Mark Coleman Wallace PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

Night was spent in the greatest Harmony & Politicks intirely excluded the Walls
of our peacefull habitation. No toast was given that Could be offensive to either
Whig or Torry & Consequently the Grand design of Masonry was strictly
adhered to.” 36
Notwithstanding repeated affirmations of loyalty to the Crown and the
attempts of masons to proscribe political discussions, it is clear that some
Scottish lodges were associated with radical and seditious societies. Wartski
argues that freemasons in the United Kingdom espoused “many divergent
opinions and sentiments,” and thus it was quite possible that some supported
government reform. 37 Nevertheless, as Wartski reasons, the fact that masons
“met behind closed and guarded doors and deliberated in secret” suggested a
comparison with revolutionary societies in Britain and Europe. 38
No. 8 Journeymen Operative Lodge in Edinburgh, for example, was
involved in an incident which exemplified this gradual opening-up to political
questions. On 22 November 1793, the lodge agreed to rent its premises for
149
unspecified reasons to the radical organization the Friends of the People. Led by
their lionized and demonized vice president Thomas Muir and relying on
Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) to express their beliefs in universal
suffrage and annual parliaments, the Friends actively communicated with the
London Corresponding Society (LCS), a “leader among [the] new generation of
36
No. 27 St Mungo’s Lodge Minutes, 4 November 1788.
37
L.D. Wartski, “Freemasonry and the Early Secret Societies Act,” (Monograph, Grand Lodge
of Scotland), 19.
38
Ibid. For further discussion on European attitudes towards freemasonry, see Jacob, Living the
Enlightenment, esp. 23-32, and Radical Enlightenment; Kosselleck, Critique and Crisis, 62-98;
Melton, Rise of the Public, 262-270; Roberts, Mythology, 58-90; A. Mellor, “Eighteenth-Century
French Freemasonry and the French Revolution,” AQC, 97(1984), 105-114; Turnbridge and
Bantham, “The Climate of European Freemasonry 1750-1810,” AQC, 83(1970), 248-255.