On 27 August 1717, two flamboyant and rakish young men took their seats in the Irish House of Lords, and their subsequent careers would reveal not only their frolics in the Hell Fire Clubs but their participation in Jacobite and Masonic affairs. Philip, future Duke of Wharton, was just nineteen years old, but the reputation of his late father, Thomas, 1st Marquis of Wharton, a staunch Whig and Hanoverian, made him welcome by the Anglo-Irish Protestants who dominated the Irish House of Lords. Little did they know that a year earlier he had made a vow of loyalty to James “III,” the Stuart Pretender, and was now keeping on the mask while he appeared publicly as a Whig. Wharton’s seat-mate in the Lords, the twenty-one year-old Richard Parsons, 1st Earl of Rosse, became his boon companion, and the two would later play important roles in Freemasonry in London and Dublin. Like Wharton, Rosse was a crypto-Jacobite, who publicly associated with the dominant Hanoverian Whigs. Among their admirers was the great Irish satirist, Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a disaffected Tory and suspected Jacobite, who scathingly criticized the British government and Protestant Ascendancy that governed and oppressed Ireland. The subsequent activities of the three men provide the background for the later convergence of Jacobite and Masonic interests in Spain in 1732-33, when an exiled rebel, Sir Charles Wogan, “the Irish Quixote,” wrote to Swift about his close collaboration with Wharton, Grand Master of Écossais Masonry in Europe, who had recently died in Spain.1
In 1717, despite his youth, Wharton made a positive impression by his active engagement and eloquent speeches in the Irish House of Lords.2 Though Swift considered his late father “the most universal villain I ever knew,” the earl had provided an outstanding education for his precocious son, who became widely read in classical literature and history, developed a prodigious memory, and excelled as a writer and orator.3 As a rebellious sixteen year-old, Philip had married Martha Holmes, daughter of a dismissed Jacobite military officer, which drove the earl to separate the couple and send his son to Geneva for Calvinist indoctrination.4 Fleeing his puritanical governor, Philip went to France, where under the influence of the Jacobite, John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar, he became an enthusiastic supporter of James “III.”5 Through Mar, who was a brilliant architect and Freemason, he may have learned about the role that Jacobite Masonry played in political intrigue and networking.6 James secretly made him Duke of Northumberland, and he and Mar then advised their impulsive recruit to return to England and appear publicly as a government supporter, which would allow him to privately solicit supporters and collect intelligence on the Hanoverians. In autumn 1716, he wrote from London to Mar, “I smile on the faces of the Whigs in order to cut their throats. I will always stand to what I have promised, and am ready to make one of twenty proclaim James in Cheapside.”7
In early August 1717, on Wharton’s way to Ireland, his travelling companion wrote that the high-spirited youth “did several things at the places where they laid &c in ye gayety of his heart which some think has well been let alone.”8 With his additional Irish title of Marquis of Catherlough, he was allowed to join the House of Lords, though underage. Over the next four months, he enjoyed the company of Rosse, his kindred spirit, who “shared a liking for drink and dissipation, an underlying Jacobitism, and a strong disregard for orthodox religion.”9 Though the Irish Masonic historian Chetwode Crawley described Rosse as “the most finished libertine” and “the wildest and most dissolute among the gallants of the Irish metropolis,” he admitted that his “high intellectual and social gifts lifted him above the level of his companions’ dull debauchery.”10 Later Irish historians qualified Crawley’s criticism of Rosse as based on “some contemporary gossip” and countered that “he was an outstanding wit and scholar,” who was “generous in his dealings with the world, and the protector and fosterer of artistic genius.”11 It seems likely that Swift knew Rosse at this time, and the earl later supported the Dean’s protests against English policies. Swift definitely got to know Wharton, whose wit and intelligence he greatly admired (almost amounting to “hero worship”).12
During one of the many meetings between Swift and Wharton, “the brilliant lad” recounted “several wild frolics in which he had taken part,” which led the fifty year-old Dean to respond: “You have had some capital frolics, my Lord, and let me recommend one to you. Take a frolic to be virtuous: take my word for it, that one will do you more honour than all the other frolics of your life.”13 Swift had been friendly with Lord Mar, before the latter’s exile, and he continued to respect him, which makes one wonder if Wharton revealed his confidential relationship with the Jacobite Mason.14 Swift had written about Scots-Irish Masonry in 1688 and would again in 1724.15 Wharton could also learn about Freemasonry from Rosse, whose family had long connections with the fraternity, and who would become Irish Grand Master in 1725.16 In December 1717, Wharton bid farewell to Rosse and sent a note to Swift: “I shall embark for England tomorrow,” and he invited the Dean to “favor me with your company” before his departure.17
Once in England, Wharton was wooed by the Whig ministry, which made him Duke of Wharton, but he continued his clandestine support of the Jacobites. In summer 1720, he made a return trip to Ireland to sell his Irish estates, and he spent some time with Swift, who had just angered the government by publishing The Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures (1720), a patriotic blast that was approved by Wharton.18 One wonders if he confided to Swift his own opposition work in London. He had become especially close to the Jacobite leader, Frances Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, an admired friend of Swift. In 1721 he helped in the secret organization of the developing Atterbury plot.19 Ironically, during the same period as he worked with this leading Anglican churchman, he served as president of the Hell Fire Club, in which forty aristocratic men and women “assumed the names of the patriarchs, prophets, and martyrs, and ridiculed at their meetings the Trinity and Mysteries of the Christian Religion.”20 Though the charges were probably exaggerated, a hypocritical George I banned it along with “all profligate societies” in April.
While it is possible that Wharton had earlier become a Mason in France or Ireland, he now made an audacious move to gain Jacobite influence in the government-supporting Grand Lodge of England.21 In late July 1721, he joined a lodge in St. Paul’s churchyard, whose gentleman members were all “Tories or even almost Jacobites,” and he publicly flaunted his membership by wearing his white leather apron while he walked home from the ceremony.22 By 24 June 1722, he had gathered enough Tory and Jacobite support in the fraternity to surprisingly win election to the Grand Mastership of the largely Hanoverian Grand Lodge, a move which produced alarm among the government loyalists. 23 In Ireland, Wharton’s election was published in the newspapers and described as unanimous, and Swift was undoubtedly aware of his protégé’s new role.24
While Wharton gained Jacobite influence in English Masonry, Mar determined to enhance the security and morale of Scottish Jacobite Masonry—at home and abroad. He sent to James a proposal for a new “Royall Military Order of Knighthood to be erected and confer’d by His Majesty or the Commander in Chife from him,” with the purpose of “Restoring Scotland to its ancient Military Spirit.”25 On 6 May 1722, James accepted the proposal and wrote that it should be called “the Restoration Order.” Edward Corp argues that this new chivalric order was Masonic in nature and that Mar served as its Grand Master.26 Assisting Mar on the proposal was Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Scottish convert to Catholicism, whom Mar would subsequently recommend to become governor-tutor to the young Prince Charles Edward Stuart (born December 1720). Chevalier Ramsay would later play an important role in Écossais Masonry.27
By spring 1722, Prime Minister Robert Walpole was receiving disturbing news about the progress of the Atterbury plot, which involved Mar in France; the Wogan brothers, Keith brothers, and Duke of Ormonde in Spain; and Swift’s friend, the Irish Anglican minister, George Kelly, in England.28 They determined to bring Irish troops from Spain and France to raise a rebellion in the British Isles. All of the planners allegedly had Masonic ties, which helped initially to maintain secrecy and security during the planning.29 However, the government interceptions of mail led to the issuance of arrest warrants in May for Kelly and in August for Atterbury, and though the plot was real, the ministry stretched the limits of legal evidence to convict them. Wharton’s bold and public defense of Atterbury won Swift’s admiration, and the Dean drafted a blistering satire, “Upon the horrid Plot discovered by Harlequin, the B[ishop] of R[ochester]s French Dog,” which was not published until 1735.
Wharton’s attacks upon the government prosecutions worried the loyalist Masons and provoked John, 2nd Duke of Montagu, the preceding Whig Grand Master, to summon a Grand Lodge meeting in January 1723 to “heal the breach of harmony” and to extract from Wharton a promise to be “true and faithful.”30 As James Anderson, Presbyterian minister and anti-Jacobite Scot, prepared an official history of the fraternity, Wharton was to be featured on the engraved frontispiece as he received the Grand Mastership from Montagu. But the disaffected Wharton and his supporters made a pre-emptive strike and anonymously published on 15 February a scatological satire on loyalist Masonry and on Charles Delafaye, Grand Lodge member and government intelligence chief, who undertook the decipherment of the correspondence between Atterbury, Mar, and Kelly.31
In The Free-Masons: An Hudibrastick Poem (1723), the Whartonians mocked the inaccurate deciphering (using a lame dog’s paw-print as evidence) and disingenuously defended the Jacobite Masons from charges of sedition:
Swift contributed to Wharton’s satirical campaign with a scatological pamphlet, Serious and Cleanly Meditations on a House of Office, advertised on 5 March 1723 as the Dean’s work by John Harding, Swift’s Jacobite friend, to be published in Dublin.33 Swift recognized that the government believed the plotters included several of his Irish friends, “and every Plot costs Ireland more than any plot can be worth.”34 Angered by Delafaye’s search for incriminating papers in Atterbury’s “Necessary House” (his toilet or close stool), Swift called for the public construction of more public toilets throughout London, so the Whig “Fertuosi” and their agents can then make timely searches “of Close Stools which reveal Plots and Conspiracies against the Government.”35 With gleeful jokes on flatulence and excrement, he portrayed a “Protocaccographer,” who boasts of his virtuoso standing as a Fellow of the Royal Society, an adept in “this noble art of Turd-conjuring.” We will return to this pamphlet, when Swift adds scornful references to Anderson’s Constitutions of the Freemasons (1723), in a revised second edition in London in 1726. While Wharton and Swift continued their mockery, the government became frustrated that they were unable to definitely prove the treason charge against Atterbury, so they banished him for life from Britain. On 18 June, Wharton accompanied him to the waterfront, where he dramatically handed the Bishop a sword engraved with the mottoes, “Draw me not without Reason” and “Put me not up without Honour.”36
During these perilous times, the Jacobites’ spirits were lifted by the publication of Female Fortitude, Exemplify’d in an Impartial Narrative of the Seizure, Escape, and Marriage of the Princess Clementina Sobieski (London, 1722), by Sir Charles Wogan, Irish exile now resident in Spain, who had successfully arranged the escape and marriage of the Polish princess to James III.37 Wogan, a Catholic friend of Alexander Pope, had taken his fifteen year-old brother, Nicholas, to join James Radcliffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater, in the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. The Wogans evidently joined Derwentwater’s fraternity, the Knights of Walton-le-Dale, a secret political society, whose surviving rituals reveal that “the mise en scene is Masonic.”38 Wogan described himself as the leader of “my little troop of Knights-errant,” and they were joined by a group of Northumberland operative masons, led by their ballad-making master mason.39 It seems certain that Wogan was also a Mason, but definite proof is lacking.
After the Jacobites’ defeat at Preston in 1716, the Wogans were captured and imprisoned in London, where Charles joined a fellow prisoner in issuing bantering and defiant poems, in the spirit of the seventeenth-century, royalist Cavaliers.40 He and William Tunstall, a Northumberland Catholic, exchanged poems with James Robson, the song-writing stonemason, held in prison in Preston.41 In a poem with Masonic resonance, Wogan identified himself with the crusaders in Israel and lamented: “If I with Captive Salem [Jerusalem] could forget/ My native Freedom, and my former State,/ With thee I’d sing, but not to sing too late.”42 The teenage Nicholas Wogan was reprieved because of the compassion he showed a wounded English soldier, and Charles made a daring escape; both subsequently fled to France. While mourning the execution of their Catholic martyr, Derwentwater, the Wogan brothers then worked with James Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormonde; George Keith, Earl Marischal; and the Earl of Mar, who all shared Masonic affiliation and participated in the Atterbury Plot.43
In 1723, the exiled Masons followed with great interest the defiant activities of Wharton, the most famous “brother” of his time. But his role in the Grand Lodge would soon be terminated. On 24 June, six days after Atterbury’s departure, Wharton campaigned for two Jacobite candidates for the office of sheriff in London, while “at the same time organizing his Masonic adherents for the struggle the same evening in Grand Lodge.”44 Though he accepted Francis Scott, the Scottish 5th Earl of Dalkeith, to succeed him as Grand Master, he was furious when it was announced that the Whig scientist, John Theophilus Desaguliers, would again serve as Deputy Grand Master. The appointment was ratified by only one vote, and Wharton challenged the accuracy of the division, a move which a loyalist deemed “unacceptable, unwarrantable, and irregular,” provoking Wharton and his supporters to storm out of the meeting. While the Whigs attacked him in England, the Irish patriots continued to admire him. On 8 July 1723, a Dublin newspaper reported that Wharton planned to set out for Ireland, “to distinguish himself in the Parliament,” but a riding accident prevented his journey. On 18 February 1724, John Harding published praise of the Duke, noting that “Wharton continues in great esteem with several of our chief citizens.”45
Wharton now used his new journal, The True Briton (1723-24), to scorn “the Ambition and Avarice of Evil Ministers,” who brand all “honest” critics of the government with the “odious names of Jacobites and Disaffected Persons.”46 He especially attacked Delafaye, who “perverted the whole scope” of the evidence against George and Dennis Kelly, Irish friends of Swift. The staunch Jacobite Mary Caesar, another friend of Swift, shared his admiration for Wharton’s energy and stamina, even after excessive drinking: “After sitting up all Night, [he] Lay Him self on the ground and Wrote a True Briton, sending it from thence to the Press and It came out that Day.”47 Swift was pleased to receive the full run of Wharton’s journal, as well as his speeches in defense of George Kelly.48 Kelly, in turn, would publish from his prison cell a fulsome dedication to Wharton, our “incomparable Orator,” in his anonymous translation of Jacques Morabin’s History of Cicero’s Banishment (1725), with veiled allusions to the persecution of Atterbury (“our English Cicero”).49
Perhaps encouraged by Wharton’s defiance, Swift set off a firestorm of Irish nationalism versus English imperialism by anonymously publishing The Drapier’s Letters (March to October 1724), to condemn the English imposition of inferior copper coins on Ireland, which he blamed on William Wood, the coiner, and Sir Isaac Newton, chief of the Mint. His blistering satire made him a popular hero in Ireland, and the more nationalistic Masons, including Rosse, supported the campaign of a man they considered a “brother.”50 Irritated further by James Anderson’s Whiggish Masonic history, Swift anonymously issued a rollicking burlesque, titled A Letter from the Grand Mistress of the Female Freemasons to Mr. Harding the Printer (Dublin, 1724), in which he challenged Anderson’s official, Anglo-centric Constitutions of the Free-Masons (1723), and mocked his mediocre Masonic song.51 Drawing on his own experiences in Dublin, where a lodge met at Trinity College in 1688, and among the Scots-Irish in Ulster in 1695-96, Swift revealed the “ancient” Cabalistic and chivalric themes of Stuart “Celtic” Masonry, themes which subsequently emerged in Écossais lodges on the Continent.52 In repeated comparisons between the Hebrew letters and the shape of the gallows, he warned obliquely about the danger that the dissident Masons faced from government surveillance. 53 Philip Crossle observes that Swift’s Letter from the Grand Mistress was a very popular pamphlet.54
Having abandoned the Grand Lodge, Wharton and his supporters organized a mock-Masonic fraternity, the Gormogons, which claimed Chinese origins and links with Rome. Scorning the loyalist officers Anderson and Desaguliers, the Gormogons complained of the prostitution of “modern” Masonry by drunks, illiterates, and mercenaries, which contrasted sadly with their own cultivation of arts and sciences and recognition of individual merit.55 They announced that a new Gormogon lodge would be opened “for regulating the Modern Abuses, which crept into the Ancient Fraternity of Free-Masons; where `tis desired, that all the old real Masons will be present.” Swift followed these developments, and in his Masonic letter praised the efforts of “the Chinese Sage” to develop an alternative Masonry.56
In June 1725, as the restless Wharton waited for orders from James to leave England and undertake diplomatic work in Europe, his former companion in Dublin, the Earl of Rosse, was elected Grand Master of the Irish Grand Lodge, where he acted cautiously while surrounded by Hanoverian loyalists. After he supported Swift’s anti-government campaign in The Drapier’s Letters, he was suspected of Jacobitism, charges reinforced a year later when on 10 June 1726, a Jacobite mob riotously celebrated the Pretender’s birthday. Rosse reportedly appeared in “Jacobite Dress” (white suit with white roses in his hair) and acted “Unmannerly” when questioned by an officer.57 His Whig opponents even claimed that he was killed in the confrontation. But, like Wharton, the ebullient and free-spirited Rosse remained popular within the Irish fraternity, and he would be re-elected Grand Master in 1730. Between his two known periods of tenure as Grand Master, when he may have continued in office, there was “a struggle between Jacobite and Hanoverian factions for control of the movement.”58 While Rosse served as Irish Grand Master, many of his exiled countrymen joined a new Jacobite lodge in Paris in 1725-26, led by Dominic O’Heguerty, expatriate Irish entrepreneur; Charles Radcliffe, brother of the executed 3rd Earl of Derwentwater; Sir Hector Mclean, Scottish Highlander and protégé of Mar.59 This was the beginning of what became known as Écossais Freemasonry.
In Ireland, it seems certain that Rosse and probably Swift were aware of the Parisian development, but it is unknown if they stayed in touch with Wharton. As suspected Jacobites, all three were cautious about government interception of their correspondence. By July 1725, the Duke was finally summoned to leave London in order to undertake negotiations at the Hapsburg court for a Spanish-Austrian alliance against England. He argued that the Irish regiments in French service were ready to leave France as soon as they were ordered by “their King” (James), and with the alliance’s support would successfully recapture Ireland and invade England.60 When negotiations stalled, Wharton briefly visited Rome and then secretly travelled to Spain, where he evidently joined the quasi-Masonic, mock chivalric Order of Toboso, founded by the Episcopalian Masons, the Earl Marischal Keith and Reverend Ezekiel Hamilton.61 The Order drew on Keith’s love of Spanish romances and Masonic rituals, while the initiates made toasts to “a fair meeting on the green”—i.e., the restoration of the Stuarts.62 Returning to Rome in February, Wharton described himself as “full of the Spirit of Knight Errantry,” while he emulates his “famous predecessor Don Quixot” and ruminates “on all my Books of Chivalry.”63 Though he did not meet Charles Wogan, now serving in the Spanish military, they shared similar Tobosan self-identifications. In April 1725, Wogan wrote from Madrid to the Stuart court: “My life has ever been a sort of Romance, and tis but fit in this country to follow in ye steppes of my renown’d predecessor, Don Quixote.”64
After arriving in Rome, Wharton was honored by James, who granted him the Order of the Garter on 5 March 1726 and then sent him back to Spain, where he was to work with Ormonde and James FitzJames Stuart, 2nd Duke of Liria, to gain Spanish support for an invasion of England. Like Wogan, Wharton urged the Spanish king to gain recruits from Ireland and to utilize the Irish regiments in Spanish service for the ambitious project. Thus, it is curious that on 13 May Wharton wrote from Madrid to John Stearne, the Irish Anglican Bishop of Clogher, a friend of Swift, who was accused of Jacobite sympathies.65 Wharton affirmed his duty to the Church of Ireland and lamented the “wild irreligious Sects” that arose chiefly “when there was “no King in our Israel (tho’ Oliver [Cromwell] acted as King).”66 He then made a provocative reference to “our common Friend honest Jonathan Swift.” At this time, “honest” was a code word for Jacobite loyalty.67 In January 1727, a Dublin newspaper reported that the Pretender planned to invade Ireland in the spring, and there was a dragnet of arrests of Irish volunteers on their way to Spain. In February, Swift’s friend and publisher, George Faulkner, published Wharton’s long letter to Stearne, with its reference to “honest Jonathan Swift,” certainly a risky move.68 Reinforcing these Spanish-Jacobite links with Swift, Charles Wogan sent copies of Swift’s works to the Stuart court, where James was eager to read Gulliver’s Travels (1726), especially because the Dean’s anonymous satire enraged George I and his Hanoverian ministry.69
Philip Crossle argues that in 1726, when Swift took the manuscript of Gulliver to London, he also revised and published The Grand Mystery, or Art of Meditating over an House of Offices, originally published in Dublin in 1723. 70 In the London edition, he added an attack upon Anderson’s Constitutions and the Whig fellows of the Royal Society who dominated loyalist Masonry: “I hereby propose…to publish a Work I have by me, in the same Volume, Paper and Letter, as the Constitutions of the Free-Masons was some time ago published; in which are laid down…all the Principles and Rules of this great Science”—i.e. Caccocraphy, or Turd-conjuring.71 Crossle observes that 1726 was a difficult time for Masonry in Ireland, with the press going silent on the subject, as certain Grand Lodge officers were active in prosecuting “Wild Geese,” recruits for the Irish brigades in Spain.72 It was probably not coincidental that Swift did not include the Masonic reference in the Dublin edition of 1726, for he was acquainted with Thomas Griffith, a loyalist Mason, who instigated the arrests of twenty-four Irish “boys” headed to Spain, while secretly opening Swift’s mail.73
Though the Irish press did not cover local Masonry in 1726, they continued to report Wharton’s activities with the Irish regiments in Spain, where he was viewed as a valuable agent for the Stuart cause, despite his often reckless and irreverent behavior. However, the relatively positive image of the Duke among Irish Protestants, subsequently changed. In July 1726, three months after the death of his first, estranged wife in London, he determined to marry Teresa O’Beirne, daughter of a deceased Irish officer and lady-in-waiting to the Spanish Queen, who tried to dissuade the infatuated couple from an improvident marriage. In order to gain her royal consent, Wharton determined to convert to Catholicism and even underwent interrogation by an Inquisitor about his sincerity in abandoning Protestantism. In Dublin, Faulkner reported positively his plan to marry “an Irish lady,” and Wharton believed his conversion would strengthen his status with the Irish troops.74 However, his surprising move dismayed many of his former supporters.
In April 1726, the Irish Anglican priest, Ezekiel Hamilton, Grand Master of the Order of Toboso, wrote to Rome to praise Wharton, who has “so great vivacity and sprightliness of wit mix’d with so clear and sound a judgment as is very rarely to be met with. His talents are entirely devoted to the service of the King.”75 In July, after Wharton’s conversion, an angry Hamilton worried that he was too reckless to be trusted with any important role, and warned the Stuart court that the Duke was determined to become tutor to Prince Charles Edward Stuart.76 In 1724, Wharton had supported the appointment of Chevalier Ramsay as tutor, but he wryly remarked that he hoped Ramsay “might inoculate the royal charge with a taste for pleasurable Vice.” 77 Because of Ramsay’s heterodox and ecumenical views, he was removed from his position after eleven months. Now, in July 1726, Hamilton feared that the newly converted Wharton had reverted to his old ways, and “as an illustrious member of the Hell-Fire Club,” he “will attempt to Bamboozle or Whartonize the King,” and change “the mild and merciful temper of the Stuarts into that of a Caligula or Nero.”78 Even the Catholic James disapproved, while the anti-Catholic Bishop Atterbury (later Prelate of Toboso) viewed it as a personal betrayal and disaster. It is unknown how Swift reacted to the Duke’s conversion, but the Dean’s opponents in Ireland reacted gleefully and published A Vindication of the Duke of Wharton’s Answer to the Quaker’s Letter (Dublin, 1726), mocking his turn to the Catholic church as just another Babylonish whore, fit for “a wild peer,/ So known for rakish tricks,” who now is ready to “kiss a crucifix.”79 For the once blasphemous Wharton, his “penance in Madrid” will lead to his martyrdom at the Tyburn gallows.
Wharton and his bride made a brief visit to Bologna, where he presented to James a plan to gain Spanish support for an invasion of Britain and the subsequent return of Gibraltar to Spain.80 He was advised to go back to Spain, and in spring 1727 Irish newspapers reported that there was a plot to send James and his sons to Ireland or Scotland, with the assistance of the King of Spain and Austrian Emperor.81 Perhaps inspired by this alleged plot, Wharton volunteered to lead the Irish troops to join the Spanish army in the planned siege of English-occupied Gibraltar.82 Swift and Rosse must have been aware of his role, because the Dublin press gave his participation full coverage.83 While the siege dragged on, Wharton became so bored and restless that in May 1727 he walked straight up to the walls of the British fortifications, where he flaunted his Garter-riband and shouted, “Long live the Pretender,” accompanied by “huzzahs” and much profanity. The startled British soldiers held their fire, but eventually he was struck by a piece of shell in his foot.
On Wharton’s return to Madrid, the King praised his bravery and appointed him Colonel of the Irish regiment, Hibernia, commanded by the Marquis de Castelar. His brash action earned him plaudits from the Irish exiles, but in Dublin and London his actions at Gibraltar were mocked by loyalists in a lengthy, bawdy poem, A Spanish Fart, published as a broadside in 1727. Drawing on the popularity of Swift’s jocular pamphlet, The Benefit of Farting Explained. Wrote in Spanish by Don Fart-Inhands Puff-indorst (1722; rpt. 1727), the anti-Jacobite poet ridiculed the ineffective Philip Wharton for his “toe” wound and, more stridently, the bellicose Spanish King for daring to challenge George I’s possession of “Gibraltor”:
When Philip’s “dainties” were not royal enough for the King, he determined to plunder the British fortress, but could not get in, “Because the famous Gibraltor,/ Belongs to George our King.” He then served a large dish of cabbage, “which fill’d their Guts with Wind”:
The poet lamented that many Irish boys (recruits) were blown across the sea to Spain by the King’s fart, but “He will be glad,/ With his Bum to make a Lease,/ That he shall never Fart again,/ But when it Farts a Peace.” In conclusion, the increasingly John-Bullish poet turned the flatulence-theme back on the King: “A Fart for those that’s Britain’s Foes/ We ne’er will value Spain.” Though it may have seemed feckless, Philip’s reckless bravado would eventually lead to English government charges of treason against him.
During the siege, Wharton could have learned that a Masonic lodge had been formed among English soldiers in the garrison at Gibraltar, and it received recognition by the Hanoverian Duke of Richmond on 10 May 1727.85 Perhaps as a countermove, Wharton founded in late 1727 or early 1728 a lodge in Madrid, which met in his apartment in a French hotel popular with exiled Stuart sympathizers.86 Two of his co-founders, Eldridge Dinsdale and Andrew Galloway, were Irish Jacobites. Galloway was a ship captain who attempted to transport Irish and Scottish recruits from Spain to England during the Atterbury Plot. By February they were joined by the hydraulic engineer Charles de Labelye, a Swiss Huguenot, who was made Master of the lodge. Labelye had worked closely with Desaguliers in London and joined a loyalist lodge. Employed by the British navy, he worked on engineering projects in Spain. Ric Berman speculates that he was instructed by Delafaye and Desaguliers “to seek out Wharton” and to gather intelligence on his activities and those of his Irish Jacobite colleagues.87
Labelye’s timing was propitious, for the death of George I in June 1727 led many Tories and Jacobites to hope for a more tolerant and inclusive reign under George II, who reportedly hated his father and Prime Minister Walpole. Rumors circulated that Wharton would make his peace with the government in order to recover his vast estates. Motivated by such hopes, on 15 February 1728 Wharton directed the lodge officers in Madrid to write to the Grand Lodge in London to praise his actions as “a second Deputy” to Henry Hare, 3rd Baron Colerane, current English Grand Master. Colerane had inherited an Irish peerage, and Wharton may have been aware of his private Tory sympathies, which emerged in 1730 when he became an anti-Walpolean M.P.88 The officers claimed that Wharton sent all the lodge proceedings with a request to be recognized as a regularly constituted lodge. When Labelye returned to London in November, he was welcomed as Master of the Madrid lodge.89 But he would later claim that the charter requested by Wharton was irregular.
Meanwhile, in June 1727, Swift had planned to visit France, where Chevalier Ramsay hoped to welcome him.90 But George I’s death changed his plans, and he now shared with Wharton a vague hope for an accommodation with the new regime. It was during his visit to London (April to September) that he reportedly attended a lodge (along with Pope).91 However, Walpole eventually won over George II, and a disappointed Swift returned to Ireland, where he gained an opportunity to learn about recent Masonic and Jacobite developments in Spain. In June 1728, he began an eight-month visit to Ulster, where he stayed at Market Hill, Armagh, with Sir Arthur Acheson, an Episcopalian Scot, Freemason, and “professed Jacobite.”92 While preoccupied with plans for building his own house, to be named Drapier’s Hill, Swift often talked with local masons, and he adopted a Masonic phrase, taken from Irish references to a royal arch: “And let the Cement of the Brotherhood be so well preserv’d, that the whole Body may remain as a well-built Arch.”93 The Royal Arch degree became important in local Irish and Continental Écossais lodges.
Acheson and Swift spent much time with their neighbors, Robert and Henry Leslie, former Jacobite exiles who had returned from Spain to Ireland.94 In 1717 Robert (“Robin”) had earned Mar’s amused admiration for his “stirring spirit,” which apparently influenced Mar to consider using the Irish troops in Spain as part of the developing Swedish-Jacobite plot.95 In 1718 Robert collaborated in Madrid with his confidant, Charles Wogan, who fully supported his audacious plan for an Ulster rising, which angered the cautious James, who took Wogan “to task,” because he thought Robin both insolent and mad.96 In 1725 Robert revealed to Thomas Carte important details about the aborted Swedish-Jacobite plot, which had involved Swift’s good friend, the Swedish Ambassador Carl Gyllenborg, and his hero the Swedish king, Charles XII. 97 Now in Armagh, Swift enjoyed teasing the notoriously talkative Robin about his romantic and flamboyant personality (he is “doom’d to be a beau for life”).98
Henry (Harry), an excellent scholar and essayist, had attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the Spanish army, but lost his commission when Protestants were prohibited from serving. He returned to Ulster with his Spanish wife, whom Swift praised as Mrs. Leslie, the “Goody Julia.” He enjoyed conversing with Swift about Don Quixote and the works of Cervantes, which raises the question of whether he was associated with the Order of Toboso in Spain.99 The Dean shared with “Grave Harry” an interest in construction projects, which involved conversations with local stonemasons. In April 1729, Chevalier Ramsay—the eminent Jacobite Mason—wrote from London to Swift: “I could not let our Common friend Mr Lesley go back to Ireland” without seizing the opportunity to thank Swift for his zealous promotion of Ramsay’s Masonic novel, The Travels of Cyrus.100 He supplied Leslie with one hundred copies of proposals for the revised edition of Cyrus, in order to solicit subscribers in Ireland.
The Leslie brothers maintained contact with their old colleagues in Spain, and they were almost certainly aware of Wharton’s activities there, for the Irish press “retained a particular (almost fanatical) preoccupation” with him and Ormonde: “It seethed with insinuations of Jacobite intrigues and kept the activities of `the Pretender’” and his Irish-Spanish “cohorts firmly in the public domain.”101 When Swift returned to Armagh in summer 1730, he stayed with Henry Leslie, and he wrote “The Revolution at Market Hill,” a “carnivalesque version of a Jacobite rebellion,” with links to Spain.102 Swift portrayed himself, Acheson, and Henry as political allies:
Though the poem was “a playful burlesque,” about his and Henry’s position as rent-paying tenants on Acheson’s estate, Swift rather cruelly minimized his landlord’s genuine political courage, which had led to Acheson’s return to Ulster:
With his companion Henry, former Jacobite-Spanish officer who indeed “ventured to be hang’d,” Swift then hinted dangerously at rebellion:
In the meantime, in the “distant regions” to the south, Wharton continued to work on his plan to send Irish troops from Spain to invade Britain. He had the full support of the Duke of Ripperda, Spanish foreign minister, but the latter’s scandalous fall led to the collapse of their ambitious project. Though Wharton did not know Wogan at this time, the Irish soldier shared in the disappointment, for he had heartily supported the project. A frustrated Wharton now asked for a leave of absence from his regiment and departed precipitously for Italy, where he met with the Pretender at Parma in May 1728.104 However, James worried about his impulsive behavior and his own lack of funds to support the young couple. He thus advised Wharton to return to England and try to restore his fortune, which would make him even more useful to the Jacobite cause. This context perhaps explains Wharton’s next moves, which have long puzzled historians.
Evidently with James’s connivance, he travelled to Paris, where in July he appealed to Ambassador Horatio Walpole to accept his rejection of the Jacobite cause and to assist his return to London. He visited Atterbury and claimed that he “was no Catholic” and laughed that “We might as well think he was a Turk,” but the suspicious Bishop no longer trusted him.105 He then wrote James about his meeting with Walpole and about “the steps I have taken to avoid attainder pursuant to your Majesty’s directions,” but this “has drawn upon me ill opinion”; nevertheless, “I scorn the venom of their impotent spleen.”106 He begged James to send word to his friends in England that he was still in good standing with him.
In July the Dublin newspapers reported that a bill of indictment for high treason was presented against the Duke of Wharton, followed by long paragraphs about his fight against the English garrison at Gibraltar and the sequestration of his estate.107 In August, an angry Wharton moved to Rouen, where he and the exiled Jacobite printer, Nathaniel Mist, planned to print a manifesto “in favour of the Pretender,” but it was seized and prohibited.108 Mist had recently published part of Swift’s anti-government tract, A Short View of the State of Ireland, and Swift worried that the publication led to the printer’s prosecution.109 Wharton now encouraged Mist to issue inflammatory propaganda against the Hanoverian regime in England, including the Duke’s famous Persian Letter (1728), in which he praised James III and denigrated the Georges I and II, using code-names employed earlier by the mock-Masonic Gormogons. The letter created a sensation in Britain and was soon sold out, while hand-written copies were issued at half-a-guinea apiece. Swift was undoubtedly aware of Wharton’s publication, for the Dublin newspapers gave it full coverage.
Rebuffed by Ambassador Walpole and Bishop Atterbury, Wharton determined to enhance his reputation with the non-English Jacobites in France, and he worked on plans for a rising in Ireland, where the old Swiftian agitation against Wood’s half-pence had re-emerged, “even among the Presbyterians in Ulster.”110 At Market Hill, Swift and Acheson protested the lack of silver coinage which created great hardship during a time of famine. Swift wrote that the poor “must pay ten pence or a shilling for changing that piece,” a counterfeit halfpence, “into silver to some huckstering fellow who follows the trade.”111 Pamphlets appeared in praise of “our celebrated Drapier,” and when Swift returned to Dublin, celebratory bonfires were lighted in his honor.112 In this context, it is not surprising that some Irish Jacobites assured the Pretender of “Dean Swift’s eagerness to see him and his zeal in satirizing the [Whig] government.”113
Having run deep in debt in Rouen, Wharton returned to Paris, where he worked with the Irish officer, Colonel Daniel O’Brien, an Écossais Mason and James’s chief agent in France, who resented Atterbury’s Anglo-centric attitudes and supported the Irish and Scottish Jacobites whom the irascible Bishop had alienated. O’Brien especially wanted to reconcile Wharton with Mar, who in 1723 had been removed from his position as James’s secretary of state because of Atterbury’s accusation (inaccurate) that he was a double agent.114 Mar had long worried about the Bishop’s anti-Catholic, anti-Irish prejudices, and in 1726 he wrote to his son that James had earlier offered him an Irish peerage, and it now appears,
He advised his son, in the event of a Restoration, to reside in Ireland rather than England, “it agreeing more with the interest of yr own country.” In the same letter, Mar advised his son to get Chevalier Ramsay to help arrange his papers, “because of the trust I have in him, founded on the experience of his uprightness and honesty.”116
Thus, in December 1728, O’Brien determined to bring together Mar and Wharton, whom he thought of as Irish. He chose James, 6th Lord Cranstoun, a Scottish friend of Mar and future Grand Master in England, to arrange the meeting. Cranstoun had recently spent some months in Bologna, where James was residing and where, according to Baron Stosch, the British-paid spy, he shocked all well-intentioned Englishmen by throwing himself into the arms of the Pretender for the love of a Jacobite’s daughter.117 Wharton, who was stung by Atterbury’s criticism of his drinking, had recently become a relative tee-totaller, and he admitted to James that wine had often “robbed my brains of common sense.”118 O’Brien reported that Wharton had “completely quit drinking,” but by abstinence, the Duke meant that he limited himself to “no more than a pint of burgundy at dinner and a bottle at supper.” Though it is unknown what Wharton and Mar discussed, the Duke piously accused his former mentor of becoming so drunk he had to be carried home.119 At this time, Mar and Ramsay were living together on the Rue de Boucheries, meeting place of the Jacobite lodge, and Wharton may have met Ramsay, for he acquired the Chevalier’s Jacobite-Masonic novella, The Travels of Cyrus (1727), and his earlier works on Fenelon.120 Working with O’Brien, they possibly enabled Wharton’s election as Grand Master of the Écossais system, a move kept so secret that it was unknown in England.121 It was a position he would hold until his death in 1731.
As Wharton worked on his Irish invasion plans, which would include his Hibernia regiment in Spain (now at war with England), the Jacobite Masons in London achieved a coup in December 1728, when the Irish brother, James King, 4th Baron Kingston, was elected Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of England. A year earlier, O’Brien wrote James that King fils and his father, the Catholic 3rd Baron, were in Paris, where Kingston père vowed his loyalty to the Stuart cause.122 After his father’s death in February 1728, the new 4th Baron Kingston, converted to the Anglican church, took the oaths of allegiance, and joined the English house of Lords. He now “kept on the mask,” while he built enough Jacobite-Tory and opposition Whig support to be elected Grand Master.123 At an important lodge meeting, with “the Master of the Lodge at Madrid” (Labelye) present, a Prologue written by Kingston was read, in which he affirmed Masonic loyalty to the government but acknowledged the existence of fraternal bonds between opposing soldiers (i.e., his Irish countrymen fighting with Spanish forces against England).124 He then worked toward the election of the crypto-Jacobite Catholic, Thomas Howard, 8th Duke of Norfolk, as his successor in 1729 (a point that would become important for Ramsay when he joined a London lodge in 1729-30).125
These Masonic developments must have been welcome by Wharton who, despite his eminence in the Écossais fraternity, was sinking under his dissipation and debts. His position became more perilous when the British government outlawed him for treason in April 1729. Often ill and depressed, he even considered taking monastic vows and thus entered a monastery outside of Paris. The monks looked upon him as “a Devotee: He talk’d so well upon all Points of Religion, that the pious Fathers held him with admiration.”126 In the convent, he studied the works of Ramsay and the Chevalier’s late spiritual mentor, Archbishop Fenelon, and began a poetic translation of the latter’s Telemachus. But his repentance did not last long and, rejoining his wife, he faced the necessity of returning to Spain—a return that seemed to him “as if I were doomed to be buried alive.”127
However, after his arrival in Spain in May, his spirits recovered, when he learned from his new friend, Sir Charles Wogan, about the Wogan brothers’ ambitious plan to send a Spanish expeditionary force to Ireland to support an invasion of England. Wogan had recently written James that he learned from “gentlemen of good sense lately returned from Ireland” that the Irish Catholics were ready to rise and that even the Protestant converts “would shake off the yoke from their consciences” by embracing the Jacobite cause.128 Did he include Lord Kingston, current Grand Master in England, among those converts who would break their yokes? Kingston had many Masonic supporters in Munster, where Wogan argued the expeditionary force should land, and most of those Masons privately harbored Tory and Jacobite sentiments.129 One wonders if Lord Rosse, Wharton’s former boon companion, shared those sentiments when he returned from London to Dublin in May 1729.130
Supported by the nationalistic Masons, Rosse was re-elected Grand Master in Ireland in June 1730, and in March 1731, he inherited from his eccentric Jacobite grandmother “near a Million of Money,” which news was received “to the general joy of the Citizens, that Nobleman having been formerly one of their greatest benefactors.”131 Rosse was succeeded as Grand Master by Lord Kingston in 1731 and by Nicholas, 5th Viscount Netterville in 1732, a cousin of Rosse and former Catholic, who was similarly suspected of Jacobite sympathies.132 Taking advantage of his new affluence, Rosse travelled for several years on the Continent, but it is unknown if he contacted any Irish Masonic brothers while abroad. It would be interesting to learn if he communicated with his old friend Wharton, as two former Grand Masters of England and Ireland.
The English government must have worried about the increasing Jacobite influence on Masonry in Ireland and Spain, which perhaps precipitated Labelye’s return to Madrid, where in March 1729 he still functioned as Master of the lodge. He apparently determined to distance it from Wharton and the Irish Jacobites, for he “stood up and represented that his Lodge had never been regularly constituted” by the Grand Lodge of England and thus requested a new charter, which he received.133 In the same month, the military lodge at Gibraltar was recognized by London as “regular.”134 Once back in London, Labelye attended loyalist lodges and worked on engineering projects with Desaguliers, Wharton’s former bête noire.
Back in Spain, the now-impoverished Wharton became the confidant of Wogan, and the Irish Quixote’s vision of a Spanish landing in Ireland evidently stirred the Duke, who straightened up, became more sober, and worked diligently with his Irish regiment. The two may have shared Écossais bonds, for Wogan seemed to hint at his fraternal affiliation when he wrote Swift that “All men in their own interior take themselves to be, at least, upon a level” (a well-known Masonic phrase).135 It is unknown if the two utilized their Masonic connections in the process, but Wharton’s Irish soldiers must have known of his previous Masonic role in Madrid and current prestigious position as the Écossais Grand Master in France. AsThomas O’Connor observes, “Already in the 1730s, Irish Catholics in Iberia had enthusiastically embraced Freemasonry.”136
In March 1731, the foreign minister Newcastle, a Hanoverian Mason, instructed his loyalist “brother,” Ambassador Waldegrave in Paris, to “take notice whether the Irish regiments are ordered to the coasts nearest to England.”137 Unaware of this surveillance, Wogan in April wrote to the Stuart court that “at home [in Ireland] they long for us,” but we cannot go to them until the European leaders “give us a lift.”138 Except in Spain, the other courts use “a thousand Caballs and idle Treaties” to delay the inevitable, but “the ferment is too strong and the demands too great to be satisfied without war.” As they drilled their troops and waited impatiently for action, Wogan and Wharton took solace in their shared love of literature and admiration of their hero, Jonathan Swift. The only surviving evidence of their collaboration in Spain is found in the unpublished papers that Wogan sent to Swift after Wharton’s death in 1731.139
While the Duke of Ormonde, Wharton’s Masonic brother, looked after Teresa in Madrid, Wharton spent most of his time in Lerida with his Irish regiment and with Wogan. In consultation with the Irish officer, Wharton worked steadily at night on a versified tragedy based on the life of Mary Queen of Scots, first of the Stuart martyrs. While he suffered bouts of ill health, he managed to finish several scenes and persuaded his old friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to write the epilogue. He sketched out a plan to write “A History of My Times,” and completed a first, well-written section, covering the years up to 1714. The Jacobite historian Thomas Carte obtained the manuscript and noted that Wharton observed that both political parties hated him, so he could now be objective as a historian.140 Despite their relative isolation in Spain, Wharton and Wogan kept up with literary and political developments in London and Dublin, and they encouraged each other’s defiance of the current Whig cultural establishment.
Wogan defended not only Wharton but Bolingbroke in “An Answer short and pithy to some hireling Poetasters, Authors of the late Pieces in Doggerell and Heroick, Viz; The Petitition of the Duke of Wharton , and the Epistle of the Lord Bolingbroke to his Grace. In Imitation of Lord Rochester’s sketch upon Rhimers in General.”141 He was responding to The Humble Petition of His Grace Ph---p D. of Wh---n to a Great Man, published in London on November 1730 and subsequently in Dublin, with Sir Robert Walpole identified in the Irish title. The anonymous “hireling Poetaster” attacked Wharton as a political opportunist and drunken rake, who hypocritically changed religions but was no more converted to Catholicism “than Pigs were by St. Anthony.”142 He accused Wharton of trying to gain Walpole’s support by promising to reveal “useful Secrets” and provide “a List of Persons disaffected.”
The two exiles were especially angered by An Epistle from the Lord Bo----ke to the Duke of W---n, published in May 1730 by another of Walpole’s “hirelings” (probably William Arnall). The author pretended to be Bolingbroke, who advised Wharton to continue their treasonous and Jacobite activities, which he linked with Charles Radcliffe’s rebellious troops and Swift’s falsehoods.143 Wogan countered the Hanoverian propaganda and attacks upon Wharton by referring to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels:
After describing other cowardly, hypocritical attacks, he concluded, “if you have seen all this, to crown the Farce,/ you and your Pay-master, come kiss my A-se.”
Though it may seem surprising that Wogan would praise the reckless Wharton as a paragon of virtue, he was then collaborating closely with the Duke on his historical and religious writings, and he believed that Wharton was sincere in his Catholic conversion and effort at personal reformation. Some of Wogan’s most eloquent writings were his poetical commentaries on the seven penitential psalms, in which he seemed to target Wharton’s state of physical deterioration and spiritual yearning (a yearning vouched for by various monks who counselled the Duke, both in France and Spain). In “A Comment on the 37th Psalm,” Wogan introduced his theme of repentance and salvation and described a Wharton-like figure, to whom an instructive God has “blasted all the Beauty of this clay,/ that wrapps my soul, wither’d of all its Health,/ late so robust for sin.” The penitent cries out to God to “Behold my troubled Heart and all my Limbs/ Spoyl’d of their wonted Vigour,” while his recent friends and kinsmen “frown upon me, nor frequent my Door,” but to “vex my soul/ With bitter curses and opprobrious Taunts.” Even worse are his former “Flatt’ers (Parasites and Knaves),/ Friends once in shew, Adorers of my Pow’r,/ That fawn’d on me in Crowds.”
In Écossais Masonic rituals, the initiate’s gradual spiritual regeneration was expressed in terms of rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem, and Wharton was certainly familiar with these themes. Thus, in “A Comment on the 50th Psalm,” Wogan portrayed the repentant sinner “in true Remorse/ mourning its sins, and humbled in the dust,” who cries out:
Wharton appreciated Wogan’s effort to reform and rehabilitate him, both spiritually and physically, and he wrote a poetic tribute to the Irish soldier’s literary talent, religious faith, and heroic accomplishments. In “To MY FRIEND SIR CHARLES WOGAN, BARONET, on his excellent Poeticall Comment on the Seaven PENITENTIAL PSALMS,” he described him, “With thoughts sublime of true Devotion fired,/ YOU sing those Themes, which GOD alone inspired.” He agreed with Wogan’s criticism of the trivial themes and petty rivalries of so much English poetry and called upon “BRITONS! Henceforth, in works of EPICK Height,” aim instead for the Sublime and Great Resolves. He then concluded with praise of his new and valued relationship with Wogan:
That Wharton’s poem was bound with Wogan’s commentaries on the Psalms means that they were in the packet sent to Swift, who had earlier wryly hoped that “the brilliant lad” would take his “Advice of fancying to have Virtue.”144
Despite his new-found sobriety, Wharton’s years of excess took their toll, and in spring 1731, his weakened body was taken into a Franciscan convent in Poblet, where he wrote The Fear of Death. An Ode, which was later sent from Spain and published in London in 1739. The dying Duke described his “lab’ring Frame,” which “dire Convulsions rend,” but he rejected “the threat’nd Terrours of death’s reign.” To die is “but to slumber into Immortality,” leaving behind “Seditious Tumults,” the “Feuds” of zealots, and “Debated Empires.” According to the monks, he made a very penitent and Christian end, which came on 31 May 1731. He had signed his will, Philip James Wharton, “the second forename presumably added to indicate his Jacobitism.”145 According to a monastery report, Wharton left behind two trunks of papers, but it is unknown if they survived.146
In London the faithful Jacobite Mary Caesar, friend and correspondent of Swift, mourned Wharton’s loss:
Though Alexander Pope was close to the Caesars, he could not resist some malice, for he had earlier been jealous of Wharton in a romantic competition, and he wrote, “Wharton, the scorn and wonder of our days,/ Whose ruling Passion was the Lust of Praise.”148 He further mocked the Duke’s conversion to Catholicism: “Then turns repentant, and his God adores/ With the same spirit that he drinks and whores.”
In The Life and Writings of Philip Late Duke of Wharton (London, 1731), an English acquaintance of the Duke praised him for “Extensiveness of Wit, Liveliness of Imagination, all the Graces of a most persuasive Oratory, and an exceeding Frankness of Temper and Good Nature.”149 However, his turn to Jacobitism and conversion to Catholicism could not be excused, for he should have remained “an honour to his Country,” i.e., Protestant England. None of his English critics recognized Wharton’s popularity and respect among the Irish exiles in Spain, who did not agree with the current image of him as a drunken and cowardly wastrel. Wogan’s high estimation of the former Hell Fire clubber certainly supplies a new perspective on his last years. It is unknown how Swift reacted to Wharton’s death, which was fully covered in the Dublin newspapers.150
Swift’s close friend and publisher, George Faulkner, had reported Wharton’s activities and Masonic affairs in Ireland and England, and he was allegedly a Mason himself.151 Thus, Swift had access to the increasing divergence of the Irish Grand Lodge from its English counterpart, mainly on political grounds. The election of Kingston and other former Catholics and suspected Jacobites to high office was resented and resisted by prominent Whig Masons, such as Joshua, 2nd Viscount Allen, and Sir Thomas Prendergast, whom Swift despised and attacked in bitter poems, with Masonic references.152 It was in this context that in December 1731 Faulkner reprinted the Dean’s defense of the “Celtic” Masonry that was the source of the developing Écossais system, recently led by Wharton. In A Letter from the Grand Mistress of the Female Freemasons, to George Faulkner, Printer, the publisher replaced the name of the original printer, John Harding, with his own. Though he maintained the anonymity of the author, he later allowed his London agents to identify the recently deceased Swift and include the work in Miscellanies of Dr. Swift (London, 1746), volume XI. In the same volume (18-21 December 1731) that Faulkner advertised publication of Swift’s Masonic letter, he reported a Masonic meeting in Dublin, called by the then Deputy Grand Master, Viscount Netterville.153
On 14 December 1731, Faulkner reported in his Dublin Journal the recent initiation of Prime Minister Walpole in an occasional lodge at Houghton, his ostenstatious “great house” in Norfolk, attended by the Foreign Minister Newcastle and other prominent Whigs. Walpole’s ally, the new Grand Master, Thomas Coke, Lord Lovell, gave the third degree to Francis Stephen, Duke of Lorraine, whom they hoped to win to the Hanoverian side.154 They were probably aware that the Duke’s late father had not only welcomed James III but many Irish Jacobites to his court.155 Swift’s arch-enemy Delafaye arranged much of Lorraine’s visit, and the Walpoleans’ blatant, widely-publicized Masonic ploy may have angered Swift so much that he wrote a new attack upon the Whigs’ manipulation of English Masonry. In March 1732, he issued An Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions, and Enormities in the City of Dublin, published by Faulkner. Ridiculing “the absurdity of some of the suspicions entertained by the Court against Tories and Jacobites,” Swift comically interpreted the various cries of street vendors as political codes.156 Certain female vendors were employed by government emissaries, to cry out “buy my fresh places” (plaices, a type of fish), while they had a certain sign, “somewhat resembling that of the free-masons,” which “the purchasers of places” (government jobs) knew well enough. One wonders if Wogan, who followed all of Swift’s publications, received this pamphlet.
While Walpole and Delafaye implemented their Masonic agenda, Swift was so depressed that he drafted “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” in which he raged against the corrupt politicians who had ruined not only Ireland but England:
He had vowed to write no more “state scribble,” but In May 1732 he was surprised to receive a politically dangerous, anonymous letter from Spain. It was enclosed in a green velvet bag which included more writings in prose and verse, along with a cask of fine Spanish wine. This letter from Sir Charles Wogan does not survive, but Swift’s reply on 2 August 1732 revealed his intense interest in the author, whose identity he was determined to learn. It was apparently Robert Leslie, Wogan’s old friend, who identified the author.158 Swift was amazed to learn that the voluminous writings in English and Latin had come from an exiled Irish soldier:
Swift and Wogan then engaged in a lively debate about the virtues and failings of English writers and historians, and the latter’s revelation of his positive relationship with Wharton took place within this context. Like Wharton, who spoke of the relation of Mentor and Telemachus in the works of Fenelon and Ramsay, Wogan gave the name Mentor to Swift. He explained that “Uranius,” was his better angel or tutelary spirit, whom he consulted when in meditation or self-examination:
Wogan assured Swift that he has “enter’d into inviolable Articles with my self to conceal nothing from you, that may be told with safety to us both.” It is suggestive that an attainted Jacobite believed that Swift shared equally his vulnerability to government prosecution. Unfortunately for posterity, Uranius advised Wogan to burn his many comical, rhymed, and political writings, before he set off for a military campaign in Italy. In the event of his capture or death, they could provide information dangerous to the Jacobite cause.
In March 1733, Swift received a fifty-page letter from Wogan, which apparently influenced the Dean’s increasing hostility to the English government and Whiggish Presbyterians and, more importantly, sympathy for the Irish Catholics. With his incognito now broken, Wogan gave Swift permission to share his writings but only with trustworthy, kindred spirits, because “the arms of whiggism are extremely long, and reach them into their remotest haunts.”160 Wogan was especially pleased by Swift’s praise of the “Wild Geese,” the Irish Jacobites who fled abroad:
Swift recognized that the Irish Catholic position had become worse after the so-called “Glorious Revolution” that deposed James II, the Stuart King, and he evidently became sympathetic to Wogan’s description of a truly catholic Catholicism which, like that of Chevalier Ramsay, was tolerant of other religions. Echoing Ramsay’s Masonic statements of universalist fraternity, Wogan affirmed that “We are all brethren in fact.”162 Having condemned what he saw as the many wrong-headed policies of the Anglican and dissenting churches, he wrote:
It was probably Wogan’s defense of a tolerant Catholicism that led Swift in November to pose as a Catholic and show “how innocent and oppressed the Roman Catholics have been.” He published anonymously, Reasons Humbly Offered to the Parliament of Ireland for Repealing the Sacramental Test, in Favour of Catholicks, Otherwise Called Roman Catholicks, and by their Ill-Willers, Papists (Dublin, 1733). He argued that when the Puritans murdered Charles I, their Stuart King, and turned the Monarchy into a Republic, it is not to be wondered “if the Catholicks, in such a Babel of Religions, chose to adhere to their own Faith left by their Ancestors, rather than seek for a better among a Rabble of hypocritical, rebellious, deluding Knaves, or deluded Enthusiasts.”164 This pamphlet was later considered so dangerous that the sub-title, “Written in the Style of a Roman Catholic,” was omitted from the 1746 edition, when Britain was still in the throes of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.165
Meanwhile, among the Jacobite and Écossais Masons at home and abroad, their communication networks and recruitment were going well. Swift must have been pleased that in 1733-34, the Irish elected to the Grand Mastership Henry Benedict Barnewell, 4th Viscount Kingsland, a Catholic, whose father had been friendly with the Dean.166 Like the preceding Grand Master Netterville, Kingsland was related to the Rosse family, and he carried on their families’ private Stuart sympathies. However, when Lord Rosse returned to Ireland from his Grand Tour, he seemed to lose interest in Grand Lodge Masonry and resumed the dissipated lifestyle he had earlier enjoyed with Wharton. Swift was appalled when in 1735 he co-founded in Dublin a new Hell Fire Club, leading the Dean to denounce the members, several of whom he earlier knew, as “Blasters, Blasphemers, or Bacchanalians.”167 The Masonic membership of some members led pious churchmen to condemn the whole Irish fraternity.168
In France, the deceased Wharton was succeeded as Grand Master by Sir Hector Maclean, Scottish Highland chief, protégé of the late Mar and member of his Restoration Order.169 Over the next years, Maclean would work closely with Ramsay, Charles Radcliffe (5th Earl of Derwentwater), and the Irish and Scottish troops in France, Spain, and Italy, while he extended negotiations with fellow Masons in Sweden and Poland.170 It is unknown if he was in contact with Wogan, who after writing Swift, gained military fame in 1733 when he led his 1,300 Irish-Spanish troops against 15,000 Moors at the siege of Oran, where he was wounded but victorious. 171
Though Swift had promised Wogan that he would help get his works published anonymously and even to place his own name and acknowledgment “after your Epistle,” by January 1736, he realized that he could not do so. Swift had begun drafting his most incendiary criticism of the Anglo-Irish ruling class, titled The Legion Club, in which he attacked the Whig architects and Masons who designed, constructed, and now inhabited the new Parliament House, a monument to English oppression: “Tell us, what this Pile contains?/ Many a head that holds not Brains.”172 He was probably aware that an Irish Masonic delegation recently sent to London by the Grand Master Kingston was rudely snubbed by the English Grand Lodge, an incident that provoked the serious divergence of Irish Masonry from its English counterpart.173 He now wrote Wogan that he wanted to publish “your poetical history in prose of your own life and actions, inscribed to me; which I often wished it were safe to print here, or in England, under the madness of universal party now reigning.”174 Ian Higgins comments on Swift’s eventual failure to fulfill his promise, because it would presumably be “too dangerously provocative an act, even for the Dean of St. Patrick’s and his risk-taking printers to contemplate.”175
Over the next years, despite Wogan’s many disappointments, he continued to press the Stuart court and European leaders to back a Jacobite invasion, to be led by the Irish regiments in Spain. In 1744 he was appointed governor of Don Quixote’s home territory, “San Clemente de la Mancha,” and he wrote James:
Though Swift and Ramsay had earlier written about the chivalric themes of “Celtic” and Écossais Masonry, they did not live to see the crusade led by “Bonnie Prince Charlie” in 1745.177 For Charles Wogan, the Jacobite rising in Scotland was initially the fulfillment of a knight errant’s decades-long dream. On 5 August, he received a letter (written on 19 June) from Charles Edward and George Kelly, who ordered him to collect Irish officers, Spanish soldiers, arms, and funds for the planned expedition against Britain. Apparently drawing on their shared Masonic and Tobosan experiences, the two wrote in chivalric and Quixotic terms to their fellow knight.178 After several weeks of delays, Wogan had a French translation of the letter presented to the Spanish King and Queen by the minister Villarias, who reported that they were pleased at Charles Edward’s appointment of Wogan and delighted by the chivalric language of the letter:
In late September, while Wogan recruited Irish troops from Spain, the victorious Prince and George Kelly arrived in Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, a private Masonic ceremony reportedly took place in the inner sanctuary.180 According to James Drummond, 3rd Duke of Perth, the prince was made Grand Master of the Order of the Temple in a “Chapter of the ancient chivalry of the Temple of Jerusalem,” which echoed the language of the earlier letter to Wogan.181 Kelly was well versed in this Écossais language, for he had translated Chevalier Ramsay’s famous Masonic oration of December 1736, with its themes of Jewish mysticism and Christian chivalry.182
In August 1745, at a time of high hopes for a successful rebellion, the prince’s letter was tonic for Wogan, who had earlier written Swift in the wake of Wharton’s death, at a time of low hopes:
“Undaunted spirit” and “so much gayety”--through ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies, exaltation and depression—these were the qualities that Irish nationalism and Écossais fraternalism struggled to keep alive during the long, fruitless decades of Jacobite resistance to Hanoverian domination. They may have been Quixotic, but they kept hope alive.
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Bell, John. Rhymes of the Northern Bards. Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1812.
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1 While this article focuses on the four main figures, it draws on the extensive, detailed coverage of Jacobite versus Hanoverian controversies presented in my book, Masonic Rivalries and Literary Politics: From Jonathan Swift to Henry Fielding (Amazon/Gauthier Pierozac Editeur, 2018).
2 For the most thorough biography of Wharton, see Lewis Melville, The Life and Writings of Philip, Duke of Wharton (London, 1913).
3 Christopher Robbins, “`The Most Universal Villain I Ever Knew’: Jonathan Swift and the Earl of Wharton,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 18 (2003): 24-38.
4 Eveline Cruickshanks, “Lord Cowper, Lord Orrery, the Duke of Wharton, and Jacobitism,” Albion 26 (1994): 37.
5 Historical Manuscripts Commission: Calendar of the Stuart Papers (London, 1902-03), V, 396, 471. Henceforth cited as HMC.
6 Margaret Stewart, The Architecture, Landscape, and Constitutional Plans of the Earl of Mar, 1700-1732 (Dublin, 2006). On Mar’s Masonic affiliation and networking, see Robert Collis, The Petrine Instauration: Religion, Esotericism, and Science at the Court of Peter the Great (Leiden, 2011), 132-33.
7 HMC. Stuart, III, 312.
8 Melville, Life, 75.
9 David Ryan, Blasphemers & Blackguards: The Irish Hellfire Clubs (Dublin, 2012), 25.
10 W.J. Chetwode Crawley, Caementaria Hibernica (Dublin, 1895), II, 13.
11 John Heron Lepper and Philip Crossle, History of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Ireland (Dublin, 1925), I, 61-62.
12 John Robert Robinson, Philip, Duke of Wharton, 1698-1731 (London, 1896), 26.
13 Melville, Life, 77.
14 Stewart, Architecture, 110-11. Swift attended Mar’s wedding in July 1714 and included him on a 1729 list of “Men of distinction and my friends who are still alive.” In 1733 he described Mar as “crooked,” a reference to his deformed spine, which caused his ungainly walk, and not to his politics; the epithet “Bobbin’ John” was used earlier than his political shifts in 1715. Swift added, “He seemed to me a Gentleman of good sense & good nature”; see Swift, Prose, V, 262.
15 George Mayhew, “Swift and the Tripos Tradition,” Philological Quarterly, 45 (1966), 85-101; Katsumi Hashinuma, “Jonathan Swift and Freemasonry,” Hitotsubashi Journal of Arts and Sciences 38 (1977): 13-2
16 Sean Murphy, “Irish Jacobitism and Freemasonry,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 9 (1994), 78-79. Chetwode Crawley explains the difficulty of proving Masonic membership in 18th-century Ireland: “It was a point of honour with the Irish Freemasons…to prevent any written information or authorization, concerned with the Craft, from passing out of fraternal keeping. The Irish Freemason held it to be his plain duty to destroy any document, public or private, historical or evidential, sooner than let it pass into the hands of outsiders”; see his “Notes on Early Irish Freemasonry, No. VII, part 1,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum 16 (1903): 69. Henceforth cited as AQC.
17 Jonathan Swift, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. F. Elrington Ball (London, 1910), III, 1-2.
18 Swift, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, III, 66.
19 Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill, The Atterbury Plot (New York, 2004).
20 Melville, Life, 83.
21 In Ireland and France, the Jacobites occasionally initiated adolescents into Masonry. See Edward Corp, L’Autre Exil: Les Jacobites en France au Début de XVIIIe Siècle (Montpellier, 1993), 17.
22 Aubrey Newman, “Politics and Freemasonry in the Eighteenth Century,” AQC 104 (1991): 36. Also, David Stevenson, “James Anderson, Man and Mason,” Heredom: Transactions of the Scottish Rite Research Society 10 (2002): 93-138.
23 Robert Freke Gould, “Masonic Celebrities: The Duke of Wharton, G.M. 1722-23,” AQC, 8 (1895), 115-55.
24 Hume’s Courant (3 July 1722); Lepper and Crossle, History, I, 43.
25 Erskine, “Mar’s Legacy,” 197-203.
26 Edward Corp, “The Jacobite Community at Saint-Germain after the Departure of the Stuart Court,” in Allan Mcinnes, Kieran Gorman, Lesley Graham, eds., Living with Jacobitism, 1690-1788: The Three Kingdoms and Beyond (London, 2014), 29-31.
27 André Kervella, Le Chevalier Ramsay, Une Fierté Ecossaise (Paris, 2009).
28 Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill, Atterbury Plot .
29 Claude Nordmann, Le Crise du Nord au Début de XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1962), 109-10, 153, 217-21.
30 Alfred Robbins, “The Earliest Years of English Organized Freemasonry,” AQC 22 (1909): 76-77.
31 Delafaye had long suspected Swift of Jacobite disaffection. On his espionage and Masonic career, see Ric Berman, Espionage,Diplomacy, and the Lodge: Charles Delafaye and the Secret Department of the Post Office (Goring Heath, 2017). On Wharton as probable author, see Wallace McLeod, “The Hudibrastic Poem of 1723,” AQC 107 (1994): 9-50.
32 The Free-Masons: An Hudibrastik Poem (London, 1723), 2-3.
33 United Grand Lodge of England: Philip Crossle’s Notes and Extracts from Irish Newspapers, part 2, 18. I am grateful to Dr. Róbert Péter for informing me about this valuable resource. Henceforth cited as UGLE: Crossle.
34 Jonathan Swift, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. David Wooley (Frankfurt am Main, 1999-2007), II, 432, 433n.5.
35 No copy of the original Dublin edition of 1723 has been found. Jonathan Swift, The Grand Mystery, or Art of Meditating, 2nd rev. ed. (London, 1726), 9-12.
36 Eveline Cruickshanks, “Lord North, Christopher Layer, and the Atterbury Plot,” in The Jacobite Challenge, Eveline Cruickshanks and Jeremy Black, eds., (Edinburgh, 1988), 105n.28.
37 J.M. Flood, The Life of the Chevalier Wogan (Dublin, 1922).
38 W. Moss, “Freemasonry in France in 1725-1735,” AQC 47 (1934): 105. Moss argues that James Radcliffe and his brother Charles were Freemasons before 1715.
39 Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788 (Cambridge, 1988), 300.
40 Richard Maher, “Poems from the Prison Yard—A Poetic Correspondence between Charles Wogan and William Tunstall,” History Ireland: Features 25 (2017).
41 John Bell, Rhymes of the Northern Bards (Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1812), 250.
42 [William Tunstall, Charles Wogan, etc.], Poems of Love and Gallantry. Written in the Marshalsea and Newgate, by Several of the Prisoners Taken at Preston (London, 1716), 5-6. According to Swift, there were chivalric and crusader themes in early Scots-Irish Masonry; see The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1962), V, 328.
43 On their Masonic membership, see Frank McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart: A Tragedy in Many Acts (1988; Oxford, 1991), 532.
44 Robbins, “Earliest Years,” 177.
45 UGLE: Crossle, part 2, 18, 25.
46 The True Briton (3 June and 5 July 1723).
47 Mary Caesar, The Journal of Mary Caesar, 1724-41, ed. Dorothy Potter (Lewiston, 2002), 58.
48 Jonathan Swift, Catalogue of the Books, the Library of the late Rev. Jonathan Swift (Dublin, 1745), 22.
49 Jacques Morabin, The History of Cicero’s Banishment, trans. George Kelly (London, 1725), vII-viii.
50 Lepper and Crossle, History, I, 47-48.
51 Swift, Prose, V, 323-33.
52 Hashinuma, “Jonathan Swift ,” 13-22. For evidence of Swift’s authorship, see Schuchard, Masonic Rivalries, 34 n. 3, 222-25. Paul Monod notes that the Letter from the Grand Mistress is “peppered with insider jokes aimed at other Masons,” and “Swift is now acknowledged to have been the author”; see his Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, 2013), 381 n.16.
53 Swift, Prose, V, 325.
54 Philip Crossle, “Freemasonry in Ireland ca. 1725-31,” The Lodge of Research No. CC. Ireland: Transactions for the Year 1924 (1931), 167. He argues strongly for Swift’s authorship, 107-23.
55 Douglas Knoop, G.P. Jones, and Douglas Hamer, Early Masonic Pamphlets (1945; London, 1978), 137-50.
56 Swift, Prose, V, 328.
57 Lepper and Crossle, History, I, 71.
58 Turlough O’Riordan, “Richard Parsons,” Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge, 1997).
59 For the many Irish initiates, see Edward Corp, ed., Lord Burlington—The Man and His Politics (Lewiston, 1998), 20-21.
60 Royal Archives. Stuart Papers: 83/87 (3 September 1725). Henceforth cited as RA.Stuart Papers. Quoted in Janetta Guite, “The Jacobite Cause, 1730-1740: The International Dimension” (McMaster University: Ph.D. Thesis, 1987), 90 n.59.
61 On this little-known Spanish visit, see Melville, Life, 172-73.
62 Robert Collis, “The Order of Toboso: a Pan-European Jacobite Fraternal Network,” in Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, ed., Diffusions et Circulations des Pratiques Maçonniques, XVIIIe-XXe Siècles (Paris, 2013), 141-56.
63 RA. Stuart Papers: 90/illeg. (10 February 1726).
64 Henrietta Tayler, Jacobite Epilogue (London, 1941), 298.
65 Irwin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (London, 1962), III, 53-54.
66 Melville, Life, 179-82.
67 For the Jacobite use of “honest,” see David Greenwood, William King: Tory and Jacobite (Oxford, 1969), 159.
68 UGLE: Crossle, part 2, 91. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal (23 February 1727).
69 Eamonn O’Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, A Fatal Attracton, 1685-1766 (Dublin, 2002), 216-17.
70 Crossle, “Freemasonry in Ireland,” 139.
71 Swift, Grand Mystery, 9-12.
72 Lepper and Crossle, History, I, 70.
73 UGLE: Crossle, part 2, p. 77. For the Masonic and espionage context of Swift’s ambiguous relationship with Griffith, see Schuchard, Masonic Rivalries, 234-36, 355, 381-82.
74 Faulkner’s Dublin Journal (15 July 1726).
75 RA. Stuart Papers: 92/136 (April 13, 1726).
76 RA. Stuart Papers: 95/110 (July 20, 1726).
77 Alice Shield and Andrew Lang, The King Over the Water (London, 1907), 368.
78 RA. Stuart Papers: 95/110.
79 Robinson, Philip, Duke of Wharton, 317-19.
80 Melville, Life, 188-89
81 O’Ciardha, Ireland, 236.
82 One thousand soldiers of the Irish regiment assisted the Spanish at Gibraltar (Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 20-24 June 1727); for the participation of the Hibernia regiment, see José Ferrer Benimeli, Masoneria, Iglesia et Illustracion: Un Conflicto Ideologico-religioso (Madrid, 1976-77), I, 91n.266.
83 UGLE: Crossle, part 2, 54-61.
84 UGLE: Crossle, part 2, 96-98. Crossle transcribed a copy of this very rare broadsheet in his Masonic notebook.
85 Benimeli, Masoneria, I, 98-101; Keith Sheriff, “A Brief History of the District Grand Lodge of Gibraltar” (2008).
86 José Ferrer Benimeli, “La Prsence de la Franc-Maçonnerie Stuartiste à Madrid et à Rome,” Politica Hermetica 24 (2010): 73-77. The date of the earliest meeting of the lodge is unclear.
87 Berman, Espionage, 198-99.
88 Romney Sedgwick, ed., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715-1754 (London, 1970 I, 109-10.
89 Ric Berman, The Foundations of Modern Freemasonry: The Grand Architects, Political Change, and the Scientific Enlightenment, 1714-1749 (20212; rev. ed. Brigthon, 2015), 179-80.
90 Swift, Correspondence (Wooley), III, 108-09.
91 Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, 1985), 437-39.
92 Berman, Foundations, 254-55; J.G. Simms, “Dean Swift and County Armagh,” Seanchas Ardmbacha. Armagh Dioscesan Historical Society, 6 (1971), 134.
93 Lepper and Crossle, History, I, 60.
94 They were the sons of the famous Non-Juror and Jacobite, Charles Leslie, whose writings were admired and cited by Swift, despite the fact that to quote him was “to be tainted with treason”; see Ian Higgins, “Jonathan Swift and Charles Leslie,” in Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad, Paul Monod, Murray Pittock, and Daniel Szechi, eds., (Houndsmill, 2010), 149.
95 O’Ciardha, Ireland, 136, 220.
96 HMC: Calendar of Stuart Papers, VI, 406-08.
97 Bodleian Library. Carte MS. 231, ff. 22-23 (19 April 1725). On Swift’s admiration of Gyllenborg and Charles XII, see Marsha Keith Schuchard, Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven: Jacobites, Jews, and Freemasons in Early Modern Sweden (Leiden, 2012), 76, 83, 149-50.
98 Jonathan Swift, The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. W.E. Browning (London, 1910), II, 114-15.
99 Higgins, “Jonathan Swift and Charles Leslie,” 150.
100 Swift, Correspondence (Wooley), III, 233-34 n. 2. In Masonic Rivalries, p 288, I identified “Mr Lesley” as Robert, but Wooley identified him as Henry Leslie. It remains an open question.
101 O’Ciardha, Ireland, 236.
102 Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge, 1994), 83-85.
103 Swift, Poems, II, 111-12.
104 Melvlle, Life, 214.
105 Melvlle, Life, 224-25.
106 RA. Stuart Papers: 118/54, 105.
107 Dublin Intelligence (2 and 6 July 1728); Philip Crossle, “Masonic News in Dublin Newspapers, 1728,” AQC 40 (1928): 84.
108 William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, (London, 1798), 636-37.
109 Mist’s Weekly Journal (30 March 1728).
110 RA. Stuart Papers: 114/136; 118/66; 119/56.
111 Simms, “Dean Swift,” 135-36.
112 Faulkner’s Dublin Journal (11 October 1729).
113 O’Ciardha, Ireland, 216-17.
114 Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill, Atterbury Plot, 226. She argues that “it beggars belief” that Mar would hand over to Atterbury “anything incriminating that he did not think he could explain as having been accepted by James.”
115 Maurice Bruce, “The Duke of Mar in Exile, 1716-1732,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th s., 20 (1937), 169, 171.
116 Bruce, “The Duke of Mar in Exile, 1716-1732,” 161-62.
117 “Cranstoun,” in John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800 (New Haven, 1997), plus on-line edition. He served as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of England in 1745-47.
118 RA. Stuart Papers: 119/56.
119 RA. Stuart Papers: 122/110.
120 British Library. Shelfmark S.C. 541 (3): Bibliothecarum…Ducis de Wharton (London, 1733), #3927, 1358.
121 Pierre Chevallier, Histoire de la Franc-Maçonnerie (Paris, 1974), I, 7; Benimeli, “La Présence ,” 80n.3; and Masoneria, I, 94..
122 RA. Stuart Papers: 110/85.
123 O’Ciardha, Ireland, 232.
124 Knoop, Jones, and Hamer, Early Masonic Pamphlets, 208-09.
125 On Norfolk’s Jacobitism, see Monod, Jacobitism, 134; on Kingston’s support, see Robert Freke Gould, History and Antiquities of Freemasonry, 3rd. rev. ed. (1882-87; New York, 1951), III, 136.
126 Melville, Life, 239.
127 RA. Stuart Papers: 117/85.
128 Eamonn O’Ciardha, “Jacobite Jail-Breakers, Jail-Birds: the Irish Fugitive and Prisoner in the Early Modern Period,” Immigrants and Minorities (2013), 17-19, 32n.33-37.
129 Lisa Meaney, “Freemasonry in Munster, 1726-1789” (MA Thesis: Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, 2005), 35, 90, 183; David Dickson, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630-1830 (Cork, 2005), 275.
130 Dublin Weekly Journal (29 May 1729).
131 Dublin Weekly Journal (13 March 1731).
132 Murphy, “Irish Jacobitism,” 81. In 1734, an Irish Bishop would recommend Netterville to the Pretender as “a man of good fortune and wishes our affairs very much”’ see Patrick Fagan, Ireland in the Stuart Papers (Dublin, 1995), 199, 201, 220.
133 Berman, Foundations, 180.
134 Michael Jenkins, Freemasonry in Gibraltar, 1727-Present (Nepean, 2006), 3.
135 Galway Diocesan Archives: Sir Charles Wogan, “URANIUS or the Epistle Dedicatory to the Reverend Doctor JONATHAN SWIFT, DEAN of St. Patrick’s DUBLIN,” 20.
136 Thomas O’Connor, Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition (New York, 2016), 138.
137 Guite, “Jacobite Cause,” 90 n. 60. She notes that the fear of the Irish regiments was a recurrent theme at this time.
138 Guite, “Jacobite Cause,” 24, 37 n. 23.
139 Copies of the papers Wogan sent to Swift were made later in the 18th century by the Bishop of Ossory and are now preserved in the Diocesan Archives in Galway, Ireland. I am grateful to Tom Kilgariff, the archivist, for sending me typed copies of the English-language documents. Translation and publication of the Latin documents is a scholarly desideratum.
140 Bodleian Library: Carte MS. 125, ff. 96-100.
141 The following quotes are taken from Wogan’s papers in the Galway archives.
142 Anon., The Humble Petition of his Grace Ph—p D. of Wh---n to a Great Man (London, 1730), 5-12.
143 Anon., An Epistle from Lord B----------ke to the Duke of Wh----n (London, 1730), 71-12.
144 Swift, Correspondence (Wooley), II, 494.
145 Laurence Smith, “Philip Wharton,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
146 Benimeli, ”La Présence,” 82.
147 Caesar, Journal, 59. Her original spelling and punctuation.
148 Alexander Pope, The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Herbert Davis (London, 1966), 288-89.
149 Anon., The Life and Writings of the Late Philip Duke of Wharton (London, 1731), I, Preface.
150 Dublin Weekly Journal (May 22, 1731).
151 Crawley, Caementaria Hibernica, 2.
152 For the Masonic and political context of their mutual antagonisms, see Schuchard, Masonic Rivalries, 347-55, 389-91.
153 Faulkner’s Dublin Journal (18-21 December 1731); Róbert Péter, ed., British Freemasonry,1717-1813 (New York, 2016), V, 16.
154 Berman, Espionage, 227-44. Lorraine had been initiated at The Hague by Desaguliers, and he was betrothed to Maria Theresa, heir to the Habsburg Empire. Despite his affiliation with English Freemasonry, he was “faithfully though covertly a friend to James”; see Alice Shield, Henry Stuart, Cardinal of York (London, 1908), 40-41.
155 Jeremy Filet, “Jacobitism in an Early-modern State: the Duchy of Lorraine and the 1715 Rebellion” (Mémoire d Master: Universite de Lorraine , 2015/2016), 1-12.
156 Jonathan Swift, Irish Tracts, 1728-1733, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1955), xxxv. 227.
157 Jonathan Swift, Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (London, 1739), ll. 391-96. He worked on it from late December 1731 to spring 1732, and circulated manuscript versions among friends.
158 Higgins, “Jonathan Swift and Charles Leslie,” 150.
159 Swift, Correspondence (Wooley), III, 514-15.
160 Jonathan Swift, The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D.,… Arranged by Thomas Sheridan, A.M., rev. ed. John Nichols (London, 1803), XVIII, 181. The modern editor, David Wooley, dismisses the letter as a mere “screed” and unaccountably does not publish the full text.
161 Swift, The Works of Jonathan Swift, XVIII, 173.
162 Swift, The Works of Jonathan Swift, XVIII, 216.
163 Swift, The Works of Jonathan Swift, XVIII, 217.
164 Swift, Prose, XII, 286-87, 290.
165 Swift, Prose, XII, 347.
166 Lepper and Crossle, History, 150-51; Swift, Correspondence (Wooley), II, 201-02.
167 bid., IV, 503-04. The hilltop location of the Dublin Hell Fire Club has now become a tourist attraction, with guides telling lurid and sensationalized tales about its secret rituals.
168 There is an obscure tradition that Rosse visited Egypt and acquired some Dionysian manuscripts, which had been stolen from the Great Library of Alexandria. He allegedly rewrote them as a book, Dionysius Rising, and founded a Masonic Sacred Sect of Dionysius; see Norman Milne, Libertines and Harlots, From 1600-1836 (Northampton, 2014), 118.
169 Louis Trebuchet, De l’Écosse à l’Écossisme: Les Deux Siècles fondateurs, 1598-1804 (Marseilles, 2015), 159, 288-89.
170 For Maclean’s international and Masonic efforts, see Schuchard, Masonic Rivalries.
171 John Cornelius O’Callaghan, History of the Irish Brigades in the Service of France (Glasgow, 1870), 315.
172 Swift, Poems, II, 264.
173 Berman, Schism, 13.
174 Swift, Correspondence, III, 503; IV, 272-73.
175 Ian Higgins, “Jonathan Swift’s Memoirs of a Jacobite,” 84.
176 Tayler, Jacobite Epilogue, 301.
177 Ramsay died in May 1743 and Swift, after several years of dementia, in October 1745.
178 In 1732 in Rome, the twelve year-old Prince was initiated in the Order of Toboso; see HMC: Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Eglinton, ed. Sir John Stirling Maxwell (London, 1885), 178.
179 Tayler, Jacobite Epilogue, 306.
180 James Denistoun, Memoirs of Sir Robert Strange (London, 1855), I, 79-82. For the controversy about this reported ceremony, see Schuchard, Masonic Rivalries, 540-44, 548-49. My earlier account includes an unfortunate error in the dating of the letter to Wogan, which is corrected in the present text.
181 James Denistoun, Memoirs of Sir Robert Strange (Edinburgh, 1855), I, 81-82.
182 Bodleian Library: Carte MS. 226, f. 398.
183 Swift, Works…Thomas Sheridan, XVIII, 216.