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The Order of Sanctissima Sophia is a sovereign chivalric order of knighthood founded in the United Kingdom in 1905. Its Rule asserts an allegiance to the ‘Catholic Faith’ ‒ in the broad sense, encompassing both the Roman and Anglican communions ‒ but also emphasises the Order’s robustly humanist purpose, ‘the pursuit of Wisdom’ through arts and letters.

The Co-Founders
The Order was conceived and founded by three Englishmen:

Harry Pirie-Gordon (1883-1969) was the son of the 12th Laird of Buthlaw in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He followed his father to Harrow, but before starting at Magdalen College in Oxford he toured Morocco with his friend Compton Mackenzie. He took his degree in modern history in 1905, and spent much of the autumn and winter of 1905 into 1906 in Rome, researching the history of the Crusades in the Vatican Library. He was a wealthy young man, and big-hearted. Although he was not a Catholic, he revelled in the history and the pageantry of the papacy, and he was an expert heraldist, even at a young age, possibly due to the interesting complexity of his own family's heraldic heritage. He led an extraordinarily full life, becoming an intelligence agent, editing Burke’s Landed Gentry, and even writing the screenplay of a successful film starring Lady Diana Cooper as Elizabeth I.

Sir Harry Luke (1884-1969) was a descendant of an ancient Magyar clan, which accounted for his original Hungarian surname, Lukach. After Eton and Trinity College, Oxford, he joined the British Colonial Office in 1907, serving at various times in Sierra Leone, Palestine, Cyprus, Armenia and the other Transcaucasian republics, and Malta. He was knighted in 1933 and promoted to KCMG in 1939 upon his appointment as Governor of Fiji. He retired in 1943 to join the British Council in the Caribbean. He shared many of Pirie-Gordon’s interests, including medieval history, heraldry and philately, and was the author of several books, including a discreet but entertaining autobiography, Cities and Men, and an eccentric cookery compendium, The Tenth Muse.

Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913) was born in London into a family with a declining piano manufacturing business. He left school at 14 and taught in a succession of minor schools over the ensuing decade. Converting to Catholicism in 1886, he became convinced that he had a vocation to the priesthood and spent two brief periods as a seminarian to test this. He lived in Italy for some months in 1890 as a guest of an Englishwoman, the Duchess Sforza Cesarini, and this engendered in him a lifelong love of medieval history. Returning to England, he wrote a number of books, including his well-known novel Hadrian the Seventh, but he never achieved financial or personal stability. He spent his final eventful years in Venice.

The Founding of the Order
In the summer of 1905, Pirie-Gordon and Luke were undergraduates at Oxford, 23 and 20 years old respectively. They later agreed that it was on 4 June that year that they had come up with the idea of a new chivalric order. They began to draft its Rule and concurred that Luke should be its inaugural Grand Master. Throughout July and August, they undertook a retreat together at Bishop’s House, a pilgrim guesthouse on the Scottish island of Iona. On their long walks there they elaborated their plans, but made little progress in finalising the structure of their new order’s Rule. Pirie-Gordon then departed for several months’ archival research in Rome, and it was only upon his return that he rejoined Luke in Oxford.

Harry Luke had greatly admired Frederick Rolfe’s Hadrian the Seventh when he read it back in March 1905, and he had introduced himself to its author. He recommended the novel to Pirie-Gordon who, when he heard in the early summer of 1906 that Rolfe was temporarily resident in Jesus College, helping with the marking of finals papers, paid him a surprise visit. Rolfe was intrigued by the plans for the Order of Sanctissima Sophia. The two men struck up an immediate friendship, and Rolfe, excited by the prospect of a new Order, accepted Pirie-Gordon’s invitation to spend several weeks at the family home Gwernvale, outside Abergavenny in Wales.

There followed a frenzy of activity, with Pirie-Gordon designing the vesture to be used by the Order’s office-bearers, Rolfe its banners, emblems and devices, and both men its complex heraldry. The following Easter, Rolfe began living permanently at Gwernvale, and he worked to finalise the Order’s Rule, which was accepted and promulgated by them in that year, 1907. His contribution was such that he was thereafter acknowledged by Pirie-Gordon and Luke as one of the Order’s co-founders. One of Pirie-Gordon’s friends, Michael Percival, helped by producing roneoed copies of the Rule at the London headquarters of his father’s railway company.

The Structure of the Order
The Order’s Rule sets out in considerable detail an organisational structure, reflecting Rolfe’s influence by closely mirroring that of the Holy See. As in the Vatican, the Order’s bureaucracy is called the Curia, and it is divided into ten ministries, or Congregations. Presiding over all is the Grand Master who, like his Vatican counterpart, exercises ‘all executive power.’ The British Isles and overseas territories are divided into Provinces (later Priories), each presided over by a General (later a Prior). The Order was to have its own hierarchy: a College of Generals, a Company of Knights, a Fellowship of Brothers and a Family of Servitors. A few months later two further categories were introduced: Ladies of Honour and Page Boys.

The Cross of St Julian
The most readily identifiable symbol of the Order is the Cross of St Julian. This is a cross-crosslet, a cross with an additional cross on each arm. This is a charge well-known in heraldry, but the founders of the Order turned it at an angle of 45 degrees, which is blazoned as a cross-crosslet in saltire, a charge not often encountered. In this way they created a central symbol for the Order that was quite fresh and unlikely to be mistaken for any existing arms. It is named the Cross of St Julian because it had been used by the Worshipful Company of Innholders, whose patron saint was Saint Julian the Hospitaller.

Catholics and Masons
At the time of the Order’s founding, there was considerable animosity between Freemasonry and the Catholic Church. Pope Leo XIII had forbidden Catholics to become masons, declaring that many masonic principles and rituals were incompatible with Catholic teachings. He particularly objected to freemasonry’s naturalism, rationalism, anti-clericalism and emphasis on secrecy.

While both Pirie-Gordon and Luke were masons, the Catholic Rolfe felt he was justified in associating with them as long as he did not actually become a mason himself. He insisted that the following words be included in the Rule’s preamble: ‘Being convinced that the practice of the Catholic Faith is compatible with the pursuit of Wisdom…the Rule of this Our Order may be prosecuted so far as is consistent with Our Religious obligations’. Over the years 1907 to 1911, membership of the Order expanded apace. Among these new Knights were Arthur Cowley (Bodley’s Librarian), Dion Calthorp (Editor of The Idler), Guy Ridley (now best known for his involvement with Virginia Woolf in the Dreadnought Hoax in 1910), Douglas Crick, the future Anglican Bishop of Stafford, and Cardinal Filippo Camassei, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.

Rolfe promoted a number of Catholic candidates, but these were easily outnumbered by Pirie-Gordon’s masonic acquaintances. Rolfe, whose relations with Pirie-Gordon had in any case been deteriorating for unrelated reasons, protested that his co-founder ‘had been admitting so many Freemasons as to make the said Order merely a private succursale of Freemasonry.’ The Catholic-Freemason tensions became acute, and in early 1911 an exodus of masonic Knights began, including Pirie-Gordon’s parents, Harry Luke and Michael Percival. On 24 January 1911, Pirie-Gordon himself announced his intention to leave, citing ‘the disinclination of Catholics to assist an organisation ruled by an Anglican chief officer, and the unwillingness of Anglicans to work for the Order while Catholics are influential therein’. Diplomatically, he also cited his lack of time and his many other commitments. Several days later, however, he agreed to remain, and he went on to serve a record sixty years as Grand Master.

The Order in the Twenty-First Century
Remarkably, the Order has had only four Grand Masters since its inception: Sir Harry Luke (4 June 1905 – 4 June 1907); Harry Pirie-Gordon (3 June 1909 – 8 December 1969); Cecil Woolf (8 December 1969 – 10 June 2019); and Timothy d’Arch Smith (19 June 2022 -).

The Order’s organisational structure, as envisioned in the Rule, proved unnecessarily top-heavy, and within the Order’s first few years almost all of its bodies and titles fell into disuse. Over a hundred years later the Order consists simply of the Grand Master, the Knights and the Ladies of Honour. Women were originally accorded a subordinate rank, but they are now full members. Seniority is still according to the date of investiture, and ‘three valid reasons’ must still be given for the investiture of any new Knight or Lady of Honour. This usually involves scholarly publication or some other contribution to knowledge which comes under the rubric of ‘the pursuit of Wisdom.’