It would seem that the Editor of Freemasonry Today is still concerned about my education as he has sent me for another learning experience; this time with David Stevenson, Emeritus Professor of History, St Andrews University, Scotland; author of The Origins of Freemasonry – Scotland’s Century and The First Freemasons - Scotland’s Early Lodges and their Members.
    I wanted to speak with David Stevenson on his claim that English Speculative Freemasonry had been substantially informed by events which had begun, over a century earlier, in Scotland. That is to say, he claims that there is evidence to support the conclusion that the due form Scotland’s lodges in the seventeenth century had been a model for the formalisation of speculative freemasonry in England. I sought to be guided by Stevenson on a journey of historical discovery from Schaw to Anderson; from the Statutes to the Constitution!
    David Stevenson took early retirement a decade ago, well officially that is.
    ‘Yes, in retirement I am keeping myself busy, I have more time now for historical research. Although Scottish history, in general, is my field, I keep returning to the Scottish record of Freemasonry’s genesis because there is so much to be done. It started, purely by chance. Some thirty years ago I was undertaking a PhD thesis on the Civil Wars in Scotland when I came across a reference to two rebel generals being entered as members of a Lodge in Edinburgh - I was startled! Obviously, I had the idea that freemasonry had started with England’s Grand Lodge and no standard history books had said anything about Freemasonry in Seventeenth Century Scotland. I could not abandon my thesis to pursue this “red herring” but made a file note to return to this matter as it could have formed the basis of a short article!’
    ‘It must have been some ten years later that I returned to it and after digging about found this invisible world of freemasonry in Seventeenth Century Scotland. It was invisible to outside academic historians yet freemasons had written extensively, knew of these records, and were just sitting on them! Historians didn’t know of their existence and it was a marvellous thing for me to come across a subject that nobody knew about and yet with an availability of copious records. Two books later I paused, but have since returned to the subject repeatedly. Biographies are still being produced without reference to the fact that their subject was a freemason. This could be due to either ignorance or embarrassment - Freemasonry not being “respectable”. Anti Masonic prejudice remains. That Robert Burns was a Freemason is for some an embarrassment; they would rather enjoy his poetry and not know about his masonry.’

The Schaw Statutes for the Mason’s Trade

And so I ventured that it was with the Schaw Statutes that Freemasonry burst onto the historical scene in the sense that copious records survive.
    ‘There is not much in the way of records before then. There had been a diminution in serious church building in the years leading up to the Reformation and the newly established Calvinist faith had little interest in church buildings. Times were probably hard in the mason trade but then in 1583 William Schaw was appointed Master of Works to King James VI.’
    ‘We do not know much about his royal brief but it is clear that Schaw was seeking to centralise the mason trade, away from the burghs, and place it under his own authority as Grand Warden. The first Statutes were published in 1598 and revised a year later, perhaps from pressures exerted from within the trade. My feeling is that Schaw was seeking to revive elements of the practices and organisation of Medieval masons, and up-date them with Renaissance elements.’
    ‘The official bodies representing the guilds in the burghs had been stripped of religious functions at the Reformation. Schaw was conservative (believed to be of catholic persuasion) and was seeking to restore to the masons’ organisation, form and functions other than just the regulation of the trade. Because of the Gothic cathedrals and other construction wonders, their use of ‘magical’ mathematics and geometry and a greater body of tradition there was within the mason trade a stronger self image than in other craft organisations.’
    ‘However, within three years of the Statutes, Shaw was dead and the King had moved south to become James VI of England and Scotland. Subsequently, the post of Master of the Kings Works in Scotland became of much less significance and Schaw’s plans for central supervision of the lodges vanished. But, lodges continued to meet and as well as regulating trade – their ‘operative’ functions and continued to have mixed in with them the secrets and rituals known as the Mason Word – the speculative functions.’
    ‘Masons liked to identify with architects and architecture tended to be closely linked with mathematical skills. It is therefore not surprising that when some lodges began to admit non-operatives – men who were not themselves stonemasons – a high proportion of these men had mathematical skills. Other outsiders were attracted to the lodges by interest in their secrets and claims to ancient knowledge. Thus gentlemen, tradesmen in various crafts, parish ministers, begin to appear in some lodges. Thus some lodges, in time, became more social club than trade organisation, and new lodges were founded which made no attempt to regulate trade. There are signs that by 1700 the influence of Scottish masonry was spreading south of the border, leading to Scottish type lodges appearing in the north of England.’

Presbyterian Scotland and Freemasonry

But, I had to enquire of David Stevenson just why, in a fundamentally strict Presbyterian Scotland, were these speculative activities able to flourish
    ‘I am astonished that the practice of these things was allowed. Within the lodge the Bible was present, a meeting started with an invocation to God which surely must mean worship but not as church, family or individual - the only forms allowed. They took oaths including one that, without mental reservation etc. was to keep the secrets of the masons’ word. Their possession of the mysterious second sight was not regarded as a threat by the religious authorities. The lodge was closed with an anthem and a prayer; it was deemed by the church that it was neither a sin nor a scandal for a clergyman to be entered into a lodge. It can perhaps be understood that, despite an outward requirement for conformity, there was a milieu of toleration, even a social respect and acceptance of the lodges and a reluctance to confront them. These heretical activities were going on, not necessarily in secret (some lodge meetings were held in parish churches) but with some measure of invisibility.’
    Yet I suggested to David Stevenson that Presbyterianism and the Lodge were perhaps united by the Calvinist work ethic. We discussed that the term ‘Architect of the Universe’, that it was used six times by Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion and in his commentary on Psalm 19. That did bring us on to Dr. James Anderson! I asked was not the move from Aberdonian ‘Kirk’ to Grand Lodge of England, quite some journey?

Anderson and Masonic Constitutions

‘Dr. James Anderson continued a long tradition of inventing imposing Masonic pasts. Even his own father, when secretary of the lodge of Aberdeen, had also elaborated on the truth by adding to the glory and antiquity of the institution. He created records for his lodge which, to use a charitable word, were misleading! Anderson Jnr. was a Presbyterian clergyman whose education would likely have been informed by the teachings of John Knox who in turn had learned his Protestantism in Calvin’s Geneva.’
    ‘Anderson would have been familiar with Institutes, Covenants and Constitutional monarchy. In London he had defended his right to be a Dissenter quoting the 1689 Act of Toleration. Otherwise, he had a remarkable ability to avoid controversy in his Constitutions of the Freemasons. The new Grand Lodge in London, which commissioned his work, was establishing an organisation that, though drawing on older Masonic rituals and concepts of brotherhood, had little to do with the mason trade.’
    ‘This emerging Freemasonry sought to unite, in friendship, men of different religious and political persuasions, providing a forum in which socialising was possible through the banning of talk of religion and politics. But, in the Constitutions something had to be said on these subjects. Anderson’s approach was just what was required - keep things short and obscure. What he wrote on these subjects is ambiguous enough to be reassuring and avoid controversy - cunning. Veiling belief in allegories of Masonic myths and substituting for specific dogma vague assertions about supreme beings and divine architects was to prove a hugely successful formula for social organization bringing together men of varying beliefs, in an organisation inclusive where belief was concerned, yet exclusive in having a membership bound together by ritual and secrets.’
    We discussed the possibility that speculative masons were united in the belief that peace and prosperity were more important than religious or political dogma and I again returned to Calvin’s work ethic. We laughed at the remark of Brother Voltaire, when on a visit to the City of London, observed that men of all races and faiths worked together to accumulate wealth, the only heretic being a bankrupt.
    I thanked Professor David Stevenson for talking with me and for his patience whilst sharing with me his unique insight into perhaps the defining phase in the history of speculative freemasonry. I then went off to take my seat in the lecture theatre and hear him present an excellent paper on Freemasonry and Religion in seventeenth century Scotland.

Gerald Reilly is a member of St. Osyth’s Priory Lodge, No. 2063, Clacton on Sea.
    Freemasonry Today thanks Professor Andrew Prescott for his hospitality in kindly hosting this interview at The Centre for Masonic Studies at Sheffield University.
    Professor David Stevenson is the author of two standard histories of Freemasonry, The Origins of Freemasonry (Cambridge) and The First Freemasons (Aberdeen), both first published in 1988.