Mark Coleman Wallace PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

letter was removed from the Court. On 7 July, 1810, Hope handed down the
following judgment:
The Lords having resumed consideration of this process and advised the
mutual memorials for the parties in respect the Suspenders insist in the
Character of Office bearers of a Self-Constituted Society which is not
entitled to the privileges of a Corporation Repel the Reasons of
Suspension Refuse interdict and Discern. 126
The decision of the Courts hinged on the defence of the Associated
Lodges. Asserting their rights as explained in the Secret Societies Act, the
Seceders maintained that their meetings were not seditious and the Grand Lodge
had distorted the provision of the original Act. Characterizing this interpretation
as a “gross perversion,” the Associated Lodges noted that the Act, “from
beginning to end, never once made any mention of the Grand Lodge, or of any
disputes that might exist between one Lodge and another, [or] about their
internal regulations or rules of management.” 127 Perhaps more importantly, a
“certificate upon oath by two of the Members of the mason Lodge called Mary’s
Chapel Lodge…in terms of an Act of Parliament pass’d in the year seventeen
268
and The Hon. Harry Erskine) lodged a Minute in which they stated they had advised its
production,” Holyrood House, 308.
126 National Archives of Scotland, West Register House CS/235/M39/2.
127 Printed in the Petition and Complaint, and quoted in the Edinburgh Star, 5-6. The Seceders
argued that the act “was passed at an alarming period in the history of this country…[but] by a
strange perversion, however…the complainers supposed that all Masonic meetings that did not
conform to the rules of the Grand Lodge, that did not recognise its supremacy, and act according
to its orders, were seditious meetings in the sense of the act,” 5. See also Exposition, 63-70.
The Seceders also stated that the Grand Lodge is “neither more nor less than a masonic
committee, appointed by some of the Scottish lodges for the purpose of presiding over and
representing them in public processions, &c. and for managing the distribution of the funds
collected for charitable purposes. It has likewise been in the use of settling matters of
precedency and masonic etiquette among the several lodges holding under it but on no occasion
till now has it presumed to interfere with the radical rights of individual masons, much less to
abridge or curtail them,” Exposition, 63.