Reproduced by kind permission of
Royal Lodge No. 251, Devon
Above:
The Duke of Wharton
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For speculative Freemasons, times have
always been a-changin’, and the erection of
the Premier Grand Lodge by ‘Four Old
Lodges’ in 1717 was itself a novelty. When,
in 1722 the Grand Master, the Duke of
Wharton, laid down the procedure for
constituting a new Lodge, this was almost
revolutionary.
Not only had it not occurred to anyone
before this that a special ceremony was
needed to do such a thing, but it was the
first time since 1717 that the detailed ritual
for any ceremony had been written down.
When, during the next 30 years the
Royal Arch emerged from the shadows,
many brethren in the Premier Grand lodge
considered this not only a novelty, but an
outrage – it was not ‘Pure Ancient Masonry’.
Those who founded the Grand Lodge
of the Antients in 1751 took the opposite
view – they regarded the Royal Arch as “the
heart and marrow of Masonry.” However,
by the end of the century the Premier
Grand Lodge – the Moderns – had not only
recognised the Degree, but had set up a
Grand and Royal Arch Chapter, something
which the Antients never effectively did.
Often too little thought is given to how
Masonic developments taking place in
London affected Brethren and Companions
in the rest of the country. The “collective
wisdom of the tribe” to use Galbraith’s
phrase, is that communications in England
were so poor at the end of the 18th century
that it is a wonder that changes made in
London ever filtered down to distant
communities. And where was more remote
than the north coast of Cornwall, 300 miles
from London, the other side of Exmoor,
Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor.
Here, Freemasonry flourished in many
towns, including Redruth, where for some
40 years before his death in 1828 John
Knight was the leading Masonic figure.
In fact, Knight was to correspond at
considerable length with leading London
masons – Thomas Dunckerley, Robert
Gill and Edward Harper for example –
with little more difficulty than he would
have experienced today.
Weekly at 2pm each Friday the mail
coach left neighbouring Truro for London,
where it arrived on Monday morning,
and weekly it left London at mid-day
on Tuesday and returned to Truro on
Thursday. In 1791 Dunckerley, “the Grand
Master of Royal Arch Masons”, could reply
from Hampton Court on 15 July to a letter
written in Cornwall three days earlier.
Parcel post took no longer, for packages
of regalia, Books of Constitutions and Lodge
and Chapter furnishings travelled on the
same mail coach. Cornish Freemasons could
be made aware of developments in London
as they occurred, little more slowly than
would be the case today.
The letter which Dunckerley wrote
on 15 July 1791 provided a Dispensation
to open the Druids Chapter of Love and
Reality in Redruth – at the time there
was a tradition in Cornwall that the
Ancient Druids had brought Freemasonry
to the country.
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