Thomas Dunckerley and English Freemasonry

Updated with a new preface, this study provides a comprehensive biography of Thomas Dunckerley. An eighteenth-century success story, Dunckerley rose from obscurity to a twenty-year-long career in the Royal Navy, the centerpiece of which was the famous Siege of Quebec. He retired from the navy to climb to the highest echelons of English Freemasonry, holding Grand Masterships and Provincial Grand Masterships across England and across Orders. He was a tender family man, an inspiring leader and heroic patriot. He also had a secret. When Dunckerley was in his forties, his mother left a deathbed confession of her seduction and adultery—and his illegitimacy. As Dunckerley revealed his mother’s confession, his friends and Masonic colleagues were thunderstruck to discover he was not the son of a porter at Somerset House, but of the late King George II.For his contemporaries and biographers, all good things in his later career seemed to flow from this revelation. His mother’s confession was not Dunckerley’s real secret, however. What he actually hid, even from his wife of fifty years, was that the confession, the seduction, the hidden royal birth were all lies—so well-crafted that even now, more than two hundred years after his death, they are still held as Masonic gospel.

Sommers has revealed a stunning story of self-deception and re-invention. In a shrewd re-examination of the hagiographic accounts she shows the sleights of hand underlying our understanding of the past, its many twists of fate, and what enthusiastic biographers do with them. A must-read for modern historians and their students., The intricate historical detective work involved in Sommers's exposure of Dunckerley's invention of his own past is fascinating and compelling., Sommers's revelatory and revisionist biography of Thomas Dunckerley offers an entertaining and insightful entrance into the demimonde of royal patronage, institutional instability, and status anxiety which surrounded eighteenth-century English Freemasonry. This work destabilizes stodgy fraternal histories while demonstrating how 'the Craft' assumed its modern shape through the sincere efforts of imperfect men.

Susan Mitchell Sommers is professor of history at St. Vincent College.