Whatever its provenance, there is little doubt that Freemasonry was ‘born’ in Scotland rather than England. There were strong romantic links between Scotland, France, Freemasonry, pseudo-chivalry and the Jacobites […]. The creation of a London-based Grand Lodge with strong links to the Hanoverian establishment wrested Freemasonry away from those romantic (and revolutionary) links, and put it firmly under the control of the new royal and political hierarchy. […] It was perhaps convenient that a number of Masonic historical records were apparently destroyed in a fire before Anderson’s Constitutions, the first official Masonic history and rulebook from the London Grand Lodge, was published in 1723.
The second reason [why, as John H. Robinson asks, “the Freemasons, assuming they already existed in secret, waited until 1717 before ‘coming out'” – p. 131] is to do with religion. Protestantism may have many things in its favour, but mystery is not one of the them. The Church of England was originally simply the Catholic Church without the pope; but the further it removed itself from Rome, the more it divested itself of ritual and symbolism. The Presbyterians were essentially a dour bunch in their worship. Puritanism did not welcome glorious clerical vestments, candles, incense, paintings and statues; it roundly condemned ‘idolatry’; it shrank in horror from what it saw as the barbaric heresy of transsubstantiation in the mass. Evangelicalism. in contrast with Rome, was rational and straightforward.
– A Brief History of Secret Societies: An Unbiased History of Our Desire for Secret Knowledge (1997), p. 133