The Book of the Dead (38 page)
Gradually, though, public opinion began to turn. No “great plot” materialized. Serious contradictions in Oates’s evidence began to emerge and the judges started to find in favor of those he had accused. In 1681 he was thrown out of his grace-and-favor lodgings. In 1684 he was arrested at a city coffeehouse, tried for defamation, fined the enormous sum of £100,000 (equivalent to almost $20 million today), and thrown into prison for calling the king’s brother James a traitor. Worse was to come when James came to the throne, intent on revenging his fellow Catholics whom Oates’s lies had condemned to death. The one-time savior of the English monarchy was now vilified in pamphlets as a “Buggering, Brazen-faced, Lanthorn-jawed, Tallow-chapt Leviathan.” He was retried, this time for perjury, sentenced to life imprisonment, stripped of his clerical status, and forced to endure a public flogging. He received more than a thousand lashes while being dragged behind a cart from Aldgate to Tyburn, a distance of more than three miles. To rub salt in the wound, he had to appear five times a year in different parts of London, spending a whole day in the stocks and being pelted with eggs and kitchen slops.
Notwithstanding his horrific injuries from the flogging and regular beatings from his jailers, Oates survived, and with the accession of William of Orange in 1688, he was free once more. Undeterred by his experiences, and his powers of persuasion still intact, he got a job as a royal spy, the new king paying him an allowance to keep an eye on possible French Jacobite plotters. In 1693, hideous though he was, Oates married a wealthy young widow, and despite the sniggering about his homosexuality, the couple went on to have a daughter. Somehow, he got yet another
job as a minister, this time as a Baptist. It was no more successful than any of his other clerical posts. One of his parishioners, Heather Parker, disliked him so much that, on her deathbed, she expressly asked that he be barred from attending her funeral. When the day came, Oates’s response was to occupy the pulpit and preach an interminable and irrelevant sermon to delay the ceremony, causing a riot in the church, and being thrown out, yet again, by his own congregation.
It was to be his last expulsion, but not his last appearance in court. In 1702 he was fined at Westminster for hitting a woman over the head with his walking stick. She had confronted him about his sermons criticizing the Church of England and accusing Charles II of being a closet papist. A man in his mid-fifties hitting a woman is particularly pathetic. Prison had not improved his manners or diminished his insolent self-regard. He was what he always had been, an insecure coward and a bully. His delusional fantasies had signed the death warrant of thirty-five entirely innocent men, changed the law of the land, and disrupted the lives of thousands of English Catholics. He spent his last years in obscurity writing religious tracts that nobody read and haunting the Westminster law courts as a spectator. He never tired of complicated, self-justifying stories.
If Titus Oates had any redeeming features, history does not record them. The same cannot be said of
Alessandro, Count Cagliostro
(1743–95). He too was a liar and a charlatan, but he became a genuine celebrity all over late eighteenth-century Europe. Magician, Freemason, alchemist, forger, spiritualist, and healer, he inspired both Goethe’s
Faust
and Mozart’s
The Magic Flute.
It’s hard to think of another historical figure whose story also links Pope Pius IV, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, Casanova, and William Blake.
Born Giuseppe Balsamo in one of the poorest parts of Sicily, he lost his father while still a child. His mother couldn’t afford to educate him, so at the age of fifteen, with the help of relatives, he was sent to a nearby monastery. The Fatebenefratelli, or “Do-Good Brothers,” were Augustinian monks famed for their network of hospitals. Medicine and chemistry were well taught and Giuseppe was a gifted pupil, spending his free time in the library, poring over books of occult lore. But he was still a Sicilian street brat at heart and—rather like Oates—foulmouthed, belligerent, and lazy. During mealtime readings of the lives of the saints, he swapped their names for those of notorious Palermo prostitutes. The monks rapidly tired of these games and let him go. Bright and unscrupulous, he settled into a life of petty crime and soon became a gang leader. Using what he’d learned in the monastery, he was also able to pose as a convincing alchemist. In this guise he convinced a goldsmith called Marano that he had sold his soul to the devil and could locate a cave in the mountains stuffed full of gold, but that first he would need sixty ounces of the precious metal to perform some expensive preliminary magic. The venal and credulous Marano fetched the money and, at midnight, set out for the hills, where he was promptly ambushed by six of Giuseppe’s accomplices dressed as devils armed with pitchforks and, according to the terrified merchant, blowing blue and red flames. They beat and robbed him and left him for dead. Giuseppe pocketed his share of the cash and left Palermo, never to return.
The attention to detail is impressive. The costumes weren’t strictly necessary for the robbery, but they gave life to a tale that
was told and retold and that always left Marano looking a fool. This imaginative approach to crime—with the victims appearing to deserve their comeuppance—was to become Giuseppe’s trademark.
Arriving at Messina on the other side of the island, he lodged with his well-to-do uncle, Joseph Cagliostro, before swiftly making off with some of his money and his surname. As Giuseppe Cagliostro, he set out on a series of escapades in Egypt and Turkey in the company of a mysterious adept called Althotas, an alchemist who spoke several Eastern languages. To fund their travels, they hawked a chemical formula devised by the old magician that supposedly transformed rough fibers of hemp so they appeared to be silk. These could be sold to merchants at a profit, a rather more practical alchemy than turning base metal into gold.
By 1765 he was in Malta, in the service of the secretive Knights Hospitaller, Europe’s richest and most powerful charitable institution. The Grand Master was himself an alchemist, and Giuseppe’s training as an apothecary came in handy: He ground medicine during the day and concocted his own potions in the evenings. After three years, he decided it was safe to return to Italy and, in 1768, surfaced in Rome, carrying letters of recommendation from the Grand Master himself. These secured him the patronage of Cardinal Orsini, whose secretary he became. Rome had a thriving Sicilian community: sharp-witted, resourceful immigrants keen to make money, from whom Giuseppe learned how to forge paintings and antiquities and sell them to tourists. At the same time, he put his medical skills to good use, presenting himself as a physician and peddling the fruits of his Maltese experiments: an “elixir of life” that was said to delay the aging process.
Not long after he arrived, he fell in love with and married a fourteen-year-old Roman girl called Lorenza Serafina Feliciani, from a poor family. She was both heart-stoppingly beautiful and more than a match for her husband in cunning. Without her, Giuseppe Balsamo might never have promoted himself to the giddy heights of Count Alessandro di Cagliostro. They were a brilliant team—he was handsome, charismatic, and ruthless; she was prepared to do anything to achieve a life of luxury and privilege. Giuseppe used her charms to entrap wealthy men whom he could then blackmail. On meeting the consummate con man, the Marquis of Agliata, he went even further, trading his wife’s sexual favors in return for instruction in how to forge official documents. Soon he could produce letters of credit, wills, army commissions, even titles. A string of new identities followed. Styling themselves “the Colonel and Mrs. Pelligrini,” they met Casanova. He was captivated by them but warned them to be careful: Forgery was a risky business and carried the death penalty. He needn’t have worried: Rome was already becoming too small and the Inquisition too suspicious. The Pelligrinis disappeared and the Count and Countess di Cagliostro took Europe by storm.
Over the next two decades, they lived and worked in France, England, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Russia, and Poland. In Germany they met another great impostor, the Count de Saint Germain, who made a decent living by claiming to be two thousand years old. As ever, Cagliostro listened and learned. In Strasbourg, he encountered the fashionable theory of animal magnetism and incorporated it into his act. In London, the chance discovery of an old manuscript inspired him to revive the ancient Egyptian Order of Masons, publicizing it as a return to the authentic roots of Freemasonry. Renting a house on Sloane
Street, he billed himself as the “Grand Coptha.” Serafina was the Grand Priestess, able to transfer the eternal spirit simply by breathing on a person’s cheek. The order not only admitted women to the lodge, it also held elaborate ceremonies in which participants of both sexes wore nothing but diaphanous robes. Acolytes were taught the names of seven secret angels to ease their path to earthly riches and immortality. Polite London society was mesmerized and subscriptions poured in.
The basic business plan was the same wherever they went. Arriving in a city, they rented grand and luxurious rooms and announced the establishment of a brand-new school of medicine and philosophy. The services they offered wove together Masonry, alchemy, animal magnetism, and Giuseppe’s trusty elixir of life—with an unmistakable background throb of sex. Cagliostro led the healing and the rituals; the Countess sat looking ravishing and offering a direct connection to the spirit world, like some elegant piece of mystical wireless technology. As one Parisian chronicler remarked:
There was hardly a fine lady in Paris who would not sup with the shade of Lucretius; a military officer who would not discuss war with Caesar, Hannibal or Alexander; or an advocate or counsellor who would not argue legal points with Cicero.
Premium services such as the elixir and the spirit consultations had to be paid for, but the healing was free and open to all. This was a brilliant marketing ploy: once the news spread, the sick and the poor queued up at the premises, adding philanthropy to the Cagliostros’ burgeoning reputation. What’s more, the treatments seemed to work. In Strasbourg more than fifteen thousand people claimed they had been cured; in Bordeaux
the crowd greeting their arrival was so vast the local militia had to be deployed; and in Lyon, Cagliostro fever led to the building of a vast new Masonic temple to house his Egyptian Rite.
As is the way with fads, the excitement soon faded. Most of the cures came from the placebo effect, from people’s own belief in the magical powers on offer. Once that started to waver, the success rate dwindled and Cagliostro was forced to make even more extreme claims: that he could travel in time; he had been with Christ at the wedding at Cana; he could make himself invisible. When business started to fall off, it was time to move on.
This served them well for several years, and they amassed quite a fortune. Then things started to go seriously awry. Cagliostro’s attempt to seduce Catherine the Great with a love potion was a hopeless failure. She declared him a fraud and a menace and had him thrown out of Russia. In London a team of tricksters, intent on relieving him of his alchemical formulas, took advantage of his ignorance of English law and summonsed him for debt. Much of the money he had made inducting men and women into his Egyptian order went to bribe his way out of debtor’s prison. In France, his friend Cardinal de Rohan became embroiled in the affair of the diamond necklace implicating Marie Antoinette. Without a shred of evidence, Cagliostro was thrown into the Bastille. Even there he left a lasting impression: Graffiti he scrawled on his cell wall was said to have predicted the Bastille would be “pulled down” in 1789.
Ejected from France, almost bankrupt and tired of their rootless and increasingly hazardous travels, Serafina persuaded Cagliostro to return to Rome. It was a terrible mistake. The Inquisition had Freemasonry in its sights and the great illusionist was caught trying to recruit two papal spies into his Egyptian
order. To save herself, Serafina testified against him. Cagliostro received a death sentence, but after an audience with the pope, this was commuted to life imprisonment. The unique life of Giuseppe Balsamo, Count di Cagliostro, ended in a stone box high up in the fortress of San Leo, near Urbino. For four years, his only connection with the outside world was through a tiny trapdoor. Tormented by his captors, starving and louse ridden, he gradually lost his mind and died of a stroke in 1795. As a heretic, he was refused the last rites and buried in the grounds of the castle in an unmarked grave. So many people refused to believe the news that Napoleon was forced to commission an official report, detailing beyond doubt that Cagliostro—inventor of the elixir of life—really was dead.
Some years earlier, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) had visited Sicily, fascinated by rumors that Cagliostro wasn’t really a count at all, but a jumped-up guttersnipe from Palermo. He tracked down Cagliostro’s mother, who was living with her daughter and two grandchildren crammed into a one-room apartment. Rather touchingly, they were thrilled to hear that their Giuseppe had done so well for himself, but disappointed that he hadn’t thought to help them. Goethe later sent them some money but the visit proved far more valuable for him. The idea of a man whose life is based on a lie and who claims to possess supernatural powers found its niche in history many years later in his great play
Faust.
Cagliostro’s journey from poverty, to fame and riches, to penury and disgrace has an undeniably mythic quality. Even today, some people make claims for him as a great seer, with the courage and energy to do what few of us manage: to dream up a better life for himself and then to live it. Just as Oates had exploited people by playing on their nameless fears of impending doom, Cagliostro
tapped into the common sense that there is more to life than meets the eye; that what happens to us is driven by unseen forces. It may be that he succeeded because people wanted to believe him.
