q.C., vol. i, while the present author offers in vol. lxvii of the same transactions a review of the existing evidence.
‘Arching’
‘Arching’ was a commonly used term to signify what is now called ‘Exaltation,’ and an early use of it is in the minutes of a Bolton lodge in 1766, where from each of nine Brethren 5s. 3d. was “Received for Arching.” Unanimity Lodge, Wakefield, charged a Brother a fee “for the Arches” in 1766, the plural form agreeing with an idea quite general in that day and one that is exemplified on many old Royal Arch jewels. An old manuscript ritual of Sincerity Chapter, Taunton (warranted 18i9), contains many references to candidates “passing through the Arches and back again.” There must be many available references on similar lines.