An unusual print in the collection at Freemasons’ Hall in London features a fencing exhibition staged in front of the Prince of Wales in 1787. One of the participants, who appears to be a middle-aged woman, is in fact the Chevalier D’Eon, one of the most colourful characters in 18th Century Freemasonry, a diplomat, spy, swordsman and Freemason, who lived the first half of his life as a man and the second as a woman.
     Charles D’Eon de Beaumont was born of minor noble birth in the French town of Tonnerre in 1728. After studying law in Paris, working as an official Crown Censor and establishing himself as one of France’s top swordsmen, he joined the diplomatic service in 1756, just after the outbreak of the Seven Years War. The war involved all of Europe’s major powers and D’Eon was sent to Russia, to the Court of the Empress Elizabeth, to work as a diplomatic secretary.

RISE AND FALL OF A DIPLOMAT AND A SPY

Unofficially he was also enrolled into an organisation known as the Secret du Roi or King’s Secret. Louis XV had started the Secret as a secret alternative to the Foreign Ministry, which was then under the influence of his mistress Madame Pompadour.
     After some success in negotiating with the Empress, D’Eon returned to France and a commission in the Dragoons in 1761. Still working closely with the head of the Secret, the Comte de Broglie, D’Eon had a successful war, unlike France, which was forced to sue for peace with England. Broglie managed to persuade Louis to send D’Eon as Secretary to the French Ambassador, the Duc de Nivernais, to lead the peace negotiations. At the same time he was to run spies, investigating England’s coastal defences. Nivernais and D’Eon managed to negotiate the best possible deal for France, possibly helped by the vast quantities of Chablis that D’Eon exported to London to help oil the diplomatic wheels. Nivernais was so impressed by his secretary, that he persuaded the English to allow D’Eon to deliver the ratification of the peace treaty to Paris in 1763. The King rewarded D’Eon by making him a Chevalier of the Order of St. Louis and giving him a pension. He was also made Plenipotentiary Minister of the French Crown, running the Embassy until a replacement for Nivernais could be found. Biding his time by spending money, importing more wine and amassing a vast library, D’Eon made plenty of friends in London. He entertained such luminaries as Horace Walpole and David Hume. He also made lasting friendships of the radical politician John Wilkes (see Freemasonry Today, issue 40) and of Washington Shirley, Lord Ferres, who would later be Grand Master of England. Unfortunately his diplomatic career was about to come to a dramatic halt. Nivernais’ replacement, the Comte de Guerchy was one of Madame Pompadour’s favourites and had once crossed swords with the Chevalier during the Seven Years War.
     D’Eon spent the next twelve years trying to keep his job and avoiding a return to France. Various plots ensued; de Guerchy tried to have D’Eon poisoned, arrested by the English and kidnapped. D’Eon in turn tried to blackmail France into keeping him in post by threatening to publish letters about the Secret and made huge demands for money and compensation. A popular figure among the English, the Chevalier was even protected by Wilkes’ London mob for some time.
     Eventually the French managed to persuade the Chevalier to return to France but not until after a set of more unusual and dramatic events.

METAMORPHOSIS

In the late 1760s rumours began to circulate that the Chevalier was a woman. No one knows who started the rumours; the Chevalier may even have started them himself. London society was gripped and soon bets or policies of insurance were being taken out on the sex of the Chevalier. It has been estimated that at the height of the betting, policies worth £120,000 were tied up in the question of D’Eons’ gender. The Chevalier was not impressed by all this speculation.
     Often he would burst into gambling dens, demanding satisfaction from those insulting his gender, whatever it was. No one would fight him, either fearing his reputation as a swordsman or not wanting to fight a woman.
     D’Eon still remained a popular curiosity. Cartoons appeared, often depicting Wilkes as D’Eon’s husband and portraits in which the Chevalier sported female attire, something he was yet to do in public.
     In 1774 Louis XV died and his successor Louis XVI engaged the famous playwright, Pierre Beaumarchais, to negotiate the Chevalier’s return to France, his retirement and his abandonment of his Dragoons uniform in exchange for women’s clothes. The King had obviously decided that the rumours were true or it was an easy way to get D’Eon out of office. In 1775 the Chevalier was persuaded to sign a Transaction, in which he admitted that he was a woman and agreed to a pensioned retirement in Tonnerre adopting female attire. By now the Chevalier seems to have accepted womanhood, although he had no desire to wear female clothing.
     In 1777, Lord Mansfield, by now fed up with D’Eon, sat in judgement on a court action taken by one of the gamblers on D’Eon’s gender. The Chevalier refused to have anything to do with the case and Mansfield ruled that D’Eon was a woman.
     As both England and France believed that he was female, the Chevalier started to embrace his new gender, even creating a new personal mythology. Tales emerged of him being born as a girl and brought up as a boy, of the young Chevalier infiltrating the Court of the Russian Empress as a serving girl and of seducing Madame Pompadour. D’Eon returned to France and was invited by Marie-Antoinette to employ the services of the royal dressmaker. The transformation was complete. D’Eon remained a woman for the rest of his life.
     Now and again he donned Dragoons uniform but this only landed him in trouble with the authorities. In 1785 he left France for London again, started giving fencing demonstrations and was given a pistol by the Prince Regent for winning the famous match in 1787. In 1789, the French Revolution put an end to his pension and he gradually slipped into poverty. When he died in 1810 he had already sold his library and his Cross of St. Louis. As a final indignity, the autopsy proved he was a man who had been living a lie for half his life. However, one chapter of the Chevaliers life still deserves a mention.

D’EON THE FREEMASON

The Chevalier was a member of the Lodge of Immortality No. 376, which met at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand.
     The Lodge had been established by a French exile called de Vignoles in 1766 for European masons in London. It worked under the Modern’s Grand Lodge and was one of the most expensive lodges in Europe at the time, charging £15 9s 0d as an initiation fee, which is the equivalent of over £1,500 today.
     In 1770 an internal feud broke out in the Lodge between French and German speakers and a year later de Vignoles and the French faction, including D’Eon, petitioned the Grand Master for help. D’Eon had joined the lodge in 1768 and the petition sent at the height of the gambling on his gender, stated that he had been Junior Warden between 1769 and 1770. The Chevalier’s private papers in the Brotherton Collection at Leeds University show that D’Eon did not pay the full initiation fee, and that since 1765 he had been employing de Vignole as his secretary. Jean de Vignole was a controversial character in his own right. An ex-priest who had fled France to live off his mistress in Holland, he had at one point been Provincial Grand Master for the Low Countries until he fell out with most of the lodges over financial regularities. The Lodge does not appear to have lasted much longer than the year of the petition and the Chevalier’s involvement with Freemasonry ended there too. Once he was considered a woman it would have been impossible for him to attend a lodge meeting, despite many masonic friends, including Wilkes and Ferres. This did not stop Laurence Dermott of the Antients Grand Lodge, from having a go at the Moderns in the 1778 edition of Ahiman Rezon with the line

And upon a late tryal at Westminster, it appeared that they had admitted a woman called Madame D’E--.