Richard Cooper

Bro. Richard Cooper was born in London on 26 October 1701 and was brought by the influential brewer, Sir Felix Feast who died in 1724. Sir Felix, alderman and briefly Sheriff of London, lived in a smart house in Marine Square, an edgy, cosmopolitan area of the Tower Liberty, close to the thriving docks at Wapping. The other residents included, until 1715, the Swedish scientist and esoteric Masonic philosopher, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) who must have had some influence of Cooper.

In December 1717 Richard was apprenticed for seven years as an engraver to the writing master John Clarke. Cooper was a very influential freemason, instrumental in building the Canongate Kilwinning Lodge, beside his new house, in 1736. This building has been associated with the architect, William Adam, for whom Cooper engraved the plates of his Vitruvius Scoticus (Edinburgh 1812) but with a father and a brother in the building trade, Cooper was probably well equipped to design his own house and the lodge.He can be positively associated with Masonic meetings at the Blue Boar in Fleet Street in 1723 where the master was the map engraver Emanuel Bowen (1693-1767) and the membership included the painter Richard Collins (d.1732) and John Clark, possibly his master, the Scottish stationer.

Significantly, 'Mr. Thomas Coke Esq.' is noted as a member in 1721. These lodges were very fluid in their meeting places and Cooper signed the minute book at the Lodge that met in the Goose and Gridiron tavern, close to St. Paul’s cathedral, on 15 March 1725; the same evening the seal engraver John Claus andWilliam Dugood (See Cross Keys September 2022), scientist, print collector, Jacobite spy and jeweller to the Old Pretender, became masons. The Master there in the previous two years had been John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683-1744) and in 1723 he had served as Deputy Grand Master to Francis, Earl of Dalkeith. This is the earliest evidence that Cooper was a proselytising freemason and some of the preliminary meetings of Canongate Kilwinning were held in his house.

Significantly, the meeting to install William St. Clair of Roslin as a prelude to his election as the first Grand Master for Scotland in 1736 was held there. Cooper was joined in the Lodge by other members of the St. Luke’ s academy; Andrew Hay, James Norie, William Robertson and David Clelland along with Alexander Lindsay (who would become father in law to the young Ramsay in 1752) and the surgeon George Lauder who would serve with the Jacobite army. John Murray of Broughton, later Secretary to Prince Charles Edward became a member in 1738; his name vigorously crossed from the roll when he turned King’s evidence following Culloden. Allan Ramsay senior was not a member of Canongate Kilwinning but had been active in Scottish freemasonry before Cooper’s arrival, writing a poem in honour of the visit of Desaguliers to Edinburgh in 1721.

Canongate Kilwinning would eventually include influential merchants, lawyers and gentry and a host of medical students from the University, many of them American. Clearly the lodge, like the Academy of St Luke before it, had a significant Jacobite membership. Cooper would eventually serve as JW of Canongate Kilwinning No.2 in 1735 and 1748—50.