The Inquisition

by Michael Baigent

  It goes without saying, of course, that the potentialities offered by the Lodges were not always actualised, and as often as not, remained purely theoretical. But the Church's capacity for arbitration had seldom been more than theoretical either; and the Lodges were at least as successful as the Church at turning theory into practice. Even if war could not be averted, it could be made to conform, insofar as possible, to scrupulously observed rules and certain premises of the Enlightenment promulgated by the Lodges. And in fact, the wars of the eighteenth century, unlike those of the seventeenth, were conducted in as ‘civilised’, ‘chivalrous’ and ‘gentlemanly’ a fashion as any war can be conducted, in rigorous adherence to internationally agreed and accepted tenets and standards of behaviour. In part, this reflected a revulsion from the excesses of such conflicts as the Thirty Years War, but it also stemmed from an absence of religious hatred and fanaticism, and a recognition of certain increasingly respected codes. These codes owed more than a little to the ideas, attitudes and values disseminated by the Lodges.

  Attacks upon Freemasonry

  Alarmed by the vigorous spread of Freemasonry and by the threats the institution posed, the Church proceeded to act. On 25 July 1737, a secret conference of the Holy Office was convened in Florence, probably under the auspices of Pope Clement XII himself. The conference was attended by three cardinals, the heads of the primary Papal Congregations and the Inquisitor General. Their sole topic of discussion was Freemasonry.1

  High-level leaks of information were almost as prevalent then as they are now, and reports of the secret conclave were published soon after in a Berlin journal. According to these reports, the assembled ecclesiastics were convinced that Freemasonry was but a façade for some much vaster, all-encompassing, clandestine heresy of an altogether new kind. It is difficult to imagine what the clerics believed such a heresy might entail to generate such extreme anxiety. In any case, the Berlin journal reported, Freemasons were already being arrested. Later in the year, anti-Masonic riots instigated by unseen hands erupted in a number of towns. It was growing increasingly clear that powerful interests behind the scenes were beginning to mobilise against Freemasonry.

  Nine months after the conference in Florence, on 28 April 1738, Pope Clement issued the first of what was to become an increasingly belligerent sequence of Bulls on the subject. The Bull, In eminenti, began:

  Condemnation of the Society, Lodges… (of) Free Masons, under pain of excommunication to be incurred ipso facto, and absolution from it being reserved for the Supreme Pontiff.2

  In the text that followed, the Pope proceeded to state that

  it is our will and charge that as well Bishops or higher or Prelates, and other local Ordinaries as the deputed Inquisitors of Heretical Depravity everywhere take action and make inquisition against transgressors, of whatever status, grade, condition, order, dignity or eminence they may be, and inflict upon them condign punishment, as though strongly suspected of heresy, and exercise constraint upon them.3

  The ‘constraint’ in question – the imprisonment and attendant punishment-was, if necessary, to be implemented and effected with ‘the aid of the secular branch’.

  Being reluctant to antagonise the Church, a number of European regimes acted at once. As early as the previous summer, the police in France had begun to arrest Lodge members and confiscate their literature – from which much of our knowledge of French Freemasonry at the time derives. In Poland, Freemasonry was banned throughout the kingdom. In Sweden, participation in Masonic rituals was declared punishable by death. Encouraged by this response, the Church hardened its position. On 14 January 1739, Cardinal Joseph Firrao, Secretary of State for the Vatican, published a new edict. All Freemasons everywhere were threatened with the confiscation of their possessions, excommunication and death.4

  In February 1739, a Masonic text – written in French but published in Dublin – was condemned, placed on the Index and officially burned in the Piazza Santa Maria Minerva in Rome. Shortly thereafter, a number of Freemasons in Florence were arrested, imprisoned and tortured. One of them managed to obtain his freedom when certain English Lodges made a ‘financial donation’ – that is, paid a fine – to the Holy Office. Others were released through the intervention of François of Lorraine, whose titles included that of Grand Duke of Tuscany.

  In 1751, Pope Clement XII's successor, Benedict XIV, issued a second Bull against Freemasonry, repeating the condemnation of the first but adding even more stringent penalties. Despite such measures, however, and to the profound consternation of the Holy Office, Catholics continued to join Lodges in substantial numbers. More worrisome still, the Lodges were beginning to attract not only lay Catholics, but priests as well, and even several high-level clergy. A Lodge in Mainz, for example, was composed almost entirely of clergy. Another, in Münster, included the presiding bishop's own officials. At Erfurt, the future bishop founded a Lodge himself, which convened in the rooms of the abbot at a prominent monastery. A Lodge in Vienna included two royal chaplains, the rector of the theological college and two other priests. Another Viennese Lodge counted no fewer than thirteen priests among its membership. By the end of the eighteenth century, the list of high-ranking Catholic Freemasons was augmented by numerous abbots and bishops, one imperial chaplain, one cardinal and at least five archbishops.5 Freemasonry was rapidly becoming as hydra-headed, and as irrepressible, as Protestantism had been 200-odd years before. And the Church, increasingly bereft of secular armies to impose its authority, was significantly more impotent than it had been at the time of the Reformation.

  Where the Holy Office's writ still ran enforceably, however, Freemasons were fair game, and pursued as assiduously as witches had been in the past. This was particularly so in Spain and Portugal, where a national Inquisition, accountable to the Crown, still operated. Shortly after the first Papal pronouncement against Freemasonry in 1738, the Spanish Inquisition raided a Lodge in Madrid and arrested its members, eight of whom were sentenced to the galleys. In 1748, the Inquisition completed a four-year investigation into Freemasonry. All Freemasons, it concluded, were subject to automatic excommunication as ‘perverse reprobates acting contrary to the purity of the Holy faith and public safety of the realm’.6 Three years later, in 1751, the Inquisition procured a decree from the Crown which sanctioned an automatic death penalty for Free-masons and denied them even the right of trial. In that same year, one Inquisitor, Father Joseph Torrubia, joined a Lodge himself in order to spy, to collect information and denounce members. According to his reports, there were ninety-seven Lodges in Spain at the time.7 Despite the draconian measures instigated against them, their number was to increase and their struggle against the Inquisition's persecution to continue for another three-quarters of a century. In the end, they would emerge triumphant. After the Napoleonic Wars and the restoration of the Spanish monarchy, it was the Inquisition that was dismantled. The Lodges survived and thrived, both in Spain and the Spanish colonies of Latin America.

  A similar story obtained for Portugal. In certain of his works, the novelist José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, depicts the omnipresence of the Portuguese Inquisition well into the eighteenth century. Like its counterpart in Spain, it needed a scapegoat to justify its continued existence, and Freemasonry was an obvious candidate for the role. One particularly notorious case was that of John Coustos, a Swiss-born diamond cutter resident in England since childhood, naturalised and duly initiated as a Freemason.

  In 1736, Coustos had established a Lodge of his own in Paris. In 1741, impelled by the discovery of diamonds in Brazil, he moved to Lisbon and founded a Lodge there. It included no Portuguese members, only other foreign diamond cutters, traders, merchants, goldsmiths and a ship's captain. It was nevertheless denounced to the Portuguese Inquisition, which, in March of 1743, proceeded to act. The first member of the Lodge to be arrested was a French jeweller. On a pretext of business, agents of the Inquisition visited him at noon, just as he was closing his sho
p for siesta. He was summarily arrested, searched for weapons and forbidden to speak. He was then hustled out into a small closed carriage, driven off and imprisoned in the dungeon of the Inquisition's palace without being allowed to contact anyone. To account for his disappearance, the Inquisition disseminated a rumour that he had absconded with a quantity of diamonds.

  Four days later, on 5 March 1743, Coustos himself was arrested. At ten in the evening, he emerged from a coffee house where he had been chatting with two friends. Outside, nine officers of the Inquisition were waiting with the customary small closed carriage. His sword being taken from him, he was handcuffed and driven rapidly to the Inquisition's palace, where he, too, was consigned to the dungeon. Here he was left in solitude for two days, receiving no visitors, hearing only moans and cries from the surrounding cells and corridors. At last, there began a prolonged sequence of torture and interrogation. The Inquisition, it transpired, desired to know everything possible about Freemasonry and the extent of the Lodges' activity in Portugal.

  Not being a masochist or a particularly heroic individual, Coustos endeavoured to satisfy his persecutors. In the course of several sessions of interrogation, he volunteered a good many details on the rituals and practice of Freemasonry and named twelve other members of his Lodge, all foreign nationals, most of them French. Despite having taken down pages of information and confession, however, the Inquisitors were not convinced they had learned everything Coustos had to tell. What was more, they insisted that he convert to Catholicism. This he refused to do, even when English and Irish monks resident in Lisbon at the time were brought in to exhort him.

  The Inquisition's files on Coustos's case still exist and run to some 600 pages. They include the text of an exhaustively detailed confession. Despite this confession, the tribunal decided to ‘proceed to Tortures, to extort from him a Confession… that the several Articles of which he stands accused are true’.8 In other words, Coustos was to be tortured in order to obtain a confession attesting to the validity of his previous confession. According to the surviving Inquisition documents, Coustos, on 6 March 1744, nearly a year after his first confession, was ‘given a turn on the rack’.9 Coustos himself later described what this apparently insouciant phraseology entailed. He was conducted to a square tower-like room with no windows and no illumination save that of two candles. The doors were padded to muffle all sound. The victim was seized by six assistants, who stripped him of most of his clothes and fastened him to the rack with an iron collar around his neck and an iron ring on each foot, two ropes around each arm and two around each thigh. Four men then proceeded to stretch his limbs by drawing the ropes tight – so tight that the ropes cut through his flesh and caused him to bleed from all eight lacerations. When he fainted, he was returned to his cell to recover.10

  Six weeks later, on 25 April 1744, Coustos was subjected to a second session of torture. The Inquisition's documents describe the punctiliousness with which the legal niceties were observed. Thus

  the Doctor and Surgeon and the other Ministers of the torture approached the Bench where they were given the oath of the Holy Gospels, on which they placed their hands, and promised faithfully and truly to carry out their duties, and the torture prescribed for the accused was then ordered to be executed, and stripped of those clothes which might impede the proper execution of the torture, he was placed on the rack and the binding commenced and he was then informed by me, the notary, that if he died during the operation, or if a limb was broken, or if he lost any of his senses, the fault would be his, and not of the Lords Inquisitors.11

  On this occasion, Coustos's arms were stretched backwards over a wooden frame, dislocating his shoulders and making blood run from his mouth. The process was repeated three times, after which he was returned to his cell. Here, a physician and a surgeon reset his bones, giving him ‘exquisite pain’ in the process.12

  Some two months later, Coustos was subjected to his third session of torture. A thick chain was wound around his stomach and attached at each arm to a rope, which was progressively tightened by means of a windlass. His stomach was severely bruised, his shoulders were dislocated again and his wrists as well. When a surgeon had reset his bones, the whole procedure was repeated. For some weeks afterwards, he was unable to lift his hand to his mouth.

  On 21 June 1744, Coustos's public trial was held. Along with other victims, he was made to walk in procession to the Church of Saint Dominic, where the king, the royal princes, members of the nobility and a substantial crowd waited in attendance. Coustos was accused of

  not confessing the heretical, disturbing and scandalous purpose for which he intended to introduce a new doctrine into the Catholic Realm, nor has he made true declaration in connection with the matters for which such inviolable secrecy is required.13

  He was sentenced to four years in the galleys, but quickly became so ill that he was obliged to spend two months in an infirmary. Here, he was again visited by Irish monks, who promised him release in exchange for conversion to the Church. Coustos again refused; but from the infirmary, he managed to smuggle out a letter to his brother-in-law, who worked in the household of a prominent Freemason, the Earl of Harrington. The earl spoke to a secretary of state at the time, the Duke of Newcastle, who instructed the British ambassador in Lisbon to effect Coustos's release. This finally occurred in October. There were no British ships in the vicinity; but a small Dutch fleet happened to be at anchor in the harbour, and Coustos was granted passage on a Dutch vessel by the admiral in command. The Inquisition was still sniffing about, looking for an excuse to rearrest him. He was accordingly allowed aboard immediately. For the next three weeks, he remained there, while agents of the Inquisition rowed repeatedly around the fleet, trying to locate the ship on which he had found refuge. His health severely impaired, he arrived back in London on 15 December 1744. Of his ordeal, he wrote:

  I have but too much Reason to fear, that I shall feel the sad Effects of this cruelty so long as I live; I being seized from time to time, with thrilling Pains, with which I never was afflicted till I had the misfortune of falling into the merciless and bloody Hands of the Inquisitors.14

  He was to die two years later. Before that he wrote an account of his experience, The Sufferings of John Coustos for Freemasonry, which was published at the end of December 1745, when the Jacobite rebellion instigated by Bonnie Prince Charlie was still in progress. Not surprisingly, Coustos's book was seized upon for purposes of anti-Catholic, and thus anti-Jacobite, propaganda. It continued to exert an influence long afterwards, establishing an indelible portrait of the Inquisition in the minds of English readers and the English public. One can discern traces of this portrait in some of the ‘Gothic fiction’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Matthew Lewis's novel, The Monk.

  Cagliostro and Casanova

  Supported by the judicial, civic and military authority of their respective crowns, the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions continued to operate with vigour throughout the eighteenth century, not only at home, but in colonies abroad as well. Both were dismantled during Napoleon's occupation of the Iberian Peninsula and the campaign of reconquest that followed under the future Duke of Wellington; and Freemasons in the British army, as well as the French, displayed little sympathy towards the institution that had formerly persecuted them. Towards the end of the Peninsular War, the Inquisition was reestablished by the restored and restabilised monarchies in Spain and Portugal. Its reestablishment, however, was to be short-lived. By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions were both defunct; and in the former colonies of Latin America, republics dominated largely by Freemasons were founded.

  Elsewhere in Catholic Europe, the Holy Office, lacking the secular support of its Spanish and Portuguese counterparts, functioned in a more desultory fashion. Tenuous though its position was becoming, it did continue to flail out against Freemasonry; and in Italy especially, Freemasons continued to suffer from its mi
nistrations. Among the more prominent victims was Joseph Balsamo, better known as Count Cagliostro. Born in Palermo in 1743, Cagliostro travelled widely and was initiated into Freemasonry in London in 1777. He subsequently proceeded to devise his own brand, or rite, of Freemasonry, which he then attempted to disseminate across Europe. In 1789, he arrived in Rome to seek an audience with Pope Pius VI, whom he imagined would be sympathetic towards his Masonic rite and embrace it to the benefit of the Church. This might appear to have been naive; but Cagliostro in fact found the Roman clergy extremely receptive to his evangelism, and he made friends with high-ranking figures in a number of Catholic institutions, including the Knights of Malta. Encouraged by his success, he established his own Lodge in the Eternal City, which supposedly met at the palace of the Knights of Malta. Its membership is reported to have included not only knights and nobles, but also clerical officials, ecclesiastics and at least one cardinal.