The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw an explosion of orders, degrees and societies, among them benevolent societies that survive to this day such as the Oddfellows and the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, or spiritual groups such as the Druids, given to pantheistic nature worship in imitation of Bronze Age Celtic Druids. By 1800 there were hundreds, maybe over a thousand, of these organisations in Britain, and like the Freemasons they gave themselves antique histories; the Oddfellows, for example, traced their spiritual origins back to the Jews at the time of their Babylonian exile in 586 BC. In addition to these organisations, there were other orders or degrees, about thirty in all, which claimed to be masonic, indeed were often operating unofficially within local lodges, among them the Knights Templar. Chivalry and mysticism were very much in fashion, and though at first both the English and Scottish Grand Lodges rejected the Knights Templar, saying they were a foreign corruption, in the age of Romanticism the fashion proved irresistible and eventually the Templars were accepted within British Freemasonry.
In 1843 the Order of the Knights Templar in Scotland published a Historical Notice of the Order, which was written by the Scottish masonic Templars themselves and gave an account of their origins:
It is agreed by all hands, even the French, that the Templars joined the standard of Robert the Bruce and fought in his cause until the issue of the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 securely placed him on the throne. That Monarch ms not ungrateful.
The account explains that after the suppression of the Knights Templar in France, local Scottish Templars gave their support to Robert the Bruce during his war of independence against the English, and that at the battle of Bannockburn on 24 June 1314, three months after the burning of James of Molay, a troop of Templars charged against the English at the decisive moment and gave the victory to the Scots. In gratitude, Robert the Bruce protected the Templars by assimilating them into a new order, the Freemasons.
None of this had been recorded by any Scottish chronicler at the time. It was entirely made up in the nineteenth century. The masonic Scottish Templars had done what masons always do: they invented a tradition, a connection with the past, and a very flattering one for Scots Freemasons. These inventions were never meant as factual history. This is explained by Robert Cooper, Freemason and curator at the Grand Lodge of Scotland in Edinburgh in his book The Rosslyn Hoax?:
There are a number of branches wthin Freemasonry. Each has its owi ‘story’, its owi traditional history, which underpins that particular part of the Masonic system...The Royal Arch Chapter is concerned with
The building of a new or second Temple, often referred to as ZerubbabeTs Temple. Another branch of Freemasonry has for its traditional history the story of Helena, wfe of Constantine, and her search for the place of Christ’s cmcifixion..AII branches of Freemasonry, therefore, have a traditional history’on which their ceremonies are based. As well as having considerable colour (the Temple at Jemsalem must have seemed very exotic to the stonemasons of Scotland), King Solomon’s Temple added a great deal of prestige to a group of honest working men... None of the traditional histories of any of the branches of Freemasonry are, or were, intended to be taken literally. Our forebears in all the Masonic Orders manufactured suitable ‘pasts’ for allegorical purposes. They did so with romantic notions at heart but understood that these histories manufactured by, and for, themselves were not literal truths.
But many people, both masons and non-masons, failed to separate fantasy from fact. For example, in his History of Free Masonry published in Edinburgh in 1859, Alexander Laurie, who was himself a Freemason, wrote, ‘It will be necessary to give some account of the Knight Templars, the fraternity of Freemasons, whose affluence and virtues aroused the envy of contemporaries, and whose unmerited and unhappy end must have frequently excited the compassion of posterity. To prove that the order of the Knight Templars was a branch of Free Masonry would be a useless Labour, as the fact has been invariably acknowledged by Free Masons themselves, and none have been more zealous to establish it than the enemies of their order.’
Evidence and proof were irrelevant to Laurie. He asserted that it was not necessary to prove that the medieval Order of the Knights Templar was an outgrowth of the Freemasons because Freemasons already knew it, as did the enemies of Freemasonry, people like the Abbe Barruel.
The myth of the Knights Templar was taking its modern shape. The medieval order had survived but in another form. The battle of Bannockburn was established as a central event in the myth. What was needed was a central place, and its invention began in 1982 with the publication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and has continued with other ‘alternative histories’ such as The Hiram Key (written by two Freemasons) and The Templar Revelation, not to mention The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s novelised synthesis of these pseudo-histories, which all worked to bring Rosslyn Chapel, south of Edinburgh, and its founding family the St Clairs into the myth.
The Sinclairs (as the St Clairs are known in English) were themselves Templars, and Rosslyn Chapel became a repository for the Templars’ treasure or their secrets, or for some powerful iconic object such as the embalmed head of Jesus Christ or the Ark of the Covenant orthe Holy Grail. Or so the story goes.
World History
