Roman Catholics are banned from being Freemasons so imagine the horror in Victorian England when a leading masonic politician quit being Grand Master of the country’s masons and converted to Roman Catholicism. A former governor-general of India and pillar of the establishment bent his knee to Rome. Queen Victoria called him a pervert. Society turned its back on him. George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon, had disgusted respectable society to the core. No Protestant English gentleman should become a Roman Catholic – especially a Freemason!
The hostile relationship between the Roman Catholic church and Freemasonry is something I explore in my forthcoming book – The Knights Templar and Freemasonry: The Hidden Connection – published by Pen & Sword and available for pre-order now at Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Amazon and other retail outlets. Don’t miss out on this page turner – exposing this bitter history between Catholics and masons.
So, who was this member of the British Empire’s establishment class in the 19th century who dared to turn his back on the Protestant faith and Freemasonry to embrace the pope in Rome?
On the morning of 8 September 1874, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a member of Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone’s cabinet, a Knight of the Garter, and the sitting Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England walked into the London Oratory and was received into the Roman Catholic Church.
By evening, London society was reeling. Within weeks, he had resigned the highest office in English Freemasonry. It remains one of the most startling personal reversals in Victorian public life. And the Pall Mall Gazette, that mouthpiece of London’s gentlemen’s clubs, spat bile at his lordship in no uncertain terms.
From Reforming Whig to Grand Master
George Frederick Samuel Robinson was, on paper, about as establishment as Victorian Britain could produce. Born in 1827, he entered Parliament in 1852 and spent the next fifty years cycling through the great offices of state: under-secretary for war, under-secretary for India, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for India, and Lord President of the Council under Gladstone. In 1871 he chaired the commission that produced the Treaty of Washington, settling the Alabama claims with the United States — a diplomatic triumph that earned him his marquessate that same year.
He had also risen fast within Freemasonry. Installed as Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England in 1870, Ripon sat atop the entire English Masonic establishment at a moment when the “Craft” was a genuinely central institution of upper-class and professional life — a place where bishops, dukes, and cabinet ministers mixed as brothers. By any measure, Ripon was one of the most powerful Freemasons in the world.
The Conversion
And then, in 1874, he simply left it all behind — not just the Grand Mastership, but his membership of the Craft entirely, to become a Roman Catholic. Ripon’s conversion took London society and even his closest friends by surprise, since Victorians were accustomed to the steady drift of ritualists and Puseyites (Victorian Catholic revivalists) toward Rome but were puzzled that this wealthy nobleman, evangelical Anglican, former Christian Socialist, and Grand Master of the English Freemasons should be received into the Catholic Church.
Contemporaries searched for scandal or intrigue and found none. As one Masonic commentator later put it, this was a very religious man who, for pure motives of religious conviction, decided to convert — a decision that must have cost him dearly, since it meant resigning not only his grand mastership but his membership in the Craft altogether. There was no dispute, no financial ruin, no scandal to explain it away. It was, by every account, a matter of conscience.
The timing mattered enormously. Rome’s position on Freemasonry was, and had long been, unambiguous — papal condemnations of the Craft stretched back to Clement XII in 1738. A serious Catholic convert in 1874 could not quietly keep his apron in a drawer. Ripon understood this immediately, and resigned both the Grand Mastership and his Masonic membership as part of the same act of conscience that took him to the altar rail.
DISCOVER: What links the Freemasons and Knights Templar?
“How Dreadful This Perversion”
The reaction was fierce, and it came from every direction at once.
The political establishment was aghast. Gladstone’s distress at the news was genuine — obviously shaken, he wrote to Ripon’s wife, who remained an Anglican, asking how such news could possibly be true. Queen Victoria was blunter still, dismissing the conversion in a single cutting phrase as a “perversion.”
The press was enraged. Ripon’s reception into the Church caused a minor sensation in the world of politics and a howl of no-popery protest in the non-Catholic press — Britain’s deep-seated Victorian anti-Catholicism, still very much alive a mere three decades after the Oxford Movement began sending Anglican clergy over to Rome in droves, found in Ripon a target of unusual prominence.
This was not a curate or a country squire; this was a former Cabinet minister and the head of English Freemasonry, apparently choosing the Vatican over the Crown. Suspicion of undue Roman influence followed him for years — an 1876 editorial in The Times, dripping with sarcasm, suggested Rome regarded Ripon as a valuable prize useful for luring further converts, and reported rumours that he had already contributed a substantial sum to the Pope.
Within Freemasonry itself, the response was, by most tellings, notably more gracious than the political world’s. The Craft did not attack him on his way out. English Freemasonry had never opposed the gradual advance of Catholic emancipation, and it treated Ripon’s departure with something close to equanimity even though the Church’s condemnation of the Craft remained firmly in place. Ripon, for his part, never turned on his former brethren; there was no bitterness in either direction, only the quiet, costly logic of a man honouring a Church that would not compromise on the question.
DISCOVER: The funeral of Queen Victoria as reported at the time
The Long Afterlife
Ripon did not vanish into obscurity, as some no doubt hoped he would. After six years largely out of frontline politics, Gladstone brought him back in 1880 — as Viceroy of India, no less, a post demanding the very highest loyalty to Crown and Empire. He went on to serve as Colonial Secretary, support Irish Home Rule, and lead the Liberals in the House of Lords, remaining a committed radical to the end of his life in 1909. He lived, by all accounts, as a devout and active Catholic layman for the following thirty-five years, serving as president of the Society of St Vincent de Paul in England.
It’s worth noting that while in India, he was a reforming viceroy who even advocated for Indians serving on the judicial bench – something that earned the support of Florence Nightingale but was shouted down by English settlers in India who were appalled at the idea of being put on trial in front of an Indian judge.
Why It Still Matters
Ripon’s story is a useful corrective to two lazy modern narratives at once. It is not evidence, as some conspiracist writers would have it, of a secret Masonic-Catholic conspiracy — quite the opposite: Ripon left the Craft precisely because Rome would not permit dual loyalty, and did so publicly, at enormous personal cost, with no material gain to show for it. Nor is it evidence that Freemasonry and Catholicism were closet allies — the entire episode only makes sense because the Church’s opposition to the Craft was real, serious, and non-negotiable.
What it does show, vividly, is how high the stakes of religious conscience still ran in the England of the 1870s, and how completely incompatible institutional Catholicism and institutional Freemasonry were understood to be by the people actually living inside both worlds — the Grand Master included.
To find out more about this and other stories relating to the historical tension between the Catholic church and Freemasonry – pre-order my book today.
