The 2016 Prestonian Lecture - Foundations, new light on the formation and early years of the Grand Lodge of England - explores the evolution of freemasonry from the mid-fourteenth century through to the creation of the first Grand Lodge of England. Ric Berman challenges old Masonic myths, explains the interconnections between Freemasonry, Grand Lodge and Britain’s new Hanoverian government, and outlines how and why its leaders positioned the Craft as a bastion against the Jacobite followers of James Stuart - ‘the king over the water’. The book provides a context for the tercentenary of the formation of the Grand Lodge of England - the world’s first grand lodge.