one of the Fiend's Sabbaths, placed the gibbet on which they executed
their victims just on the spot where Satan's gilded chair was usually
stationed. The devil was much offended at such an affront, and yet had
so little power in the matter that he could only express his resentment
by threats that he would hang Messieurs D'Amon and D'Urtubbe, gentlemen
who had solicited and promoted the issuing of the Commission, and would
also burn the Commissioners themselves in their own fire. We regret to
say that Satan was unable to execute either of these laudable
resolutions. Ashamed of his excuses, he abandoned for three or four
sittings his attendance on the Sabbaths, sending as his representative
an imp of subordinate account, and in whom no one reposed confidence.
When he took courage again to face his parliament, the Arch-fiend
covered his defection by assuring them that he had been engaged in a
lawsuit with the Deity, which he had gained with costs, and that six
score of infant children were to be delivered up to him in name of
damages, and the witches were directed to procure such victims
accordingly. After this grand fiction he confined himself to the petty
vengeance of impeding the access of confessors to the condemned, which
was the more easy as few of them could speak the Basque language. I have
no time to detail the ingenious method by which the learned Councillor
de Lancre explains why the district of Labourt should be particularly
exposed to the pest of sorcery. The chief reason seems to be that it is
a mountainous, a sterile, and a border country, where the men are all
fishers and the women smoke tobacco and wear short petticoats.
To a person who, in this presumptuous, trifling, and conceited spirit,
has composed a quarto volume full of the greatest absurdities and
grossest obscenities ever impressed on paper, it was the pleasure of the
most Christian Monarch to consign the most absolute power which could be
exercised on these poor people; and he might with as much prudence have
turned a ravenous wolf upon an undefended flock, of whom the animal was
the natural enemy, as they were his natural prey. The priest, as well as
the ignorant peasant, fell under the suspicion of this fell Commission;
and De Lancre writes, with much complacency, that the accused were
brought to trial to the number of forty in one day--with what chance of
escape, when the judges were blinded with prejudice, and could only hear
the evidence and the defence through the medium of an interpreter, the
understanding of the reader may easily anticipate.
Among other gross transgressions of the most ordinary rules, it may be
remarked that the accused, in what their judges called confessions,
contradicted each other at every turn respecting the description of the
Domdaniel in which they pretended to have been assembled, and the fiend
who presided there. All spoke to a sort of gilded throne; but some saw a
hideous wild he-goat seated there; some a man disfigured and twisted, as
suffering torture; some, with better taste, beheld a huge indistinct
form, resembling one of those mutilated trunks of trees found in ancient
forests. But De Lancre was no "Daniel come to judgment," and the
discrepancy of evidence, which saved the life and fame of Susannah, made
no impression in favour of the sorcerers of Labourt.
Instances occur in De Lancre's book of the trial and condemnation of
persons accused of the crime of _lycanthropy_, a superstition which was
chiefly current in France, but was known in other countries, and is the
subject of great debate between Wier, Naudé, Scot, on the one hand, and
their demonological adversaries on the other. The idea, said the one
party, was that a human being had the power, by sorcery, of transforming
himself into the shape of a wolf, and in that capacity, being seized
with a species of fury, he rushed out and made havoc among the flocks,
slaying and wasting, like the animal whom he represented, far more than
he could devour. The more incredulous reasoners would not allow of a
real transformation, whether with or without the enchanted hide of a
wolf, which in some cases was supposed to aid the metamorphosis, and
contended that lycanthropy only subsisted as a woful species of disease,
a melancholy state of mind, broken with occasional fits of insanity, in
which the patient imagined that he committed the ravages of which he was
accused. Such a person, a mere youth, was tried at Besançon, who gave
himself out for a servant, or yeoman pricker, of the Lord of the
Forest--so he called his superior--who was judged to be the devil. He
was, by his master's power, transformed into the likeness and performed
the usual functions of a wolf, and was attended in his course by one
larger, which he supposed the Lord of the Forest himself. These wolves,
he said, ravaged the flocks, and throttled the dogs which stood in their
defence. If either had not seen the other, he howled, after the manner
of the animal, to call his comrade to his share of the prey; if he did
not come upon this signal, he proceeded to bury it the best way he
could.
Such was the general persecution under Messieurs Espiagnel and De
Lancre. Many similar scenes occurred in France, till the edict of Louis
XIV. discharging all future prosecutions for witchcraft, after which the
crime itself was heard of no more.[52]
[Footnote 52: The reader may sup full on such wild horrors in the
_causes célèbres_.]
While the spirit of superstition was working such horrors in France, it
was not, we may believe, more idle in other countries of Europe. In
Spain, particularly, long the residence of the Moors, a people putting
deep faith in all the day-dreams of witchcraft, good and evil genii,
spells and talismans, the ardent and devotional temper of the old
Christians dictated a severe research after sorcerers as well as
heretics, and relapsed Jews or Mahommedans. In former times, during the
subsistence of the Moorish kingdoms in Spain, a school was supposed to
be kept open in Toboso for the study, it is said, of magic, but more
likely of chemistry, algebra, and other sciences, which, altogether
mistaken by the ignorant and vulgar, and imperfectly understood even by
those who studied them, were supposed to be allied to necromancy, or at
least to natural magic. It was, of course, the business of the
Inquisition to purify whatever such pursuits had left of suspicious
Catholicism, and their labours cost as much blood on accusations of
witchcraft and magic as for heresy and relapse.
Even the colder nations of Europe were subject to the same epidemic
terror for witchcraft, and a specimen of it was exhibited in the sober
and rational country of Sweden about the middle of last century, an
account of which, being translated into English by a respectable
clergyman, Doctor Horneck, excited general surprise how a whole people
could be imposed upon to the degree of shedding much blood, and
committing great cruelty and injustice, on account of the idle
falsehoods propagated by a crew of lying children, who in this case were
both actors and witnesses.
The melancholy truth that "the human heart is deceitful above all
things, and desperately wicked," is by nothing proved so strongly as by
the imperfect sense displayed by children of the sanctity of moral
truth. Both the gentlemen and the mass of the people, as they advance in
years, learn to despise and avoid falsehood; the former out of pride,
and from a remaining feeling, derived from the days of chivalry, that
the character of a liar is a deadly stain on their honour; the other,
from some general reflection upon the necessity of preserving a
character for integrity in the course of life, and a sense of the truth
of the common adage, that "honesty is the best policy." But these are
acquired habits of thinking. The child has no natural love of truth, as
is experienced by all who have the least acquaintance with early youth.
If they are charged with a fault while they can hardly speak, the first
words they stammer forth are a falsehood to excuse it. Nor is this all:
the temptation of attracting attention, the pleasure of enjoying
importance, the desire to escape from an unpleasing task, or accomplish
a holiday, will at any time overcome the sentiment of truth, so weak is
it within them. Hence thieves and housebreakers, from a surprisingly
early period, find means of rendering children useful in their mystery;
nor are such acolytes found to evade justice with less dexterity than
the more advanced rogues. Where a number of them are concerned in the
same mischief, there is something resembling virtue in the fidelity with
which the common secret is preserved. Children, under the usual age of
their being admitted to give evidence, were necessarily often examined
in witch trials; and it is terrible to see how often the little
impostors, from spite or in mere gaiety of spirit, have by their art and
perseverance made shipwreck of men's lives. But it would be hard to
discover a case which, supported exclusively by the evidence of children
(the confessions under torture excepted), and obviously existing only in
the young witnesses' own imagination, has been attended with such
serious consequences, or given cause to so extensive and fatal a
delusion, as that which occurred in Sweden.
The scene was the Swedish village of Mohra, in the province of Elfland,
which district had probably its name from some remnant of ancient
superstition. The delusion had come to a great height ere it reached the
ears of government, when, as was the general procedure, Royal
Commissioners were sent down, men well fitted for the duty entrusted to
them; that is, with ears open to receive the incredibilities with which
they were to be crammed, and hearts hardened against every degree of
compassion to the accused. The complaints of the common people, backed
by some persons of better condition, were that a number of persons,
renowned as witches, had drawn several hundred children of all classes
under the devil's authority. They demanded, therefore, the punishment of
these agents of hell, reminding the judges that the province had been
clear of witches since the burning of some on a former occasion. The
accused were numerous, so many as threescore and ten witches and
sorcerers being seized in the village of Mohra; three-and-twenty
confessed their crimes, and were sent to Faluna, where most of them were
executed. Fifteen of the children were also led to death. Six-and-thirty
of those who were young were forced to run the gauntlet, as it is
called, and were, besides, lashed weekly at the church doors for a whole
year. Twenty of the youngest were condemned to the same discipline for
three days only.
The process seems to have consisted in confronting the children with the
witches, and hearing the extraordinary story which the former insisted
upon maintaining. The children, to the number of three hundred, were
found more or less perfect in a tale as full of impossible absurdities
as ever was told around a nursery fire. Their confession ran thus:--
They were taught by the witches to go to a cross way, and with certain
ceremonies to invoke the devil by the name of Antecessor, begging him to
carry them off to Blockula, meaning, perhaps, the Brockenberg, in the
Hartz forest, a mountain infamous for being the common scene of witches'
meetings, and to which Goethe represents the spirit Mephistopheles as
conducting his pupil Faustus. The devil courteously appeared at the call
of the children in various forms, but chiefly as a mad Merry-Andrew,
with a grey coat, red and blue stockings, a red beard, a high-crowned
hat, with linen of various colours wrapt round it, and garters of
peculiar length. He set each child on some beast of his providing, and
anointed them with a certain unguent composed of the scrapings of altars
and the filings of church clocks. There is here a discrepancy of
evidence which in another court would have cast the whole. Most of the
children considered their journey to be corporeal and actual. Some
supposed, however, that their strength or spirit only travelled with the
fiend, and that their body remained behind. Very few adopted this last
hypothesis, though the parents unanimously bore witness that the bodies
of the children remained in bed, and could not be awakened out of a deep
sleep, though they shook them for the purpose of awakening them. So
strong was, nevertheless, the belief of nurses and mothers in their
actual transportation, that a sensible clergyman, mentioned in the
preface, who had resolved he would watch his son the whole night and see
what hag or fiend would take him from his arms, had the utmost
difficulty, notwithstanding, in convincing his mother that the child had
not been transported to Blockula during the very night he held him in
his embrace.
The learned translator candidly allows, "out of so great a multitude as
were accused, condemned, and executed, there might be some who suffered
unjustly, and owed their death more to the malice of their enemies than
to their skill in the black art, I will readily admit. Nor will I deny,"
he continues, "but that when the news of these transactions and
accounts, how the children bewitched fel into fits and strange unusual
postures, spread abroad in the kingdom, some fearful and credulous
people, if they saw their children any way disordered, might think they
were bewitched or ready to be carried away by imps."[53] The learned
gentleman here stops short in a train of reasoning, which, followed out,
would have deprived the world of the benefit of his translation. For if
it was possible that some of these unfortunate persons fell a sacrifice
to the malice of their neighbours or the prejudices of witnesses, as he
seems ready to grant, is it not more reasonable to believe that the
whole of the accused were convicted on similar grounds, than to allow,
as truth, the slightest part of the gross and vulgar impossibilities
upon which alone their execution can be justified?
[Footnote 53: Translator's preface to Horneck's "Account of what
happened in the Kingdom of Sweden." See appendix to Glanville's work.]
The Blockula, which was the object of their journey, was a house having
a fine gate painted with divers colours, with a paddock, in which they
turned the beasts to graze which had brought them to such scenes of
revelry. If human beings had been employed they were left slumbering
against the wall of the house. The plan of the devil's palace consisted
of one large banqueting apartment and several withdrawing-rooms. Their
food was homely enough, being broth made of coleworts and bacon, with
bread and butter, and milk and cheese. The same acts of wickedness and
profligacy were committed at Blockula which are usually supposed to take
place upon the devil's Sabbath elsewhere; but there was this particular,
that the witches had sons and daughters by the fiends, who were married
together, and produced an offspring of toads and serpents.
These confessions being delivered before the accused witches, they at
first stoutly denied them. At last some of them burst into tears, and
acquiesced in the horrors imputed to them. They said the practice of
carrying off children had been enlarged very lately (which shows the
whole rumours to have arisen recently); and the despairing wretches
confirmed what the children said, with many other extravagant
circumstances, as the mode of elongating a goat's back by means of a
spit, on which we care not to be particular. It is worth mentioning that
the devil, desirous of enjoying his own reputation among his subjects,
pretended at one time to be dead, and was much lamented at Blockula--but
he soon revived again.
Some attempts these witches had made to harm individuals on middle
earth, but with little success. One old sorceress, indeed, attempted to
strike a nail, given her by the devil for that purpose, into the head of
the minister of Elfland; but as the skull was of unusual solidity, the
reverend gentleman only felt a headache from her efforts. They could not
be persuaded to exhibit any of their tricks before the Commissioners,
excusing themselves by alleging that their witchcraft had left them, and
that the devil had amused them with the vision of a burning pit, having
a hand thrust out of it.
The total number who lost their lives on this singular occasion was
fourscore and four persons, including fifteen children; and at this
expense of blood was extinguished a flame that arose as suddenly, burned
as fiercely, and decayed as rapidly, as any portent of the kind within
the annals of superstition. The Commissioners returned to Court with the
high approbation of all concerned; prayers were ordered through the
churches weekly, that Heaven would be pleased to restrain the powers of
the devil, and deliver the poor creatures who hitherto had groaned under
it, as well as the innocent children, who were carried off by hundreds
at once.
If we could ever learn the true explanation of this story, we should
probably find that the cry was led by some clever mischievous boy, who
wished to apologise to his parents for lying an hour longer in the
morning by alleging he had been at Blockula on the preceding night; and
that the desire to be as much distinguished as their comrade had
stimulated the bolder and more acute of his companions to the like
falsehoods; whilst those of weaker minds assented, either from fear of
punishment or the force of dreaming over at night the horrors which were
dinned into their ears all day. Those who were ingenuous, as it was
termed, in their confessions, received praise and encouragement; and
those who denied or were silent, and, as it was considered, impenitent,
were sure to bear the harder share of the punishment which was addressed
to all. It is worth while also to observe, that the smarter children
began to improve their evidence and add touches to the general picture
of Blockula. "Some of the children talked much of a white angel, which
used to forbid them what the devil bid them do, and told them that these
doings should not last long. And (they added) this better being would
place himself sometimes at the door betwixt the witches and the
children, and when they came to Blockula he pulled the children back,
but the witches went in."
This additional evidence speaks for itself, and shows the whole tale to
be the fiction of the children's imagination, which some of them wished
to improve upon. The reader may consult "An Account of what happened in
the Kingdom of Sweden in the years 1669 and 1670, and afterwards
translated out of High Dutch into English by Dr. Antony Horneck,"
attached to Glanville's "Sadducismus Triumphatus." The translator refers
to the evidence of Baron Sparr, Ambassador from the Court of Sweden to
the Court of England in 1672; and that of Baron Lyonberg, Envoy
Extraordinary of the same power, both of whom attest the confession and
execution of the witches. The King of Sweden himself answered the
express inquiries of the Duke of Holstein with marked reserve. "His
judges and commissioners," he said, "had caused divers men, women, and
children, to be burnt and executed on such pregnant evidence as was
brought before them. But whether the actions confessed and proved
against them were real, or only the effects of strong imagination, he
was not as yet able to determine"--a sufficient reason, perhaps, why
punishment should have been at least deferred by the interposition of
the royal authority.
We must now turn our eyes to Britain, in which our knowledge as to such
events is necessarily more extensive, and where it is in a high degree
more interesting to our present purpose.
LETTER VIII.
The Effects of the Witch Superstition are to be traced in the Laws
of a Kingdom--Usually punished in England as a Crime connected with
Politics--Attempt at Murder for Witchcraft not in itself
Capital--Trials of Persons of Rank for Witchcraft, connected with
State Crimes--Statutes of Henry VIII--How Witchcraft was regarded by
the three Leading Sects of Religion in the Sixteenth Century; first,
by the Catholics; second, by the Calvinists; third, by the Church of
England and Lutherans--Impostures unwarily countenanced by
individual Catholic Priests, and also by some Puritanic
Clergymen--Statute of 1562, and some cases upon it--Case of
Dugdale--Case of the Witches of Warbois, and the execution of the
Family of Samuel--That of Jane Wenham, in which some Church of
England Clergymen insisted on the Prosecution--Hutchison's Rebuke to
them--James the First's Opinion of Witchcraft--His celebrated
Statute, 1 Jac. I.--Canon passed by the Convocation against
Possession--Case of Mr. Fairfax's Children--Lancashire Witches in
1613--Another Discovery in 1634--Webster's Account of the manner in
which the Imposture was managed--Superiority of the Calvinists is
followed by a severe Prosecution of Witches--Executions in Suffolk,
&c. to a dreadful extent--Hopkins, the pretended Witchfinder, the
cause of these Cruelties--His Brutal Practices--His
Letter--Execution of Mr. Lowis--Hopkins Punished--Restoration of
Charles--Trial of Coxe--Of Dunny and Callendar before Lord
Hales--Royal Society and Progress of Knowledge--Somersetshire
Witches--Opinions of the Populace--A Woman Swum for Witchcraft at
Oakly--- Murder at Tring--Act against Witchcraft abolished, and the
belief in the Crime becomes forgotten--Witch Trials in New
England--Dame Glover's Trial--Affliction of the Parvises, and
frightful Increase of the Prosecutions--Suddenly put a stop to--The
Penitence of those concerned in them.
Our account of Demonology in England must naturally, as in every other
country, depend chiefly on the instances which history contains of the
laws and prosecutions against witchcraft. Other superstitions arose and
decayed, were dreaded or despised, without greater embarrassment, in the
provinces in which they have a temporary currency, than that cowards and
children go out more seldom at night, while the reports of ghosts and
fairies are peculiarly current. But when the alarm of witchcraft arises,
Superstition dips her hand in the blood of the persons accused, and
records in the annals of jurisprudence their trials and the causes
alleged in vindication of their execution. Respecting other fantastic
allegations, the proof is necessarily transient and doubtful, depending
upon the inaccurate testimony of vague report and of doting tradition.
But in cases of witchcraft we have before us the recorded evidence upon
which judge and jury acted, and can form an opinion with some degree of
certainty of the grounds, real or fanciful, on which they acquitted or
condemned. It is, therefore, in tracing, this part of Demonology, with
its accompanying circumstances, that we have the best chance of
obtaining an accurate view of our subject.