ONCE A KNIGHT IS ENOUGH
Freemasonry’s Odd Juxtaposition of Knighthoods
by Philip Carter, 2005
The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy.
You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration,
and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.
(Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, p.67)
Introduction'Oh ancient treachery of the Temple!
Oh long-standing sedition of the Hospitallers!'
Wrote Matthew Paris in an often-repeated rebuke.
(Sire, The Knights of Malta, p.13)Beyond the first three freemasonic degrees, which all freemasons take and beyond which many chose not to venture, are a number of allied organisations. Among these are the several
United Religious Military and Masonic Orders of the Temple and of St. John of Jerusalem, Palestine, Rhodes and Malta. In his
Encyclopedia (p.463), Albert Mackey tells us: ‘
The [freemasonic] degree of Knight of Malta is conferred in the United States as “an appendant Order” in a Commandery of Knights Templars.’ Herein lies a paradox.
Freemasonic ritual takes many historical liberties. Of these liberties, none is more audacious than the juxtaposition of the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller. Not only are these degrees imitations of separate and distinct Orders, the original Orders were notoriously and openly hostile towards each other. One can easily imagine that knights of both these Orders would have been outraged at any suggestion of the joint pantomime in which modern freemasons now engage. Fraternal studies are, however, fraught with inconsistencies and freemasons are not alone in taking such bold, historical liberties. Indeed, as we shall see, while many freemasons believe their traditions derive from the Knights Templar, we find that a significant number of the legitimate, Catholic heirs of the Knights Hospitallers, whom one might expect to be hostile towards freemasonry, (in accordance with the Papal Bulls condemning the fraternity), were themselves active freemasons.
In delving into the antecedents of the present situation, we need note several distinct, corporate identities. Firstly, there are the original, crusading Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller. Of these medieval Orders of chivalry, we find:
- The Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon is better known as the Knights Templar: They were founded in Jerusalem 1119, suppressed in 1307 (following allegations which included heresy); and abolished by papal decree in 1312, (although there are various theories suggesting an underground continuance of the Order).
- The Sovereign Military Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta, is better known as the Knights Hospitaller, The Knights of St. John or the Knights of Malta. Their origins predate the first Crusade, in 1095. Their predecessors had established of a hospital for pilgrims in Jerusalem; they had established themselves as a distinct organisation by 1113, when they received papal approval; during the early thirteenth century they developed into a military Order, in imitation of the Templars, and although they too are said to have been threatened with suppression (Sire, p.27), they continue to exist as a Catholic Order, (although they have, from time-to-time, been suppressed in several countries).
Following on from the original, Catholic Hospitallers, we find four Protestant Order of St. John. These Protestant Orders, include the British Order of St. John, here designated as the ‘Venerable Order’ and now better known as the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade. These Protestant Orders all claim some form of legitimate descent from the Catholic Order, now designated as the ‘Sovereign Order’ (the historical legitimacy of which is unbroken and unquestioned), and, while this Protestant claim has, to some extent, been countenanced by the establishment of fraternal relations with the Sovereign Order, this is only a relatively recent development.
Following on from the original, allegedly heretical, Catholic Knights Templar, we find their freemasonic imitators to be among the first of a vast number of such imitators (Axelrod, pp.236/238), all lacking any credible, historical justification for their pretence. Albeit, the freemasonic knights, now officially admit they have no connection with the original crusading knights - but carry on regardless.
Not One but ManyThe old order changeth, yielding place to the new
And God fulfills himself in many ways
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
(Tennyson, 1870, Idylls of the King)
We can usually rely upon our opponents to rectify any baseless conceits. However, both freemasons and their opponents have been eager to accept the proposition that freemasonry derived from the crusading Knights Templar. For instance, Robert Cooper cites (pp.172/3) L’Abbé Barruel who, in 1798, wrote:
Your whole school and all your Lodges are derived from the Templars after the extinction of their Order, a certain number of guilty knights, having escaped the proscription, united for the preservation of their horrid mysteries. To their impious code they added the vow of vengeance against the kings and priests who destroyed their Order, and against all religion which anathematized their dogmas. They made adepts, who should transmit from generation to generation the same hatred of the God of the Christians, and of Kings, and of Priests. These mysteries have descended to you, and you continue to perpetuate their impiety, their vows, and their oaths. Such is your origin. The lapse of time and the change of manners have varied a part of your symbols and your frightful systems; but the essence of them remains, the vows, the oaths, the hatred, and the conspiracies are the same.
Freemasons, for their part, generally reject the more lurid ‘confessions’ obtained under torture from the knights by their inquisitors and regard the abolition of the original Templars as being a gross injustice, motivated by political and financial greed. Most freemasonic Knights Templar are comfortable with the possibility that the original knights were somewhat heretical. Indeed, a hint of special knowledge and defiance has always added a frisson of scandal to the allure of what is now called the Templar Transmission Theory.
The eighteenth century origins of the freemasonic degrees of ‘Knights Templar’ and ‘Knights of Malta’ are obscured by conflicting opinions and an absence of concrete proof. Whether or not freemasons adopted the degree of ‘Knights Templar’ before that of ‘Knights of Malta’, as is now usually supposed, is uncertain. What is certain is that their degree of Knight Templar now has pre-eminence among their ‘chivalric degrees’. Freemasonry’s official stance, as already stated, is that they have no historical connection with either of the crusading Orders. However, one cannot prove a negative. There are many romantic and credulous freemasons who strongly believe there are such connections, especially to the Knights Templar. Admittedly, it is common among secret associations to lack much clear evidence as to their origins and, especially in such cases, absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence. This peculiar belief dates back to the 1737 oration by Andrew Ramsay, in which he first popularized the Templar Transmission Theory. In 1990, John Robinson reinvigorated the theory in his book
Born in Blood. Despite comprehensive rebuttals by such eminent freemasons as Albert Mackey, in his
History (pp.255/266), and Robert Cooper in his address, ‘
The Knights Templar in Scotland: The Creation of a Myth’ (pp.141/219), the Templar Transmission Theory continues to gain adherents, as with Paul Naudon, in his book, ‘
The Secret History of Freemasonry: It Origins and Connection to the Knights Templar’.
At the heart of the theory is a fundamental category error: Those, such as Robinson and Naudon, who support the Templar Transmission Theory tend to conflate all references to fraternal associations, (generally referred to as guilds), so as to be taken to be references to guilds of operative freemasons, i.e. stonemasons. However, such associations were ubiquitous. From antiquity, women and men, high and low, throughout and beyond Europe, we find almost everyone belonged to some such association. There were those that were purely social and religious; there were those of craftsmen, merchants, scholars and priests; some were combinations of allied interest groups. Indeed, they ranged between bands of pirates and outlaws to royal courts and Orders of knighthood. Taking England as typical example, we read in the introduction to Toulmin Smith’s
English Gilds (p.xv):
English Gilds, as a system of wide-spread practical institutions, are older than any Kings of England. They are told of in the books that contain the oldest relics of English Laws. The old laws of King Alfred, of King Ina, of King Athelstan, of Henry I, reproduce still older laws in which the universal existence of Gilds is treated as a matter of well-known fact, and in which it is taken to be a matter of course that every one belonged to some Gild.
Fraternity existed not only within guilds but also between them, creating a sense of community, (albeit, there were also instances of rivalry). Guild membership conferred a degree of respectability. High office within a guild carried with it station and dignity which was acknowledged beyond its own membership. Guilds appear to have provided a means of communication between classes, in which some mutual respect was maintained. While basically conservative, they appear to have influenced each other, with some ideas coming into and out of vogue and being communicated between guilds. They provided an intermediate level of social organisation between that of the family and that of the state and, to a degree, informed both the family and the state and, at times, mediated between the two. They were the non-government organisations (NGOs) of their day. Some extended beyond national borders, making them multi-national corporations.
Fraternal associations occasionally provided cover for subversion. Accordingly, the state has often sought to monitor and control them. These measures became so onerous throughout much of Europe that many such associations were disbanded, went underground or abandoned those fraternal characteristics that stigmatized them as ‘secret societies’. Freemasonry was an exception to this trend. Having organised itself under grand lodges, which inspected and policed the regularity of the working of their lodges, and having successfully obtaining the protection of royal patrons, ‘regular’ freemasonry was not regarded as a threat by some states and was granted singular exemptions from the secret societies acts that devastated other such associations. Thus, it stands as a remnant and example of a vast network of fraternal associations that is now all but lost.
Any connection between freemasonry and the medieval, crusading Knights Templar (and Knights Hospitaller) can be attributed to this network and any similarities they shared had a wide and common origin in that network. While they would have shared a fraternal relationship, that relationship was not special, let alone unique. Naturally, however, because freemasonry survived, albeit, much transformed, people now look to it as being identical with (e.g., Pike, p.23) rather being more or less representative of, the ancient, fraternal associations. Compounding this misleading identification, whereby all things fraternal are taken to be generically freemasonic, we find modern freemasonry has taken upon itself the role of adopting more and more rituals, presumably to preserve them. Many are rarely enacted, as with those conferred ‘in passing’ in the ‘Scottish’ Rite, or conferred as ‘appendant’ degrees’ in the ‘York’ Rite. Indeed, there is the Grand Council of the Allied Masonic Degrees, which assumes responsibility for many rituals for which there would otherwise be no governing body. For better or for worse, the freemasonic Knights Templar and Hospitaller have no need of that Grand Council. Rather, while the original, crusading knights were bitter rivals, their freemasonic emulators now blithely combine the two.
Freemasonic Knights Templar & HospitallerThe age of the common man has proved fertile in bodies of private citizens
adopting the titles of Knights Templar and similar exciting fraternities;
the unique status of the Order of Malta has made it, unwillingly enough,
the model for a large number of such imitations.
(Sire, The Knights of Malta, p.271)
The incorporation of the Hospitallers under the Templars in a freemasonic context can be traced back to the late eighteenth century. However, as attested by Albert Mackey in his
Encyclopedia (p.464): ‘
How anything so anomalous in history as the commingling in one body of Knights Templars and Knights of Malta … first arose, is now difficult to determine.’
The freemasonic emulation of the Knights of Malta, under the banners of their ‘Knights Templar’, precedes any official countenancing by the Sovereign, Catholic Order, of the several Protestant Priories or Encampments of Knights Hospitaller. Perhaps the freemasonic connection can, be traced to early negotiations towards this end. Perhaps too, Edward VII’s positions as both Prior of the Venerable, Protestant Order of St John and as the most prominent freemason of the age lent an air of legitimacy to the association of the two Orders, one that he may have officially endorsed.
In England the Hospitallers were abolished in 1534 by Henry VIII, as part of his dissolution of the monasteries. Of the revival of the Order in England, H.R.A. Sire wrote (p.254):
It originated … in the 1820s, as a means of securing the indispensable support of Britain for the attempt to recover the Order’s territorial sovereignty. Through the agency of the Irish knight Dennis O’Sullivan, who had entered the Langue of France in 1783, the Priory of England was ‘revived’, the Prior being a chaplain of [the Protestant King] George IV who styled himself Sir Robert Peat. With such sponsors, the Priory had no hope of being recognized by [the Catholic head of the Order] Busca, but it continued unsuccessfully to seek acceptance from the Lieutenant Carlo Candida; the veterans of the old Barbary patrols must have been puzzled by these Quixotes of romantic Toryism, buckling on their armour to tilt at cotton-mills. The group eventually acquired the patronage of the 7th Duke of Manchester, who in turn secured the membership of the Prince of Wales (Edward VII) and opted for the more attainable aim of recognition by the British Crown. The Priory received a royal charter in 1888 as the ‘Venerable [Protestant] Order of St John’. In 1890 the Duke of Manchester was succeeded as Grand Prior by the Prince of Wales, who showed his reverence for the office by choosing the prioral costume invented by the Duke to attend the famous fancy-dress ball at Devonshire House in 1897. The Venerable Order has maintained the Hospitaller traditions of its ancestor and has rendered sterling service as the St. John’s Ambulance Association.
Cadets of that association can still apply to be made Knights of the Venerable Order.
Further on, Sire wrote (p.270):
Since 1963 the Sovereign [Catholic] Order has maintained formal relations with the alliance of four Protestant Orders of St John which trace their historical roots to it. These are the German Johanniterorden, which is the Grand Bailiwick of Brandenberg as restored by the Prussian monarchy in 1852, and its Dutch and Swedish offshoots … The fourth non-Catholic order is the Venerable Order of St John in the British Realm. All four have been constituted as orders of chivalry by their respective monarchies and they are the only Orders of St John which their own governments and the Sovereign Order recognize as legitimate. Their common traditions and Hospitaller aims are reflected in the co-operation they maintain with their Catholic progenitor.
There also we read (ibid.):
In the United States Peter Grace, President of the American Association since 1977, has long been one of the most influential members of the Republican Party; his links with President Reagan were particularly close, while the advent of the Bush presidency drew the social worlds of the White House and the Knights of Malta even closer together.
While, several pages later (p.278), of Andrew Bertie, the first English Grand Master of the Sovereign, Catholic Order, we are told:
On a private visit to England in 1991 he was received by the Queen, bringing about the first meeting between a Grand Master and an English monarch since 1528. In January 1989 he conferred the Grand Cross of Merit on President Reagan in recognition of his stand against abortion, the first time the Order’s honours have been used as an affirmation of Catholic moral teaching rather than as a mere courtesy.
Strange BedfellowsThere is no fact in history better known than that
there existed from their very birth a rivalry between the
two Orders of the Temple and of St. John of Jerusalem,
which sometimes burst forth into open hostility.
(Albert Mackey, Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, p.464)
A major difference between the two original, crusading Orders was the secrecy of the Templars’ rituals as compared to the Hospitallers’ openness. In his
Encyclopedia, Albert Mackey argues against freemasonry parodying the Knights of Malta, giving several reasons and saying (pp.464/5):
Another reason why the degree of Knight of Malta should be ejected from the Masonic system is that the ancient order never was a secret association. Its rites of reception were open and public, wholly unlike anything in Masonry. In fact, historians have believed that the favor shown to the Hospitallers, and the persecutions waged against the Templars, are to be attributed to the fact that the latter Order had a secret system of initiation which did not exist in the former. The ritual f reception, the signs and words as modes of recognition now practiced in the modern Masonic ceremonial, are all a mere invention of a very recent date. The old Knights knew nothing of such a system.
As stated,
The United Religious Military and Masonic Orders of the Temple and of St. John of Jerusalem, Palestine, Rhodes and Malta presents us with an unlikely combination, that of the Knights Templar in union with the Knights Hospitaller. Moreover, in this freemasonic union the Templars appear to have primacy.
These two Orders were nominally allies but behaved like enemies during and after the crusades. From their rivalries it was the Hospitallers who emerged with the assets of the Templars (although, controversially, much appeared to have disappeared or was otherwise seized). This profit by their rivals was much resented by those who subsequently claimed to have perpetuated the Knights Templar, (through either clandestine, legitimate succession or through sympathetic emulation). These ‘successors’ of the Templars, claimed the Hospitallers were one of their three sworn enemies - the other two being the papacy and the French monarchy - all having been party to the suppression of the Templars (A&A Rite). Curiously, the Saracens, the ostensible enemies of the original, crusading knights, were conspicuous only by their absence among the stated enemies of the ‘Scottish’ Rite of Freemasonry. In the late eighteenth-century, with the expulsion of the Knights Hospitaller from Malta, the loss of the Papal States and the abolition of the French monarchy, all neo-Templar enmity ostensibly ceased. The official freemasonic Templar objectives (‘Scottish’ Rite) are now abstract and moral. Even so, there may be some satisfaction for those freemasonic Knights Templar (‘York’ Rite) who claim jurisdiction over the Knights Hospitaller.
Nobility!?… the Order of Malta; it is the only genuinely aristocratic
institution that retains an effective role in the modern world.
(Sire, The Knights of Malta, p.271)
Sire speaks of ‘
the Templars habitually taking the baronial side and the Hospitallers that of the monarchy’ (p.13) in disputes. While being far from egalitarian in any modern sense, like the Magna Charta, granted by the King John to the English barons at the time, one can see from this distinction a tendency within the Templars towards the later ideals of ‘
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité!’ Indeed, from the outset, while only nobles could join either Order as knights, the Hospitallers were more insistent on aristocratic qualifications and, with some variation between its different national divisions (Langues), came to insist upon proof of more and more generations of noble ancestors from their applicants.
Albeit, among the Hospitallers, Sire allows (p.8) that, until the early thirteenth century, ‘… the distinction between
fratrers [knights] and
confratres [associates] was not clear cut.’ Among the Templars, this laxity in distinctions of rank remained characteristic of their Order. For instance, after the Pope granted their knights the privilege of a distinctive addition to their uniform, it was quickly adopted by all combatants, regardless of rank (Sire, p.12). Perhaps this proto-egalitarian tendency lies at the heart of the appeal the Knights Templar have had to freemasons and to other advocates of dignity and justice for all.
Among the Hospitallers, their aristocratic tendency continued unabated until relatively recently. At a time when the concept of noble birth ought to have been of historical interest only, the Sovereign, Catholic Order had, until the late twentieth century, been insistent upon increasingly more stringent proofs of nobility. For instance, after a grave financial blunder in June 1949, as a result of inept grain negotiations with Argentina, Evita Perón generously offered the Order an honourable remedy to their dilemma. Rather than insisting upon reaping Argentina’s full and unexpected advantage, she offered a more equitable contract, asking only what, for the first lady of a then prosperous nation, would have been little more than a token honour by way of recompense. H.J.A. Sire, in writing a sympathetic history of the Order, viewed the matter somewhat differently, saying (p.258):
Evita Perón, with her notorious passion for acceptance by the haut monde, offered to let the Order have the grain at a very favourable price if she were appointed a Dame of Honour and Distinction – a distinction which, under the Spanish rules applicable to her nation, was reserved for ladies with sixteen quarters of nobility. Rather than debase its honours, the Order preferred to shoulder a burden of nine million dollars, and her offer was refused.
Thus, by upholding the insistence upon a qualification of each of all sixteen of one’s great, great grand parents having been entitled to display a coat-of-arms (it did not matter if one or more of the coats-of-arms was over-represented in one’s family tree), the Order supported the decrepit and vicarious distinction of aristocracy. This obscenity the Hospitallers chose above their much self-lauded work, which would otherwise have been advanced by what was, in 1949, a huge sum. In doing so, they showed the superficiality of their chivalry by insulting a lady who had graciously offered them assistance.
The Sovereign Order has since acquiesced to the anachronistic futility of its insistence upon candidates being of ‘noble’ birth. In 1978,
The Newcastle Morning Herald published an AAP-Reuter article reporting that, the Order, '
…was formerly an exclusive club for nobles, princes and members of religious orders. But of the 9489 knights in 26 nations today, fewer than 3000 were elected because of their nobility’ (Mooney). The Order’s Grand Chancellor is reported to have lamented: ‘
The exclusive respect for nobility is being rapidly eroded by our associations throughout the world’ (ibid.). To which, we add – about time!
Catholic Knights and FreemasonryIt is surely intriguing that whereas tradition has often, erroneously,
traced the origins of speculative Masonry back to the Knights Templar,
the real truth … is the precise opposite; namely, that the Knights of Malta,
who were, in a [material] sense, the heirs to the Knights Templar,
derived their Freemasonry from the Grand Lodge of England.
(Vatcher, in Caywood, Freemasonry and the Knights of Malta, AQC, v.83, p.91)
While the Sovereign, Catholic Order of Knights Hospitaller appears to have had grounds for objecting to freemasons aping their traditions, we find instead (Caywood, pp. 71/95), knights of the Sovereign Order defying Papal Bulls and edicts by practicing freemasonry on their island of Malta in the eighteenth century!? Virtually all the members of the
St. John’s Lodge of Secrecy and Harmony were knights of the Sovereign, Catholic Order, established under charter from the Grand Lodge of England. One of their members, Deputy Master Charles Abel de Loras, was even a friend and follower of the fiercely controversial freemasonic figure ‘Count’ Cagliostro, whom the Vatican deemed so dangerous that they lured him to Rome, where he was convicted of heresy and died in prison. When the Holy Inquisitor arrived to discipline the knights and close the lodge, rather than acquiesce, they continued their freemasonry surreptitiously. Paradoxically, Napoleon (who some say was at least a patron of freemasonry), finally caused the closure of their freemasonic lodge when he expelled the knights from Malta.
Here we are left with a conundrum: The only generality that can be drawn from this study is that the fraternities of Knights Templar and Hospitaller and their freemasonic emulators defy analysis. As with most fraternities, where one identifies a general rule, one can usually find exceptions, and, rather than an orderly network of relationships, more often than not, one finds a tangled web of contradictions. This situation is somewhat ironical in a fraternity where, among its mottoes, one finds, in the 33º,
Ordo ab Chao, meaning ‘Order out of Chaos’.
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