Page 57 - An account of the Lodge of Nine Muses No. 235. 1777 to 2012UGLE

Lodge of the Nine Muses 57

leading spirit among the “Antients”. His early career is obscure, but he is known
to have been made a Mason towards the end of 1761, at a Lodge in Bristol long
extinct. He went out to America about 1760, but was back in England and in
London in 1785, when he was elected J.G.W. of the “Atholl” Grand Lodge. He
was S.G.W. in 1786, 1787, and 1788, Deputy G.S. from 1792 to 1800, when he
became Deputy G.M., a post which he held till the Union in 1813.
He joined the Grand Master’s Lodge in 1787, of which he was W.M. in 1793-
4, and Treasurer from 1794 to 1829.
Bro. Harper was one of the most active advocates of the Union, and in order
to help to bridge the gap he joined the “Modem” Globe Lodge, now No. 23, in
1787, and the Lodge of Antiquity in 1792, and held office in both; in 1800 he
joined the Nine Muses.
This bold policy laid him open to attack from both sides.
He was suspected of acting from mercenary motives, and, indeed, he may have
found a footing in both camps profitable. On 9 February 1803, he was formally
“expelled this Society” by the unanimous vote of the “Modern” Grand Lodge, for
“countenancing and supporting a Set of Persons calling themselves Antient Masons,
and holding Lodges in this Kingdom without authorisation from His Royal Highnefs
the Prince of Wales, the Grand Master duly elected by the Grand Lodge”. The
resolution was ordered “to be inserted in the printed Account of the Grand Lodge to
prevent the said Thomas Harper from gaining admission to any regular Lodge”. The
mover was rather strangely Sir William Rawlins, with whom Thomas Harper was to
work harmoniously for twenty-three years at the Nine Muses after the Union.
Sir William had been appointed S.G.W. in 1802; of his earlier Masonic career
the Lodge has no knowledge.
It was not unusual for Masons to pass from one jurisdiction to the other, or to
belong to both; some Lodges even held warrants from both Grand Lodges. But
neither recognised the other’s degrees, and a “Modem” joining the “Antients”, or
vice versa, had to go through the ceremonies again.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century party feeling was very strong, and
the excommunication by the “Moderns” of the “Antient” Deputy G.M. was a
vigorously uncompromising gesture.