William Wynn Westcott

(1848–1925) — London coroner, Freemason, Theosophist, and the Order's administrative founder. It was Westcott who produced the Cipher Manuscripts and the Sprengel correspondence that authorised the founding, and Westcott who brought in Mathers to expand the sketched rituals into a working system.

In 1897 his occult activities became known to his employers and he resigned from the Order to protect his professional position — an ordinary Victorian collision between a public career and a private one. Mathers later accused him outright of having forged the Sprengel letters.

A coroner, a doctor and a scholar founding a magical order between them is a useful corrective to the picture of these people as cranks. They were respectable professional men, and that is part of why the thing spread.