This illustrated talk will examine the circumstances in which Irish freemasons sang the British national anthem from the eighteenth century onwards.
Loyalty to the Hanoverian succession was embedded in eighteenth-century British freemasonry as shown in The Constitutions of the Freemasons (1723). After 1745, freemasons adopted the melody of ‘God Save the King’ into their musical culture, incorporating it into lodge ceremonies alongside dance tunes, patriotic songs and originally composed melodies.
From the 1750s onward, Irish freemasons played a key role in disseminating this song repertoire within Ireland, Britain, and America. The constitutions by Edward Spratt and Laurence Dermott included or referenced the British anthem, while later Irish Masonic songbooks from the 1790s onward contained various musical settings of the tune.
The British anthem remained part of Irish Masonic practice from the mid-eighteenth century until 1935 when the Grand Lodge of Ireland discouraged its use.
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