Grand Masters of the United Grand Lodge of England [ugle] and of Scotland
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UGLE Grand Masters & DGMsand Fellows of the Royal Society [FRS] - 1719-1741 AQC Vol. 113 – 2000, pg. 93 Remarks by Bro. Bruce G. Hogg “based very largely on . . . the tables prepared by Clarke, J. R., as Appendices I and III in his paper The Royal Society and Early Grand Lodge Freemasonry, AQC 80, 1967, pp. 110-119 . . .” See also, Lomas, Robert, Freemasonry and the Birth of Modern Science, Barnes & Nobles Books, New York. 2002. Note: The following extract from Trevor Stewart’s ‘dissertation’ on Freemasonry and Hermeticism is printed here to lend some general background material for consideration [re: http://sric-canada.org/stewartintro.html ]. Unfortunately, Bro. Steward provides no details as to the names of the members alluded to below. . . . Attention has been drawn from time to time to the fact that at any one time during the first half of the 18th century at least 25% of the Fellows of the Royal Society were freemasons. According to the 1723 masonic membership List, 40 Fellows (i.e., 25% of the total membership of the Royal Society) belonged to London Lodges. Of these, 23 were Fellows before their Initiations and 16 were elected to their Fellowships after their Initiations. Of the former sub-group, 13 had been elected before the ‘re-founding’ of the Grand Lodge in June 1717. Examination of the 1723 List shows that 32 of these 40 Fellows still retained their membership of their Lodges and it also shows that a further 27 had been initiated before them. Of this latter ‘intake’, 16 had been elected to their Fellowships before their Initiations and 11 were elected after that. By 1725, 59 Fellows (i.e., still 25% of the Society’s total membership!) were freemasons. Examination of the Lists for 1723, 1725 and 1730 shows that nine Fellows continued their membership of their various Lodges throughout the decade. It has also been noted that these Fellows were members of at least 29 different Lodges that worked mostly in or around the central London area. Therefore, it has been assumed that this ‘elite’ membership was not concentrated in just a few Lodges; nor were they simply responding to the novelty of belonging to a new institution; nor to the social cachet of belonging (when it may have been perceived that some important noblemen had accepted the titular leadership of it in successive years). The assumption is that there must have been something more than the mere re-enactment of medieval builders’ ceremonies which attracted these distinguished men who contributed to the scientific literature of the nation. However, before too much weight is placed on this remarkable incidence of Fellows of the Royal Society as freemasons, the morphology of Royal Society membership itself. For instance, it is by no means certain what kind of sample the membership of the Society provides. While it may be accepted that the Society did form some kind of English elite in the field of ‘scientific investigation’, it remains unclear even to this date what precise relationship its membership bore to the contemporary English scientific community generally and no one has yet been able to answer the following crucial and related questions: What prompted some scientific enthusiasts to join the Society while others did not accept membership? To what extent could membership be due to motives that had nothing to do with an interest/skill in science? It is beginning to emerge that less formal and even accidental factors limited recruitment to the Society and these produced thereby both positive and negative distortions in the membership. These distortions are important factors in assessing the relationship between the Society’s membership and the general phenomenon of scientific enthusiasm in late Stuart England. It is now clear that in its early days the Royal Society was never central to the scientific activities of those many investigators who were based elsewhere in the provinces. Furthermore, judging from the elaborate genealogical links delineated in the data collected assiduously by William Bullock in the late 1820s, there are many instances when the only apparent reason for someone joining the Royal Society seems to have been the candidates’ social and/or family connections with those who were already members. Many of its aristocratic recruits were valued as much for the social eminence as for their enthusiasm and the inclusion of those names in the published membership lists gave much-needed testimony to the Society’s espousal of the ‘new science’ as well as lending a certain social rose. Indeed, there is every reason now to suspect that these printed sheets were used deliberately as roselytizing propaganda by the Society and that there may well have been considerable truth in the common contemporary and repeated complaint that the Fellows came to the meetings ‘only as to a play to amuse themselves for an hour or so’. While analysis of the Society’s membership cannot illustrate fully the social, political or religious affiliations of science, nevertheless it may provide a partial illustration of the social, political or religious affiliations of the supporters of the Royal Society in London – which is something quite different. Moreover, the same sort of caveat can be made about not attributing too much significance to the involvement of 25% of the Fellows in Freemasonry. If a quarter of the Society’s members became freemasons because they judged that there was something worthwhile pursing in the Lodges’ activities, what does that say about the remaining 75% who did not become freemasons? That said, the Royal Society did have a sustained interest in Hermeticism in its early decades. Prominent members then were as much exercised by the underlying mystical principles and harmonies of the perceived universe as they were about furthering practical experimentation. In 1667, for example, the Society issued several alchemical and ‘Hermetic’ questionnaires to foreign correspondents to solicit their views and accumulate records of their experiences. Lynn Thorndike’s analysis of the first 20 volumes of the Society’s Philosophical Transactions revealed that there was a persistent preoccupation in Hermeticism over several generations in common with members of other such Societies in Europe and Keith Hutchinson has shown that there were continuing underlying Hermetic qualities in the Scientific Revolution. In the Society’s library there are meticulous MSS copies of geometric drawings taken directly from Perspectiva Corporum Regulatium, a book published in 1568 by Wenzel Jamnitzer. He was a distinguished member of a secretive circle of scholars, the Rosenkreizern, which flourished in Nurnberg in the early decades of the 17th century. The same clandestine association had no less a personage than Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), one of the most original ‘scientific’ thinkers of the age, as its secretary. Another of its prominent members, Johann Wulfer, emigrated to London in the latter part of the same century and became a close associate of four Fellows of the Royal Society: Boyle, Pell, Oldenberg and Haak. Another Rosicrucian group, called Aufrichtige Geselleschaft von der Tanne, flourished in Strasbourg from 1633. One of its leading proponents, Georg Rudolph Weckherlin (1584-1653), also came to live in London and after 1642 was employed in several key Chancery posts. He became a close friend of Hartlib and Pell. A third such group, the Collegium Philosophicum (or Societas Ereunetica) was founded in Rostock in 1619 by Joachim Junge (1587-1657). He was also a close associate of Hartlib. Likewise, Comenius, who was connected closely with Zesen, the founder of the Drei Rosen group in Hamburg, came to reside is London in 1641 at the express invitation of Hartlib and his Oxford circle. There were several other such sustained connections among English ‘scientific revolutionaries’ with Continental ‘Rosicrucianism’ at that time – particularly among those various English groups that were not centred on Oxford and London – and therefore, those Hermetic doctrines espoused by the Continental sources may have percolated into early speculative Freemasonry via the Royal Society. ----------------------
1719 36 Desaguliers, John T [1683-1744] LLD FRS 1714 c. 31 Montagu, John, [1688/90-1749] 2nd Duke of Montagu [with note] . . . . . FRS 1718 1723 28 Scott, Francis, [1695-1751] Earl of Dalkeith (1732 2nd Duke of Buccleuch) FRS 1724 1724-25 23 Lennox, Charles, [1710*-50] 2nd Duke of Richmond (and Lennox) FRS 1724 1726-27 39 Hamilton, James, [1686-1744] Lord Paisley (1734 7th Earl of Abercorn) FRS 1715 1727-28 34 Hare, Henry, [1693-1749] 3rd Lord Coleraine FRS 1730 1731 33 Coke, Thomas, [1697-1759] Lord Lovell [later [1744] 1st Earl of Leicester) FRS 1735 1733 30 Lyon, James, [1702-1735] 7th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne FRS 1732 1734 31 Lindsay, John, [1702-1749] 20th Earl of Crawford (4th Earl of Lindsay) FRS 1732 1736 31 Campbell, John, [1705-1782] 4th Earl of Loudoun FRS 1737 1737 21 Bligh, Edward, [1715-1747] 2nd Earl of Darnley FRS 1738 1739 c. 22 Raymond, Robert, [c. 1717-56] 2nd Lord Raymond FRS 1740 1741 c. 39 Douglas, James, [1701-1768] 14th Earl of Morton (GMM of Scotland 1739) FRS 1733 President of the Royal Society 1764-68 *should be b. 18 May 1701 No. Year[s] Name Title[s] FRS
* Acting Grand Master or Pro Grand Master FRS = Fellow of the Royal Society of London [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip,_Duke_of_Wharton [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_of_Strathmore_and_Kinghorne [3] http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/History/Barons/barons3.html -------------- Great Kings, Dukes and Lords, Have laid by their Swords, Our myst'ry to put a good grace on; And ne'er been ashamed To hear themselves nam'd With a Free and an Accepted Mason. Bro. Matthew Birkhead - 1722 Directory: sites -> default -> files -> history files -> Nstructions for Acquiring Excess Equipment online, through the 1033 Program files -> Occupational health and safety files -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program files -> International programs roel profile files -> Fermi Questions a guide for Teachers, Students, and Event Supervisors Lloyd Abrams, Ph. D. DuPont Company, cr&D/ccas experimental Station Wilmington, de 19880 files -> Personal Information Name: Maha Al-Ammari Nationality: Saudi Relationship Status history -> History of the Third Masonic District Grand Lodge of the State of New York history -> Freemasons of New York State in the Civil War history -> Grand Lodge of New York Masonic Lodge Histories Lodge Nos. 201-230 Download 7.35 Mb. Share with your friends:
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