The Founding of the Grand Lodge of Downpatrick

Downpatrick Lodge 367 from one of the early
Minute Books. Copied from the DownpatrickFreemason Website.

It is perhaps hard to appreciate from a distance the ideological and religious ferment of those bygone days. For those of a theological disposition, the precise relationship of Jesus Christ to God was a matter of passionate debate and disagreement, as exemplified in the trial of the Reverend Thomas Nevin,  So too was the question of who - if anyone - should be the symbolic and mediating link between earth and heaven. It could be the Pope, if one chose to be Catholic, the Monarch if you chose the Anglican route, or nobody much at all if you followed the dissenting tradition for whom the function of their leaders was more a matter of governance than direct intercession. 

Then there was the question of how this intersected with the rise of nation states and national identity, which also seemed to demand conformance to a common set of beliefs and values. For the English rulers of the time, this meant adherence to Anglicanism, and second class citizenship at best for others. 

Add to this the explosive concepts unleashed by the French and American revolutions that laid the base for universal rights and secular organisation, enormous economic and social disparities, and powerful vested interests in the status quo, and there you have a recipe for interesting times. 

Tongues will hence have fluttered wildly in the Downpatrick debating societies, not only in the Whig club, but also in the Downpatrick Grand Lodge of the Freemasons, Lodge Number 367 to be precise, after the issue of its official warrant in 1767. 

Edward Parkinson, who was to write about the West family at the turn of the twentieth century was a member of the Lodge. So too many years earlier was Thomas Russell, the Linen Hall librarian and United Irishman, who was to meet his end on the gallows outside Downpatrick prison in 1803. And so also, a generation earlier, was Godfrey West, the grandfather of Harriett Wombwell.