Bro the Prince of Wales, who had just been made an Honorary Member of the Chancery Bar, said in a speech of thanks: ‘I am a Mason. I am glad to think that on this occasion the great legal profession and the great Masonic Brotherhood are more intimately connected tonight than perhaps they have ever been before. (Cheers from all.)’90
Arsonists in charge of the firehose.
Which brings us to our last esteemed guest at that occasion, a man of whom it was written, ‘Englishmen are far from purists in judging the manners and life of their aristocracy. What they cannot tolerate is the sight of names which they have been accustomed to regard with respect surrounded by low and contaminating associations.’91 The guest was, of course, Bro the Earl of Euston.
The function of the Establishment was to look after the Establishment. Prying journalists could be jailed, and lippy MPs shown the door. Cleveland Street was a rank perversion of the course of justice, its puppet-masters senior Freemasons, and its puppets the Masonic herd.
‘The Mystic Tie’.
We must move on from Euston and his brothel, leaving the final comment on Cleveland Street to a journalist of the day: ‘The determination of men of rank to stand by scoundrels of their order, no matter what their crimes are, and the certainty with which they can count upon men who have merely a brevet claim to associate with them to help them out.’92
I think that is precisely put, and worth repeating. ‘The determination of men of rank to stand by scoundrels of their order, no matter what their crimes are’ is a statement of inestimable importance when trying to come to terms with the scandal of Jack the Ripper.
* See Appendix I, ‘The Parnell Frame-Up’.
2
A Conspiracy of Bafflement
Customary use of artifice is the sign of a small mind, and it almost always happens that he who uses it to cover one spot uncovers himself in another.
La Rochefoucauld, Maxims
It is impossible to understand ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’ without an understanding of the Freemasonry. Masonry permeates every fibre of this conundrum, both as its inspiration and its stooge. To acquiesce to the proposition of this scandal as an impenetrable mystery is to prostrate one’s intellect before the savageries of Victorian spin. The ‘mystery’ is a manipulation, a piece of propaganda, like calling Nixon’s great felony ‘the Watergate mystery’, as I’m sure many among that gentleman’s associates would have been pleased to do.
‘We are all the President’s men,’ said Henry Kissinger, and no less were England’s ruling elite ‘all the Widow’s men’.
The degree of control this unique criminal exercised is indicated by the efforts of those who would still seek to protect him. Like courtiers from beyond the grave, they are essentially blameless, but also fools. Freemasonry may never have asked for Jack the Ripper (it certainly did not), but a combination of circumstance and moral turpitude made it his stupefied guardian.
Concealing the Ripper was not a Masonic conspiracy, but a conspiracy of Her Majesty’s executive, who almost without exception were Freemasons. In other words, it was a conspiracy of the System. The man they were required to be baffled by was ‘in house’, and unquestionably revelling in the security he’d spun about himself. The Ripper was smart, but not that smart. It is simply an insult to the Victorian police to believe that detectives like Moore, Reid and Abberline couldn’t have caught this prick in their sleep.
It goes without saying that there was nothing illaudable about being a Victorian Mason, any more than it was improper to enjoy membership of a tricycle club. But as I have said, this narrative is about the bad guys, and about one in particular who went rotten, and what that did to the rest of the barrel. Beyond that, I have no opinion on Freemasonry, no animosity towards it, no motive to wish it ill. My interest in Masonry is only inasmuch as it relates to ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’.
By the late nineteenth century this quasi-religious, highly conservative society was a power in the land, perhaps the most powerful, because of its ability to insinuate itself into powerful institutions – Parliament, the police, the press, the judiciary and the Crown. It’s worth reiterating that the heir to the throne, Bro Edward, Prince of Wales, was the most powerful Freemason on earth. His Chancellor, Bro Lord Halsbury, was the most powerful Law Lord, and Bro Sir Charles Warren the most senior copper in the Metropolitan Police. Excepting Home Secretary Matthews (and possibly Salisbury himself), every man at the Viscount’s cabinet table had sworn the Masonic oath.
The Prime Minister’s organic antipathy to democracy was generally well served by this cabal. In parallel with the elected government, the hidden constructs of Freemasonry facilitated a clandestine executive underpinning the power of the ruling class. ‘A government within a government’, as the American historian Henry Austin called it. At its head were the royals and estate-owning aristocrats, with their House of Lords – its laws, bishops and judges – at its servile root, an army of Pecksniffs: the town councillors, provincial chief constables, coroners, aldermen, magistrates and mayors. Throughout the kingdom, Freemasonry had managed a truly breathtaking infiltration of municipal and political representation, the Provincial Grand Master more often than not an area’s MP. Thus, from the remotest little town to the grandest of cities, the English political system was inalienably connected to a terminus of power of which the electorate knew nothing, and nobody was saying anything about. It was the secrecy of Freemasonry that allowed this occult telegraph to survive, which at the time of Jack the Ripper was hard-wired into the nucleus of government.1
It is a paradox of this narrative that before investigating a murderer, we must investigate the policeman who was pretending to hunt him.
London’s Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren, was a forty-eight-year-old ex-military man and a Freemasonic obsessive. He was a lousy cop and a worse soldier;2 his God inclined to the hard right – probably something like Kitchener in freshly laundered clouds. Warren was an aggressive authoritarian who imagined all social ills could be solved with a truncheon. If you were superfluous to the System – sick, unemployed or Irish, for example – then you weren’t much better than a wog. In 1887 he went berserk on the back of a horse in London’s West End, and shafted the riff-raff as if he was up a delta in Matabeleland.
In was in Africa only two years before that Warren had lost the plot. The Prime Minister didn’t have a lot of time for ethnics, but so alarmed was Salisbury at Warren’s ‘overzealousness’ in Bechuanaland Protectorate that in September 1885 he personally recalled him. ‘His continuance in power was a real danger,’3 Salisbury wrote, and this ‘danger’ returned to London to be appointed Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
Like many in politics with energetic mouths, the Establishment had created the very circumstance it most feared. Without enough war to soak up the rabble, the plebs were getting frisky. On Sunday, 13 November 1887 a huge contingent of the Untermenschen, the starving and exasperated underclass, had descended on Trafalgar Square.
Warren’s intention was to kick them back to the slums where they belonged. Twelve hundred troops and sabre-wielding cavalry supplemented an army of truncheon-wielding cops. ‘I’ve never seen such police brutality,’ recalled Karl Marx’s daughter – but then, she would say that, wouldn’t she. Notwithstanding that, Warren’s subsequent replacement as Police Commissioner James Monro summed up the inevitable consequences of trusting anything on the street to his colleague. ‘I am bound to say,’ he wrote, ‘Sir C. Warren was just the man to have injudiciously, in some way or other, caused the very panic I was anxious to avoid.’4 Dozens were injured, and at least one man lost his life.
Warren managed to close down Trafalgar Square, but it’s perhaps worth noting that just a year later, in the dead of night, with not a mouse about, he was to claim that he couldn’t shut down a doorway in the East End. We shall be coming to the lamentable events of Goulston Street by and by.
The Establishment lauded Warren for his violence,
and he went down on a knee for his Queen in May 1888. ‘Among the recipients of honours,’ beamed the weekly The Freemason, ‘were … Bro Sir Charles Warren, who was invested with the insignia of KCB [Knight of the Bath].’
Not everyone was quite so delighted. ‘In a single twelvemonth,’ reported the Daily News,
the martinet whose record of meddling and muddling extends over a good part of the British Empire, has destroyed the good feeling between the London police and the public, and replaced it by a feeling of bitter antagonism. It is not a case of Trafalgar Square only; that would be bad enough. But what the Square did wholesale, Sir CHARLES’s men, under the brutal initiative from Scotland Yard, have done in detail. During the last few weeks hardly a day has passed when some constable has not been convicted of gross insult and harshness to some peaceful inhabitant, supported by still grosser perjury. The London Magistrates have for the most part given up the police and rejected their evidence as worthless. The moral Miracle has become the Miracle of Lying … Major General Sir CHARLES WARREN, K.C.B., G.C.M.G., was far too lofty a personage to look after petty larcenies and street inebriates. His first Pyrrhic victory in bludgeoning the people out of the Square intoxicated him, and henceforth we have had nothing but a carnival of perjury, violence and discontent.
This condemnation of police ‘perjury’ and ‘lying’ was published on 1 September 1888, only a matter of days before Jack got his show on the street. We shall see how the perjury and lying escalated by increment as the assassin got into his stride.
I haven’t got much in the way of compliments for Warren as a policeman, but he must sincerely be celebrated in the arena in which he excelled. All too often he is characterised as an authoritarian disaster. Although merit attaches to the vignette, it is ultimately shallow, hawked by authors who interminably reiterate the content of each other’s books. By this corporate myopia they miss a fundamental that all but defines motive in the Ripper’s thinking. Warren was a ‘martinet’, sure, as Ripperology never tires of telling us. But he was also a talented and undeniably brave archaeologist, and it was Warren underground that was of subliminal interest to Jack.
As a young man, Captain Warren of the Royal Engineers was motivated by a duo of passions. It distorts neither to construe them as one. They were, as he saw them, the complementary sciences of Biblical and Freemasonic research. He was driven to prove that Freemasonry was of similar stuff to the Bible, and that by investigation of one, the other could somehow be validated. Such wishful thinking came together in the Holy Land, and here Warren is, in his own words, exploring a 3,000-year-old subterranean conduit in the guts of Jerusalem:
The water was running with great violence, one foot in height, and we, crawling full-length, were up to our necks in it, one hand necessarily wet and dirty, the other holding a pencil, compass, and field book, the candle for the most part in my mouth. Another fifty feet brought us to a place where we had to run the gauntlet of the waters, the passage being only one foot four inches high, we had just four inches of breathing space.5
Warren was digging his way into the Old Testament under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund. The PEF had been funded by various worthies and religious executives, including the Freemasons, as ‘a Society for the accurate and systematic investigation of the Archaeology, the Topography, the Geology and Physical Geography, the Manners and Customs of the Holy Land, for Biblical instruction’. Founded in 1865, its membership grew rapidly, with signatures that would include a roll-call of notables, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the great sculptor/painter Sir Frederick Leighton.
From its inception the Society had an advocate of ‘burning enthusiasm’ in its co-founder and first secretary, the forty-four-year-old George Grove. Trained originally as an engineer, Grove emerged as one of the Great Victorians, a man capable of transforming enthusiasm into practicality in whatever area his humanity pleased. He was said to have known much of the Bible by heart, thus it was natural for him to write a Concordance, plus about 1,000 pages of the Standard Bible Dictionary. If it interested him, Grove got it done. ‘His work from first to last,’ wrote the novelist and historian Walter Besant, ‘was literally a labour of love.’
Knighted in 1883, Sir George Grove comes out of the nineteenth century like an engine of benevolence. His infatuation with all things musical brought London its Royal College of Music, and his Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1879–89) is still internationally recognised as the standard work on the subject. ‘I have always been a mere amateur in music,’ he claimed with customary modesty. ‘I wrote about symphonies and concertos because I wished to try and make them clear to myself and to discover the secret of the things that charmed me.’
Short on charm but full of secrets were the vast underground ruins of what some believed were the remains of Solomon’s Temple at Jerusalem. In 1866 Grove approached the War Office on behalf of the PEF for archaeological assistance, and got twenty-six-year-old Captain Warren in response. It was a fortuitous liaison. The following year, together with his wife and little daughter and a handful of NCOs, Bro Warren and his party set sail for the Holy Land.
‘It was somewhat in the role of a Crusader that Warren accepted the charge,’ wrote his grandson and biographer Watkin Williams, ‘as he was stirred by a longing to reveal to the Christian world those sacred places hidden in the debris of many a siege and jealously guarded by the Turkish Mussulmans.’6 More accurately, Warren’s eagerness was in no small part because he was a member of the Knights Templar.
The story of that body’s godforsaken origins at the time of the Crusades needs little retelling here. For about two hundred years in the Middle Ages, the good guys (Christians) fought the bad guys (Muslims) for possession of the Holy Lands around Jerusalem. In the eleventh century the Turks had usurped control of Palestine and put their god in charge. Christian pilgrims were no longer welcome, and the proposition of liberating ‘the birthplace of the cross from the thraldom of the crescent’ began to resonate as a good idea. A mentally abnormal priest called Peter the Hermit went about Europe inciting a Holy War. ‘It’s the voice of God!’ he shrieked, when in fact it was the voice of the Pope, Urban II in Rome. The result was misery without end for a God that didn’t give a monkey’s. Urged on in atrocity by religious fanatics called Popes, the insanity went on and on. Tens of thousands would bleed their lives away, suffering every conceivable inhumanity. In 1099, under the banner of a French knight called Godfrey de Bouillon, the Muslims were temporarily driven from the Holy City, and the real estate returned to Christ.
Great congratulation and instant myth were bestowed upon the Soldiers of the Cross. After the usual protocols of butchery and rape, a barracks was constructed in their honour on the site of Solomon’s Temple, the exalted House of the Lord, and the ‘fame of the Knighthood of the Temple of Solomon began to spread through the enlightened [i.e. Christian] world’.
It was primarily in Europe, most especially France, that the returning knights evolved into the Templars. Initially received as heroes, but later reviled, outcast, imprisoned, and sometimes burnt to a cinder by papal diktat, the Knights Templar had to put up shutters to survive. They became a secret society, and over the centuries they developed into what is understood (in the higher degrees) as Christian Freemasonry.7
Below is the Earl of Euston, resplendent in his Knights Templar togs. Given his brush with the law, it was perhaps a happy circumstance that from the first, English jurisprudence shared an embryo with this cabal of covert Masonic tradition.
The Inner and Middle Temples at the ancient Inns of Court (off Fleet Street in the City of London) take their names from the House of the Lord in Jerusalem. ‘Within these precincts have lived and toiled many of our great statesmen,’ wrote barrister at law Colonel Robert Blackham, ‘to say nothing of a long unbroken line of eminent lawyers who in their turn succeeded in the illustrious order of the Knights Templars of Medieval fame.’8
That Freemasonry and the law should conflate so intimately i
s no accident. By the time of Victoria it would take a very long day to discover any member of the judiciary who wasn’t heir to that not entirely impartial root.
Captain Warren became a Templar in 1863, installed in the Cape Preceptory (60) while he was at Gibraltar with the Royal Engineers. Four years later, on the morning of 17 February 1867, he climbed to the summit of Mount Moriah (better known today as the Temple Mount) and looked across the city of Jerusalem from where the Crusaders had gasped their first short breath of victory. His guide would have told him what he already knew, that the plateau had been ‘flattened by centuries of disaster and detrition’, and that the mosque of Qubbat as-Sakhra now stood on the site of Solomon’s glorious temple. It was here that de Bouillon had raised his banners to Jesus Christ, and that the mysteries of the Templars had begun.
But it was a legend of deeper antiquity, almost 3,000 years before, that was predominant in Warren’s thoughts. Under his feet was the place of the Great Secret, from whence Freemasonry had come, but where no Freemason had ever been. Warren must have looked about him, wondering how he was going to get at it.
‘The Dome of the Rock’ at Haram el Sharif was sacred to whoever held it – Christian, Jew, Mohammedan alike – and once again it was under the flag of the Crescent Moon. Its holy places were forbidden to Christians, and it was second only to Mecca itself among the sacred sites of Islam. It is not surprising, therefore, that Warren and his diggers ran into immediate difficulties. They weren’t invited and they weren’t welcome. ‘The result,’ according to his grandson, ‘was that Warren had to work on the peripheries of Jerusalem and could reach few of the places he wanted.’
This is a distracting synopsis, and in no way correct. Watkin Williams was also a Freemason, which makes his account of his grandfather’s underground activities in Jerusalem somewhat circumspect. The reason is to attempt to diminish the reality of Warren’s Masonic expertise. The motive behind this subterfuge will soon explain itself. When Bro Williams writes that his grandfather ‘could reach few of the places he wanted’, he neglects to clarify that among the few was one of the only places he really wanted, and that was deep in the foundations of Solomon’s Temple. For so zealous a Freemason there could be no more enthralling place on earth. Such mystery, such occult romance was there, all waiting to be dug out. It couldn’t have been more exhilarating – nor more pertinent to my point. Here was something Masonry condemns with such venom in others, but congratulates in itself: a desire to penetrate ‘mystery’, and a compulsion to find the truth.
They All Love Jack Page 8
