Page 25 - An account of the Lodge of Nine Muses No. 235. 1777 to 2012UGLE

Lodge of the Nine Muses 25

As the Chevalier had been dead since December 1813 the mention of his future
residence reads oddly. The practice must have been carried on under his name, but
the personal reference is misleading. The dodges of advertising are nothing new.
Several portraits of Bro. Ruspini are known; a pleasing pastel, by Bro. the Rev.
W. M. Peters, showing him as a comparatively young man, hangs in the offices of
the Girls’ Institution in Great Queen Street, and there is a statue at the School at
Rickmansworth. 7
Of the four Brethren described as visitors, little has come to light regarding
Bros. Richard Barker, named as Junior Warden on the Warrant, William Porter
or Borghi, unless the last may not improbably be identified with Luigi Borghi,
an eminent violinist who visited London in 1774 and 1777, and settled there in
1780. A Bro. Richard Barker, however, was P.G.M. of Rutland, then a sinecure
appointment, from 1798 to 1813. He was a prominent London Mason and may
8
well have been our man. Bro. Jean Baptiste Cipriani was, of course, the fashionable
painter and designer, from whose hand came the much-prized miniatures described
and illustrated in Chapter Twelve. It was fitting that one of the first ceremonies in
the new Lodge should have been the raising of Bro. Cipriani to the Third Degree.
Where he received the former degrees we do not know.
Even in the free and easy manner of those days five Brethren could hardly have
met, constituted themselves into a Lodge with Master, Wardens, and Treasurer, and
received four others as Visitors, without some authority. It may be presumed that
a meeting had taken place before 14 January 1777, and that a dispensation had
already been obtained from the Grand Lodge, pending the issue of a Constitution
or Warrant, a procedure which will be referred to in detail later on. Further, the
Grand Lodge Register shows a Bro. Teissa as having been initiated in the Nine
Muses on 14 January 1777.
It will be noted that the Master is designated as “Right Worshipful”, a
distinction now confined to certain of the principal Grand Lodge Officers. The
last Master to be so entitled in the minutes was Bro. Henry Martin in 1819.
Apparently also the Master was addressed as “Your Worship”.
Two Brothers not mentioned in the Freemasons’ Magazine are named in the
warrant, Isaac (Henriques) Sequeira, M.D., and Abraham Teixeira.

7 The RMIG completed the amalgamation with the RMIB in 1986? to form ‘The Royal
Masonic Trust for Girls and Boys’. In 2005 they vacated their offices and moved across the
road to the lower floor of FMH. The inscriptions on the buildings remain as a reminder of
their previous occupants. The school at Rickmansworth is now an independent school open
to all girls.
8 Farington’s Diary, under 4 July 1809, has a reference to landscapes by a Richard Barker as
“pasticios from Gainsborough, and mannered, one pretty”. Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and
Engravers (1930) has seven Barkers but no Richard.