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Is St Mary le Strand a Jacobite Church? (II of III)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 17, 2025| Leave a Comment »

(Please read Part I first)

The Architect of St. Mary le Strand

James Gibbs was seven years old when Bonnie Dundee was killed at Killiecrankie. He was born in Aberdeen to Roman Catholic parents who continued to practice their faith, even though it had been banned in Scotland. Young James was a devout Catholic – so devout he determined to go to Rome to train as a renegade priest. When Gibbs’s parents died, around 1700, he sold their isolated home to the Aberdeen Freemasons to use as a Lodge.

There had been Lodges in Aberdeen since the beginning of the sixteenth century – but they had been for working Stonemasons – and were like early Trades Union.  Many of the Masons were unlettered – so rote-learning took the place of books, and handshakes and passwords took the place of certificates of proof of training. These were called Operative Lodges.

But in 1670 a Speculative Lodge was established in Aberdeen for those not in the building trade but interested in the history and philosophy of Masonry – and eager to embark on its course of self-improvement and enlightenment. All that was required was a nomination, a wish to enter a supportive brotherhood and a belief in a Supreme Architect of the Universe. So Jewish people, Roman Catholics and even Quakers, were welcome as Brothers to the Aberdeen Lodge.

Gibbs was a Freemason: James Anderson in his ‘Constitutions of the Freemasons’ describes him as ‘Bro. Gib’ and describes him walking in a Masonic procession in 1721 to the ‘levelling’ ceremony at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church. It is perfectly possible Gibbs’s father was a Mason and that Gibbs, then 18, was ‘fast-tracked’ into the Aberdeen Lodge before he left for Rome.

We know that on the way there he visited Paris and may well have introduced himself to the exiled Catholic Stuart family. But when he arrived at Rome, he was so terrified of the Italian Jesuit who ran the Scots College that he left without taking his oath. He became apprenticed to some of the top architects in Rome, including Carlo Fontana, sold his water colours to aristocrats on their Grand Tour and acted as a guide.

Word reached him that his half-brother was dying, so he returned to Scotland in 1709 – but arrived too late. There was no money for him in his native country – so he journeyed down to England.

But there was no money for him there, either.

For ‘four years he starved’ and wrote that he had ‘a great many very good friends here … of the first rank and quality … but their promises are not a present relief for my circumstances.’

But being ‘of good parts and virtuously inclined and well disposed’…….

……Gibbs was lucky enough to catch the eye of John Erskine, 23rd Earl of Mar – a fellow Scottish Freemason and architect – who was in London working on the Union between England and Scotland.

Mar called Gibbs ‘Signor Gibbi’, gave him some minor architectural work in Alloa in Scotland and appointed him Surveyor of Stirling Castle. The money for Gibbs’s Surveyorship soon ran out.

But Mar had another idea….

Two years after Gibbs came to England, there had been a massive power shift at Queen Anne’s Court. The Queen had fallen out with her friend, Sarah Churchill, an ardent Whig.

So the Tories were back in power.

They came up with a plan to build fifty new churches, in the High Church Anglican style, in the suburbs of the City of London – to celebrate the piety and power of the Stuart dynasty. Queen Anne – like all the Stuarts – loved architecture – and gave her full backing to the scheme.

Mar introduced Gibbs to Sir Christopher Wren, who was then in his late 70s.

A Tory (he sat as an M.P. in the Loyal Parliament to support James II), a Jacobite (he had been Surveyor of the King’s Works to Charles II) and a Freemason (to this day his gavel is on show at the Museum of Freemasonry in London), he became ‘much Gibbs’ friend and pleased with his drawings’. Wren and Mar came up with a scheme to make Gibbs one of the two surveyors on the Commission for Building 50 Churches.

But there was a problem. John Vanbrugh, the playwright and architect, was on the Commission as well….

……and he and Wren hated each other. Vanbrugh was also a Freemason – but he was a Hanoverian Freemason. An irrevocable split had begun in the Brotherhood…..

Vanbrugh supported a different candidate for the Surveyor’s post – John James – ten years older than Gibbs and with a lot more experience. Wren and Mar had to call on the help of Queen Anne’s proto-Prime Minister, Lord Harley (Tory, Jacobite and Freemason) her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Benson – newly created Lord Bingley (Tory, Jacobite and Freemason) and even her Physician, Dr. Arbuthnot (Tory, Jacobite and Freemason) to push the appointment through….

ST MARY LE STRAND CHURCH

By 1714 the Maypole that Charles II had erected in the Strand had fallen into disrepair and the Commission decided to replace it with a church – St. Mary le Strand. It would be on the Processional Route from Westminster to St. Paul’s Cathedral and Queen Anne loved processions.

The Church would also raise the tone of the area which had become a notorious red light district since the Restoration.

It was planned to place a statue of Queen Anne over the Church’s porch. But the Jacobites on the Commission came up with an even more striking idea. A huge column – like Trajan’s Column in Rome – even higher than Wren’s Monument to the Great Fire – with an internal spiral staircase and viewing platform, four guardian lions round the base, and a statue of Queen Anne at the top.

Gibbs, who had submitted a design for the Church, but had lost out to Thomas Archer, was given the consolation prize of designing the column.

But the Queen’s health, which had never been good, was getting worse. By 8th July it was so bad the Commission considered a six week adjournment. On 15th July a Committee was set up ‘to confer together’ about the design of the Strand Church. If the Queen died, everything would change.

The Commission, though, took a chance and went ahead with the column. But on 1st August, 1714 the Queen did die.

Intestate.

Four days later work on the column was stopped…. and everyone started to plot…..

The Tory Party at the time was hopelessly divided, so the Whigs swept back into power. Sophia of Hanover had died a few weeks earlier, at the age of 83, so the Elector of Hanover was proclaimed King George I of Britain, France and Ireland.

To the Jacobites, of course, this was a catastrophe. Loyalty to the Stuart Family suddenly became treason. If you drank a toast to ‘James III’ you could be put in jail for two years. One poor soldier knelt as he toasted the ‘King over the Water’ and was flogged to death.

Secret Jacobite symbols had to be employed all over again – and new songs written – collected by James Hogg and published in two volumes in 1819 and 1821. Hogg – ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’…..

……who really had been a farm worker before he turned writer – is not always reliable and may even have forged some of the songs himself. But many are contemporary – and even those written later – when Jacobitism became a remembered romance rather than a movement – give us an insight into what people were thinking and feeling at the time.

‘The Blackbird’, though, which Hogg describes as ‘a street song of the day’ is genuinely contemporary:

In this a ‘fair lady’ sobs and laments the loss of her ‘blackbird’ – the code-word for James III who had a swarthy complexion and dark hair – like Charles II who was called ‘The Black Boy’ by his mother. A Spanish gene seems to have been introduced to the Stuart family by Charles II’s maternal grandmother, Marie de Medici….

‘My blackbird for ever is flown.

He’s all my heart’s treasurer, my joy and my pleasure,

So justly, my love, my heart follows thee;

And I am resolved, in foul or fair weather

To seek out my blackbird, wherever he be.’

Britain, in many Jacobite songs, became a woman, yearning for her beloved bird – in the way Parker had yearned for the return of the dove of peace.

Scottish Jacobites were particularly scathing about King George I. In ‘The Wee Wee German Lairdie’, a song in almost impenetrable dialect, the Scots display contempt for the new monarch, not only because he is small, but because, when word came to him that he was King of England, he was found hoeing turnips in his garden.

And though he was the King of England, he could not speak English…

‘The very dogs o’ England’s court

They bark and howl in German’.

If he ever tries to enter Scotland ‘our Scots thristle [thistle] will jag [prick] his thumbs’.

In another Jacobite song, ‘At Auchindown’, George I is described as ‘cuckold Geordie’ and in ‘Jamie the Rover’ there is a reference to the King’s ‘horns’:

‘In London there’s a huge black bull

That would devour us at his will

We’ll twist his horns out of his skull

And drive the old rogue to Hanover’.

George I’s wife, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, had been accused of having an affair with Count Philip Christoph von Konigsmark. The Count went missing – murdered, it was rumoured by George, who locked up his wife at the Castle of Ahiden.

She took her revenge by always referring to him as ‘Hagenschnaut’ – ‘Pig Snout’.

George was crowned on 20th October 1714 – provoking Jacobite riots in twenty diffferent English towns….

 A fortnight later, a meeting of the Building Committee of the Commission for Building 50 Churches convened, chaired by Lord Bingley and composed of Dr. Arbuthnot, Sir Christopher Wren and his son (also called Christopher and also a Tory, a Jacobite and a Freemason).

Vanbrugh (newly knighted by King George and with Blenheim Palace to his credit) and Gibbs (only 30 and without a single public building to his name) ‘both laid before the committee two designs for the next church ‘to be erected near the Maypole in the Strand’. The committee judged both designs were ‘proper to be put into execution’ and ‘referred to Commissioners to make the choice.

At this point two pages have been ripped out of the Minutes book of the Building Committee…

Two days later the designs were submitted to the Commission itself – who, as usual, voted by secret ballot. Wren was not in attendance – but his son was.

Gibbs was awarded the commission. The Jacobites had won.

But Gibbs nearly lost the job. His mentor, the Earl of Mar, was the leading Jacobite in Britain and he led the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715.

It failed, of course, but it introduced the most powerful Jacobite symbol of all…the five-petalled White Rose.

According to Hogg, there was a gathering of Northern Jacobite men and women at the ruined Auchindown Castle in Scotland on 10th June, 1715 – the anniversary of James III’s birthday.

The Castle had been the temporary headquarters of Bonnie Dundee during the 1689 Rebellion, so the Jacobites met there to drink to the memory of Dundee and the health of James III.  

They picked wild, white alba roses……

……then pinned them to their bosoms and bonnets and danced.

‘Of all the days that’s in the year

The tenth of June I hold most dear,

When our white roses all appear

For the sake of Jamie the Rover.

In tartans braw our lads are drest

With roses glancing on the breast

For among them a’ we love him best,

Young Jamie they call the Rover.’

Legend has it that the Earl of Mar’s Jacobite soldiers wore white ribbons in their bonnets, shaped into roses.

The famous ‘White Cockade’ had been born.

‘My love was born in Aberdeen,

 The bonniest lad that e’er was seen,

 But now he makes our heart fu’ sad

 He’s ta’en the field with his white cockade.

 O he’s a ranting roving blade!

 O he’s a brisk and bonny lad!

Betide what may my heart is glad

To see my lad with his white cockade!’

The Earl of Mar fled from Britain at the end of 1715 and at the beginning of 1716 all the suspected Jacobites were thrown off the Commission for Building 50 Churches – including Wren, Arbuthnot, Bingley and Gibbs.

A rival Scottish architect called Colen Campbell had written anonymously to the Commission, accusing Gibbs of being a ‘Papist’ and a ‘disaffected person’. Gibbs was sacked as the Commission’s Surveyor and taken off the St. Mary le Strand project.

Gibbs of course denied the charges – which were completely true – and made the Commission an astonishing proposal. He would design and build the Church for nothing.  His only condition was to take his designs away with him – ‘and no-one be allowed to take a copy…. he intending to engrave it for his own use’.

This was an offer the Commission could not refuse. King George had no interest in architecture – certainly not Anglican architecture – and the Commission wanted to wrap up the fifty church project as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

But they came to regret their decision. It meant they could not check that Gibbs was following the designs they had agreed to and, because they were not paying him, they could not control him.

Gibbs was also in a secret, coded correspondence with the exiled Earl of Mar. It is clear from the letters that Gibbs was working as a Jacobite agent – using codewords like ‘landlady’ for King James III and ‘Benjamin Bing’ for Robert Benson, Lord Bingley.

Mar wrote to Gibbs on 16th April 1716 that ‘Benjamin Bing in Westminster now ought to build the lodge for himself or someone else’ [using ‘building the lodge’ as a code for recruiting Jacobites] and hopes ‘it may come to be built upon the bank where it was designed’ [i.e. take over the running of Parliament in Westminster].  

At this point Gibbs was even planning to join Mar in France.

Dislike of Hanoverian rule was growing in London and all the rest of the country. People feared a Lutheran King would bring back the bad old days of Cromwell.

There were two flash points in the year: the first was 29th May, Restoration Day, when the King had returned to England from exile. People now wore sprays of oak leaves, decorated their front doors with oak boughs and danced round oak trees and maypoles.

          The lads took heart, and dressed themselves

          In rural garments gay

          And round about like fairy elves,

          They danced the live-long day;

          Around around an oaken tree

          They danced with joy, and so do we.

The educated Jacobites would paint their oak boughs gold – in memory of Aeneas who plucked a golden bough from a tree so he could enter the underworld.

Jacobites identified the exiled Aeneas with James III – hoping that in the way Aeneas founded Rome, James would found a new Augustan Age when he was back in Britain..

The Freemasons also hoped he would bring back the fashion for building in stone. Protestant Kings favoured brick…

The second flashpoint was the 10th June – James III’s birthday, White Rose Day – when people carried and wore bunches of white roses.

Soldiers went through London, snatching oak leaves and roses from the people and arresting those who resisted.  But all over the country people made fun of George I by brandishing turnips and wearing horns on their heads.

And, of course, everyone was still dancing and singing to ‘The King shall enjoy his own again’…

In November 1718 the Commission Surveyors got suspicious and visited the St. Mary le Strand building site. They were horrified by what they saw and recommended to the Commission that ‘a stop should be put to the extravagant carvings within the Church’.

In March the following year the Commission resolved that ‘Before Gibbs direct any further carvers’ or painters’ work for finishing Strand Church design and estimate to be laid before Board so that agreement may be made with artificers before they are put in hand. Copy to Gibbs’.

But Gibbs was off. Word had got round about the beauty of St. Mary le Strand, as Gibbs predicted it would, and work came flooding in. Interestingly he had been employed by Lord Burlington at Chiswick House….

– but Burlington diplomatically ‘sacked’ him when he was accused of Jacobitism. The reason for this – as Jane Clark, and later Ricky Pound, have argued – is that Burlington – seemingly a pillar of the Hanoverian Establishment – was in fact a closet Jacobite.

In a letter to King James III in October, 1719, the Earl of Mar compares the exiled Stuarts to the exiled Israelites and hopes that King George I – like Cyrus the Great of Persia who invited the Israelites to return and rebuild the Temple of Solomon – will invite the Stuarts to return to Britain.

Clark believes that Chiswick House was a Jacobite Temple – dedicated to the return of the Stuarts. It is full of discreet Jacobite symbols – discreet because they had to be…

One of mantlepieces has a King Charles II Green Man –

….another has thistles, and roses, and grapes and fleur de lyses….

The reason for the fleur de lyses is that, at the end of 1720, James III and his wife, Maria Clementina Sobieska, had a son, Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart – better known to the world as ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’. At birth he was created the Prince of Wales and inducted into the Order of the Thistle. Jacobite astronomers claimed that a new star had appeared in the sky….

Now there was a distinct hope of a Stuart dynasty – and Chiswick House is full of the faces and bodies of putti and young men and women, encouraging Stuart procreation.

Some of them seem to have fleur de lyses in their hair…

And as we have seen, Freemasonry went hand in hand with Jacobitism from the very beginning. Chiswick House has a blue velvet room….

…..a colour associated with ‘Cabala’ Masonry (now called Third Degree Masonry) and a red velvet room…..

…….a colour associated with Knights Templar Masonry (now called Royal Arch Masonry).

Chiswick House is separated from the main family dwelling. It has no kitchen – but it does have a wine cellar and a spiral stairway – ideal conditions, Jane Clark argues, for Masonic Rites – designed to will the King over the Water back to England.

Could any of this apply to St. Mary le Strand?

© Stewart Trotter February 2025

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Is St. Mary le Strand a Jacobite Church? (I of III)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 15, 2025| Leave a Comment »

The Background

First, what do we mean by Jacobite?

‘Jacobus’ is the Latin name for James – and the Jacobites were named after the followers of King James II who was crowned in 1685 and deposed three years later.

But ‘Jacobitism’ itself, as a philosophy, a movement and finally a romance, goes back to 1643, the fortieth anniversary of the coronation of King James VI of Scotland as King James I of England, and the end of the first year of the English Civil Wars.

Jacobitism started life as a song – written to a ‘sweet tune’ to which you could march – or dance – but whose lyrics, the writer insisted, must be sung ‘joyfully’. His name was Martin Parker – a hugely popular balladeer – as well as being, in his time, a vagrant, tapster, drunk and thief.  

He was responding to a prediction made by John Booker, an eminent Astrologer who had successfully predicted the deaths of the Kings of Bohemia and Sweden – and was now predicting the downfall of King Charles I.

Parker’s ballad was originally titled ‘Upon the Defacing of Whitehall’ but soon became better known as ‘The King shall Enjoy his own Again’ or ‘The King shall come Home in Peace Again’. There are variations in the lyrics – but that is hardly surprising as the song was sung for over a hundred years.

It begins:

‘What Booker can prognosticate

Or speak of our Kingdom’s present state?

I think myself to be as wise

As he that most looks at the skies.

My skill goes beyond the depth of a pond

Or rivers in the greatest rain

By the which I can tell that all things will be well

When the King comes home in peace again’.

Parker sets himself up in opposition to Booker – not because he has more skill in prediction but because he has more common sense. Between 1642 and the summer of 1643 there were no fewer than 14 battles between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists.

Charles I had left his Whitehall Palace and set up a base in York, but at the end of 1642 he was denied entry to London by Parliamentarian troops at Turnham Green. He set up his base in Oxford which, became a Royalist stronghold way into the eighteenth century.

Parker is saying that while the King is away from his Palace in London, there will never be peace in the land. For Parker this is not prophecy – it is fact. And by writing so directly – and vividly – in the first person, he invites you to join in with him – and become him.

The ballad continues:

‘Though for a time you see White-hall

 With cobwebs hanging over the wall

 Instead of silk and silver brave

 As formerly it used to have;

 In every room, the sweet perfume,.

 Delightful for that princely train;

 The which you shall see, when the time it shall be

That the King comes home in peace again’.

Parker pictures the neglected Whitehall which Charles I’s father, James I, had beautified with the help of Inigo Jones. Charles himself had commissioned paintings from Peter Paul Rubens, depicting King James as Solomon – the King of Peace.

Even though Parker has been penniless at times, he enjoys the surrogate pleasure of describing King Charles surrounded by beautiful sights and smells.

‘For forty years the Royal Crown

Hath been his father’s and his own

And I am sure there’s none but he

Hath right to that sovereignty.

Then who better may the sceptre sway

Than he that hath such right to reign?

The hopes of your peace, for the wars will then cease

When the King enjoys his own again’.

Parker here celebrates the Divine Right of Kings which was introduced to England by James I. He believed that the monarchy was – in his own words to Parliament in 1610 – ‘the most supreme thing on earth’ and that ‘kings are God’s lieutenants sitting upon God’s throne’. The King’s successor should share the same blood line so that peace – not war – would follow the death of monarchs.

Oliver Cromwell was coming into prominence in 1643 when he was made a Colonel in the Parliamentarian Army.

Parker foresaw his coming threat, and challenges his right to ‘reign’ as he is not a Stuart. The ballad, in its early version, concludes with:

‘Till then upon Ararat’s Hill

My hope shall cast her anchor still

Until I see some peaceful dove

Bring home that branch which I do love

Still will I wait till the waters abate

Which most disturbs my troubled brain

For I’ll never rejoice till I hear the voice

That the King comes home in peace again’.

Parker refers to the story of Noah – whose ark came to rest on Mount Ararat. Like him, Parker will only know peace of mind when the dove returns with an olive branch.

Unknown – 17th Century.

Parker did not put his name to this ballad as it would have been dangerous to do so. He did, though, put his initials on one which supported the Anglican Bishops – and was threatened with jail by the Puritan Parliament.

He fell silent – but he had touched a nerve with the ‘ordinary’ English public. He captured their love of the Royal Family and their longing for peace.

Booker, of course, proved correct in his prediction about the decline of Charles I – even if he didn’t foresee his execution. But Parker had a poetic, even spiritual, truth about his poem that was to grow with time – especially when Charles I’s son, Charles II, had to flee to France. He became ‘the King Over the Water’ and people wanted to him to fly back, like Noah’s dove, to his own country.

This was to happen five years later, in 1660, when red wine flowed in the fountains of London and King Charles had a huge maypole erected where St. Mary le Strands Church now stands. The crowds at his Coronation danced round it and sang ‘The King shall enjoy his own again’.

Parker, who had died four years earlier, had been accused of being a Roman Catholic because of his support for the Stuarts – and Charles I and Charles II had both married Catholic wives. Charles II converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed in 1685, but his brother, James, who became King James II, was by then an open follower of ‘the Old Faith’.

James II wanted freedom of worship in Britain and appointed Catholics to leading positions in government and the army. This alarmed the newly formed Whig Party, who wanted to get rid of both Roman Catholicism and the Divine Right of Kings. So the King sought the support of the newly formed Tory party – and in March, 1686, the support of the Scottish Lords.

An anonymous Scottish poet wrote a poem called ‘Caledonia’s Farewell’ to the Duke of Perth and the Duke of Queensbury, urging them to travel down to London to kiss the hands of King James to prove that ‘Caledonia loves the Stuarts well’.

The poem has a strange, esoteric footnote – explaining, that because King James II was the hundredth and eleventh Scottish King since Fergus, he had a right to the throne by numerology as well as blood.

The ‘111’ can convert to an equilateral triangle which, for the ‘Grecians denominated a King’. The poet added the information that the base of the triangle represented Scotland – from which the Stuart line originated – with England on the left and Ireland on the right.

 

The Jacobites now had a symbol as well as a song. The great esoteric scholar Marsha Keith Schuchard tells us that supporters of the Stuarts would include a triangle formed of three dots in their correspondence.

But as we can see from the medallion struck in Paris by a Masonic Lodge to commemorate Benjamin Franklin…..

……the triangle was also a symbol of Freemasonry.

‘Caledonia’s Farewell’ was published, it is thought, by a group of Edinburgh Freemasons. Certainly the poem itself praises the loyalty to the King of ‘builders’ and ‘the cementing trade’. It also mentions Euclid and ‘the Architect’ – Harim Abiff – both central to Masonic philosophy and practice.

Some Masons believe that Freemasonry began in London in 1717 – but that wasn’t the view of Jonathan Swift – who was friends with many of the people engaged in building St. Mary le Strand.

In the persona of ‘the Grand Mistress of the Female Freemasons’ Swift claims that Freemasonry started in Scotland at the time of King Fergus ‘who reigned there more than two thousand years ago’ and was the ‘grand master’ of the Kilwinning Lodge ‘the antientest and purest now on earth’.

Masonry, the Grand Mistress claims, was first begun by Scottish Druids who worshipped – and carved – oak trees. The movement, influenced by Jewish people, developed into Rosicrucianism and ‘Cabala’ [Swift’s spelling]. The Knights Templar later ‘adorned the ancient Jewish and Pagan mystery with many religious and Christian rules’.

Stone came to replace oak as the central symbol of Freemasonry and, according to ‘Swift’, ‘after King James VI’s accession to the throne of England, he revived masonry, of which he was grand master, both in Scotland and England. It had been entirely suppressed by Queen Elizabeth, because she could not get into the secret’.

How much of this is ‘literally’ true is difficult to say – but a number of modern historians believe that Freemasonry did, indeed, originate in Scotland and was developed by King James VI who brought it into England in 1603.

King James’s son, Charles I, attended Masonic ceremonies at Somerset House in the Strand and he too had links with the Scottish Freemasons even before the Civil Wars.

In 1638 Henry Adamson, a Scottish poet and Freemason, had written to King Charles I asking him to repair the great stone bridge at Perth. He predicted to his fellow Masons:

‘Therefore I courage take, and hope to see

A bridge yet built although I aged be’.

He then explains to his brothers why he is so certain this will happen:

‘For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse

 We have the Mason Word, and second sight,

 Things for to come we can foretell aright,

 And shall we show what misterie we mean

In fair acrostics ‘Carolus Rex’ is seen.

Describ’d upon that bridge in perfect gold…’

‘Carolus Rex’ is King Charles I – and it has been suggested that the acrostic reads ‘Roseal cross’ – a reference to Rosicrucianism.

Etienne Morin, an eighteenth century French sea-faring trader and leading Freemason, claimed that Charles I’s son, Charles II, also had links with the Freemasons in Europe and formed Masonic Lodges in France when he was in exile.

Another eighteenth century Freemason, Nicholas de Bonville, also suggested that a network of Freemasons – led by Colonel George Monck (who was said to have converted from the Parliamentary Army to Freemasonry in Scotland) engineered King Charles II’s Restoration to the British Throne.

We know from papers left by Thomas Hearne, the Jacobite underkeeper of the Bodleian Library, that Charles II, when in exile, adopted for his personal symbol the ouroboros – the snake that feeds on itself.

This symbolised the immortality of the Stuart line and its constant return, but it was also associated with Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, as we can see when we look at the Franklin Medal again, where it symbolises Craft ideas of renewal and rebirth.

Another symbol emerged at the Restoration which was linked to both Freemasonry and the Stuarts was the oak tree – worshipped by the Druids – which came to represent Charles I – chopped down by Cromwell.

Saplings, though, spring from the oak tree, which represent Charles I’s sons, Charles II and James II.

Charles II also famously hid in an oak tree, disguised as a peasant, after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester.

The idea grew that he took on himself the power and fertility of the oak – which loses its leaves in winter but regains them in summer. He became associated with fruit and flowers, pomegranates and grapes – and all the joys of spring. Charles II is celebrated as the Garland King or Green Man on Oak Apple Day in parts of England up to present times.

Oak Apple Day, 29th May.

Charles II’s wife – Catharine of Breganza – was unable to bear children, but Charles himself was certainly fecund: he fathered at least fourteen of them outside his marriage, two with the beautiful Nell Gwn…

Charles’s brother James II managed to produce a son with his wife, Mary of Modena in 1688 – also named James. James II’s daughters, Mary and Anne, were both Protestants, but now he had a son, Whigs feared it would be the start of a Roman Catholic dynasty. King James’s enemies put it around that the baby boy had been smuggled into the Queen’s bedchamber in a bedpan.  

Seven notables – including aristocrats and the Bishop of London – invited the Calvinist William of Orange – who was married to King James II’s daughter Mary – to invade Britain.

King James was arrested, but escaped from his Dutch guards and fled abroad.

Loyalist Jacobites rose up in Ireland and Scotland, but King William and the Government Army defeated them. The Scottish Highland Jacobites – under John Graham of Claverhouse – known as ‘Bonnie Dundee’ – had a famous victory at Killiekrankie…..

.

……..but Dundee himself was shot and killed in the battle.

Political songs started up again and many Jacobite scholars believe that ‘God save the King’ began life as a Jacobite anthem. It existed in a Latin form sung in James II’s Catholic Chapel in Whitehall and its lyrics, especially ‘Send him victorious’, sound as though they are addressed to a ‘King over the Water’. The anthem – which is also engraved on Jacobite drinking glasses….

…..has the phrase ‘Soon to reign over us’ and asks God to bless ‘The True Born Prince of Wales’ – which sounds like a reply to the bedpan scandal.

The song goes on to bless what is clearly the Roman Catholic Church and hopes that it will remain….

‘Pure and against all heresy

And Whigs’ hypocrisy

Who strive maliciously

Her to defame’.

The last verse runs….

‘God bless the subjects all,

And save both great and small

In every station.

That will bring home the King,

Who hath best right to reign

It is the only thing

Can save the Nation’.

This is a re-run of ‘The King shall enjoy his own again’ – which the Irish Jacobites were still marching to in the 1690s and which the Bristol Jacobites were still dancing to when Queen Mary died in 1694…

James II died in exile in 1701. The Pope in Rome immediately acknowledged James’s son as ‘King James III’ ….

…….but in London the Act of Settlement was passed the same year which decreed that only a Protestant could become King or Queen of England.

King William died the following year – following a fall from his horse which had stumbled over a molehill. The Jacobites had a new coded toast: ‘To the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat.’

James II’s younger daughter, Anne, a High Church Anglican, became Queen of England.

Loyalists hoped that Queen Anne and her husband, Prince George of Denmark, would produce heirs to secure the Stuart line – but though Anne had 18 pregnancies, none of her children survived.

When Prince George died in 1708, it became clear to everyone that Anne – then 43 – would have to nominate her successor. She was rumoured to favour her half-brother, James III, known as ‘The Pretender’ to his enemies.

Most of the Tories also backed James III and tried to persuade him to become a Protestant.

The Whig Party, however, favoured Sophia of Hanover, but she was approaching 80. Failing her, they would invite George Louis, the Elector of Hanover, to become King of Britian.

He was 54th in line to the throne, but a Protestant.

It was now a waiting game to see who Queen Anne would nominate in her will.

Meanwhile, Militia Men marched through the City of London in 1711 – to the tune of ‘The King shall enjoy his own again’….

© Stewart Trotter February 2025

[Please read ‘Is St. Mary le Strand a Jacobite Church? (II of III)]

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Was William Shakespeare a Freemason?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 12, 2025| Leave a Comment »

An Important Statement from Trixie the Cat!

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code

Your Cat writes to you on a subject of the utmost gravity….

In 1933, a Past Master Mason called Alfred Dodds published a book entitled…..

‘Shakespeare: Creator of Freemasonry: Being a Remarkable Examination of the Plays and Poems, Which Proves Incontestably That These Works Were Saturated in Masonry, That Shakespeare Was a Freemason and the Founder of the Fraternity‘

As you can imagine, the Academic World at the time roared with laughter.

But never forget!

The number of Views that The Shakespeare Code has enjoyed to this date stands at:

397, 520!!!

But when our Chief Agent, in 1971, submitted his Finals Long Essay to the English Faculty at Cambridge University he was equally derided.

In fact he was instructed by his Supervisor NOT to submit it – an injunction Stewart ignored.

He had no other essauy to submit!

And what was so shocking? Stewart’s assertion that, from his study of the Sonnets, William Shakespeare was Bi-Sexual!

THIS IS NOW A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED!!!

(almost)

The Code, as Brothers and Sisters well know, is a great admirer of John Dover Wilson – who sadly came to the Sonnets too late in life.

He famously said that you needed more than one lifetime to understand them…

Dover Wilson argued that Shakespeare was intimately tied up with the Earl of Southampton’s circle of friends – and many of his plays were a debate with Southampton and Essex about the wisdom (or otherwise) of their plot to overthrow Queen Elizabeth.

Sadly he was mocked and derided by his nemesis W.W. Greg….

…….a textual scholar who hated real life to be brought into Shakespeare Studies – an attitude that was still around during our Chief Agent’s time at Cambridge University.

Greg described Dover Wilson’s ideas about Shakespeare as “the careerings of a not too captive balloon in a high wind”.

THE HORROR IS DOVER WILSON LISTENED TO HIM!

He even went as far to withdraw his ideas – saying he no longer believed in them.

BUT HE WAS RIGHT!

Dover Wilson believed that ‘Macbeth’ was first performed in Scotland in 1599 in an attempt to involve King James VI in the Essex Plot. The Code believes this is true – and has been developing these ideas on this blog and in a film script.

We believe that Shakespeare fled to Scotland after the Essex Plot failed – and became an intimate friend of King James VI.

The two men influenced each others thinking.

For example, both wrote poems comparing their male lovers to the fabulous Phoenix Bird…

The Code also believes that Shakespeare was up in Scotland earlier – in 1594 – as part of the English party to celebrate the baptism of Prince Henry at Stirling Castle.

The Earl of Sussex represented Queen Elizabeth.

He was part of the Southampton-Essex circle – and his men had performed ‘Titus Andronicus’ at the Rose Theatre earlier that year.

Originally King James was to include a live lion in the masque – they had one in Stirling Castle! – but dropped the idea because he thought the women would be frightened….Shakespeare, of course, recycles this in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’….

‘You ladies you whose gentle hearts do fear

The smallest monstous mouse that creps

May now perchance to quake and tremble here

While lion rough in wildest rage doth roar

Then know that I as Snug the joiner am…’

King James had built a replica of the Temple of Solomon at Stirling Castle….

….together with a Vault.

He staged pageants where the Templar Knights defeated the Turks – and wandered round dressed as a Templar Knight….

Recent research suggests that Freemasonry has its roots in Scotland – and was developed both by King James VI and his Master of Works, William Schaw……

…….who is known as ‘The Father of Freemasonry’. He designed the Temple at Stirling Castle.

The Temple of Solomon – both before its completion and after its destruction – is the setting for many Masonic rites – as is the Temple’s ‘Sacred Vault’.

Were Masonic Rites performed there in 1594? And was Shakespeare in attendance?

The Code will try to answer these questions – but in a ‘synchronistic’ way….

When Your Cat was on her Rehabilitation Programme she became very attracted to Muscular Christianity – and started to become a bit of a Church Cat.

Among the churches she visited was St. Mary le Strand……

……designed in 1714 by a young Scottish Freemason – and Jacobite! – called James Gibbs……

…….known to friends as ‘Signor Gibbi’.

Your Cat fell in love with the Church – and dragged the Code’s Chief Agent along with her – and he fell in love with it too. So much so that he became a member of the Parish Church Council there – and a Trustee!

Stewart became fascinated by the Church’s history – particularly a symbol in the apse….

He had a ‘hunch’ about it – as he does with most of his research – and followed it up.

The result is the Posts – ”Is St. Mary le Strand a Jacobite Church’ – Parts I, II and III – which will follow in the next few days…..

Jacobitism leads to Freemasonry leads to Scotland leads to James VI leads to William Shakespeare himself!

So Brothers and Sisters- please check for new posts – and above all

ENJOY!!!

‘Bye now!!

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When Will met Harry….a riposte to the BBC!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »

An Important Statement from Trixie the Cat.

Brothers and Sisters of the Shakespeare Code….

All at Code Headquarters in West London wish you a Very Happy 2024!

Just before Christmas, the Shakespeare Code’s Chief Agent – Stewart Trotter – accompanied by Your Faithful Cat – travelled down to Titchfield in Hampshire to address a packed meeting of the august Titchfield History Society….

Here is Stewart’s talk…

Your Cat read the quotes!

‘Bye, now!

***

The BBC has just televised a three part, three hour, life of William Shakespeare – titled…

The Rise of a Genius.

It makes no mention at all of Titchfield – or even Henry Rosely, the Third Earl of Southampton.

I pronounce his surname ‘Rosely’ because that’s how the aristocratic branch of the Wriothesley family is named in the local Parish Register. The non-aristocratic branch called themselves Risley – and even spelt their surname Risley.

The Third Earl of Southampton called himself ‘Harry’ in his letters and Shakespeare called himself ‘Will’ in his Sonnets. So let’s call them ‘Harry and Will’.

For the last quarter of a century I have taken Will’s link with Titchfield and the Southampton family as a truth universally acknowledged. But clearly it isn’t. Or not by the BBC anyway. So I thought the best thing to do for this talk was to take a fresh look at the evidence to see if it really does stack up.

What it boils down to is this:

Do we believe what Nicholas Rowe says in his ‘Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear’ – …..the first ever biography of Will published in 1709?

It must be admitted, for a start, that Rowe spells ‘Shakespeare’ without the final ‘e’. Not a good sign.

Rowe writes:

‘What grace so ever the Queen conferred upon Shakespeare it was not to her only he owed the fortune which the reputation of his wit made. He had the honour to meet with many great and uncommon marks of favour and friendship from the Earl of Southampton, famous in the histories of that time for his friendship to the unfortunate Earl of Essex. It was to that noble Lord that he dedicated his Venus and Adonis, the only piece of his poetry which he ever published himself.‘

Rowe forgets that Will had also dedicated Lucrece to Harry – and in 1709 Will’s Sonnets had just been printed. Rowe had a copy – but hadn’t read them. Not a good sign either.

Rowe continues:

‘There is one incidence so singular in the magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare’s, that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D’Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not have ventured to have inserted, that my Lord Southampton, at one time, gave him [Will] a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to. A bounty very great and very rare at any time, and almost equal to that profuse generosity the present age has shown to French dancers and Italian eunuchs.’ 

£1,000 is thought by some to be worth half a million pounds in today’s money – or even a million.

Can we rely on this story? Rowe was a playwright himself – and had just edited an edition of Shakespeare’s plays. He got his information from Thomas Betterton…

….a hugely admired actor, famous for his Hamlet…

…..who had visited Stratford-upon-Avon toward the end of his life to gather information.

Betterton had acted for Davenant – who John Aubrey tells us – believed he was Will’s illegitimate son. Will had certainly been Davenant’s Godfather – and the teenage Davenant had written an ode on Will’s death.

Davenant also knew ‘old Mr. Lowen’ who had been directed by Will – so the story has a provenance going back to the Bard himself.

And in 1806, R.B. Wheeler provided back up evidence. He wrote in his ‘History and Antiquities of Stratford upon Avon….’

‘the unanimous tradition of this neighbourhood is that by the uncommon bounty of the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare was enabled to purchase houses and land in Stratford’.

But Edmond Malone…..

– an Irish ex-barrister with inherited wealth – was having none of it.

In 1770 he wrote:

‘that Lord Southampton gave Shakespeare a thousand pounds in order that he might complete a purchase is totally unworthy of credit since no such extensive a purchase ever appears to be made by him as will be seen when we come to make an estimate of the property which he possessed.’

Malone never even visited Stratford – but since his time, Shakespeare Scholars have simply repeated what he wrote.

Up to 2011, that is. A finance director turned academic called David Fallow wrote a Ph D for Exeter University in which he showed that purchases Will made between 1597 and 1614 cost him £1,400 – far in excess of the maximum of £60 a year he could have made in the theatre.

He must have had another source of money.

Now it has to be said that Dr. Fallow has other ideas about where the money came from. However, the facts fit Rowe’s account. 

But how did Will come to meet Harry? Why did he leave Stratford in the first place?

The BBC series suggests it was simply an ambition to be a writer: but in the reign of Elizabeth that would have been suicidal.

Robert Greene…..

……whom the BBC presents as the successful ‘University Wit’ who gave Will his first writing break – ended up in the garret of a kind-hearted cobbler who found him dying of starvation in the street.

Rowe has a far more convincing story. He states that Will, on leaving school, joined the family business – butchery and gloving:

‘In this kind of settlement he continued for some time, till an extravagance that he was guilty of, forced him both out of his country and his way of living which he had taken up, and though it seemed at first to be a blemish on his good manners, and a misfortune to him, yet it afterwards happily proved the occasion of exerting one of the greatest Genius’s that ever was known in dramatic poetry.

He had by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged with them more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford.

For this he was prosecuted by that Gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him.

And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree, that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.‘

Malone, again, dismisses this story: but it is backed up by three different sources that pre-date Rowe – including a man called Thomas Jones – born in neighbouring Tarbick three years before Will died.  He not only remembered the story – but remembered the ballad as well, which he sang way into his nineties! It has a refrain of:

‘Lucy is lousy’.

Joshua Barnes, a Cambridge don, reported, in the 1680s, he had heard the words of the ballad sung by his hostess at a Stratford inn – and in 1688 Richard Davies – an Oxford man – inherited notes about Will from a Gloucester clergyman called William Fullman. Davies records:

‘Shakespeare was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir — Lucy who oft had him whipped and sometimes imprisoned and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement’.

At the end of his account Davies writes:

‘He died a Papiste’.

This hits the crux. Robert Dudley, the First Earl of Leicester……

……moved to Kennilworth – a dozen miles from Stratford – when Will was twelve years old. Leicester – an intimate of Queen Elizabeth – claimed to be England’s leading Puritan and terrorised Roman Catholics.  Thomas Lucy was his agent.

We know Will’s father, John, was also a Catholic because he signed a Testament of Faith which he hid in the walls of his house. The authenticity of this document was, of course, challenged by Malone. But other Testaments were later found in other places with exactly the same wording.

John Shakespeare had once been the Bailiff of Stratford and so rich he actually lent money to the Council. But his recusancy led him into direct conflict with the authorities and this ruined his business. He had to take Will out of school – but it seems a Catholic network was at hand to help.

John Cottom – a Lancashire Catholic who came to teach at Stratford – recognised Will’s talent and managed to get him a position as children’s entertainer with the Catholic Hoghton family at Hoghton Tower.

But Hoghton died, and Leicester’s thugs were circling, so Will had to return Stratford.

He wooed Anne Hathaway…..

…..eight years his senior – with ballads and songs – one of which we still have – and married her when she became pregnant. It was at this period – around 1582 – that Will began poaching Lucy’s deer – first to help feed his family, but later to take a Catholic revenge.

Leicester had accused Will’s aristocratic cousin, Edward Arden……

…….of plotting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth – and had him hanged, drawn and quartered in 1583.

When Will wrote his scandalous poem about Lucy – and according to Betterton hung it on the gates of Charlecote Park…….

……..Will had to flee. Again the Catholic network, it seems, was there to help him. It engineered a collaboration with Thomas Kyd……

…..not a University Wit as the BBC series asserted, but a fellow grammar school boy – a ‘grammarian’- from a Catholic family.

Evidence for this can be found in the pamphlets of the University Wits Robert Greene…..

…and Thomas Nashe……

…..who describe Will and Kyd as:

‘deep read Grammarians, who having no more art in their brain, than was nourished in a serving-man’s idleness, will take upon them to be the ironic censors of all, when God and poetry doth know, they are the simplest of all.’

According to the Wits, Will and Kyd, had day jobs in Westminster as ‘noverints’ – that is to say, solicitors’ clerks – which was the profession Kyd’s father followed. They would write by candlelight at night. And then….

‘for recreation, after their candle stuff, having starched their beards most curiously, make a peripatetical path into the inner parts of the City…‘

…..where Elizabethan gentlemen got up to no good.

To make sure readers knew who the grammarians were, the Wits quote the ‘kid in Aesop’ and Will’s ‘killcow conceit’ – a reference to Will’s former profession as a butcher and glover. 

Will was the junior collaborator to Kyd, who was already established. Computer analysis suggests that Kyd produced early versions of Hamlet, King Lear, King John, Henry V, and The Taming of the Shrew or The Taming of a Shrew as it was then called.

According to a coded poem by Ben Jonson…..

…..Will Shakespeare….

……‘the poet-ape who would be thought our chief’…..

…..bought the rights to these plays when Kyd died in 1594 and developed them into the masterpieces they became. In the BBC series there was hardly a mention of Will’s extensive collaborations – or the fact he lifted the vast majority of his plots from other men’s work.

Richard Simpson – an Anglican priest in Queen Victoria’s reign who converted to Rome – was the first person in modern times to suggest that Will was a Catholic. But Simpson also traced – through the coded satires of Greene and Nashe – a massive influence on Will of a radical Anglican priest, poet and printer, Robert Crowley, the Rector of St. Giles Without Cripplegate.

Greene writes:

‘If they [Kyd and Will] come to publish anything, it is either distilled out of ballads or borrowed of theological poets and he that cannot write true English without the help of clerks of Parish Churches will need make himself father of interludes…in charity be it spoken, I am persuaded the sexton of St. Giles without Cripplegate would have been ashamed of such blasphemous rhetoric.

And Nashe writes:

‘I must needs send such idle wits [Kyd and Will] to shrift to the Vicar of St. Fooles….their ghostly father.’

Crowley believed that all wealth should be voluntarily re-distributed – and gave his own stipend to the poor. He believed that everything should be shared – and that everything should be simple and natural. He hated artifice in language and artifice in adornment. He hated wigs and he hated make-up. These are the massive themes of Will’s Sonnets – and the great, later plays.

But how did Will – a committed Catholic – come to meet Crowley – a priest so Protestant he refused to wear a surplice?

St. Giles without Cripplegate was the Church Sir Thomas Lucy used when he was in London. His second daughter, Margaret, who died at around 19 is buried there – and there is a memorial to his granddaughter, Constance Whjitney. It would only be natural for Will to try to enlist the priest’s support in his ongoing battle with Lucy.  In return Will wrote the quasi-Biblical play The Fair Em to please Crowley – and toured the Midlands with it in Lord Strange’s Company.

So, if Rowe was right about Lucy, it could well mean that he was right about Harry and the £1,000 as well.

The Spanish Armada in 1588 spelt the death – for a time – of the theatre. The public were engaged in their own drama with Spain – and actors were seen as shirkers. Kyd joined Lord Strange’s household and Christopher Marlowe……

– whom Kyd and Will had befriended in London – joined Bess of Hardwick’s.

What happened to Will?

The great Shakespeare scholar, John Dover Wilson…..

……believed that Will joined Mary Southampton’s household in Titchfield as tutor to her teenage son, Harry – another indication that there was a Catholic network at work as the Southampton family were ardent followers of the Old Faith.

John Aubrey also states that Will…

‘understood Latin pretty well because he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country’.

But was the country Hampshire?

****

To find out read ‘When Will met Harry: Part Two’!!!

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