The Golden Dawn expelled its founder in 1900, his envoy Aleister Crowley tried to seize the London vault in a mask, and Yeats and the landlord threw him out

William Westcott, William Woodman and Samuel MacGregor Mathers founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888. Mathers wrote the rituals of its inner order and became its chief. He lived in Paris. The London adepts, among them W. B. Yeats, expelled him in 1900. The inner order met in rented rooms at 36 Blythe Road, which held its vault and papers. Mathers sent Aleister Crowley, whom he had initiated in Paris, to take the rooms. With the help of Elaine Simpson, Crowley summoned the senior adepts one by one and asked them to sign a pledge of loyalty to Mathers. He then arrived at Blythe Road in a black mask and Highland dress. The landlord stopped him, and Edmund Hunter and Yeats, with a policeman, made him leave. Crowley later printed a circular calling the story of the masked man untrue. Hunter and Yeats used the law of the tenancy to hold the rooms, and the locks were changed again. Mathers' loyalists formed the Alpha et Omega. The order split further into the Stella Matutina and the group around A. E. Waite. Much of the Golden Dawn's surviving archive is in the Library and Museum of Freemasonry in London; part was deposited in the 1920s, and more was bought in 2008 with a public grant.