On the fifth of March 1743, nine men lay in wait for John Coustos near a coffee-house in Lisbon. A Portuguese whom Coustos had accounted a friend had marked his movements and alerted the officers. These familiars stripped him of his sword, secured his wrists with irons, and thrust him into a closed carriage. Coustos, a Swiss-born jeweller naturalised an English subject, was yet ignorant of the crime laid to his charge. At the prison of the Inquisition, they stripped him of his gold, his papers, and even the buckles from his shoes and habit. He was cast solitary into a cell where he could summon the gaolers only by beating the padlock against the heavy iron bars.
By slow degrees, he came to understand the occasion of his capture. By Coustos’s account, a woman had denounced a gathering of Freemasons held within the private walls of an associate’s house. The brethren of the lodge were wont to dine together and observe their traditional rites, altogether unaware, so Coustos averred, that Freemasonry stood prohibited within the realm of Portugal. His friend Mouton had already been seized. The familiars had intercepted their correspondence and sought to ascertain whether these assemblies masked seditious crimes or designs against the Holy Faith. For Coustos, the very secrecy that shielded the brotherhood became in the eyes of his captors the clearest token of their guilt.
The first interrogations commenced after two nights spent listening to the screams of unseen wretches piercing through the masonry. He was questioned as to his name, his parentage, his trade, his religion, and the duration of his stay in Lisbon. He was forthwith accused of having reviled the Holy Office and urged to make full confession of all transgressions committed since the days of his infancy. Coustos demanded that they state the precise offence laid against him. Bred from his cradle in the Protestant faith, he replied that he confessed his sins to Almighty God alone, and not to mortal men. The inquisitors answered that the tribunal was already apprised of his impious words against them. He was sent back to his cell, still ignorant of the identity of his accuser and the nature of the deposition.
Seven weeks wore away. He was summoned afresh, on this occasion that he might yield up the secrets of the Masonic craft. Coustos refused to violate the solemn oath plighted to his lodge. His judges declared they possessed the power to absolve him of it; he maintained that no earthly authority could loose a man from a covenant pledged upon his conscience. He proposed that the Portuguese ministers resident in London and Paris be consulted as to the lawful nature of Masonic assemblies. He cited likewise an English Catholic gentleman, well known to the King’s favourite, who could bear witness to the decorum of the Lisbon lodge. These overtures opened no door; he was remanded once more to his cell.
The question of faith then entered the lists of examination. His judges enquired whether he had dispensed alms to the indigent; he cited relief afforded to a woman in childbed, an offering bestowed upon the Franciscans after the burning of their convent, and aid given to an unemployed father. They held out his imprisonment as a providential occasion to return to the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. Coustos affirmed his resolve to die within the communion of the Church of England. He perceived that fidelity to his brethren and fidelity to his religion had become one and the same in the eyes of his examiners: to yield upon the one was to renounce the other.
At length, an indictment was formally read to him. Freemasonry was there denounced as a nefarious sect compounding sacrilege with unnatural vices; its inviolable secrecy and the exclusion of women were proffered as manifest proofs. He was charged with having contemned the edicts of the Pope, refused to declare the true purpose of the society, and persisted in affirming its virtue. The procurator prayed that the question of torture be applied to wrest from him a confession. Coustos refused to sign the articles of his accusation. He petitioned for means to prepare a written defence; his judges replied that prisoners were allowed neither ink nor paper. He was permitted merely to dictate his arguments to an advocate designated by the tribunal, with no leave to choose his own counsel.
Following several more weeks of solitary confinement, his sentence was pronounced: he was condemned to undergo the severities of the Holy Office for having refused to "speak the truth," in the parlance of the court, and for withholding the mysteries of the lodge. In a chamber illumined by only two candles, the executioners stripped him to his linen drawers. An iron collar fastened him to an engine of wood, while rings enclosed his ankles. Cords bound tight about his arms and thighs were strained in concert. He recounts that the hemp cut deep into his living flesh, the tormentors pausing at intervals that a physician and a surgeon might feel his pulse. When he swooned, they bore him senseless to his pallet.
Six weeks thereafter, he was put to a fresh ordeal. His arms were stretched out and bound behind his back, his shoulders hauled backwards until the joints were wrenched from their sockets. Two months later, cords and an engine of traction mangled his belly, his wrists, and his shoulders. After every bout, the surgeons forced the dislocated bones back into place. In his narrative, Coustos reckoned nine separate applications of the question. His wounds were such that he could no longer lift a hand to his mouth. The tribunal had failed to extort the confession of any crime; it had succeeded only in shattering his limbs, without ever wrenching from him the secrets it pursued.
On the twenty-first of June 1744, he was led forth with a company of wretched captives in the grim procession of the auto-da-fé. The cortege passed before the royal palace and proceeded to the church of Saint Dominic, where each man’s sentence was published to the multitude. Certain of the condemned were doomed to the stake; others, like Coustos, were condemned to the galleys. He records his own doom: four years of hard labour. He was the sole prisoner denied the yellow wax taper borne by his fellows, branded an "obstinate" Protestant, according to the account he has left. From the church he was marched back to the dungeons, awaiting his conveyance to the hulks.
The galley was in truth a penal station on the banks of the Tagus. The convicts laboured in the naval yards, unladed the vessels, or toiled at carrying water. Two men were linked together by an iron chain riveted to the ankle; to Coustos was assigned the heavy labour of carrying loads of water to the several prisons of Lisbon. After twelve days, he fell dangerously sick. He had already contracted debts to the guards to obtain some mitigation of his toil; he languished two months in the infirmary, where certain Irish friars offered their intercession would he but consent to abjure his faith. He steadfastly refused.
His deliverance was ultimately wrought by another power. His brother-in-law had moved the Earl of Harrington, who laid the matter before the Duke of Newcastle and the British Crown. The English envoy at Lisbon addressed an urgent memorial to the King of Portugal, claiming Coustos as a British subject and demanding his release. At the end of October 1744, he was led out from the galley. Yet the Inquisitor-General laid his command upon him to appear once more before the Holy Office within three or four days. The prison gates had opened, but the summons hung still above his head.
No British ship of war rode then at anchor in the roadstead. Coustos had recourse to the Dutch resident and obtained a passage aboard the *Damietta*. He sent word to the inquisitors that he would embark on the morrow at nine of the clock. They required him to present himself at that hour at the palace of the Inquisition, where officers would attend him to the vessel. In his narrative, he explains that he chose rather to board the vessel instantly, without warning. He would not entrust his newly recovered liberty a second time to the hands of those who had so reluctantly yielded it up.
His departure was not immediate. For near three weeks the vessel remained windbound in the roads of Lisbon. Coustos relates that officers ransacked his former lodgings, breaking open his chests and presses, while barks manned by familiars of the Holy Office rowed continually about the Dutch ships. The fugitive stood free, yet so near his dungeon that its walls remained ever before his eyes. On the fifteenth of December 1744, after a voyage he describes as long and perilous, he set foot in London. His chronicle of captivity closes upon this arrival, before expanding into a scathing arraignment of the tribunal that had held him in its clutches.