Page 26 - An account of the Lodge of Nine Muses No. 235. 1777 to 2012UGLE

26 An Account of the

Of the latter the writer knows nothing, but Dr Sequeira was a well-known
figure in his day. He was born in Portugal in 1739 and died in 1816 in Mark
Lane. He also married a daughter of Baron d’Aguilar, and was therefore Raphael
Franco’s brother-in-law.
In the year 1796 the Lodge of Rural Friendship, No. 350, amalgamated with
the Nine Muses. The minutes of the Grand Lodge state that on 13 April 1796,
it was “Ordered. That No. 350, Lodge of Rural Friendship, be discontinued on
the list of Lodges, being united to No. 330, the Lodge of the Nine Muses, at the
Thatched-House-Tavern, St. James’s Street.” The name is unique and charming, and
it has been said that to cultivate the Muses in an atmosphere of Rural Friendship
would come very near to attaining the Good Life. Unfortunately, next to nothing
is known of the Lodge beyond the facts that it was founded in 1780 and met
at the Angel Tavern, Upper Fore Street, Edmonton. An exhaustive search of the
documents in their charge, kindly carried out by the Librarians of the Edmonton
Public Libraries, has yielded no result. The 1795 report of the Anniversary Meeting
of the Girls’ School tells that the Lodge of Rural Friendship gave “60 blankets
towards furnishing the new School House, now nearly completed,” which shows
that the Lodge had a sound idea of practical benevolence.
At the new School House, specially built for it in St George’s Fields, the
School for Girls remained till 1852, when the School at Clapham was opened,
to be succeeded in 1934 by the magnificent building at Rickmansworth Park.
There is a list of the members in the Grand Lodge Register; this is printed in
Appendix B. Judging from this the Lodge must have been a small one, but the list
is manifestly far from complete; it contains only eighteen names, the first in 1789,
nine years after the foundation of the Lodge. Four additional names have been
recovered from other sources.
To us Edmonton sounds hardly the spot in which to enjoy rural friendship, but
the insatiable flood of bricks and mortar had not in 1780 engulfed it with so many
other once-pleasant country places; it was then a favourite residential district, noted
for its invigorating air and for its market gardens. Cowper, who wrote John Gilpin in
1782, makes Mrs Gilpin fix on the Bell at Edmonton for her long-deferred jaunt, and
it was at Edmonton that Charles Lamb found a country retreat thirty years later. Both