But tragedy struck in 1534, when Henry VIII broke with Rome; denied the authority of the Pope and declared himself head of the Church of England. At that time the Roman Catholic Church had been the largest land owner in Britain, as well as having great wealth and political power. So, this was a major problem for the stonemasons because they did the bulk of their work for the Roman Catholic Church, and after the Reformation, with the Church of England no longer paying for the construction of new cathedrals, abbeys and parish churches, the supply of stonemasons far exceeded the demand for their work, and so most of them simply became redundant.

Just a few years later, Henry was seizing the Church's wealth, dissolving and dispossessing the majority of significant cathedrals and monasteries across England and laying claim to their wealth and land for himself and the Royal court. So, just as modern Trade Unionists in industries such as Coal mining or Printing lost their bargaining power, the Stonemasons also lost their bargaining power. Lodges disintegrated and their assets, if any, were looted by the State. Henry desperately needed money for the wars that he was waging overseas, and so being Catholic institutions, the Masons assets could easily be seized.
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The earliest complete surviving membership roll is dated 1670, for a lodge in Aberdeen, where, out of forty-nine Master and Fellow craft members, only ten were working masons. Of the remainder, fifteen were artisans: carpenters, slaters, glaziers, wigmakers, a smith, an armourer, a hookmaker and a cardmaker. All the rest would now be considered middle or upper class: nine merchants, three clergymen, three gentlemen, two surgeons, a collector of customs, a lawyer, a professor of Mathematics and four noblemen, of which three were Earls. All coming from a town with a population of only about 8,000.

Such folk were not attracted to the quaint customs of a medieval trade union for stone cutters, and within just a few decades, a Trojan horse filled with landowners and merchants had appropriated an originally Catholic workers protection society and turned it into a predominantly Protestant gentlemen's club, although the term "lodge" had still been retained.

The first recorded initiation of a "speculative" Freemason in an English lodge was in 1646 when Alias Ashmole, the Antiquary, Astrologer and Alchemist, joined a lodge in Warrington which had no working masons in it at all. Then, by the late 17th century, so many gentlemen - including a lot more Antiquaries, Astrologers and Alchemists - were intrigued by the rituals of the brotherhood that new lodges were being created to satisfy the craze to join.

This moralizing however fell on deaf ears, since many 18th century Masons used their lodges merely as social clubs, indulging in "the dissipation of luxury and temperance". Although, if this had been Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ's only attraction, it would have soon died out, like so many other drink-sodden fraternities of that time. There had to be another incentive to join, and though the craft's claim to be a "moral" society may have had some appeal, it's unlikely that the 18th century gentleman was keen to be given mid-week morality lectures, when he had to endure hellfire and damnation preaching in church on Sundays.