ct to find a secret tradition grafted upon Anderson's system."[358]

Precisely in this same year of 1740 Mr. Waite says that "an itinerant
pedlar of the Royal Arch degree is said to have propagated it in
Ireland, claiming that it was practised at York and London,"[359] and
in 1744 a certain Dr. Dassigny wrote that the minds of the Dublin
brethren had been lately disturbed about Royal Arch Masonry owing to the
activities in Dublin of "a number of traders or hucksters in pretended
Masonry," whom the writer connects with "Italians" or the "Italic
Order."

A Freemason quoting this passage in a recent discussion on the upper
degrees expresses the opinion that these hucksters were "Jacobite
emissaries disguised under the form of a pretended Masonry," and that
"by Italians and Italian Order he intends a reference to the Court of
King James III, i.e. the Old Pretender at Rome, and to the Ecossais
(Italic) Order of Masonry."[360] It is much more likely that he had
referred to another source of masonic instruction in Italy which I shall
indicate in a later chapter.

But precisely at the moment when it is suggested that the Jacobites were
intriguing to introduce the Royal Arch degree into Masonry they are also
said to have been engaged in elaborating the "Scottish Rite." Let us
examine this contention.

Freemasonry in France

The foundation of Grand Lodge in London had been followed by the
inauguration of Masonic Lodges on the Continent--in 1721 at Mons, in
1725 in Paris, in 1728 at Madrid, in 1731 at The Hague, in 1733 at
Hamburg, etc. Several of these received their warrant from the Grand
Lodge of England. But this was not the case with the Grand Lodge of
Paris, which did not receive a warrant till 1743.

The men who founded this lodge, far from being non-political, were
Jacobite leaders engaged in active schemes for the restoration of the
Stuart dynasty. The leader of the group, Charles Radcliffe, had been
imprisoned with his brother, the ill-fated Lord Derwentwater who was
executed on Tower Hill in 1716. Charles had succeeded in escaping from
Newgate and made his way to France, where he assumed the title of Lord
Derwentwater, although the Earldom had ceased to exist under the
bill of attainder against his brother.[361] It was this Lord
Derwentwater--afterwards executed for taking part in the 1745
rebellion--who with several other Jacobites is said to have founded the
Grand Lodge of Paris in 1725, and himself to ha