Gazette_, was very popular in Germany. It detailed, according to the
title-page of a copy printed at Smalcald in 1627, "An account of the
remarkable events which took place in Franconia, Bamberg, and Würzburg,
with those wretches who from avarice or ambition have sold themselves to
the devil, and how they had their reward at last: set to music, and to be
sung to the tune of Dorothea." The sufferings of the witches at the stake
are explained in it with great minuteness, the poet waxing extremely witty
when he describes the horrible contortions of pain upon their
countenances, and the shrieks that rent the air when any one of more than
common guilt was burned alive. A trick resorted to in order to force one
witch to confess, is told in this doggrel as an excellent joke. As she
obstinately refused to own that she was in league with the powers of evil,
the commissioners suggested that the hangman should dress himself in a
bear's skin, with the horns, tail, and all the et-ceteras, and in this
form penetrate into her dungeon. The woman, in the darkness of her cell,
could not detect the imposture, aided as it was by her own superstitious
fears. She thought she was actually in the presence of the prince of hell;
and when she was told to keep up her courage, and that she should be
relieved from the power of her enemies, she fell on her knees before the
supposed devil, and swore to dedicate herself hereafter, body and soul, to
his service. Germany is, perhaps, the only country in Europe where the
delusion was so great as to have made such detestable verses as these the
favourites of the people:
"Man shickt ein Henkersknecht
Zu ihr in Gefängniss n'unter,
Den man hat kleidet recht,
Mit einer Bärnhaute,
Als wenns der Teufel wär;
Als ihm die Drut anschaute
Meints ihr Buhl kam daher.
Sie sprach zu ihm behende,
Wie lässt du mich so lang
In der Obrigkeit Hände?
Hilf mir aus ihren Zwang,
Wie du mir hast verheissen,
Ich bin ja eben dein,
Thu mich aus der Angst entreissen
O liebster Buhle mein!"[36]
[36] They sent a hangman's assistant down to her in her prison;
they clothed him properly in a bear's skin, as if he were the
devil. Him, when the witch saw, she thought he was her
familiar. She said to him quickly, "Why hast thou left me so
long in the magistrate's hands? Help me out of their power,
as thou hast promised, and I will be thine alone. Help me
from this anguish, O thou dearest devil [or lover] mine!"
This rare poet adds, that in making such an appeal to the hangman, the
witch never imagined the roast that was to be made of her, and puts in, by
way of parenthesis, "was not that fine fun!--_was das war für ein Spiel!_"
As feathers thrown into the air shew how the wind blows, so this trumpery
ballad serves to shew the current of popular feeling at the time of its
composition.
All readers of history are familiar with the celebrated trial of the
Maréchale d'Ancre, who was executed in Paris in the year 1617. Although
witchcraft was one of the accusations brought against her, the real crime
for which she suffered was her ascendency over the mind of Mary of
Medicis, and the consequent influence she exercised indirectly over the
unworthy king, Louis XIII. Her coachman gave evidence that she had
sacrificed a cock at midnight in one of the churches, and others swore
they had seen her go secretly into the house of a noted witch named
Isabella. When asked by what means she had acquired so extraordinary an
influence over the mind of the Queen Mother, she replied boldly that she
exercised no other power over her than that which a strong mind can always
exercise over the weak. She died with great firmness.
In two years afterwards, scenes far more horrible than any that had yet
taken place in France were enacted at Labourt, at the foot of the
Pyrenees. The parliament of Bourdeaux, scandalised at the number of
witches who were said to infest Labourt and its neighbourhood, deputed one
of its own members, the noted Pierre de l'Ancre, and its president,
Espaignel, to inquire into the matter, with full powers to punish the
offenders. They arrived at Labourt in May, 1619. De l'Ancre wrote a book
setting forth all his great deeds in this battle against the powers of
evil. It is full of obscenity and absurdity, but the facts may be relied
on as far as they relate to the number of trials and executions, and the
strange confessions which torture forced from the unhappy criminals.
De l'Ancre states as a reason why so many witches were to be found at
Labourt, that the country was mountainous and sterile! He discovered many
of them from their partiality to smoking tobacco. It may be inferred from
this that he was of the opinion of King James, that tobacco was the
"devil's weed." When the commission first sat, the number of persons
brought to trial was about forty a day. The acquittals did not average so
many as five per cent. All the witches confessed that they had been
present at the great Domdaniel, or Sabbath. At these saturnalia the devil
sat upon a large gilded throne, sometimes in the form of a goat; sometimes
as a gentleman, dressed all in black, with boots, spurs, and sword; and
very often as a shapeless mass, resembling the trunk of a blasted tree,
seen indistinctly amid the darkness. They generally proceeded to the
Domdaniel, riding on spits, pitchforks, or broomsticks, and on their
arrival indulged with the fiends in every species of debauchery. Upon one
occasion they had had the audacity to celebrate this festival in the very
heart of the city of Bourdeaux. The throne of the arch fiend was placed in
the middle of the Place de Gallienne, and the whole space was covered with
the multitude of witches and wizards who flocked to it from far and near,
some arriving even from distant Scotland.
After two hundred poor wretches had been hanged and burned, there seemed
no diminution in the number of criminals to be tried. Many of the latter
were asked upon the rack what Satan had said when he found that the
commissioners were proceeding with such severity? The general reply was,
that he did not seem to care much about it. Some of them asserted that
they had boldly reproached him for suffering the execution of their
friends, saying, "_Out upon thee, false fiend! thy promise was that they
should not die! Look, how thou hast kept thy word! They have been burned,
and are a heap of ashes!_" Upon these occasions he was never offended: he
would give orders that the sports of the Domdaniel should cease, and
producing illusory fires that did not burn, he encouraged them to walk
through, assuring them that the fires lighted by the executioner gave no
more pain than those. They would then ask him, where their friends were,
since they had not suffered; to which the "Father of Lies" invariably
replied, that they were happy in a far country, and could see and hear all
that was then passing; and that, if they called by name those they wished
to converse with, they might hear their voices in reply. Satan then
imitated the voices of the defunct witches so successfully that they were
all deceived. Having answered all objections, the orgies recommenced and
lasted till the cock crew.
De l'Ancre was also very zealous in the trial of unhappy monomaniacs for
the crime of lycanthropy. Several who were arrested confessed, without
being tortured, that they were _weir-wolves_, and that at night they
rushed out among the flocks and herds killing and devouring. One young man
at Besançon, with the full consciousness of the awful fate that awaited
him, voluntarily gave himself up to the commissioner Espaignel, and
confessed that he was the servant of a strong fiend, who was known by the
name of "Lord of the Forests:" by his power he was transformed into the
likeness of a wolf. The "Lord of the Forests" assumed the same shape; but
was much larger, fiercer, and stronger. They prowled about the pastures
together at midnight, strangling the watch-dogs that defended the folds,
and killing more sheep than they could devour. He felt, he said, a fierce
pleasure in these excursions, and howled in excess of joy as he tore with
his fangs the warm flesh of the sheep asunder. This youth was not alone in
this horrid confession; many others voluntarily owned that they were
_weir-wolves_, and many more were forced by torture to make the same
avowal. Such criminals were thought to be too atrocious to be hanged first
and then burned: they were generally sentenced to be burned alive, and
their ashes to be scattered to the winds. Grave and learned doctors of
divinity openly sustained the possibility of these transformations,
relying mainly upon the history of Nebuchadnezzar. They could not imagine
why, if he had been an ox, modern men could not become wolves by Divine
permission and the power of the devil. They also contended that, if men
should confess, it was evidence enough, if there had been no other. Delrio
mentions that one gentleman accused of lycanthropy was put to the torture
no less than twenty times; but still he would not confess. An intoxicating
draught was then given him, and under its influence he confessed that he
was a _weir-wolf_. Delrio cites this to shew the extreme equity of the
commissioners. They never burned any body till he confessed; and if one
course of torture would not suffice, their patience was not exhausted, and
they tried him again and again, even to the twentieth time! Well may we
exclaim, when such atrocities have been committed in the name of religion,
"Quel lion, quel tigre égale en cruauté,
Une injuste fureur qu'arme la piété?"
The trial of the unhappy Urbain Grandier, the curate of Loudun, for
bewitching a number of girls in the convent of the Ursulines in that town,
was, like that of the Maréchale d'Ancre, an accusation resorted to by his
enemies to ruin one against whom no other charge could be brought so
readily. This noted affair, which kept France in commotion for months, and
the true character of which was known even at that time, merits no more
than a passing notice in this place. It did not spring from the epidemic
dread of sorcery then so prevalent, but was carried on by wretched
intriguers, who had sworn to have the life of their foe. Such a charge
could not be refuted in 1634: the accused could not, as Bodinus expresses
it, "make the malice of the prosecutors more clear than the sun;" and his
own denial, however intelligible, honest, and straightforward, was held as
nothing in refutation of the testimony of the crazy women who imagined
themselves bewitched. The more absurd and contradictory their assertions,
the stronger the argument employed by his enemies that the devil was in
them. He was burned alive, under circumstances of great cruelty.[37]
[37] A very graphic account of the execution of this unfortunate
gentleman is to be found in the excellent romance of M.
Alfred de Vigny, entitled _Cinq Mars_; but if the reader
wishes for a full and accurate detail of all the
circumstances of one of the most extraordinary trials upon
record, he is referred to a work published anonymously, at
Amsterdam, in 1693, entitled _Histoire des Diables de Loudun,
ou de la Possession des Religieuses Ursulines, et de la
Condemnation et du Supplice d'Urbain Grandier_.
A singular instance of the epidemic fear of witchcraft occurred at Lille,
in 1639. A pious but not very sane lady, named Antoinette Bourignon,
founded a school, or _hospice_, in that city. One day, on entering the
schoolroom, she imagined that she saw a great number of little black
angels flying about the heads of the children. In great alarm she told her
pupils of what she had seen, warning them to beware of the devil whose
imps were hovering about them. The foolish woman continued daily to repeat
the same story, and Satan and his power became the only subject of
conversation, not only between the girls themselves, but between them and
their instructors. One of them at this time ran away from the school. On
being brought back and interrogated, she said she had not run away, but
had been carried away by the devil; she was a witch, and had been one
since the age of seven. Some other little girls in the school went into
fits at this announcement, and, on their recovery, confessed that they
also were witches. At last the whole of them, to the number of fifty,
worked upon each other's imaginations to such a degree that they also
confessed that they were witches--that they attended the Domdaniel, or
meeting of the fiends--that they could ride through the air on
broom-sticks, feast on infants' flesh, or creep through a key-hole.
The citizens of Lille were astounded at these disclosures. The clergy
hastened to investigate the matter; many of them, to their credit, openly
expressed their opinion that the whole affair was an imposture--not so the
majority; they strenuously insisted that the confessions of the children
were valid, and that it was necessary to make an example by burning them
all for witches. The poor parents, alarmed for their offspring, implored
the examining Capuchins with tears in their eyes to save their young
lives, insisting that they were bewitched, and not bewitching. This
opinion also gained ground in the town. Antoinette Bourignon, who had put
these absurd notions into the heads of the children, was accused of
witchcraft, and examined before the council. The circumstances of the case
seemed so unfavourable towards her that she would not stay for a second
examination. Disguising herself as she best could, she hastened out of
Lille and escaped pursuit. If she had remained four hours longer, she
would have been burned by judicial sentence as a witch and a heretic. It
is to be hoped that, wherever she went, she learned the danger of
tampering with youthful minds, and was never again entrusted with the
management of children.
The Duke of Brunswick and the Elector of Menz were struck with the great
cruelty exercised in the torture of suspected persons, and convinced, at
the same time, that no righteous judge would consider a confession
extorted by pain, and contradictory in itself, as sufficient evidence to
justify the execution of any accused person. It is related of the Duke of
Brunswick that he invited two learned Jesuits to his house, who were known
to entertain strong opinions upon the subject of witchcraft, with a view
of shewing them the cruelty and absurdity of such practices. A woman lay
in the dungeon of the city accused of witchcraft, and the duke, having
given previous instructions to the officiating torturers, went with the
two Jesuits to hear her confession. By a series of artful leading
questions the poor creature, in the extremity of her anguish, was induced
to confess that she had often attended the sabbath of the fiends upon the
Brocken; that she had seen two Jesuits there, who had made themselves
notorious, even among witches, for their abominations; that she had seen
them assume the form of goats, wolves, and other animals; and that many
noted witches had borne them five, six, and seven children at a birth, who
had heads like toads, and legs like spiders. Being asked if the Jesuits
were far from her, she replied that they were in the room beside her. The
Duke of Brunswick led his astounded friends away, and explained the
stratagem. This was convincing proof to both of them that thousands of
persons had suffered unjustly; they knew their own innocence, and
shuddered to think what their fate might have been if an enemy instead of
a friend had put such a confession into the mouth of a criminal. One of
these Jesuits was Frederick Spee, the author of the _Cautio Criminalis_,
published in 1631. This work, exposing the horrors of the witch-trials,
had a most salutary effect in Germany: Schonbrunn, Archbishop and Elector
of Menz, abolished the torture entirely within his dominions, and his
example was imitated by the Duke of Brunswick and other potentates. The
number of supposed witches immediately diminished, and the violence of the
mania began to subside. The Elector of Brandenburg issued a rescript, in
1654, with respect to the case of Anna of Ellerbrock, a supposed witch,
forbidding the use of torture, and stigmatising the swimming of witches as
an unjust, cruel, and deceitful test.
This was the beginning of the dawn after the long-protracted darkness. The
tribunals no longer condemned witches to execution by hundreds in a year.
Würzburg, the grand theatre of the burnings, burned but one where, forty
years previously, it had burned three score. From 1660 to 1670 the
electoral chambers, in all parts of Germany, constantly commuted the
sentence of death passed by the provincial tribunals into imprisonment for
life, or burning on the cheek.
[Illustration: ROUEN.]
A truer philosophy had gradually disabused the public mind. Learned men
freed themselves from the trammels of a debasing superstition, and
governments, both civil and ecclesiastical, repressed the popular delusion
they had so long encouraged. The parliament of Normandy condemned a number
of women to death, in the year 1670, on the old charge of riding on
broomsticks to the Domdaniel; but Louis XIV. commuted the sentence into
banishment for life. The parliament remonstrated, and sent the king the
following remarkable request. The reader will perhaps be glad to see this
document at length. It is of importance, as the last effort of a
legislative assembly to uphold this great error; and the arguments they
used and the instances they quoted are in the highest degree curious. It
reflects honour upon the memory of Louis XIV. that he was not swayed by
it.
"REQUEST OF THE PARLIAMENT OF ROUEN TO THE KING, IN 1670.
"SIRE,--Emboldened by the authority which your majesty has committed into
our hands in the province of Normandy, to try and punish offences, and
more particularly those offences of the nature of witchcraft, which tend
to the destruction of religion and the ruin of nations, we, your
parliament, remonstrate humbly with your majesty upon certain cases of
this kind which have been lately brought before us. We cannot permit the
letter addressed by your majesty's command to the attorney-general of this
district, for the reprieve of certain persons condemned to death for
witchcraft, and for the staying of proceedings in several other cases, to
remain unnoticed, and without remarking upon the consequences which may
ensue. There is also a letter from your secretary of state, declaring your
majesty's intention to commute the punishment of these criminals into one
of perpetual banishment, and to submit to the opinion of the
procureur-general, and of the most learned members of the parliament of
Paris, whether, in the matter of witchcraft, the jurisprudence of the
parliament of Rouen is to be followed in preference to that of the
parliament of Paris, and of the other parliaments of the kingdom which
judge differently.
"Although by the ordinances of the kings your predecessors, parliaments
have been forbidden to pay any attention to _lettres de cachet_; we,
nevertheless, from the knowledge which we have, in common with the whole
kingdom, of the care bestowed by your majesty for the good of your
subjects, and from the submission and obedience to your commandments which
we have always manifested, have stayed all proceedings, in conformity to
your orders; hoping that your majesty, considering the importance of the
crime of witchcraft, and the consequences likely to ensue from its
impunity, will be graciously pleased to grant us once more your permission
to continue the trials, and execute judgment upon those found guilty. And
as, since we received the letter of your secretary of state, we have also
been made acquainted with the determination of your majesty, not only to
commute the sentence of death passed upon these witches into one of
perpetual banishment from the province, but to re-establish them in the
possession of their goods and chattels, and of their good fame and
character, your parliament have thought it their duty, on occasion of
these crimes, the greatest which men can commit, to make you acquainted
with the general and uniform feelings of the people of this province with
regard to them; it being, moreover, a question in which are concerned the
glory of God and the relief of your suffering subjects, who groan under
their fears from the threats and menaces of this sort of persons, and who
feel the effects of them every day in the mortal and extraordinary
maladies which attack them, and the surprising damage and loss of their
possessions.
"Your majesty knows well that there is no crime so opposed to the commands
of God as witchcraft, which destroys the very foundation of religion, and
draws strange abominations after it. It is for this reason, sire, that the
Scriptures pronounce the punishment of death against offenders, and that
the Church and the holy fathers have fulminated their anathemas, and that
canonical decisions have one and all decreed the most severe punishments,
to deter from this crime; and that the Church of France, animated by the
piety of the kings your predecessors, has expressed so great a horror at
it, that, not judging the punishment of perpetual imprisonment, the
highest it has the power to inflict, sufficiently severe, it has left such
criminals to be dealt with by the secular power.
"It has been the general feeling of all nations that such criminals ought
to be condemned to death, and all the ancients were of the same opinion.
The law of the 'Twelve Tables,' which was the principal of the Roman laws,
ordains the same punishment. All juris-consults agreed in it, as well as
the constitutions of the emperors, and more especially those of
Constantine and Theodosius, who, enlightened by the Gospel, not only
renewed the same punishment, but also deprived, expressly, all persons
found guilty of witchcraft of the right of appeal, and declared them to be
unworthy of a prince's mercy. And Charles VIII., sire, inspired by the
same sentiments, passed that beautiful and severe ordinance (_cette belle
et sévère ordonnance_), which enjoined the judges to punish witches
according to the exigencies of the case, under a penalty of being
themselves fined or imprisoned, or dismissed from their office; and
decreed, at the same time, that all persons who refused to denounce a
witch, should be punished as accomplices; and that all, on the contrary,
who gave evidence against one should be rewarded.