Grand Lodge had been established in 1783. It was here that the deaths of Louis XVI and Gustavus III of Sweden are said to have been decreed.
But already in this same year of 1785 the first act of the revolutionary drama had been played out. The famous "Affair of the Necklace" can never be understood in the pages of official history; only an examination of the mechanism provided by the secret societies can explain that extraordinary episode, which, in the opinion of Napoleon, contributed more than any other cause to the explosion of 1789. In its double attack on Church and Monarchy the Affair of the Necklace fulfilled the purpose of both Frederick the Great and of the Illuminati. Cagliostro, we know, received both money and instructions from the Order for carrying out the plot, and after it had ended in his own and the Cardinal de Rohan's exoneration and exile, we find him embarking on fresh secret-society work in London, where he arrived in November of the same year. Announcing himself as the Count Sutkowski, member of a society at Avignon, he "visited the Swedenborgians at their Theosophical Society meeting in rooms in the Middle Temple and displayed minute acquaintance with their doctrines, whilst claiming a superior knowledge." According to a generally received opinion, Cagliostro was the author of a mysterious proclamation which appeared at this moment in the Morning Herald in the cypher of the Rose-Croix.
But in the year before these events an extraordinary thing had happened. An evangelist preacher and Illuminatus named Lanze