Scottish Knights Templar
There are Masonic degrees named after the Knights Templar but not all Knights Templar Orders are Masonic. There is no direct connection with the 13th-century presence of Knights Templar in Scotland. However, since the 1980s such a connection has been a popular topic in fiction and in pseudohistorical speculation. Early modern history In the seventeenth century, interest in Templarism became political after the execution of Charles I, with the idea that Stuart partisans invented a Templar degree, as the king's death was to be avenged, as was the violent death in 1314 of Jacques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Templars. The story told by Dom Calmet was that Viscount Dundee was supposed to have been an early Templar Grand Master and to have fallen at Killiecrankie wearing the Grand Cross of the Order. The Duke of Mar is then said to have held office, after which time the Templar Order was apparently inactive until its revival by Charles Edward Stuart in 1745. An original letter of the 3rd Duke of Perth to Earl of Airlie Lord Ogilvy shortly after the Jacobite victory at Prestonpans, described a secret ceremony at Holyrood in which the prince was elected Grand Master of the ancient chivalry of the Temple of Jerusalem on Tuesday 24 September 1745. Templarism experienced a revival of interest in the eighteenth century through Freemasonry with a Scottish influence. The first record of this is in Ramsay's Oration in Paris in 1737. Andrew Michael Ramsay was tutor to the Young Pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart. He claimed that Freemasonry had begun among crusader knights and that they had formed themselves into Lodges of St John. The next development was with Karl Gotthelf, Baron Von Hund, and Alten-Grotkau, who had apparently been introduced to the concept by the Jacobite Lord Kilmarnock, and received into a Templar Chapter by a mysterious "Knight of the Red Feather". Baron von Hund established a new Masonic rite called the "Strict Templar Observance". The "Knight of the Red Feather" has been identified subsequently as Alexander Seton better known as Alexander Montgomerie, 10th Earl of Eglinton, a prominent Freemason in the Jacobite movement. Since the mid nineteenth century myths, legends and anecdotes connecting the Templars to the Battle of Bannockburn have been created. Degrees in Freemasonry, such as the Royal Order of Scotland, allude to the story of Rosslyn and the Scottish Knights Templar. This theme was repeated in the pseudohistory book The Temple and The Lodge by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, first published in 1989. On the subject of a possible Bruce connection, Masonic Historian D Murray Lyon wrote "The fraternity of Kilwinning never at any period practiced or acknowledged other than the Craft degrees; neither does there exist any tradition worthy of the name, local or national, nor has any authentic document yet been discovered that can in the remotest degree be held to identify Robert Bruce with the holding of Masonic Courts, or the institution of a secret society at Kilwinning." Masonic