ESTABLISHMENT HISTORIANS like to construct closets around certain chapters of American history, and they reserve a special closet for any “founding father” who wasn’t a Bible-quoting Protestant heterosexual. They snarl when revisionist historians point out that many of the founders were Freemasons who didn’t subscribe to their idea of traditional Christian beliefs. One can only imagine their reaction to the suggestion that some of the founders expressed same-sex affections for one another.
In one of the most startling chapters of the Revolutionary period, two young Freemasons—Alexander Hamilton and Baron Von Steuben—appear to have come close to masterminding the establishment of a constitutional American monarchy. It might have been headed by the deposed Stuart dynasty of Scotland. And, at least initially, George Washington may have supported their efforts.
Establishment history has managed to obscure what a confusing time our Revolution was from an ideological standpoint. How would the new country be run? They had options. In the old-style Catholic monarchies, absolute power was held by rulers who imposed their religious beliefs and held themselves accountable to no one. Puritan Protestants had gotten their first shot at governing during England’s 1653–59 Protectorate; their regime turned out as absolutist as the old Catholic variety. The idea of reviving a Roman-style republic ruled by a legislative body was relatively new—and so was the idea of a constitutional monarchy founded on an actual document that established due process and a balance of power between sovereign and Parliament.
During the Revolutionary War, Hamilton was General Washington’s chief of staff, secretary, and chief advisor. Von Steuben was inspector general of the Continental Army. Like others among Washington’s posse of 32 aides, these two men were spirited, stylish, brilliant, brave, ambitious, aristocratic, and functioned as a think-tank for the General. Their monarchist aims may have been supported by a few other aides whose sexuality has also been scrutinized, notably the Marquis de Lafayette and John Laurens.
Washington’s monarchism has been examined frequently, his sexual orientation less so. It does appear that the General was soft on the type of passionate and emotional “friendship” that 18th-century upper-class men sometimes favored, not only those for whom friendship shaded over into sexual intimacy, but also for straight men. As combat veterans like gay historian Paul Hardman tell us (he wrote about both Von Steuben and Hamilton), it’s easy for men at war to slip into this mode of physical closeness. Washington wrote tender letters to his favorite aides, and sometimes slept in the same bed with his number one favorite, Lafayette, when they were in the field on campaign. Last but not least, Washington was a Freemason, which encouraged him to be a liberal-thinking, nonjudgmental sort of man, not a Puritan ogre like the ones who wrote the colonial sodomy laws. My conclusion: while Washington may have been heterosexual, he loved his “boys”—he was older than most of them, and clearly enjoyed having their young brains, brawn, and bravery around him.
Monarchism among our founders has become such a touchy subject that the closet-builders have tried to bury it very deep. There’s actually an urban myth that Washington’s officers offered him the crown and he turned it down in outrage. In 1782, Col. Lewis Nicola, representing the other officers, is said to have sent the General a letter urging him to accept the title of king. Washington scribbled an angry reply, telling Nicola to “banish these thoughts from your mind.” However, a careful reading of Washington’s letter (which still exists among his papers) reveals that he was not rejecting a kingship. He was rejecting a creative suggestion by Nicola on how the financially strapped Continental government could finally pay its soldiers and officers, a burning issue that had the army close to mutiny.
Indeed, the idea that Washington’s officers offered him a crown is not very credible. The aristocrats among them would know that their General lacked the proper family credentials for the job. He was not “of the blood royal.” If he had accepted a crown, he would have been viewed as a joke in Europe, where long, horrible wars had been fought over these very credentials. However, Washington was royalist enough, and Freemason enough, that he and his young posse might have looked across the Atlantic to see what authentic king candidates might be available over there—especially those with Masonic connections.
Today’s conspiracy-mongers imagine that Freemasonry is a “pagan Satanic international conspiracy whose members seek to impose a New World Order.” Indeed, some modern brands of Freemasonry have been identified with ultraconservatism, even white supremacy. But in earlier times, Freemasonry had a very different image, as I learned when I started studying its history, spurred by the knowledge that several generations of men in my own family were Freemasons. To make sense of what our monarchist Freemason founders did, we have to look at several centuries of history.
Scotland and the Templars
The late Middle Ages was full of secret fraternities with nonconformist ideas, and Freemasonry was one of them. It surfaced in Scotland in the late 1500’s, with strong links to the Stuart dynasty. In the next century-and-a-half, Freemasonry went international, spreading like wildfire to England, Ireland, and the Continent, and later to the American colonies. Its members included enlightened aristocrats, educated middle-class men, and noted thinkers like Sir Isaac Newton. Members pledged to aid other Masons, no matter what country they were from.
While it had its purely social side, Freemasonry also became a political movement with a strikingly ecumenical tone at a time when Europeans were killing each other over religious tenets. Its members did acknowledge the existence of a deity they called the Supreme Architect of the Universe, but they refrained from being doctrinaire. Eventually Jews and Muslims were welcome in many lodges (hence the urban myth that Jews aimed to rule the world through Freemasonry). There was a good reason why Masonic meetings were kept secret. Any person who worked to curtail the power claimed by religious authorities was viewed as a traitor. If you were caught, you met a horrible end during a public execution.
Questions remain: Why Scotland? Why the Stuarts? What’s the gay thread to the story?
In ancient times, the Romans failed to conquer those rugged peoples living on the north end of Britain. So did Roman Christianity at first; the Celtic Church of Ireland and Scotland operated off a network of feisty bishops and monasteries who rejected central control by the Roman Church. In the 11th century, William the Conqueror compelled the Celtic Church to submit to papal supremacy. But Scottish kings held onto their independence through intermittent bloody wars with English kings who aimed to annex Scotland. In the 14th century, Scotland got the Pope to recognize her political independence; in 1320 the country adopted the first written constitution since the Roman Republic. The Declaration of Arbroath gave Parliament the right to choose its king—and to depose a king if he betrayed their national ideals. In 1371, the Scots chose Robert the Bruce as the first Stuart king.
At about the same time, another feisty, independent entity was rankling the Roman Church. This was the Knights Templar, a military order founded during the Crusades. Although the Templars paid lip service to the Pope, their real goal was to evade papal control. They accumulated so much wealth that they financed kings, maintained friendly relations with Jews and Muslims, and guarded scientific information—navigation, architecture, military engineering—with ancient traditions. Because of this unorthodox cultural positioning, it is possible that same-sex bonding among some of its members was tolerated.
In 1307, the Roman Church moved to smash the Templars. After a wave of arrests, members were charged with sodomy, blasphemy, and heresy. Were the charges of sodomy valid? When it was all over in 1312, some Templars had confessed to sodomy under torture and died in prison or at the stake. Others managed to flee. Some took refuge in Scotland because of its independence from papal control.
Through the 1500’s, as the Protestant revolt hit Europe, Scotland was one of the countries that agonized between Catholicism and Protestantism. After the Protestant Kirk became the national church, the Stuarts remained Catholic but committed themselves in a written declaration to tolerate both religions—the first European monarchs to do so.
Meanwhile, safe in their Scottish exile, surviving Templars were regrouping. Still businessmen, they grafted themselves onto the trade guilds—bakers, dyers, weavers, carpenters, stonemasons—that ran the medieval economy. Each guild was an elite fraternity that guarded the secrets of its craft, educated its apprentices, protected and regulated its members, and looked after their families. Most important, the guilds organized themselves on the basis of written constitutions. The earliest known document was that of the stonemasons in the late 1300’s, which detailed due process and members’ duties. To this day, a new Freemason is called an “apprentice” and dons a stonemason’s sheepskin apron, as he would if he were learning the building trade.
The Freemasons came to think of themselves as “free men” dedicated to “rebuilding the Temple.” In time, they developed a body of thought on how government could make itself more independent of the church. As a holdover from the Templars, their writings and rituals were rich with ancient Eastern associations, notably King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, which had been razed by the Romans. Many Freemasons supported the idea of a wise, just, and spiritually enlightened monarch like Solomon.
From the beginning, Freemasonry was never monolithic. The Grand Lodge of Scotland, with its more hermetic and free-thinking traditions, already had local lodges in place before 1600. The Grand Lodge of England, appearing in 1717, was more Anglican and Bible-based, and insisted at first that members believe in the Trinity. But the 1723 Constitution written by James Anderson broadened this English requirement to a simple belief in some form of Supreme Being. (This outraged the Pope, who prohibited Catholics from joining the order.) The Grand Orient of France, which appeared around 1733, was influenced by Scottish tradition and had a fiery political character.
At the community level, local lodges met in taverns or private homes. In the American colonies in 1731, the first Grand Lodge received its Constitution in Pennsylvania, where Benjamin Franklin published the first Masonic Constitutions. Wherever they met, Freemasons always started their meetings by opening a “book of law” on the altar. This could be the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, Aristotle’s Athenian constitution, or simply the Grand Lodge’s own constitution. The point was that members revered the law and studied it.
Many church apologists hated Freemasonry from the beginning, for two reasons: one, because it had ancestors in the “heretical” Knights Templar; and two, because it became a political movement that aimed to limit the power of established religions in Europe, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Anglican. Some Freemasons—in Scotland and England, for example—felt that monarchy could safely be retailored, with a monarch’s powers limited by a written constitution and a strong Parliament. Others—revolutionary France, for one—concluded that monarchy had to be nixed entirely, replaced by constitutional republics on the pagan Roman model.
Did Freemasons inherit the Templars’ putative tolerance on the sexual orientation front? During this pioneering period, Masonic membership included a number of prominent men whose contemporaries knew them to be sexually passionate toward other men. It’s not surprising that thinking gay and bisexual men of those times would gravitate to a semi-secret political movement that might result in more liberal government and a brighter day for their love lives.
Gay and Bisexual Royals
Every European dynasty had its gay or bisexual offshoots, or so it seems, and the Stuarts were no exception. What’s more, these Stuarts form an important part of the Freemason story.
Some historians speculate that Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who married Mary Queen of Scots, was bisexual. He was reportedly “effeminate” and, according to no less a source than Court TV’s Crime Library, “From time to time, he was reported to enjoy men as partners in sex as well.” In 1567, Darnley’s enemies had him murdered, along with a man who was evidently his lover at the time. Both were found strangled, a common punishment for sodomy.
The son that Mary had with Darnley was later crowned James VI of Scotland. At age thirteen, James showed his passion for men when he chose as his first favorite his older cousin Esmé Stuart, 1st Duke of Lennox. The Protestant Church forcibly separated James from Esmé, but James persisted in his passions. In 1601, at age 34, he was inducted into the Freemasons at the Lodge Scoon and Perth No. 3 in Perth, Scotland. The following year, he was invited by the English to rule them as James I of England, since Elizabeth I had died childless and James was her closest living relative. When James moved to London, he took Freemasonry with him, and his court helped the fraternity put down its first roots there. From 1614 until his death in 1625, King James maintained a public relationship with his most beloved favorite, George Villiers 1st Duke of Buckingham.
Admittedly, James was an autocrat who insisted on the “divine right” of kings, as did his son Charles I. Both kings wrestled with Parliament, defending their personal Catholic sympathies in a country that was ever more stridently Protestant. After a decade of civil wars, Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan protectorate took over and had Charles I beheaded in 1649. The king’s son Charles II went into exile in Holland and France, taking Freemason ideas with him.
But the English soon tired of Puritan absolutism, and in 1660 Parliament invited Charles II to come home. His Restoration court openly celebrated sexual liberation, as portrayed in the recent film The Libertine. Charles II himself was cheerfully bisexual, with a train of male lovers and seven mistresses with whom he had fourteen children. He also ran the country so well that he would be seen as one of England’s best kings. Freemasonry established itself solidly in England during his reign.
But English Protestants remained unhappy with the Stuarts’ Catholic and Masonic connections. In 1688–89, King James II had an epic arm-wrestling match with Parliament over whether Anglican belief would be imposed, not only on the people but also on the King personally. In 1687, James publicly reiterated the old Stuart religious tolerance by issuing a Declaration for Liberty of Conscience. This was the last straw. Parliament, which was strongly influenced by the Church of England, saw to it that James was deposed (he was allowed to flee the country). A new Protestant monarch was needed, so Parliament invited the Netherlands’ William of Orange, who ruled with wife Mary, followed by their daughter Anne, before the German House of Hanover took over in 1714.
Meanwhile, England had finally annexed Scotland, an act that sped the flow of disgruntled Scottish royalists to the American colonies. Washington’s home state, Virginia, was sprinkled with “Cavaliers,” or Stuart-sympathizing survivors of the English Civil Wars. The Washingtons themselves were royalist gentry from Yorkshire with old ties to Scotland and the Stuarts. But the northern colonies were well supplied with royalists, too. These refugees helped establish colonial Masonic lodges, and stirred up dissatisfaction with the Hanoverian kings’ high-handed manner of ruling the colonies. They also kept alive sympathy for the Stuarts and their religious tolerance. According to British historian Sir Charles Petrie, the first American feeler to a refugee Stuart had already been put out to Charles II, inviting him to be King of Virginia when he was still in exile in Holland.
By 1776, the son of the exiled James II, Charles Edward Stuart, had grown up in exile in Italy. A charismatic and charming man, he was known as “Bonnie Prince Charlie.” Many Europeans regarded him as the rightful occupant of the English throne; he became a rallying point for an international group of royalists called Jacobites, many of whom were Freemasons. In 1778, no sooner had the American Revolution broken out than a feeler was put out to Bonnie Prince Charlie by Jacobites in America. According to Petrie and another source, a letter was written to the Prince by a group of Bostonians. Some of them may well have been Freemasons—the Boston Lodge had helped organize the Tea Party. The Prince’s response is not known. But by 1781, with the British army ready to surrender to Washington, the stage was set for American royalists to make a stronger bid for a king.
The Once and Reluctant King
Through the war, the “united States of America” had operated haphazardly as thirteen cantankerous little republics loosely joined by the 1775 Articles of Confederation. The limping confederacy was overseen by the Congress of the Confederation, which was governed by a president elected by Congress. But the president wasn’t a head of state; he was something like today’s Speaker of the House.
Meanwhile, like a chest of that rejected tea, each state had dumped overboard the royal charter by which it had been governed for a century or more. Between 1776 and 1778, each state adopted its own written constitution in which everything was meticulously laid out, from elections to criminal penalties. Concern about better government had sunk deep enough that even the states with powerful church establishments—Maryland, Virginia, New England—saw the value of these Freemason-type documents, though they insisted on adding clauses that required a Protestant religious test for officeholders and voters. Indeed, adopting a constitution was the grandest way for a new state to thumb its nose at England, which was still governed without a written constitution.
But by the end of the Revolution, problems had come up that the Articles of Confederation couldn’t fix. It was clear that a strong centralized governing focus—they called it “federal”—was needed. In 1778, as Alexander Hamilton called for a Constitutional Convention to be held, he and others felt that this focus should be an elected king.
American closet-builders categorically deny that George Washington might have been party to shopping an American crown to Europe. Scottish historians Laurence Gardner and Prince Michael of Albany, who have written extensively about American interest in the Stuarts, are dismissed out of hand because of their close ties with the dynasty. But Charles Petrie is not so easy to dismiss—he had no Stuart axes to grind, and he documented the American Jacobites in his 1950’s study The Jacobite Movement. I believe Washington knew what was going on, or was party to it; his young monarchist officers would have been guilty of mutiny if they did anything behind his back. Besides, Washington’s bad temper was legend. It wasn’t smart to cross him.
According to Petrie, this shopping expedition was risky for Washington and his posse. Other colonists could have accused them of being “loyalists.” Throughout the war, colonists who stayed loyal to the Hanoverian George III had been hounded, even tortured and executed, and their property seized.
At this moment in history, it was Alexander Hamilton who came to the fore. Born in 1755 in the West Indies, Hamilton was the illegitimate son of James Hamilton, an emigrant merchant who descended from one of Scotland’s most powerful old aristocratic families, one that had strong ties with the Stuarts. Alexander was so brilliant and energetic that he put a checkered childhood behind him, passed the New York bar as a lawyer, and emerged as one of the Revolution’s leading thinkers and actors. At the outbreak of the fighting, he was just 21. Some historians insist that Hamilton wasn’t a Freemason—there’s no record of the lodge to which he belonged. But evidence shows that he visited Masonic lodges, which only members could do.
Sexually, Hamilton did marry and have eight children, but he lived in the grip of powerful attractions to other men. For instance, he went heartsick over British spy John André, who was captured in 1780. André was clearly homosexual, as most historians admit. He was so handsome and charming that Washington expressed regret as he had André hanged.
Even stronger was the feeling Hamilton had for his fellow officer and best friend, John Laurens. John was the son of Henry Laurens, president of the Continental Congress, also a Mason. Hamilton detached himself from Washington’s staff for a while so that he and Laurens could serve together in cavalry combat, until Washington decided he couldn’t do without Hamilton and dragged him back. Hamilton wrote his buddy some love letters that survive today. In one of them, he confessed, “I wish, my dear Laurens … it might be in my power, by action rather than words, to convince you that I love you.” Lauren’s letters to Hamilton were warm, but a shade less passionate; it’s not known if the two were physically intimate.
Hamilton’s monarchism was supported by his good friend, the equally charismatic Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. The Marquis had arrived breathlessly from France at age nineteen to support the American revolution with his own personal fortune, and was appointed one of Washington’s field generals. Lafayette presented Washington with his own Masonic lambskin apron, which had been hand-embroidered with Masonic symbols by his wife. He and Washington became so chummy that some of the American officers grumbled at the general’s closeness with a foreigner.
It isn’t known exactly when and how the American monarchists decided to put out their most serious feeler to Bonnie Prince Charlie. The allegations are this: after the British army surrendered in 1781, as a few last skirmishes were going on and diplomats wrangled over how to end the war officially, an American delegation is said to have traveled to Italy and called on the Prince in 1782. He was at home in his Palazzo San Clemente in Florence. Laurence Gardner mentions this delegation, as does Prince Michael of Albany, today’s descendant of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who has written a history of his own family. Both cite papers in the Stuart archives in Europe and the U.S. Senate archives. Petrie gives more details on some of these Stuart papers.
After presenting their credentials, the Americans popped the question. But Bonnie Prince Charlie turned them down. He was aging and tired. He was also the veteran of two problematical marriages, with no legitimate male heir as yet. According to Michael of Albany, he feared that his lack of an heir would bring about renewed Hanoverian claims to rule America. Back home, the bad news about Prince Charlie’s refusal was not the only one that Hamilton got that year. John Laurens had been killed in a skirmish, one of the last of the war.
Undaunted, the American royalists moved down the list to their second choice. This was Prince Henry of Prussia, younger brother of Frederick the Great of Prussia. Henry and his powerful brother had supported the Stuart cause. This time, it was Hamilton’s good friend Baron von Steuben who took the lead. In 1786 he wrote Prince Henry a letter offering him the crown of America.
The Baron already had a colorful history with Prince Henry. While still in Europe, he had served under Henry, who was commander-in-chief of Frederick the Great’s army, then the best in Europe. Rising to captain, Von Steuben distinguished himself in battle. Since he and Prince Henry were both apparently gay and Freemasons, they formed a close friendship. Most historians have little doubt about the sexual orientation of both men (or that of Frederick the Great himself, who was also flamboyantly gay). In 1763, despite all his achievements and connections, von Steuben was cashiered out of the Prussian army. One biographer says it was because of a scandal involving “familiarities with young boys.” After a desperate job search with armies across Europe, von Steuben sought out Freemason Benjamin Franklin, who was in France at the time. Through Franklin’s recommendation, von Steuben reached the American colonies—timing is everything—just as Washington’s battered army was at its low point during that horrible 1777 winter in Valley Forge. Von Steuben landed the dream job—reorganizing and modernizing the American army. He did it brilliantly. In 1787, however, Prince Henry wrote back to von Steuben declining the invitation.
By this time, Washington and others were evidently having second thoughts about an American monarchy. A firestorm of controversy had erupted around the Society of the Cincinnati, a patriotic fraternity organized by von Steuben for all Continental army officers, whose constitution provided hereditary privileges for the members’ male descendants. Washington had been elected its first President. But Democrats like Jefferson now attacked the organization as an American peerage that might put a king in place. Washington was so concerned that he put some distance between himself and the Cincinnati; it was time to retrench.
Long Live the Constitution
With the constitutional monarchy option now dead, the Founders moved to finish the job of replacing the rickety Articles with a Constitution appropriate to a republic. Hamilton emerged as a key figure, working tirelessly on the memoranda now known as the Federalist Papers. King or no king, he insisted, the country still needed a powerful executive. The office that had presided over the Continental Congress was not powerful enough, so he convinced the founders to turn the U.S. President into a true chief of state. Hamilton favored electing the President for life, a suggestion that shocked the anti-royalists. So our founders settled on a four-year term.
But Congress would not elect the president themselves, Scottish style. Instead, the Founders imported yet another old European idea. This was the Electoral College, an invention of the Roman Republic. Celtic and Germanic peoples of ancient times had also elected their kings this way. Now those Americans eligible to vote (state law usually restricted them to white Christian male property-owners) would elect their electors, who in turn would elect the President. On April 17, 1788, all the grand pieces came together, as 69 electors assembled in New York City and unanimously elected George Washington as our first President.
President Washington also made a real brick-and-mortar contribution as a Masonic builder. The new nation had no real capital, so he pushed to create Washington D.C. out of a frog-infested swamp along the Potomac River. As he laid the cornerstone of the Capitol building in a public Masonic ceremony, trowel in hand, the former General wore Lafayette’s Masonic apron. Over the next century, the architectural grandeur of Washington D.C. was created by Masonic architects, who wove their vision and symbols into every building, from the great obelisk on the Mall to the mosaics in the Library of Congress.
Washington’s posse had dispersed. Baron von Steuben retired to country life in New York with his longtime secretary and boyfriend John Mulligan, where he died forgotten and broke in 1794. Lafayette returned to France, where he had a long political career, and nearly got in big trouble with the French Revolution by advocating a constitutional monarchy at a time when the heads of monarchs were falling at the guillotine.
But it was Hamilton who made the biggest mark on U.S. history. He went on to oppose slavery, found the Coast Guard, serve as Secretary of the Treasury, organize the country’s first federal bank, and lay the foundations for today’s centralized economy. In his later years, practicing law in New York City, he disagreed with fellow Masons like Jefferson who were advocating the separation of church and state, as was happening in revolutionary France. Hamilton, who still held a place for a “Supreme Being” in government, denounced Jefferson as an “atheist.” By 1802, Hamilton was launching a Christian Constitutional Society, which was essentially a PAC for electing public officials who believed as he did. But it never got off the ground. In 1804, after a bitter political dispute, Hamilton was killed in a duel by Vice President Aaron Burr.
In one of those ironies of history, both Hamilton and Von Steuben have been derided as “aristocrat elitists,” but their efforts on behalf of constitutional monarchy unwittingly helped to lay the groundwork for an enduring constitutional republic.
References
Bergeron, David M. King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire. University of Iowa Press, 1999.
Gardner, Laurence. The Shadow of Solomon: The Lost Secret of the Freemasons Revealed. HarperElement, 2005.
Hardman, Paul D. Homoaffectionalism: Male Bonding From Gilgamesh to the Present. GLB Publishers, 1993.
Myers, Jr., Minor. Liberty Without Anarchy: A History of the Society of the Cincinnati. University of Virginia Press, 1983.
Petrie, Sir Charles. The Jacobite Movement: The Last Phase (1716—1807). Eyre & Spottiswoode (London), 1950.
Stewart, Michael James. The Forgotten Monarchy of Scotland: The True Story of the Royal House of Stewart and the Hidden Lineage of the Kings and Queens of Scots. Element Books, 1998.
© 2006 by Patricia Nell Warren. All rights reserved.
Patricia Nell Warren is the author of The Front Runner, Billy’s Boy, and The Fancy Dancer: A Novel, among other novels.
