1541, 33 Hen. VIII. c. 8, made both felony without “benefit of clergy;”
and by the 1 Jac. I. c. 12, all persons invoking any evil spirit, or
taking up dead bodies from their graves to be used in any Witchcraft,
sorcery, charm, or enchantment, or killing or otherwise hurting any
person by such infernal arts, shall be guilty of felony without
“benefit of clergy,” and suffer death. King James’s views on Witchcraft
and his skill (whereon he greatly plumed himself) as witch-finder are
famed. Royal influence went hand-in-hand with popular superstition. In
less than a century and a half, legislative if not vulgar ideas were
altered, and in 1736, by 9 Geo. II. c. 5, the laws against Witchcraft
were swept away, though charlatans professing the occult sciences were
still punished as cheats.
I pass as of little interest Howell’s first case, that of Mary Smith,
in 1616. More worthy of note are the proceedings against the Essex
witches, some twenty in number, condemned at the Chelmsford Sessions on
July 29, 1645, before the Earl of Warwick and other Justices. One noted
witch was Elizabeth Clarke to whom the devil had appeared “in the shape
of a proper gentleman with a laced band, having the whole proportion of
a man.” She had certain imps, whom she called Jamara (“a white dogge
with red spots”), Vinegar Tom, Hoult, and Sack and Sugar. So far the
information of Matthew Hopkins, of Manningtree, gent., who further said
that the same evening whereon the accused confessed those marvels to
him, “he espied a white thing about the bignesse of a kitlyn,” which
bit a piece out of his greyhound, and in his own yard that very night
“he espied a black thing proportioned like a cat, only it was thrice
as big, sitting on a strawberry-bed, and fixing the eyes on this
informant.”
John Sterne, gent., had equal wonders of imps the size of small dogs,
and how Sack and Sugar were like to do him hurt. ’Twere well, said the
malevolent Elizabeth, “that this informant were so quick, otherwise
the said impe had soone skipped upon his face, and perchance had got
into his throate, and then there would have been a feast of toades in
this informant’s belly.” The witch Clarke ascribed her undoing to Anne
Weste, widow, here usually called Old Beldam Weste, who, coming upon
her as she was picking up a few sticks, and seeming to pity her for
“her lamenesse (having but one leg) and her poverty,” promised to send
her a little kitten to assist her. Sure enough, a few nights after
two imps appeared, who vowed to “help her to an husband who should
maintain her ever after.” A country justice’s notions of evidence are
not supposed to be exact even to-day; what they were then let the
information of Robert Tayler, also of Manningtree, show. It seems
Clarke had accused one Elizabeth Gooding as a confederate. Gooding was
refused credit at Tayler’s for half a pound of cheese, whereupon “she
went away muttering and mumbling to herself, and within a few hours
came again with money and bought a pound of cheese of this informant.”
That very night Tayler’s horse fell grievously ill and four farriers
were gravelled to tell what ailed it, but this portentous fact was
noted: “the belly of the said horse would rumble and make a noyse as
a foule chimney set on fire.” In four days it was dead. Tayler had
also heard that certain confessed witches had “impeached the said
Elizabeth Gooding for killing of this said horse,” moreover Elizabeth
kept company with notorious witches--after which scepticism was scarce
permissible. Rebecca Weste, a prisoner awaiting trial in Colchester,
confessed how at a witches’ meeting the devil appeared to her in the
shape of a dog and kissed her. In less than six months he came again
and promised to marry her. “Shee said he kissed her, but was as cold as
clay, and married her that night in this manner: he tooke her by the
hand and led her about the chamber and promised to be a loving husband
to death, and to avenge her of her enemies.”
One Rawbood had taken a house over the head of Margaret Moon, another
of the accused, with highly unpleasant consequences. Thus, Mrs.
Rawbood, though a “very tydy and cleanly woman, sitting upon a block,
after dinner with another neighbour, a little before it was time to go
to church upon an Easter Day, the said Rawbood’s wife was on a sudden
so filled with lice that they might have been swept off her clothes
with a stick; and this informant saith he did see them, and that they
were long and lean, and not like other lice.” More gruesome were the
confessions of Rebecca Jones, of Osyth. One fine day some twenty-five
years past she, a servant lass at Much-Clacton, was summoned by a knock
at the door, where she saw “a very handsome young man, as shee then
thought, but now shee thinks it was the devil.” Politely inquiring how
she did, he desired to see her left wrist, which being shown him, he
pulled out a pin “from this examinant’s owne sleeve, and pricked her
wrist twice, and there came out a drop of bloud, which he took off
with the top of his finger, and so departed”--leaving poor Rebecca’s
heart all in a flutter. About four months afterwards as she was going
to market to sell butter, a “man met with her, being in a ragged state,
and having such great eyes that this examinant was very much afraid of
him.” He presented her with three things like to “moules,” which she
afterwards used to destroy her neighbours’ cattle, and now and again
her neighbours themselves. In evidence against other suspects there was
mention of a familiar called Elimanzer, who was fed with milk pottage,
and of imps called Wynowe, Jeso, Panu, with many other remarkable
particulars.
The foregoing was collected before trial as information upon oath; but
this testimony of Sir Thomas Bowes, knight, was given from the bench
during the trial of Anne Weste, whom it concerned. He reported that
an honest man of Manningtree passing Anne Weste’s door at the very
witching hour of night, in bright moonlight saw four things like black
rabbits emerge. He caught one of them, and beat the head of it against
his stick, “intending to beat out the braines of it,” failing in which
benevolent design, he next tried to tear off its head, “and as he wrung
and stretched the neck of it, it came out between his hands like a lock
of wooll;” then he went to a spring to drown it, but at every step he
fell down, yet he managed to creep to the water, under which he held
the thing “a good space.” Thinking it was drowned he let go, whereupon
“it sprang out of the water into the aire, and so vanished away.” There
was but one end possible for people who froze the rustic soul with such
pranks. Each and all were soon dangling from the gallows.
The case of the Devon witches tried at Exeter in August 1682 is much
like the Essex business. The informations are stuffed with grotesque
horrors, yet it is hard to believe that the accused--three poor women
from Bideford, two of them widows--had been convicted but for their
own confessions, which are full of copious and minute details of their
dealings with Satan. Going to their death, they were worried by Mr.
H----, a nonconformist preacher and (as is evident) a very pestilent
fellow. “Did you pass through the keyhole of the door, or was the door
open?” was one query. The witch asserted that like other people she
entered by the door, though “the devil did lead me upstairs.” Mr. H----
went on, “How do you know it was the devil?” “I knew it by his eyes,”
she returned. Again, “Did you never ride over an arm of the sea on a
cow?”--an exploit which the poor woman sturdily disclaimed. Mr. H----,
a little dissatisfied, one fancies, prayed at them a while, after which
two of the women were turned off the ladder. Mr. Sheriff tried his
hand at the survivor: he was curious as to the shape or colour of the
devil, and was answered that he appeared “in black like a bullock.”
He again pressed her as to whether she went in “through the keyhole
or the door,” but she alleged the more commonplace and (for a witch)
unorthodox mode of entry, “and so was executed.”
Between these two cases one occurred wherein the best legal intellect
of the day was engaged--and with no better result. In March 1665, Rose
Cullender and Amy Duny, widows, were indicted at the Assizes at Bury
St. Edmunds for bewitching certain people. Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief
Baron of the Exchequer, presided. “Still his name is of account.” To
an earlier time he seemed a judge “whom for his integrity, learning,
and law, hardly any age, either before or since, could parallel.”
William Durant, an infant, was one victim; his mother had promised
Amy Duny a penny to watch him, but she was strictly charged not to
give him suck. To what end? queried the court reflecting on Amy’s age.
The mother replied: firstly, Amy had the reputation of a witch, and
secondly, it was a custom of old women thus to please the child, “and
it did please the child, but it sucked nothing but wind, which did
the child hurt.” The two women had a quarrel on the subject: Amy was
enraged, and departed after some dark sayings, and the boy forthwith
fell into “strange fits of swounding.” Dr. Jacob, of Yarmouth, an
eminent witch-doctor, advised “to hang up the child’s blanket in the
chimney-corner all day, and at night when she put the child to bed
to put it into the said blanket, and if she found anything in it she
should not be afraid, but throw it into the fire.” The blanket was duly
hung up, and taken down, when a great toad fell out, which being thrown
into the fire made (not unnaturally) “a great and horrible noise;”
followed a crack and a flash, and--exit the toad! The court with solemn
foolishness inquired if the substance of the toad was not seen to
consume? and was stoutly answered “No.” Next day Amy was discovered
sitting alone in her house in her smock without any fire. She was in
“a most lamentable condition,” having her face all scorched with fire.
This deponent had no doubt as to the witch’s guilt, “for that the said
Amy hath been long reputed to be a witch and a person of very evil
behaviour, whose kindred and relations have been many of them accused
for witchcraft, and some of them have been condemned.”
Elizabeth Pacy was another bewitched child. By direction of the judge,
Amy Duny was made to touch her, whereupon the child clawed the Old
Beldam till the blood came--a portentous fact, for everybody knew that
the bewitched would naturally scratch the tormentor’s face and thus
obtain relief. The father of the child, Samuel Pacy (whose soberness
and moderation are specially commended by the reporter), now told how
Amy Duny thrice came to buy herrings, and, being as often refused,
“went away grumbling, but what she said was not perfectly understood.”
Immediately his child Deborah fell sick, whereupon Amy was set in the
stocks. Here she confessed that, when any of her offspring were so
afflicted, “she had been fain to open her child’s mouth with a tap to
give it vitals,” which simple device the sapient Pacy practised upon
his brats with some effect, but still continuing ill they vomited
“crooked pins and one time a twopenny nail with a very broad head,
which pins, amounting to forty or more, together with the twopenny
nail, were produced in court,” so what room was there for doubt? The
children, continually accusing Amy Duny and Rose Cullender as cause
of their sickness, were packed off by their distracted father to his
sister at Yarmouth, who now took up the wondrous tale. When the younger
child was taking the air out of doors, “presently a little thing like a
bee flew upon her face, and would have gone into her mouth.” She rushed
indoors, and incontinent vomited up a twopenny nail with a broad head,
whose presence she accounted for thus: “the bee brought this nail and
forced it into her mouth”; from all which the guilt of the witches was
ever more evident.
Even that age had its sceptics. Some people in court, chief among them
Mr. Serjeant Keeling, whose position and learning made it impossible
to disregard their opinion, “seemed much unsatisfied.” The learned
serjeant pointed out that even if the children were bewitched, there
was no real evidence to connect the prisoners with the fact. Then Dr.
Browne, of Norwich, “a person of great knowledge” (no other, alas! than
the Sir Thomas Browne of the _Religio Medici_), made a very learned if
confusing dissertation on Witchcraft in general, with some curious
details as to a late “great discovery of witches” in Denmark; which
no whit advanced the matter. Then there was another experiment. Amy
Duny was brought to one of the children whose eyes were blinded. The
child was presently touched by another person, “which produced the
same effect as the touch of the witch did in the court.” The sceptical
Keeling and his set now roundly declared the whole business a sham,
which “put the court and all persons into a stand. But at length
Mr. Pacy did declare that possibly the maid might be deceived by a
suspicion that the witch touched her when she did not.” This was the
very point the sceptics were making, and was anything but an argument
in reply, though it seems to have been accepted as such. And how to
suppose, it was urged, that innocent children would tell such terrible
lies? It was the golden age of the rod; never was there fitter occasion
for its use. Once fancies a few strokes had produced remarkable
confessions from the innocents! However, the court went on hearing
evidence. The judge summed up with much seeming impartiality, much
wooden wisdom, and the usual judicial platitudes, all which after more
than two centuries you read with considerable irritation. The jury upon
half an hour’s deliberation returned a verdict of guilty. Next morning
the children were brought to the judge, “and Mr. Pacy did affirm that
within less than half an hour after the witches were convicted they
were all of them restored.” After this, what place was left for doubt?
“In conclusion the judge and all the court were fully satisfied with
the verdict, and thereupon gave judgment against the witches that they
should be hanged.” Three days afterwards the poor unfortunates went to
their death. “They were much urged to confess, but would not.”
Finally, you have this much less tragic business. In the first year
of Queen Anne’s reign (1702), Richard Hathaway was tried at the
Surrey Assizes before Lord Chief Justice Holt for falsely accusing
Sarah Morduck of bewitching him. The offence being a misdemeanour,
the prisoner had counsel, an advantage not then fully given to those
charged with felony. The trial reads like one in our own day. The case
for the Crown had been carefully put together. Possibly the authorities
were striking at accusations of and prosecutions for Witchcraft.
Sarah Morduck had been tried and acquitted at Guildford Assizes for
bewitching Hathaway, whereupon this prosecution had been ordered. Dr.
Martin, parish minister in Southwark, an able and enlightened divine,
had saved Sarah from the mob, and so was led on to probe the matter.
He found Hathaway apparently blind and dumb, but giving his assent
by a sign to the suggestion that he should scratch Morduck, and so
(according to the superstition already noted) obtain relief. Dr. Martin
brought Sarah and a woman of the same height called Johnson to the room
where the impostor lay, seemingly, at death’s door. Morduck announced
her willingness to be scratched, and then Johnson’s hand was put into
his. Hathaway was suspicious, and felt the arm very carefully, whereat
the parson “spoke to him somewhat eagerly: If you will not scratch I
will begone.” Whereupon he clawed so lustily that Johnson near fainted.
She was forthwith hustled out of the room and Morduck pushed forward;
but the rogue, fearing a trap, lay quiet till Dr. Martin encouraged him
by simulated admiration. Then he opened wide his eyes, “caught hold of
the apron of Sarah Morduck, and looked her in the face,” thus implying
that his supposed scratching of her had restored his eyesight. Being
informed of his blunder he “seemed much cast down,” but his native
impudence soon asserting itself, he gave himself out for worse than
ever, whilst Sarah Morduck, anxious to be clear at any cost, declared
that not she but Johnson was the witch. The popular voice roundly
abused Dr. Martin for a stubborn sceptic. Charges of bribery against
him, as well as against the judge and jury who had acquitted Morduck,
were freely bandied about. Dr. Martin had got Bateman a friend of his
to see Hathaway, one of whose symptoms was the vomiting of pins. His
evidence was that the rogue scattered the pins about the room by
sleight of hand; Bateman had taken several parcels of them, almost by
force, out of his pocket. Kensy, a surgeon, further told how Hathaway,
being committed to his care, at first would neither eat nor drink.
Kensy being afraid that he would starve himself to death sooner than
have his cheat discovered, arranged a pretended quarrel with his maid
Baker, who supplied the patient with food as if against his orders.
Indeed, she plied him so well with meat and drink that, so she told
the court, “he was very merry and danced about, and took the tongs
and played upon them, but after that he was mightily sick and vomited
sadly”--but there were no pins and needles! She further told how four
gentlemen, privily stored away in the buttery and coal-hole, witnessed
Hathaway’s gastronomic feats. Serjeant Jenner for the defence called
several witnesses, who testified to the prisoner’s abstinence from
food for quite miraculous periods. The force of this evidence was much
shaken by the pertinent cross-examination of the judge, who asked the
jury in his summing up, “Whether you have any evidence to induce you
to believe it to be in the power of all the witches in the world, or
all the Devils in Hell, to fast beyond the usual time that nature will
allow: they cannot invert the order of nature.” The jury, “without
going from the bar, brought him in Guilty.” He was sentenced to a fine,
a sound flogging, the pillory, and imprisonment with hard labour. The
last conviction for Witchcraft in England was that of Jane Wenham,
at Hertford, in 1712. She was respited by the judge and afterwards
pardoned. The case is not here reported.
These trials throw a curious light on the ideas of the time;
unfortunately they exhibit human nature in some of its worst aspects.
The victims were women, old, poor, helpless, and the persecution to
which they were subjected was due partly to superstition, partly to
that delight in cruelty so strong in the natural man. The “confessions”
of the accused are easily accounted for. The popular beliefs so
impressed their imaginations that they believed in their own malevolent
power, also the terror they inspired lacked not charm, it procured
them consideration, some money, even some protection. Not seldom
their “confessions” were merely terrified assents to statements made
about them by witch-finders, clergymen, and justices. And the judges?
Sometimes, alas! they callously administered a law in which they had no
belief. Is there not still something inexplicable? Well, such things as
mesmerism, thought-reading, and so forth exhibit remarkable phenomena.
A former age ascribed all to Satan: we believe them natural though we
cannot as yet solve all their riddles. I must add that the ancient
popular horror of witches is partly explained by the hideous and
grotesque details given at the trials, but those obscenities I dare not
reproduce.
A Pair of Parricides
The State Trials--The Dry Bones of Romance--Pictures of
the Past--Their Value for the Present--The Case of Philip
Standsfield--The Place of the Tragedy--The Night of the
Murder--The Scene in Morham Kirk--The Trial--“The Bluidy
Advocate--Mackenzie”--The Fate of Standsfield--The Case
of Mary Blandy, Spinster--The Villain of the Piece--The
Maid’s Gossip--Death of Mr. Blandy--The “Angel” Inn at
Henley-on-Thames--The Defence--Miss Blandy’s Exit.
There is a new series of _State Trials_ continuing the old, and edited
with a skill and completeness altogether lacking in its predecessor;
yet its formal correctness gives an impression of dulness. You
think with regret of Howell’s thirty-three huge volumes, that vast
magazine of curiosities and horrors, of all that is best and worst
in English history. How exciting life was long ago, to be sure, and
how persistently it grows duller! What a price we pay for the smug
comfort of our time! People shuddered of yore; did they yawn quite so
often? Howell and the folk he edits knew how to tell a story. Judges,
too, were not wont to exclude interesting detail for that it wasn’t
evidence, and the compilers did not end with a man’s condemnation.
They had too keen a sense of what was relished of the general: the
last confession and dying speech, the exit on the scaffold or from the
cart, are told with infinite gusto. What a terrible test earth’s great
unfortunates underwent! Sir Thomas More’s delicate fencing with his
judges, the exquisite courtesy wherewith he bade them farewell, make
but half the record; you must hear the strange gaiety which flashed
in the condemned cell and by the block ere you learn the man’s true
nature. And to know Raleigh you must see him at Winchester under the
brutal insults of Coke; “Thou art a monster, thou hast an English face
but a Spanish heart;” again, “I thou thee, thou traitor!” and at Palace
Yard, Westminster, on that dreary October morning urging the sheriff to
hurry, since he would not be thought fear-shaken when it was but the
ague; for these are all-important episodes in the life of that richly
dressed, stately, and gallant figure your fancy is wont to picture in
his Elizabethan warship sweeping the Spanish Main. Time would fail
to tell of Strafford and Charles and Laud and a hundred others, for
the collection begins with Thomas à Becket in 1163 and comes down to
Thistlewood in 1820. Once familiar with those close packed, badly
printed pages, you find therein a deeper, a more subtle charm than
cunningest romance can furnish forth. The account of Mary Stuart’s
ending has a finer hold than Froude’s magnificent and highly decorated
picture--Study at first hand “Bloody Jeffreys,” his slogging of Titus
Oates, with that unabashed rascal’s replies during his trial for
perjury; or again, my Lord’s brilliant though brutal cross-examination
of Dunn in the “Lady” Alice Lisle case, during the famous or infamous
Western Circuit, and you will find Macaulay’s wealth of vituperative
rhetoric, in comparison, tiresome and pointless verbiage. Also you
will prefer to construct your own Braxfield from trials like those of
Thomas Muir in 1793, and of Alexander Scott and Maurice Margarot in
1794, rather than accept the counterfeit presentment which Stevenson’s
master-hand has limned in _Weir of Hermiston_.
But the interests are varied. How full of grotesque and curious horrors
are the prosecutions for witchcraft! There is that one, for instance,
in March 1665 at Bury St. Edmunds before Sir Matthew Hale, with
stories of bewitched children, and plague-stricken women, and satanic
necromancy. Again, there is the diverting exposure of Richard Hathaway
in 1702, and how the rogue pretended to vomit pins and abstain from
meat or drink for quite miraculous periods. But most of those things I
deal with elsewhere in this volume. The trials of obscurer criminals
have their own charm. Where else do you find such Dutch pictures of
long-vanished interiors or exteriors? You touch the _vie intime_ of a
past age; you see how kitchen and hall lived and talked; what master
and man, mistress and maid thought and felt; how they were dressed,
what they ate, of what they gossiped. Again, how oft your page recalls
the strange, mad, picturesque ways of old English law! _Benefit of
clergy_ meets you at every turn, the _Peine Fort et Dure_ is explained
with horrible minuteness, the lore of _Ship Money_ as well as of
_Impressment of Seamen_ is all there. Also is an occasional touch of
farce. But what phase of man’s life goes unrecorded in those musty old
tomes?
Howell’s collection only comes down to 1820. Reform has since then
purged our law, and the whole set is packed off to the Lumber Room. In
a year’s current reports you may find the volumes quoted once or twice,
but that is “but a bravery,” as Lord Bacon would say, for their law is
“a creed outworn.” Yet the human interest of a story remains, however
antiquated the setting, incapable of hurt from Act of Parliament. So,
partly for themselves, partly as samples of the bulk, I here present in
altered form two of these tragedies, a Pair of Parricides: one Scots
of the seventeenth, the other English of the eighteenth century.