History Netherland

With the help of freemasons from England and France, the first Dutch lodge was established in The Hague as early as 1734. This took place in the Lion d'Or lodge, later the House of Lords, which was demolished in 1986 due to the new construction of the Lower House. The establishment of a second lodge followed in 1735, then more lodges, including in other cities.
Suspected of being Orangist, the lodges were soon banned by the patriotic States of Holland. It was considered strange and suspicious that men of different political persuasion and church affiliation united in one organisation.

Prince Frederik

After the restoration of stadtholdership, in 1744, Freemasonry revived. In 1756, ten lodges joined together to form the ‘Groote Loge der Zeven Vereenigde Nederlanden’, which name was changed in 1817 to the even today: ‘Order of Freemasons under the Greater East of the Netherlands’.

Two princes from the House of Orange held the position of Grand Master of the Order of Freemasons in the 19th century: Prince Frederik (the younger brother of King William II, who was himself a Freemason) for 65 years, from 1816-1881, and Prince Alexander (the youngest son of King William III) from 1882 until his early death in 1884.

The colonial era influenced the spread of Freemasonry from our country. Dutchmen settled in the Antilles, Suriname, Ceylon, India, South Africa and Rhodesia, the former Dutch East Indies, China and Brazil. Sixteen lodges outside the Netherlands, including in the Netherlands Antilles and Suriname, still belong to the order.

In 1940, the order was one of the first to be declared a banned society by the German occupiers. The world-renowned Order library and precious museum property were taken away to Germany. Grand Master Hermannus van Tongeren was arrested and died in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 29 March 1941. Shortly after the end of the war, most of the library and historical archives were found and returned to barns near Frankfurt.

In 1939, the order had over 4,100 members and 67 lodges. After the occupation of the Netherlands and the end of the war in the Far East, this number had fallen to three thousand members and 64 lodges, partly due to natural attrition, partly because a number of members had died in German and Japanese camps in the then Dutch East Indies.

After 1945, the membership in the Netherlands initially increased sharply, also due to the repatriation of freemasons from Indonesia. Until 1970, the growth of the number of lodges almost paralleled that of the number of members. After 1970, the number of lodges increased further, while membership remained more or less constant around six thousand. The increase in the number of lodges was mainly caused by the growth of commuter towns, industrialisation and urbanisation outside the Randstad.

In the southern provinces, growth was also facilitated by the improved relationship between Freemasonry and the Roman Catholic Church. As a result, in places like Almere, Velsen, Amstelveen, Castricum, Huizen,

's-Hertogenbosch, Tilburg, Oosterhout, Roosendaal and Heerlen lodges were established.

There are currently 156 lodges in 73 towns in the Netherlands and the Order (Freemasonry) has some 6,000 members.

History: 300 years of free man at the centre. On St John's Day, 24 June 1717, the first overarching Grand Lodge was founded in London by four lodges. This is considered the birth date of modern Freemasonry. After that, Freemasonry grew impetuously. People had had enough of political strife and religious wars. By 1734, Freemasons were already meeting in The Hague, where our Order was founded in 1756.

Ancient and venerable

Freemasonry emerged from the building societies of the Middle Ages and is three centuries old in its current organisational form. There are many roots, including in Scotland and France, but England is the cradle of Freemasonry. There, in the ^17th century, the Royal Society, a society of progressive scientists, including many freemasons, flourished. In 1666, a huge fire raged in largely wooden London, burning eighty per cent of the city to ashes. To rebuild in stone, builders and architects came to London from all over Europe.
Freemasonry counted among its members the greatest minds and artists of their time. Freemasonry's significance as a school of virtue and democracy was enormous. Most of the great philosophers of the Enlightenment were Freemasons: Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Lessing, Goethe, and so on. Most ‘founding fathers’ of the US were Freemasons, including the first president George Washington. Priests and ministers were freemasons. Famous musicians from Mozart to Duke Ellington. In the Netherlands, writers like Johannes Kinker, Multatuli and Frederik van Eeden. Politicians like Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, and in our country, the socialist Willem Drees and the liberal Pieter Oud. All of them independent minds.
Freemasons worked for society by founding associations and charitable organisations.