Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 10/11/2014; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/SPF_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9781138828162_text.3d 2 The mysteries of popery unveiled Affective language in John Coustos’s and Anthony Gavín’s accounts of the inquisition Giovanni Tarantino Persons are not only forbid to save Hereticks; but are obliged to discover them, tho’ a father, brother, husband, or wife; and this upon pain of excommunication; of incurring a suspicion of heresy; and of being obnoxious to the rigours of the Tri- bunal in question, as fautors or abettors of Heresy. How innatural, how cruel is such an injunction!1 What must that Tribunal be, which obliges parents, not only to eraze from their minds the remembrance of their own children; to extinguish all the sensations of tenderness and affection, which nature inspires for them; but even to extend their inhumanity so far, as to force them to become their accusers, and consequently the cause of the cruelties inflicted on them.2 For Mary was in a flood of tears, but Father Joseph, who was a learned man, with great boldness and assurance, said, what, do you call yourself holy fathers of pity and compassion? I say unto you, that you are three devils on earth, fathers of all manner of mischief, barbarity and lewdness. No inquisitors were ever treated at such a rate before.3 The freemason and the inquisitor At a meeting organized by the Grand Lodge of Argentina in Buenos Aires in 1942, a previously unknown document, dated 1751, was presented by A. S. Hall- Johnson, Grand Representative of the Grand Lodge of Connecticut. The speaker claimed that it had recently been found among the papers of an old masonic family from New England. According to Hall-Johnson, the document was a detailed account of a New England mason’s visit to a London lodge in 1750. It started by describing an odd and rather inconclusive dispute that took place in the presence of the American visitor. The bone of contention was whether or not it would be fitting to commission the printmaker William Hogarth to design some jewellery for the freemasons. Although he was himself a freemason, Hogarth had shown no qualms about pouring scorn on prominent masons in his etchings.4 Interestingly, the letter then made mention of what was an emblematic example of eighteenth-century anti-Catholic literature, in which the role of hero and martyr of the freedom of conscience was taken on by a Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 10/11/2014; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/SPF_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9781138828162_text.3d 36 Giovanni Tarantino mason – in other words, by a representative of a secret society, reserved for men only,5 in which social and religious barriers and enmity appeared to dissolve, and where emphasis was placed on rational inquiry into natural phe- nomena, the promotion of science, a disregard for religious affiliation, the pleasure of conviviality, mutual solidarity, and a benevolent, charitable attitude towards the needy. In fact, the letter describes the initiation of a new affiliate to the London lodge, a sea captain dressed in a blue coat with large silver buttons. After the Ancient Charges had been read out to him, he was invested with a white apron and gloves, and presented with a book called The Sufferings of John Coustos. A diamond cutter by trade, John (or Jean) Coustos had been detained by the Inquisition in Portugal about eight years previously for non-observance of the papal bull on freemasonry.6 The lodge master, so the letter said, recom- mended that the new brother should emulate the constancy of Bro. Coustos and remain loyal to his obligation. I should now warn the reader – as Hall-Johnson must also have done in his presentation, aimed to captivate, not to bamboozle his audience – that the document is not authentic, but a fake produced by Hall-Johnson himself and made somewhat plausible by close examination of eighteenth-century sources and specialist studies cited in the footnotes.7 The plausibility of the letter, though, is evidence of the continuing popularity, in masonic circles, of the steadfastness shown by John Coustos before the Inquisition.8 John Coustos was born sometime around 1703 in Berne, Switzerland, the son of a physician named Isaac Coustos, a Huguenot exile from Guienne, France, and his wife, Marie Roman. His grandfather had been a Huguenot preacher, possibly with Jewish ancestors.9 After leaving Switzerland, the family spent time in Milan, The Hague, Leiden, and Rotterdam, before finally moving to London in 1716, where Isaac and his son became naturalized citizens. John trained to be a stone cutter and set up as a jeweller and dealer in precious stones. He married Alice Barbu, born in London but of French descent, and the couple had four children.10 Coustos was initiated as a freemason in 1730 during a lodge meeting at the Rainbow Coffee House (later Britannic Lodge), a well-known haunt of French intellectuals who came to London, generally via Holland, after the edict of Nantes had been revoked in 1685, and for prominent English freethinkers such as John Toland and Anthony Collins. In the same year, Coustos was one of the founders of a lodge meeting at Prince Eugene Head’scoffee house in St Alban’s Street.11 In 1735, he moved to Paris to work as a cutter of precious stones in the Louvre Palace galleries. In the French capital, he served as worshipful master of the lodge later known as Coustos-Villeroy.12 Five years later, in 1740, Coustos moved to Lisbon, attracted by the prospect of securing permis- sion to go to Brazil, where diamonds had been discovered in 1729. Although the Portuguese authorities turned down his request, he decided to stay on in Lisbon, where he established a lodge and was elected worshipful master. In 1738, however, Pope Clement XII had issued his bull In eminenti apostolatus condemning freemasonry on two grounds: its religious toleration, and its oath Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 10/11/2014; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/SPF_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9781138828162_text.3d The mysteries of popery unveiled 37 of secrecy, both of which were considered offensive. Evidently, freemasonry was perceived as a form of sociability that allowed unacceptable emotional ties with the ‘wrong’ sort of people. So as soon as a woman disclosed Coustos’s masonic affiliation in the confessional, he was arrested on the grounds that masonic lodges superseded confessional and social barriers, and on 14 March 1743 he was handed over to the Inquisition: Afterwards calling to my mind, that grief would only aggravate my calamity, I endeavoured to arm my soul with patience; and to habituate myself, as well as I could, to woe. Accordingly I rouz’d my spirits; and banishing for a few moments, these dreadfully-mournful ideas, I began to reflect ser- iously, on the methods how to extricate myself from this labyrinth of horrors. My consciousness that I had not committed any crime which could justly merit death, would now and then soften my pangs; but immediately after, dreadful thoughts overspread my mind. … I consider’d that, being a Pro- testant, I should inevitably feel, in its utmost rigours, all that rage and barbarous zeal could infuse in the breast of monks; who cruelly gloried, in committing to the flames great numbers of ill-fated victims, whose only crime was their differing from them in religious opinions.13 ‘Monks’ were thus effectively depicted as bonding emotionally through the act of inflicting torture and as embodying a distinguished form of sociability based on hierarchy, fear, and forced inclusivity. Protestant readers, generally accus- tomed, admittedly with innumerable contradictions, to putting the dictates of conscience before dogmatic ‘uniformity’, must have been alarmed at the thought of being exposed to the Catholic threat of an annihilation which, if not yet physical, was psychological and cultural. Coustos reported that he was tortured nine times in the space of two months, and was repeatedly told that if he died in the torture chamber the fault would be his alone (‘guilty, by my obstinacy, of self-murder’).14 Despite everything, he refused to disclose the secrets of the craft, and was sentenced to four years in the galley (not a ship, as the name suggests, but a kind of riverside workhouse). In the auto-da-fé into which he walked on 21 June 1744, eight prisoners were sentenced to execution by burning. For the others, not being given the same sentence made this moment a space for shared feelings of unexpected relief: ‘We thought ourselves the happiest persons upon the earth, tho’ we had little to boast of. However, we were now together, and breath’d the fresh air; we enjoy’d the light of the sky, and had a view of a garden: in a word we knew that we should not be put to a death; all which circumstances prov’d a great consolation.’15 Moreover, Coustos was a British subject, which prompted the British Min- ister in Lisbon to intervene, and in October 1744 he was freed on condition that he left Portugal. After arriving back in England on 15 December, he wrote, possibly in French, an account of his captivity. Entitled The Sufferings of John Coustos for Freemasonry and for His Refusing to Turn Roman Catholic, in the Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 10/11/2014; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/SPF_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9781138828162_text.3d 38 Giovanni Tarantino Inquisition at Lisbon, it was published in an English translation in 1746, the year in which he died, aged forty-three.