Mark Coleman Wallace PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

patriot politics than to the hierarchy of king, church, and aristocracy.” 6 As we
have seen in Chapters 4 and 5, the actions of No. 8 Journeymen Lodge in
Edinburgh and No. 264 Royal Arch Maybole suggest that lodges were exposed
to reformist groups and vulnerable to radical, revolutionary ideas.
It would be too convenient and simplistic to conclude that all Scottish
freemasons were bitterly divided along shades of political loyalty. During the
early 1800s, however, a polarization of party allegiances occurred within the
Grand Lodge of Scotland which ultimately spilled over into several Edinburgh
lodges and resulted in the Masonic Secession of 1808. Considering the demise
of operative freemasonry, it is not surprising that social and fraternal
connections established strictly for trade and building purposes gradually
collapsed, eventually replaced by Whig or Tory affiliations. Certainly,
traditional operative freemasonry was dealt a damaging blow by the
establishment of the Grand Lodge of Scotland and eventually expired with the
advent of the French Revolution. Thus liberated from the narrow conservative
views and political reservations of the operatives, and bolstered by the new
measure of power granted by the Secret Societies Act, the Grand Lodge
attempted to absorb all lodges into a highly politicized agenda.
Peter Clark argues that the discord which resulted from competing
political ideologies during the eighteenth century created a “need for a neutral
arena.” 7 This came in the form of clubs and associations such as the
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6 John Money, “The Masonic Movement; Or, Ritual, Replica and Credit: John Wilkes, the
Macaroni Parson, and the Making of the Middle-Class Mind,” in Journal of British Studies, Vol.
32 No. 1(January 1993), 372.
7 Clark, British Clubs, 180.