The illiterate enemy

One illiterate and ignorant opponent of The Craft has started a petition to rid all the public sector of Freemasons. The link is below.



http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/the-u-k-government-make-freemasonry-illegal-within-positions-of-public-services-2?utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=url_share&utm_campaign=url_share_before_sign

Well known Freemason hits headlines again

From the Daily Mail...

Lord Spencer Northampton has reached a divorce settlement worth around £17million with his soon-to-be fifth ex-wife Lady PamelaA truce has been called on an acrimonious divorce battle that was set to become one of the most expensive in English legal history.

The 7th Marquess of Northampton has struck a deal worth around £17million with his soon-to-be ex-wife and spared them both a divorce trial which was expected to cost £2m and start in the High Court tomorrow.

Married for 20 years, the couple is said to have called it quits after Spencer Northampton - one of Britain's wealthiest aristocrats - discovered Lady Pamela had been having an affair with a wealthy Romanian.

Under the terms of the agreement, Lady Northampton, 61, will receive a £4m apartment in Pimlico, central London, as well as cash and possessions worth £13m. She had originally demanded £25m.

The vast majority of the Eton-educated peer's fortune - estimated at £120m - which includes two stately homes, land, valuable paintings, furniture and a disputed Roman treasure hoard, will remain intact.

Confidentiality clauses prevent both parties from speaking about the failure of their 20-year marriage, but details of the acrimonious divorce first began to surface during the summer.

At a pre-trial hearing, Lady Northampton's lover was named as Dr Dan Stoicescu, who made his fortune in the pharmaceutical industry.

The couple were also embroiled in a separate privacy action, which has now ended, over the emergence of secretly-taped phone conversations between Lady Pamela and her 87-year-old father, Jim Haworth.

The recordings were made by Lady Pamela's stepmother, a hairdresser from Staines, Middlesex, and passed on to the 66-year-old peer, prompting him to throw his wife out of their country estate at Compton Wynyates, Middlesex.

Known affectionately as 'Spenny' to his friends, Lord Northampton had already been married four times before he met Pamela Kyprios, who was born into a working class family from Lancashire. 

They shared a mutual interest in spiritualism after her second divorce from a wealthy Greek-American shipping financier.

She had been planning to open a holistic healing centre when the pair were introduced by friends. He later claimed that she turned up on his London doorstep demanding to talk to him about her project and never left. 

Wealthy: Lord Northampton has an estimated £120 million fortune, owns two stately homes and is regarded as one of Britain's richest aristocrats

They married in December 1990 at Stratford-Upon-Avon register office, with the marquess speaking movingly of his love for her.

'She is the centre of my life. I call her “stregissima” — great white witch,' he said at the time. 'She is a healer, very good at relaxing me.'

And tucked away in the romantic surroundings of Compton Wynyates for the past two decades, the couple seemed blissfully happy.

Affair: Dr Dan Stoicescu was named as Lady Pamela's lover during a pre-trial hearing

Then came the couple's ill-fated 2006 meeting with Dr Dan Stoicescu at a Freemasonry convention in Cyprus.

At first it seemed that Lord Northampton, once dubbed 'the Mystic Marquess' for his preoccupation with spirituality, Freemasonry and alternative religions, had much in common with the fabulously rich Dr Stoicescu, 60, who describes himself as a 'transhumanist' with a deep-seated interest in immortality and anti-ageing therapies.

Described as 'charming' and 'self-effacing', the divorced scientist became only the second person ever to have his human genome mapped.

The procedure, which can reveal genetic diseases which could help you take action to delay their development, cost him £220,000.

He later forked out double that sum to pay for both the marquess and Lady Pamela to undergo the same process at a US clinic. 

In the weeks and months that followed their first meeting, divorced father-of-one Stoicescu became a firm family friend and a regular guest at Compton Wynyates. 

Stoicescu also lavished gifts upon Lady Pamela — in addition to a Cartier necklace, which came with matching earrings, he bought her a diamond-encrusted watch.

He has homes in Switzerland, Cyprus, Finland, the US and Australia, and was equally generous to her relatives. Her father Jim was presented with a £1,300 bottle of wine from Harrods and a Rolex watch, and taken to dinner at Claridge's.

Stoicescu's huge fortune was first built on a business selling cancer-care products, and he even paid for private treatment for Jim when he had bowel cancer.

But by 2009, Lady Northampton had begun working for Stoicescu, telling her husband that she had been made president of one of his biopharmaceutical companies, Asterion.

This new role meant frequent trips to the US and lengthy absences from Compton Wynyates, where Lord Northampton was left alone and increasingly suspicious about his wife's behaviour.

A friend of the Marquess told The Sunday Telegraph: 'Spenny feels betrayed by Dan Stoicescu, whom he once regarded as one of his closest friends. 

'Stoicescu's role in the end of his marriage was a complete and utter shock.'

A friend of Lady Northampton defended her: 'Spenny has had a chequered past and Pamela has had to put up with a great deal. It's fair to say...the marriage was already faltering a considerable time before the relationship began with Dan.'

She added that Lady Pamela resented the claim that she was a gold-digger and deserved a fair settlement for her many years of marriage with Lord Northampton.

As English divorce law largely protects inherited wealth, his two stately homes, Compton Wynyates and Castle Ashby will remain in the family and passed on to his heir. 

His other assets include the Sevso Treasure, which comprises 14 large decorated silver vessels and platters. But these cannot be sold due to a long-running dispute over their provenance.

It is thought a painting of Mary I, dating back to 1554 and worth around £6m, may be auctioned to help pay for the divorce settlement.

Divorce deal: As the fifth wife of Lord Northampton, Lady Pamela will receive a settlement worth around £17million

Happier times: Lord Spencer Northampton met Lady Pamela in the late Eighties

Heavens above!

These splendid terrestrial and celestial globes by Thomas Malby and Son are going under the hammer at Bonhams in London on January 30.

They are expected to fetch up to £80,000.

The globes date from 1860 and, amusingly, the address of Malby and Son is Little Queen Street, London.

Here's the catalogue description:

"A pair of 18-inch Thomas Malby library globes, English, published 1860,
the terrestrial globe with printed cartouche MALBY'S TERRESTRIAL GLOBE Compiled from the latest & MOST AUTHENTIC SOURCES including all the recent Georgraphical Discoveries Manufactured by and Published under the superintendance of the SOCIETY FOR THE DIFFUSION OF USEFUL KNOWLEDGE by THOS MALBY & SON MAP AND GLOBE SELLERS TO THE ADMIRALTY, 37 PARKER STREET, LITTLE QUEEN STREET, HOLBORN, LONDON, both spheres mounted in brass meridian within horizon ring applied with printed zodiac and calendar scales, supported on three fluted mahogany legs with stretcher and magnetic compass, 44in (112cm) high."

Subject's links with Freemasonry

This portrait being sold by Sotheby's is estimated to sell for $22,000 when it goes under the hammer in New York on January 30th. The catalogue note explains what connection he has with Freemasonry.

Here it is: This charming and characteristic portrait was part of a series which Carmontelle drew during his time at the court of the Duc d'Orléans.  Carmontelle entered the service of Louis Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, in 1759 and enjoyed a buoyant career there, organizing official entertainments and later also becoming a garden designer, creating what is now the Parc Monceau.

Over the course of some 34 years, Carmontelle made more than 750 portraits of the Orléans family, their court, and other friends and acquaintances, which were bound in eleven albums.  The majority of the sitters were drawn full length and in profile, as here.  He drew the portraits mainly for himself and would only produce replicas on request.

At the end of his life, Carmontelle gave the names of all the sitters in his portraits to his great friend Richard de Lédans who compiled a manuscript list, now in the museum at Chantilly, where there are 570 portraits from the original group.  The albums remained intact until in the possession of Pierre de La Mésangère, who dismantled them and mounted each drawing on a green mount, like that on this lot.

Nowadays, the Duc de Piney-Luxembourg's main claim to fame is that he is considered to have been the founder of the Grand Orient de France, the country's principal Masonic lodge.

Masonic "temple" in danger

From the Daily Telegraph

Masonic ‘Da Vinci Code’ church in danger, warns charity

A CRUMBLING and abandoned Victorian church built as a “temple to Freemasonry” needs urgent restoration work to save it for the nation, a charity has warned.

St Edmund’s Church was constructed based on the dimensions of King Solomon’s Temple in the Bible Photo: Andy Marshall

St Edmund’s Church in, Falinge, Rochdale, is regarded as one of the finest but least known gems of ecclesiastical architecture in the country.

Although resembling a typical parish church on the outside, its elaborate exterior is packed with Masonic symbolism prompting comparisons with the medieval Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, the setting for much of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code.

Built in 1870 by the industrialist and banker Albert Hudson Royds, its cavings, windows, furniture and vaulted gothic ceiling are covered in masonic imagery.

And sited on the highest point in the surrounding area, it was constructed based on the dimensions of King Solomon’s Temple in the Bible.

Hudson Royds himself appears in a stained glass window as one of the masons rebuilding the Temple after the exile in Babylon.

Although Rosslyn Chapel’s possible links to the Freemasons or resemblance to the former Temple in Jersualem have been hotly disputed, enthusiasts have nicknamed St Edmund’s “Britain’s greatest Masonic secret”.

Hudson Royds, a pasionate Freemason who saw Rochdale as the "New Jerusalem", poured £20,000 into the project, the equivalent of £1.6 million today. It is regarded as as a major example of the great municipal beneficence of Victorian industrialists.

Although a grade one listed building, it has been sealed off for three years since it closed as a parish church.

Since then a colony of pigeons has taken over the tower and its grand ceilings have begun to leak.

Although still consecrated for worship, the building was recently handed over by the Church of England to the Churches Conservation Trust which hopes to restore it for use by the local community.

The charity is currently carrying out surveying work but expectes to have to spend several hundred thousand pounds to make it safe and usuable. It is preparing to launch a fundraising campaign next year.

Crispin Truman, chief executive of the Trust, said: “The suggestion that there are more important things than saving heritage in areas where homelessness, poverty and unemployment are a daily concern, carries an implicit assumption that people in disadvantaged areas don’t care about – or maybe don’t even appreciate or understand – the history in their midst.

“That’s something you’ll never hear said in the Cotswolds, and it’s wrong.”