Mark Coleman Wallace PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

1790s. 145 Ultimately, financial disputes and disagreements among operatives
and speculatives were overshadowed by endless wrangling over lodge
precedence and charges of sedition and treason.
Secondly, the legislation passed by parliament, though it initially offered
a measure of protection to the freemasons, caused turmoil among the Scottish
lodges for several years after its passage. Enacted to eradicate seditious
societies, masonic lodges actually used them maliciously against one another;
not as a legitimate means to safeguard Scotland against revolution, but rather to
pursue political quarrels and personal vendettas against other freemasons.
The Grand Lodge of Scotland wavered on its decisions and verdicts and
simultaneously supported and condemned the defendants and plaintiffs,
manifesting a lack of conviction and confidence in its own authority. In the
instance of the Maybole Trial, No. 14 Lodge Maybole – not being satisfied with
the Grand Lodge verdict – argued its case before the Justiciary Court in Ayr. In
145 English freemasonry also was not totally impervious to high profile conflicts and disputes.
During the end of the eighteenth century, when the government passed the Unlawful Oaths and
Secret Societies Acts and Scottish freemasons began wrangling over charter-granting privileges,
English freemasons were in the process of restoring order and organization to the fraternity. In
1751, the Grand Lodge of England split into two grand lodges – the Modern Grand Lodge of
England and the Ancient Grand Lodge of England. Jacob describes the conflict as the “taking
over of the old masonry of the operatives by gentlemen, and even nobles…By 1751 it appears
that some lodges had become battlegrounds where the meaning of equality, as well as the claim
to possess the true, ancient constitution, was being adjudicated…In general, the impulse of the
ancients was decidedly reformist. Once freed from the discipline of the Grand Lodge, ancient
lodges also experimented in new rituals and degrees. To add an air of respectability to these
innovations, they were described as ‘Scottish,’” Living the Enlightenment, 60-61. According to
the Ancients, the Moderns had drifted away from the Constitutions of the freemasons and
effectively created a “New Mason,” or speculative mason. See Knoop and Jones, Genesis, 242.
Imbued with power that steadily grew throughout the eighteenth century, the Modern Grand
Lodge – just as the Grand Lodge of Scotland would do almost fifty years later – alienated many
lodges, thus causing the Grand Lodge of England to split. Ironically, the legislation passed by
parliament prompted the two rival lodges to reconcile their differences, as the Secret Societies
Act signaled “the need for the heads of the two Societies to act together,” United Grand Lodge
of England, Grand Lodge, 121. See also Clark, British Clubs, 309-319; Bullock, Revolutionary
Brotherhood, 87-90; Clawson, Reconstructing Brotherhood, 75-76.
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