as a body of
Hospitallers devoting themselves to the care of the lepers and which in
1608 had been joined to the _Ordre du Mont-Carmel_. It seems probable
from all accounts that Ramsay was a Chevalier of this Order, but he
cannot have been admitted into it by the Duc d'Orleans, for the Grand
Master of the Ordre de Saint-Lazare was not the Duc d'Orleans but the
Marquis de Dangeau, who, on his death in 1720, was succeeded by the son
of the Regent, the Duc de Chartres.[365] If, then, Ramsay was admitted
to any Order by the Regent, it was surely the _Ordre du Temple_, of
which the Regent is said to have been the Grand Master at this date.

Now, the infamous character of the Duc d'Orleans is a matter of common
knowledge; moreover, during the Regency--that period of impiety and
moral dissolution hitherto unparalleled in the history of France--the
chief of council was the Duc de Bourbon, who later placed his mistress
the Marquise de Prie and the financier Paris Duverney at the head of
affairs, thus creating a scandal of such magnitude that he was exiled
in 1726 through the influence of Cardinal Fleury. This Duc de Bourbon in
1737 is said to have become Grand Master of the Temple. "It was thus,"
observes de Canteleu, "that these two Grand Masters of the Temple
degraded the royal authority and ceaselessly increased hatred against
the government."

It would therefore seem strange that a man so upright as Ramsay appears
to have been, who had moreover but recently been converted to the
Catholic Church, should have formed a friendship with the dissolute
Regent of France, unless there had been some bond between them. But here
we have a possible explanation--Templarism. Doubtless during Ramsay's
youth at Kilwinning many Templar traditions had come to his knowledge,
and if in France he found himself befriended by the Grand Master
himself, what wonder that he should have entered into an alliance which
resulted in his admission to an Order he had been accustomed to revere
and which, moreover, was represented to him as the _fons et origo_ of
the masonic brotherhood to which he also belonged? It is thus that we
find Ramsay in the very year that the Duc de Bourbon is said to have
been made Grand Master of the Temple artlessly writing to Cardinal
Fleury asking him to extend his protection to the society of Freemasons
in Paris and enclosing a copy of the speech which he was to deliver on
the following day, March 21, 1737. It is in this famo