The Freemasons by Jasper Godwin Ridley

Author:Jasper Godwin Ridley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

Perhaps she was underestimating her intelligence and independence, thinking that the judge and the middle-class jury would approve of a wife who adopted this attitude. They might indeed have done so in other cases, but not when they were dealing with rebels who attacked religion, one of the cornerstones of the established order of society. She was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

In 1825 Richard Carlile was still in prison, having served nearly six years for selling atheist books. On 30 June he petitioned the House of Commons, asking them to release him. The petition was presented by the Freemason, Henry Brougham.

Carlile was praised by his fellow-rebel, William Cobbett: ‘You have done your duty bravely, Mr Carlile; if every one had done like you, it would be all very well’.35 Carlile died in 1843. By this time, Lord Brougham and Vaux had become a reactionary, warning the peers and the world, in his speeches in the House of Lords, of the danger to society presented by American democracy.

Politically, there were Freemasons and anti-masons on both sides. Charles X, Joseph de Maistre, and the revolutionaries in Paris, Naples and Spain were Freemasons; the Catholic Church, the monarchs of the Holy Alliance, all the anti-revolutionaries of Europe, and the Radical freethinker Richard Carlile, were anti-masons. Being a Freemason did not determine a man’s political beliefs; but the political beliefs of the members of a lodge determined whether it was a body of loyal monarchists or an organization of Red revolutionaries.

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