Thomas Dunckerley is a late eighteenth-century icon of British Freemasonry; his story is a fascinating morality tale of self-invention and self-deception. Climbing to the highest echelons of the order, and long-accepted as something of a hero, the reality of Dunckerley’s life is very different from the version recorded by his nineteenth-century biographers. Sommers reveals Dunckerley’s widely accepted claim to be an illegitimate son of George II to be untrue. But alongside a very real success as a Freemason, his true story includes the Royal Navy, travel, a career in law and the ‘scandalous Worsley affair’. In one of the first books to provide a scholarly study of English Freemasonry, Sommers uses Dunckerley’s case to examine the changeable nature of personal identity in the eighteenth century and the evolving methodology and expectations of biography.

"'Sommers has revealed a stunning story of self-deception and re-invention. In a shrewd re-examination of the hagiographic accounts she shows the sleights of hand underlying our understanding of the past, its many twists of fate, and what enthusiastic biographers do with them. A must-read for modern historians and their students.'"