Page 22 - An account of the Lodge of Nine Muses No. 235. 1777 to 2012UGLE

22 An Account of the

Chaplain in 1775. Dr Johnson’s reply to the clergyman who asked “were not
Dodd’s sermons addressed to the passions?” is famous. “They were nothing, Sir, be
they addressed to what they may.” But Dodd must have had some genuine gifts,
for his address at the inauguration of the Freemasons’ Hall was highly thought of
by a critical audience.
Having got into money difficulties, Dodd was so misguided as to forge
the signature of Lord Chesterfield, whose tutor he had been, to a bond of
£4200, and after the inhuman law of that time he was hanged at Tyburn. Dr
Johnson, writing to Boswell on 28 June 1777, says: “Poor Dodd was put to
death yesterday, in opposition to the recommendation of the jury – the petition
of the city of London – and a subsequent petition signed by three-and-twenty
thousand hands. Surely the voice of the public, when it calls so loudly, ought
to be heard.” Readers of Boswell will recall how the Doctor, whose bark was
always worse than his bite, exerted himself in Dodd’s defence, less however out
of consideration for the man than out of respect for the clerical profession.
On 7 April, only a few months after his attendance at the meeting on 14 January
1777, Dr Dodd was expelled from the Craft by resolution of the Grand Lodge, as
a convicted felon.
Two curious traditions have been preserved about this unhappy affair.
The first is that Lord Chesterfield confronted Dodd with the forged document
while they were alone together in a room in his Lordship’s house. A fire was
burning, and the bond lay on the table. Chesterfield deliberately turned his back
on Dodd and looked out of the window for a time; Dodd, however, did not use
the opportunity thus given him for destroying the evidence, and the law took
its course.
The other is that Dodd’s body was cut down from the gallows before death,
and that he was revived and smuggled into Spain, to die there in poverty. This
yarn is doubtless apocryphal; the former may well be true.
But enough of Dr Dodd; his fate may serve now on occasion to point an
after-dinner jest – there is something irresistibly humorous in a hanging; but
the story is a sordid one, and the connection is no credit to the Lodge, of which
Dodd was never a regular member.