England, as in the countries on the Continent, and originally punished
accordingly. But after the fourteenth century the practices which fell
under such a description were thought unworthy of any peculiar
animadversion, unless they were connected with something which would
have been of itself a capital crime, by whatever means it had been
either essayed or accomplished. Thus the supposed paction between a
witch and the demon was perhaps deemed in itself to have terrors enough
to prevent its becoming an ordinary crime, and was not, therefore,
visited with any statutory penalty. But to attempt or execute bodily
harm to others through means of evil spirits, or, in a word, by the
black art, was actionable at common law as much as if the party accused
had done the same harm with an arrow or pistol-shot. The destruction or
abstraction of goods by the like instruments, supposing the charge
proved, would, in like manner, be punishable. _A fortiori_, the
consulting soothsayers, familiar spirits, or the like, and the obtaining
and circulating pretended prophecies to the unsettlement of the State
and the endangering of the King's title, is yet a higher degree of
guilt. And it may be remarked that the inquiry into the date of the
King's life bears a close affinity with the desiring or compassing the
death of the Sovereign, which is the essence of high treason. Upon such
charges repeated trials took place in the courts of the English, and
condemnations were pronounced, with sufficient justice, no doubt, where
the connexion between the resort to sorcerers and the design to
perpetrate a felony could be clearly proved. We would not, indeed, be
disposed to go the length of so high an authority as Selden, who
pronounces (in his "Table-Talk") that if a man heartily believed that he
could take the life of another by waving his hat three times and crying
Buzz! and should, under this fixed opinion, wave his hat and cry Buzz!
accordingly, he ought to be executed as a murderer. But a false prophecy
of the King's death is not to be dealt with exactly on the usual
principle; because, however idle in itself, the promulgation of such a
prediction has, in times such as we are speaking of, a strong tendency
to work its completion.
Many persons, and some of great celebrity, suffered for the charge of
trafficking with witches, to the prejudice of those in authority. We
have already mentioned the instance of the Duchess of Gloucester, in
Henry the Sixth's reign, and that of the Queen Dowager's kinsmen, in the
Protectorate of Richard, afterwards the Third. In 1521, the Duke of
Buckingham was beheaded, owing much to his having listened to the
predictions of one Friar Hopkins. In the same reign, the Maid of Kent,
who had been esteemed a prophetess, was put to death as a cheat. She
suffered with seven persons who had managed her fits for the support of
the Catholic religion, and confessed her fraud upon the scaffold. About
seven years after this, Lord Hungerford was beheaded for consulting
certain soothsayers concerning the length of Henry the Eighth's life.
But these cases rather relate to the purpose for which the sorcery was
employed, than to the fact of using it.
Two remarkable statutes were passed in the year 1541; one against false
prophecies, the other against the act of conjuration, witchcraft, and
sorcery, and at the same time against breaking and destroying crosses.
The former enactment was certainly made to ease the suspicious and
wayward fears of the tetchy King Henry. The prohibition against
witchcraft might be also dictated by the king's jealous doubts of hazard
to the succession. The enactment against breaking crosses was obviously
designed to check the ravages of the Reformers, who in England as well
as elsewhere desired to sweep away Popery with the besom of destruction.
This latter statute was abrogated in the first year of Edward VI.,
perhaps as placing an undue restraint on the zeal of good Protestants
against idolatry.
At length, in 1562, a formal statute against sorcery, as penal in
itself, was actually passed; but as the penalty was limited to the
pillory for the first transgression, the legislature probably regarded
those who might be brought to trial as impostors rather than wizards.
There are instances of individuals tried and convicted as impostors and
cheats, and who acknowledged themselves such before the court and
people; but in their articles of visitation the prelates directed
enquiry to be made after those who should use enchantments, witchcraft,
sorcery, or any like craft, _invented by the devil_.
But it is here proper to make a pause for the purpose of enquiring in
what manner the religious disputes which occupied all Europe about this
time influenced the proceedings of the rival sects in relation to
Demonology.
The Papal Church had long reigned by the proud and absolute humour which
she had assumed, of maintaining every doctrine which her rulers had
adopted in dark ages; but this pertinacity at length made her citadel
too large to be defended at every point by a garrison whom prudence
would have required to abandon positions which had been taken in times
of darkness, and were unsuited to the warfare of a more enlightened age.
The sacred motto of the Vatican was, "_Vestigia nulla retrorsum_;" and
this rendered it impossible to comply with the more wise and moderate of
her own party, who would otherwise have desired to make liberal
concessions to the Protestants, and thus prevent, in its commencement, a
formidable schism in the Christian world.
To the system of Rome the Calvinists offered the most determined
opposition, affecting upon every occasion and on all points to observe
an order of church-government, as well as of worship, expressly in the
teeth of its enactments;--in a word, to be a good Protestant, they held
it almost essential to be in all things diametrically opposite to the
Catholic form and faith. As the foundation of this sect was laid in
republican states, as its clerical discipline was settled on a
democratic basis, and as the countries which adopted that form of
government were chiefly poor, the preachers having lost the rank and
opulence enjoyed by the Roman Church, were gradually thrown on the
support of the people. Insensibly they became occupied with the ideas
and tenets natural to the common people, which, if they have usually the
merit of being honestly conceived and boldly expressed, are not the less
often adopted with credulity and precipitation, and carried into effect
with unhesitating harshness and severity.
Betwixt these extremes the Churchmen of England endeavoured to steer a
middle course, retaining a portion of the ritual and forms of Rome, as
in themselves admirable, and at any rate too greatly venerated by the
people to be changed merely for opposition's sake. Their comparatively
undilapidated revenue, the connexion of their system with the state,
with views of ambition as ample as the station of a churchman ought to
command, rendered them independent of the necessity of courting their
flocks by any means save regular discharge of their duty; and the
excellent provisions made for their education afforded them learning to
confute ignorance and enlighten prejudice.
Such being the general character of the three Churches, their belief in
and persecution of such crimes as witchcraft and sorcery were
necessarily modelled upon the peculiar tenets which each system
professed, and gave rise to various results in the countries where they
were severally received.
The Church of Rome, as we have seen, was unwilling, in her period of
undisputed power, to call in the secular arm to punish men for
witchcraft--a crime which fell especially under ecclesiastical
cognizance, and could, according to her belief, be subdued by the
spiritual arm alone. The learned men at the head of the establishment
might safely despise the attempt at those hidden arts as impossible; or,
even if they were of a more credulous disposition, they might be
unwilling to make laws by which their own enquiries in the mathematics,
algebra, chemistry, and other pursuits vulgarly supposed to approach the
confines of magic art, might be inconveniently restricted. The more
selfish part of the priesthood might think that a general belief in the
existence of witches should be permitted to remain, as a source both of
power and of revenue--that if there were no possessions, there could be
no exorcism-fees--and, in short, that a wholesome faith in all the
absurdities of the vulgar creed as to supernatural influences was
necessary to maintain the influence of Diana of Ephesus. They suffered
spells to be manufactured, since every friar had the power of reversing
them; they permitted poison to be distilled, because every convent had
the antidote, which was disposed of to all who chose to demand it. It
was not till the universal progress of heresy, in the end of the
fifteenth century, that the bull of Pope Innocent VIII., already quoted,
called to convict, imprison, and condemn the sorcerers, chiefly because
it was the object to transfer the odium of these crimes to the
Waldenses, and excite and direct the public hatred against the new sect
by confounding their doctrines with the influences of the devil and his
fiends. The bull of Pope Innocent was afterwards, in the year 1523,
enforced by Adrian VI. with a new one, in which excommunication was
directed against _sorcerers and heretics_.
While Rome thus positively declared herself against witches and
sorcerers, the Calvinists, in whose numbers must be included the greater
part of the English Puritans, who, though they had not finally severed
from the communion of the Anglican Church, yet disapproved of her ritual
and ceremonies as retaining too much of the Papal stamp, ranked
themselves, in accordance with their usual policy, in diametrical
opposition to the doctrine of the Mother Church. They assumed in the
opposite sense whatever Rome pretended to as a proof of her omnipotent
authority. The exorcisms, forms, and rites, by which good Catholics
believed that incarnate fiends could be expelled and evil spirits of
every kind rebuked--these, like the holy water, the robes of the priest,
and the sign of the cross, the Calvinists considered either with scorn
and contempt as the tools of deliberate quackery and imposture, or with
horror and loathing, as the fit emblems and instruments of an idolatrous
system.
Such of them as did not absolutely deny the supernatural powers of which
the Romanists made boast, regarded the success of the exorcising priest,
to whatever extent they admitted it, as at best a casting out of devils
by the power of Beelzebub, the King of the Devils. They saw also, and
resented bitterly, the attempt to confound any dissent from the
doctrines of Rome with the proneness to an encouragement of rites of
sorcery. On the whole, the Calvinists, generally speaking, were of all
the contending sects the most suspicious of sorcery, the most undoubting
believers in its existence, and the most eager to follow it up with what
they conceived to be the due punishment of the most fearful of crimes.
The leading divines of the Church of England were, without doubt,
fundamentally as much opposed to the doctrines of Rome as those who
altogether disclaimed opinions and ceremonies merely because she had
entertained them. But their position in society tended strongly to keep
them from adopting, on such subjects as we are now discussing, either
the eager credulity of the vulgar mind or the fanatic ferocity of their
Calvinistic rivals. We have no purpose to discuss the matter in
detail--enough has probably been said to show generally why the Romanist
should have cried out a miracle respecting an incident which the
Anglican would have contemptuously termed an imposture; while the
Calvinist, inspired with a darker zeal, and, above all, with the
unceasing desire of open controversy with the Catholics, would have
styled the same event an operation of the devil.
It followed that, while the divines of the Church of England possessed
the upper hand in the kingdom, witchcraft, though trials and even
condemnations for that offence occasionally occurred, did not create
that epidemic terror which the very suspicion of the offence carried
with it elsewhere; so that Reginald Scot and others alleged it was the
vain pretences and empty forms of the Church of Rome, by the faith
reposed in them, which had led to the belief of witchcraft or sorcery in
general. Nor did prosecutions on account of such charges frequently
involve a capital punishment, while learned judges were jealous of the
imperfection of the evidence to support the charge, and entertained a
strong and growing suspicion that legitimate grounds for such trials
seldom actually existed. On the other hand, it usually happened that
wherever the Calvinist interest became predominant in Britain, a general
persecution of sorcerers and witches seemed to take place of
consequence. Fearing and hating sorcery more than other Protestants,
connecting its ceremonies and usages with those of the detested Catholic
Church, the Calvinists were more eager than other sects in searching
after the traces of this crime, and, of course, unusually successful, as
they might suppose, in making discoveries of guilt, and pursuing it to
the expiation of the fagot. In a word, a principle already referred to
by Dr. Francis Hutchison will be found to rule the tide and the reflux
of such cases in the different churches. The numbers of witches, and
their supposed dealings with Satan, will increase or decrease according
as such doings are accounted probable or impossible. Under the former
supposition, charges and convictions will be found augmented in a
terrific degree. When the accusations are disbelieved and dismissed as
not worthy of attention, the crime becomes unfrequent, ceases to occupy
the public mind, and affords little trouble to the judges.
The passing of Elizabeth's statute against witchcraft in 1562 does not
seem to have been intended to increase the number of trials, or cases of
conviction at least; and the fact is, it did neither the one nor the
other. Two children were tried in 1574 for counterfeiting possession,
and stood in the pillory for impostors. Mildred Norrington, called the
Maid of Westwell, furnished another instance of possession; but she also
confessed her imposture, and publicly showed her fits and tricks of
mimicry. The strong influence already possessed by the Puritans may
probably be sufficient to account for the darker issue of certain cases,
in which both juries and judges in Elizabeth's time must be admitted to
have shown fearful severity.
These cases of possession were in some respects sore snares to the
priests of the Church of Rome, who, while they were too sagacious not to
be aware that the pretended fits, contortions, strange sounds, and other
extravagances, produced as evidence of the demon's influence on the
possessed person, were nothing else than marks of imposture by some idle
vagabond, were nevertheless often tempted to admit them as real, and
take the credit of curing them. The period was one when the Catholic
Church had much occasion to rally around her all the respect that
remained to her in a schismatic and heretical kingdom; and when her
fathers and doctors announced the existence of such a dreadful disease,
and of the power of the church's prayers, relics, and ceremonies, to
cure it, it was difficult for a priest, supposing him more tender of the
interest of his order than that of truth, to avoid such a tempting
opportunity as a supposed case of possession offered for displaying the
high privilege in which his profession made him a partaker, or to
abstain from conniving at the imposture, in order to obtain for his
church the credit of expelling the demon. It was hardly to be wondered
at, if the ecclesiastic was sometimes induced to aid the fraud of which
such motives forbade him to be the detector. At this he might hesitate
the less, as he was not obliged to adopt the suspected and degrading
course of holding an immediate communication _in limine_ with the
impostor, since a hint or two, dropped in the supposed sufferer's
presence, might give him the necessary information what was the most
exact mode of performing his part, and if the patient was possessed by a
devil of any acuteness or dexterity, he wanted no further instruction
how to play it. Such combinations were sometimes detected, and brought
more discredit on the Church of Rome than was counterbalanced by any
which might be more cunningly managed. On this subject the reader may
turn to Dr. Harsnett's celebrated book on Popish Impostures, wherein he
gives the history of several notorious cases of detected fraud, in which
Roman ecclesiastics had not hesitated to mingle themselves. That of
Grace Sowerbutts, instructed by a Catholic priest to impeach her
grandmother of witchcraft, was a very gross fraud.
Such cases were not, however, limited to the ecclesiastics of Rome. We
have already stated that, as extremes usually approach each other, the
Dissenters, in their violent opposition to the Papists, adopted some of
their ideas respecting demoniacs; and we have now to add that they also
claimed, by the vehemence of prayer and the authority of their own
sacred commission, that power of expelling devils which the Church of
Rome pretended to exercise by rites, ceremonies, and relics. The
memorable case of Richard Dugdale, called the Surrey Impostor, was one
of the most remarkable which the Dissenters brought forward. This youth
was supposed to have sold his soul to the devil, on condition of being
made the best dancer in Lancashire, and during his possession played a
number of fantastic tricks, not much different from those exhibited by
expert posture-masters of the present day. This person threw himself
into the hands of the Dissenters, who, in their eagerness, caught at an
opportunity to relieve an afflicted person, whose case the regular
clergy appeared to have neglected. They fixed a committee of their
number, who weekly attended the supposed sufferer, and exercised
themselves in appointed days of humiliation and fasting during the
course of a whole year. All respect for the demon seems to have
abandoned the reverend gentlemen, after they had relieved guard in this
manner for some little time, and they got so regardless of Satan as to
taunt him with the mode in which he executed his promise to teach his
vassal dancing. The following specimen of raillery is worth
commemoration:--"What, Satan! is this the dancing that Richard gave
himself to thee for? &c. Canst thou dance no better? &c. Ransack the old
records of all past times and places in thy memory; canst thou not there
find out some better way of trampling? Pump thine invention dry; cannot
the universal seed-plot of subtile wiles and stratagems spring up one
new method of cutting capers? Is this the top of skill and pride, to
shuffle feet and brandish knees thus, and to trip like a doe and skip
like a squirrel? And wherein differ thy leapings from the hoppings of a
frog, or the bouncings of a goat, or friskings of a dog, or
gesticulations of a monkey? And cannot a palsy shake such a loose leg as
that? Dost thou not twirl like a calf that hath the turn, and twitch up
thy houghs just like a springhault tit?"[54] One might almost conceive
the demon replying to this raillery in the words of Dr. Johnson, "This
merriment of parsons is extremely offensive."
[Footnote 54: Hutchison on Witchcraft, p. 162.]
The dissenters were probably too honest, however simple, to achieve a
complete cure on Dugdale by an amicable understanding; so, after their
year of vigil, they relinquished their task by degrees. Dugdale, weary
of his illness, which now attracted little notice, attended a regular
physician, and was cured of that part of his disease which was not
affected in a regular way _par ordonnance du médecin_. But the reverend
gentlemen who had taken his case in hand still assumed the credit of
curing him, and if anything could have induced them to sing _Te Deum_,
it would have been this occasion. They said that the effect of their
public prayers had been for a time suspended, until seconded by the
continued earnestness of their private devotions!
The ministers of the Church of England, though, from education,
intercourse with the world, and other advantages, they were less prone
to prejudice than those of other sects, are yet far from being entirely
free of the charge of encouraging in particular instances the witch
superstition. Even while Dr. Hutchison pleads that the Church of England
has the least to answer for in that matter, he is under the necessity of
acknowledging that some regular country clergymen so far shared the
rooted prejudices of congregations, and of the government which
established laws against it, as to be active in the persecution of the
suspected, and even in countenancing the superstitious signs by which in
that period the vulgar thought it possible to ascertain the existence of
the afflictions by witchcraft, and obtain the knowledge of the
perpetrator. A singular case is mentioned of three women, called the
Witches of Warbois. Indeed, their story is a matter of solemn enough
record; for Sir Samuel Cromwell, having received the sum of forty pounds
as lord of the manor, out of the estate of the poor persons who
suffered, turned it into a rent-charge of forty shillings yearly, for
the endowment of an annual lecture on the subject of witchcraft, to be
preached by a doctor or bachelor of divinity of Queen's College,
Cambridge. The accused, one Samuel and his wife, were old and very poor
persons, and their daughter a young woman. The daughter of a Mr.
Throgmorton, seeing the poor old woman in a black knitted cap, at a time
when she was not very well, took a whim that she had bewitched her, and
was ever after exclaiming against her. The other children of this
fanciful family caught up the same cry, and the eldest of them at last
got up a vastly pretty drama, in which she herself furnished all the
scenes and played all the parts.
Such imaginary scenes, or _make-believe_ stories, are the common
amusement of lively children; and most readers may remember having had
some Utopia of their own. But the nursery drama of Miss Throgmorton had
a horrible conclusion. This young lady and her sisters were supposed to
be haunted by nine spirits, dispatched by the wicked Mother Samuel for
that purpose. The sapient parents heard one part of the dialogue, when
the children in their fits returned answers, as was supposed, to the
spirits who afflicted them; and when the patients from time to time
recovered, they furnished the counterpart by telling what the spirits
had said to them. The names of the spirits were Pluck, Hardname, Catch,
Blue, and three Smacks, who were cousins. Mrs. Joan Throgmorton, the
eldest (who, like other young women of her age, about fifteen, had some
disease on her nerves, and whose fancy ran apparently on love and
gallantry), supposed that one of the Smacks was her lover, did battle
for her with the less friendly spirits, and promised to protect her
against Mother Samuel herself; and the following curious extract will
show on what a footing of familiarity the damsel stood with her
spiritual gallant: "From whence come you, Mr. Smack?" says the afflicted
young lady; "and what news do you bring?" Smack, nothing abashed,
informed her he came from fighting with Pluck: the weapons, great
cowl-staves; the scene, a ruinous bakehouse in Dame Samuel's yard. "And
who got the mastery, I pray you?" said the damsel. Smack answered, he
had broken Pluck's head. "I would," said the damsel, "he had broken your
neck also." "Is that the thanks I am to have for my labour?" said the
disappointed Smack. "Look you for thanks at my hand?" said the
distressed maiden. "I would you were all hanged up against each other,
with your dame for company, for you are all naught." On this repulse,
exit Smack, and enter Pluck, Blue, and Catch, the first with his head
broken, the other limping, and the third with his arm in a sling, all
trophies of Smack's victory. They disappeared after having threatened
vengeance upon the conquering Smack. However, he soon afterwards
appeared with his laurels. He told her of his various conflicts. "I
wonder," said Mrs. Joan, or Jane, "that you are able to beat them; you
are little, and they very big." "He cared not for that," he replied; "he
would beat the best two of them, and his cousins Smacks would beat the
other two." This most pitiful mirth, for such it certainly is, was mixed
with tragedy enough. Miss Throgmorton and her sisters railed against
Darne Samuel; and when Mr. Throgmorton brought her to his house by
force, the little fiends longed to draw blood of her, scratch her, and
torture her, as the witch-creed of that period recommended; yet the poor
woman incurred deeper suspicion when she expressed a wish to leave a
house where she was so coarsely treated and lay under such odious
suspicions.