James of Molay was burnt to death in Paris on the evening of 18 March 1314. The one eyewitness account of the burning of Molay, written by an anonymous monk, says that he went to his death ‘with easy mind and will’. There is no contemporary reference to him uttering a curse, yet it has since been said that as the flames engulfed the Templars’ last Grand Master he cried out for vengeance and called on the king and Pope to appear with him before the tribunal of God within a year and a day. Less than five weeks later, on 20 April, Pope Clement V died of the long and painful illness that had afflicted him throughout his pontificate. And still within that same year King Philip IV died, on 29 November, afterfalling from a horse while hunting.
The supposed secret survival of the Templars through the centuries opened the way for agents of the order to take their revenge for the burning of James of Molay. With a sense of prophecy owing everything to hindsight, James of Molay was now remembered to have brought his curse down on the heads of the king and Pope. The downfall of the French royal house of Capet, and the humbling of the Catholic Church in France, would come with the French Revolution-brought about by a secret conspiracy controlled by the Templars working through the Freemasons. That anyway was the belief of some extreme conservative elements in France, among them Charles de Gassicour, the author of Le Tombeau de Jacques Molay, published in 1796. Describing the death by guillotine of Louis XVI, Gassicour has someone rise up and shout, ‘James of Molay, you are avenged!’-a hated Freemason, or a Templar, whose subversive organisation had overturned the established order. Gassicour also claimed that James of Molay had founded four lodges, one in Edinburgh; that the Templars/Freemasons were associated with the Assassins and the Old Man of the Mountain; that they supported Oliver Cromwell; and that they had stormed the Bastille.
Others added their voices to the story. For example in 1797 Abbe Augustin Barruel published Memoirs, his account of the French Revolution, which he helped explain by saying that Freemasonry had derived from the Templars after their suppression, when:
A certain number of guiity 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 m/?o destroyed their Order, and against ait reiigion which anathematised their dogmas. They made adepts, who shouid transmit from generation to generation the same hatred of the God of the Christians, and of Kings, and of Priests.
Addressing the Freemasons directly, he continued:
These mysteries have descended to you, and you continue to perpetuate their impiety, their vows, and their oaths. Such is your origin. The iapse of time and the change of manners have varied a part of your symbois and your frightfui systems; but the essence of them remains, the vows, the oaths, the hatred, and the conspiracies are the same.
A few years later Barruel added Jews to the conspiracy, seeing them as the real power behind the Templars and the Freemasons and the ultimate manipulators of European events-a conspiracy theory that culminated in the gas ovens of the Third Reich.
Barruel was in exile from revolutionary France and published hs Memoirs in London, where he was politic enough to thank the British government for granting him asylum and wrote that his claims of dangerous Freemason activities did not apply to the respectable Freemasons of Britain. The British government agreed. Worried about the virus of revolution from France, in 1799 it passed the Unlawful Societies Act, although this specifically excluded the Freemasons.
World History
