usual precipitancy pronounced the case one of possession. Somers, he
said, was suffering for the sins of Nottingham.[18] It was time that
something should be done. Prayer and fasting were instituted. For three
days the youth was preached to and prayed over, while the people of
Nottingham, or some of them at least, joined in the fast. On the third
day came what was deemed a most remarkable exhibition. The preacher
named slowly, one after another, fourteen signs of possession. As he
named them Somers illustrated in turn each form of possession.[19] Here
was confirmatory evidence of a high order. The exorcist had outdone
himself. He now held out promises of deliverance for the subject. For a
quarter of an hour the boy lay as if dead, and then rose up quite well.
Darrel now took up again the witchfinder's role he had once before
assumed. Somers was encouraged to name the contrivers of his
bewitchment. Through him, Darrel is said to have boasted, they would
expose all the witches in England.[20] They made a most excellent start
at it. Thirteen women were accused by the boy,[21] who would fall into
fits at the sight of a witch, and a general invitation was extended to
prefer charges. But the community was becoming a bit incredulous and
failed to respond. All but two of the accused women were released.
The witch-discoverer, who in the meantime had been chosen preacher at
St. Mary's in Nottingham, made two serious mistakes. He allowed
accusations to be preferred against Alice Freeman, sister of an
alderman,[22] and he let Somers be taken out of his hands. By the
contrivance of some citizens who doubted the possession, Somers was
placed in the house of correction, on a trumped-up charge that he had
bewitched a Mr. Sterland to death.[23] Removed from the clergyman's
influence, he made confession that his possessions were pretended.[24]
Darrel, he declared, had taught him how to pretend. The matter had now
gained wide notoriety and was taken up by the Anglican church. The
archdeacon of Derby reported the affair to his superiors, and the
Archbishop of York appointed a commission to examine into the case.[25]
Whether from alarm or because he had anew come under Darrel's influence,
Somers refused to confess before the commission and again acted out his
fits with such success that the commission seems to have been convinced
of the reality of his possession.[26] This was a notable victory for the
exorcist.
But Chief-Justice Anderson of the court of common pleas was now
commencing the assizes at Nottingham and was sitting in judgment on the
case of Alice Freeman. Anderson was a man of intense convictions. He
believed in the reality of witchcraft and had earlier sent at least one
witch to the gallows[27] and one to prison.[28] But he was a man who
hated Puritanism with all his heart, and would at once have suspected
Puritan exorcism. Whether because the arch-instigator against Alice
Freeman was a Puritan, or because the evidence adduced against her was
flimsy, or because Somers, again summoned to court, acknowledged his
fraud,[29] or for all these reasons, Anderson not only dismissed the
case,[30] but he wrote a letter about it to the Archbishop of
Canterbury. Archbishop Whitgift called Darrel and More before the court
of high commission, where the Bishop of London, two of the Lord
Chief-Justices, the master of requests, and other eminent officials
heard the case. It seems fairly certain that Bancroft, the Bishop of
London, really took control of this examination and that he acted quite
as much the part of a prosecutor as that of a judge. One of Darrel's
friends complained bitterly that the exorcist was not allowed to make
"his particular defences" but "was still from time to time cut off by
the Lord Bishop of London."[31] No doubt the bishop may have been
somewhat arbitrary. It was his privilege under the procedure of the
high commission court, and he was dealing with one whom he deemed a very
evident impostor. In fine, a verdict was rendered against the two
clergymen. They were deposed from the ministry and put in close
prison.[32] So great was the stir they had caused that in 1599 Samuel
Harsnett, chaplain to the Bishop of London, published _A Discovery of
the Fraudulent Practises of John Darrel_, a careful resume of the entire
case, with a complete exposure of Darrel's trickery. In this account the
testimony of Somers was given as to the origin of his possession. He
testified before the ecclesiastical court that he had known Darrel
several years before they had met at Nottingham. At their first meeting
he promised, declared Somers, "to tell me some thinges, wherein if I
would be ruled by him, I should not be driven to goe so barely as I
did." Darrel related to Somers the story of Katherine Wright and her
possession, and remarked, "If thou wilt sweare unto me to keepe my
counsell, I will teache thee to doe all those trickes which Katherine
Wright did, and many others that are more straunge." He then illustrated
some of the tricks for the benefit of his pupil and gave him a written
paper of directions. From that time on there were meetings between the
two at various places. The pupil, however, was not altogether successful
with his fits and was once turned out of service as a pretender. He was
then apprenticed to the musician already mentioned, and again met
Darrel, who urged him to go and see Thomas Darling of Burton, "because,"
says Somers, "that seeing him in his fittes, I might the better learn to
do them myselfe." Somers met Darrel again and went through with a
series of tricks of possession. It was after all these meetings and
practice that Somers began his career as a possessed person in
Nottingham and was prayed over by Mr. Darrel. Such at least was his
story as told to the ecclesiastical commission. It would be hazardous to
say that the narrative was all true. Certainly it was accepted by
Harsnett, who may be called the official reporter of the proceedings at
Darrel's trial, as substantially true.[33]
The publication of the _Discovery_ by Harsnett proved indeed to be only
the beginning of a pamphlet controversy which Darrel and his supporters
were but too willing to take up.[34] Harsnett himself after his first
onslaught did not re-enter the contest. The semi-official character of
his writing rendered it unnecessary to refute the statements of a
convicted man. At any rate, he was soon occupied with another production
of similar aim. In 1602 Bishop Bancroft was busily collecting the
materials, in the form of sworn statements, for the exposure of Catholic
pretenders. He turned the material over to his chaplain. Whether the
several examinations of Roman exorcists and their subjects were the
result of a new interest in exposing exorcism on the part of the powers
which had sent Darrel to prison, or whether they were merely a phase of
increased vigilance against the activity of the Roman priests, we cannot
be sure. The first conclusion does not seem improbable. Be that as it
may, the court of high commission got hold of evidence enough to
justify the privy council in authorizing a full publication of the
testimony.[35] Harsnett was deputed to write the account of the Catholic
exorcists which was brought out in 1603 under the title of _A
Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures_. We have not the historical
materials with which to verify the claims made in the book. On the face
of it the case against the Roman priests looks bad. A mass of
examinations was printed which seem to show that the Jesuit Weston and
his confreres in England had been guilty of a great deal of jugglery and
pretence. The Jesuits, however, were wiser in their generation than the
Puritans and had not made charges of witchcraft. For that reason their
performances may be passed over.
Neither the pretences of the Catholics nor the refutation of them are
very important for our purposes. The exposure of John Darrel was of
significance, because it involved the guilt or innocence of the women he
accused as witches, as well as because the ecclesiastical authorities
took action against him and thereby levelled a blow directly at exorcism
and possession[36] and indirectly at loose charges of witchcraft.
Harsnett's books were the outcome of this affair and the ensuing
exposures of the Catholics, and they were more significant than
anything that had gone before. The Church of England had not committed
itself very definitely on witchcraft, but its spokesman in the attack
upon the Catholic pretenders took no uncertain ground. He was skeptical
not only about exorcism but about witchcraft as well. It is refreshing
and inspiriting to read his hard-flung and pungent words. "Out of
these," he wrote, "is shaped us the true _Idea_ of a Witch, an old
weather-beaten Croane, having her chinne and her knees meeting for age,
walking like a bow leaning on a shaft, hollow-eyed, untoothed, furrowed
on her face, having her lips trembling with the palsie, going mumbling
in the streetes, one that hath forgotten her _pater noster_, and hath
yet a shrewd tongue in her head, to call a drab, a drab. If shee have
learned of an olde wife in a chimnies end: _Pax, max, fax_, for a spel:
or can say _Sir John of Grantams_ curse, for the Millers Eeles, that
were stolne: ... Why then ho, beware, looke about you my neighbours; if
any of you have a sheepe sicke of the giddies, or an hogge of the
mumps, or an horse of the staggers, or a knavish boy of the schoole, or
an idle girle of the wheele, or a young drab of the sullens, and hath
not fat enough for her porredge, nor her father and mother butter enough
for their bread; and she have a little helpe of the _Mother_,
_Epilepsie_, or _Cramp_, ... and then with-all old mother _Nobs_ hath
called her by chaunce 'idle young huswife,' or bid the devil scratch
her, then no doubt but mother _Nobs_ is the witch.... _Horace_ the
Heathen spied long agoe, that a Witch, a Wizard, and a Conjurer were but
bul-beggers to scare fooles.... And _Geoffry Chaucer_, who had his two
eyes, wit, and learning in his head, spying that all these brainlesse
imaginations of witchings, possessings, house-hanting, and the rest,
were the forgeries, cosenages, Imposturs, and legerdemaine of craftie
priests, ... writes in good plaine terms."[37]
It meant a good deal that Harsnett took such a stand. Scot had been a
voice crying in the wilderness. Harsnett was supported by the powers in
church and state. He was, as has been seen, the chaplain of Bishop
Bancroft,[38] now--from 1604--to become Archbishop of Canterbury. He was
himself to become eminent in English history as master of Pembroke Hall
(Cambridge), vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, Bishop of
Chichester, Bishop of Norwich, and Archbishop of York.[39] Whatever
support he had at the time--and it is very clear that he had the backing
of the English church on the question of exorcism--his later position
and influence must have given great weight not only to his views on
exorcism but to his skepticism about witchcraft.[40]
His opinions on the subject, so far as can be judged by his few direct
statements and by implications, were quite as radical as those of his
predecessor.[41] As a matter of fact he was a man who read widely[42]
and had pondered deeply on the superstition, but his thought had been
colored by Scot.[43] His assault, however, was less direct and studied
than that of his master. Scot was a man of uncommonly serious
temperament, a plain, blunt-spoken, church-going Englishman who covered
the whole ground of superstition without turning one phrase less serious
than another. His pupil, if so Harsnett may be called, wrote earnestly,
even aggressively, but with a sarcastic and bitter humor that
entertained the reader and was much less likely to convince. The curl
never left his lips. If at times a smile appeared, it was but an
accented sneer. A writer with a feeling indeed for the delicate effects
of word combination, if his humor had been less chilled by hate, if his
wit had been of a lighter and more playful vein, he might have laughed
superstition out of England. When he described the dreadful power of
holy water and frankincense and the book of exorcisms "to scald, broyle
and sizzle the devil," or "the dreadful power of the crosse and
sacrament of the altar to torment the devill and to make him roare," or
"the astonishable power of nicknames, reliques and asses ears,"[44] he
revealed a faculty of fun-making just short of effective humor.
It would not be fair to leave Harsnett without a word on his place as a
writer. In point of literary distinction his prose style maintains a
high level. In the use of forceful epithet and vivid phrase he is
excelled by no Elizabethan prose writer. Because his writings deal so
largely with dry-as-dust reports of examinations, they have never
attained to that position in English literature which parts of them
merit.[45]
Harsnett's book was the last chapter in the story of Elizabethan
witchcraft and exorcism. It is hardly too much to say that it was the
first chapter in the literary exploitation of witchcraft. Out of the
_Declaration_ Shakespeare and Ben Jonson mined those ores which when
fused and refined by imagination and fancy were shaped into the shining
forms of art. Shakespearean scholars have pointed out the connection
between the dramatist and the exposer of exorcism. It has indeed been
suggested by one student of Shakespeare that the great playwright was
lending his aid by certain allusions in _Twelfth Night_ to Harsnett's
attempts to pour ridicule on Puritan exorcism.[46] It would be hard to
say how much there is in this suggestion. About Ben Jonson we can speak
more certainly. It is clearly evident that he sneered at Darrel's
pretended possessions. In the third scene of the fifth act of _The Devil
is an Ass_ he makes Mere-craft say:
It is the easiest thing, Sir, to be done.
As plaine as fizzling: roule but wi' your eyes,
And foame at th' mouth. A little castle-soape
Will do 't, to rub your lips: And then a nutshell,
With toe and touchwood in it to spit fire,
Did you ner'e read, Sir, little _Darrel's_ tricks,
With the boy o' _Burton_, and the 7 in _Lancashire_,
Sommers at _Nottingham_? All these do teach it.
And wee'l give out, Sir, that your wife ha's bewitch'd you.
This is proof enough, not only that Jonson was in sympathy with the
Anglican assailants of Puritan exorcism, but that he expected to find
others of like opinion among those who listened to his play. And it was
not unreasonable that he should expect this. It is clear enough that the
powers of the Anglican church were behind Harsnett and that their
influence gave his views weight. We have already observed that there
were some evidences in the last part of Elizabeth's reign of a reaction
against witch superstition. Harsnett's book, while directed primarily
against exorcism, is nevertheless another proof of that reaction.
[1] Sir George Peckham of Denham near Uxbridge and Lord Vaux of Hackney
were two of the most prominent Catholics who opened their homes for
these performances. See Samuel Harsnett, _Declaration of Egregious
Popish Impostures_ (London, 1603), 7, 8.
[2] For a discussion of the Catholic exorcists see T. G. Law, "Devil
Hunting in Elizabethan England," in the _Nineteenth Century_ for March,
1894. Peckham's other activities in behalf of his church are discussed
by Dr. R. B. Merriman in "Some Notes on the Treatment of English
Catholics in the Reign of Elizabeth," in the _Am. Hist. Rev._, April,
1908. Dr. Merriman errs, however, in supposing that John Darrel
cooperated with Weston and the Catholic exorcists; _ibid._, note 51.
Darrel was a Puritan and had nothing to do with the Catholic
performances.
[3] It is quite possible to suppose, however, that its course would have
been run in much the same way at a later time.
[4] For Harsnett's account of Katherine Wright see his _Discovery of the
Fraudulent Practises of John Darrel_ (London, 1599), 297-315. For
Darrel's story see _The Triall of Maist. Dorrel, or A Collection of
Defences against Allegations ..._ (1599), 15-21.
[5] See Harsnett, _Discovery_, 310.
[6] Katherine Wright's evil spirit returned later.
[7] "I have seene her begging at our doore," he declared, "as for her
name I know it not."
[8] Harsnett, _Discovery_, 41, 265, deals briefly with the Darling case
and Alse Gooderidge. See also John Darrel, _A Detection of that sinnful,
shamful, lying, and ridiculous discours of Samuel Harshnet_ (1600),
38-40. But the fullest account is a pamphlet at the Lambeth Palace
library. It is entitled _The most wonderfull and true Storie of a
certaine Witch named Alse Gooderidge of Stapenhill.... As also a true
Report of the strange Torments of Thomas Darling...._ (London, 1597).
For a discussion of this pamphlet see appendix A, Sec. 1.
[9] The boy was visited by a stranger who tried to persuade him that
there were no witches. But this Derbyshire disciple of Scot had come to
the wrong place and his efforts were altogether useless.
[10] Meantime her mother Elizabeth Wright was also being worried. She
was found on her knees in prayer. No doubt the poor woman was taking
this method of alleviating her distress; but her devotion was
interpreted as worship of the Devil.
[11] So Darrel says. The pamphleteer Denison, who put together the story
of Alse Gooderidge, wrote "she should have been executed but that her
spirit killed her in prison."
[12] Darrel gives an extended account of this affair in _A True
Narration of the strange and grevous Vexation by the Devil of seven
persons in Lancashire_ (1600; reprinted in _Somers Tracts_, III),
170-179. See also George More, _A true Discourse concerning the certaine
possession and dispossession of 7 persons in one familie in Lancashire ..._
(1600), 9 ff.
[13] Certain matters in connection with this case are interesting.
George More tells us that Mrs. Starchie was an "inheritrix." Some of her
kindred, Papists, prayed for the perishing of her issue. Four of her
children pined away. Mrs. Starchie, when told of their prayers, conveyed
all her property to her husband. She had two children afterwards, the
two that were stricken. It is possible that all this may present some
key to the case, but it is hard to see just how. See More, _A true
Discourse_, 11-12.
[14] George More, _A true Discourse_, 15; Harsnett, _Discovery_, 22.
While Dee took no part in the affair except that he "sharply reproved
and straitly examined" Hartley, he lent Mr. Hopwood, the justice of the
peace before whom Hartley was brought, his copy of the book of Wierus,
then the collections of exorcisms known as the _Flagellum Daemonum_ and
the _Fustis Daemonum_, and finally the famous _Malleus Maleficarum_. See
Dee's _Private Diary_ (Camden Soc., London, 1843), entries for March 19,
April 15, and August 6, 1597.
[15] George More, _A true Discourse_, 21; Darrel, _A True Narration_
(_Somers Tracts_, III), 175.
[16] Harsnett, _Discovery_, tells us that "certain Seminarie priests"
got hold of her and carried her up and down the country and thereby
"wonne great credit."
[17] Darrel's account of this affair is in _A True Narration_ (_Somers
Tracts_, III), 179-186. Harsnett takes it up in his _Discovery_, 78-264.
[18] See deposition of Cooper, in Harsnett, _Discovery_, 114.
[19] Depositions of Somers and Darrel, _ibid._, 124-125. It must be
recalled that when this was first tried before a commission they were
convinced that it was not imposture. A layman cannot refrain from
suspecting that Darrel had hypnotic control over Somers.
[20] _Ibid._, 141-142.
[21] _Ibid._, 141. Harsnett quotes Darrel for this statement.
[22] _Ibid._, 5; John Darrel, _An Apologie, or defence of the possession
of William Sommers ..._ (1599?), L verso.
[23] Darrel, _A True Narration_ (_Somers Tracts_, III), 184; see also
his _A brief Apologie proving the possession of William Sommers ..._
(1599), 17.
[24] Harsnett, _Discovery_, 7.
[25] _Ibid._
[26] _Ibid._, 8; Darrel, _An Apologie, or defence_, 4; Darrel, _A True
Narration_ (_Somers Tracts_, III), 185.
[27] _Triall of Maist. Dorrel_, narrative in back of pamphlet.
[28] Darrel, _A Detection of that sinnful ... discours of Samuel
Harshnet_, 40. And see above, p. 56, note.
[29] Harsnett, _Discovery_, 8.
[30] _Ibid._, 320-322; Darrel, _An Apologie, or defence_, L III, says
that the third jury acquitted her. Harsnett refers to the fact that he
was found guilty by the grand inquest.
[31] _The Triall of Maist. Dorrel_, preface "To the Reader."
[32] Harsnett, _Discovery_, 9.
[33] _Ibid._, 78-98.
[34] Yet Darrel must have realized that he had the worst of it. There is
a pathetic acknowledgment of this in the "Preface to the Reader" of his
publication, _A Survey of Certaine Dialogical Discourses, written by
John Deacon and John Walker ..._ (1602): "But like a tried and
weather-beaten bird [I] wish for quiet corner to rest myself in and to
drye my feathers in the warme sun."
[35] T. G. Law, "Devil Hunting in Elizabethan England," in _Nineteenth
Century_, March, 1894.
[36] On the matter of exorcism the position of the Church of England
became fixed by 1604. The question had been a cause of disagreement
among the leaders of the Reformation. The Lutherans retained exorcism in
the baptismal ritual and rivalled the Roman clergy in their exorcism of
the possessed. It was just at the close of the sixteenth century that
there arose in Lutheran Germany a hot struggle between the believers in
exorcism and those who would oust it as a superstition. The Swiss and
Genevan reformers, unlike Luther, had discarded exorcism, declaring it
to have belonged only to the early church, and charging modern instances
to Papist fraud; and with them seem to have agreed their South German
friends. In England baptismal exorcism was at first retained in the
ritual under Edward VI, but in 1552, under Bucer's influence, it was
dropped. Under Elizabeth the yet greater influence of Zurich and Geneva
must have discredited all exorcism, and one finds abundant evidence of
this in the writings of Jewel and his followers. An interesting letter
of Archbishop Parker in 1574 shows his utter incredulity as to
possession in the case of Agnes Bridges and Rachel Pinder of Lothbury;
see Parker's _Correspondence_ (Parker Soc., Cambridge, 1856), 465-466.
His successor, the Calvinistic Whitgift, was almost certainly of the
same mind. Bancroft, the next archbishop of Canterbury, drew up or at
least inspired that epoch-making body of canons enacted by Convocation
in the spring of 1604, the 72d article of which forbids any Anglican
clergyman, without the express consent of his bishop obtained
beforehand, to use exorcism in any fashion under any pretext, on pain of
being counted an impostor and deposed from the ministry. This ended the
matter so far as the English church was concerned. For this resume of
the Protestant and the Anglican attitude toward exorcism I am indebted
to Professor Burr.
[37] Harsnett, _A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures_ (London,
1605), 136-138.
[38] It is not impossible that Harsnett was acting as a mouth-piece for
Bancroft. Darrel wrote: "There is no doubt but that S. H. stand for
Samuell Harsnet, chapline to the Bishop of London, but whither he alone,
or his lord and hee, have discovered this counterfeyting and cosonage
there is the question. Some thinke the booke to be the Bishops owne
doing: and many thinke it to be the joynt worke of them both." _A
Detection of that sinnful ... discours of Samuel Harshnet_, 7, 8.
[39] From 1602 until 1609 he was archdeacon of Essex; see _Victoria
History of Essex_, II, (London, 1907), 46.
[40] There is a statement by the Reverend John Swan, who wrote in 1603,
that Harsnett's book had been put into the hands of King James,
presumably after his coming to England; see John Swan, _A True and
Breife Report of Mary Glover's Vexation, and of her deliverance ..._
(1603), "Dedication to the King," 3. One could wish for some
confirmation of this statement. Certainly James would not at that time
have sympathized with Harsnett's views about witches, but his attitude
on several occasions toward those supposed to be possessed by evil
spirits would indicate that he may very well have been influenced by a
reading of the _Discovery_.
[41] On page 36 of the _Discovery_ Harsnett wrote: "Whether witches can
send devils into men and women (as many doe pretende) is a question
amongst those that write of such matters, and the learneder and sounder
sort doe hold the negative." One does not need to read far in Harsnett
to understand what he thought.
[42] His scholarship, evident from his books, is attested by Thomas
Fuller, who calls him "a man of great learning, strong parts, and stout
spirit" (_Worthies of England_, ed. of London, 1840, I, 507).
[43] See his _Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures_, 134-136; his
_Discovery_ also shows the use of Scot.
[44] Harsnett, _Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures_, 98, 123,
110.
[45] Read _ibid._, 131-140.
[46] Joseph Hunter, _New Illustrations of the Life, Studies and Writings
of Shakespeare_ (London, 1845), I, 380-390.
CHAPTER V.
JAMES I AND WITCHCRAFT.
Some one has remarked that witchcraft came into England with the Stuarts
and went out with them. This offhand way of fixing the rise and fall of
a movement has just enough truth about it to cause misconception.
Nothing is easier than to glance at the alarms of Elizabeth's reign and
to see in them accidental outbreaks with little meaning, isolated
affairs presaging a new movement rather than part of it. As a matter of
fact, any such view is superficial. In previous chapters the writer has
endeavored to show just how foreign ideas and conditions at home gave
the impulse to a movement which within a single reign took very definite
form.
Yet so much was the movement accelerated, such additional impetus was
given it by James I, that the view that James set the superstition going
in England, however superficial, has some truth in it. If Elizabeth had
ever given the matter thought, she had not at least given it many words.
James had very definite opinions on the subject and hesitated not at all
to make them known. His views had weight. It is useless to deny that the
royal position swayed the courts. James's part in the witch persecution
cannot be condoned, save on the ground that he was perfectly honest. He
felt deeply on the matter. It was little wonder. He had grown up in
Scotland in the very midst of the witch alarms. His own life, he
believed, had been imperilled by the machinations of witches. He
believed he had every reason to fear and hate the creatures, and we can
only wonder that he was so moderate as we shall later find him to have
been. The story of the affair that stirred up the Scottish king and his
people has often been told, but it must be included here to make his
attitude explicable. In 1589 he had arranged for a marriage with the
Princess Anne of Denmark. The marriage had been performed by proxy in
July, and it was then provided that the princess was to come to England.
She set out, but was driven on to the coast of Norway by a violent
storm, and detained there by the continuance of the storms. James sailed
to Upsala, and, after a winter in the north of the Continent, brought
his bride to Scotland in the spring, not without encountering more rough
weather. To the people of the time it was quite clear that the ocean was
unfriendly to James's alliance. Had Scotland been ancient Greece, no
doubt Neptune would have been propitiated by a sacrifice. But it was
Scotland, and the ever-to-be-feared Satan was not so easily propitiated.
He had been very active of late in the realm.
Moreover it was a time when Satanic and other conspiracies were likely
to come to light. The kingdom was unsettled, if not discontented. There
were plots, and rumors of plots. The effort to expose them, as well as
to thwart the attacks of the evil one on the king, led to the conception
and spread of the monstrous story of the conspiracy of Dr. Fian. Dr.
Fian was nothing less than a Scottish Dr. Faustus. He was a schoolmaster
by profession. After a dissolute youth he was said to have given soul to
the Devil. According to the story he gathered around him a motley crowd,
Catholic women of rank, "wise women," and humble peasant people; but it
was a crew ready for evil enterprise. It is not very clear why they were
supposed to have attacked the king; perhaps because of his well known
piety, perhaps because he was a Protestant. In any case they set about,
as the story went, to destroy him, and thought to have found their
opportunity in his trip to Denmark. They would drown him in a storm at
sea. There was a simple expedient for raising a storm, the throwing of
cats into the sea. This Scottish method of sacrificing to Neptune was
duly carried out, and, as we have seen, just fell short of destroying
the king. It was only the piety of the king, as Dr. Fian admitted in his
confession, that overmatched the power of the evil one.[1]
Such is the story that stirred Scotland from end to end. It is a story
that is easily explained. The confessions were wrung from the supposed
conspirators by the various forms of torture "lately provided for
witches in that country." Geillis Duncane had been tried with "the
torture of the pilliwinkes upon her fingers, which is a grievous
torture, and binding or wrinching her head with a cord or roape." Agnes
Sampson had suffered terrible tortures and shameful indignities until
her womanly modesty could no longer endure it and she confessed
"whatsoever was demanded of her." Dr. Fian was put through the ordinary
forms of torture and was then "put to the most severe and cruel pain in
the world, called the bootes," and thereby was at length induced to
break his silence and to incriminate himself. At another time, when the
king, who examined him in person, saw that the man was stubborn and
denied the confessions already made, he ordered him to be tortured
again. His finger nails were pulled off with a pair of pincers, and
under what was left of them needles were inserted "up to the heads."
This was followed by other tortures too terrible to narrate.[2]
It is a little hard to understand how it was that the king "took great
delight to be present at the examinations," but throughout the whole
wretched series of trials he was never wanting in zeal. When Barbara
Napier, sister-in-law to the laird of Carshoggil, was to be executed, a
postponement had been granted on account of her approaching
accouchement. Afterwards, "nobody insisting in the pursute of her, she
was set at libertie." It seems also that the jury that had before
condemned her had acquitted her of the main charge, that of treasonable
witchcraft against the king. The king was angered at the default of
justice, went to the Tolbooth, and made an address on the subject. He
spoke of "his own impartiality, the use of witchcraft, the enormity of
the crime, ... the ignorance of thinking such matters mere fantasies,
the cause of his own interference in the matter, the ignorance of the
assizes in the late trial, his own opinion of what witches really
are."[3]
It was only a few years later that James put that opinion into written
form. All the world knows that the king was a serious student. With
unremitting zeal he studied this matter, and in 1597, seven years after
the Dr. Fian affair, he published his _Daemonologie_.[4] It was expressly
designed to controvert the "damnable opinions of two principally in our
age"--Scot, who "is not ashamed in publick Print to deny that there can
be such a thing as witchcraft," and Wierus, "a German physician," who
"sets out a publicke apologie for all these craft-folkes whereby ... he
plainly bewrayes himself to have been one of that profession."
It was to be expected that James would be an exponent of the current
system of belief. He had read diligently, if not widely, in the
Continental lore of the subject and had assimilated much of it. He was
Scotch enough to be interested in theology and Stuart enough to have
very definite opinions. James had, too, his own way of putting things.
There was a certain freshness about his treatment, in spite of the fact
that he was ploughing old fields. Nothing illustrates better his
combination of adherence to tradition, of credulity, and of originality
than his views on the transportation of witches, a subject that had long
engaged the theorists in demonology. Witches could be transported, he
believed, by natural means, or they could be carried through the air "by
the force of the spirit which is their conducter," as Habakkuk was
carried by the angel.[5] This much he could accept. But that they could
be transformed into a "little beast or foule" and pierce through
"whatsoever house or Church, though all ordinarie passages be closed,"
this he refused to believe. So far, however, there was nothing original
about either his belief or his disbelief. But his suggestion on another
matter was very probably his own. There had been long discussion as to
how far through the air witches could go. It was James's opinion that
they could go only so far as they could retain their breath.
But it was seldom that the royal demonologist wandered far from the
beaten road. He was a conformist and he felt that the orthodox case
needed defence: so he set about to answer the objectors. To the argument
that it was a strange thing that witches were melancholy and solitary
women (and so, he would have explained, offer the easiest object of
attack) he interposed a flat denial: they are "some of them rich and
worldly-wise, some of them fat or corpulent in their bodies." To the
point that if witches had the power ascribed to them no one but
themselves would be left alive in the world, he answered that such would
be the case, were not the power of the Devil bridled by God. To the plea
that God would not allow his children to be vexed by the Devil, he
replied that God permits the godly who are sleeping in sin to be
troubled; that He even allows the Evil One to vex the righteous for his
own good--a conventional argument that has done service in many a
theological controversy.
It is a curious circumstance that James seemingly recognized the
reliability of the Romish exorcisms which the Church of England was
about that time beginning to attack. His explanation of them is worthy
of "the wisest fool in Christendom." The Papists could often effect
cures of the possessed, he thought, because "the divell is content to
release the bodily hurting of them, ... thereby to obtain the perpetual
hurt of the soules."
That James should indulge in religious disquisitions rather than in
points of evidence was to be expected. Although he had given up the
Scottish theology, he never succeeded in getting it thoroughly out of
his system. As to the evidence against the accused, the royal writer was
brief. Two sorts of evidence he thought of value, one "the finding of
their marke, and the trying the insensiblenes thereof, the other is
their fleeting [floating] on the water." The latter sign was based, he
said, on the fact that the water refuses to receive a witch--that is to
say, the pure element would refuse to receive those who had renounced
their baptism.[6] We shall see that the influence of the _Daemonologie_
can be fairly appraised by measuring the increased use of these two
tests of guilt within his own reign and that of his son. Hitherto the
evidence of the mark had been of rather less importance, while the
ordeal by water was not in use.
The alleged witch-mark on the body had to do with the contracts between
witches and the Devil. This loathsome side of witch belief we cannot go
into. Suffice it to say that James insisted on the reality of these
contracts and consequently upon the punishment that should be meted to
those who had entered into them. All witches except children should be
sentenced to death. The king shows a trace of conventional moderation,
however, and admits that the magistrates should be careful whom they
condemned. But, while he holds that the innocent should not be
condemned, he warns officials against the sin of failing to convict the
guilty.[7] We shall see that throughout his reign in England he pursued
a course perfectly consistent with these principles.
A critical estimate of James's book it is somewhat hard to give.
Students of witchcraft have given utterance to the most extravagant but
widely divergent opinions upon it. The writer confesses that he has not
that acquaintance with the witch literature of the Continent which would
enable him to appraise the _Daemonologie_ as to its originality. So good
an authority as Thomas Wright has declared that it is "much inferior to
the other treatises on the subject," and that it was compiled from
foreign works.[8] Doubtless a study of the Continental literature would
warrant, at least in part, this opinion. Yet one gets the impression,
from what may be learned of that great body of writing through the
historians of witchcraft, that James's opinions were in some respects
his own. He had, of course, absorbed the current belief, but he did not
hesitate to give his own interpretation and explanation of phenomena.
That interpretation is not wanting in shrewdness. It seems to one who
has wandered through many tedious defences of the belief in witchcraft
that James's work is as able as any in English prior to the time of
Joseph Glanvill in 1668. One who should read Glanvill and James together
would get a very satisfactory understanding of the position of the
defenders of the superstition. Glanvill insisted upon what he believed
were well authenticated facts of experience. James grounded his belief
upon a course of theoretical reasoning.
We have already indicated that James's book was influential in its time.
It goes without saying that his position as a sovereign greatly enhanced
its influence. This was particularly true after he took the throne of
England. The dicta that emanated from the executive of the English
nation could not fail to find a wide audience, and especially in England
itself. His work offered a text-book to officials. It was a key to the
character and methods of the new ruler, and those who hoped for
promotion were quick to avail themselves of it. To prosecute witches was
to win the sovereign's approval. The judges were prompted to greater
activity. Moreover, the sanction of royalty gave to popular outbreaks
against suspicious women greater consideration at the hands of the
gentry. And it was in the last analysis the gentry, in the persons of
the justices of the peace, who decided whether or no neighborhood
whispering and rumors should be followed up.
But the king's most direct influence was in the passing of a new law.
His first Parliament had been in session but eight days when steps were
taken by the House of Lords towards strengthening the statute against
witchcraft. The law in force, passed in the fifth year of Elizabeth's
reign, imposed the death penalty for killing by witchcraft, and a year's
imprisonment for injuring by witchcraft or by allied means. James would
naturally feel that this law was merely one version of the statute
against murder and did not touch the horrible crime of contract with the
Devil and the keeping of imps.[9] Here was a sin beside which the taking
of life was a light offence. It was needful that those who were guilty
of it should suffer the severest penalty of the law, even if they had
not caused the loss of a single life. It was to remedy this defect in
the criminal code that a new statute was introduced.
It is not worth while to trace the progress of that bill from day to
day. It can be followed in the journals of the Lords and Commons. The
bill went to a large committee that included six earls and twelve
bishops.[10] Perhaps the presence of the bishops was an evidence that
witchcraft was still looked upon as a sin rather than as a crime. It was
a matter upon which the opinion of the church had been received before
and might well be accepted again. It was further arranged that the Lord
Chief-Justice of the common pleas, Sir Edmund Anderson, and the
attorney-general, the later so famous Sir Edward Coke, along with other
eminent jurists, were to act with the committee. Anderson, it will be
recalled, had presided over numerous trials and had both condemned and
released witches. As to Coke's attitude towards this subject, we know
not a thing, save that he served on this committee. The committee seems
to have found enough to do. At any rate the proposed statute underwent
revision.[11] Doubtless the privy council had a hand in the matter;[12]
indeed it is not unlikely that the bill was drawn up under its
direction. On the 9th of June, about two months and a half after its
introduction, the statute passed its final reading in the Lords.[13] It
repealed the statute of Elizabeth's reign and provided that any one who
"shall use, practise or exercise any Invocation or Conjuration of any
evill and wicked Spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertaine,
employe, feede, or rewarde any evill and wicked Spirit to or for any
intent or purpose; or take up any dead man, woman, or child, ... to be
imployed or used in any manner of Witchcrafte" should suffer death as a
felon. It further provided that any one who should "take upon him or
them by Witchcrafte ... to tell or declare in what place any treasure of
Golde or Silver should or might be founde ... or where Goods or Things
loste or stollen should be founde or become, or to the intent to provoke
any person to unlawfull love, or wherebie any Cattell or Goods of any
person shall be destroyed, wasted, or impaired, or to hurte or destroy
any person in his or her bodie, although the same be not effected and
done," should for the first offence suffer one year's imprisonment with
four appearances in the pillory, and for the second offence, death. The
law explains itself. Not only the killing of people by the use of evil
spirits, but even the using of evil spirits in such a way as actually
to cause hurt was a capital crime. The second clause punished white
magic and the intent to hurt, even where it "be not effected," by a
year's imprisonment and the pillory. It can be easily seen that one of
the things which the framers of the statute were attempting to
accomplish in their somewhat awkward wording was to make the fact of
witchcraft as a felony depend chiefly upon a single form of evidence,
the testimony to the use of evil spirits.
We have seen why people with James's convictions about contracts with
the Devil might desire to rest the crime upon this kind of proof.[14] It
can be readily understood, too, how the statute would work in practice.
Hitherto it had been possible to arraign a witch on the accusations of
her neighbors, but it was not possible to send her to the gallows unless
some death in the vicinity could be laid to her charge. The community
that hustled a suspicious woman to court was likely to suffer the
expense of her imprisonment for a year. It had no assurance that it
could be finally rid of her.
Under the new statute it was only necessary to prove that the woman made
use of evil spirits, and she was put out of the way. It was a simpler
thing to charge a woman with keeping a "familiar" than to accuse her of
murder. The stories that the village gossips gathered in their rounds
had the keeping of "familiars" for their central interest.[15] It was
only necessary to produce a few of these gossips in court and the woman
was doomed.
To be sure, this is theory. The practical question is, not how would the
law operate, but how did it operate? This brings us again into the
dangerous field of statistics. Now, if we may suppose that the witch
cases known to us are a safe basis of comparison, the reign of James, as
has already been intimated, shows a notable increase in witch executions
over that of Elizabeth. We have records of between forty and fifty
people who suffered for the crime during the reign of James, all but one
of them within the first fifteen years. It will be seen that the average
per year is nearly double that of the executions known to us in the
first part of Elizabeth's rule, and of course several times that of
those known in the last part. This increased number we are at once
inclined to assign to the direct and indirect influence of the new king.
But it may very fairly be asked whether the new statute passed at the
king's suggestion had not been in part responsible for the increased
number. This question can be answered from an examination of those cases
where we have the charges given. Of thirty-seven such cases in the reign
of James I, where the capital sentence was given, seventeen were on
indictments for witchcrafts that had not caused death. In the other
twenty cases, the accused were charged with murder.[16]
This means that over two-fifths of those who are known to have been
convicted under the new law would have escaped death under the
Elizabethan statute. With all due allowance for the incompleteness of
our statistics, it seems certain that the new law had added very
considerably to the number of capital sentences. Subtract the seventeen
death sentences for crimes of witchcraft that were not murder from the
total number of such sentences, and we have figures not so different
from those of Elizabeth's reign.
This is a sufficient comment on the effectiveness of the new law as
respects its particularly novel features. A study of the character of
the evidence and of the tests of guilt employed at the various trials
during the reign will show that the phrasing of the law, as well as the
royal directions for trying guilt, influenced the forms of accusation
and the verdicts of the juries. In other words the testimony rendered in
some of the well known trials of the reign offers the best commentary
upon the statute as well as upon the _Daemonologie_. This can be
illustrated from three of the processes employed to determine guilt. The
king had recommended the water ordeal. Up to this time it had not been
employed in English witch cases, so far as we know. The first record of
its use was in 1612, nine years after James ascended the English throne.
In that year there was a "discoverie" of witches at Northampton. Eight
or nine women were accused of torturing a man and his sister and of
laming others. One of them was, at the command of a justice of the
peace, cast into the water with "her hands and feete bound," but "could
not sink to the bottome by any meanes." The same experiment was applied
to Arthur Bill and his parents. He was accused of bewitching a Martha
Aspine. His father and mother had long been considered witches. But the
"matter remaining doubtful that it could not be cleerly tryed upon him,"
he (and his parents) were tied with "their thumbes and great toes ...
acrosse" and thrown into the water. The suspicion that was before not
well grounded was now confirmed.[17] To be sure, this was done by the
justices of the peace and we do not know how much it influenced the
assize court.[18]
These are the only instances given us by the records of James's reign
where this test was employed by the authorities. But in the very next
year after the Northampton affair it was used in the adjoining county of
Bedford by private parties. A land-owner who had suffered ills, as he
thought, from two tenants, Mother Sutton and her daughter, took matters
into his own hands. His men were ordered to strip the two women "in to
their smocks," to tie their arms together, and to throw them into the
water. The precaution of a "roape tyed about their middles" was useless,
for both floated. This was not enough. The mother, tied toe and thumb,
was thrown into the water again. She "sunke not at all, but sitting upon
the water turned round about like a wheele.... And then being taken up,
she as boldly as if she had beene innocent asked them if they could doe
any more to her."
The use of marks as evidence was not as new as the water ordeal. But it
is a rather curious thing that in the two series of cases involving
water ordeal the other process was also emphasized. In these two
instances it would seem as if the advice of the _Daemonologie_ had been
taken very directly by the accusers.[19] There was one other instance of
this test.[20] The remarkable thing, however, is that in the most
important trial of the time, that at Lancaster in 1612, there was an
utter absence, at least so far as the extant record goes, of female
juries or of reports from them.[21] This method of determining guilt was
not as yet widely accepted in the courts. We can hardly doubt that it
had been definitely forbidden at Lancaster.[22] The evidence of the use
of evil spirits, against which the statute of the first year of James I
had been especially framed, was employed in such a large proportion of
trials that it is not worth while to go over the cases in detail.
The law forbade to take up any dead person or the skin, bone, or other
part thereof for use in witchcraft. Presumably some instance of this
form of witchcraft had been responsible for the phrase, but we have on
record no case of the sort until a few years after the passage of the
statute. It was one of the principal charges against Johanna Harrison
of Royston in 1606 that the officers found in her possession "all the
bones due to the Anatomy of man and woman."[23] This discovery brought
out other charges and she was hanged. At the famous Lancashire trials in
1612 the arch-witch Chattox was declared to have had in her possession
three scalps and eight teeth. She was guilty on other counts, but she
escaped the executioner by death.
These are illustrations of the point that the _Daemonologie_ and the
statute of James I find their commentary in the evidence offered at the
trials. It goes without saying that these illustrations represent only a
few of the forms of testimony given in the courts. It may not,
therefore, be amiss to run over some other specimens of the proof that
characterized the witch trials of the reign. With most of them we are
already familiar. The requirement that the witch should repeat certain
words after the justice of the peace was used once in the reign of
James. It was an unusual method at best.[24] A commoner form of proof
was that adduced from the finding or seeing clay or waxen images in the
possession of the accused.[25] The witness who had found such a model on
the premises of the defendant or had seen the defendant handling it,
jumped readily to the conclusion that the image represented some
individual. If it should be asked how we are to account for this sort of
evidence, the answer is an easy one. Every now and then in the annals of
witchcraft it came out that a would-be accuser had hidden a waxen or
clay figure in the house of the person he wished to accuse and had then
found it. No doubt some cases started in this way. No doubt, too, bitter
women with grudges to satisfy did experiment with images and were caught
at it. But this was rare. In the greater number of cases the stories of
images were pure fabrications. To that category belong almost certainly
the tales told at Lancaster.[26]
"Spectral evidence" we have met with in the Elizabethan period. That
reign saw two or three instances of its employment, and there were more
examples of it in the reign of James. Master Avery of Northampton, who
with his sister was the principal accuser in the trials there, saw in
one of his fits a black wart on the body of Agnes Brown, a wart which
was actually found "upon search."[27] Master Avery saw other spectres,
but the most curious was that of a bloody man desiring him to have mercy
on his Mistress Agnes and to cease impeaching her.[28] At Bedford,
Master Enger's servant had a long story to tell, but the most thrilling
part concerned a visit which the young Mary Sutton (whom he was
accusing) made to him. On a "moonshine night" she came in at the window
in her "accustomed and personall habite and shape" and knitted at his
side. Then drawing nearer, she offered him terms by which he could be
restored to his former health, terms which we are to understand the
virtuous witness refused. It is pleasant to know that Master Enger was
"distrustfull of the truth" of this tale. One fears that these spectres
were not the products of overwrought imagination, as were many others,
but were merely fabrics of elaborate fiction.[29] In any case they were
not the groundwork of the proof. In the Fairfax prosecutions at York in
1622 the charges against the six women accused rested entirely upon a
great tissue of spectral evidence. The three children had talked to the
spectres, had met them outdoors and at church and in the kitchen. The
spectres were remarkably wise and named visitors whom the family did not
know. They struggled with the children, they rolled over them in bed,
they followed them to the neighbors.
Somewhat akin to the evidence from apparitions was that from the effect
of a witch's glance. This is uncommonly rare in English witchcraft, but
the reign of James offers two instances of it. In Royston,
Hertfordshire, there was "an honest fellow and as boone a companion ...
one that loved the pot with the long necke almost as well as his
prayers." One day when he was drinking with four companions Johanna
Harrison came in and "stood gloating upon them." He went home and at
once fell sick.[30] At Northampton the twelve-year-old Hugh Lucas had
looked "stark" upon Jane Lucas at church and gone into convulsions when
he returned home.[31]
One other form of proof demands notice. In the trial of Jennet Preston
at York it was testified that the corpse of Mr. Lister, whom she was
believed to have slain by witchcraft, had bled at her presence. The
judge did not overlook this in summarizing the evidence. It was one of
three important counts against the woman, indeed it was, says the
impressive Mr. Potts, quoting the judge, of more consequence than all
the rest.[32] Of course Mistress Preston went to the gallows.
It will occur to the reader to ask whether any sort of evidence was
ruled out or objected to. On this point we have but slight knowledge. In
reporting the trial of Elizabeth Sawyer of Edmonton in 1621 the Reverend
Henry Goodcole wrote that a piece of thatch from the accused woman's
house was plucked and burned, whereupon the woman presently came upon
the scene.[33] Goodcole characterized this method as an "old ridiculous
custome" and we may guess that he spoke for the judge too. In the
Lancashire cases, Justice Altham, whose credulity knew hardly any
bounds, grew suddenly "suspitious of the accusation of this yong wench,
Jennet Device," who had been piling up charges against Alice Nutter. The
girl was sent out of the room, the witches were mixed up, and Jennet was
required on coming in again to pick out Alice Nutter. Of course that
proved an easy matter.[34] At another time, when Jennet was glibly
enumerating the witches that had assembled at the great meeting at
Malking Tower, the judge suddenly asked her if Joane-a-Downe were there.
But the little girl failed to rise to the bait and answered negatively,
much to the satisfaction of everybody, and especially of the righteous
Mr. Potts.[35]
This is all we know directly about any tendency to question evidence at
Lancaster in 1612, but a good deal more may be inferred from what is not
there. A comparison of that trial with other contemporary trials will
convince any one that Justices Altham and Bromley must have ruled out
certain forms of evidence. There were no experiments made of any sort
nor any female juries set inspecting.[36] This, indeed, is not to say
that all silly testimony was excluded. There is enough and more of sheer
nonsense in the testimony to prove the contrary.
We turn now from the question of evidence to a brief consideration of
several less prominent features of Jacobean witchcraft. We shall note
the character of the sentences, the distribution of the trials, the
personnel and position in life of the accused, and lastly the question
of jurisdiction.
We have in another connection indicated the approximate number of
executions of which we have record in James's reign. That number, we
saw, was certainly over forty and probably approached fifty. It
represented, however, not quite half the total number of cases of
accusation recorded. In consequence the other verdicts and sentences
have significance. Especially is this true of the acquittals. They
amounted to thirty, perhaps to forty. When we add the trials of which we
do not know the outcome, we can guess that the number was close to the
sum total of executions. Legally only one other outcome of a trial was
possible, a year's imprisonment with quarterly appearances in the
pillory. There were three or four instances of this penalty as well as
one case where bond of good behavior was perhaps substituted for
imprisonment.[37] Five pardons were issued,[38] three of them by the
authorities at London, two of them by local powers apparently under
compulsion.[39]
We come now to consider the personnel, sex, occupations, and positions
in life of the accused. On certain of these matters it is possible to
give statistical conclusions, but such conclusions must be accepted with
great caution. By a count as careful as the insufficient evidence
permits it would seem that about six times as many women were indicted
as men. This was to be expected. It is perhaps less in accord with
tradition that twice as many married women as spinsters seem to have
figured in the witch trials of the Jacobean era. The proportion of
widows to unmarried women was about the same, so that the proportion of
unmarried women among the whole number accused would seem to have been
small. These results must be accepted guardedly, yet more complete
statistics would probably show that the proportion of married women was
even greater.[40]
The position in life of these people was not unlike that of the same
class in the earlier period. In the account of the Lancashire trials we
shall see that the two families whose quarrels started the trouble were
the lowest of low hill-country people, beggars and charmers, lax in
their morals and cunning in their dealings. The Flower women, mother and
daughter, had been charged with evil living; it was said that Agnes
Brown and her daughter of Northampton had very doubtful reputations;
Mother Sutton of Bedford was alleged to have three illegitimate
children. The rest of the witches of the time were not, however, quite
so low in the scale. They were household servants, poor tenants, "hog
hearders," wives of yeomen, broomsellers, and what not.
Above this motley peasant crew were a few of various higher ranks. A
schoolmaster who had experimented with sorcery against the king,[41] a
minister who had been "busy with conjuration in his youth,"[42] a lady
charged with sorcery but held for other sin,[43] a conjurer who had
rendered professional services to a passionate countess,[44] these make
up a strange group of witches, and for that matter an unimportant one.
None of their cases were illustrations of the working of witch law; they
were rather stray examples of the connection between superstition, on
the one hand, and politics and court intrigue on the other. Not so,
however, the prosecution of Alice Nutter in the Lancashire trials of
1612. Alice Nutter was a member of a well known county family. "She
was," says Potts, "a rich woman, had a great estate and children of good
hope."[45] She was moreover "of good temper, free from envy and malice."
In spite of all this she was accused of the most desperate crimes and
went to the gallows. Why family connections and influences could not
have saved her is a mystery.
In another connection we spoke of two witches pardoned by local
authorities at the instance of the government. This brings us to the
question of jurisdiction. The town of Rye had but recently, it would
seem, been granted a charter and certain judicial rights. But when the
town authorities sentenced one woman to death and indicted another for
witchcraft, the Lord Warden interfered with a question as to their
power.[46] The town, after some correspondence, gave way and both women
were pardoned. This was, however, the only instance of disputed
jurisdiction. The local powers in King's Lynn hanged a witch without
interference,[47] and the vicar-general of the Bishop of Durham
proceeded against a "common charmer"[48] with impunity, as of course he
had every right to do.
There is, in fact, a shred of evidence to show that the memory of
ecclesiastical jurisdiction had not been lost. In the North Riding of
Yorkshire the quarter sessions sentenced Ralph Milner for "sorcerie,
witchcraft, inchantment and telling of fortunes" to confess his fault at
divine service, "that he hath heighlie offended God and deluded men, and
is heartily sorie."[49] There is nothing, of course, in the statute to
authorize this form of punishment, and it is only accounted for as a
reversion to the original ecclesiastical penalty for a crime that seemed
to belong in church courts.
What we call nowadays mob law had not yet made its appearance--that is,
in connection with witchcraft. We shall see plenty of it when we come to
the early part of the eighteenth century. But there was in 1613 one
significant instance of independence of any jurisdiction, secular or
ecclesiastical. In the famous case at Bedford, Master Enger, whom we
have met before, had been "damnified" in his property to the round sum
of L200. He was at length persuaded that Mother Sutton was to blame.
Without any authority whatsoever he brought her forcibly to his house
and caused her to be scratched.[50] Not only so, but he threw the woman
and her daughter, tied and bound, into his mill-pond to prove their
guilt.[51] In the mean time the wretched creatures had been stripped of
their clothes and examined for marks, under whose oversight we are not
told, but Master Enger was responsible. He should have suffered for all
this, but there is no record of his having done so. On the contrary he
carried the prosecution of the women to a successful issue and saw them
both hanged.
We now turn to the question of the distribution of witchcraft in the
realm during James's reign. From the incidental references already
given, it will be evident that the trials were distributed over a wide
area. In number executed, Lancashire led with ten, Leicester had nine,
Northampton five or more, Middlesex four,[52] Bedford, Lincoln, York,
Bristol, and Hertford each two; Derby had several, the exact number we
can not learn. These figures of the more serious trials seem to show
that the alarm was drifting from the southeast corner of England towards
the midlands. In the last half of Elizabeth's rule the centre had been
to the north of London in the southern midlands. Now it seems to have
progressed to the northern midlands. Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham
may be selected as the triangle of counties that would fairly represent
the centre of the movement. If the matter were to be determined with
mathematical accuracy, the centre would need to be placed perhaps a
little farther west, for Stafford, Cheshire, Bristol, and the remote
Welsh Carnarvon all experienced witch alarms. In the north, York and
Durham had their share of trials.
It will be easier to realize what had happened when we discover that, so
far as records go, Kent and Essex were entirely quiet during the period,
and East Anglia almost so. We shall later see that these counties had
not at all forgotten to believe in witchcraft, but the witchfinders had
ceased their activities for a while.
To be sure, this reasoning from the distribution of trials is a
dangerous proceeding. Witch alarms, on they face of things, seem
haphazard outbursts of excitement. And such no doubt they are in part;
yet one who goes over many cases in order cannot fail to observe that an
outbreak in one county was very likely to be followed by one in the next
county.[53] This is perfectly intelligible to every one familiar with
the essentially contagious character of these scares. The stories spread
from village to village as fast as that personified Rumor of the poet
Vergil, "than which nothing is fleeter"; nor did they halt with the
sheriffs at the county boundaries.
We have now traced the growth of James's opinions until they found
effect in English law, have seen the practical operation of that law,
and have gone over the forms of evidence, as well as some other features
of the witch trials of his reign. In the next chapter we shall take up
some of the more famous Jacobean cases in detail as examples of witch
alarms. We shall seek to find out how they started and what were the
real causes at work.
[1] I have not attempted to give more than a brief resume of this story,
and have used Thomas Wright, _Narratives of Sorcery and Magic_ (London,
1851), I, 181-190, and Mrs. Lynn Linton, _Witch Stories_, 21-34. The
pamphlet about Dr. Fian is a rare one, but may be found in several
libraries. It has been reprinted by the _Gentleman's Magazine_, vol.
XLIX (1779), by the Roxburghe Club (London, 1816), by Robert Pitcairn,
in his _Criminal Trials in Scotland_ (Edinburgh, 1829-1833), vol. I, and
doubtless in many other places. Pitcairn has also printed a part of the
records of his trial.
[2] This is all based upon the contemporary accounts mentioned above.
[3] _Register of the Privy Council of Scotland_, IV (Edinburgh, 1881),
644-645, note.
[4] A fresh edition was brought out at London in 1603. In 1616 it
appeared again as a part of the handsome collection of his _Workes_
compiled by the Bishop of Winchester.
[5] This story is to be found in the apocryphal book of Bel and the
Dragon. It played a great part in the discussions of the writers on
witchcraft.
[6] H. C. Lea, _Superstition and Force_ (4th ed., Philadelphia, 1892),
325 ff., gives some facts about the water ordeal on the Continent. A
sharp dispute over its use in witch cases was just at this time going on
there.
[7] He recommended torture in finding out the guilty: "And further
experience daily proves how loth they are to confesse without torture,
which witnesseth their guiltinesse," _Daemonologie_, bk. ii, ch. i.
[8] Wright, _Narratives of Sorcery and Magic_, I, 197.
[9] Edward Fairfax, _A Discourse of Witchcraft As it was acted in the
Family of Mr. Edward Fairfax ... in the year 1621_ (Philobiblon Soc.,
_Miscellanies_, V, ed. R. Monckton Milnes, London, 1858-1859), "Preface
to the Reader," 26, explains the king's motive: His "Majesty found a
defect in the statutes, ... by which none died for Witchcraft but they
only who by that means killed, so that such were executed rather as
murderers than as Witches."
[10] _Journals of the House of Lords_, II, 269; Wm. Cobbett,
_Parliamentary History_, I, 1017, 1018.
[11] _Lords' Journal_, II, 271, 316; _Commons' Journal_, I, 203-204.
[12] _Cal. St. P., Dom., 1603-1610_, 117.
[13] It had passed the third reading in the Commons on June 7; _Commons'
Journal_, I, 234.
[14] It can hardly be doubted that the change in the wording of the law
was dictated not only by the desire to simplify the matter of proof but
by a wish to satisfy those theologians who urged that any use of
witchcraft was a "covenant with death" and "an agreement with hell"
(Isaiah xxviii, 18).
[15] See Southworth case in Thomas Potts, _The Wonderfull Discoverie of
Witches in the countie of Lancaster ..._ (London, 1613; reprinted,
Chetham Soc., 1845), L 2 verso. Cited hereafter as Potts.
[16] See, below, appendix B. It should be added that six others who had
been condemned by the judges for bewitching a boy were released at
James's command.
[17] _The Witches of Northamptonshire ..._ C 2 verso. The writer of this
pamphlet, who does not tell the story of the ordeal so fully as the
author of the MS. account, "A briefe abstract of the arraignment of nine
witches at Northampton, July 21, 1612" (Brit. Mus., Sloane, 972), gives,
however, proof of the influence of James in the matter. He says that the
two ways of testing witches are by the marks and "the trying of the
insensiblenesse thereof," and by "their fleeting on the water," which is
an exact quotation from James, although not so indicated.
[18] The mother and father were apparently not sent to the assize court.
[19] The female jury was used at Northampton ("women sworn"), also at
Bedford, but by a private party.
[20] It was used in 1621 on Elizabeth Sawyer of Edmonton. In this case
it was done clearly at the command of the judge who tried her at the Old
Bailey.
[21] Elizabeth Device, however, confessed that the "said Devill did get
blood under her left arme," which raises a suspicion that this
confession was the result of accusations against her on that score.
[22] See account in next chapter of the trial at Lancaster.
[23] This case must be used with hesitation; see below, appendix A, Sec. 3.
[24] At Warboys the Samuels had been required to repeat: "If I be a
witch and consenting to the death" of such and such a one. Alice Wilson,
at Northampton in 1612, was threatened by the justice with execution, if
she would not say after the minister "I forsake the Devil." She is said
to have averred that she could not say this. See MS. account of the
witches of Northampton.
[25] Well known is the practice ascribed to witches of making a waxen
image, which was then pricked or melted before the fire, in the belief
that the torments inflicted upon it would be suffered by the individual
it represented.
[26] Potts, E 3 verso, F 4, G 2; also _The Wonderful Discoverie of the
Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower, ..._ (London, 1619), 21.
[27] See MS. account of the Northampton witches.
[28] _Ibid._: "Sundry other witches appeared to him.... Hee heard many
of them railing at Jane Lucas, laying the fault on her that they were
thus accused."
[29] There was practically no spectral evidence in the Lancashire cases.
Lister on his death-bed had cried out against Jennet Preston, and John
Law was tormented with a vision of Alizon Device "both day and night";
Potts, Y 2 verso. But these were exceptional.
[30] See _The Most Cruell and Bloody Murther committed by ... Annis
Dell.... With the Severall Witch-crafts ... of one Johane Harrison and
her Daughter_ (London, 1606).
[31] MS. account of the Northampton witches.
[32] See Potts, Z 2.
[33] The dramatist Dekker made use of this; see his _Witch of Edmonton_,
act IV, scene I (Mermaid edition, London, 1904):
1st Countreyman.--This thatch is as good as a jury to prove she is a
witch.
* * * * *
Justice.-- Come, come: firing her thatch? ridiculous!
Take heed, sirs, what you do; unless your proofs
Come better aimed, instead of turning her
Into a witch, you'll prove yourselves stark fools.
[34] See Potts, P 2.
[35] See _ibid._, Q verso. This, however, was the second time that the
judge had tried this ruse; see _ibid._, P 2.
[36] See above, note 21.
[37] North Riding Record Soc., _Quarter Sessions Records_ (London, 1883,
etc.), III, 181.
[38] Two of them, however, were issued to the same woman, one in 1604
and one in 1610.
[39] _Hist. MSS. Comm. Reports_, XIII, 4 (Rye), pp. 136-137, 139-140,
144, 147-148.
[40] The term "spinster" was sometimes used of a married woman.
[41] _Cal. St. P., Dom., 1619-1623_, 125, Chamberlain to Carleton,
February 26, 1620: "Peacock, a schoolmaster, committed to the Tower and
tortured for practising sorcery upon the King, to infatuate him in Sir
Thos. Lake's business." This is one of those rare cases in which we know
certainly that torture was used.
[42] Sir Thomas Lake to Viscount Cranbourne, January 20, 1604, Brit.
Mus., Add. MSS., 6177, fol. 403.
[43] _Cal. St. P., Dom., 1623-1625_, 474, 485, 497.
[44] T. B. and T. J. Howell, _State Trials_ (London, 1809-1818), II.
[45] See Potts, O 3 verso.
[46] See _Hist. MSS. Comm. Reports_, XIII, 4 (Rye), pp. 136-137,
139-140, 144, 147-148.
[47] See Alexander Roberts, _A Treatise of Witchcraft ..._ (London,
1616), dedicated to the "Maior and Aldermen."
[48] M. A. Richardson, _Table Book_ (London, 1841-1846), I, 245.
[49] North Riding Record Soc., _Quarter Sessions Records_, I, 58.
[50] "... neither had they authoritie to compell her to goe without a
Constable."
[51] Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 36,674, fol. 148. This is a brief
description of "how to discover a witch." It recommends the water ordeal
and cites the case of Mr. Enger and Mary Sutton.
[52] In the case of three of these four we know only that they were
sentenced.
[53] Before the Flower case at Lincoln came the Willimot-Baker cases at
Leicester. The Bedford trial resembled much the Northampton trial of the
previous year.
CHAPTER VI.
NOTABLE JACOBEAN CASES.
It is possible to sift, to analyze, and to reconstruct the material
derived from witch trials until some few conclusions about a given
period can be ventured. A large proportion of cases can be proved to
belong in this or that category, a certain percentage of the women can
be shown to possess these or those traits in common. Yet it is quite
thinkable that one might be armed with a quiver full of generalizations,
and fail, withal, to comprehend Jacobean witchcraft. If one could have
asked information on the subject from a Londoner of 1620, he would
probably have heard little about witchcraft in general, but a very great
deal about the Lancashire, Northampton, Leicester, Lincoln, and Fairfax
trials. The Londoner might have been able to tell the stories complete
of all those famous cases. He would have been but poorly informed could
he not have related some of them, and the listener would have caught the
surface drift of those stories. But a witch panic is a subtle thing, not
to be understood by those who do not follow all its deeper sequences.
The springs of the movement, the interaction of cause and effect, the
operation of personal traits, these are factors that must be evaluated,
and they are not factors that can be fitted into a general scheme,
labelled and classified.
This does not mean that the cases should be examined in chronological
sequence. That is not necessary; for the half-dozen cases that we shall
run over had little or no cause-and-effect connection with one another.
It is convenient, indeed, to make some classification, and the simplest
is that by probable origin, especially as it will enable us to emphasize
that important feature of the trials. Now, by this method the six or
more trials of note may be grouped under three headings: cases that seem
to have originated in the actual practice of magic, cases where the
victims of convulsions and fits started the furor, and cases that were
simply the last stage of bitter quarrels or the result of grudges.
To the first group belongs the Lancastrian case of 1612, which, however,
may also be classed under the last heading. No case in the course of the
superstition in England gained such wide fame. Upon it Shadwell founded
in part a well-known play, _The Lancashire Witches_, while poets and
writers of prose have referred to it until the two words have been
linked in a phrase that has given them lasting association. It was in
the lonely forest of Pendle among the wild hills of eastern Lancashire
that there lived two hostile families headed by Elizabeth Southerns, or
"Old Demdike," and by Anne Chattox. The latter was a wool carder, "a
very old, withered, spent, and decreped creature," "her lippes ever
chattering"; the former a blind beggar of four-score years, "a generall
agent for the Devell in all these partes," and a "wicked fire-brand of
mischiefe," who had brought up her children and grandchildren to be
witches. Both families professed supernatural practices. Both families
no doubt traded on the fear they inspired. Indeed Dame Chattox was said
to have sold her guarantee to do no harm in return for a fixed annual
payment of "one aghen-dole of meale."
That there was a feud between the two clans was to be expected. They
were at once neighbors and competitors, and were engaged in a career in
which they must plot each against the other, and suspect each other.
There are hints of other difficulties. Years before there had been a
quarrel over stolen property. Demdike's daughter had missed clothes and
food to the value of 20 shillings, and had later found some of the
clothing in the possession of Chattox's daughter. A more serious
difficulty involved a third family: a member of the Nutter family,
well-to-do people in Lancashire, had sought to seduce old Chattox's
married daughter, and, when repelled, had warned her that when he
inherited the property where she lived she should be evicted. Chattox
had retaliated by seeking to kill Nutter by witchcraft, and had been
further incited thereto by three women, who wished to be rid of Nutter,
in order that "the women, their coosens, might have the land." As a
consequence Nutter had died within three months. The quarrel, indeed,
was three-cornered. It was said that Demdike's daughter had fashioned a
clay picture of a Nutter woman.[1]
We have all the elements here of a mountain feud; but, in place of the
revolvers and Kentucky moonshine of to-day, we have clay images and
Satanic banquets. The battles were to be fought out with imps of Hell as
participants and with ammunition supplied by the Evil One himself. It
was this connection with a reservoir of untouched demoniacal powers that
made the quarrel of the miserable mountaineers the most celebrated
incident in Lancashire story. Here were charmers and "inchanters,"
experienced dealers in magic, struggling against one another. Small
wonder that the community became alarmed and that Roger Nowell, justice
of the peace, suddenly swooped down upon the Pendle families. It was but
a short time before he had four women cooped up in Lancaster castle. In
a few days more he was able to get confessions out of them. They
admitted acquaintance with the Devil and implicated one another.
Now comes the strange part of the story. According to confessions made
later, Elizabeth Device, not yet shut up, but likely to be at any time,
called a meeting on Good Friday of all the witches in Pendle forest.
They were to come to her home at Malking Tower to plot the delivery of
the imprisoned women by the blowing up of Lancaster castle.[2] The
affair took the form of a dinner; and beef, bacon, and roasted mutton
were served. "All the witches went out of the said House in their owne
shapes and likenesses. And they all, by that they were forth of the
dores, gotten on Horsebacke, like unto Foales, some of one colour, some
of another; and Preston's wife was the last; and, when shee got on
Horsebacke, they all presently vanished out of ... sight." This was the
story, and the various witnesses agreed remarkably well as to its main
details. Those who believed in the "sabbath" of witches must have felt
their opinions confirmed by the testimony of the witnesses at Lancaster.
Even the modern reader, with his skepticism, is somewhat daunted by the
cumulative force of what purports to be the evidence and would fain
rationalize it by supposing that some sort of a meeting actually did
take place at Malking Tower and that some Pendle men and women who had
delved in magic arts till they believed in them did formulate plans for
revenge. But this is not a probable supposition. The concurring evidence
in the Malking Tower story is of no more compelling character than that
to be found in a multitude of Continental stories of witch gatherings
which have been shown to be the outcome of physical or mental pressure
and of leading questions. It seems unnecessary to accept even a
substratum of fact.[3] Probably one of the accused women invented the
story of the witch feast after the model of others of which she had
heard, or developed it under the stimulus of suggestive questions from a
justice. Such a narrative, once started, would spread like wildfire and
the witnesses and the accused who were persuaded to confess might tell
approximately the same story. A careful re-reading of all this evidence
suggests that the various testimonies may indeed have been echoes of the
first narrative. They seem to lack those characteristic differences
which would stamp them as independent accounts. Moreover, when the story
was once started, it is not improbable that the justices and the judges
would assist the witnesses by framing questions based upon the narrative
already given. It cannot be said that the evidence exists upon which to
establish this hypothesis. There is little to show that the witnesses
were adroitly led into their narratives. But we know from other trials
that the method was so often adopted that it is not a far cry to suspect
that it was used at Lancaster.
It is not worth while to trace out the wearisome details that were
elicited by confession. Those already in prison made confessions that
implicated others, until the busy justices of the peace had shut up
sixteen women and four men to be tried at the assizes. Sir Edward
Bromley and Sir James Altham, who were then on the northern circuit,
reached Lancaster on the sixteenth of August. In the meantime, "Old
Demdike," after a confession of most awful crimes, had died in prison.
All the others were put on trial. Thomas Potts compiled a very careful
abstract of all the testimony taken, perhaps the most detailed account
of a witch trial written in the English language, with the possible
exception of the St. Oses affair. The evidence was in truth of a
somewhat similar type. Secret interviews with the Evil One, promises of
worldly riches, a contract sealed with blood, little shapes of dogs,
cats, and hares, clay pictures that had been dried and had crumpled,
threats and consequent "languishing" and death, these were the trappings
of the stories. The tales were old. Only the Malking Tower incident was
new. But its very novelty gave a plausibility to the stories that were
woven around it. There was not a single person to interpose a doubt. The
cross-examinations were nothing more than feeble attempts to bring out
further charges.
Though there is in the record little suggestion of the use of pressure
to obtain the confessions, the fact that three were retracted leads to
a suspicion that they had not been given quite freely. There was
doubtless something contagious about the impulse to confess. It is,
nevertheless, a curious circumstance that five members of the two rival
Pendle families made confession, while all the others whom their
confessions had involved stuck to it that they were innocent.[4] Among
those who persisted in denying their guilt Alice Nutter merits special
note. We have already mentioned her in the last chapter as an example of
a well-to-do and well connected woman who fell a victim to the
Lancashire excitement.[5] The evidence against the woman was perhaps the
flimsiest ever offered to a court. Elizabeth Device, daughter of "Old
Demdike," and her two children were the chief accusers. Elizabeth had
seen her present at the Malking Tower meeting. Moreover, she stated that
Alice had helped her mother ("Old Demdike") bewitch a man to death. Her
son had heard his grandmother Demdike narrate the incident. This
testimony and his sister's definite statement that Alice Nutter attended
the Malking Tower meeting established Mistress Nutter's guilt.[6] The
judge, indeed, was "very suspitious of the accusation of this yong
wench, Jennet Device," and, as we have already seen, caused her to be
sent out of the court room till the accused lady could be placed among
other prisoners, when the girl was recalled and required before the
great audience present to pick out the witch, as, of course, she easily
did, and as easily escaped another transparent trap.[7]
The two children figured prominently from this on. The nine-year-old
girl gave evidence as to events of three years before, while the young
man, who could hardly have been out of his teens,[8] recounted what had
happened twelve years earlier. It was their testimony against their
mother that roused most interest. Although of a circumstantial
character, it fitted in most remarkable fashion into the evidence
already presented.[9] The mother, says the nonchalant pamphleteer,
indignantly "cryed out against the child," cursing her so outrageously
that she was removed from the room while the child kept the stand. It is
useless to waste sympathy upon a mother who was getting at the hands of
her children the same treatment she had given her own mother Demdike.
The Chattox family held together better. Mistress Redfearne had been
carefully shielded in the testimony of her mother Chattox, but she fell
a victim to the accusations of the opposing family. The course of her
trial was remarkable. Denying her guilt with great emphasis, she had by
some wonder been acquitted. But this verdict displeased the people in
attendance upon the trial. Induced by the cries of the people, the court
was persuaded to try her again. The charge against her was exactly the
same, that eighteen years before she had participated in killing
Christopher Nutter with a clay figure. "Old Demdike" had seen her in the
act of making the image, and there was offered also the testimony of
the sister and brother of the dead man, who recalled that Robert Nutter
on his death-bed had accused Anne of his bewitchment.[10] It does not
seem to have occurred to the court that the principle that a person
could not twice be put in jeopardy for the same offence was already an
old principle in English law.[11] The judges were more concerned with
appeasing the people than with recalling old precedents, and sent the
woman to the gallows.
The Pendle cases were interrupted on the third day by the trial of three
women from Salmesbury, who pleaded not guilty and put themselves "upon
God and their Countrey." The case against them rested upon the testimony
of a single young woman, Grace Sowerbutts, who declared that for the
three years past she had been vexed by the women in question, who "did
violently draw her by the haire of the head, and layd her on the toppe
of a Hay-mowe." This delightfully absurd charge was coupled with some
testimony about the appearances of the accused in animal form. Three men
attempted to bolster up the story; but no "matter of witchcraft" was
proved, says the for once incredulous Mr. Potts. The women seized the
decisive moment. They kneeled before the judge and requested him to
examine Grace Sowerbutts as to who set her on. The judge--who had
seemingly not thought of this before--followed the suggestion. The girl
changed countenance and acknowledged that she had been taught her story.
At the order of the judge she was questioned by a clergyman and two
justices of the peace, who found that she had been coached to tell her
story by a Master Thompson, alias Southworth, a "seminarie priest." So
ended the charges against the Salmesbury witches.
One would suppose that this verdict might have turned the tide in the
other cases. But the evidence, as Potts is careful to show, lest the
reader should draw a wrong conclusion, was of very different character
in the other trials. They were all finished on the third day of court
and turned over to the jury. Five of the accused, exclusive of those at
Salmesbury, were acquitted, one condemned to a year's imprisonment, and
ten sentenced to death. To this number should be added Jennet Preston,
who had in the preceding month been tried at York for the killing of a
Mr. Lister, and who was named by the Lancaster witnesses as one of the
gang at Malking Tower.
So ended the Lancashire trials of 1612. The most remarkable event of the
sort in James's reign, they were clearly the outcome of his writings and
policy. Potts asks pointedly: "What hath the King's Maiestie written and
published in his Daemonologie by way of premonition and prevention, which
hath not here by the first or last beene executed, put in practice, or
discovered?"
Our second group of cases includes those where convulsive and
"possessed" persons had started the alarm. The Northampton, Leicester,
and Lichfield cases were all instances in point. The last two, however,
may be omitted here because they will come up in another connection. The
affair at Northampton in 1612, just a month earlier than the Lancashire
affair, merits notice. Elizabeth Belcher and her brother, "Master
Avery," were the disturbing agents. Mistress Belcher had long been
suffering with an illness that baffled diagnosis. It was suggested to
her that the cause was witchcraft. A list of women reputed to be witches
was repeated to her. The name of Joan Brown seemed to impress her. "Hath
shee done it?" she asked.[12] The name was repeated to her and from that
time she held Joan guilty.[13] Joan and her mother were shut up.
Meantime Master Avery began to take fits and to aid his sister in making
accusation. Between them they soon had accused six women for their
afflictions. The stir brought to the surface the hidden suspicions of
others. There was a witch panic and the justices of the peace[14]
scurried hither and thither till they had fourteen witches locked up in
Northampton. When the trial came off at Northampton, Master Avery was
the hero. He re-enacted the role of the Throckmorton children at Warboys
with great success. When he came to court--he came in a "coch"--he was
at once stricken with convulsions. His torments in court were very
convincing. It is pleasant to know that when he came out of his seizure
he would talk very "discreetly, christianly, and charitably." Master
Avery was versatile, however. His evidence against the women rested by
no means alone on his seizures. He had countless apparitions in which he
saw the accused;[15] he had been mysteriously thrown from a horse;
strangest of all, he had foretold at a certain time that if any one
should go down to the gaol and listen to the voices of the witches, he
could not understand a word. Whereupon a Master of Arts of Trinity
College, Oxford, went off to the prison at the uncanny hour of two in
the morning and "heard a confused noise of much chattering and chiding,
but could not discover a ready word."
Master Avery had a great deal more to tell, but the jury seem not to
have fully credited him.[16] They convicted Joan Brown and her mother,
however, on the charges of Elizabeth and her brother. Three others were
found guilty upon other counts. None of them, so far as the records go,
and the records were careful on this point, admitted any guilt.[17] The
one young man among those who were hanged bitterly resisted his
conviction from the beginning and died declaring that authority had
turned to tyranny. He might well feel so. His father and mother had both
been tortured by the water ordeal, and his mother had been worried till
she committed suicide in prison.
This brings us to the third sort of cases, those that were the outcome
of quarrels or grudges. It has already been observed that the Lancashire
affair could very well be reckoned under this heading. It is no
exaggeration to say that a goodly percentage of all other witch trials
in the reign of James could be classified in the same way. Most notable
among them was the famous trial of the Belvoir witches at Lincoln in
1618-1619. The trial has received wide notice because it concerned a
leading family--perhaps the wealthiest in England--the great Catholic
family of Manners, of which the Earl of Rutland was head. The effort to
account for the mysterious illness of his young heir and for that which
had a few years earlier carried off the boy's elder brother led to a
charge of witchcraft against three humble women of the neighborhood. The
Rutland affair shows how easily a suspicion of witchcraft might involve
the fortunes of the lowly with those of the great. Joan Flower and her
two daughters had been employed as charwomen in Belvoir Castle, the home
of the Rutlands. One of the daughters, indeed, had been put in charge of
"the poultrey abroad and the washhouse within dores." But this daughter
seems not to have given satisfaction to the countess in her work, some
other causes of disagreement arose which involved Mother Flower, and
both Mother Flower and her daughter were sent away from the castle. This
was the beginning of the trouble. Mother Flower "cursed them all that
were the cause of this discontentment." Naturally little heed was paid
to her grumblings. Such things were common enough and it did not even
occur to any one, when the eldest son of the earl sickened and died,
that the event was in any way connected with the malice of the Flowers.
It was not until about five years later, when the younger son Francis
fell sick of an illness to prove fatal, that suspicion seems to have
lighted upon the three women.[18] The circumstances that led to their
discharge were then recalled and along with them a mass of idle gossip
and scandal against the women. It was remembered that Mother Joan was
"a monstrous malicious woman, full of oathes, curses, and imprecations
irreligious." Some of her neighbors "dared to affirme that she dealt
with familiar spirits, and terrified them all with curses and threatning
of revenge." At length, in February of 1618/19, on the return of the
earl from attending His Majesty "both at Newmarket before Christmas and
at Christmas at Whitehall," the women were fetched before justices of
the peace, who bound them over to the assizes at Lincoln. Mother Flower
died on the way to Lincoln, but the two daughters were tried there
before Sir Edward Bromley, who had been judge at the Lancashire trials,
and before Sir Henry Hobart. The women made a detailed confession of
weird crimes. There were tales of gloves belonging to the two young sons
of the earl, gloves that had been found in uncanny places and had been
put in hot water and rubbed upon Rutterkin the cat--or spirit. There
were worse stories that will not bear repetition. Needless to say,
Margaret and Philippa Flower were convicted and hanged.[19]
The Rutland cases have been used to illustrate how the witch accusation
might arise out of a grudge or quarrel. There were three or four other
cases that illustrate this origin of the charge. The first is that of
Johanna Harrison--she has been mentioned in the previous chapter--who
had an "altercation" with a neighbor. Of course she threatened him, he
fell ill, and he scratched her.[20] But here the commonplace tale takes
a new turn. She had him arrested and was awarded five shillings damages
and her costs of suit. No wonder the man fell sick again. Perhaps--but
this cannot be certain--it was the same man who was drinking his ale one
day with his fellows when she entered and stood "gloating" over him. He
turned and said, "Doe you heare, Witch, looke tother waies." The woman
berated him with angry words, and, feeling ill the next morning--he had
been drinking heavily the night before--he dragged her off to the
justice. A few weeks later she and her daughter were hanged at
Hertford.[21]
The story of Mother Sutton and Master Enger has been referred to in
several connections, but it will bear telling in narrative form. Mother
Sutton was a poor tenant of Master Enger's, "a gentleman of worship,"
who often bestowed upon her "food and cloathes." On account of her want
she had been chosen village "hog-heard," and had for twenty years
fulfilled the duties of her office "not without commendations." But it
happened that she quarreled one day with her benefactor, and then his
difficulties began. The tale is almost too trivial for repetition, but
is nevertheless characteristic. Master Enger's servants were taking some
corn to market, when they met "a faire black sowe" grazing. The wayward
beast began turning round "as readily as a Windmill sail at worke; and
as sodainly their horses fell to starting and drawing some one way, some
another." They started off with the cart of corn, but broke from it and
ran away. The servants caught them and went on to Bedford with the load.
But the sow followed. When the corn had been sold, one of the servants
went home, the other stayed with his "boone companions." When he rode
home later, he found the sow grazing outside of town. It ran by his
side, and the horses ran away again. But the servants watched the sow
and saw it enter Mother Sutton's house. Master Enger made light of the
story when it was told to him, and, with remarkable insight for a
character in a witch story, "supposed they were drunke." But a few days
later the same servant fell into conversation with Mother Sutton, when a
beetle came and struck him. He fell into a trance, and then went home
and told his master. The next night the servant said that Mary Sutton
entered his room--the vision we have already described.[22]
The rest of the story the reader knows from the last chapter. Mother
Sutton and her daughter were put to various ordeals and at length
hanged. Doubtless the imaginative servant, who had in some way, perhaps,
been involved in the original quarrel, gained favor with his master, and
standing in the community.[23]
The tale of the Bakewell witches is a very curious one and, though not
to be confidently depended upon, may suggest how it was possible to
avail oneself of superstition in order to repay a grudge. A Scotchman
staying at a lodging-house in Bakewell fell in debt to his landlady, who
retained some of his clothes as security. He went to London, concealed
himself in a cellar, and was there found by a watchman, who arrested him
for being in an unoccupied house with felonious intent. He professed to
be dazed and declared that he was at Bakewell in Derbyshire at three
o'clock that morning. He explained it by the fact that he had repeated
certain words which he had heard his lodging-house keeper and her sister
say. The judge was amazed, the man's depositions were taken down, and he
was sent to the justices of Derby.
All that we really know about the Bakewell affair is that several
witches probably suffered death there in 1607. A local antiquarian has
given this tale of how the alarm started.[24] While it is unlike any
other narrative of witchcraft, it is not necessarily without foundation.
The reader has doubtless observed that the cases which we have been
describing occurred, all of them with one exception, between 1603 and
1619. In discussing the matter of the distribution of witchcraft in the
last chapter we noted that not only executions for the crime, but even
accusations and indictments, were nearly altogether limited to the first
fifteen years of James's rule. If it is true that there was a rather
sudden falling off of prosecution in the reign of the zealous James, the
fact merits explanation. Fortunately the explanation is not far to seek.
The king's faith in the verity of many of the charges made against
witches had been rudely shaken. As a matter of fact there had always
been a grain of skepticism in his make-up. This had come out even before
he entered England. In 1597 he had become alarmed at the spread of
trials in Scotland and had revoked all the commissions then in force for
the trial of the offence.[25] At the very time when he became king of
England, there were special circumstances that must have had weight with
him. Throughout the last years of Elizabeth's reign there had been, as
we have seen, a morbid interest in demoniacal possession, an interest to
which sensation-mongers were quickly minded to respond. We saw that at
the end of the sixteenth century the Anglican church stepped in to put
down the exorcizing of spirits,[26] largely perhaps because it had been
carried on by Catholics and by a Puritan clergyman. Yet neither
Harsnett's book nor Darrel's imprisonment quite availed to end a
practice which offered at all times to all comers a path to notoriety.
James had not been on the English throne a year when he became
interested in a case of this kind. Mary Glover, a girl alleged to have
been bewitched by a Mother Jackson, was at the king's wish examined by a
skilled physician, Dr. Edward Jorden, who recognized her fits as
disease, brought the girl to a confession, published an account of the
matter, and so saved the life of the woman whom she had accused.[27]
In the very next year there was a case at Cambridge that gained royal
notice. It is not easy to straighten out the facts from the letters on
the matter, but it seems that two Cambridge maids had a curious disease
suggesting bewitchment.[28] A Franciscan and a Puritan clergyman were,
along with others, suspected. The matter was at once referred to the
king and the government. James directed that examinations be made and
reported to him. This was done. James wormed out of the "principal" some
admission of former dealing with conjuration, but turned the whole thing
over to the courts, where it seems later to have been established that
the disease of the bewitched maidens was "naturall."
These were but the first of several impostures that interested the king.
A girl at Windsor, another in Hertfordshire, were possessed by the
Devil,[29] two maids at Westminster were "in raptures from the Virgin
Mary and Michael the Archangel,"[30] a priest of Leicestershire was
"possessed of the Blessed Trinity."[31] Such cases--not to mention the
Grace Sowerbutts confessions at Lancaster that were like to end so
tragically--were the excrescences of an intensely religious age. The
reader of early colonial diaries in America will recognize the
resemblance of these to the wonders they report. James took such with
extreme seriousness.[32] The possessed person was summoned to court for
exhibition, or the king went out of his way to see him. It is a matter
of common information that James prided himself on his cleverness.
Having succeeded in detecting certain frauds, he became an expert
detective. In one instance "he ordered it so that a proper courtier made
love to one of these bewitched maids"[33] and soon got her over her
troubles. In another case a woman "strangely affected" by the first
verse of John's Gospel failed to recognize it when read in Greek,[34]
proof positive that the omniscient Devil did not possess her.
Three instances of exposure of imposture were most notable, those of
Grace Sowerbutts, the boy at Leicester, and the "Boy of Bilston." The
first of these has already been sufficiently discussed in connection
with the Lancashire trials. The second had nothing remarkable about it.
A twelve or thirteen-year-old boy had fits which he said were caused by
spirits sent by several women whom he accused as witches. Nine women
were hanged, while six more were under arrest and would probably have
met the same end, had not the king in his northward progress, while
stopping at Leicester, detected the shamming.[35] Whether or no the boy
was punished we are not told. It is some satisfaction that the judges
were disgraced.[36]
The boy of Bilston was, if Webster may be believed,[37] the most famous,
if not the most successful, fraud of all. The case was heralded over the
entire realm and thousands came to see. The story is almost an exact
duplicate of earlier narratives of possession. A thirteen-year-old boy
of Bilston in Staffordshire, William Perry, began to have fits and to
accuse a Jane Clarke, whose presence invariably made him worse. He "cast
out of his mouth rags, thred, straw, crooked pins." These were but
single deceptions in a repertoire of varied tricks. Doubtless he had
been trained in his role by a Roman priest. At any rate the Catholics
tried exorcism upon him, but to no purpose. Perhaps some Puritans
experimented with cures which had like result.[38] The boy continued his
spasms and his charges against the witch and she was brought into court
at the July assizes. But Bishop Morton,[39] before whose chancellor the
boy had first been brought, was present, and the judges turned the boy
over to him for further investigation.[40] Then, with the help of his
secretary, he set about to test the boy, and readily exposed his
deception--in most curious fashion too. The boy, like one we have met
before, could not endure the first verse of John's Gospel, but failed to
recognize it when read in the Greek. After that he was secretly watched
and his somewhat elaborate preparations for his pretences were found
out. He was persuaded to confess his trickery in court before Sir Peter
Warburton and Sir Humphrey Winch, "and the face of the County and
Country there assembled,"[41] as well as to beg forgiveness of the women
whom he had accused.
It will be seen that the records of imposture were well on their way to
rival the records of witchcraft, if not in numbers, at least in the
notice that they received. And the king who had so bitterly arraigned
Reginald Scot was himself becoming the discoverer-general of
England.[42] It is not, then, without being forewarned that we read
Fuller's remarkable statement about the king's change of heart. "The
frequency of such forged possessions wrought such an alteration upon the
judgement of King James that he, receding from what he had written in
his 'Daemonology,' grew first diffident of, and then flatly to deny, the
workings of witches and devils, as but falsehoods and delusions."[43] In
immediate connection with this must be quoted what Francis Osborne has
to say.[44] He was told, he writes, that the king would have gone as far
as to deny any such operations, but out of reasons of state and to
gratify the church.[45]
Such a conversion is so remarkable that we could wish we had absolutely
contemporary statements of it. As a matter of fact, the statements we
have quoted establish nothing more than a probability, but they
certainly do establish that. Fuller, the church historian, responsible
for the first of the two statements, was a student in Queen's
College[46] at Cambridge during the last four years of James's reign;
Osborne was a man of thirty-two when the king died, and had spent a
part of his young manhood at the court. Their testimony was that of men
who had every opportunity to know about the king's change of
opinion.[47] In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we must
accept, at least provisionally, their statements.[48] And it is easier
to do so in view of the marked falling off of prosecutions that we have
already noted. This indeed is confirmation of a negative sort; but we
have one interesting bit of affirmative proof, the outcome of the trials
at York in 1622. In that year the children of Mr. Edward Fairfax, a
member of the historic Fairfax family of Yorkshire, were seized with
some strange illness, in which they saw again and again the spectres of
six different women. These women were examined by the justices of the
peace and committed to the assizes.[49] In the mean time they had found
able and vigorous defenders in the community. What happened at the April
assizes we no not know, but we know that four of the women were
released, two of them on bond.[50] This was probably a compromise method
of settling the matter. Fairfax was not satisfied. Probably through his
influence the women were again brought up at the August assizes.[51]
Then, at least, as we know beyond a doubt, they were formally tried,
this time upon indictments preferred by Fairfax himself.[52] The judge
warned the jury to be very careful, and, after hearing some of the
evidence, dismissed the women on the ground that the evidence "reached
not to the point of the statute."[53] This seems significant. A man of a
well known county family was utterly baffled in pressing charges in a
case where his own children were involved.[54] It looks as if there were
judges who were following the king's lead in looking out for
imposture.[55] In any case there was, in certain quarters, a public
sentiment against the conviction of witches, a sentiment that made
itself felt. This we shall have occasion to note again in following out
the currents and fluctuations of opinions.
[1] Of course the proof that some of the accused really made pretensions
to magic rests upon their own confessions and their accusations of one
another, and might be a part of an intricate tissue of falsehood. But,
granting for the moment the absolute untrustworthiness of the
confessions and accusations there are incidental statements which imply
the practice of magic. For example, Elizabeth Device's young daughter
quoted a long charm which she said her mother had taught her and which
she hardly invented on the spur of the moment. And Demdike was requested
to "amend a sick cow."
[2] The gunpowder plot, seven years earlier, no doubt gave direction to
this plan, or, perhaps it would be better to say, gave the idea to those
who confessed the plan.
[3] James Crossley seems to believe that there was "some scintilla of
truth" behind the story. See his edition of Potts, notes, p. 40.
[4] Among those who never confessed seems to have been Chattox's
daughter, Anne Redfearne.
[5] See above, p. 116.
[6] It is a satisfaction to know that Alice died "impenitent," and that
not even her children could "move her to confesse."
[7] See above, pp. 112-113, and Potts, Q-Q verso.
[8] See Potts, I.
[9] It can hardly be doubted that the children had been thoroughly
primed with the stories in circulation against their mother.
[10] Other witnesses charged her with "many strange practises."
[11] The principle that a man's life may not twice be put in jeopardy
for the same offence had been pretty well established before 1612. See
Darly's Case, 25 Eliz. (1583), Coke's _Reports_ (ed. Thomas and Fraser,
London, 1826), IV, f. 40; Vaux's Case, 33 Eliz. (1591), _ibid._, f. 45;
Wrote _vs._ Wiggs, 33 Eliz. (1591), _ibid._, f. 47. This principle had
been in process of development for several centuries. See Bracton (ed.
Sir Travers Twiss, London, 1878-1883), II, 417, 433, 437; Britton (ed.
F. M. Nichols, Oxford, 1865), bk. I, cap. xxiv, 5, f. 44 b.
It must be noted, however, that the statute of 3 Hen. VII, cap. II,
provides that indictments shall be proceeded in, immediately, at the
king's suit, for the death of a man, without waiting for bringing an
appeal; and that the plea of _antefort acquit_ in an indictment shall be
no bar to the prosecuting of an appeal. This law was passed to get
around special legal inconvenience and related only to homicide and to
the single case of prosecution by appeal. In general, then, we may say
that the former-jeopardy doctrine was part of the common law, (1) an
appeal of felony being a bar to subsequent appeal or indictment, (2) an
indictment a bar to a subsequent indictment, and (3) an indictment to a
subsequent appeal, except so far as the statute of 3 Hen. VII., cap. II,
changed the law as respects homicides. For this brief statement I am
indebted to Professor William Underhill Moore of the University of
Wisconsin.
What Potts has to say about Anne Redfearne's case hardly enables us to
reach a conclusion about the legal aspect of it.
[12] This is the story in the MS. account (Brit. Mus., Sloane, 972). The
printed narrative of the origin of the affair is somewhat different.
Joan had on one occasion been struck by Mistress Belcher for unbecoming
behavior and had cherished a grudge. No doubt this was a point recalled
against Joan after suspicion had been directed against her.
[13] In John Cotta's _The Triall of Witchcraft ..._ (London, 1616),
66-67, there is a very interesting statement which probably refers to
this case. Cotta, it will be remembered, was a physician at Northampton.
He wrote: "There is a very rare, but true, description of a Gentlewoman,
about sixe yeares past, cured of divers kinds of convulsions, ... After
she was almost cured, ... but the cure not fully accomplished, it was by
a reputed Wisard whispered ... that the Gentlewoman was meerely
bewitched, supposed Witches were accused and after executed.... In this
last past seventh yeare ... fits are critically again returned." Cotta
says six years ago and the Northampton trials were in 1612, four years
before. It is quite possible, however, that Mistress Belcher began to be
afflicted in 1610.
[14] One of these was Sir Gilbert Pickering of Tichmarsh, almost
certainly the Gilbert Pickering mentioned as an uncle of the
Throckmorton children at Warboys. See above, pp. 47-48. His hatred of
witches had no doubt been increased by that affair.
[15] See what is said of spectral evidence in chapter V, above.
[16] At least there is no evidence that Alice Abbott, Catherine
Gardiner, and Alice Harris, whom he accused, were punished in any way.
[17] It seems, however, that Arthur Bill, while he sturdily denied
guilt, had been before trapped into some sort of an admission. He had
"unawares confest that he had certaine spirits at command." But this may
mean nothing more than that something he had said had been grossly
misinterpreted.
[18] Three women of Leicestershire, Anne Baker, Joan Willimot, and Ellen
Greene, who in their confessions implicated the Flowers (they belonged
to parishes neighbor to that of Belvoir, which lies on the shire border)
and whose testimony against them figured in their trials, were at the
same time (Feb.-March, 1618/19) under examination in that county.
Whether these women were authors or victims of the Belvoir suspicions we
do not know. As we have their damning confessions, there is small doubt
as to their fate.
[19] The women were tried in March, 1618/19. Henry, the elder son of the
earl, was buried at Bottesford, September 26, 1613. John Nichols,
_History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester_ (London,
1795-1815), II, pt. i, 49, note 10. Francis, the second, lingered till
early in 1620. His sister, Lady Katherine, whose delicate health had
also been ascribed to the witches, was now the heiress, and became in
that year the bride of Buckingham, the king's favorite. There is one
aspect of this affair that must not be overlooked. The accusation
against the Flowers cannot have been unknown to the king, who was a
frequent visitor at the seat of the Rutlands. It is hard to believe that
under such circumstances the use of torture, which James had declared
essential to bring out the guilt of the accused witches, was not after
some fashion resorted to. The weird and uncanny confessions go far
towards supporting such an hypothesis.
[20] _The Most Cruell and Bloody Murther committed by ... Annis Dell,
... with the severall Witch-crafts ... of one Johane Harrison and her
Daughter_, 63.
[21] This story must be accepted with hesitation; see below, appendix A,
Sec.3.
[22] See above, pp. 110-111.
[23] The trial of Elizabeth Sawyer at Edmonton in 1621 had to do with
similar trivialities. Agnes Ratcliffe was washing one day, when a sow
belonging to Elizabeth licked up a bit of her washing soap. She struck
it with a "washing beetle." Of course she fell sick, and on her
death-bed accused Mistress Elizabeth Sawyer, who was afterwards hanged.
[24] See T. Tindall Wildridge, in William Andrews, _Bygone Derbyshire_
(Derby, 1892), 180-184. It has been impossible to locate the sources of
this story. J. Charles Cox, who explored the Derby records, seems never
to have discovered anything about the affair.
[25] See F. Legge, "Witchcraft in Scotland," in the _Scottish Review_,
XVIII, 264.
[26] See above, ch. IV, especially note 36.
[27] On Mary Glover see also appendix A, Sec. 2. On other impostures see
Thomas Fuller, _Church History of Britain_ (London, 1655; Oxford, ed. J.
S. Brewer, 1845), ed. of 1845, V, 450; letters given by Edmund Lodge,
_Illustrations of British History, Biography and Manners ..._ (London,
1791), III, 275, 284, 287-288; also _King James, His Apothegms, by B.
A., Gent._ (London, 1643), 8-10.
[28] _Cal. St. P., Dom., 1603-1610_, 218.
[29] Fuller, _op. cit._, V, 450.
[30] _Ibid._; John Gee, _The Foot out of the Snare, or Detection of
Practices and Impostures of Priests and Jesuits in England ..._ (London,
1624), reprinted in _Somers Tracts_, III, 72.
[31] _Ibid._; Fuller, _op. cit._, V, 450.
[32] How much more seriously than his courtiers is suggested by an
anecdote of Sir John Harington's: James gravely questioned Sir John why
the Devil did work more with ancient women than with others. "We are
taught thereof in Scripture," gaily answered Sir John, "where it is told
that the Devil walketh in dry places." See his _Nugae Antiquae_ (London,
1769), ed. of London, 1804, I, 368-369.
[33] Fuller, _op. cit._, V, 451.
[34] _Ibid._
[35] The story of the hangings at Leicester in 1616 has to be put
together from various sources. Our principal authority, however, is in
two letters written by Robert Heyrick of Leicester to his brother
William in 1616, which are to be found in John Nichols, _History and
Antiquities of the County of Leicester_ (London, 1795-1815), II, pt. ii,
471, and in the _Annual Register_ for 1800. See also William Kelly,
_Royal Progresses to Leicester_ (Leicester, 1884), 367-369. Probably
this is the case referred to by Francis Osborne, where the boy was sent
to the Archbishop of Canterbury for further examination. Osborne, who
wrote a good deal later than the events, apparently confused the story
of the Leicester witches with that of the Boy of Bilston--their origins
were similar--and produced a strange account; see his _Miscellany of
Sundry Essays, Paradoxes and Problematicall Discourses_ (London,
1658-1659), 6-9.
[36] For the disgrace of the judges see _Cal. St. P., Dom., 1611-1618_,
398.
[37] Webster knew Bishop Morton, and also his secretary, Baddeley, who
had been notary in the case and had written an account of it. See John
Webster, _The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft_ (London, 1677), 275.
[38] The Catholics declared that the Puritans tried "syllabub" upon him.
This was perhaps a sarcastic reference to their attempts to cure him by
medicine.
[39] Then of Lichfield.
[40] Baddeley, who was Bishop Morton's secretary and who prepared the
narrative of the affair for the printer, says that the woman was freed
by the inquest; Ryc. Baddeley, _The Boy of Bilson ..._ (London, 1622),
61. Arthur Wilson, who tells us that he heard the story "from the
Bishop's own mouth almost thirty years before it was inserted here,"
says that the woman was found guilty and condemned to die; Arthur
Wilson, _Life and Reign of James I_ (London, 1653), 107. It is evident
that Baddeley's story is the more trustworthy. It is of course possible,
although not probable, that there were two trials, and that Baddeley
ignored the second one, the outcome of which would have been less
creditable to the bishop.
[41] Webster, _Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft_, 275.
[42] See Fairfax, _A Discourse of Witchcraft_ (Philobiblon Soc.): "and
those whose impostures our wise King so lately laid open." See also an
interesting letter from James himself in J. O. Halliwell, _Letters of
the Kings of England_ (London, 1846), II, 124-125.
[43] Fuller, _Church History of Britain_, V, 452 (ch. X, sect. 4). It is
worthy of note that Peter Heylyn, who, in his _Examen Historicum_
(London, 1659), sought to pick Fuller to pieces, does not mention this
point.
[44] See Francis Osborne, _Miscellany_, 4-9. Lucy Aikin, _Memoirs of the
Court of King James the First_ (London, 1823), II, 398-399, gives about
the same story as Fuller and Osborne, and, while the wording is slightly
different, it is probable that they were her sources.
[45] Arthur Wilson, _op. cit._, 111, tells us: "The King took delight by
the line of his reason to sound the depth of such brutish impostors, and
he discovered many." A writer to the _Gentleman's Magazine_ (LIV, pt. I,
246-247), in 1784, says that he has somewhere read that King James on
his death-bed acknowledged that he had been deceived in his opinion
respecting witchcraft and expressed his concern that so many innocent
persons had suffered on that account. But, as he has forgotten where he
read it, his evidence is of course of small value.
[46] The college where an annual sermon was preached on the subject of
witchcraft since the Warboys affair.
[47] Osborne's statement should perhaps be discounted a little on
account of his skepticism. On the other hand he was not such an admirer
of James I as to have given him undue credit. Fuller's opinion was
divided.
[48] James still believed in witchcraft in 1613, when the malodorous
divorce trial of Lady Essex took place. A careful reading of his words
at that time, however, leaves the impression that he was not nearly so
certain about the possibilities of witchcraft as he had been when he
wrote his book. His position was clearly defensive. It must be
remembered that James in 1613 had a point to be gained and would not
have allowed a possible doubt as to witchcraft to interfere with his
wish for the divorce. See Howell, _State Trials_, II, 806.
[49] One of them was publicly searched by command of a justice. See
Fairfax, _op. cit._, 138-139.
[50] _Ibid._, 205. Two of the women had gone home before, _ibid._, 180.
[51] _Ibid._, 225-234.
[52] _Ibid._, 234.
[53] _Ibid._, 237-238. If the women were tried twice, it seems a clear
violation of the principle of former jeopardy. See above, note 11. The
statute of 3 Hen. VII, cap. I, that the plea of _antefort acquit_ was no
bar to the prosecution of an appeal, would not apply in this instance,
as that statute was limited to cases of _homicide_.
[54] Fairfax was moreover a man for whom the king had a high personal
regard.
[55] At the August assizes there had been an effort to show that the
children were "counterfeiting." See the _Discourse_, 235-237.
CHAPTER VII.
THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES AND CHARLES I.
In his attitude towards superstition, Charles I resembled the later
rather than the earlier James I. No reign up to the Revolution was
marked by so few executions. It was a time of comparative quiet. Here
and there isolated murmurs against suspected creatures of the Devil
roused the justices of the peace to write letters, and even to make
inquiries that as often as not resulted in indefinite commitments, or
brought out the protests of neighbors in favor of the accused. But, if
there were not many cases, they represented a wide area. Middlesex,
Wilts, Somerset, Leicestershire, Staffordshire, Lancashire, Durham,
Yorkshire, and Northumberland were among the counties infested. Yet we
can count but six executions, and only four of them rest upon secure
evidence.[1] This is of course to reckon the reign of Charles as not
extending beyond 1642, when the Civil War broke out and the Puritan
leaders assumed responsibility for the government.
Up to that time there was but one really notable witch alarm in England.
But it was one that illustrated again, as in Essex, the continuity of
the superstition in a given locality. The Lancashire witches of 1633
were the direct outcome of the Lancashire witches of 1612. The story is
a weird one. An eleven-year-old boy played truant one day to his
cattle-herding, and, as he afterwards told the story, went
plum-gathering. When he came back he had to find a plausible excuse to
present to his parents. Now, the lad had been brought up in the
Blackburn forest, close to Pendle Hill; he had overheard stories of
Malking Tower[2] from the chatter of gossipping women;[3] he had
shivered as suspected women were pointed out to him; he knew the names
of some of them. His imagination, in search for an excuse, caught at the
witch motive[4] and elaborated it with the easy invention of youth.[5]
He had seen two greyhounds come running towards him. They looked like
those owned by two of his neighbors. When he saw that no one was
following them, he set out to hunt with them, and presently a hare rose
very near before him, at the sight whereof he cried "Loo, Loo," but the
dogs would not run. Being very angry, he tied them to a little bush in
the hedge and beat them, and at once, instead of the black greyhound,
"one Dickonson's wife" stood up, and instead of the brown greyhound "a
little boy whom this informer knoweth not." He started to run away, but
the woman stayed him and offered him a piece of silver "much like to a
faire shillinge" if he would not betray her. The conscientious boy
answered "Nay, thou art a witch," "whereupon shee put her hand into her
pocket againe and pulled out a stringe like unto a bridle that gingled,
which shee put upon the litle boyes heade that stood up in the browne
greyhounds steade, whereupon the said boy stood up a white horse." In
true Arabian Nights fashion they mounted and rode away. They came to a
new house called Hoarstones, where there were three score or more
people, and horses of several colors, and a fire with meat roasting.
They had flesh and bread upon a trencher and they drank from glasses.
After the first taste the boy "refused and would have noe more, and said
it was nought." There were other refreshments at the feast. The boy was,
as he afterwards confessed, familiar with the story of the feast at
Malking Tower.[6]
The names of those present he did not volunteer at first; but, on being
questioned, he named eighteen[7] whom he had seen. The boy confessed
that he had been clever enough to make most of his list from those who
were already suspected by their neighbors.
It needed but a match to set off the flame of witch-hatred in
Lancashire. The boy's story was quite sufficient. Whether his narrative
was a spontaneous invention of his own, concocted in emergency, as he
asserted in his confession at London, or whether it was a carefully
constructed lie taught him by his father in order to revenge himself
upon some hated neighbors, and perhaps to exact blackmail, as some of
the accused later charged, we shall never know. In later life the boy is
said to have admitted that he had been set on by his father,[8] but the
narrative possesses certain earmarks of a story struck out by a child's
imagination.[9] It is easy enough to reconcile the two theories by
supposing that the boy started the story of his own initiative and that
his father was too shrewd not to realize the opportunity to make a
sensation and perhaps some money. He took the boy before justices of the
peace, who, with the zeal their predecessors had displayed twenty-two
years before, made many arrests.[10] The boy was exhibited from town to
town in Lancashire as a great wonder and witch-detector. It was in the
course of these exhibitions that he was brought to a little town on the
Lancashire border of Yorkshire and was taken to the afternoon church
service, where a young minister, who was long afterwards to become a
famous opponent of the superstition, was discoursing to his
congregation. The boy was held up by those in charge as if to give him
the chance to detect witches among the audience. The minister saw him,
and at the end of the service at once came down to the boy, and without
parley asked him, "Good boy, tell me truly, and in earnest, didst thou
see and hear such things of the meeting of the witches as is reported by
many that thou dost relate?" The boy, as Webster has told the story, was
not given time for reply by the men in charge of him, who protested
against such questions. The lad, they said, had been before two justices
of the peace, and had not been catechized in that fashion.[11]
A lone skeptic had little chance to beat back the wave of excitement
created by the young Robinson's stories. His success prompted him to
concoct new tales.[12] He had seen Lloynd's wife sitting on a cross-bar
in his father's chimney; he had called to her; she had not come down but
had vanished in the air. Other accounts the boy gave, but none of them
revealed the clear invention of his first narrative.
He had done his work. The justices of the peace were bringing in the
accused to the assizes at Lancaster. There Robinson was once more called
upon to render his now famous testimony. He was supported by his
father,[13] who gave evidence that on the day he had sent his boy for
the cattle he had gone after him and as he approached had heard him cry
and had found him quite "distracted." When the boy recovered himself, he
had related the story already told. This was the evidence of the father,
and together with that of the son it constituted the most telling piece
of testimony presented. But it served, as was usual in such cases, as an
opening for all those who, for any reason, thought they had grounds of
suspicion against any of their neighbors. It was recalled by one witness
that a neighbor girl could bewitch a pail and make it roll towards her.
We shall later have occasion to note the basis of fact behind this
curious accusation. There was other testimony of an equally damaging
character. But in nearly all the cases stress was laid upon the bodily
marks. In one instance, indeed, nothing else was charged.[14] The reader
will remember that in the Lancaster cases of 1612 the evidence of marks
on the body was notably absent, so notably that we were led to suspect
that it had been ruled out by the judge. That such evidence was now
reckoned important is proof that this particularly dark feature of the
witch superstition was receiving increasing emphasis.
How many in all were accused we do not know. Webster, writing later,
said that seventeen were found guilty.[15] It is possible that even a
larger number were acquitted. Certainly some were acquitted. A
distinction of some sort was made in the evidence. This makes it all the
harder to understand why the truth of Robinson's stories was not tested
in the same way in which those of Grace Sowerbutts had been tested in
1612. Did that detection of fraud never occur to the judges, or had they
never heard of the famous boy at Bilston? Perhaps not they but the
juries were to blame, for it seems that the court was not altogether
satisfied with the jury's verdict and delayed sentence. Perhaps, indeed,
the judges wrote to London about the matter. Be that as it may, the
privy council decided to take cognizance of an affair that was already
the talk of the realm.[16] Secretaries Coke and Windebank sent
instructions to Henry Bridgeman, Bishop of Chester and successor to that
Morton who had exposed the boy of Bilston, to examine seven of the
condemned witches and to make a report.[17] Bridgeman doubtless knew of
his predecessor's success in exposing fraudulent accusations. Before the
bishop was ready to report, His Majesty sent orders that three or four
of the accused should be brought up to London by a writ of habeas
corpus. Owing to a neglect to insert definite names, there was a
delay.[18] It was during this interval, probably, that Bishop Bridgeman
was able to make his examination. He found three of the seven already
dead and one hopelessly ill. The other three he questioned with great
care. Two of them, Mary Spencer, a girl of twenty, and Frances
Dickonson, the first whom Robinson had accused, made spirited denials.
Mary Spencer avowed that her accusers had been actuated by malice
against her and her parents for several years. At the trial, she had
been unable, she said, to answer for herself, because the noise of the
crowd had been so great as to prevent her from hearing the evidence
against her. As for the charge of bewitching a pail so that it came
running towards her of its own accord, she declared that she used as a
child to roll a pail down-hill and to call it after her as she ran, a
perfectly natural piece of child's play. Frances Dickonson, too, charged
malice upon her accusers, especially upon the father of Edmund Robinson.
Her husband, she said, had been unwilling to sell him a cow without
surety and had so gained his ill-will. She went on to assert that the
elder Robinson had volunteered to withdraw the charges against her if
her husband would pay him forty shillings. This counter charge was
supported by another witness and seemed to make a good deal of an
impression on the ecclesiastic.
The third woman to be examined by the bishop was a widow of sixty, who
had not been numbered among the original seventeen witches. She
acknowledged that she was a witch, but was, wrote the bishop, "more
often faulting in the particulars of her actions as one having a strong
imagination of the former, but of too weak a memory to retain or relate
the latter." The woman told a commonplace story of a man in black attire
who had come to her six years before and made the usual contract. But
very curiously she could name only one other witch, and professed to
know none of those already in gaol.
Such were the results of the examinations sent in by the bishop. In the
letter which he sent along, he expressed doubt about the whole matter.
"Conceit and malice," he wrote, "are so powerful with many in those
parts that they will easily afford an oath to work revenge upon their
neighbour." He would, he intimated, have gone further in examining the
counter charges brought by the accused, had it not been that he
hesitated to proceed against the king, that is, the prosecution.
This report doubtless confirmed the fears of the government. The writs
to the sheriff of Lancaster were redirected, and four of the women were
brought up to London and carried to the "Ship Tavern" at Greenwich,
close to one of the royal residences.[19] Two of His Majesty's surgeons,
Alexander Baker and Sir William Knowles, the latter of whom was
accustomed to examine candidates for the king's touch, together with
five other surgeons and ten certificated midwives, were now ordered to
make a bodily examination of the women, under the direction of the
eminent Harvey,[20] the king's physician, who was later to discover the
circulation of the blood. In the course of this chapter we shall see
that Harvey had long cherished misgivings about witchcraft. Probably by
this time he had come to disbelieve it. One can but wonder if Charles,
already probably aware of Harvey's views, had not intended from his
first step in the Lancashire case to give his physician a chance to
assert his opinion. In any case his report and that of his subordinates
was entirely in favor of the women, except that in the case of Margaret
Johnson (who had confessed) they had found a mark, but one to which they
attached little significance.[21] The women seem to have been carried
before the king himself.[22] We do not know, however, that he expressed
any opinion on the matter.
The whole affair has one aspect that has been entirely overlooked.
Whatever the verdict of the privy council and of the king may have
been--and it was evidently one of caution--they gave authorization from
the highest quarters for the use of the test of marks on the body. That
proof of witchcraft had been long known in England and had slowly won
its way into judicial procedure until now it was recognized by the
highest powers in the kingdom. To be sure, it was probably their purpose
to annul the reckless convictions in Lancashire, and to break down the
evidence of the female juries; but in doing so they furnished a
precedent for the witch procedure of the civil-war period.
In the mean time, while the surgeons and midwives were busy over these
four women, the Robinsons, father and son, had come to London at the
summons of the privy council.[23] There the boy was separated from his
father. To a Middlesex justice of the peace appointed by Secretary
Windebank to take his statements he confessed that his entire story was
an invention and had no basis of fact whatever.[24] Both father and son
were imprisoned and proceedings seem to have been instituted against
them by one of the now repentant jurymen who had tried the case.[25] How
long they were kept in prison we do not know.
One would naturally suppose that the women would be released on their
return to Lancaster, but the sheriff's records show that two years later
there were still nine witches in gaol.[26] Three of them bore the same
names as those whom Robinson pretended to have seen at Hoarstones. At
least one other of the nine had been convicted in 1634, probably more.
Margaret Johnson, the single one to confess, so far as we know, was not
there. She had probably died in prison in the mean time. We have no clue
as to why the women were not released. Perhaps public sentiment at home
made the sheriff unwilling to do it, perhaps the wretched creatures
spent two or more years in prison--for we do not know when they got
out--as a result of judicial negligence, a negligence of which there are
too many examples in the records of the time. More likely the king and
the privy council, while doubting the charges against the women, had
been reluctant to antagonize public sentiment by declaring them
innocent.
It is disagreeable to have to state that Lancaster was not yet through
with its witches. Early in the next year the Bishop of Chester was again
called upon by the privy council to look into the cases of four women.
There was some delay, during which a dispute took place between the
bishop and the sheriff as to where the bishop should examine the
witches, whether at Wigan, as he proposed, or at Lancaster.[27] One
suspects that the civil authorities of the Duchy of Lancaster may have
resented the bishop's part in the affair. When Bridgeman arrived in
Lancaster he found two of the women already dead. Of the other two, the
one, he wrote, was accused by a man formerly "distracted and lunatic"
and by a woman who was a common beggar; the other had been long reputed
a witch, but he saw no reason to believe it. He had, he admitted, found
a small lump of flesh on her right ear.[28] Alas that the Bishop of
Chester, like the king and the privy council, however much he discounted
the accusations of witchcraft, had not yet wholly rid himself of one of
the darkest and most disagreeable forms of the belief that the Evil One
had bodily communication with his subjects.
In one respect the affair of 1633-1634 in northern England was singular.
The social and moral character of those accused was distinctly high. Not
that they belonged to any but the peasant class, but that they
represented a good type of farming people. Frances Dickonson's husband
evidently had some property. Mary Spencer insisted that she was
accustomed to go to church and to repeat the sermon to her parents, and
that she was not afraid of death, for she hoped it would make an
entrance for her into heaven. Margaret Johnson was persuaded that a man
and his wife who were in the gaol on Robinson's charges were not
witches, because the man "daily prays and reads and seems a godly man."
With this evidence of religious life, which must have meant something as
to the status of the people in the community, should be coupled the
entire absence of stories of threats at beggars and of quarrels between
bad-tempered and loose-lived women, stories that fill so many dreary
pages of witchcraft records. Nor is there any mention of the practice of
pretended magic.
In previous chapters we have had occasion to observe the continuity of
superstition in certain localities. It is obvious that Lancashire offers
one of the best illustrations of that principle. The connection between
the alarms of 1612 and 1633-1634 is not a matter of theory, but can be
established by definite proof. It is perhaps not out of order to
inquire, then, why Lancashire should have been so infested with
witches. It is the more necessary when we consider that there were other
witch cases in the country. Nicholas Starchie's children gave rise to
the first of the scares. It seems likely that a certain Utley was hanged
at Lancaster in 1630 for bewitching a gentleman's child.[29] During
Commonwealth days, as we shall find, there was an alarm at Lancaster
that probably cost two witches their lives. No county in England except
Essex had a similar record. No explanation can be offered for the
records of these two counties save that both had been early infected
with a hatred of witches, and that the witches came to be connected, in
tradition, with certain localities within the counties and with certain
families living there. This is, indeed, an explanation that does not
explain. It all comes back to the continuity of superstition.
We have already referred to the widespread interest in the Lancashire
witches. There are two good illustrations of this interest. When Sir
William Brereton was travelling in Holland in June of 1634, a little
while before the four women had been brought to London, he met King
Charles's sister, the Queen of Bohemia, and at once, apparently, they
began to talk about the great Lancashire discovery.[30] The other
instance of comment on the case was in England. It is one which shows
that playwrights were quite as eager then as now to be abreast of
current topics. Before final judgment had been given on the Lancashire
women, Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, well known dramatists, had
written a play on the subject which was at once published and "acted at
the Globe on the Bankside by His Majesty's Actors." By some it has been
supposed that this play was an older play founded on the Lancashire
affair of 1612 and warmed over in 1634; but the main incidents and the
characters of the play are so fully copied from the depositions of the
young Robinson and from the charges preferred against Mary Spencer,
Frances Dickonson, and Margaret Johnson, that a layman would at once
pronounce it a play written entirely to order from the affair of 1634.
Nothing unique in the stories was left out. The pail incident--of course
without its rational explanation--was grafted into the play and put upon
the stage. Indeed, a marriage that afforded the hook upon which to hang
a bundle of indecencies, and the story of a virtuous husband who
discovers his wife to be a witch, were the only added motives of
importance. For our purpose the significance of the play lies of course
in its testimony to the general interest--the people of London were
obviously familiar with the details, even, of the charges--and its
probable reflection of London opinion about the case. Throughout the
five acts there were those who maintained that there were no witches, a
recognition of the existence of such an opinion. Of course in the play
they were all, before the curtain fell, convinced of their error. The
authors, who no doubt catered to public sentiment, were not as earnest
as the divines of their day, but they were almost as superstitious.
Heywood showed himself in another work, _The Hierarchie of the Blessed
Angels_,[31] a sincere believer in witchcraft and backed his belief by
the Warboys case. Probably he had read Scot, but he was not at all the
type of man to set himself against the tide. _The late Lancashire
Witches_ no doubt expressed quite accurately London opinion. It was
written, it will be remembered, before the final outcome of the case
could be foreseen. Perhaps Heywood foresaw it, more probably he was
sailing close to the wind of opinion when he wrote in the epilogue,
... "Perhaps great mercy may,
After just condemnation, give them day
Of longer life."