Part 5: Rulers of Evil...The Madness of King George III...Tweaking the Religious Right...A Timely Grand Tour

Rulers of Evil; Useful Knowledge 
about Governing Bodies
By F.Tupper Saussy

Chapter 15 

THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE III 

UPON THE DEATH in 1732 of Thomas Howard, Eighth Duke of Norfolk and real Founder of American Freemasonry, the Norfolk title passed to Thomas’ brother Edward. In a curious way, the Ninth Duke of Norfolk played a part in the founding of the United States as well, albeit a cameo role. 

Sun-tzu wrote 

Multiply your spies, put them everywhere, in the very Palace of the enemy Prince; have a list of the principal Officers who are at his service. Know their first & last names, the number of their children, their relatives, their friends, their servants. Let nothing happen to them that is not known to you. 

Edward, Ninth Duke of Norfolk, was a regular in the crowd of Frederick William, Prince of Wales , and his Princess, Augusta of Saxony. The Waleses were party creatures, and an on-going disappointment to the Prince’s father, King George II. The king resented that his son appeared not to have inherited his craving for war, George II was the last British monarch to lead his army into battle, which he did against the Spanish in 1739. George despised his son’s Ignatian entourage. When Frederick William ran up an exorbitant tab entertaining foreign ambassadors at St. James’s Palace, the king cut his allowance, shooed the ambassadors away, and ordered the couple to move out of St. James’s and take up a simpler residency at Leicester House. 

In 1738, Augusta gave birth to a son, George William. At the age of six the child was placed under the tutelage of a Dr. Ayscough. Like the Society of Jesus, Ayscough did not wish the head of the Church of England well. “He is chiefly remarkable,” says Britannica, “as an adherent of the opposition.” Ayscough role in history was to keep the future king of England, who suffered emotionally under the ungainly squabbles dividing father and grandfather, virtually illiterate for more than five years. 

The Prince of Wales was fond of horse-racing. One afternoon in 1747, so the official story goes, a sudden downpour of rain confined him and a handful of friends to his tent at the Egham races. Determined to play cards, the Prince sent Edward, Ninth Duke of Norfolk, out in the rain to find someone to make up a whist party. The Duke returned with a strikingly handsome Scot, John Stuart, third Earl of Bute. “Bute immediately gained the favour of the prince and princess,” says Britannica, “and became the leading personage at their court. ” What Britannica omits saying, along with every other source I could find on this leading character in the formation of Anglo-American relations, is that Bute, like Norfolk, was a secret brother of the Lodge. This fact is ascertainable only from the keystone of the arch over Bute’s mausoleum in St. Mary’s Cemetery at Rothesay, Isle of Bute, in the Firth of Clyde west of Glasgow. Carved into that keystone is the familiar Masonic disembodied all-seeing eye. 

Born in 1713 , educated at Eton, Bute was elected in 1737 to the representative peerage for Scotland. He never opened his mouth in debate. When his bid for re-election failed, he returned to the family estate on the Isle of Bute, whose remarkably temperate climate produces a lush foliage, even palm trees. There he indulged a passion for botany that can be experienced to this day in the verdant grounds at Mount Rothesay. In 1745, Bute suddenly left Rothesay and took up residence in London. The year 1745 is distinguished by the so-called Jacobite Rebellion, another wondrous Sun-tzuan ruse in which apparent defeat for the Society of Jesus masked a hidden victory. 

The Jacobite Rebellion aimed to restore Roman Catholic rule over England by deposing George II and placing James II’s grandson Charles Stuart, better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, on the throne. However , when Charlie marched on London with a band of Scottish devotees , no Catholic politician of any prominence would desert George II. The Rebellion was forced to abort. Charlie escaped to France and the and the Scots were massacred. Clearly, this was a Catholic disaster. Or was it? Such extensive Catholic support for a Protestant king assured England that the monarchy would be forever Protestant. A Catholic England was now an impossible dream. The Jesuits could give up. Englishmen could now relax with them in their midst, just as Jesuits could now go about their business without causing official alarm. The Jacobite Rebellion made England at last... safe for the black papacy. The Jesuits secured a new cover by blowing their cover – “blown cover as cover ” in the parlance of CIA. The SunTzuan General wins whatever the circumstances. 

WHEN Bute joined the court of the Prince and Princess of Wales , their son George William was an emotional basket case. Bute lavished attention on the lad, won his trust and admiration, became his mentor. Indeed, Bute made himself so delightfully indispensable around Leicester House that the Prince appointed him, in 1750, to the most intimate position on his staff, Lord of the Bedchamber. Nothing happened in the life of the two heirs to the throne of England that was not privy to a man under obedience to the Unknown Superior. 

But in the year following Bute’s appointment, the Prince died mysteriously at the age of forty-four. Rumors that Bute was responsible circulated for a while and evaporated. However , gossip linking Bute romantically to Princess Augusta never went away, even though he was husband to a devoted wife and happy family. 

George II, surprisingly desolate over the Prince’s untimely death, remained an absurdly stern grandfather to George William. Until his own death in 1760, George II grew increasingly melancholic and disinterested in ruling. Parliament gained strength. Bute acted the surrogate father to the future king. Caring for the gardens at Leicester House, he inspired the boy with a lifelong interest in botany. He encouraged him to patronize the arts – the composer Handel, though blind, was still superintending performances of his works at the royal behest. However , Bute did little to allay George’s tormenting fears of inadequacy. Reinforcing himself as the ideal of conduct, the Scot nourished the boy’s self-distrust, which would become the most prominent feature of his maturity. 

Such was the context of English power when Lorenzo Ricci tipped the stones in the Ohio valley that tumbled into a costly world war between England and France. Six years into the war, George II died at the age of seventy-seven. He left behind a disunited Parliament and a dysfunctional heir barely out of his teens. George William, now King George III, fearfully turned the British Empire over to John Stuart. Bute acted swiftly to conform to the wishes of his Unknown Superior. He began by appointing a more compliant first lord of the Treasury, the office later to be known as Prime Minister. Next, with secretly-funded grants, he purchased votes from key members of Parliament widely known as “the King’s Friends.” Under the noble pretext of achieving “a closer unity of the British Empire under Parliament, ” Bute whipped the King’s Friends into passing a law to enforce writs of assistance across the Atlantic. These were revenue-raising warrants issued summarily under the royal seal requiring a law officer to take possession of lands without trial, without jury. 

One does not need a doctorate in political science to know that summary expropriation is a sure way to divide an empire, not unite it. When the writs were enforced in Massachusetts , James Otis resigned his Advocate-General' s post in the Court of Admiralty to preach against them “in a style of oratory,” John Adam s would later recall, “that I have never heard equalled in this or any other country.” In July 1776 , Adams would declare that the enforcement of Bute's writs of assistance in 1761 was “the commencement of this controversy between Great Britain and America.” 1 

Lorenzo Ricci's War, or the Maritime War, or the French and Indian Wars , came to an end in 1763. England was the apparent victor . Bute was sent by his protege, George III, to negotiate a peace in Paris. Assisted by Robert Petty, Lord Shelburne, the notorious “Jesuit of Berkeley Square, ” Bute perfected the Treaty of Paris. Under its terms England won from France all of Catholic Quebec and the region east of the Mississippi, except for the island of New Orleans. This was such a great territorial windfall for the colonists that North Carolinians created Bute County in the northeastern part of the colony. 2 However , Bute restricted the windfall by ordering the infamous Royal Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited Americans from moving west of a line drawn along the crest of the Allegheny Mountains. Most colonists viewed the Proclamation as a scheme to imprison them between the Alleghenies and the Atlantic. To purchasers of western real estate prior to the Treaty, it was legalized theft. The churchgoers saw a papal advance: “With Roman Catholicism no longer actively persecuted in England, many Americans concluded that the mother country was about to return to Rome.” 3 

Prior to Lorenzo Ricci's accession to the black papacy in 1758, the colonists had been blissfully loyal to the mother country. Looking back on the pre-Riccian years while testifying before the House of Commons in 1766, Benjamin Franklin recalled that “the colonists were governed by England at the expense only of a little pen, ink, and paper; they were led by a thread.” Yet, with the rise of Ricci, as if in preparation for the absurdities of Bute, radical propagandists began appearing throughout the colonies - Christopher Gadsden in South Carolina, Cornelius Harnett in North Carolina, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, and, in Pennsylvania, Charles Thomson. The dean of all these propagandists was Samuel Adams, the celebrated “Father of the American Revolution” and Freemasonry’s “dominant figure in the mobilization of the Boston artisans and inland towns.” 4 John Adams, in a letter dated February 9, 1819, framed his cousin Sam’s political activism within exactly the seventeen years of Lorenzo Ricci’s generalate: 

Samuel Adams, to my certain knowledge, from 1758 to 1775, that is, for seventeen years, made it his constant rule to watch the rise of every brilliant genius, to seek his acquaintance, to court his friendship, to cultivate his natural feelings in favor of his native country, to warn him against the hostile designs of Great Britain, and to fix his affections and reflections on the side of his native country. 

Thus, well before the advent of much to rebel against, well before Bute’s writs of assistance and the Royal Proclamation, a propaganda of American rebellion was being organized. At the same time, Dr. Franklin put together the means of disseminating it. He streamlined the colonial postal system to flow smoothly and efficiently from southern Virginia through eastern New England. 

On the diplomatic front, England’s future war-making capability was stunted by the Paris negotiations of Bute and Shelburne, which isolated England from any possibility of forming helpful European alliances. This, in 1763, was of negligible importance to anyone but the foreknowing and omniscient Lorenzo Ricci. When the hour came for America to revolt for independence, and no one but Ricci knew when that hour would come, England had to be friendlessly alone. 

Having weakened England and stimulated the production of hostile, divisive rhetoric in America , Bute resigned from public life a very unpopular man. But the king’s mentor was not yet finished. From the shadows, Bute handpicked a new Prime Minister, George Grenville. Grenville made a broad show of refusing to accept office unless the king promised never again to employ Bute in office or seek his counsel. The king promised. Pledging to give the British Empire a thorough overhauling, Grenville then proceeded (with Bute’s secret counsel and more money grants from the King’s Friends) to create dynamic situations that accelerated Britain and the colonies toward divorce. 

Duties were increased on colonial imports, justified by the notion that the colonies should contribute their fair share to the increased expenses of running an Empire much expanded by the Treaty of Paris. Higher duties heightened smuggling activities , which in turn increased the admiralty caseload. Americans began sniffing tyranny in the breeze. 

Grenville’ s new Sugar and Molasses Act enforced ruinous duties on foreign staples necessary for rum-making. The Act reduced imports of sugar and molasses from the French, Spanish, and Dutch West Indies, which in turn greatly reduced the meat, fish, flour, horses and lumber which the colonies could export to the islands. This caused a slump in colonial production. Large debts which colonists owed to their British creditors for furniture, clothing, ironware, pottery, jewelry, and many other articles, went unpaid. Merchants complained that Parliament was killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Parliament’s strange response was to prohibit the colonies from issuing paper currency to supply their lack of gold and silver. George Grenville did, however, invite the fuming colonists to propose suggestions for how they would like to be taxed. When the colonists refused to dignify the invitation with a response, Parliament in March 1765 passed, without debate or opposition, an even more infuriating measure. 

The Stamp Act required the purchasing and fixing of stamps to all colonial deeds, leases, bills of sale, pamphlets, newspapers, advertisements, mortgages, wills, and contracts. If duties on sugar and molasses could be considered part of the regulation of the Empire’s trade, the Stamp Act was a tax levied by a body thousands of miles away for the sole purpose of raising a revenue. It affected all classes of colonist. Never before had Parliament dared to impose such a tax. Whereas the duty on foreign molasses or anti-smuggling measures were felt only by the great merchants in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or Charleston, the Stamp Act affected a wider public. It added the price of a stamp to the lawyer’s bill of every colonist selling a horse, making a will, or mortgaging a house. The price of every newspaper was increased by the stated value of the stamp attached to it. 

In Massachusetts, “Britannus Americanus,” one of Sam Adams’ more than twenty pseudonyms, charged that it was as absurd for Parliament to tax the American people as it would be for an assembly of Americans to tax the people of England. In Virginia, Patrick Henry cried his slogan “NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION!” From the London Coffee House in Philadelphia, Charles Thomson led a secret club of workers, teachers, merchants and professionals in advocating the production and sales of local goods strengthened by an intercolonial agreement not to import goods from Britain. 

A month before the first stamps arrived, Sam Adams agitated Massachusetts to hold a “Stamp Act Congress, ” which convened at Ne w York in October . The Congress drew up a Declaration of Rights and Grievances protesting that the Act threatened “the liberties of the colonies.” By the time the stamps arrived from England in November, the colonists had forced most of the stamp-distributors to resign. The merchants of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia agreed not to import English goods, causing a decline in trade with Great Britain of about twenty-five percent within a year. In an address before the House of Commons , Benjamin Franklin issued his famous warning that if troops should be sent to the colonies to enforce the Act , they “will not find a revolution there but might very well create one.” 

Grenville’ s ministry suddenly fell to William Pitt and Lord Rockingham, who repealed the Stamp Act in March. The colonies rejoiced and pledged loyalty to George III. They hardly noticed that the King’s Friends had accompanied the repeal with a Declaratory Act claiming “full power and authority to bind the colonies and people of America , subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” 

Regarding Patrick Henry’s objections to unfair taxation as “so much nonsense,” Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, vowed to get “plenty of revenue from the colonies. ” In the summer of 1767, he and the King’s Friends passed acts laying duties on glass, painters’ colors, red and white lead, paper, and tea shipped to America. But the acts produced little revenue. By Townshend’s own estimate, made shortly before his premature death at forty-two, the British Treasury stood to gain no more than £40,000. Th e real, covert, purpose of the Acts appears to have been not to get “plenty of revenue,” but to stimulate the rebellious investment of colonial capital in local manufacturing. 

In March of 1770, a small crowd of jeering Bostonians pelted a few British redcoats with snowballs. The angry redcoats fired into the crowd, killing four men, wounding several more. The town and surrounding countryside reacted in rage to the Boston Massacre. Samuel Adams led his disciples to the mansion of acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson and demanded the immediate deportation of the redcoats, who wisely retreated to Castle William on the harbor. When news of the Massacre reached England, the King’s Friends scolded Hutchinson’s “cowardly surrender to Sam Adams’s regiments.” Thenceforth, each anniversary of the Boston Massacre became an occasion for Adams and others to make more blistering orations against British tyranny in favor of independence. 

In 1770, Lord North, the new Prime Minister, declared the Townshend Acts were costing more to collect than the revenue was returning to the Treasury. North secured the repeal of all the Townshend duties, except a tax on tea of three pence a pound to prove Parliament had authority to tax the colonies. The colonists weren’t affected by this miniscule tax, since most of their tea was smuggled in from Holland anyway. Feelings toward England turned amicable once again, as colonial merchants increased orders from British firms from £1,336,122 in 1769 to £4,200,000. Sam Adams , Patrick Henry, Charles Thomson and Thomas Jefferson took advantage of the lull to agitate. Observing the first anniversary of the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1771 , Adams called for action and solidarity:

It is high time for the people of this country explicitly to declare whether they will be Freemen or Slaves. Let it be the topic of conversation in every social Club. Let every Town assemble. Let Associations & Combinations be everywhere set up to consult and recover our just Rights. 5 

Between 1770 and 1773, about the only troublesome confrontations were those between British revenue vessels and smugglers. The colonies began producing more. Trade was so brisk that merchants, formerly the chief opponents of British rule, had little to protest. They turned their full attention back to business. 

And then Lorenzo Ricci nudged his weightiest boulders to date, the Religious Right, the Protestant churchgoers. How he did this is the subject of our next chapter.  

Chapter 16 

TWEAKING THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT 

As THE FUROR over the Stamp Act was cooling down, the Jesuits of Maryland and Pennsylvania discovered that the director of Catholic operations in the British colonies , Bishop Richard Challoner, had asked Rome to ordain an American bishop. 

The American Jesuits disliked the idea. Father Ferdinand Steinmayer (alias Farmer) of New York cautioned Bishop Challoner, “It is incredible how hateful to non-Catholics in all parts of America is the very name of bishop.” Still, in Challoner’s view, an American bishop would establish better order in the colonies , restore discipline, and make it possible for colonial Catholics to be confirmed. Steinmayer and his American brethren strenuously opposed the idea on grounds that it would only make life among Protestants more difficult for Catholics. They collected lay support for their views and asked Challoner himself to forward the protests to Rome, which he declined to do, leaving it to the Jesuits to state their own case. 1 

Rome never replied to Challoner’s petition for an American bishop. The bishop later discovered that the petition, made in a letter to Cardinal Spinelli and entered into the post in 1764, never left England. In Bishop Challoner’s words, “it was opened, and stopped on this side of the water.” 2 

Whoever opened Challoner’s letter must have passed its contents on to the Church of England. For no sooner had Challoner posted his letter than the Anglican Bishop of London, who had thus far been content to rule his American subjects from London, asked the British cabinet to permit the Church of England to create an American bishop to “attend the shepherdless flock in the colonies.” When word of this request reached the colonies, which were mostly Protestant but less than fifteen percent Anglican, 3 the reaction must have elated Lorenzo Ricci. The sons and daughters of immigrants who had braved wild Indians and rattlesnakes to escape religious prelates took the Bishop’s petition to be the worst act of tyranny yet, the most pressing cause for alarm, the number one thing to revolt against. 

The American bishop scare was whipped up in the non-Anglican Protestant church pulpit, the era’s most electrifying communications medium. Presbyterian and Congregationalist preachers, representing nearly fifty percent of the churched colonists, charged that an American bishop would be “an ecclesiastical Stamp Act” which would strip Americans of all their liberties, civil as well as religious, and “if submitted to will at length grind us to powder.” 4 They warned that an American bishop would dominate the colonial governors and councils, strengthen the position of the colonial oligarchy, and drive dissenters from political life with a Test Act requiring officials to state their religious preference. Having brought the colonial governments under his control, the American bishop would then establish the Church of Rome in all the colonies and impose taxes for the support of its hierarchy. A letter in the New York Gazette or Weekly Post Boy for March 14, 1768 charged that an American bishop would “introduce a system of episcopal palaces, of pontifical revenues, of spiritual courts and all the pomp, grandeur, luxury, and regalia of an American Lambeth”, Lambeth Palace being the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of all England after the royal family. An American bishop would transform Americans into a people “compelled to fall upon their knees in the streets and adore the papal miter as the Apostolic Tyrant rides by in his gilded equipage.” 

Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, Dudleian Lecturer at Harvard, inveighed against “Popish Idolatry” in a famous (and arguably prophetic) sermon by that title, saying, 

Let the bishops get their foot in the stirrup, and their beast, the laity, will prance and flounce about to no purpose. Bishops will prove to be the Trojan horse by which Popery will subjugate North America. 

The American bishop scare did more to foment the colonists to revolt, and eventually raised more soldiery, than all the tyrannical writs and tax schemes combined. Immediately, it created permanent Committees of Correspondence, an intercolonial organization of churches, and a “Society of Dissenters” based in New York. These organizations brought all opposed to the Church of England into correspondence with one another, whether in America, Great Britain, or Ireland. 5 The specter of an American bishop gave the colonial patriots an almost inexhaustible fund of propaganda to employ against any form of perceived tyranny at home and abroad. It served, in Jonathan Boucher’s words, “to keep the public mind in a state of ferment and effervescence; to make the people jealous and suspicious of all measures not brought forward by [popularly-approved leaders]; and above all, to train and habituate the people to opposition.” 6 

The fact that Americans were trained and habituated to oppose the British Crown and the Church of England not by Roman Catholics but by Protestant churchmen is, to my mind, proof of the Sun-Tzuan ingenuity of Lorenzo Ricci. Sun-Tzu said: “The General will know how to shape at will, not only the army he is commanding but also that of his enemies.” While Ricci’s own army was appearing in the world’s opinion markets to be a band of vicious dolts slipping down into their well-deserved oblivion, a small elite corps of indispensibles, some neither knowing nor caring who their true boss was, were facilitating English-speaking Protestant churchgoers in systematically annihilating one another! Lorenzo Ricci’s orchestration had reached such fullness that he could now soliloquize Iago’s boast in Othello: “Now, whether he kill Cassio or Cassio him, or each do kill the other, every way makes my gain.” 

Back in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Central American Jesuits designed posters to motivate campesinos to overthrow corrupt politicians. The posters for this Bellarminian liberation theology depicted an angry Jesus Christ in the image of Che Guevara, swathed in fatigues, draped in bullet-belts, holding a submachine gun at the ready, a Rambo Jesus, a Jesus whose Sacred Heart called for social action that included killing. The American bishop scare aroused the same dynamic in the 1770’s. What was considered by many to be the most influential sermon on the subject was preached to Boston’s Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company by Rev. Jonathan Mayhew’s successor at Harvard, Rev. Simeon Howard. Simeon Howard received his early preaching experience in Nova Scotia, or Acadia  as the French settlers called it. He experienced first-hand the uprooting and expulsion, by British soldiers, of some three thousand French Catholic Acadians , along with their Jesuit priests. Cruelly, often violently, the Acadians were forced to emigrate to various American colonies, with no compensation for property or livestock. (Longfellow memorialized the event in Evangeline). 

With a casuistry that would have delighted Cardinal Bellarmine, Rev. Howard’s famous Artillery Company sermon openly advocated the use of violence against a political tyrant. Our duty to defend personal liberty and property, he argued, is stated in Scripture at Galatians 5:1 – “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.” True, Rev. Howard admitted, Christ requires us to “resist not evil – love your enemies , do good to them that hate you” (Matthew 5), and “recompense to no man evil for evil – avenge not yourselves” (Romans 12, 17, 19). But these precepts apply only to cases of “small injuries,” Howard said, not large ones, such as tyranny.

Nor, said Rev. Howard, should we fully accept Christ’s commandments on property. “Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world” (John 2:5), and “Lay not up for yourselves treasure on earth” (Matthew 6:19), and “Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee, turn not thou away” (Matthew 5:42) – such precepts as these, Rev. Howard said, are “indefinite expressions” which “we have a right to limit.” 

Now, the defensive application of lethal force is reasonable, and noble, and patriotic. But it is not recommended by Jesus Christ. The Jesus of the Scriptures cautions that life by the sword means death by the sword. It is Rome, not Jesus, that commands the use of lethal force – Rome, whose natural-law society was built on the willingness of the individual to risk his own life in killing to preserve the Religious State. And it was Rome that Simeon Howard beseeched his audience to emulate: “Rome, who rose to be mistress of the world by an army composed of men of property and worth.” 

A decade after the American bishop scare had broken out, thousands of American Protestant and Catholic churchgoers began killing and being killed to win The War That Would Keep Anglican Bishops Out of America. And they won this war. But the utterly stupefying outcome of their victory was that no bishops were kept out of America : two bishops were brought into America , an Anglican and a Roman Catholic ! 

The Roman Catholic , of course, was John Carroll. This Jesuit son of Maryland was consecrated Bishop of Baltimore on August 15, 1790, in the chapel of Lulworth, a castle set high on the Dorset coast of England owned by the Welds , a prominent Roman Catholic family. Lulworth’ s upper “Red Room ” looks to the east upon a commanding view of the estate’s long entrance meadow and to the south upon a famous smugglers’ cove in the distance. A frequent visitor to Lulworth Castle , and honored guest in its Red Room, I am told, was King George III. 

Bishop Carroll became the Holy See’s direct representative not just in Baltimore but throughout the U.S. This fact was validated in 1798 by Judge Addison, President of the Court of Common Pleas of the Fifth Circuit of Pennsylvania in the case of Fromm vs. Carroll. Fromm was a recalcitrant German Franciscan who wanted to establish his own German-speaking, laity-owned parish. Addison ruled that “the Bishop of Baltimore has sole episcopal authority over the Catholic Church of the United States, and without authority from him no Catholic priest can exercise any pastoral function over any congregation within the United States.” Fromm was excommunicated and held up as an example of what happens to rebels against wholesome Church authority. Addison’s use of the term “Catholic Church of the United States” is an interesting judicial notice that Carroll’s ordination instituted, for all practical purposes, a secular church ruled by the black papacy. Eminent Catholic historian Thomas O’Gorman concurred in 1895, observing that American Catholicism was, “in its inception, wholly a Jesuit affair and has largely remained so.” 7 

America’s first Anglican bishop, ordained in 1784, was Rev. Samuel Seabury of Connecticut. Rev. Seabury was both a High Churchman and a Freemason. 8 To avoid the political repercussions of swearing allegiance to the Church of England so soon after 1776, Seabury was consecrated in November 1784 at Aberdeen, Scotland. Of critical importance to Rome was that the three bishops consecrating Seabury were all “nonjuring” bishops. “Nonjuring” described the class of Catholic bishops that stood in the succession of “Jacobite” clergy who, remaining loyal to King James II after his abdication in 1689, had refused to take a loyalty oath to James’ successors – his daughter, Mary Stuart, and son-in-law, William of Orange , both Protestants. 9 America’s first Protestant bishop, like his Roman Catholic counterpart, owed allegiance to Rome. 

This obscure fact is commemorated in one of London’s most heavily-trafficked and world-famous locations. The spacious grassy lawns on either side of the great stairway leading up to the National Portrait Gallery facing Trafalgar Square are identical except for their bronze statuary, one piece alone placed at the center of each lawn. On the north lawn stands James II, crowned with imperial laurel, wearing the armor of Julius Caesar. (An elderly British Jesuit with a passion for offbeat historical detail confided to me that James loved to go in Caesarean drag.) On the south lawn stands the celebrated Houdon figure of... George Washington, garbed in period attire, leaning for support upon a huge bundle of rods from which projects the head of an axe – the fasces, ancient emblem of Roman legal authority! When Bishop Seabury united his episcopate with the other two Anglican communions in America in 1789, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States was born. George Washington was a member of this Church. The London statuary are explaining the little-known historical fact that James II’s Roman Catholic rulership of the English-speaking people was resumed in the First President of the Constitutional United States of America. It is a tribute to the phenomenal generalate of Lorenzo Ricci. 

John Carroll spent his final years in Europe helping to develop Lorenzo Ricci’s vision of rebellion in America . He moved cautiously, and often incognito. What few traces he left behind are quite revealing.

Chapter 17 

A TIMELY GRAND TOUR 

AMONG THE MANY British visitors to Rome during Clement XIV’s sweetening toward England in the early 1770’s was a young member of an ancient ruling family of Dorset and Somerset counties named Charles Philippe Stourton. 1 Charles Philippe was nephew to the Dukes of Norfolk. We remember the Norfolks, Thomas and Edward Howard, for their significant contributions to American independence , Thomas , originator of colonial Freemasonry; Edward, coupler of Lord Bute to the future George III. 

Arriving in Rome with Charles Philippe was his professor at the Jesuit college in the medieval Flemish (now Belgian) city of Bruges, John Carroll. The pair were enjoying a Grand Tour of Europe which had begun in the summer of 1771. 

From Bruges they had proceeded by carriage down through Alsace-Lorraine to Strasbourg, across the Rhine to Baden-Baden, then upstream to Carlsruhe, Bruchsal, Heidelberg, Mannheim , Worms , and Mainz. From Mainz they made a curious detour over to Trier, back to Mannheim, through Swabia to Augsburg, then to Munich, Innsbruck, across the Italian border to Trent, along the Adige River to Roveredo, Verona, Mantua, Modena, and Bologna. They reached Rome in the autumn of 1772. 

In Rome , Lorenzo Ricci appointed Carroll to the position of Prefect of the Sodality. This title designates, according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia , “a chief organizer of laymen for the promotion of some form of social action.” For the promotion of what social action, I wonder, might Ricci have ordained Carroll to organize, if not the American Revolution? While John was in Rome with Lorenzo Ricci, his cousin Charles Carroll, now in his mid-thirties, pulled off a clever media ruse in Maryland. It won him tremendous popularity and established him as an important civic leader. In January 1773, a letter in the Maryland Gazette attacked the administration of Maryland Governor Robert Edens. The letter was signed “First Citizen ” In a subsequent Gazette, the attack was demolished by the eloquent arguments of a “Second Citizen.” But in February, “First Citizen” demolished “Second Citizen.” As the duel continued on into the summer, “First Citizen” was revealed to be Charles Carroll. Where upon “Second Citizen” nastily slandered Carroll, putting him down as a “disfranchised Catholic.” Suddenly now, Carroll was an underdog, just like his fellow Americans in relation to the British Crown. Although Charles was a super-rich lawyer landowner educated at the best Jesuit colleges in Europe, the people lavished him with sympathy. They despised “Second Citizen” for his bigotry. Maryland and America now had a new hero, a preeminent champion of religious liberties, a Roman Catholic First Citizen advocating a new political order. Loathsome Second Citizen made the status quo seem distasteful and undesirable – which, of course, was his assignment in the ruse. Second Citizen turned out to be the acknowledged head of the American bar, a Mr. Dulany....  

MEANWHILE , with the coming of spring, Carroll and Stourton left Rome for Florence, Genoa , Lyons, Paris, Liège, arriving back in Bruges just a few weeks before Ganganelli, Clement XIV, disestablished the Jesuits. Carroll kept a journal of their tour. 2 Partly a study-guide for Charles Philippe, partly a travelog, it’s a “fragmentary and circumspect” document, as one historian gingerly put it. Here and there, one finds snatches of informal political opinion. Although Carroll’s opinions are interesting, it’s his circumspection that intrigues us most, it’s what his journal doesn’t say. Traveling with a student appears ordinary enough, but Charle s Philippe Stourton was no ordinary collegian. He was a student of casuistry, equivocation, and Bellarminian liberation theology taught by professionals sworn to expand Roman Catholicism and extirpate Protestantism. He had been indoctrinated to obedience through the Spiritual Exercises, was a member of England’s premier Catholic and Masonic family, and was about the age of Alexander Hamilton (who by then was already turning out anonymous revolutionary pamphlets at King’s College in New York). Nor were Carroll and Stourton merely sight-seeing. They were up to something big. Carroll’s journal alludes to meetings with high ranking officials in church and state, but gives no specific names. Writing to an English Jesuit colleague, he confided “I keep a close incognito during this time.” 3 

Despite Carroll’s circumspection, his itinerary reveals certain clues. Consider that odd detour to Trier from the route between Mainz and Mannheim. Trier is more than two hundred kilometers out of the way, quite a long day’s journey. What might warrant such a deviation? There appeared in 1763 a highly controversial book by an obviously pseudonymous person, “Justinius Febronius.” The pseudonym belonged to Bishop Nikolaus von Hontheim, Chancellor of the University of Trier. In John Carroll’s day, Trier University had been run by Jesuits for more than a century. The book, of which there is apparently no published English translation out of its original Latin, is entitled On the State of the Church and the Legitimate Power of the Roman Pontiff. 

The gist of State of the Church suggests why Carroll had to visit Trier: “Febronianism, ” the philosophy of von Hontheim’s book, contains the formula for administering Protestant America as a Bellarminian commonwealth! Febronianism calls for decentralizing the Roman Catholic Church into independent national churches modeled on the Church of England. Because they are ruled directly by kings and princes, these churches are more correctly called “States.” The Pope may be successor to Peter, Prince of the Apostles , but under Febronianism he has no legal jurisdiction. He is merely a principle of unity, a spiritual unifier obligated to abide by the decrees of general councils under the leadership of bishops and their properly enlightened laymen. 

Crucial to Febronianism application is “thorough popular education.” Once laymen, bishops, and councils are “properly enlightened” they will be empowered to resist any attempts of the papacy to exert monarchical control over the Church. Febronius emphasized that his system would succeed only in a milieu of popular enlightenment. His context presumes an enlightenment wherein the public is indoctrinated with the Jesuit ratio studiorum full humanist diet, of course. It cannot operate where Scripture reigns supreme. Once the milieu’s understanding, its mentality, has been shaped by the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, it will respond with unquestioning obedience to the will of the man whose fundamental duty is the expansion of Roman Catholicism and the extirpation of Protestantism. Thus will unfold a perfect secular political state within the Roman Catholic Church, an autocracy ruled by a monarch invisible to all but the few who, by the grace of God , cannot be deceived. 4 

Febronianism was the secret formula for returning the non Catholic world to the bosom of the Church. To mask this fact, the Vatican dramatically condemned the book. The Jesuited Clement XIII had banned it from colleges and universities. In a rather quaint example of academic “blown cover as cover, ” Bishop von Hontheim, whom few realized was Febronius, even banned it from his own classes at the University! 

On the State of the Church is arguably Lorenzo Ricci’s “American Manifesto,” the social blueprint for how the General intended to realize Bellarmine liberation in a Protestant monarchy. The full title page of the first edition copy of the book says it all: 

On the State of the Church and the Legitimate Power of the Roman Pontiff: A Singular Book On the Properly-Ordered Reunification with Dissidents in the Christian Religion. 

Here one beholds a description of the momentous social change that the American Revolution would indeed produce, neither monarchical overthrow, nor democracy, nor republicanism, but a “properly-ordered reunification with dissidents in the Christian religion,” that is, the reunification of Roman Catholics with Protestants under a secularized religion whose values, long on humanism, short on Scripture – are taught through public schools following the Jesuit ratio studiorum. “Reunification” means that Protestantism has been reabsorbed into Rome. This, in the eyes of the black papacy, to the Sun-Tzuan mind, and to common sense, equals the practical extirpation of Protestantism.

ALTHOUGH Bishop von Hontheim lived in Trier, he was Archbishop of Mainz. His jurisdiction extended to the Mainz principality of Hesse-Hanover. Von Hontheim was thus the spiritual counterpart of the ruler of Hesse-Hanover, Frederick II (not to be confused with the King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, who was also a Frederick II.) Frederick II of Hesse was married to the aunt of the King of England, which made him George III’s uncle. Born a Protestant, Frederick subscribed to the Rosicrucian style of Freemasonry. Although Jesuits converted him to Roman Catholicism, he nevertheless remained a Rosicrucian secretly active. 

Frederick of Hesse was one of Europe’s richest rulers. Much of his business was handled by his son, Prince William, also a Rosicrucian Freemason. William’s specialty was facilitating war. He drafted able-bodied male Hessians, outfitted and trained them for battle, and then sold them to his English cousin George, who used them to fight alongside his own redcoats. Every time a Hessian was killed, William received a reparation in the form of extra compensation. As casualties mounted, so did his profits, which he loaned out at interest. 

In September 1769, Prince William appointed Meyer Amschel Rothschild of nearby Frankfurt to transact some of his financial affairs in the capacity of Crown Agent. Aware that the Rothschilds are an important Jewish family, I looked them up in Encyclopedia ]udaica and discovered that they bear the title “Guardians of the Vatican Treasury.” The Vatican Treasury, of course, holds the imperial wealth of Rome. Imperial wealth grows in proportion to its victories in war – as the Jesuit empowerment Regimini militantis ecclesiae implies, the Church-at-War is more necessary than the Church-at-Peace. According to H. Russell Robinson’s illustrated Armour of Imperial Rome, Caesarean soldiers protected themselves in battle with shields painted red. Since the soldiery is the State’s most valuable resource (the Council of Trent admitted this in preferring the Jesuits to all other religious orders), it is easy to understand why the red shield was identified with the very life of the Church. Hence, the appropriateness of the name Rothschild, German for “red shield.” The appointment of Rothschild gave the black papacy absolute financial privacy and secrecy. Who would ever search a family of orthodox Jews for the key to the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church? I believe this appointment explains why the House of Rothschild is famous for helping nations go to war. It is fascinating that, as Meyer Rothschild’s sons grew into the family business, the firm took on the title Meyer Amschel Rothschild und Söhne, which gives us the notarikon MARS. Isn’t Mars the Roman Go d of War, whose heavenly manifestation is “the red planet”? There is powerful kabbalah here, and there’s hardly an acre of inhabitable earth that hasn’t been affected by it in some way. 

It may never be known if John Carroll and Charles Philippe Stourton paid a call on the offices of Meyer Rothschild during their Grand Tour. Carroll was not permitted to keep a record, and the Rothschild name is synonymous with secrecy. But a call, keeping a “close incognito,” at the House of Rothschild would not be inconsistent with outcome. The newly-designed Prefect of the Sodality, chief organizer of laymen for social action, would have a legitimate need to talk finances with the Church’ s most secret trustee. As things were developing, General Ricci needed an American financial crisis to provoke the colonists into resolving the utter necessity of war. 

Carroll’s journal reflects that he and Stourton did enter the Frankfurt-Mainz area, which is Rothschild country, in early spring 1772. If we suppose they talked financial crisis with the Rothschilds, the outcome of their talks actually did occur several months later. During July, in fact, the British banking system underwent a severe credit reduction. This consequently threw American merchants into an extreme financial distress that did not end until the Revolutionary War itself produced a business boom in 1776. Rothschild, with his access to Hesse-Hanover’s vast wealth, and conceivably that of the Jesuits as well, had power to affect a credit reduction in British banking. And Rothschild’s profiting from the Revolutionary War is well known. If, during the spring of 1772, the circumspect young Jesuit professor conveyed to the powerful young Jewish banker Lorenzo Ricci’s need for a financial disturbance in England and America , didn’t John Carroll admirably serve his Superior General, his Church, and his country? And didn’t Rothschild do his client likewise? 

Even as Carroll and Stourton were networking (according to my surmise) with Ricci and the bankers of war, Amiot’s Sun-Tzu was published. Carroll’s circumspection bars us ever from knowing whether he and Stourton came upon a copy and read it. Did Rothschild know the book? Even if they knew it well, the experience could not possibly have been for them the adventure in irony it is for us now. We open The Thirteen Articles and hear the gentle voice of the man in charge of the papacy’s most important business, the man who decided everything, who was in the process of gaining advantage from dangerous and critical circumstances, whose intentions were unguessable, whose decisions were shaping both his own army and the armies of his English-speaking Protestant enemies, the man who through cleverness and ruse had already secured the obedience of his enemies in London and Boston and Paris and Philadelphia although they believed him and his army to be far away and slumped in rest from sustained losses, the man who would win the most important War in modern times without giving battle or drawing a sword, who uniquely knew the day, the hour, the moment of battle-less, sword-less combat. Lorenzo Ricci’s voice whispers to us across the centuries between the lines in passages such as these: 5 

A State’s most important business is its army. It is the General who decides everything. If he is clever, he will gain an advantage from even the most dangerous & critical circumstances. He will know how to shape at will, not only the army he is commanding but also that of his enemies. 

Try to be victorious without giving battle. Without giving battle, without spilling a drop of blood, without even drawing a sword, the clever General succeeds in capturing cities. Without setting foot in a foreign Kingdom, he finds the means to conquer them. He acts in such a way that those who are inferior to him can never guess his intentions. He has them change location, even taking them to rather difficult places where they must work & suffer. 

Do not disdain the use of artifice. Begin by learning everyhing there is to know about your enemies. Know exactly what relationships they have, their reciprocal liaisons & interests. Do not spare large amounts of money. Have spies everywhere, be informed of everything. 

Overlook nothing to corrupt what is best on the enemy’s side: offers, presents, caresses, let nothing be omitted. Maintain secret liaisons with those amongst the enemy who are the most depraved. Use them for your own ends, along with other depraved individuals. Cross through their government, sowing dissension amongst their Chiefs. Ceaselessly give them false alarms & bad advice. Engage the Governors of their Provinces in your interests. That is approximately what you must do, if you wish to fool them by cleverness & ruse. 

When a clever General goes into action, the enemy is already defeated. When he fights, he alone must do more than his entire army, not through the strength of his arm but through his prudence, his manner of commanding, & above all his ruses. The great secret of solving all problems consists of the art of knowing how to create division when necessary. 

What is far must be brought near, advantage must be drawn even from losses, and slowness must be turned into diligence. You must be near when the enemy believes you to be far, have a real advantage when the enemy believes you have sustained some losses, be occupied by useful work when he believes you are slumped in rest, and use all sorts of diligence when he only perceives you to be moving slowly. Thus, by throwing him off track, you will lull him to sleep in order to attack him when he expects it the least & without him having the time to prepare for it. 

As it is essential for you to be completely familiar with the place where you must fight, it is no less important for you to know the day, the hour, even the moment of combat. That is a calculation which you must not neglect. 

You, therefore, who are at the head of an army must overlook nothing to render yourself worthy of the position you hold. Throw your gaze upon the measurements of quantities & the measurements of dimensions. Remember the rules of calculus. Consider the effects of balance. Examine what victory really is. Think about all of this deeply & you will have everything you need in order to never be defeated by your enemies. 

They who possess the true art of governing troops well are  those who have known & who know how to make their power formidable, who have acquired unlimited authority, who are not brought low by any event no matter how vexing, who do nothing with precipitation, who conduct themselves as calmly when they are surprised as they do when their actions have been planned long in advance, and who always act in everything they do with that promptness which is in fact the fruit of cleverness combined with great experience. 

The strength of this sort of warrior is like that of those great bows which can only be stretched with the help of some machine. Their authority has the effect of those terrible weapons which are shot from bows which are thus stretched. Everything succumbs to their blows, everything is laid low.... 

If you do exactly as I have indicated, success will accompany all your steps. Everywhere you will be a conqueror, you will spare the lives of your soldiers, you will affirm your country in its former possessions and procure new ones, you will augment the splendor & glory of the State, and the Prince as well as his subjects will be indebted to you for the sweet tranquility in which they will henceforth live their lives. What objects can be more worthy of your attention & all your efforts? 

CHARLES Philippe Stourton and John Carroll departed Rome for Flanders in March 1773 . Th e journey took them four months . They passed through Florence, Genoa, Lyons, and Paris, arriving at Liège in early July. John returned Charles Philippe to his father, Lord Stourton, and proceeded alone to the Jesuit College at Bruges. 

Meanwhile, in London, during the month of April, the British East India Company presented the King’s Friends a scheme which, if measured by the way it would anger American merchants and point them inexorably toward rebellion, could only have sprung from the Sun-Tzuan intellect of Lorenzo Ricci – “I demand the art of making enemies move as one wishes.” That scheme, a plan to glut New England with cheap tea, is the subject of our next chapter.  

next

THE STIMULATING EFFECTS OF TEA 

notes

Chapter 15: The Madness of King George III 

1. Koch and Peden, The Selected Writings of John & John Quincy Adams, New York: Alfred A. Knopf (1946), letter of July 3, 1776 

2. In 1779, they would divide Bute County into two new counties, named Warren and Franklin, after patriots Joseph and Benjamin. Bute County no longer exists. 

3. John G. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution, New York: Little, Brown (1943), p 190 

4. S. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, (1996), p 106 

5. David S. Muzzey, Our Country’s History, Boston: Ginn &Company (1961), p 92 

Chapter 16: Tweaking the Religious Right 

1. Denis Gwynn, Bishop Challoner, London:Douglas Organ (1946), p 192 

2. Gwynn, Challoner, p 191 

3. Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press (1993), p 25 

4. Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., A Memoir of the Life of William Livingston, New York (1844), p 136 

5. The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, New York (1901), Vol I, p 490 

6. Jonathan Boucher, in Miller, Origins, p 195
7. Thomas O’Gorman, History of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, New York (1895), p 208 

8. Sidney Hayden, Washington and his Masonic Compeers, New York: Masonic Publishing and Manufacturing Co., (1868), p 371 . Before the Provincial Grand Lodge of New York, Rev. Seabury delivered an address December 27, 1782, as seen by the following record of that body: “Resolved unanimously, that the thanks of this Lodge be given to our Rev. Bro. Dr. Seabury, for his sermon delivered this day, before this and other Lodges, convened for the celebration of St. John the Evangelist.” 

9. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp 368-70 

Chapter 17: A Timely Grand Tour 

1. The Barony of Stourton, according to Burke’s Peerage, is “the oldest surviving barony created by Letters Patent.” A “letter patent” is a royal grant. 

2. The John Catroll Papers, Georgetown University, 

3. J.C. Papers, Letter to Thomas Ellerker, October 26, 1772 

4. Matthew 24:24 

5. Garcia’s manuscript translation from the French of Amiot’s Thirteen Articles Concerning Military Art, used by permission of La Belle Eglise.