communicated seems exactly to resemble those remarkable instances of
sympathy which occur in the cases of the Scottish Cambuslang Conversions
and the American Forest Preachings. No sooner has one hypochondriac
published his symptoms, than fifty others feel themselves at once affected
with the same disorder. In the celebrated Mora case in 1669, with which of
course all the readers of Glanvil (and who has not occasionally peeped
into his horrors?) are familiar, the disease spreads first through the
children, who believed themselves the victims of diabolical agency, and
who ascribed the convulsions, faintings, etc., with which they were
attacked, to that cause; and next through the unfortunate witches
themselves, for as soon as one or two of them, bursting into tears,
confessed that the accusation of the children was true, all the rest
joined in the confession. And what is the nature of their confession? Of
all impossible absurdities that ever entered the brain of man, this trial
is the epitome. They meet the devil nightly on the Blocula, which is the
devil's ball-room in Sweden, as the Brocken is in Germany; they ride
thither on sticks, goats, men's backs, and spits; they are baptized by a
priest provided by the devil; they sup with him, very frugally it would
appear, for the banquet commonly consists of broth made with colewort and
bacon, oatmeal, bread and butter, milk and cheese; and the devil allows no
wine. After supper they dance, and when the devil wishes to be
particularly jolly he pulls the spits from under them, and beats them
black and blue, after which he sits down and laughs outrageously.
Sometimes he treats them to a musical exhibition on the harp, for he has a
great turn for music, as his famous sonata to Tartini proves. All of them
confess intercourse with him[29], and most of them had sons and daughters
by him. Occasionally he fell sick, and required to be bled and blistered;
and once he seemed to be dead, on which occasion there was a general
mourning for him on the Blocula, as the Syrian damsels used to bewail the
annual wound of their idol Thammuz on Lebanon. Is it not frightful to
think that in a trial held before a tribunal consisting of the _élite_ of
the province of Dalecarlia, assisted by the commissioners from the
capital,--in a country where, until this time, the witch mania, already
beginning to abate in Germany, had scarcely been heard of, and where it
ceased earlier perhaps than in most other countries in
Europe,--seventy-two women and fifteen children should have been condemned
and executed at one time upon such confessions? Is it possible after this
to read without shuddering the cool newspaper-like conclusion of Dr.
Horneck--"On the 25th of August execution was done upon the notoriously
guilty, _the day being bright and glorious, and the sun shining_, and some
thousands of people being present at the spectacle!"
Thirty years before, a similar instance of the progress of the epidemic
had taken place at Lille, in the hospital founded by the pious enthusiast
Antoinette Bourignon. On entering the schoolroom one day, she imagined
that she saw a number of little black children, with wings, flying about
the heads of the girls; and not liking the colour or appearance of these
visitors, she warned her pupils to be on their guard. Shortly before this,
a girl who had run away from the institution in consequence of being
confined for some misdemeanour of which she had been guilty, being
interrogated how she had contrived to escape, and not liking probably to
disclose the truth, had maintained that she had been liberated by the
devil, to whose service she had devoted herself from a child. Nothing more
was wanting in that age of _diablerie_ to turn the heads of the poor
children; in the course of six months almost all the girls in the
hospital, amounting to more than fifty, had confessed themselves confirmed
witches, and admitted the usual intercourse with the devil, the midnight
meetings, dances, banquets, etc., which form the staple of the narrative
of the time. Their ideal banquets seem to have been on a more liberal
scale however than those of the poor Mora witches; probably because many
of the pupils had been accustomed to better fare in a populous and wealthy
town in Flanders, than the others in a poor village in Sweden. Exorcisms
and prayers of all kinds followed this astounding disclosure. The
Capuchins and Jesuits quarrelled, the Capuchins implicitly believing the
reality of the possession, the Jesuits doubting it. The parents of the
culprit now turned the tables upon poor Bourignon, by accusing her of
having bewitched them; and at last the pious theosophist, after an
examination before the Council, was glad to seek safety in flight; having
thus obtained a clearer notion than she formerly possessed of the kingdom
of Satan, with regard to which she had entertained and published as many
strange fancies as the Bishop of Benevento; and having been taught by her
own experience the danger of tampering with youthful minds, in which the
train of superstition had been so long laid, that it only required a spark
from her overheated brain to kindle it into a flame.
It would appear too that physical causes, and in particular nervous
affections of a singular kind, had about this time mingled with and
increased the delusion which had taken its rise in these superstitious
conceptions of the devil and his influence. During the very year (1669) in
which the children at Mora were suffering under convulsions and fainting
fits, those in the Orphan Hospital at Hoorn, in Holland, were labouring
under a malady exactly similar; but though the phenomena were attributed
to diabolical agency, the suspicions of the public fortunately were not
directed to any individual in particular. Another instance of the same
kind had taken place about a century before in the Orphan Hospital at
Amsterdam, of which a particular account is given in Dapper's history of
that city, where the number of children supposed to be bewitched amounted
to about seventy, and where the evil was attributed to some unhappy old
women, before whose houses the affected urchins, when led out into the
streets, had been more than usually clamorous. Such also appears to have
been the primary cause of the tragedies in New England in 1699; of the
demoniac exhibitions at Loudon, which were made a pretext for the murder
of the obnoxious Grandier; of the strange incidents which occurred so late
as 1749 in the convent of Unterzell at Wurtzburg; and of most of the other
more remarkable cases of supposed possession. The mysterious principle of
sympathy, operating in weak minds, will in fact be found to be at the root
of most of the singular phenomena in the history of witchcraft. No wonder
then that after the experience of a century, the judges, and even the
ignorant public themselves, came at last to suspect that, however the
principle might apply to other crimes, the confession of the criminal was
not, in cases of witchcraft, the _best_ evidence of the fact. In the New
England cases, says Mr. Calef (April 25, 1693), "one was tried that
confessed; but they were now so well taught what weight to lay upon
confessions, that the jury brought her in not guilty, although she
confessed she was."
But what a deluge of blood had been shed before even this principle came
to be recognized, and still more before the judicial belief in the
existence of the crime was fully eradicated! What a spectacle does Europe
present from the date of Innocent's Bull down to the commencement of the
eighteenth century! Sprenger, Henry Institor, Geiss von Lindheim, and
others in Germany; Cumanus in Italy; the Inquisition in Spain; Remigius,
Bodinus, and De l'Ancre in France and Lorraine, flooring witches on all
sides with the 'Malleus Maleficarum,' or flogging them to death with the
'Flagellum' and 'Fustis Dæmonum;' Holland, Geneva, Sweden, Denmark,
England, and Scotland vying with each other in the number of trials and
the depth of their infatuation and bigotry!
The Reformation, which uprooted other errors, only strengthened and
fostered this. Every town and village on the continent was filled with
spies, accusers, and wretches who made their living by pretending to
detect the secret marks which indicated a compact with the
devil[30],--inquisitors, judges, advocates, executioners, every one
connected with these frightful tribunals, on the watch for anything which
might afford the semblance of suspicion. To ensure the death or ruin of an
enemy, nothing more was necessary in most cases than to throw into this
lion's mouth an accusation of magic against him. "Vix aliquis eorum," says
Linden, the determined foe of these proceedings, "qui accusati sunt,
supplicium evasit." The fate of Edelin, of Urban Grandier, and of the
Maréchale d'Ancre in France, of Doctor Flaet and Sidonia von Vork in
Germany, and of Peter of Abano in Italy[31], prove how often the
accusation of sorcery was not even believed by the accusers themselves,
but was resorted to merely as a certain means to get rid of an obnoxious
enemy. Meanwhile the notaries' clerks and officials, labouring in their
vocation, grew rich from the enormous fees attendant on these trials; the
executioner became a personage of first-rate consequence: "generoso equo
instar aulici nobilis ferebatur, auro argentoque vestitus: uxor ejus
vestium luxu certabat cum nobilioribus[32]." Some partial diminution of
this persecuting zeal took place in consequence of a Rescript of John VII.
(18th December, 1591), addressed to the commission, by which the fees of
court were restricted within more moderate bounds; but still the profits
arising from this trade in human victims were sufficient to induce the
members and dependants of court, like the Brahmins in India, to support
with all their might this system of purification by fire.
At last however the horrors of Wurtzburg and Treves began to open the eyes
even of the dullest to the progress of the danger, which, commencing like
Elijah's cloud, had gradually overshadowed the land. While the executions
were confined to the lower classes, to crazed old women or unhappy
foreigners, even those whose more vigorous intellect enabled them to
resist the popular contagion chose rather to sit by spectators of these
horrors, than to expose themselves to the fate of Edelin or Flaet, by
attacking the madness in which they originated. But now, when the
pestilence, spreading on and on, threatened the lives of more exalted
victims,--when noblemen and abbots, presidents of courts and professors,
began to swell the catalogue, and when no man felt secure that he might
not suddenly be compelled by torture to bear witness against his own
innocent wife or children,--selfishness began to co-operate with truth
and reason. So, in the same way, in the case of the New England
witchcrafts, the first effectual check which they received was from the
accusation of Mrs. Hale, the clergyman's wife: her husband, who till then
had been most active in the persecution, immediately received a new light
with regard to the transaction, and exerted his whole influence for the
suppression of the trials.
The first decisive blow which the doctrines of the inquisitors received in
Germany was from the publication of the 'Cautio Criminalis,' in 1631. In
the sixteenth century, it is true that Ponzonibius, Wierus, Pietro
d'Apone, and Reginald Scott had published works which went to impugn their
whole proceedings; but the works of the foreigners were almost unknown in
Germany, and that of Wierus was nearly as absurd and superstitious as the
doctrines he combated. It is little to the credit of the Reformers that
the first work in which the matter was treated in a philosophical, humane,
and common-sense view should have been the production of a Catholic
Jesuit, Frederick Spee, the descendant of a noble family in Westphalia. So
strongly did this exposure of the horrors of the witch trials operate on
the mind of John Philip Schonbrunn, Bishop of Wurtzburg, and finally
Archbishop and Elector of Mentz, that his first care on assuming the
Electoral dignity was to abolish the process entirely within his
dominions--an example which was soon after followed by the Duke of
Brunswick and others of the German princes. Shortly after this the
darkness begins to break up, and the dawning of better views to appear,
though still liable to partial and temporary obscurations,--the evil
apparently shifting further north, and re-appearing in Sweden and Denmark
in the shape of the trials at Mora and Fioge. Reichard[33] has published a
rescript of Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, bearing date the
4th of November, 1654, addressed to the judges in reference to the case of
Ann of Ellerbroke, enjoining that the prisoner should be allowed to be
heard in defence, before any torture was resorted to (a principle directly
the reverse of those maintained by the inquisitorial courts), and
expressly reprobating the proof by water as an unjust and deceitful test,
to which no credit was to be given. Even where a conviction takes place,
as in the Neuendorf trial of Catherine Sempels, we find the sentence of
death first passed upon her by the provincial judges, commuted into
imprisonment for life by the Electoral Chamber in 1671,--a degree of
lenity which never could have taken place during the height of the mania.
In 1701 the celebrated inaugural Thesis of Thomasius, 'De Crimine Magiæ,'
was publicly delivered, with the highest applause, in the University of
Halle, a work which some fifty years before would assuredly have procured
the author no other crown but that of martyrdom, but which was now
received with general approbation, as embodying the views which the honest
and intelligent had long entertained. Thomasius's great storehouse of
information and argument was the work of Bekker, who again had modelled
his on the Treatise of Van Dale on Oracles; and Thomasius, while he
adopted his facts and arguments, steered clear of those Cartesian
doctrines which had been the chief cause why the work of Bekker had
produced so little practical effect. Still, notwithstanding the good thus
produced, the fire of persecution seems to have been smothered only, not
extinguished. In 1728 it flamed up again at Szegedin in Hungary, where
thirteen persons were burnt alive on three scaffolds, for witchcraft,
under circumstances of horror worthy of the wildest periods of this
madness. And so late as 1749 comes the frightful story of Maria Renata, of
Wurtzburg, the whole official details of which are published by Horst, and
which in its atrocity was worthy to conclude the long series of murders
which had polluted the annals of Bamberg. This trial is remarkable from
the feeling of disgust it seems to have excited in Germany, Italy, and
France; and the more so because, whatever may be thought of the reality of
her pretensions, there seems to be no doubt from the evidence that Maria
was by no means immaculate, but _was_ a dabbler in spells and potions, a
_venefica_ in the sense of the Theodosian code. But there is a time, as
Solomon says, for everything under the sun; and the glories of the
'Malleus Maleficarum' were departed. The consequence was, that taking this
trial as their text-book, various foreigners, particularly Maffei,
Tartarotti, and Dell' Ossa, attacked the system so vigorously, that since
that time the adherents of the old superstition seem to have abandoned the
field in Germany.
Matters had come to a close much sooner in Switzerland and France. In the
Catholic canton of Glarus, it is said, a witch was burnt even so late as
1786; but in the Protestant cantons no trials seem to have taken place for
two centuries past. The last execution in Geneva was that of Michel
Chauderon, in 1652. Sebastian Michaelis indeed would have us to believe,
that at one time the tribunal at Geneva put no criminals accused of
witchcraft to death, unless on proof of their having done actual injury to
men or animals, and that the other phenomena of confessions, etc., were
regarded as mere mental delusions. If such however was originally the
case, this humane rule was unfortunately soon abandoned; for nowhere did
the mania of persecution at one time rage more than in Geneva, as is
evident from Delrio's preface. It seems fairly entitled however to the
credit of having been the first state in Europe which emancipated itself
from the influence of this bloody superstition.
In France, the edict of Louis XIV., in 1682, directed only against
_pretended_ witches and prophets, proves distinctly that the belief in the
reality of witchcraft had ceased, and that it was merely the pretended
exercise of such powers which it was thought necessary to suppress. It is
highly to the credit of Louis and his ministry, that this step was taken
by him in opposition to a formal _requête_ by the Parliament of Normandy,
presented in the year 1670, on the occasion of his Majesty having commuted
the punishment of death into banishment for life, in the case of a set of
criminals whom the Parliament had condemned _more majorum_ for
witchcraft[34]. In this apology for their belief, they reminded Louis of
the inveterate practice of the kingdom; of the numerous arrêts of the
Parliament of Paris, from the trials in Artois in 1459, reported by
Monstrelet, down to that of Leger in May 1616; of the judgments pronounced
under the commission addressed by Henry the Great to the Sieur de l'Ancre,
in 1609; of those pronounced by the Parliament of Toulouse, in 1577; of
the celebrated case of Gaufridy, in 1611; of the _arrêts_ of the
Parliaments of Dijon and Rennes, following on the remarkable trial of the
Maréchal de Retz, in 1441, who was burnt for magic and sorcery in the
presence of the Duke of Bretagne: and after combating the authority of a
canon of the Council of Aucyra, and of a passage in St. Augustine, which
had been quoted against them by their opponents, they sum up their
pleading with the following placid and charitable supplication to his
Majesty--"Qu'elle voudra bien souffrir l'exécution des arrêts qu'ils ont
rendus, et leur permettre de continuer l'instruction et jugement des
procès des personnes accusés de sortilège, et que la piété de Votre
Majesté ne souffrira pas que l'on introduise durant son règne une nouvelle
opinion contraire aux principes de la religion, pour laquelle Votre
Majesté a toujours si glorieusement employé ses soins et ses armes."
Notwithstanding this concluding compliment to his Majesty's zeal and
piety, it is doubtful whether the Parliament of Normandy, in their anxiety
for the support of their constitutional privileges, could have taken a
more effectual plan to ruin their own case, than by thus presenting Louis
with a sort of anthology or elegant extracts from the atrocities of the
witch trials; and in all probability the appearance of the edict of 1680
was accelerated by the very remonstrance by which the Norman sages had
hoped to strangle it.
In turning from the Continent to the state of matters in England and
Scotland, the prospect is anything but a comfortable one; and certainly
nothing can be more deceitful than the unction which Dr. Francis
Hutchinson lays to his soul, when he ventures to assert that England was
one of those countries where its horrors were least felt and earliest
suppressed. Witness the trials and convictions which, even before the
enactment of any penal statute, took place for this imaginary offence, as
in the case of Bolingbroke and Margery Jourdain, whose incantations the
genius of Shakespear has rendered familiar to us in the Second Part of
King Henry VI. Witness the successive statutes of Henry VIII., of
Elizabeth, and of James I., the last of which was repealed only in 1736,
and passed while Coke was Attorney-General, and Bacon a member of the
Commons! Witness the exploits of Hopkins, the witch-finder-general,
against the wretched creatures in Lincolnshire, of whom--
"Some only for not being drown'd,
And some for sitting above ground
Whole nights and days upon their breeches,
And feeling pain, were hanged for witches."
_Hudibras_, part ii. canto iii.
What would the Doctor have said to the list of THREE THOUSAND victims
executed during the dynasty of the Long Parliament alone, which Zachary
Grey, the editor of Hudibras, says he himself perused? What absurdities
can exceed those sworn to in the trials of the witches of Warboys, whose
fate was, in Dr. Hutchinson's days, and perhaps is still, annually
"improved" in a commemoration sermon at Cambridge? or in the case of the
luckless Lancashire witches, sacrificed, as afterwards appeared, to the
villany of the impostor Robinson, whose story furnished materials to the
dramatic muse of Heywood and Shadwell? How melancholy is the spectacle of
a man like Hale, condemning Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, in 1664, on
evidence which, though corroborated by the opinion of Sir Thomas Browne, a
child would now be disposed to laugh at? A better order of things, it is
true, commences with the Chief-justiceship of Holt. The evidence against
Mother Munnings, in 1694, would, with a man of weaker intellect, have
sealed the fate of the unfortunate old woman; but Holt charged the jury
with such firmness and good sense, that a verdict of Not Guilty, almost
the first then on record in a trial for witchcraft, was found. In about
ten other trials before Holt, from 1694 to 1701, the result was the same.
Wenham's case, which followed in 1711, sufficiently evinced the change
which had taken place in the feelings of judges. Throughout the whole
trial, Chief Justice Powell seems to have sneered openly at the
absurdities which the witnesses, and in particular the clergymen who were
examined, were endeavouring to press upon the jury; but, with all his
exertions, a verdict of guilty was found against the prisoner. With the
view however of securing her pardon, by showing how far the prejudices of
the jury had gone, he asked, when the verdict was given in, "whether they
found her guilty upon the indictment for conversing with the devil in the
shape of a cat?" The foreman answered, "We find her guilty of that!" It is
almost needless to add that a pardon was procured for her. And yet after
all this, in 1716, Mrs. Hicks and her daughter, aged _nine_, were hanged
at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, and raising a storm,
by pulling off their stockings and making a lather of soap!
With this crowning atrocity, the catalogue of murders in England closes;
the penal statutes against witchcraft being repealed in 1736, and the
pretended exercise of such arts being punished in future by imprisonment
and pillory. Even yet however the case of Rex _v._ Weldon, in 1809, and
the still later case of Barker _v._ Ray, in Chancery (August 2, 1827),
proves that the popular belief in such practices has by no means ceased;
and it is not very long ago that a poor woman narrowly escaped with her
life from a revival of Hopkins's trial by water[35]. Barrington, in his
observations on the statute 20 Henry VI., does not hesitate to estimate
the numbers of those put to death in England on this charge at 30,000!
We now turn to Scotland. Much light has been thrown on the rise and
progress, decline and fall, of the delusion in that country by the
valuable work of Mr. Pitcairn[36], which contains abstracts of every trial
in the supreme Criminal Court of Scotland: the author has given a faithful
and minute view of the procedure in each case, accompanied with full
extracts from the original documents, where they contained anything of
interest.
In no country perhaps did this gloomy superstition assume a darker or
bloodier character than in Scotland. Wild, mountainous, and pastoral
countries, partly from the striking, varied, and sometimes terrible
phenomena which they present,--partly from the habits and manner of life,
the tendency to thought and meditation which they create and foster,--have
always been the great haunts in which superstition finds its cradle and
home. The temper of the Scots, combining reflection with enthusiasm--their
mode of life in earlier days, which amidst the occasional bustle of wild
and agitating exertion, left many intervals of mental vacuity in
solitude--their night watches by the cave on the hill-side--their
uncertain climate, of sunshine and vapour and storm--all contributed to
exalt and keep alive that superstitions fear with which ignorance looks on
every extraordinary movement of nature. From the earliest period of the
Scottish annals, "All was bot gaistis, and eldrich phantasie;" the meteors
and auroræ boreales which prevailed in this mountainous region were
tortured into apparitions of horsemen combating in the air, or
corpse-candles burning on the hill-tops[37]. Skeletons danced as familiar
guests at the nuptials of our kings[38]: spectres warned them back from
the battle-field of Flodden, and visionary heralds proclaimed from the
market-cross the long catalogue of the slain.
"Figures that seemed to rise and die,
Gibber and sign, advance and fly,
While nought confirmed, could ear or eye
Discern of sound or mien;
Yet darkly did it seem as there
Heralds and pursuivants appear,
With trumpet sound and blazon fair,
A summons to proclaim."
_Marmion_, canto v.
Incubi and succubi wandered about in all directions, with a degree of
assurance and plausibility which would have deceived the very elect[39];
and wicked churchmen were cited by audible voices and an accompaniment of
thunder before the tribunal of Heaven[40]. The annals of the thirteenth
century are dignified with the exploits of three wizards, before whom
Nostradamus and Merlin must stoop their crests, Thomas of Ercildoune, Sir
Michael Scott, and Lord Soulis. The Tramontane fame of the second had even
crossed the Alps, for Dante[41] accommodates him with a place in Hell,
between Bonatto, the astrologer of Guido di Monte Feltro, and Asdente of
Parma.