From 1640 to 1645 a devastating civil war was fought in England between the supporters of the King, Charles I, and the supporters of Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell.  The Royalists eventually lost, Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector, and King Charles was tried and beheaded.  After Cromwell’s death in 1654, the country began to disintegrate in a mass of rivalries and religious squabbles.  With the support of the army, General Monck gained the approval of Parliament to invite the old king’s son to return from exile in France and become the new monarch.

The prince returned, and was crowned Charles II.  The ensuing period, known as the Restoration, introduced a settled and prosperous period into English history.  It also marked the beginning of the Age of Reason, known as the Enlightenment, when science and enterprise began to replace religion and hereditary right as the basis of society.  One group of men played a particularly important role in this process.

In 1648, Sir Robert Moray, a Scottish adventurer who was well-regarded by King Charles, having assisted with his restoration, was rewarded with high office and the personal favour of the monarch.  He and the King shared a common interest in science, and Moray’s first and most enduring project was to bring together and secure royal recognition for what was to become the Royal Society.

Moray was a Scotsman with a complex and confusing background.  As a soldier, he had fought on both sides in the Civil War.  He had worked as a spy for the French, and was instrumental in having Charles II crowned King of Scots before the Restoration.  He was also an enthusiastic member of the mysterious and secretive organisation known as the Freemasons.

Long before Moray’s time, mediaeval society had been dominated by king and nobles, the Catholic Church, and the guilds.  The guilds united the employers  and employees  of each trade in a single organisation, hierarchically ordered and governed by ritual, “mysteries” (skills and secrets of their particular business), and a royal monopoly to stop others practising their craft.  They regulated trade, restricted entry to their guild, and ensured that the passage from the bottom of the ladder (“apprentice”) to the top (“master”) was a long, difficult and expensive process.

One of the oldest and most renowned of these guilds was the stonemasons (or, as they became known from about 1487, the freemasons).  They built the bridges and castles, the mansions and palaces of the nobility, and their supreme achievement was the great mediaeval gothic cathedrals.  They were the custodians of the arts of mathematics, particularly geometry, originally learned from the Arabs, who were much in advance of Europe in these disciplines during the Middle Ages.  We could consider these masons as the leading experts in technology of those times.

At some point in the 16th century, the Scottish masons’ guild (which was more organised and established than the English guild at that time), began accepting as members gentlemen who did not practice the arts of stone-cutting and architecture, but who wished to gain access to the “mysteries of the craft” – the mathematical and scientific knowledge that was the special preserve of the masons.  These gentlemen masons were known as “speculative” or “accepted” masons, in distinction to the working “operative” masons.  In this fashion, Sir Robert Moray became an “accepted” member of the Lodge of Edinburgh in 1641.

Many distinguished Scotsmen (even, according to some authorities, the King of Scots himself, James VI who later became James I of England) were speculative masons.  The first record we have of an Englishman becoming an accepted mason concerns Elias Ashmole, later Fellow no. 37 of the Royal Society, who joined a lodge at Warrington in 1646.  What the accepted masons sought in the Freemasons’ Guild was a strict ethical code, a pattern for living, self-improvement and, above all, a knowledge of “the hidden mysteries of nature and science”. 

A small group of learned men, interested in the “experimental” or “new” philosophy as it was then called, began to meet informally from about 1645 at Gresham College in Bishopsgate to attend lectures and discuss their mutual interests.  They called themselves “the invisible college.”  Gresham had been founded in 1579 by a bequest of Sir Thomas Gresham, who laid down in his will the subjects to be taught.  These were:  divinity, medicine, geometry, astronomy, rhetoric and music.  Gresham had been appointed joint General Warden of Masons in 1567, so it is therefore not surprising that he sought to imbue his new college with the principles of Freemasonry.

Unusually, the college encouraged its professors to discuss practical applications of their subjects.  The professors of geometry and astronomy, in particular, worked closely with the Royal Navy and its shipbuilders, assisting with computational techniques for navigation and the design of efficient warships.  It has been suggested that the practical bias of the early Gresham professors set down a basis for the practical science of the Royal Society.  No less than ten past professors of the college became Fellows of the Royal Society.

Following a lecture by Christopher Wren, twelve men met in the rooms of the Professor of Geometry at Gresham College on 28th November 1680.  Half of them had lost high academic positions granted them under the Commonwealth, as they had supported Parliament against the King in the Civil War.  The other half was royalists who had been reinstated after the Restoration.  In spite of their political disagreements, they agreed to form a society for “experimental philosophy”, and to pay substantial fees to enable such experiments to be carried out.

Sir Robert Moray, who was well established in the new King’s good graces, was chosen as the most suitable member to seek the approval and support of the monarch.  Moray had only recently returned from France, where he had been engaged on the King’s business.  The King greeted him with great warmth, and established him in a suite of rooms at the Palace of Whitehall.   Moray was to set up a laboratory to continue his studies in the palace, where the King could observe his experiments.

The King endorsed the idea of the new society with enthusiasm, and Moray broached the idea of a possible Royal Charter for the group.  The King was pleased to grant this, especially as the society was to be self-financing.  The state finances were in a parlous situation, and Charles was concerned about his run-down and under-funded Navy, particularly because a war with Holland, a rival maritime nation, was looming.

Moray, who chaired the meetings of the new society, was concerned to draft a constitution that would make it possible to overcome the differences and difficulties that existed.  Borrowing from Freemasonry, he forbade discussion of politics and religion at their meetings, as these subjects divided men rather than uniting them in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. 

The rules covered the election of Fellows, the election of Officers and servants of the society, the keeping of minutes and the payment of fees.  The society would have three officers to rule it, like a Freemasons’ Lodge.  The method of voting would be the same as that used by Masons to this day.  The rules provided for the monthly election of a president to govern the meetings, and on 6th March 1661 Sir Robert Moray was elected as the first president.  He was to hold this position until enactment of the final Royal Charter made Lord Brouncker, the King’s choice, the first long-term president.

By November 1661 the members had begun calling themselves “The Royal Society”, but it was not until September 1662 that they asked Moray to petition the King for their charter.  The King granted this in October 1662, asking that he be made a member too.  The world’s first society for scientific research was thus established.

The thirty-five original Fellows of the Society came from a variety of backgrounds.  Nineteen were scientists, while the other sixteen included statesmen, soldiers, antiquaries, administrators and literary men.  As originally constituted, the society was to consist of a mixture of experimenters and rich men, who while not scientists themselves, had an interest in science, and more importantly, could finance the work of the others.

The scientist members included Robert Boyle who, with Robert Hooke, explored the properties of a vacuum, and gave his name to the gas law of volume and pressure; William Petty, the father of modern statistics; Laurence Rooke, a geometrician who worked on methods for determining the longitude at sea; Christopher Wren, Gresham Professor of Astronomy and prominent architect.  After the granting of the Royal Charter, the Society quickly added the antiquarian Elias Ashmole, famous amongst Freemasons as being the first accepted or speculative Freemason for whom written records exist in England.

Sir Christopher Wren was a founding member of the Society and served as its president from 1680 to 1682.   According to William Preston he became a Freemason in 1691, although John Aubrey, a founder of the Society and a Freemason himself, claimed Wren was already a Warden of the Craft by 1663!  The Masonic records of Wren are contradictory, with some sources even stating he was a Grand Master.

Boyle was not a Mason at the founding of the Royal Society, but became one later.  Sir Isaac Newton, President from 1703 to 1727, was a member of a curious quasi-masonic society that met in Spalding.  He nominated John Desaguliers for fellowship of the Royal Society in 1712.  Desaguliers was the first man to demonstrate the existence of the atom.  He became the Grand Master of the Freemasons in 1719, and was most influential in shaping the form that 18th century Freemasonry was to take.

The Royal Society was founded by Freemasons, and dominated by Freemasons for the first two centuries of its existence.  This raises the questions of why this was so, and what did the Masons hope to gain out of it?  It is difficult to give a short answer to these questions.

The early guilds of masons possessed an advanced knowledge of mathematics, especially geometry, which came from Arab sources and was therefore suspect in the eyes of the Church.  However, the Church needed the masons to build their great cathedrals.  The masons protected their knowledge by rituals of secrecy and binding obligations, thus preventing the spread of that knowledge, which would have incurred the wrath of the Church.

In the prescientific age, ruled as it was by absolutist kings and dogmatic religion, gentlemen with a curiosity about nature and science could find protection as accepted or speculative members of the masons’ guild.  There they could discuss ideas freely, and overcome the barriers and prejudices that made such talk dangerous outside the walls of the lodge.

Through the 17th century, the monopolies and privileges of the guilds were slowly eroded by the State, both in Scotland and England.  The building of castles and cathedrals diminished, and the masons’ guilds fell slowly into decay.  However, from mid-century on, “free and accepted” speculative gentlemen members gradually replaced the operatives, so that by the end of the century the lodges were dominated by the speculatives.  The craft guild had gradually evolved into “a society” which retained something of the old while incorporating the interests and values of the higher classes who rapidly came to dominate.  These new clubs became the avant-garde of a new culture that was beginning to appear in Europe.

This new culture, with Freemasonry as its vanguard, is known today as the Enlightenment, a key passage in European development.  It began in England, but is strongly identified with France, where events took a more dramatic turn.  It argued that people’s habits of thinking were based on irrationality, polluted by religious dogma, and over-conformed to historical precedent and irrelevant tradition.  The way to escape was to seek true knowledge in every sphere of life, to study the liberal arts and sciences, to establish the truth and build upon it.  Its premises were liberal, pro-science, anti-superstition, and that the State was the proper vehicle for the improvement of the human condition.

The essence of Enlightenment philosophy was reason.  Logic had been borrowed from the Greeks as early as the time of Thomas Aquinas, but Descartes and other 17th century philosophers had applied reason to the traditional questions, judging it to be a powerful avenue to truth.  They understood that logic alone could be used to defend all manner of absurd notions, and insisted on combining it with this new principle, which embodied common sense and observation, as well as incorporating their own inclinations towards scepticism and freedom.

The rising merchant class was the driving force of the Enlightenment.  They firmly believed that their new-found wealth was the result of their individual merit and hard work, unlike the inherited wealth of traditional aristocrats.  But the chief obstacles to the reshaping of Europe by the merchant class were the same as those faced by the rationalist philosophers: absolutist kings and dogmatic churches.  In the course of the struggle, individualism, freedom and change replaced community, authority, stability and tradition as core European values.  Religion survived, but was weakened and often transformed almost beyond recognition; monarchy was to dwindle over the course of the next century to a pale shadow of its former self.

Freemasonry encouraged its members to explore “the hidden mysteries of nature and science”, and to “follow the paths of virtue and science”.  By founding the Royal Society they could do exactly that.  Even so, this does not fully explain the drive that Sir Robert Moray and King Charles II put into the establishment of this organisation.  However, their motives are not too difficult to understand.

England and Scotland (not united as Great Britain until 1707) occupied an island, and relied on their ships for trade and the beginnings of an overseas empire.  Unfortunately, other trading nations had better ships, and more of them.  The Dutch, in particular, were England’s rivals for control of trade with North America.  The Royal Navy was so run down that, to Charles’s chagrin, a Dutch fleet sailed into the Medway in 1667 and destroyed the English fleet at anchor.

Charles’s first priority after his restoration was to improve and strengthen the English fleet.  Moray, who was more what we would call a civil engineer today rather than a scientist, had a practical purpose in mind when he formed the Royal Society.  Gresham College’s interest was already in applied science and technology, and it had strong links with the Navy and the shipbuilders.  Charles needed better ships and cannon, on the practical side, and also a reliable system of navigation on the theoretical side.  An accurate method of finding the longitude at sea was of vital importance.  Latitude was relatively easy to determine, but the measurement of longitude was the most pressing contemporary problem of maritime navigation.

Moray knew that some of the best scientists in England had been Parliamentarians, who were out of favour with the King.  Could he bring them together with the leading Royalist scientists to unite them in the task of rebuilding and strengthening the Navy?  King Charles obviously had the same motivation.  Immediately after he replaced Moray with Brouncker as President of the Royal Society, he made the latter a Commissioner for the Navy.  Brouncker, with Samuel Pepys as Clerk of the Navy Board, worked for many years to overcome the corruption, lack of discipline and shortage of funds that afflicted the Navy.  Pepys was later to become a President of the Royal Society himself.

The problem of determining the longitude at sea was worked on assiduously by Newton, Rooke, Wren, Huygens, Bruce and other members.  Unfortunately, the methods they chose proved impractical, and another hundred years were to pass before John Harrison provided the definitive solution to the prime problem of maritime navigation.

There was thus a practical motive behind the launching of the world’s first scientific society.  The success of the initiative was such that Great Britain rose to become the greatest nautical power on earth, and surged forth in the following century to dominate the seas and establish a vast overseas empire.

In 1768 British astronomers wished to make observations of the transit of the planet Venus across the face of the Sun, which was due in June 1769, when it would be seen best at Tahiti in the mid-Pacific.  The Royal Society agreed to organise and finance the venture.  The seaman James Cook was made a first lieutenant at five shillings a day, and given command of the Endeavour, a stout collier of 370 tons, which carried a complement of 84 and cost ₤5,000 to buy and refit.

Accompanying Cook was a young Eton and Oxford man named Joseph Banks, then 25 years old.  He was an ardent botanist with ample means, and he was to become a Freemason, a friend of the King, the advisor of statesmen, the President of the Royal Society for 42 years, and the father of New South Wales.  Cook has sometimes been claimed as a Freemason, but there are no unequivocal records of his belonging to any known Lodge of the time.  Banks, however, was an enthusiastic and active member of the Craft, and remained so all his life.

Precise navigation requires a scaled map of the heavens.  As early as 1609 Kepler could determine very precisely a model of the Solar System by using his laws, but only after (at least) one distance was accurately measured could all the others be deduced with equal precision.  One of the direct methods of determining the distance between the Earth and Sun is to observe the transit of an inner planet, either Mercury or, preferably, Venus, simultaneously from different places on the globe.  A transit of Venus is like a solar eclipse, but instead of the Moon being in line between the Earth and Sun, it is the planet Venus.  Transits of Venus are very rare, much rarer than transits of Mercury.  In recent times, they have occurred (or are predicted to occur) in 1631, 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874, 1882, 2004 and 2012.

It is widely known that the Sun is 150 million kilometres away from the Earth.  Despite the incredible immensity of this figure in comparison with everyday scales, astronomical data of this kind is accepted on trust by most educated people.  Very few pause to consider how it could be possible to measure such a distance.  As a result of Cook's voyage, and the measurement of the solar parallax, the real distance from the Earth to the Sun (the Astronomical Unit) was at last established.  Kepler's laws had already enabled the relative distances of the planets from the Sun (in Astronomical Units) to be determined.  Now the absolute dimensions of the Solar System could be deduced.

After the observation of the Transit of Venus at Tahiti, Cook sailed south and west on the next part of the mission: to examine Tasman’s New Zealand, and establish whether it was part of a great southern continent or not.  They landed at Poverty Bay in 1769.  While there, Banks described a great number of plants found in the area and wrote detailed descriptions of the Maori people who lived there.  His scientific account of the voyage and its discoveries sparked considerable interest in Europe, encouraging European settlement in the Pacific.

During Banks's presidency the Royal Society moved to Somerset House, which was provided for them by the Crown.  Banks was in favour of maintaining a mixture among the fellowship of working scientists and wealthy amateurs who might become their patrons.  This view grew less popular in the first half of the 19th century, and in 1847 the Society decided that in future Fellows would be elected solely on the merit of their scientific work.  This was part of the process of the separation of Freemasonry from the Royal Society.

Paradoxically, the beginning of the separation of Masonry from the Royal Society was carried out by the Duke of Sussex, Grand Master of the Freemasons, who was also President of the Royal Society!  The reasons for this are complex, and have to do with conflicting Jacobite and Hanoverian sympathies, and with the existence of two rival Grand Lodges in England, which were united in 1813 under Sussex. 

It was during Sussex’s Presidency of the Royal Society that the histories of Freemasonry by Moray and Ashmole, which were in the Society’s library, disappeared.  Sussex supported the change in the Society’s membership rules, removing the amateur patrons and replacing them with practising scientists.  The Royal Society now plays down its Masonic origins, starting its history with Brouncker’s appointment and laying less emphasis on Moray’s founding role.

This new professional approach meant that the Society was no longer just a learned society but also de facto an academy of scientists.  The Government recognised this in 1850 by giving a grant to the Society of £1000 to assist scientists in their research and to buy equipment. Thus a Government Grant system was established, and a close relationship began while still allowing the Society to maintain its autonomy, essential for scientific research.  In 1857 the Society moved once more, to Burlington House in Piccadilly, with its staff of two.

Over the next century the work and staff of the Society grew rapidly and soon outgrew this site.  Therefore in 1967 the Society moved again to its present location on Carlton House Terrace, with a staff which has now grown to over 120, all working to encourage public awareness and understanding of science and to promote innovative scientific research.  It has descendants in many countries, including New Zealand.

Thus it was, after two centuries of interwoven destinies, that Freemasonry and the Royal Society parted company.  Of course, many famous scientists since then have been Freemasons, such as Sir Edward Appleton and Sir Alexander Fleming, both Nobel Prize winners.  However, the originally close links between the two organisations began to wither a century and a half ago.  Today they are nonexistent. 

The Royal Society went on to become the premier organisation of professional scientists that it is today, and Freemasonry turned back to the secrecy of the Lodge and the perfection of its ritual.  Perhaps its task had been done:  as a child of the Enlightenment, its once-secret values had become universalised, so much so that we tend to take them for granted in the modern world.  In the civil sphere, they included religious tolerance, democracy, secularism, constitutionalism and parliamentarism.  In the scientific sphere, at a time when superstition and magic governed reason, and the Church claimed a monopoly on “true” knowledge, they called for the use of logic and experimentation to establish the facts of nature.

What made the Royal Society into such an amazingly successful organisation?  It borrowed a philosophy from early Freemasonry and turned it into a force which changed the very nature of the world.  It did this by applying a concept which says that understanding comes from observation and experiment, not just from philosophy. 

The success of this approach is to be seen everywhere where science has led to technological advance.  Without this basic change in attitude we would not have electronics, biochemistry, modern medicine or abundant energy.  The Royal Society gave us the technical benefits of the modern world that we now take so much for granted.