So what’s all this ‘vanished in 1813’ tosh? The names may have been omitted, but the penalties remain the same. By the late 1960s there was a growing antipathy inside Freemasonry itself towards these verbal savageries. Many wanted rid of them, and (led in part by Churchmen) arguments for and against their abolition culminated in a packed debate at Grand Lodge in 1986. A summary of these proceedings by Bro Harry Mendoza was published in the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum. ‘There was a feeling of repugnance,’ wrote Mendoza, ‘felt by the candidate while his hand is on the volume of the sacred law [the Bible] to give a faithful promise to observe an Obligation which contains a barbarous and unenforceable penalty clause. Indeed, some have argued that by taking such an Obligation, they are taking the name of God in vain and thus violating the third of the Ten Commandments. Second,’ he continues, ‘it is a known fact that there are some brethren who have refused to participate any further in the Craft because they felt that what they had been asked to repeat was puerile, offensive or wholly out of keeping with what they understood to be the principles of Freemasonry. Third’ – and bearing the misguided Mr Stephen Knight in mind – their abandonment ‘would take a potent weapon from the hands of our adversaries’.28 Ha ha.
Mendoza then moves on to the arguments for their retention: ‘We’ve been using these Obligations for years, and there’s no good reason for changing them. The ritual was good enough for my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and it’s good enough for me.’ Moreover, ‘You are forbidden to alter the ritual,’ a rule that didn’t vanish with the Articles of Union, but actually predicates upon it: ‘There shall be the most perfect unity of Obligation, until time shall be no more.’
In the end the abolitionists won the day, and on 11 June 1986 ‘Grand Lodge resolved that “All references to physical penalties be omitted from the Obligations taken by Candidates in the three degrees.”’ ‘The Board,’ wrote Bro Higman, summing it up, ‘sees it as important that the resolution is put into effect as soon as possible, particularly in so far as it affects initiations. In any event, the change should be implemented not later than June 1987.’ That’s June, nineteen hundred and eighty-seven.29
Thus, from the summer of that year, there were to be no more throats cut across, no more vitals flung over shoulders, bodies cut in half or burnt bowels. But let me not impede Bro McLeod in his flow. This malevolent junk is to have all too short a shelf-life.
‘The estimable Mr Knight,’ he froths, ‘professes to have found “many Freemasons” who were willing to talk to him, and he alleges that he has consulted the works of such notable authorities as Father Hannah and Mr Dewer,30 and yet he seems to be blissfully unaware of the facts that I cite. I can only conclude that he was either incompetent or a liar. Is there some other possibility?’31
Yes, Bro McLeod, there is, and seeing as you introduce the word, how about that you are lying, that your invective, like the website referred to earlier, is a tribute to dishonesty, and that you are about as ingenuous as some ventriloquist’s dummy of a politician bewitched by his own propaganda.
Two questions require answers here. The first is, what happened to the ‘impeccable source’ who tipped Knight off? Where did he source this ludicrous Clarence twaddle, and why didn’t he speak up in Mr Knight’s defence? And second, why isn’t Bro McLeod directing some of his sanctimonious venom at that same source? The Metropolitan Police were given Knight’s manuscript before publication. On 28 August 1975, under an official Scotland Yard letterhead, the Departmental Record Office wrote to Mr Knight: ‘Thank you for sight of your draft typescript about Jack the Ripper, where you have clearly drawn on the contents of our Metropolitan Police files’ (my emphasis).32
You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see through a camouflage like Bro McLeod’s. It’s perfectly obvious. Mr Stephen Knight was set up. In his investigations of Bro the Duke of Clarence and Bro the Earl of Euston eighty years before, another misguided but honest journalist, Ernest Parke, got shafted by a contrived ‘leak’ out of Scotland Yard. Mr Knight was simply a victim of a similar contrivance. Clarence was (and is) a greasy mirror put up between Masonry and the Ripper, a clumsy contrivance to warn others off. Nobody wants to look like a banana, so everybody (most especially Ripperology) stays away, the Masonic baby duly disappearing with the royal bathwater.
I’ve got no brief for Stephen Knight, but he didn’t wake up one wet weekend with a headful of malice towards some forgotten royal he’d never even heard of. Malice was there, but it didn’t originate with him. We know some official introduced Mr Knight to ‘one of our people’, a gent who became the primary source for the matter of his book. But who was this man, and where did he get it? From whence did this putrescent fairy tale emerge?
More than a dozen years before anyone had heard of Stephen Knight, a well-known and very excellent writer, Mr Colin Wilson, was invited to lunch at the Athenaeum. His host was an affable seventy-year-old retired surgeon named Thomas Eldon Stowell, CBE MD FRCS DIH. As well as a lot of letters after his name, Mr Stowell had a secret under his arse ‘that he’d been sitting on for thirty years’.
Over gulls’ eggs and claret, Stowell plunged into his topic, so stimulating Mr Wilson that he ignored every word of it. Wilson had written a series of articles for the London Evening Standard,33 Jack the Ripper being the theme. The crafty septuagenarian attempted to solicit the younger man’s complicity by informing him that ‘they were thinking in a very similar way regarding the murderer’s identity’, and that the assassin ‘was the Duke of Clarence’. This surprised Mr Wilson, because he’d been thinking of no such thing; indeed, he ‘had not even heard of that particular Duke’.34
It sounded like manure then, and it sounded worse sixteen years later, when Mr Wilson was commissioned to write a review of the same nonsense in Mr Stephen Knight’s recently published book. ‘What we are being asked to believe,’ wrote Mr Wilson,
is, basically, a far taller story than any of the other theories about the Ripper – the mad surgeon, the sadistic midwife, and so on. We are asked to believe, first of all, that Eddie, the Duke of Clarence, became a close friend of Walter Sickert. This is unsupported. We are asked to believe that he became sufficiently involved with a shop assistant to actually marry her – although like everyone else in the family, he was terrified of Queen Victoria, and knew that he might – almost certainly would – be King of England one day. We are asked to believe that the Queen’s physician, Sir William Gull, was party to the kidnapping of the shop assistant, and that he probably performed some grotesque operation on her to make her lose her memory. And then that Gull, with the approval of the Prime Minister, went around Whitechapel killing prostitutes with appalling sadism (when, after all, a single stab would have done the trick). Moreover, that Gull was a Freemason, and committed murders according to Masonic ritual. (The Prime Minister and Commissioner of Police were also Masons.) Mr Knight admits that Gull had a stroke in the year before the murders, but insists that he was still spry enough to wield the knife.35
Had Mr Wilson swallowed the bait, it would doubtless have been he who wore Mr Knight’s baleful mantle, and who would have been vilified in Freemasonic journals. But Wilson was too astute; Stowell was going to have to find himself another patsy.
In 1962 the allegations against Clarence had emerged in Paris, published by Hachette in a biography of Edward VII by Phillip Julian: ‘La mauvaise reputation du jeune homme se répandit dans l’opinion. Le bruit courait qu’il était Jack l’Eventreur.’ (And for those who don’t:) ‘The young man’s evil reputation soon spread. The rumour gained ground that he was Jack the Ripper.’36
The French leak went nowhere. If Stowell wanted it out, he