Grand Masters of Scotland - Onondaga and Oswego Masonic ...

In politics he was a moderate Conservative of independent views, as was shown by his supporting the proposal for establishing the
University of London, by his making and carrying a motion for the endowment of the Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland, and by his
advocating free trade long before Sir Robert Peel yielded on the question. Appointed a Lord of the Treasury in 1827, he held the
post of Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1828 till July 1830, when he became Secretary at War for a short time.
His claims to remembrance are founded chiefly on, his services to literature and the fine arts. Before he was twenty he printed for
private circulation a volume of poems, which he followed up after a short interval by the publication of a translation of Goethe's
Faust, one of the earliest that appeared in England, with some translations of German lyrics and a few original poems. In 1839 he
visited the Mediterranean and the Holy Land. His impressions of travel were recorded in his very agreeably written Mediterranean
Sketches (1843), and in the notes to a poem entitled The Pilgrimage. He published several other works in prose and verse, all
displaying a fine literary taste. His literary reputation secured for him the position of rector of the University of Aberdeen in 1841.
Lord Ellesmere was a munificent and yet discriminating patron of artists. To the splendid collection of pictures which he inherited
from his great-uncle, the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, he made numerous additions, and he built a noble gallery to which the public
were allowed free access. Lord Ellesmere served as president of the Royal Geographical Society and as president of the Royal
Asiatic Society, and he was a trustee of the National Gallery. He was succeeded by his son (1823-1862) as 2nd Earl, and his
grandson (b. 1847) as 3rd Earl. On the extinction of the senior line of the Dukedom of Sutherland in 1963, his great-great-grandson,
the 5th Earl, succeeded as 6th Duke of Sutherland.
***Sir Walter Scott as a Freemason.
An account of his connection with the fraternity.
by Bro. Adam Muir Mackay, PM., Lodge St. David No. 36, Edinburgh.
http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/aqc/scott.html
Chapter I.
Erection of Lodge St. David.
Initiation of Scott's Father.
Initiation of Robert Scott.
Hyndford's Close.
Elected an Office Bearer.
Death of Scott's Father.
Walter Ferguson.
THE Lodge in which Sir Walter Scott was initiated into Freemasonry was constituted on the 2nd of
March, 1738, under a commission granted by the Rt. Hon. George, Earl of Cromarty, M.W. Grand
Master of the Grand Lodge of Scotland. The original name of the lodge, "Canongate Kilwinning
from Leith," was changed in 1756 to "St. David," at which it now remains, its present number on
Grand Lodge Roll being 36.
The first meetings were held at the Laigh Coffee House, Canongate, Edinburgh. In 1745 the
Lodge removed to the Convening House of the Corporation of Hammermen, also situated in the
Canongate, and in 1753 to the Convening House of the Corporation of Cordiners, or
Shoemakers, in the Potterrow Port. It was at this latter place that Walter Scott, W.S., the father of
the novelist, was made a mason.
In 1757 the brethren purchased a hall in Hyndford's Close, Netherbow, High Street, where
the meetings were held for over a century. Other masonic bodies, including the Royal Order of Scotland, and the Royal Arch
Chapter, now "Edinburgh" No. 1, held their earliest meetings there, and it was there that Sir Walter Scott and many other eminent,
Scotsmen were made freemasons.
The entry and stair leading to the lodge room was at the head of the Close, on the west side, and was then a favourite
residence. Sir Walter Scott's mother, Anne Rutherford, daughter of Dr. John Rutherford, Professor of Medicine in the University of
Edinburgh, passed her girlhood there, and Scott, when a lad, was often at his mother's old home, visiting his uncle, Dr. Daniel
Rutherford. Forty years afterwards, Sir Walter, having occasion to correspond with Lady Anne Lindsay, authoress of the ballad of
"Auld Robin Gray," whose mother, Anne, Countess of Balcarres, had been a neighbour of the Rutherfords, told her :
"I remember all the locale of Hyndford's Close perfectly, even to the Indian screen with Harlequin and Columbine, and the
harpsichord, though I never had the pleasure of hearing Lady Anne play upon it. I suppose the close, once too clean to soil the hem
of your ladyship's garment, is now a resort for the lowest mechanics — and so wears the world away. . . . It is, to be sure, more
picturesque to lament the desolation of towers on hills and haughs, than the degradation of an Edinburgh close; but I cannot help
thinking on the simple and cosy retreats where worth and talent, and elegance to boot, were often nestled, and which now are the
resort of misery, poverty and vice." 1
Notwithstanding the "degradation" to which Sir Walter alludes, the lodge continued to meet at Hyndford's Close until the end of
1860. In 1838 the lodge room was re-painted and re-decorated by Bro. David Ramsay Hay, one of the members. Bro. Hay was
distinguished for his efforts to raise the character of decorative painting and for his writings on form and colour, and it was to him
that Scott intrusted all "limning and blazoning" of the interior of Abbotsford.
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