In the summer of 1718, one year after the formation of the London Grand Lodge, the second Grand Master, Mr. George Payne, requested that Brethren donate ‘any old Writings’ concerning masonry. Accordingly, several manuscripts were produced. However, it was subsequently reported that, sometime in 1720, ‘several very valuable Manuscripts… concerning the Fraternity… particularly one writ[ten] by Mr. Nicholas Stone the Warden of Inigo Jones’ were tragically ‘burnt’.
    Although little is known about the circumstances of this calamitous loss, the fact that ‘Nicholas Stone’ (1586- 1647) is mentioned is significant; for he was not only the King’s Master Mason and England’s greatest seventeenth-century sculptor, but new research shows he was also made an accepted ‘ffreemason’ eight years before the well-known antiquary Elias Ashmole.
    Nicholas Stone was born in 1586, the son of an Exeter quarryman. At a tender age he made his way to London and was apprenticed to the Flemish mason, Isaac James. Several years later he was introduced to the Dutch mason and sculptor, Hendrick de Keyser, with whom he returned to the Netherlands, and subsequently married his daughter, Maria.
    By Dutch law Nicholas required the consent of his father in order to marry and this appears to have been attested by John Bury, the vicar of Sidbury, where Stone’s father is believed to have once resided. Sadly the records of Sidbury church cannot be consulted as they were destroyed by fire in the nineteenth century. However, there is an interesting wall plaque in the chancel of the local St. Giles Church, making a play on the word ‘Stone’:

An epitaph upon ye Life and Death of
JOHN STONE, FREEMASON,
who, Departed Ys Life ye
first of January, 1617,
and Lyeth heer under buried.
On our great Corner Stone
this Stone relied,
For blessing to his building loving most,
to build God’s Temples, in which
workes he dyed . . .

Soon after his wedding, Nicholas Stone returned to London with his bride. There he joined the ‘London Company of ffreemasons’, established a craft workshop in Long Acre, and rapidly secured a string of lucrative commissions. In June 1619 he secured a career-defining opportunity: he became the master mason responsible for rebuilding the State Banqueting House in Whitehall which meant he had to work in close consort with the Surveyor-General, Inigo Jones.

THE ACCEPTION

During the 1620s Nicholas Stone’s reputation grew and in April 1626 he was appointed ‘Master Mason and Architeckt’ at Windsor Castle. The following year he served as Renter Warden of the ‘London Company of ffreemasons’ and in 1630 he progressed to the post of Upper Warden before finally being elected Company Master in 1633. Several months after this election he was also appointed Kings’ Master Mason, making him the most senior mason in the country. Yet, curiously, four years after stepping down as Master of the London Company, its minutes record that, in 1638, Stone and four other men were ‘taken into the Accepcon’, evidently some sort of exclusive body within the Company.
    Traditionally, researchers have described the accepted masons as nonstonemasons, yet Nicholas Stone was clearly a practising stonemason and so too were the others who joined the Acception that day. They were all described as ‘ffreemasons’ and one, Edmund Kinsman, was, like Stone, also a Past Master of the Company. So what exactly was this mysterious practice? Was the Acception connected somehow with the symbolic side of architecture?
    Stone certainly mixed in sophisticated and fashionable circles and his works evidently display a range of symbolism now found in modern Freemasonry: an hour-glass over a death’s head, Time with a scythe, chequered pavements; figures representing Faith, Hope and Charity; the Four Cardinal Virtues (Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance and Justice), as well as numerous carved figures extracted from classical mythology. One of his monumental tomb designs bears the Latin inscription, ‘You are the Agriculture of God’. A serpent winds round a rock, down which runs a stream, and a riband woven through the corn carries the words, ‘If one were not to die, one could not be resurrected’. Building metaphors were by no means uncommon at this time. In 1609 a publication included the verse: As the Freemason heweth the hard stones ... even so God, the Heavenly Free-Mason, buildeth a Christian Church.
    A similar example can be found on a mason’s grave at Abbots Kerswell, Devon, dated 4 May 1639; the lines of poetry run lengthways along the tomb:

           Christ was thy Corner-stone, Christians the rest,
           Hammer the word, Good life thy line all blest,
           And yet art gone, t’was honour not thy crime,
           With stone hearts to worke much in little time,
           Thy Master saws’t and tooke thee off from them,
           To the bright stone of New Jerusalem,
           Thy worke and labour men may esteem a base one,
           Heaven counts it blest, here lies a blest free-Mason.


It is not known when Nicholas Stone joined the Company because the Company minutes before 1619 have been lost. However, in a separate building contract of 1615 Stone is described as a ‘citizen and ffreemason of London’, quite normal for the time. There are also later accounts which show Stone at various stages of progression within the Company; some of these are contained in the Company records and some derive from separate building accounts.

THE DIARY OF NICHOLAS STONE JUNIOR

In the year of Stone’s joining the Acception, his two eldest sons, Henry and Nicholas junior, both trained freemasons and sculptors, travelled to Italy to further their knowledge of continental art and architecture. Nicholas kept a diary of their travels and in Florence he recorded how they met the Duke of Tuscany; the Duke even expressed an interest in the brothers’ drawings. They also met the great sculptor, Gianlorenzo Bernini, who evidently rated the work of Nicholas the younger, as he invited him to come and watch him work and encouraged him to continue drawing in chalk. In Rome, Nicholas mentioned the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo and a ‘great piramide’ that stood before it, which was engraved with ‘Egyptian caracters’, as well as temples dedicated to various gods such as Venus, Jupiter and Ceres. Yet the most remarkable aspect of the diary undoubtedly concerns the brothers numerous purchases, as it demonstrates that the leading master masons of the seventeenth century were not the simple, untutored, craftsmen they have often been portrayed as by masonic researchers. On the contrary, many were well-educated and perfectly capable of understanding every facet of modern symbolic Freemasonry.
    And intriguingly, on 30 June 1639, Nicholas Stone junior recorded that his father requested a ‘booke of [the] Archytecture of Domenico Fontana to be sent for England for Mr Kinsman’ – the same Edmund Kinsman who had joined the Acception in 1638.
    Nicholas Stone senior died in 1647 and was buried in the parish church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. In a distinguished career, it is known that he earned well in excess of £11,000 which, for the time, shows a man of considerable standing, and in his Will he was tellingly referred to as ‘Esquier’. He also left five central London houses, and his oldest son Henry inherited the family business. It was Henry who carved a wall-tablet to his father’s memory in St. Martin’s Church which, though later destroyed, was described as consisting of ‘several Tools for Sculpture-work’ as well as ‘a Square, and Pair of Compasses’.
    Two-and-a-half years after his passing another mysterious meeting of the Acception took place on 25 January 1650 and on this occasion five men joined, one of whom was Stone’s eldest son, Henry. Henry was not only a trained Freemason, but was also a well-known copy painter, who worked for a time as assistant to the celebrated artist Van Dyck. He made numerous copies of famous paintings and later commissioned the English artist, Sir Peter Lely, to paint his own portrait.
    Upon Henry’s death in 1653, and with Nicholas junior already gone, the family business reverted to his younger brother John, who was also a qualified Freemason and probably the most educated of all. He had been educated at Westminster School and Oxford University, and worked as Bible Clerk and Librarian at University College, Oxford, from 1644 to 1648, before being expelled by Parliamentary forces. Unfortunately it is unclear whether John joined the Acception like his father and elder brother. Nonetheless, the evidence surrounding the Stone family unquestionably offers a rare insight into the world of our working forebears, a world which was sophisticated by any standard, then and now.