Mark Coleman Wallace PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

potentially subversive. His doubts were first circulated in the Anti-Jacobin
Review, a conservative and loyalist monthly journal to which he regularly
contributed. Similar to the ideas espoused in Proofs of a Conspiracy, the Anti-
Jacobin “set out to refute what it considered to be the dangerous doctrines of
sedition being fervently circulated in the country.” 20 Robison did not directly
accuse British freemasons of being seditious, but he did remark that
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the homely Free Masonry imported from England has been totally
changed in every country of Europe, either by the imposing ascendancy
of French brethren, who are to be found everywhere, ready to instruct the
world; or by the importation of the doctrines, and ceremonies, and
ornaments of the Parisian Lodges. Even England, the birth-place of
Masonry, has experienced the French innovations; and all the repeated
injunctions, admonitions, and reproofs of the old Lodges, cannot prevent
those in different parts of the kingdom from admitting the French
novelties, full of tinsel and glitter, and high-founding titles. 21
Although he asserted that British masonic lodges were vehicles only for
passing the time in merriment, Robison nevertheless retained some suspicions
regarding their association with radical groups. He does note that no definitive
link exists between European and British lodges, but Robison does not dismiss
the possibility that Continental ideas of revolution did penetrate the British
masonic models of constitutionalism and loyalism.
Indeed, the debate over freemasonry’s contribution to revolutionary
sentiments and activities has been taken up by many historians. According to
Jacob, Jacobite sympathies may have existed in some British lodges, although
20 Emsley, Britain and the French Revolution, 18. For an in-depth discussion of Jacobinism, see
Augustin Cochin, “The Theory of Jacobinism,” in Interpreting the French Revolution, ed.
Francois Furet, (Cambridge, 1981), 164-204.
21 Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 9.